Category Archives: 2024

Blink Twice

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Blink Twice         3 ½ stars

Actress Zoe Kravitz of Big Little Lies enters the writer/director role with her directorial debut in Blink Twice, a thriller/mystery that will really grab your attention and keep you guessing for much of the movie. The lead character, Frida (Naomie Ackie of I Wanna Dance with Somebody as Whitney Houston) should take a lesson from The Menu and Glass Onion. That is, if a billionaire tycoon invites you to his own private island, you should take a pass. I will try not to give away too many spoilers, but I will compare the movie to Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Midsommar as it involves a deadly trap for the welcome guests and to Promising Young Woman for its indictment of toxic masculinity in misogynistic white men. Frida and her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development) are cocktail waitresses at a gala for a foundation put on by tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum of Magic Mike and 21 Jump Street). King says he is making amends for his past bad behavior, thus the foundation. Frida and Jess decide to crash the party as guests in evening gowns and soon Frida finds herself noticed by said billionaire and the two friends are invited to his private island for a lavish vacation with several of his rich friends. These include Vic (Christian Slater) who repeatedly takes Polaroid photos of the guests, a professional chef (Simon Rex), an actor (Haley Joel Osment in a beard), a tech wiz (Levon Hawke), a bodyguard and an assistant (Geena Davis) who seems very confused. Besides Frida and Jess, there are several other women guests who spend their time lounging at the pool, running across the immense property, having top rated meals prepared by the chef and consuming hallucinogenic drugs. Also, they are all dressed in the same white bikini outfits provided in their rooms and strangely enough, do not already know one another. (This should be a clue about their situation.) Kravitz takes her time in the early part of the movie focusing on the narcissistic behavior of the various guests inserting many humorous moments including a few well-placed pranks. (You could say that Haley Joel Osment’s character is a real dickhead.) Eventually, Frida and Jess get the sense that something is not right, and they start to realize what Slater King is really all about. I’ll leave it there for you to decide if the movie is for you. There is a warning on the screen at the start saying that there are some disturbing, graphic scenes in the movie. That is accurate as the violence and blood is comparable to that in Halloween. It becomes a revenge movie much like Promising Young Woman and Revenge. While the scenes are well put together and the characters are well acted, I couldn’t help but feel it has all been done before. We have had so many condemn the rich movies, that it is getting a bit tiresome.

Didi

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Didi        5 stars

Once again, I had the chance to see a popular movie that first appeared at the Sundance Film Festival but couldn’t see while there because of its high demand. Didi, a coming-of-age movie about a 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy who is struggling, (though very badly) through those tough adolescent years. Writer director Sean Wang has created a semi-biographical film about a boy trying to make sense of his changing world and be popular but manages to be a complete jerk in going about it. Chris (or Didi as his mom calls him) lives with Mom, his older sister who is about to leave for college and Nai Nai, his father’s elderly mother. Father is absent, while working to support the family. Chris constantly gets into arguments with his sister and his mom and makes life hell for them. To call him an annoying little brother is an understatement. (How would you like to discover that someone peed in your skin lotion?) In this immigrant family the adults speak almost exclusively Chinese, while the kids understand it, but only speak English, an interesting dynamic. He has a circle of guy friends who are all East Asian that he hangs out with and occasionally goes to parties where there are girls including one he is interested in. Their language is graphic and typical for kids of this age. While not being a total jack ass, he spends his time making videos and skateboarding, the only interests he seems to have. It is 2008 and Facebook and YouTube have just become a thing. (It is fascinating to see again how social media worked back in this time.) Chris keeps track of his friends on Facebook, a list that becomes progressively shorter as his actions turn them away. At one point he meets some older kids who are not Asian but are skateboarders, so he tries to get in with them by claiming to be good at filming scenes of action, while at the same time disenfranchising his other friends. His temper is not limited to his family as he at one point physically assaults another boy, creating another headache for his suffering mom who must also take criticism from the mother-in-law. It is not spoiling anything to say that eventually Chris must come to realize that he is creating hell on his mother who does everything in support of him. At the same time, he learns that in real life not all relationships can be repaired, but hopefully the most important ones can. In the long list of coming-of-age movies, Didi ranks high. It was recently released in theaters and hopefully will soon be available on streaming.

MaXXXine

MaXXXine           3 ½ stars

In a throwback to slasher flicks of the 1980’s, director Ti West brings us MaXXXine, a story of blood, lust and murder set in 1985 Hollywood. Although there are a few suspects, MaXXXine is not really a murder mystery but a test to see how much blood and brutality the audience can endure. It can also be seen as a portrayal of how cruel the entertainment industry can be to those who seek their fortune there as untold numbers have learned. For the third time West teams up with star Mia Goth, the scream queen of the 21st century. Previously, they made X and Pearl in 2022. Goth plays Maxine Minx, an established porn actress with a very southern accent seeking greater stardom so she auditions for a role in a new film. The film, The Puritan II, seems like the ideal vehicle and the film’s director (Elizabeth Debicki) sees something in Maxine and gives her the role. But in this time of VHS tapes and St. Elmo’s Fire, there is a darkness looming. A serial killer called the Night Stalker has been hunting starlets and the police are nowhere in the search for the killer. There are flashbacks going through Maxine’s mind about killings, so we know she has a dark past. We also can see that she can be a fearsome force such as when she confronts a would-be attacker and bashes his testicles with graphic effect. A few times we catch glimpses of a masked, glove wearing figure wandering the porn parlors. Maxine is confronted by an old gumshoe (Kevin Bacon at his creepiest) who explains that he has a client who is demanding to meet her, but she wants nothing to do with this offer. Shortly, some of her friends in the industry turn up dead with horrible burns in the shape of satanic symbols. Though she is asked by police detectives (Bobby Canavale and Michelle Monaghan) for cooperation in finding the killer, she refuses, opting for protection offered by her agent (Giancarlo Esposito). Like any good slasher movie there must be a final confrontation between the film’s star and the killer where the bodies fall, and body parts get chopped up and bloodied. In this respect MaXXXine delivers very well even though it takes a while to get there. It feels very much like the genre it imitates. Along the way we even get to see some famous movie sets put to good use including a certain iconic sign in the Hollywood Hills.

Babes

Babes                    4 ½ stars

It has been a few weeks since this one went in and out of the theaters, but I knew I wanted to see it and so finally checked out Babes, the comedy about two women who are best friends facing the challenges of pregnancy and motherhood. There has been a myriad of comedies dealing with the subject over the years, (Remember Knocked Up, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Waitress and Nine Months to name a few. One of my favorites was Junebug.) but I would dare say few of them tackle the messiness of pregnancy the way that Babes does as presented by first time director Pamela Adlon. The two main characters are Eden (Ilana Glazer of Broad City) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau of Marry Me) who have been best buddies since childhood. They are now in their thirties with Dawn already married and living in the suburbs with her husband and one child and about to give birth to a second. Eden is single and living on her own in an apartment that looks like she is still in college. The two live far apart in New York but still make time for each other. They are on their annual Thanksgiving date when Dawn starts to “leak” and have contractions but can’t believe the moment of truth has really arrived. It is up to Eden to diagnose the situation by inspecting the affected area, with descriptions of the wet fluid and dilation as required and convince Dawn that she needs to get to the hospital. What follows is one of the funniest depictions of the pain of childbirth that I can remember, including descriptions of all the bodily fluids involved that one can imagine. This adventure is followed by Eden getting kicked out of the hospital and taking four trains back home, but not before meeting a handsome stranger named Claude with whom she has a close connection. Naturally, the two end up in bed together with unprotected sex (because Eden still believes you can’t get pregnant on your period). Before long the inevitable symptoms come for Eden and she must face the new reality that she is pregnant, along with all the changes a female body must go through. The movie is mostly about dealing with the physical issues of pregnancy, but it is also about female friendship and the ups and downs of their changing relationship. (They must be able to forgive their mistakes as we see in one episode involving a viewing of The Omen.) The two actresses are professional comediennes with Glazer being one of the co-writers of the film. They are both experts at expressing the feelings and the comedy that the scenes call for. Special recognition must also go to character actor John Carroll Lynch who plays the doctor with a baldness problem. Lynch is easily remembered from Fargo, Shutter Island and Jackie among his many roles. Hasan Minhaj is also effective in the role of Dawn’s understanding husband. While I strongly recommend the movie, those that are offended by the many poop jokes may find Babes a little uncomfortable.

Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1

Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1                  3 ½ stars

If you go to see Kevin Costner’s sweeping epic of the Old West, Horizon: An American Saga, you had better make sure you are in for the long haul. The movie clocks in at more than three hours and has a multitude of characters for you to keep track of. As the title implies, this is chapter 1 of what will eventually be a four-part series of movies, all of which lead to and center on a growing community in the American Southwest called Horizon. Early in the movie there is a scene of a celebration at a barn dance one night in the new town. Some nearby Apache Indians are not so enthralled with their new neighbors, so a group of them launches an attack on the new settlers in one of the most brutal scenes I can remember in the movies. (It’s on a scale of what I remember in The Revenant.) The town ends up destroyed with most of the residents dead, including many of one family, the Kittredges who put up a tremendous fight. The matriarch, Francis (Sienna Miller) and her daughter alone survive. There is a nearby US Army outpost with a contingent of soldiers that comes to the rescue, though they are too late to be of help. One soldier in particular, Lt. Gephardt (Sam Worthington) delivers a message to the survivors that they should reconsider their decision to come to this land inhabited by hostile Indians, but the settlers are unwilling to take this advise and there lies the drama and the message of the film. The lure of this land to be settled by the white travelers (and other races) leaving their former homes cannot be quenched. They must stay and others like them will continue to come, drawn by the promise of a better life. Repeatedly we see a poster about Horizon, promising unlimited land to those brave enough to make the journey. Other story lines also find characters finding their way here, one of them involving a horse trader who has found various ways of making a living named Hayes Ellison (Kevin Costner). Ellison, who is very accomplished at handling a gun, finds his life entwined with a young woman, Marigold (Abbey Lee) who is on the run from men who would like to see her dead. This mysterious man will be drawn to Horizon as well. An additional story line focuses on the Apache Indian tribe and the internal divisions that occur as a result of the incursions of the white folk. One of them, Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) is the leader of the war party, but he cannot defend his people from the inevitable retaliation from the armed settlers who practice scalping the dead for bounty. Finally, we follow a wagon train coming from Kansas on the Santa Fe trail, also seeking the new land, led by Matthew (Luke Wilson) who must deal with all the internal problems of the pioneers and be concerned about Indian attacks as well. It is a challenge for the viewer to keep up with the various stories and so many characters as the story seems so expansive. It is likely this is what Costner intended as this series has long been a dream of his that is now becoming reality. There is plenty more promised as we see at the end of the movie from a long montage of scenes involving our characters and some new ones that preview what is to come. Horizon should be considered to be more of a mini-series than a movie. Chapter 2 is expected sometime this fall, with additional chapters next year. Chapter 3 is about to begin production. Chapter 1 felt like a marathon. I am hoping that the next ones will be less than three hours!

The Bikeriders

The Bikeriders                   4 ½ stars

Mike Nichols’ The Bikeriders (in theaters now) is an homage to the biker films of the sixties, and a remembrance of a culture long gone. The biker club, The Vandals, based on a real gang from Chicago in the sixties, is a collection of misfits, young to middle-aged, working-class men who only belong to each other. We commonly see them in bars at night or in open fields during the day dressed in their grimy clothes and jackets drinking beer. Their jackets sport rebellious patches such as the extended middle finger and German crosses. They are outlaws in a sense as the cops fear them, but they rarely commit any real serious crimes, preferring their typical brawling and riding through small towns. Occasionally, they are seen on the road, riding in a pack somewhere in the Midwest. While it’s not a traditional drama it does have characters you can really feel for, that seem very real. The movie is told in a narrative form with a photographer named Danny Lyons (Mike Faist) interviewing various members and taking their photos. It is based on actual interviews the real Danny Lyons did with club members and their wives and girlfriends in making his photo-anthropology book, The Bikeriders. In the movie the story is narrated by Kathy (Jodie Comer of Free Guy and the TV series Killing Eve) as she relates her story to Danny, about how she met and fell for Benny (Austin Butler of Elvis), a young heartthrob and member of the Vandals. She soon marries Benny, but in a sense also marries the gang, finding her life intertwined with other members. Chief among them is Johnny (Tom Hardy of Inception and Mad Max: Fury Road), the gang’s leader and close friend of Benny. The three of them create a great ensemble of characters whose fates are interconnected. Comer mastered an upper Midwest accent and gives an honest performance of someone attracted to a world she doesn’t really understand. Butler, coming off his roles in Elvis and Dune, Part 2, is a man of few words, but can communicate with a look and a glance with his eyes, a la James Dean. Hardy is his iconic self, a real tough guy, a Marlon Brando type, who can fight when needed, but is aging and realizes his time as leader is fast running out. With the high drama in this story, you can expect there to be tragic consequences. The cinematography is quite arresting with the many outdoor scenes of the Midwest and an impressive collection of classic cars and motorcycles. The outstanding score includes many familiar songs by artists such as The Animals, The Shangri-Las, Bo Diddley and Cream. Nichols is well known for his previous excellent movies including Take Shelter, Mud and Midnight Special. The Bikeriders may be his most classic film yet.

Inside Out 2

Inside Out 2                        4 ½ stars

Nine years ago, Pixar thrilled us with an innovative animated film about childhood emotions in Inside Out. The five emotions managed a child’s feelings about the things going on in the girl’s life all to great comic effect and with compassion. The emotions: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Liza Lapira) and Fear (Tony Hale) are back in Pixar’s sequel where the child, Riley, just turns thirteen, bringing a whole new set of challenges for the emotions to deal with. Riley starts out as a normal well-adjusted child who likes to hang out with her two friends and play on the middle school hockey team. Things are going fine for Joy and company until an alarm on the console goes off, that is the warning for the arrival of Puberty! A construction crew suddenly arrives causing chaos followed by the new emotions led by Anxiety (Maya Hawke) who try to take over Headquarters. Accompanying Anxiety are Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and Ennui (French for Boredom) (Adèle Exarchopoulos). In the real world we follow Riley who is attending a hockey skills camp with her old friends, but now faces the chance to be accepted by more mature and talented girls at the expense of leaving her old friends behind. Anxiety takes over control at HQ, sending the old emotions to long term storage in the Vault and Riley’s sense of herself to oblivion where all her bad memories go. It’s up to Joy and company to escape and take control of HQ back from Anxiety. The movie is a creative and imaginative way of portraying the changing emotions of a teenage girl and is done in the usual Pixar comedic fashion of Pixar. The picture is very colorful and full of action and especially shows the concern that Joy has for Riley’s well-being. The movie is completely appropriate for children and does not deal directly with changing bodies or attraction to boys. It focuses on a child’s sense of themselves and how they relate to other children, or the usual things that teenagers go through. Inside Out 2 is recommended for all ages.

Back to Black

Back to Black      2 stars

One genre of film that I really like is movies about the making of music. These are the ones where we see the process of coming up with and writing a good song. They can be either fictional or about a real artist. Unfortunately, we don’t get that in the new Sam Taylor-Johnson biopic called Back to Black, the movie about the rise and tragic end to British pop star Amy Winehouse (starring Marisa Abela) who died of alcohol poisoning back in 2011. Instead, the movie focuses mainly on her troubled romance to husband Blake (Jack O’Connell) who was addicted to drugs and alcohol and played a major part in allowing Winehouse to share in the addiction. We do get several stage performances of Winehouse and her disagreements with the record producers. (She could certainly stand up for herself.) But I didn’t see enough of her composing music and feeling it in the process, other than one scene early in the movie. Abela does a decent job portraying the singer, even using her own voice in some of the songs. (It’s unlike Elvis then where Austin Butler only did lip syncing.) Much better examples of artist biopics were Rocketman (Elton John), Bohemian Rhapsody (Freddy Mercury) and even Ray (Ray Charles). We also get too many scenes of her getting more tattoos, but we do see how that enormous signature beehive hairdo came to be. If you saw the documentary, Amy, from 2015 you would see some significant details that are left out of Back to Black. The movie treats her father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan) far too sympathetically as he in reality only returned to Amy’s life after she became famous and did little to help her out of her addiction. Her record producer and band members are treated as mere background characters, and her bodyguard is left out altogether, even though in the movie she is hounded by the paparazzi. In the end the movie is reduced to one about a bad romance and I think we already have plenty of those.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga              5 stars

Mad Max. The name conjures up visions of gangs on roaring motorcycles and tricked out old cars racing through the desert wasteland after a nuclear holocaust has destroyed most of civilization. This is the world first created by George Miller back in 1979 with the release of Mad Max. Now we have Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the fifth installment of the series and it is as full of action and mayhem as any of the others. Plus, we get a fuller view of the life of Furiosa, the woman who raged across the desert against a murderous gang in the movie Fury Road that starred Charlise Theron nine years ago. Furiosa gives us the young hero’s origin story told over five acts and two and a half hours of car and motorbike chases with death defying stunts and murderous mayhem with some of the weirdest looking odd balls we’ve encountered since Fury Road. And it is the first time that Mad Max, last played by Tom Hardy, does not appear in the movie. For the first hour we follow the journey of the young girl, Furiosa (Alyla Browne) who is abducted from The Green Place, a sort of paradise in the desert, by a group of biker degenerates and brought back to the base of their outlaw gang, but only after Furiosa’s mother tracks them and kills almost all of them. There, she meets the leader of the gang, a self-absorbed psychopath named Dementus (Chris Hemsworth playing the villain in a most unusual casting choice). Dementus kills the mother, giving the young Furiosa the rage that so defines her character in the times to come. In this society, located in the Wastelands of Australia, the various gangs are led by warlords who rule cruelly over their subjects. They live in places with names like The Citadel, Bullettown and Gasland. These characters have some very descriptive names like The People Eater, Rictus Erectus and Scrotus. Eventually, Furiosa is traded to one of these warlords where she is to live with the leader’s harem of women. There, she learns the ways of the gangs, disguised as a boy, taking on a new role as a valuable sidekick to Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke). The adult Furiosa is played by Anya Taylor-Joy, the striking model from Last Night in Soho and The Queen’s Gambit. Taylor-Joy has an intensity in the role that can be seen in her face as she methodically goes about making repairs on the war-rig, stares down her enemies or puts a bullet in them. One feels the pain she goes through and can then better understand the actions of her future self in Fury Road. George Miller said that it was after seeing Anya Taylor-Joy in Last Night in Soho, that he knew he had found the young Furiosa. Taylor-Joy can seemingly easily handle maneuvering a car in the desert though she says she has never had a driver’s license. The action set pieces as imagined by George Miller are astounding in their execution. In one sequence we see a chrome plated diesel truck defended by the white War Boys from an attacking horde of bikers, some of them on hang gliders. One by one each attacker is picked off by physical assault, gunshot or being crushed by the truck’s wheels. This scene lasts probably fifteen minutes and is accompanied by a heart pounding steady beat the entire time. Such scenes are designed to get the viewers’ adrenaline pumping and they succeed. This is just one of the many thrilling action scenes brought to the screen. I understand that the story was actually written by Miller before Fury Road was filmed and that it took ten years of preparation to assemble the collection of hot rods, bikes and trucks to make such a wonder of a film. If you are a fan of action movies, this is the one you should not miss this summer.

I Saw the TV Glow

I Saw the TV Glow            4 stars

One of the movies featured at Sundance made its way to the theaters so I took in one of the festival’s favorites by watching I Saw the TV Glow. This teen horror about fandom of a cult TV show is the second feature from writer/director Jane Schoenbrun and is unique with its style and presentation. (Her first movie was the horror film We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.) It has the potential to be a cult classic and is meant to appeal to young audiences who see themselves as loners and misfits but find comradery in a mysterious TV show. In the movie we meet Owen (Ian Forman), a middle school student who lives with his parents and has no friends at school. One day while accompanying his mom (Danielle Deadwyler of Till and The Harder They Fall) to a voting booth, he spots Maddie (Brigette Lundy-Paine (Bill and Ted Face the Music)), an older girl, also a loner, reading an episode guide for her favorite TV show called The Pink Opaque. Owen has heard of the show before but could never watch it because it is on Saturday evenings after his bedtime. (The movie is set in the nineties before streaming and DVRs, so most TV shows are watched live.) The show is very campy with poor special effects but is popular with young audiences. It is about two teenage girls (actors Helena Howard and Lindsey Jordan) who meet at Sleepaway camp and become friends though they live far apart from one another. They have psychic powers enabling them to communicate with each other. Each episode they fight against the monster of the week that always appears in ridiculous looking costumes. (Think of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except on a much lower budget.) The monsters are controlled by a mysterious being called Mr. Melancholy who looks like the moon and is out to destroy the girls. Owen and Maddie aren’t close, (She is gay, and Owen isn’t sure what he is.) but they bond over the show after Owen sneaks over to her house to watch it. Then Maddie provides Owen with VHS tapes of episodes so that he can watch it on his own. A couple of years later Owen is still watching the show but he is then played by Justice Smith (The American Society of Magical Negroes). (In a note of irony, the high school they attend is Void High School (VHS).) It is only then after Owen’s mother passes away, Maddie mysteriously disappears with her TV set on fire in her back yard and The Pink Opaque is cancelled after five seasons, that we get the sense there is more to the TV show than we realized. The teens find that their very lives are intertwined with the show, and they can’t separate their lives from fiction. The neon colors and disturbing images of I Saw the TV Glow are designed to give us a sense of escapism, to get away from reality and not think about the troubles of our lives. Goth style music and dark unkept rooms aid in the nightmarish feel of the whole experience. I Saw the TV Glow may be a new cult movie that today’s Gen Z will relate to for years to come. I would like to see what Schoenbrun will bring us next.