Great fun. The new Superman is nothing short of winning (his recent angst has been jettisoned for an earnestness that cannot even countenance the needless death of a squirrel); director James Gunn (the Guardians of the Galaxy movies) has no pretensions beyond that of making a smart summer popcorn flick; the villain, Nicholas Hoult, is both interesting and funny; Krypto the unruly super dog is a great bonus for the kids; and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and Superman have real sexual chemistry. Ultimately, what I loved most about the film was that it was for kids but elevated enough that adults are also entertained, rather than some hideous transmogrification of a kid’s comic dirtied up, made noir, or otherwise infused with big serious themes, because a bunch of 41 year old fat asses sitting in their parents’ basement need to justify their childhood fetishes.
The nits are minor. A few characters get short shrift, a foray into something called a pocket galaxy is a bit long, and the last second introduction of an obnoxious Supergirl feels Something Wicked This Way Comes (next summer).
iPhones to films are what mustard is to ice cream. In the theater, they are pernicious, and I yearn for the day when those who are on their devices during a picture are summarily placed in stocks in front the multiplex where they can be freely pelted with Milk Duds and Cherry Icees.
At home, the impact is no better, but at least you’re only draining your own brain.
That said … the iPhone test is real, and it is reliable.
If you are watching a movie, and you feel the urge to check your texts, a sports score, or social media, or Bumble, you should resist that urge.
But the existence of the urge is telling you something valid.
Well, more than one thing. Primarily, it is telling you that your attention span has so deteriorated that you lack the capacity to engage singularly with art. You might think you’re a keen multitasker, or that your capabilities to receive the flow of information from many sources simultaneously makes you special. But you’re wrong. You’re just mentally degraded, and it will only get worse, until the apocalyptic end, when we are caught flat-footed by Skynet because we are gobbling increasingly dumber morsels of bite-sized shit that has been pre-packaged, pre-engineered, and pre-spiced to scratch the itch Zuckerberg identified and aggravated so we could keep coming back to his mental Calamine.
Speaking of spice, I liked Dune plenty, though it was too dark, too grey and a bit anticlimactic. While it was one of the first movies I saw in the theater post-COVID, I didn’t review it, but I dug it.
Dune: Part Two has hit HBO Max and it is long. So long, I needed two nights, because I get sleepy. But I was drawn in and eventually, riveted, and now find myself yearning for the next installment.
Denis Villeneuve has created an epic, grand, sweeping yarn with a lot of truly fine actors, and the world created is adult, forbidding, and intriguing. A full recap is unnecessary, but there is a Game of Thrones quality, with Great Houses vying for a facsimile of oil (spice) as well as the emperorship and control. There is also sinister magic, geopolitics, religious fanaticism, hand-to-hand fighting, big ass sandworms, and a love that dare not speak thy name (Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet).
Full disclosure: we paused the movie because at my advanced age, I have to pee more than I’d like. And I did a quick rinse of the dishes because I hate when the food sticks.
But I don’t think I thought about looking at my phone.
One nit – Christopher Walken is now such a caricature, he just doesn’t work outside of quirky, comedic roles. As an emperor, he shambles in (actually, kind of phones it in), and distracts.
When the James Bond series sunk into the self parodic lethal brew of bad puns and worse hair, the franchise was revived by Casino Royale. It was no accident that the first scene in the film was a sweaty, driven Daniel Craig relentlessly chasing a bomber through streets, windows, buildings, a construction site, up a crane, and further, all physicality and adrenaline, no gadgets, brutally visceral.
A necessary antidote to the disease that preceded it-
I thought about this scene while watching Godzilla Minus One, the Japanese production that has, as of this writing, reached $60 million worldwide and $30 million domestic.
The picture is roundly and rightly lauded. But a mere $60 million, you say? Not exactly world shattering.
Except for the following facts
a) the film is foreign language;
b) there are no stars;
c) there are no Avengers or Wookies;
d) the picture’s budget was $15 million, not $150 million.
Quite an achievement and hopefully a harbinger.
At the end of World War II, a young Japanese kamikaze pilot chickens out. While preparing for another sortie on a Pacific island, he sees Godzilla, who wipes out his entire contingent, and again, he hesitates. Wracked with shame, he returns to postwar Tokyo, cobbles together a makeshift family and suffers in ignominy, until Godzilla appears to threaten once again.
There is a real story here. The picture tugs on the heartstrings (admittedly, sometimes a bit too much), makes one stir with emotion, and actually draws characters rather than caricatures. Even better, no one is clad in a stupid superhero uniform, and CGI is not crammed down the viewers’ eye sockets to the point of blinding.
There is CGI, of course, but it is done with great care, and melded seamlessly into the production. It felt real, not silly, shiny, and stupid. It was exciting to see it, not numbing.
Director Takashi Yamazake also doles out Godzilla sparingly, making his appearances even more impactful. The feel is like an old-fashioned serial, updated for modern times. Thrilling, fun, moving, heroic and devoid of cheap cynicism and snark. Loved it through and through.
Who knows? Maybe this will convince Hollywood that it doesn’t need to spend $250 million for another shit box from spent IP, one almost certain to tank at the box office.
An old Twilight Zone episode depicted three soldiers on National Guard duty in Montana who went back in time and found themselves spectators to the Battle of the Little Big Horn. They struggled with the implications of intervention, essentially foreshadowing Star Trek and violation of the “prime directive” (i.e., never mess with history when time traveling lest you step on a bug and forever alter what is meant to be). They eventually jumped into the fray. This flick is essentially the same concept, but with a modern aircraft carrier being time-portaled back to the day before Pearl Harbor. Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, and James Farentino have to contend with the same conundrum.
It’s fun. A little discordant, alternating between whimsy (the commander of the modern USS Nimitz, Douglas, has a certain Disney movie mien to him, but then there are very bloody scenes that punctuate the film). But solid.
It is also clearly a joint effort with the Navy. There is so much aerial footage and extended scenes of flying and taking off that it feels like a recruiting ad, Top Gun sans the volleyball. Curious sidenote. The Department of Defense actually sued the producers for reimbursement, alleging fraud on the reporting of actual flying time. My father’s law firm represented the producers, including Kirk Douglas’ son.
On Amazon.
P.S. There was a big to do in the last several years over a Reddit discussion: “Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU?”
A short story followed. Hollywood then bought the short story. Good rundown below. Stay tuned.
George Clooney’s overly meditative, end of the world film makes the initial mistake of not quite telling us what happened to the planet. Something about radiation, and since he is alone in the Arctic, we are alone with him and his flashbacks and perhaps his hallucinations as he dies of cancer. But once you get a sense of the kind of ridiculous, ass-backward people living in the future, the cause of their extinction is of no great moment. They say chickens are so stupid they’ll drown in the rain. That’s us forty years hence.
But Clooney has one last task before he perishes. He must get word to an incoming space vessel from Jupiter that the world has gone to pieces. They have been on a two year mission and soon, they will be “in range” and Clooney can tell them, “Go back to the habitable moon near Jupiter. Great danger here.”
This film is set in 2049.
Now, imagine I am Peter Finch. I want you all to stop reading, and go Google, “How long does it take to send a message to jupiter”.
Result: “approximately 35 minutes. Radio waves travelling at 300,000 km/second would take approximately 35 minutes to reach a satellite orbiting Jupiter depending on alignment, and the same time to travel back to Earth, equaling about 1.2 hours.”
But filmvetter, you might say, the radiation threat just came on so quick there was no time!!! THERE WAS NO TIME!!!!!!
Nonsense. When the ship does get “in range” of Clooney and they establish contact, a message is downloaded (ha!!!) from the wife of crew member Kyle Chandler.
In it, she states that she is being evacuated and their sons are sick.
So, this calamity took some time. Indeed, the opening scene shows continued evacuations and there is a later reference to survivors underground.
I guess in all the panic, however, no one thought, “Hey, let’s send a raven to the incoming ship from the potentially habitable moon off of Jupiter.” It’s like the president was George Costanza and someone yelled, “Fire!”
It gets worse.
In The Martian, I raved about Matt Damon’s intrepid skills when he was stranded, and I also nit-bitched about the hip slackers on the ground (“the people who work at NASA have a certain blasé “I worked in a Blockbuster and I will never wear a uniform again” mien”)
I owe the NASA staff in The Martian an apology. They were the cream of the crop compared to this lot. And while Damon was dexterous and tough, here, the crew presents as a mixture of incurious and frivolous. When they learn that life on our planet has not only changed, but that the planet is lethal, half of them somberly insist on going to their homes to face certain death. They literally abandon ship. The other half head off back to Jupiter with a badly damaged vessel minus two critical team members. But all four seem unperturbed. Where is Chuck Heston and “You maniacs! You blew it up!” when you need him?
Oh, and the two who are Jupiter-bound are Captain Daniel Oyewelo and Felicity Jones. It appears the good captain has been at it with the crew, because she is pregnant with his child! Another crew member, Tiffany Boone, throws up several times because she has to make her first space walk. And she’s not even the one who is knocked up.
Or is she?
Mind you, this was not a 20 year voyage.
It was two!!!!!!!
(A good friend did note that at least the movie progeny will be something special, as the offspring of a filmic Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.)
Alas, NASA, apparently, becomes the DMV in the future.
Ultimately, the film is not only stupid, it is depressing. In the future, we supplant bravery and common cause and sense with uber-narcissism.
The schmaltzy, arty ending is insufferable.
Adding insult to injury, there’s a crew sing-a-long to Sweet Caroline.
Futuristic flicks from the 70s are a guilty pleasure of mine and I watched a bunch of them with my father growing up. Logan’s Run, Soylent Green, The Omega Man, Planet of the Apes, Death Race 2000. You could count us in.
This one is meh. The world is run by a few corporations. The executive class is the aristocracy, and they entertain themselves with luxury and regular ingestion of what seems to be a mix of ecstasy and LSD. The sport of the global masses is Rollerball, a violent and deadly mixture of roller derby, lacrosse, hockey and maul ball. James Caan is its biggest star, but for reasons unknown to us, he is being forced out of the game at his peak by corporate titan John Houseman, at a moment when the sport is moving to a “no penalty” phase, which will up the murders and further endanger his teammates. Caan resists and delves deeper.
The picture mixes futurism and corporate skullduggery, but the latter is simplistic, and Caan’s attempt to get to the bottom of things is haphazard and a little dull. Caan also can’t convey the emerging intellect that could drive his lummox of a character to ask deeper questions. He seems as if he senses the silliness of the endeavor, and appears to be wincing at his own involvement. Also, Houseman is really not a very good actor, pretty much at the level of his old Smith Barney commercials.
But the flick has its fun moments. And even though one doesn’t equate director Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night, And Justice for All) and “action,” the Rollerball itself is good, clean, bloody fun.
Brad Pitt is an astronaut at an undetermined time in the future (we have commercial flights to the Moon and manned installations in Mars). He’s cool as a cucumber and as revealed in voice over and daily psych evaluations, disconnected in a manner that barely registers physically but gnaws at him emotionally. Oh, and he has the mother of all Daddy issues, as he is sent out to space on a mission to stop his father (Tommy Lee Jones), a Colonel Kurtz-like figure whose own journey to Neptune 25 years earlier went bad. Jones abandoned Pitt and Pitt’s dying mother to command the endeavor. The assumption was that Jones and crew had perished, but in fact, he’s alive and he’s causing quite a bit of trouble.
The film has one flaw, but it isn’t insignificant. The Pitt voice overs – personal observations as to his own emotional state – are often distracting and unnecessary. Pitt is a fine enough actor that a lot of stuff he says just becomes superfluous, and a lot of other stuff he says borders on the clumsy. An example: “I always wanted to become an astronaut, for the future of mankind and all. At least, that’s what I always told myself. I see myself from the outside. Smile, present a side. It’s a performance, with my eye on the exit. Always on the exit. Just don’t touch me.” When you see Pitt, you know this or you will glean it. When it’s explicated, it loses force. Pitt is fantastic but hobbled by the overt inner dialogue.
That said, the film is transfixing and true to its world, offering a not fully-explained but logical future for space travel, sterility meshed with utility. It’s also visually stunning. James Gray’s (We Own the Night) world is beautiful, haunting and as evidenced in a few action sequences, lethal.
So, put the IPhone down and enjoy while you can, because they won’t be making these sorts of personal epics for much longer.
Other than some nice, genuine moments between Rey (Daisey Ridley) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), pretty terrible. Perfunctory, inconsistent, soulless and enslaved to JJ Abrams’ zealous desire to wrap everything up. But it’s Christmas. Let’s focus on the good things.
This guy (Greg Grunberg). He plays an overweight X-Wing pilot who looks like a sitcom character. The only thing he’s missing is a pastrami sandwich in his hand. Reportedly, the Star Wars folks were all over Carrie Fisher to drop a few pounds for the role, yet this lard ass catches a pass? I don’t know the other guy. Without arms, I can’t imagine he/she/it/they are of much value.
This guy (Mark Hamill). He appears as a ghost to set Rey straight. He has an uncanny resemblance to Jesus, until he speaks, and then . . . well. Not exactly commanding.
They’re baaaack. Just in time for Christmas.
Lando Calrissian and Jannah. While the chatter suggests she may be his daughter, their final scene has more a creepy, “Hey, baby, where you been all my life?” vibe.
These guys. Who follow our heroes everywhere, fortunate in the fact that they never encounter stairs.
These guys. Strategery continues to remain a weakness, as the entire fleet is a) lined up like planes at Pearl Harbor; b) wholly reliant on one communications device that allows them to maneuver during attack; c) leaden with exposed weapons in their underbelly that can be detonated with a few grenades, leading to destruction of the entire ship.
Very, very long (6 hours in total for the two films), but not altogether terrible and without giving anything away, at least they put some bodies on the block, thus limiting later franchise movies solely to origin stories. Quippy, and visually much more satisfying than a lot of these movies. Also, Thor in a fat suit is pretty funny, and melding The Hulk and Bruce Banner (now, he can wear the right size pants all the time)? Inspired.
Still, when all is said and done, the whole things turns on Superman reverse circling the earth to go back in time. They just couldn’t use him because he’s not a Marvel character. Also, the concept for the second film is the same as HBO’s The Leftovers.
The crossover movie that speaks to kids and adults is a tough trick. Guardians of the Galaxy is the model. The characters have to be winning, It has to be smart but not obtuse, and what can be mutually enjoyed (action, wise-crackery) must be primo.
Solo fails all of these prerequisites. At the outset, we get “Long ago, in a galaxy far far away . . . “ Followed by several more paragraphs setting the scene and presenting the quest, which in this case, is the obtainment of everlasting life and power enough to challenge evil in the galaxy.
I’m fucking with you. The quest is for fuel. Yup. Fuel. I mean, not as bad as one of the Lucas pictures (1, or 4, who knows?), where, if memory serves, the primary issue was taxes. But still, pretty bad.
The dull goal is matched by duller characters. Young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) apes the original via the sole utilization of a smirk. He’s a better choice for a young Paul Rudd, not Harrison Ford. He’s not as bad as Hayden Christenson as Darth Vader the teen, but he’s close. After him, bad guy Paul Bettany, well, his thing is that he gets angry. And then there is Woody Harrelson, the grizzled smuggler and thief, who keeps telling Han, “Don’t trust anybody.” Then he pulls him close, points to his own head, snaps a Polaroid, waves it, blows on it, shoves it in Han’s pocket, and says “Anybody!”
After these dolts, it’s just a bunch of facsimiles of all the weird variations one can find in the galaxy. “Hey look, it’s clarinet head!” “And there’s suckhole face!” “And does he have 5 arms?” “Ah, I get it! That’s why they called him ‘handy’ a minute ago.”
And then there are the droids. In the first picture, we had the gold guy who spoke with a British accent and was amusing, like having a character from Downton Abbey in the future. He said things like “Goodness! Oh my!” and “My heavens!” whenever someone shot a laser near him. I could see a droid maker coming up with such a program, a little pizzazz in the automaton that normally performs light-dusting and household repairs.
Now, however, all droids have been imbued with feelings and opinions and agency. Who the hell wants a droid that may start a wage strike? The writers, that’s who. It’s too ridiculous, even for this pretty ridiculous vehicle.
The script itself is similarly idiotic. The characters just bounce from place to place for small and uninteresting reasons. “Who is that?” Is generally followed by a long definitional response. “That was close!” elicits “Not as close as the parseck gleep glop on Miki Roo Roo!” Characters say banal things to Solo throughout, followed by or including “kid”, as in “You got moxie, kid!” Or “I’ll give you this. The kid’s got guts.”
That leaves the action sequences, which are required to dazzle. They don’t. They’re rote and uninspired, delivered in a look dark as dishwater. Worse, the soundtrack is phoned in, as if the John Williams score was presented as Muzak on an AM radio in Harrelson’s pocket.
This entire picture feels like a 4-D Disney ride that would be fun for 7 minutes.
But trapped in it for over 2 hours? Excruciating.
And you know Han and Chewy make it. They have to. So, there’s no drama. Nothing hangs in the balance.
Donald Glover does a decent young Billy Dee Williams and Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones) lends some gravitas to the endeavor.
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