Tag Archives: 1.5/5

Reel Views, Review

The Deliverance

If there was ever a golden age of exorcism movies, we’re certainly not in it at this present moment. The reception for The Exorcist: Believer last fall was so lackluster that Universal Pictures scrapped plans for a proposed trilogy, while the Russell Crowe-led The Exorcism barely contributed to this summer’s box office haul. Now dropping on Netflix is The Deliverance, another dud of the subgenre that tries in earnest to tackle challenging subjects like poverty and alcoholism, before succumbing to the hoariest clichés in the possession movie playbook. It comes from director Lee Daniels, who broke out 15 years ago with the Oscar-winning Precious but has since struggled to capitalize on its success. This time he teams up with his The United States Vs. Billie Holiday star Andra Day, whose performance here is one of the film’s lone bright spots, as was also the case for the duo’s previous collaboration.

Day plays Ebony Jackson, a struggling mother of three whose husband is overseas serving in Iraq and whose ailing mother Alberta (Glenn Close) has clung closer to religion after her cancer diagnosis. For the third time in a year, they’ve relocated to a new house and Ebony has found a job at a salon to support her sons Nate (Caleb McLaughlin) and Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins) along with her daughter Shante (Demi Singleton). Everyone is doing what they can to make the new arrangement work but soon, flies and strange smells begin emanating from the decrepit basement. As is common for these types of films, the children begin exhibiting strange behavior and after several disturbing incidents, Ebony and Alberta are convinced that they’re being haunted by demonic forces. They reach out to the reverend of their church (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) to intervene and save their family from the clutches of the devil.

The Deliverance is based loosely on the true story of Latoya Ammons and her family, who claimed paranormal activity occurred in their Gary, Indiana residence in 2011. Because Indiana lacks the tax incentives and financial breaks that other states have in place for filming — the reason why even films that take place in our state often aren’t shot here — the adaptation was filmed in and takes place in Pittsburgh instead. As a storyteller, Lee Daniels seems to be most in his element when he’s covering the hardships and personal demons of Ebony, a protagonist as prickly as Precious was in the 2009 movie that shares her name. Andra Day gives a powerful performance as a mom who turns to the bottle when her back is up against the well, finding the humanity in a character who can be difficult to like, to say the least.

If The Deliverance only functioned as a family drama, it would still have issues overcoming the on-the-nose and tin-eared dialogue in the subpar script from David Coggeshall and Elijah Bynum. But around the halfway mark, the movie crossfades into a full-blown horror movie and the proceedings go downhill fast from then on. The tell-tale signs of demonic possession are belabored and the special effects rendered to demonstrate physical impossibilities are extremely unconvincing. It all leads to an inevitable climax where Ebony and the church pastor must confront the devil through an immured loved one. It’s a common occurrence in exorcism films that in these heightened moments, possessed characters will say offensive things to throw the religious interveners off-kilter. The Deliverance contains a line read that’s an all-timer of what I assume is unintentional comedy.

Besides Andra Day, no one else in the qualified cast can seem to find their footing. Omar Epps pops up as a chemotherapist who has the hots for Alberta and Mo’Nique portrays a comically evil social worker — “I got you now, Ebony Jackson,” she snickers in her first line, stopping short of twirling a proverbial mustache. But no one is more lost here than Glenn Close, who has been nominated for an Academy Award on 8 different occasions but has yet to secure one; she was a lock for Best Actress in 2019, until Olivia Colman came out of nowhere to pull out the upset. Since that time, she’s turned in some ponderous performances but she’s never looked as completely out of place in a movie as she is here. We can only pray that in the future, Netflix and other studios will deliver us from disoriented dreck like The Deliverance.

Score – 1.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a horror comedy sequel starring Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, which reunites the infamous bio-exorcist with the Deetz family after a portal to the afterlife is accidentally opened once again.
Also playing in theaters is The Front Room, a psychological horror film starring Brandy and Kathryn Hunter, telling the story of a newly pregnant couple who are forced to take in an ailing, estranged stepmother.
Premiering on Netflix is Rebel Ridge, an action thriller starring Aaron Pierre and Don Johnson, centering around an ex-Marine who grapples his way through a web of small-town corruption when an attempt to post bail for his cousin escalates into a violent standoff with the local police chief.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

The Last Voyage Of The Demeter

Earlier this year, the boisterous action comedy Renfield reimagined what the world of a modern-day Dracula might look like through the eyes of his beleaguered assistant. Though the film comes undone the more it moves along, and ultimately doesn’t work on the whole, at least it has a fresh take on the material and a few well-constructed gags along the way. Comparatively, The Last Voyage Of The Demeter offers almost nothing of value when it comes to the legacy of Bram Stoker’s timeless creation. An extrapolation of a single chapter from the 1897 landmark novel that gave birth to the Count, the inexplicably 119 minute-long movie is utterly rudderless in terms of narrative conviction. It doesn’t surprise me that the project has languished in development purgatory for a couple decades but Universal’s decision to theatrically release it during a crowded summer movie season is confounding.

After a cold open capped by a tacky jump scare, Voyage kicks off with Captain Elliot (Liam Cunningham) and first mate Wojchek (David Dastmalchian) of the transport ship Demeter looking for a few more hands on deck before they set sail from Romania. After learned lad Clemens (Corey Hawkins) and a couple more relatively able-bodied men join the crew, it’s off to London with a crate branded by portentous insignia in cargo. The mariners seem to have the wind in their sails, literally and figuratively, until hidden stowaway Anna (Aisling Franciosi) appears in the hull and gives warning of a monstrous presence onboard. Soon enough, scallywags get picked off one by one by an unseen creature who only comes out at night and the Demeter crew find themselves caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Director André Øvredal had moderate success mining literary horror from Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark back in 2019 but where that collection of short stories allowed for ample avenues of adaptation, The Last Voyage Of The Demeter constantly struggles to justify its runtime. Since we know Dracula is obviously going to come out triumphant against this crew, Øvredal is not only expecting audiences to suspend their disbelief for just shy of 2 hours but also to care about these seafaring ciphers. The cast do what they can, with Dastmalchian giving the most engaging performance of the 4 primary actors, but there’s barely enough on the page to cover a feature-length storyline, much less character development. It’s hard to know what at the script level convinced these talented performers to come aboard this project.

Not that every single-location slasher has to have a sterling script but it at least has to have some creative kills and a novel tension to precede them. Unfortunately, Voyage doesn’t have much in that department either, despite a feral and fierce creature design for Dracula that is noticeably different from how we typically see the Count on-screen. Øvredal’s inability to maintain a frightening atmosphere is partially due to an inconsistent visual language between cinematographer Tom Stern and editor Patrick Larsgaard. In both scenes of dramatic conversation and of brutal action, there are cuts made that unintentionally throw off our understanding of where the characters exist in relation to one another. There are also brief lapses in continuity that could certainly be considered amateurish upon presentation but I’ll give the crew here the benefit of the doubt and assume they were rushed to deliver a final product.

After the Dark Universe franchise imploded in 2017 following the failure of The Mummy, it seems Universal has tried to revive their Classic Monsters in standalone efforts instead of trying to create yet another shared cinematic world. Though the two unrelated Dracula-based films they released this year didn’t work, they have the right idea in trying to consider each character individually and attempt to tell a different story. A perfect example of this is 2020’s The Invisible Man, which brilliantly recontextualized H. G. Wells’ tale for victims of psychological abuse. The excellent 1999 iteration of The Mummy wrapped its antagonist in a flawless combination of action and adventure. But if Universal keeps churning out monster fare as ruthlessly unexceptional as The Last Voyage Of The Demeter, then their plans to make their Monsters relevant will be dead in the water.

Score – 1.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Blue Beetle, a superhero film starring Xolo Maridueña and Adriana Barraza following a recent college graduate who is chosen to become a symbiotic host to an ancient alien biotechnological relic that grants him a powerful exoskeleton armor and superpowers.
Also coming to theaters is Strays, an R-rated comedy starring Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx set in a universe where dogs can talk and an abandoned dog teams up with other stray canines to get revenge on his former owner.
Streaming on Netflix is The Monkey King, an animated action comedy starring Jimmy O. Yang and Bowen Yang adapted from an epic Chinese tale about an egotistical primate and his magical fighting stick who team up to battle demons, dragons and gods.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

The Little Mermaid

After a pair of mild artistic successes in Mulan and Cruella, Disney retreats to the tried-and-true live-action remake formula that’s made them billions in worldwide box office previously with The Little Mermaid. The latest entry from the Disney Renaissance period that now belongs in the current Disney Retread-issance era, this latest offering, like Aladdin or The Lion King before it, only exists to remind us of the original. There are bare minimum efforts to distinguish it from its source material or, heaven forbid, improve on it; there are a few new songs, some new subplots and a new character or two. But unlike the Dumbo or Cinderella remakes, the latter of which remains a shining example of what these “updates” should do, not enough time has passed for the 1989 original Mermaid to need refreshing.

We’re reintroduced to the young mermaid Ariel (Halle Bailey) as she spends her days in the underwater kingdom of Atlantica while quietly longing for life above the ocean’s surface. Thanks to her friends Scuttle (Awkwafina) and Flounder (Jacob Tremblay), she’s developed quite a collection of human trinkets that she must hide from her human-hating father King Triton (Javier Bardem). After a shipwreck allows Ariel the opportunity to rescue seafaring prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), she becomes infatuated and even more determined to make her above-land dreams come true. In crawls Ursula (Melissa McCarthy), a devious sea witch who offers to transform Ariel’s tail into human legs to chase after Eric but demands her voice as payment.

Bailey obviously has big fins to fill in the title role and she certainly does all she can with the opportunity. She’s a fantastic singer and unlike, say, Emma Watson in Beauty and the Beast, she doesn’t have to rely on vocal processing to enhance her timbre. But there’s something about the underwater scenes that limit the expressiveness of her face, which Bardem falls victim to in almost all of his scenes as well. I would assume it’s whatever computer-generated effects they render atop the faces of the actors to make it look like they’re underwater but they really hinder the emotive facial qualities that make dramatic scenes work. Once Ariel makes it above water, Bailey’s performance finally feels more alive, even though her songs are performed in voiceover since the character isn’t able to actually sing along at that point.

Most of the fan favorite songs return, including the most-cherished of the Disney “I Want” ballads “Part of Your World” and the dastardly show-stopper “Poor Unfortunate Souls”. The respective performers do a commendable job replicating the magic of the original tunes, even though there isn’t really much that can be added to them. “Under The Sea” gets the live-action “Be Our Guest” treatment of whipping a bunch of blurry CG effects across the screen and calling it fun. Lin-Manuel Miranda contributes new numbers “Wild Uncharted Waters” and “For The First Time”, which fit in lyrically and thematically with the existing songs but don’t best any of the classic original tunes. Hamilton fans will delight at the rap-sung Awkwafina-Daveed Diggs collaboration “The Scuttlebutt”, while Hamilton detractors will likely groan and roll their eyes.

The Little Mermaid suffers from the same problem as the rest of these Disney remakes when it comes to how the animals are designed. Even though we’re dealing with talking crabs and seabirds that can somehow hang out for minutes underwater to converse, director Rob Marshall and his team still attempt to make these creatures look realistic as opposed to the cartoonish liberties that the animated original took. The fish Flounder suffers the most from this treatment; his bulging eyes and agape mouth make him more fit for a Mediterranean plate than as an active participant in this story. Of course, none of this looks better with 3D presentation and for a movie that already has a lack of defined color and visual sharpness, I can’t understand why this is even playing in 3D anywhere. Please stay out of the water and watch the far superior animated The Little Mermaid, in hopes that it will inspire Disney to get out of the shallow end and get back to producing new stories instead of rehashing existing IP.

Score – 1.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, an animated superhero sequel starring Shameik Moore and Hailee Steinfeld continuing the story of Miles Morales as he joins Gwen Stacy to complete a mission to save every universe of Spider-People
Also coming to theaters is The Boogeyman, a supernatural horror movie starring Sophie Thatcher and Chris Messina about a pair of sisters who are still reeling from the recent death of their mother when their therapist father takes in desperate patient who unexpectedly shows up at their house seeking help.
Streaming on Peacock is Shooting Stars, a sports biopic starring Marquis Cook and Wood Harris depicting a young Lebron James and his three best friends as they become the number one high school basketball team in the country.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Memory

Since his iconic tough guy role in 2008’s Taken, Liam Neeson has been on a mission with his specific set of skills: to star in as many similarly budgeted and crafted action movies as humanly possible. From anonymous thrillers like Unknown to Blacklight from just earlier this year, the almost-70-year-old performer doesn’t seem to turn his nose up at any script, provided his character growls some threatening lines and he gets to punch a few people along the way. His latest endeavor along these lines is Memory, an English-language remake of early-aughts Belgian thriller The Alzheimer Case, itself adapted from a novel of the same name. With an accomplished director like Martin Campbell at the helm, this movie had the potential to be a memorable entry in Neeson’s unofficial “Old Guy With A Gun” franchise but instead, it falls far short of that mark.

Neeson is Alex Lewis, a veteran assassin whose brutal precision is skillfully depicted in the film’s opening minutes when he ambushes a target in front of his hospital bed-ridden mother. The latest task from Alex’s handler calls him to El Paso, where he’s expected to eliminate an underage girl holding information that could be passed to the FBI. In addition to the job conflicting with his principled stand to never kill children, Alex is also struggling to keep his advanced Alzheimer’s diagnosis from interfering with his work. When someone gets to Alex’s mark before he does, FBI agents Vincent (Guy Pearce) and Linda (Taj Atwal) begin to follow the trail of mistakes that the ailing Alex leaves behind, eventually leading to hedge fund CEO Davana Sealman (Monica Bellucci) and a band of child traffickers under her employ.

It may be enough to say that no one seems like they want to be in Memory but more specifically, no one feels like they belong in the world that Memory attempts to create. Everything feels like it doesn’t fit together and naturally, the actors seem uncomfortable as a result. It would be easy to take Neeson’s awkward performance and pin its stilted nature on the condition from which his character suffers but there are more fundamental problems here. It’s not that he can’t be bothered to give a compelling performance in one of these on-brand actioners anymore; it’s that this outing seems like this is his first time appearing in one when the complete opposite is true. Elsewhere, Pearce engages in dialect rodeo with a Texas accent that barely hangs on at times but otherwise wavers violently from line to line.

This sort of cops and robbers — perhaps agents and assassins is a better fit — story isn’t particularly novel anyway but scribe Dario Scardapane peppers in a plethora of character details that add up to nothing. Much of the film boils down to Vincent and Linda meeting with witnesses or suspects but these parlays go round and round with virtually no benefit to the story. I’m all for character refinement but when we’re an hour in and learning about a tertiary character’s former Olympic swimming career as opposed to what Alex is going to do next, something has gone awry. Campbell, also responsible for directing two all-time great James Bond entries, seems to lose interest in Alex’s dementia for most of the runtime, just to exploit it later on for an eye roll-inducing last act reveal.

It would be reasonable to expect that Neeson is about ready to hang up his “action star” hat and that Memory would be his last time fronting this type of action thriller but he’s reportedly in the middle of filming another one right now. He’s obviously a talented performer and even during this gun-heavy period of his career, he’s given terrific performances in films like Ordinary Love and Widows. I can’t say I understand what is driving Neeson to keep doing these films — he even joked about the dubious existence of a second Taken sequel, only to eventually appear in it anyway — but if they allow him to appear in smaller movies without having to sweat a paycheck, then I suppose they may be worth continuing to endure. We can only hope that the next one isn’t as bad as Memory.

Score – 1.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the newest MCU superhero film starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Elizabeth Olsen following the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home as Strange looks to mend the Multiverse with the help of Scarlet Witch and other mystical allies.
Streaming on Netflix is Marmaduke, an animated adaptation of the titular comic strip starring Pete Davidson and J. K. Simmons about a legendary dog trainer who believes he can help Marmaduke become the first Great Dane in history to win the Westminster Champions trophy.
Premiering on HBO Max is Navalny, a documentary that follows the months-long recovery of a Russian opposition leader who survived an assassination attempt by poisoning with a lethal nerve agent in August 2020.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Morbius

For those who don’t have their PhDs in cinematic universes, it should be said that the awful new superhero movie Morbius is the third entry in the Sony’s Spider-Man Universe that was created in 2018 for Venom. See, Sony leased the rights for Spider-Man away to Marvel Studios in 2015 but in an effort to ring all the cash out of the spider web that they could, they developed movies based around the character’s villains, even in the hero’s absence. Making a pair of Venom movies without Spider-Man is sort of like making a film about macaroni without cheese but at least baddies like Venom and Vulture are on the A-list of the webslinger’s foes. By selecting Morbius, Sony has already jumped down to the C-list of comic book antagonists as their SSU plows ahead against petty obstacles like artistic integrity and good taste.

We meet Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) as he arrives at a cave in Costa Rica and draws vampire bats out using a machine whose function is never clearly (or unclearly) stated. Along with his childhood friend Lucien (Matt Smith), Morbius suffers from a rare blood illness, for which the doctor has spent his entire life trying to develop a cure. His latest attempt involves splicing his DNA with the recently-captured bats, which gifts him with vampiric superpowers but also curses him with an unquenchable thirst for blood. Morbius’s hunger is temporarily satiated by a synthetic blood he created but his growing bloodlust has coincided with a string of attacks on the city by someone who has been sucking victims dry. Together with fellow scientist Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona), Morbius sets out to take down the city’s new “vampire killer”.

Like many films that have been released over the past year, Morbius is yet another victim of covid-related delays after an initial July 2020 premiere window and as that’s the case, its trailer has played ad nauseum since movie theaters have reopened. It teases about a dozen Easter eggs and scenes that never made the final cut, which points to manipulative advertising rather than judicious editing on Sony’s part. It’s also indicative of aimlessness when it comes to what story director Daniel Espinosa is trying to tell. The film shamelessly rips off specific moments from better superhero films like Batman Begins and 2002’s Spider-Man but not in a way that helps justify why this interpretation of the Morbius character should exist in the first place.

From the casting of Leto as a brilliant scientist to a plot that’s been drained of every ounce of originality, there’s not an aspect of Morbius that doesn’t feel haphazard and sloppy. An awkward early flashback depicts a meet-ugly between Morbius and Lucien, where the former insists on calling the latter by the incorrect name to mock his expendability. From that moment on, the title character operates in two modes of “selfish jerk” and “outright bore” for the rest of the movie. Leto injects the film with lifeless voiceover narration that insults the audience’s intelligence, as if we’re not supposed to know what echolocation is. At least Matt Smith is trying to have some fun — he even gets a peppy dance number before a night on the town — but his antics are bogged down by the film’s brooding and moody nature.

What’s most painful about Morbius is just how hard it’s trying to be cool and how dated it looks in all of its efforts to do so. With speed-ramping bullet effects out of an Underworld sequel and color palette that blends shades of Hot Topic and Spirit Halloween, it’s about as edgy as an Evanescence cover band on a Tuesday night. I’m all for a comic book movie with moral complexity or a darker tone but there’s nothing ambiguous or artistic about the way this film tries to get across its message. Perhaps I was a bit too hard on Venom a few years ago because that movie and its sequel at least have an admirable, out-of-left-field goofiness that’s nowhere to be found in this self-serious dreck. Tawdry and toothless, Morbius is more BS from a media conglomerate that needs to put a stake in the heart of this bungled cinematic universe.

Score – 1.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Ambulance, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, is a Michael Bay-directed action thriller about two robbers who steal an ambulance and hold an EMT hostage after their heist goes awry.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2, starring Ben Schwartz and James Marsden, is the sequel to the 2020 video game adaptation that finds Sonic and his new partner Tails squaring off against the evil Dr Robotnik and his new ally Knuckles.
Everything Everywhere All at Once, starring Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, is a science fiction action comedy about an aging Chinese immigrant who is tasked with saving the world by exploring other universes connecting with the lives she could have led.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Studio 666

In addition to selling millions of records and packing stadiums around the world during their 25+ year career as a band, Foo Fighters has also demonstrated a propensity towards silly music videos. The visual companion pieces to songs like “Everlong”, “Learn To Fly” and “Long Road To Ruin” are spearheaded by the goofy charisma of frontman Dave Grohl, who has no compunction about sporting a wig or fake mustache for yuks. Conjured forth from those comedic impulses comes Studio 666, a horror comedy that could have worked as a 5-minute music video but absolutely flounders as a 105-minute feature. Shot partially during lockdown in the same mansion where the band recorded their tenth album Medicine at Midnight, it’s a lazy and pointless vanity project that inexplicably crept onto 2000 screens nationwide this past weekend.

The story features fictionalized versions of the Foos, pressured by their manager Jeremy Shill (Jeff Garlin) at the outset to complete new music for their record company. Looking for inspiration, they take Shill’s advice and move into an Encino house where fictional band Dream Widow almost finished an album of their own before the project ended abruptly by grisly means. After regurgitating riffs from tunes that he’d already written before, Grohl accepts that he’s going through a bout of songwriter’s block before happening upon the reels from Dream Widow’s partial recordings in the basement. Listening to the tracks possesses Grohl, not only figuratively in terms of musical inspiration but also literally, as the music unlocks unholy spirits that turn the frontman demonic.

Lifting visually from horror classics like The Exorcist and The Omen and narratively from scores of others, Studio 666 simply doesn’t have enough of its own ideas to justify its existence. Grohl is credited with coming up with the story, obviously conceived during his time recording the real-life album, but the screenplay by Jeff Buhler and Rebecca Hughes is paper-thin and painfully puerile. When the band members aren’t exchanging naughty four-letter words with one another, they’re stuck with witless dialogue about subpar grilling technique or aversions to meditation. Comedians like Whitney Cummings and Will Forte, the latter as a delivery guy who professes Foo Fighters are his “2nd favorite band after Coldplay”, pop up to punch things up but their effort is sadly in vain.

In the aforementioned music videos and numerous TV appearances throughout the years, Grohl has exhibited an endearing charm that has served him even outside the context of Foo Fighters fans. However, the rest of the band clearly doesn’t share his affinity for a life in front of the camera. Of course the other five members are great musicians but their unnatural and unconvincing acting feels like the product of Grohl pushing these guys past their natural abilities. Drummer Taylor Hawkins, who reportedly didn’t bother to learn any of the lines from the script, ironically gives the funniest performance of the lot simply by replaying the same note of weirded-outness at the occult occurrences. The other four Fighters are relegated to reaction shots that don’t produce any laughs nor add to the impact of the would-be scares.

The one aspect that the production team seemed to put any effort behind is in the gory practical effects during the inevitable kill scenes, which are admirable in their craft if not completely novel in their execution. Director B.J. McDonnell, who headed up the third entry in the Hatchet slasher series, leans into his skill set and delivers a few sequences that pay off with over-the-top slayings that make fine use of unique props and settings. An icon of the horror genre also shows up in an all-too-brief cameo as a sound engineer, while a legend of soul music says “hello” in another scene without adding much of an impact. Studio 666 obviously doesn’t diminish the Foo Fighters’ music legacy but it should put a swift demise to any future cinematic aspirations for the group.

Score – 1.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is The Batman, the latest reincarnation of the Caped Crusader starring Robert Pattinson and Zoë Kravitz about Batman’s second year of fighting crime as he teams up with Catwoman to take on The Riddler and The Penguin.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is Lucy and Desi, a documentary from director Amy Poehler covering the rise of comedian icon Lucille Ball, her relationship with Desi Arnaz, and how their groundbreaking sitcom I Love Lucy forever changed Hollywood.
Premiering on Hulu is Fresh, a comedy thriller starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan about a young woman who navigates the hurdles of modern dating and discovers that her new boyfriend may have sinister proclivities for sustenance.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Cyrano

Though the 19th century play Cyrano de Bergerac has been adapted countless times for the screen and stage since its premiere, the new prestige drama Cyrano is based most specifically on a 2018 stage musical of the same name. Conceived by theater director Erica Schmidt, presumably with her real-life husband Peter Dinklage in mind, the musical differs from the source material most notably by trading Cyrano’s trademark facial disfigurement with dwarfism as the protagonist’s primary obstacle. Despite this, the new adaptation remains true to the setting, story and spirit to the original work but mangles so many aspects of the execution that it hardly seems to matter. It’s not as much of an unmitigated disaster as Dear Evan Hansen but it’s not as far off as one may imagine.

Dinklage stars in the title role as a member of the French army in the mid-17th century who’s equal halves sharp-tongued wordsmith and sharp-tipped swordsmith. We meet Cyrano as he verbally spars with a gussied-up actor mid-performance and then physically spars with an upset audience member on-stage. Looking on from the balcony is Roxanne (Haley Bennett), a longtime friend of Cyrano for whom he has secretly carried a torch as long as they’ve been acquainted. She confides in him a love at first sight with Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a newcomer to the military in Cyrano’s regiment and when Cyrano brings Roxanne up to Christian, he confesses a requisite affection. Sadly, Christian’s good looks don’t translate to sharp wits, leading Cyrano to offer his verbosity as he pens love letters to Roxanne under Christian’s name.

The biggest tragedy of Cyrano is that the music and lyrics come courtesy of members from the excellent rock band The National, who have made some of my favorite albums of the past 15 years. Guitarist brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner composed the music while lead singer Matt Berninger penned the lyrics along with his wife Carin Besser. The Dessners are known for their technically intricate and sonically sophisticated guitar work with The National but their range in these songs is frustratingly limited. Too many of these numbers sound nearly identical to one another, while the words don’t reveal the characters’ motivations as much as they simply underline plot points that are already obvious. Dinklage mournfully belts out Roxanne’s name so often, I half-expected Sting to come in beckoning her not to “put on the red light.”

It could be that musical range is intentionally myopic to cover for the undeveloped vocal talents of Dinklage and Bennett, who reprise their roles from the stage musical. Neither are necessarily poor singers but they do rely on the kind of digital processing that has become alarmingly common in movie musicals over the past 10 years. In this recontextualized role, Dinklage does a fine job channeling Cyrano’s social shortcomings into poignant pathos but Bennett falls totally flat in trying to make Roxanne an empathetic character. After her first meeting face-to-face with Christian, she would understandably be confused in trying to reconcile his simple disposition with his poetic prose. Instead of singing a song about that, she simply bellows “I want more” repeatedly in regards to a potential suitor, making her seem more of an entitled brat than an unaware member of a bizarre love triangle.

Making Cyrano’s short stature a stumbling block for a potential partnership with Roxanne is a wise refresh of the original tale, given Dinklage’s affinity for the role, but there is one change that wasn’t quite as well thought-through. While I appreciate the colorblind casting of Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Christian, it’s not an especially great look for him to be cast as a slow-witted black man who seeks the aid of a white savior for guidance in his love letters. The staging of one major scene, in particular, robs Christian of his agency in ways that would seem hoary and tacky even when race isn’t factored in but even more cringe-inducing when it is. Cyrano may have worked better in the more intimate setting of musical theater but as a film, it comes up short of the mark.

Score – 1.5/5

More new movies to watch this weekend:
Streaming on Disney+ is The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, an animated spin-off starring Simon Pegg and Vincent Tong about a pair of possum brothers who team up with a weasel to save the Lost World from dinosaur domination.
Premiering on HBO Max is The Fallout, a teen drama starring Jenna Ortega and Maddie Ziegler about a high schooler who navigates the emotional fallout she experiences with friends and family in the wake of a school tragedy.
Screening at Cinema Center January 28th and 29th is Into The Storm, a documentary filmed over 5 years that follows the unlikely dream of a young indigenous surfer from one of the toughest barrios in Latin America as he struggles to escape the struggles of his background and become a professional surfer.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Red Notice

On their comedy companion channel Netflix Is A Joke, the streaming giant has a series called Written Entirely By Bots, comprised of animated shorts allegedly written by a computer program tasked with watching thousands of hours of a given genre of film. If they did one called The First Action-Adventure Film Written Entirely By Bots, I can’t imagine it would turn out much differently than Red Notice. Seemingly rendered to trigger a new wave of post-human cinema, the new would-be blockbuster doesn’t seem designed by committee as much as it seems designed by algorithm. Hypothetically, it was made to entertain humans but perhaps bots will be trained to watch it to juice up Netflix’s Nielsen numbers and trigger an inevitable franchise. We, the ticket-holders (subscription-holders, more aptly), are finally obsolete.

The story goes that thousands of years ago, Cleopatra received three egg-shaped jewels as gifts that were lost over time and scattered across the world. Cut to present day and their mystique still drives art thieves like Nolan Booth (Ryan Reynolds) to scoop them up and sell the reconvened trio to the highest bidder. After nearly catching Booth in the act of stealing the first egg from Rome, FBI agent John Hartley (Dwayne Johnson) stays hot on his trail as he travels to Spain, where the second egg is allegedly held by arms dealer Sotto Voce (Chris Diamantopoulos). We discover Booth isn’t the only one scooping up eggs, as a fellow burglar known as The Bishop (Gal Gadot) is also drawn to the bejeweled artifacts and threatens to discover the lost third egg before he does.

From the expository opening voiceover that literally sounds like it was deep-faked into existence to the obligatory sequel its ending portends, Red Notice is gallingly generic throughout its 118 minute runtime. It apes globe-trotting escapades like Indiana Jones and The Mummy but does so with a stunning lack of personality and originality. Everyone here is squarely within their wheelhouse: Johnson as the stoic straight man, Reynolds as the wise-cracking fool and Gadot as the statuesque mystery woman who knows how to kick a butt or two. I understand actors playing to their strengths but these three stars are so unwilling to move away from their comfort zones that it just comes across as lazy. Perhaps Gadot and company still believe they’re under quarantine singing “Imagine” in their mansions, locked down from venturing out into the world of creativity.

Credited writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber hit it big in the past with comedies like DodgeBall and We’re the Millers but has transitioned to helming anonymous actioners since teaming with Johnson in 2018’s Skyscraper. Red Notice is a little too eager to please with its comedic notes but despite itself, it lands a few laughs along the way. Almost all the attempts come courtesy of Reynolds’ trademark quips, which are exhausting in their frequency but not without their occasional wins. His Booth asking a Russian prison cafeteria worker if the gruel he just served is farm-to-table is one such example that caught me off guard enough to chuckle. However, on the subject of food and drink, I can’t roll my eyes hard enough at the fact that Reynolds didn’t think we’d notice product placement for his own line of gin.

Just like the on-screen persona that Reynolds has crafted over the past twenty years, Red Notice is simply far too pleased with itself. It’s fueled by the same self-satisfied soullessness that has plagued blockbusters in the past but that Netflix is cynical enough to bet on this brand of entertainment for home viewing further demonstrates their commitment towards quantity over quality. Just this month, they’ve already released two other films — The Harder They Fall and Passing — that are well worth one’s time but won’t get half the views of this star-studded sham. With a title that sounds like an ominous warning that the crimson-hued “N” will soon take over all of Hollywood, Red Notice is less of a movie and more of a call to arms for creatives at risk of being outsourced by machines.

Score – 1.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming only to theaters is Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a supernatural comedy sequel starring Paul Rudd and Finn Wolfhard about a recently evicted family who moves to a farmhouse and experiences unexplained earthquakes that they suspect could be tied to the paranormal.
Playing in theaters and streaming on HBO Max is King Richard, a sports biopic starring Will Smith and Aunjanue Ellis about how tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams became who they are after the coaching from their father Richard Williams.
Premiering on Netflix is Tick, Tick… Boom!, a musical starring Andrew Garfield and Alexandra Shipp about an aspiring theater composer endures a quarter-life crisis as he approaches 30 and does not feel close to his dream.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Stowaway

In Ridley Scott’s The Martian, Matt Damon plays a brilliant astronaut who gets stranded on Mars and with the aid of a robust sense of humor and scientific intellect along with NASA assistance, he makes it back to Earth. The new sci-fi snoozer Stowaway finds four space travelers in a similar predicament, who work through a life-or-death struggle in the most rote and matter-of-fact way possible. The special effects are believable enough and the process of how the astronauts deal with their stressful situation is likely accurate but that doesn’t mean it makes for an engaging movie. Watching the film is like reading an inventory list of dehydrated food supplies or an instruction manual for how to eat them; it’s the cinematic equivalent of the saltine cracker challenge.

The film opens on the faces of three crew members during the takeoff of a space shuttle owned by Hyperion, a sort of fictional SpaceX of the near-future. The aim of their two year, Mars-bound mission is to test food production on the red planet, spearheaded by tireless research from the ship’s biologist David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim). The rest of the trio, medic Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick) and commander Marina Barnett (Toni Collette), round out a lean crew that grows too large when the latter finds an unconscious man behind a ceiling grate. He turns out to be a concussed launch support engineer who unwittingly became an accidental stowaway on a ship that only has resources to support three people and apparently not enough to abort the mission altogether.

In his directorial debut Arctic, director Joe Penna told a similar survival story to the one found in Stowaway but with even fewer people, revolving entirely around a stranded pilot played by Mads Mikkelsen. Taking place in the oppressive tundra of the Arctic Circle, the film has a convincing and menacing sense of environment that carries over to the unforgiving outer space surroundings of Penna’s sophomore effort. Adapting from “The Cold Equations”, a sci-fi short story that has also served as the basis for a Twilight Zone episode of the same name, Penna and co-writer Ryan Morrison lay out the terms of the crew’s conundrum in fittingly unfeeling terms.

A creative decision becomes apparent early-on, one that dictates the story is told only from the perspective of these four voyagers. When Barnett communicates with a head technician at Hyperion, we only hear her side of the phone call and we don’t meet any other characters besides those four. This is in contrast to a space movie like The Martian, where we bounce between Mars and Earth and are introduced to supporting players to get a more complete picture. This withholding context should make the proceedings more tense, since we’re stuck on the ship with the crew, but the isolation only makes things painfully dull. The third act features an action setpiece of sorts but everything leading up to it is essentially hand-wringing devoid of the kind of moral ambiguity that could have made things interesting.

I’m not sure there’s a group of actors who could have given this lifeless tale what it needed but it’s certainly not for lack of trying. Aside from some fleeting sparks of chemistry with her two male cohorts, the charming Anna Kendrick is sadly miscast in a role that squanders her spunky sense of humor. Daniel Dae Kim deserves a starring role with more meat on the bone than this and Toni Collette, one of the best actresses around, is forced to push her melodramatic lines to their breaking point. Shamier Anderson might come across as the best of the quartet in his titular role but even his efforts fall short. Overacted and underdirected, Stowaway is a Netflix movie that barely passes muster as a screensaver at which to occasionally glance behind your smartphone after a hard day’s work.

Score – 1.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Opening in theaters and streaming on HBO Max is Mortal Kombat, a martial arts fantasy movie starring Lewis Tan and Jessica McNamee about an MMA fighter who recruits Earth’s greatest champions for a high stakes tournament in another universe.
Also coming to theaters is Together Together, an indie comedy starring Ed Helms and Patti Harrison about an introverted young woman who becomes a gestational surrogate for a single man in his 40s.
Also in theaters is The Asset, an action thriller starring Michael Keaton and Maggie Q about a pair of premiere assassins who team up to track down the killer of their mutual mentor.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Cherry

Transitioning in and out of a franchise-defining role can present a unique challenge to an actor, especially early in one’s career. Take Daniel Radcliffe. Starring in the first Harry Potter movie at the age of 11, he only appeared in one non-Potter film, the Australian weepie December Boys, during the octology’s 10 year run. His effort to break free from the specter of the bespectacled sorcerer in the 10 years since the series capping Deathly Hallows has led to roles that range from safe to bewildering, with flashes of brilliance in between. Tom Holland, currently filming the second sequel to 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, has faced a similar challenge shedding the image of his squeaky-clean superhero persona when taking on new projects like the pitiless dud Cherry.

Based on the bombshell autobiography from Army vet Nico Walker, Cherry stars Holland in the title role as a wayward young man who drops out of an Ohio university to become a military medic. In the transition, he meets the precocious but charming Emily (Ciara Bravo) and quickly falls in love with her. It isn’t long before he’s rushed through basic training and sent off to Iraq to treat soldiers’ horrific wounds while fighting for as much phone time with his true love as possible. When he returns stateside, he finds respite from his worsening PTSD by way of opioids and quickly falls down the steep spiral of drug addiction, while jeopardizing Emily’s future in the process. As hinted in the film’s prologue, Cherry eventually turns to bank robbery as a means of funding his heartbreaking habit.

After disintegrating the universe (half of it, technically) in Avengers: Infinity War and putting it back together in Avengers: Endgame, directors Anthony and Joe Russo are necessarily dealing in smaller stakes here by comparison. The main issue with Cherry is that even though the scale of the story should be much more modest, the Russos render every frame of their posturing crime drama with the same intensity of a big budget blockbuster. Nearly every scene incorporates at least one filming technique, be it exaggerated uses of focus or shifting aspect ratios, that seem designed to inspire nods of understanding from packed film school lecture halls. It’s enough to make one wonder if MCU architect Kevin Feige needed to tell these guys to rein it in more often than to punch things up during their 4 film stint with Marvel.

Beyond the over-stylization of the film’s visual palette, the Russos also lay it on way too thick when it comes to the themes of the narrative, which are displayed as ostentatiously as lighted letters on the side of a bank. There is a sensitive story still to be told about how veterans returning to the US don’t receive the treatment they need and become victims of drug abuse and suicide at disproportional and alarming rates. The directing duo may indeed care about these issues but the leading principle behind their vision isn’t “how can we intelligently convey this tragedy?” but rather “how can we make this look really cool?” When they do attempt to address the societal problems that sprout up from the story, their grasps at profundity couldn’t be any more amateurish and shallow.

The try-hard theatrics behind the camera could be forgiven if they at least generated a revelatory performance from Holland but the young actor is caught trying just as hard to shatter his clean-cut image. I simply never bought him as an ex-soldier turned hardened criminal, no matter how many four-letter words he spit out or how many times he brandished a gun in someone’s face. Ciara Bravo, whose name is incidentally homophonous with two letters from the military phonetic alphabet, is only slightly more convincing in her underwritten role. A product of directors trading epic storytelling for an epic failure, Cherry is filmmaking made rotten by the sickness of rampant over-direction.

Score – 1.5/5

Also new to streaming this weekend:
Premiering on Netflix is Yes Day, a family comedy starring Jennifer Garner and Édgar Ramírez about a pair of parents who give their three kids a “yes day”, where kids make the rules for 24 hours.
Streaming on Disney+ is Own The Room, a documentary from National Geographic which chronicles five students from disparate corners of the planet as they take their budding business ventures to the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards.
Available to rent digitally is Dark Web: Cicada 3301, a techno thriller starring Jack Kesy and Conor Leslie about a hacker and his friends who get caught up in a secret society’s global recruitment game.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup