Wish is a Walt Disney Animation Studios Fan-Film That Gets Lost in Its Lore

 “What would Walt do?” It was a phrase that gripped Walt Disney Animation Studios in the wake of the passing of Walt Disney in 1967. The response to this figure’s demise was to just make new animated features mimicking the greatest hits of past Disney classics. Though the era of The Fox and the Hound and Robin Hood is in the distant past, Wish, the latest Walt Disney Animation Studios feature, harkens back to that query. As an animated feature debuting in a year when Disney is celebrating its 100th anniversary of existence, Wish wants to be to animated Disney movies what Margot Robbie's Stereotypical Barbie was to Barbie's. "You close your eyes, think of an animated Disney movie, it's me!" Meanwhile, its animation style, which uses CG to emulate tentpoles of hand-drawn artistry, also clearly indicates that the phrase “What would the Spider-Verse movies do?” loomed large over the production. Oh, and Wish comes courtesy of the key creative team members behind the Frozen movies (including director Chris Buck and writer Jennifer Lee), so also throw in the phrase “What would Elsa do?” into the cinematic stew. 

The creative influences of Wish are apparent. Less clear once the credits begin to roll are the qualities that would make this feature so idiosyncratic that future Disney titles would want to imitate it. 

Hailing from directors Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn, Wish concerns Asha (Ariana DeBose), a 17-year-old girl living in the Kingdom of Rosas. This is a seemingly idyllic paradise ruled over by the magical King Magnifico (Chris Pine), who has the power to grant wishes. Everything seems perfect in this domain until Asha discovers the wicked secrets behind Magnifico's rule. Distraught over the darkness that's been lurking in plain sight all along, Asha, in a moment of desperation, makes a wish upon a night star that gives her...an actual shooting star by the name of Star. This charmingly designed critter from the cosmos has some magical abilities of its own, including making Asha's pet goat Valentino talk with the smooth voice of Alan Tudyk. Star could be the key to taking down Magnificio...but can an ordinary girl really challenge a master of dark magic?

Between this and Frozen II, screenwriter Jennifer Lee seems to be way too fascinated with overcomplicated lore that feels clumsily improvised. Awkward key plot beats related to King Magnifico’s corrupt rule (namely that you forget about your wish after he “takes” it) are hurriedly introduced in lyrics or throwaway pieces of dialogue that are easy to miss. The mechanics of the wishes themselves seem to fluctuate in a way that doesn't feel like organic extensions of a whimsical fairy tale but rather a byproduct of sloppy writing. It’s also hard to grasp a discernibly real-world parallel to all the fantasy tomfoolery that Lee and company want audiences to be deeply invested in. This isn’t just supposed to be a classical fairy tale, like Sleeping Beauty, where everything's meant to be heightened and removed from our world. Wish wants to elicit tears from viewers and have its fantasy world remind moviegoers of their own. That’s hard to do when this entire realm feels so vaguely defined and aloof from the discernible reality. Compare that problem to the stories of Moana and Encanto, which effortlessly interwove recognizable real emotions and experiences into unabashedly fantastical stories. This balance between the preposterous and emotionally tangible can work…Lee’s script for Wish just gets too lost in lore, explanations, and obvious metaphors to get that balance right. 

The plot beats that do work in Wish are effective enough to make one wish this whole movie was better. If only the screenplay trimmed down the avalanche of comic sidekick characters (why does Asha have seven additional wacky human friends plus two “critter” companions?) in favor of fleshing out its better narrative impulses. That tug of war between impressive details and derivative elements also carries over to the animation of Wish. The backgrounds here are glorious creations, downright perfect recreations of the kind of painterly sights Eyvind Earle and the like made their bread and butter in the mid-20th century. Establishing shots in Wish devoid of any characters actually look like they could’ve been lifted from a hand-drawn movie from the 50s, it’s an astonishing merging of animations past and present. 

Unfortunately, those backgrounds and other lovely visual qualities (like the welcome emphasis on bright colors that make even nighttime scenes easily visible) are paired up with humans and animals who look no different than standard CG Disney humans from the last 15 years. This time, though, those humans have extra rubbery-looking skin (a byproduct of the unique lighting schemes of Wish) while the often stilted facial expressions seem extra lifeless compared to the old-school backgrounds. Imagine the emotions that could be conveyed if these figures were rendered in good old fashioned hand-drawn animation. The dissonance between environments from Sleeping Beauty and characters lifted from crowd shots of Big Hero 6 never coalesces into something interesting and instead just remains eternally annoying.  It’s very odd Wish showed so much ambition in its backdrops, yet opted for human designs that look so familiar. If you want to truly follow in the footsteps of modern CG animation achievements like The Mitchells vs The Machines, Nimona, and the Spider-Verse movies, you have to embrace distinctive visual impulses in every department, not just with backgrounds!

A similar mixed bag is the music of Wish. Given that this is the "ultimate" Walt Disney Animation Studios movie, it shouldn't be a surprise that Wish is also a musical, with an array of tunes written by Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice. The best of these tracks are the ones that lean into being the kind of songs you could only do in a musical like Magnifico's deliciously wicked "This Is The Thanks I Get?!" or the rousing battle tune "Knowing What I Know Now." Weaker on the soundtrack are tracks like "This Wish" and "At All Costs" that are more in line with songs you'd find in a Pasek & Paul musical in that they just sound like generic pop ditties. The former track is especially disappointing since DeBose is fully committed in her vocals in this take on the "I Want" song, but the forgettable lyrics let her down. Also underwhelming is the score by Dave Metzger, a veteran of Disney's music department (he worked as an arranger and orchestrator for countless scores in the studio's past). His compositions aren't bad, but they're often lifeless and fail to demonstrate much of a personality, particularly in the instruments they employ.

More consistently successful than the visuals and music in Wish are the vocal performances. The actors assembled here do perfectly cromulent work with the writing they've been handed, with DaBose especially working overtime to inject more personality and life into Asha compared to how this figure is written in the script. A committed novice cast, undeniably cute elements (that Star character is clearly made to spawn stuffed animals, but I wanted to give him a hug all the same), and utterly stunning backgrounds can't erase the nagging feeling, though, that Wish leaves a lot of potential on the table. In trying to create a "celebration" of Disney's past, Wish just feels like a hodgepodge of the studio's greatest hits. It lacks the wit and heart that helped give an extra sense of personality to previous Mouse House homages like Enchanted or Tangled. "What would Walt do?" was clearly a question weighing heavily on the minds of Buck, Veerasunthorn, and company when it came to making this animated musical. However, just as that query drove Walt Disney Animation Studios into the ground in the 70s and 80s, so too does such adherence to the past weigh down Wish.

The Marvels Is A Disjointed Superhero Movie Buoyed By Its Lead Performers

Despite being connected to so many previous Marvel Cinematic Universe properties (Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, WandaVision, Guardians of the Galaxy, they all get referenced here), The Marvels is at its best just being a breezy good time. Whenever writer/director Nia DaCosta just settles for making a wacky comedy, this is an amiable feature. Unfortunately, the impulse to go big that's plagued nearly every Marvel Cinematic Universe feature in the wake of Avengers: Endgame is on display here again. The Marvels is torn between the two wolves inside of itself: one that wants to be silly and one that wants to be a spectacle-driven blockbuster. The tug-of-war across those ambitions results in a disjointed movie largely buoyed by its lead performances.

Outer space superhero Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) is working solo in the deepest corners of the cosmos when she is alerted to the evil machinations of Kree warrior Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton). This baddie has secured a bangle that gives her immense power and entangles Danvers with the abilities of two other superheroes. Now, whenever Danvers, astronaut Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), and New Jersey teenager Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) use their respective superpowers, they trade places with a member of the trio. This situation has ensured that these three have to work together to stop Dar-Benn, who is targeting a slew of planets as part of a deeply personal mission. It's time for another Marvel team-up, which excites superhero devotee Khan to no end. 

I'm sure Marvel Studios executives are reading a review written by a humble Texas bimbo, so let me say this to everyone in charge of these movies and TV shows: please stop treating the Kree and Skrull stuff in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with such seriousness. The former group especially is so boring in this and Captain Marvel, yet their lore is treated with such stone-faced rigidity. Anytime The Marvels cuts back to Dar-Benn and her generic revenge mission (plus a backstory meant to make her the umpteenth MCU villain who is "actually right"), one is bound to roll their eyes. Please, either make these alien races more compelling or stop returning to them so often. Despite a committed performance from Zawe Ashton, Dar-Benn's whole presence in The Marvels is a massive problem in the proceedings. She just feels disconnected from the rest of the feature, a UPN sci-fi show baddie inhabiting something with sillier inclinations. Plus, her eventual villain plot in the third act gets so big in scope that it's impossible to get dramatically invested. 

If the villain of The Marvels is a massive weak point, at least its three heroes are a treat to watch. In a happy surprise, Larson, Parris, and Vellani have terrific chemistry together. Who needs large explosions when you can just watch the three of them try to juggle or jump rope together? Their interactions are lots of fun, even when the third act gets swallowed up by half-hearted character arcs and muddled dramatic beats. Best of all, the heavy emphasis on Kamala Khan turns out to be an inspired choice for the film as a whole. She's such a delightful creation, full of infectious enthusiasm, and an opening scene cribbing from the visual aesthetic of the Ms. Marvel TV show that puts audiences into one of Khan's hand-drawn fan-fictions is lots of fun. Plus, Iman Vellani's performance is endlessly charming. While fellow 2023 Marvel Studios title Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was disappointingly devoid of personality, Kamala Khan's presence in The Marvels alone gives this feature a pulse.

Almost as entertaining as Vellani's performance are the handful of sequences where The Marvels really cuts loose and embraces its silliest impulses. Specifically, a set piece where our three leads arrive on a planet extremely familiar to Danvers and a key climactic sequence involving Goose the Cat/Flerken provide the creative high points of The Marvels. The former sequence also allows one to appreciate both the terrific costume design work on display here and the fact that much of The Marvels has actually been shot on nicely detailed sets. Yay for not just leaning on The Volume in shooting blockbuster movies! DaCosta and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt lend a polished look to this tentpole that helps make it as digestible as it is. 

Such visual details, along with some well-realized hand-to-hand fight scenes, are unfortunately often marred by choppy editing and restrictive camerawork that often won't let individual shots breathe for too long. Several gags in The Marvels are undercut by an unwillingness to let jokes play out in extended unbroken images, with the cuts between shots disrupting the comedic rhythm of these gags. Unfortunately, The Marvels can't outrun its strongest drawbacks, particularly when it comes to an overstuffed story hinging on dramatic stakes one just can't get invested in. Thankfully, whenever it leans just on the silly gags and chemistry between its three leads, The Marvels recovers some of its footing.  If nothing else, it solidifies Iman Vellani as one of the great discoveries of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, please make her the centerpiece of these movies going forward.

The Holdovers Is a Melancholy Yet Deeply Movie Exploration of Holiday Season Grief

 

Who doesn't get a little sad at Christmastime? Though it's often called "the most wonderful time of the year", Christmas can also be a challenging experience. There are often toxic relatives you've got to deal with at parties. The emphasis on "unity" and "togetherness" in all those billboards or holiday-themed passages can exacerbate your loneliness. Plus, the holidays coinciding with the end of the year can lend an innately wistful reflective quality to one's mind at the end of December. Thoughts can turn to looking back on the preceding 12 months and contemplating the future rather than living in the Yuletide joy of the moment. The end of the year can be a tricky thing to navigate. The Holdovers, a new film from director Alexander Payne, fully runs into those hurdles to make a bittersweet Christmas movie that's also oddly comforting. Any reminders that one isn't alone in experiencing severe emotional problems can be unexpectedly reassuring despite the heavy subject matters being broached.

The Holdovers focuses on Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a legendarily stern teacher at the prestigious school Barton Academy. Nobody on the campus, across the teachers and students, likes this curmudgeon who prefers to spend his days hidden away in this school rather than exploring the wider world. Screenwriter David Hemingson (impressively making his feature film screenwriting debut here) makes the wise decision to establish Hunham's crankiness in a fashion that establishes the character's abrasiveness without totally alienating viewers. We see this man's off-putting personality on full display in his interactions with his students, but most of those students are rich male jerks. Having a teacher (a job that notoriously pays little) wielding a little power against these nepo babies isn't exactly "noble" behavior, but it's also a very entertaining way to cement Hunham as an unlikeable soul. Rather than going the expected route of showing Hunham as "bad" by being explicitly ableist, homophobic, or racist, The Holdovers opts to make him more complicated. His grievances against these wealthy kids are somewhat warranted, it's just his way of communicating those frustrations (and his unwillingness to let anybody in emotionally) is deeply flawed.

After making it clear that we're watching a very detached academic soul living as a shell of himself, The Holdovers proceeds to its central conflict. Hunham is spending the final weeks of December watching over students who have nowhere to go for the holidays. Eventually, he only has one such student to look over: Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a kid who's not quite a jock, nerd, or any other easy High School archetype. He's just messy (Tully has so many family issues) and is unwilling to roll over for Hunham. Also on the campus? The head of Barton Academy cafeteria, Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph). She gets along nicely with Hunham and is grieving the recent death of her son in Vietnam. 

What if The Browning Version was directed by Hal Ashby? It'd look a lot like The Holdovers, which is a compliment. This Payne feature can't hit the highs of Version or Ashby's greatest movies, but leaning so much on cinematic magic of the past leads to The Holdovers scoring its own cinematic highs. For starters, the entire motion picture is a three-hander acting exercise between Giamatti, Sessa, and Randolph, and on that front, it's an exceptional experience. It's so good to see Giamatti in a major motion picture again and his skillful work at making Hunham so unabashedly irascible is consistently engrossing. There's a believable level of authority to Giamatti's line deliveries and physicality, but also a sadness beneath those expressive eyes that exude vulnerability even in the character's most unlikeable moments. Meanwhile, Dominic Sessa is an incredible find in his acting debut as Angus Tully. I especially liked the messy way he portrays a teenager navigating emotional quandaries beyond his years. There's such an authenticity to Sessa's depiction of Tully in turmoil that you feel like you're watching an actual teenager out of their depth rather than a cozy cinematic depiction of people in that age range.

As for Da'Vine Joy Randolph, well, those of us who watched Dolemite is My Name four years ago always knew she has incredible chops as an actor. She's absolutely riveting here on all fronts, including her terrific chemistry with both Giamatti and Sessa. Especially unforgettable is a key dialogue-free scene involving Lamb visiting her sister's house. Randolph doesn't need words to grip your eyeballs, she proves captivating so effortlessly. She and the other actors here are framed through a visual sensibility established by Payne and cinematographer Eigil Bryld that's meant to make The Holdovers look like a movie that would've been produced in the early 1970s (the era in which the story takes place). I wish more of the second half of The Holdovers leaned into interesting visual flourishes rooted in the filmmaking norms of this decade, but there's still an engaging and cozy lived-in quality to its imagery that's hard to resist. Extra bonus points too for how The Holdovers was captured with digital cameras, yet various post-production processes gave it all the delightful imperfections (like film grain) of something shot on 35mm. Some movies that go down this road of shooting digitally and then adding in the 35mm visual qualities later just look strange, but The Holdovers totally fooled me into thinking it was shot on vintage Kodak film.

Payne and Hemingson's approach to The Holdovers doesn't so much rewrite the book as it does build on cinema's past to make an enjoyable and effectively melancholy new feature. That's perfectly fine by me when the final product is both actually engaging to watch and such a drastic improvement on Payne's last movie, Downsizing. Keeping the scope of this story so intimate doesn't just let one appreciate the outstanding trio of performances anchoring The Holdovers. It also gets you so comfortable with these characters that even the most conceptually schmaltzy moments in the third act feel totally earned. What a nice gift for the holidays to see a feature like The Holdovers handle that sort of material so nicely. 

Priscilla paints a humanizing portrait of its titular subject

Both a sense of entrapment and a disconnect from reality permeate the directorial career of Sofia Coppola. The Virgin Suicides, for instance, was all about a collection of teenage girls withheld from experiencing the real world. The Bling Ring was a story about ordinary teenagers searching for an exciting escape from their lives by breaking into the houses of celebrities and taking their possessions, in essence believing owning these items will make them like their famous idols. Meanwhile, Marie Antoinette recalls the life of the titular royal figure as someone totally detached from the reality of her subjects as she enjoys an existence of luxury in her lavish domicile. Even Coppola's low-key yarn 2020 On The Rocks continued these themes by following Rashida Jones as a woman trapped by the thought of her husband having an affair and bamboozled that everyone else finds her unreliable father so charming. How come nobody else can see the man she's known all her life?

These qualities, as well as a penchant for glorious production design, lending urgent verve to period pieces,  and an overall empathy for complicated women characters, have made Sofia Coppola's career incredibly fascinating to watch unfold. Coppola continues her biggest thematic fascinations with Priscilla, a motion picture that chronicles the relationship between Priscilla Presley and Elvis. Much of the discussion around Priscilla will inevitably center around comparisons between it and Baz Luhrmann's 2022 feature Elvis and understandably so given that they're both distinctive creative visions about one of the most prolific American musicians of all time. However, in the middle of all that discussion, let's also not forget to appreciate Priscilla as a standalone piece of art and another triumphant feather in Sofia Coppola's artistic cap.

Priscilla begins in 1959, as a fourteen-year-old Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) is invited to attend a party involving Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi). At this shindig, Elvis begins to immediately express a fondness for Priscilla, a relationship that Coppola frames from the start as incredibly creepy. The exchanges between a grown man and a 9th-grader are usually rendered by Coppola and cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd through these wide shots that go on and on. The lengthy nature of these images, particularly one chronicling the duo's first Christmas together, emphasizes the incredible awkwardness and stiffness between these two people. These are not starstruck lovers, this is a relationship built on an incredibly inappropriate and off-balance power dynamic from the start. This concept is impressively rendered in Coppola's hands while the emphasis on Elvis as a self-infatuated guy with a tendency for murmuring provides a great contrast to typical hagiographic pop culture portrayals of "The King."

From here, Priscilla chronicles its titular lead getting swept up in the life of Elvis Presley and becoming his go-to lover, to the point that she's asked to come stay at Graceland. This location is one we've all seen on postcards, in films, everywhere imaginable. Its go-to visual aura is one of cozy Americana, it's a depiction of lavish living that we're supposed to wish we could have. Within this story, though, Graceland is quickly transformed into a prison. It isn't long before Priscilla Presley finds that her life as Elvis's spouse is endlessly constrictive. She can't even play with her dog outside without being told not to "make a spectacle of yourself" while she's forbidden to have a job or bring any of her friends over. "No outsiders at Graceland," she's told. It's classic abusive behavior, cutting off your partner's external life so that they can only find value in you.

Its truly impressive how well Coppola and company transform the interior of Graceland, a place we've seen all our lives in media as so ritzy and glamorous, into feeling like such a suffocating nightmare. The emptiness of this vast space (captured in haunting wide shots) serves as a visual extension of how hollow Priscilla feels inside navigating this toxic relationship. An especially harrowing depiction of how draining and insulting this experience is for Priscilla comes in an early sequence showing her sitting down at a dinner table with Elvis and his cohorts. At this bustling meal, the camera lingers on just Priscilla's face as nobody asks her any questions about herself or even really acknowledges her existence. Cailee Spaeny does remarkable work communicating with the gentlest twitches of her face this sense of unease, of recognizing that she's being ignored. There are so many people around her, she's sitting next to one of the most famous singers of all-time...yet she's never felt so alone. It's a heartbreaking moment that offers such a subtle but moving window into Priscilla Prelsey's soul.

Speaking of her, Cailee Spaney is outstanding here as Priscilla Presley. Back in 2018, Spaeny suddenly showed up in four separate movies (Pacific Rim Uprising, Bad Times at the El Royale, On the Basis of Sex, and Vice), an abrupt uptick in cinematic appearences that had me wondering what was going on. No offense to Spaney's work in any of those films (she's pretty good in El Royale), it just led me to wonder "why is Hollywood so fixated on this one actor?" Priscilla is basically a feature-length demonstration of how there's been so much hype surrounding Spaeney. Whether it's handling the subtlest yet most meaningful pieces of body language from Priscilla or accurately portraying this woman across multiple stages of her life, Spaeny crushes the assignment. Playing opposite her is Jacob Elordi, a dude from Euphoria that the gays and gals on the internet can't stop talking about as a new heartthrob. Props to Elordi then for subverting that image by communicating palpable intensity and intimidation in his version of Elvis, which is more reminiscent of Daniel Day-Lewis's whiny Phantom Thread character than any other version of Elvis Presley I've seen in cinema. The way Elvis is always speaking out the side of his mouth or the way Elordi delicately injects this singer's Southern twang into his vocals without lapsing into a stereotype, these are all such great details underscoring a well-realized performance. Maybe I'll also join that Jacob Elordi fan club, even after being terrified and repulsed by this man's version of Elvis Presley!

Unsurprisingly, because this is a Sofia Coppola movie, Priscilla also looks gorgeous in terms of its visuals. The color scheme of the feature is full of beautiful-looking warm colors, with those hues providing an especially interesting contrast whenever they're utilized in toxic environments like Graceland. The overwhelming utilization of bright red in a climatic scene depicting Elvis Presley's Vegas hotel domicile, for instance, is downright inspired. Similarly creative are the ways this feature indicates the passing of time exlucisvley through imagery and not through didactic dialogue, such as the depiction of endless empty plates being picked up by a housekeeper outside of Elvis and Prsicilla's bedroom. These kinds of flourishes and creative touches tend to work towards those key themes of entrapment and disconnect from reality that has always been around in the works of Sofia Coppola. Whether you explore it as a fascinating extension of that director's thematic fixations or just as a standalone piece of cinema, Priscilla is bound to impress.

Killers of the Flower Moon Is Another Towering Martin Scorsese Achievement

When I was in a film noir class in college, I was told of this story that Orson Welles tried to mount a major movie in the 1940s with an all-Black cast that couldn't get any financing. The chief reason for this? Welles planned to have the film's characters stare directly into the camera and studio executives thought that was too transgressive. To have Black people get close-ups and gaze into the audience, like white lead actors do all the time, was just too much. I can't find any evidence of this story existing, maybe it's just one of those showbiz legends, but it does reflect a reality of who gets photographed and how. It's also a yarn that entered my head during Killers of the Flower Moon during moments recreating real-life photographs of Osage denizens like Mollie (Lily Gladstone) staring directly into the camera. Figures brutally erased from history are center-frame, gazing into the viewer's soul. 

Such images emerge in a narrative that begins with oil being found on land belonging to the Osage tribe, a collection of indigenous people residing in Oklahoma. This discovery allows this population access to new levels of wealth and attracts the attention of some incredibly scummy outsiders. This includes Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), who travels to Oklahoma to join his uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro), in living in this territory. Hale puts on airs of being accepting and loving of the Osage, but he's always scheming ways to get more and more of that oil money for himself. One key part of this plan ends up involving a romance between Burkhart and Mollie, a connection that blossoms as more and more of the Osage are "inexplicably" murdered. The police (led by Sheriff King Shale) refuse to investigate. White folks are indifferent to the idea that indigenous people are dying off. Mollie and her Osage brethren feel like they're going insane. Killers of the Flower Moon is a cinematic testament to how normalized the horrors of colonialism and violence are in American history. The most unspeakable acts of brutality are just another day's work for the white characters here.

There are many unforgettable moments in Killers of the Flower Moon (penned by director Martin Scorsese as well as screenwriter Eric Roth), but one I especially can't get out of my mind is a tender moment in Killers of the Flower Moon when siblings Mollie and Anna (Cara Jade Myers) pause on a staircase to express their love for one another. The duo have a realistic sibling dynamic within Flower Moon, with the two sometimes being at odds with one another while ultimately always having each other's back. "You are my wealth," Mollie quietly reminds Anna while holding her close. There are no eyes on either of them, they just want to express their love for one another. It's such a beautifully-acted sequence accentuated by restrained but powerful camerawork.

It's also a moment that plays out as a great contrast to any instance where Ernest Burkhart and Willian King Hale are alone. Separated from others, there is no sense of fondness between these two people. Burkhart mostly seems intimidated by King Hale, while the latter character always has a crocodile grin cemented on his face around his nephew. In their exchanges, they only scheme. Whether it's funerals, town parties, weddings, or anything else, their sole focus is on hurting other people, particularly the indigenous Osage community. Mollie and Anna recognize that there is no replacement for the love between people. Burkhart and King Hale are terrifying husks of human beings driven by capitalistic desires. The way such personalities are just nonchalantly depicted on-screen is emblematic of just how chilling so much of Killers of the Flower Moon is. This is a film where racism is not a "surprising" quality, it's an element interwoven into every facet of American society.

Everywhere you look in Flower Moon, from condescending newsreels reporting on the Tulsa Massacre to the casual presence of the KKK in a local parade, one sees white supremacy and the dehumanizing of people of color. A scene shot from Mollie's point-of-view (accompanied by a powerfully written monologue told in voice-over) where we see all these white people spilling off of trains, eager to get a hold of that oil money, captures this hauntingly well. These individuals Mollie is eyeballing don't need to have Klan masks on to be intimidating, to be reminders of the entitlement of white people. The brutally frank depiction of racism and colonialism is also reflected in the matter-of-fact framing of any instance of white characters killing the various members of the Osage people. These horrific slayings are captured by Scorsese and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto in extended single-takes and wide shots, usually with no accompanying music. You just hear bullets going off and footsteps trudging through grass or gravel on the soundtrack. It's a stark and bleak way of depicting these gruesome killings, a devastating portrait of these senseless actions devoid of any sensationalism. The "normal" way they're shot (with no extra flourishes like discernible color grading or slow motion) hideously communicates how, for the white killers, this is "justified" or "untroublesome" behavior. It's an ingenious bit of filmmaking that just makes your soul ache.

As someone who went through all my remaining Martin Scorsese narrative film blind spots in the month leading up to Flower Moon (save for New York, New York, that feature's not available anywhere!), it's impressive to see how his directorial prowess hasn't budged with age. This man still has such a precise visual sensibility and a gift for using cinema to render the normalized injustices of the real world. It's also intriguing to see shots in here that echo unexpected classic entries in his filmography, like a shot lingering on Mollie being berated by an off-screen Burkhart mirroring a similar image of the unnamed female lead of Who's That Knocking At My Door being yelled at by Harvey Keitel. However, I was also struck by how Killers of the Flower Moon allows Scorsese to deliver plenty of new images or bursts of filmmaking that feel unprecedented in his visual toolkit. He's still discovering new exciting ways to tell stories in this medium and it's making for such rich cinematic accomplishments.

Another standout in Killers of the Flower Moon, though, is easily Lily Gladstone. This performer's been crushing it from the get-go with her remarkable work in the 2016 Kelly Reichardt movie Certain Women, but boy is Gladstone operating on another level here. Just the way she's able to utilize the tiniest corners of her face or even her throat to convey powerful internalized emotions inside Mollie is enough to grip your eyeballs. Gladstone's facial expressions are a gift and she proves equally adept at making Mollie's pronounced displays of emotions compelling. A moment where she wails in despair after hearing devastating news will haunt my nightmares, there's just years and years of pain in that noise. There are plenty of memorable turns in Killers of the Flower Moon, including DiCaprio reminding us all that he's best at playing weasley scumbags always in over their heads. However, this is Lily Gladstone's movie, her performance is nothing less than a towering achievement. 

Martin Scorsese movies have always carried more than a pinch of outrage at the despicable behavior normalized in society. In Killers of the Flower Moon, though, this thematic motif is realized in an especially haunting manner, as the film's 206-minute runtime lets viewers witness the elimination of an entire society by way of powerful white people doing whatever they want. This is how genocide occurs, right in front of everyday eyes and through the actions of ordinary souls. Scorsese has taken a medium that's typically erased the hardships and humanity of non-White Americans and used it to shine a spotlight on often-ignored historical atrocities. Killers of the Flower Moon is not an easy watch, but that's precisely what makes it a staggering filmmaking achievement...along with that Lily Gladstone lead performance.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour hits glorious creative high notes

 

When I was on the cusp of becoming a teenager, I distinctly remember sitting in my bedroom, listening to the country music station 96.7 The Texas Twister, and hearing something unexpected on the radio. I was so used to hearing older or thirty-something dudes in this genre that the sudden presence of a voice that clearly belonged to a teenage girl took me by surprise. This wasn’t somebody singing about their “brand new girlfriend” or their desire to check ladies for ticks. This was a woman signing about romantic longing, the feeling that a single artist can take you back to memories of the past, or being invisible to somebody you can’t stop thinking about. I was raised to believe all teenage girl angst was just pointless drama, a bunch of blathering originating from how “emotional” ladies were. Hearing Taylor Swift’s voice on the radio, though, these problems didn’t sound like “blathering.” They sounded important. They sounded personal. They sounded like things I’d been through.

Save for the trials of Charlie Brown in classic Peanuts comics, I’d struggled to find pieces of pop culture that made me feel normal in being sad as a youngster. Wasn’t this supposed to be the best time of my life? It sure didn’t feel like it most days. The emotionally complicated ditties of Taylor Swift made me feel a little less alone in that moment. From there, me and this artist were inseparable. In my late Middle School years, I’d clutch my green iPod Nano loaded up with Taylor Swift songs and listen to these tunes as a way to calm me down when I got overstimulated. Yes, I’m a repellant white girl Taylor Swift fan and I have been for almost two decades. That doesn’t mean I worship everything Taylor Swift touches (the album Reputation is a total mixed bag and her working with David O. Russell on Amsterdam is a disgraceful moment in her career), but a lot of her tunes have resonated with me on a profoundly important level.

All that’s to say, the new concert movie Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour always sounded like something that would be up my alley. However, watching it (my first time watching the Eras Tour in any context), I was still blown away. I was prepared to enjoy the songs, but I was not expecting the level of visual razzle-dazzle this production delivered. For those not in the known, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour chronicles a filmed version of the Los Angeles stop of Swift’s Eras Tour, a concert experience where the titular singer delves into tunes from each one of her albums. From Speak Now to evermore to Lover and everything in between, they all get highlighted. Plus, nearly all of them are performed on stage with the same level of extreme visual maximalism, with the only restrained exception coming during a pair of acoustically sung tunes.

I found myself often being a total rube during Eras Tour, just going “woah!” or “wow!” at the sheer scale of the LED screens Swift was performing against or the quickness with which she changed into different costumes. It really does feel like some form of magic the way this conceptually limited stage space is constantly transformed into everything from a pool to an isolated cottage to a catwalk where Swift and her dancers can seductively strut their stuff. The uber-pronounced executions of the various songs, which are performed alongside everything from gigantic clouds (that initially looked like the head of the Rock-Biter from The Never-Ending Story) to people trapped in boxes, dazzle the eyes and provide great visual extensions of the assorted tunes. These are tracks that often encapsulate such BIG emotions and now the Eras Tour provides creative images that reflect the expansiveness of those feelings.

Just in terms of set-pieces and spectacle, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is a triumph, particularly in how it’s able to organically shift between so many different visual moods (like quietly ominous, sexually provocative, or cheekily playful, just to name a few) without missing a beat. But something else that I found impressive watching this film (at the risk of sounding like a press release) is how gifted Taylor Swift is at working a crowd. When she’s leading up to the introduction of the performance of the song “The Man,” for instance, it’s just so much fun to see her teasing the crowd with increasingly obvious hints about what ditty is next on the tracklist. Somehow, her displays of being emotionally moved by all the love expressed by the crowd also come off as shockingly genuine. Most impressively, though, when it’s time for her to perform sadder songs like “All Too Well,” she’s able to capture that intimate vocal quality that drew me to her in the first place.

When I was first listening to “Teardrops on My Guitar” or “Tim McGraw” in 2006, what emotionally transfixed me was that Swift totally sounded like she was singing directly to me. My mind immediately captured an image of me and Swift sitting in a room, her strumming away on a guitar and talking about her recent emotional woes. In that moment, it felt like only I was listening to these melodies in the coziest confines. Somehow, even though she’s performing in front of countless souls in the massive SoFi Stadium in the Eras Tour movie, Swift conjures up that quality again for her more low-key songs. Even as you can see endless seas of concertgoers in the background of certain shots, Swift’s vocals still make you feel like she’s singing this tune directly to you. It’s a gift that’s only more apparent when you’re watching her performing songs on a massive movie theater screen.

Speaking of which, the experience of watching Eras Tour in a cinematic setting certainly provides a stirring approximation of how sweeping it would be to watch her perform live in person. Even in my sparsely attended Saturday afternoon digital projection screening (no IMAX or Dolby Cinema flourishes!), the sound of roaring crowds came through loud and clear on the speakers. Meanwhile, director Sam Wrench and the various editors make sure the various songs are so crisply realized on-screen (no shaky or clumsy editing to undercut key emotional moments in the track list) that the sheer visual imagination of this particular concert is unmistakable. The team's versatility in terms of filmmaking chops also ensures that the unique personalities of each tune are nicely realized on the screen. More aggressive quick cuts dominate the editing of the various Reputation songs, for instance, while calmer editing and longer takes are the default visual norms for the quieter acoustic dittoes or folklore tracks. Cuts to the crowd are also used sparingly, which helps to quietly cement the idea that Swift's stage is like its own isolated world. It's sometimes nice to see the wide array of souls being transported live by the music, but the decision to keep the camera almost exclusively focused on the performers (rather than constantly cutting to the crowd or backstage material) heightens the immersiveness of all those elaborate backdrops. The simultaneously intimate and sweeping camerawork really makes viewers feel like they could get lost in all the intricate detail put into those sets!

Like the best pieces of camerawork or editing, these visual touches are so well-integrated into Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, you don't even notice them as they occur, they just work seamlessly into reinforcing the images and atmosphere on-screen. The flourishes in the editing and direction make it often breathtaking to watch Swift's musical prowess on a movie theater screen. The mind reels to imagine what it’d be like to be there in person watching this material unfold live and absorbing all that energy from the audience! Still, don't take that comment to mean that the movie version of Eras Tour, is an inferior product. Sam Wrench and company provide a fantastically rendered cinematic time capsule of this event. Their work deftly makes it clear why this specific musical shindig has become such a pop culture phenomenon.

Also, props to the folks who were in charge of whittling down what songs from the various eras of Swift’s career should be played in the concert. Inevitably, some of my personal favorites were excluded from the concert (“Welcome to New York”, “I Wish You Would”, “Picture to Burn (Homophobic Version)”, you shall not be forgotten), but that was always going to happen, they were never going to cram every single Swift classic into one concert movie. The songs they chose are a fantastic line-up of Swift hits and feature enough variety in sound and aesthetics that the concert doesn’t quickly become repetitive. The highest compliment I could offer Eras Tour is that viewers will be leaving the theater raving about their favorite performances, not grousing about what tunes didn’t make the cut.

If you’re not already a fan of Taylor Swift, I’ll be the first to admit that Eras Tour won’t be a movie that suddenly makes you a believer. Also, the nitpicky film critic in me must note that Eras Tour can’t quite stand up to the all-time greatest concert films like Stop Making Sense and Beyonce Homecoming. David Byrne and Beyonce, your concert cinema crowns are not being relinquished today. However, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is still an impressive cinematic experience providing enough spectacle to make the likes of Cecil B. DeMille grin with approving pride. It was a marvelous experience to witness the same qualities that made me immediately connect to Taylor Swift’s music on The Texas Twister in 2006 still so gloriously apparent on a movie theater screen in 2023. If you think you'd even enjoy Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour a little bit, go see it on a massive screen with friends and prepare to be blown away.

Lisa Laman's Fall 2023 Arthouse Cinema Catch-Up

It's officially autumn folks and that means the arthouse cinema is in overdrive! Your local arthouse theater is playing lots of movies of varying shapes and sizes and even the streamers are getting into the spirit by debuting some smaller-scale movies meant to stimulate the brain rather than take in billions at the box office. Yes, award season is upon us, which means it's time for yours truly to dive into a selection of recent releases in bite-sized reviews. Up ahead, you'll get reviews for six different movies, each brief but certainly informative on both the overall quality of each production and where you can watch them. Let's dive right in to this breakdown of fall 2023's arthouse cinema landscape!

Foe 

You can throw as many famous and talented people as you want on a movie...you just can't salvage a piece of art that's broken from the very inside of its soul. So it is with Foe, which is headlined by some of the most talented young actors of the modern world (Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal, Aaron Pierre) and helmed by Lion director Garth Davis. This story (adapted from a novel of the same name by Iain Reid) concerns a rural married couple (Ronan and Mescal) in the future who learn that Mescal's character is being forced up into space is an absolute waste of time, pure and simple. Good actors like Mescal are misdirected and handed terrible American accents (why does the leading man of Aftersun sound like Aaron Paul now???) while any tension surrounding the central characters is nonexistent. It's impossible to get invested in such flatly realized individuals, who most often seem like they've wandered off from an Asylum version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Meanwhile, the tepid visual scheme of the entire production just makes it easier for your attention to wander. There's lots of screaming, big displays of emotion, and "plot twists" in Foe. All that noise is ultimately as empty as the dystopic landscape the lead characters call home.

Mami Wata

One of the earliest shots of Mami Wata depicts protagonist Prisca (Evelyne Ily Juhen) standing in front of a giant body of water, her head so tiny at the bottom-center of the frame. Such specific placement combined with the way this character is just dwarfed by the ocean behind her instills an immediately arresting image that sets the tone for the visually gorgeous excursion that follows. Above all else, writer/director C.J. "Fiery" Obasi and cinematographer Lílis Soares craft a visually extraordinary exercise with Mami Wata that makes great use out of the feature's default monochromatic color scheme. Those images are also in service of an engaging story that deftly explores conflicts between traditionalism and modernism as well as how misogyny can manifest in even the most seemingly relaxed men. The drama within Mami Wata is well-realized, but it's those endless black voids of the night or Obasi's reliance on engrossing esoteric imagery that truly make the film a must-see.

Mami Wata is now playing in select theaters. 

The Burial

Walk around on the internet sometime and you'll immediately find people declaring any movie they just saw as either the best thing ever or the worst piece of filth ever to be rendered with a camera. This isn't anything new nor is this observation exactly fresh, but it only gets worse every year with the way social media erodes social communication. The Burial is the kind of movie that requires more nuance to talk about in terms of ascertaining its overall quality. There's no denying it suffers from some key problems that tend to plague many streaming releases, namely an overlong runtime, and some occasionally uninspired visuals. More often than not, though, The Burial registers as something perfectly agreeable and even manages to absolutely nail its heaviest moments. A montage scene of members of a Baptist church group speaking in a courtroom and directly into the camera about their hardships faced at the hands of a gigantic corporation is especially deftly executed. Plus, it's a courtroom drama that allows Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones to engage in witty rapport and revel in their trademark silver screen personas. Even if it's sometimes more rudimentary than captivating, The Burial is a perfectly decent movie and the kind of pleasant cinema that can get lost in the hyperbole-laden discourse landscape of the internet.

The Burial begins streaming on Amazon Prime Video on October 13.

Fair Play

Emily Meyers (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke Edmunds (Alden Ehrenreich) seemed to have the perfect relationship going in their time working at a Manhattan hedge fund. However, once Meyers gets a big promotion at the company that Edmunds believes he deserves more, their dynamic starts to fall apart. This is the crux of Fair Play, which writer/director Chloe Domont wants to function as a throwback to thrillers of the 80s and 90s. These titles weren't afraid to confront sex or twisted romantic relationships, much like Fair Play, but unlike those earlier works, this Dynevor/Ehrenreich never quite gets in touch with its wild side. Classic entries in the erotic thriller genre like Showgirls and Bound felt truly unpredictable because of their wilder creative inclinations. Fair Play opts to go down more standard routes for drama that are often watchable, but rarely gripping. By the end, Domont's work here comes off as a half-hearted tribute song to classic erotic thrillers rather than an exciting new evolution of the genre.

Fair Play is now playing on Netflix.

The Royal Hotel

The Royal Hotel takes viewers on a very harrowing trip down under, as Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) take up a job at a bar (The Royal Hotel) situated in a remote part of the Australian Outback. Here, misogyny runs as rampantly as the booze, manifesting in quiet ways and also other manifestations as loud as an explosion. Writer/director Kitty Green instills an unshakeable sense of dread into The Royal Hotel that puts one right into the perspective of its lead characters. There's such underlying entitlement and hostility to every dude Hanna and Liv encounter, it's all-enveloping like a fog. Even in its quietest moments, The Royal Hotel has viewers on the edge of their seats wondering if Hell itself is just around the corner. These qualities ensure that The Royal Hotel will be like stepping into familiar memories for anyone whose had to deal with toxic behavior in a service industry position. They also cement this motion picture as another cinematic winner from the mind behind the excellent 2020 film The Assistant.

The Royal Hotel is now playing in theaters.

The Mission

After helming documentaries like The Overnights or Boys' State (either separately or together) that chronicled modern events as they unfolded, filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine opt to reflect recent events long after they occur with The Mission. The story of slain missionary John Chau is a cautionary tale about how missionary work is used to further messiah complexes and colonialist narratives, but the documentary struggles to dig really deep into the darker elements of this tale (a lack of interviews with non-white experts in various indigenous cultures keeps things more surface-level). The presentation of this particular yarn also isn't anything to write home about, there's very little in the way of notable visual elements (beyond on-screen animation often evoking the imagery seen in the pop culture that inspired Chau's life-long for "adventuring"). I can't say I was bored by The Mission, but it ultimately doesn't have much to say nor really distinctive ways of communicating what themes it does carry.

The Mission begins its limited release run in theaters on October 13, it will begin to arrive in Texas theaters on October 27.

The Creator Crafts A Compelling Sci-Fi Yarn

The Creator immediately endears itself to audiences simply by hitting the ground running. This is not a Transformers scenario where viewers will have to sit through a lot of disposable human drama before a robot shows up half an hour into the runtime. Instead, The Creator's opening montage quickly introduces the feature's versions of automatons to the audience before quickly delivering instantly memorable imagery like robotic soldiers emerging from the ocean. Writer/director Gareth Edwards is here to deliver the goods and doesn't beat around the bush when depicting the most tantalizing possibilities of this fictional world. With such an enjoyable kick-off, The Creator charges out of the gate on the right foot. Happily, the rest of the movie lives up to the promise of those inaugural scenes to deliver a robot-centric motion picture that's incredibly human.

In those opening scenes, viewers meet Joshua (John David Washington), a soldier in the war between humans and artificially intelligent robots. This battle has waged on for years now and Joshua, after suffering a deep personal loss, is just not in the mood to do any more fighting. However, he's brought back into the front lines for a special mission: to eliminate some new weapon that could turn the tide of this entire conflict. As he breaks into enemy terrain, Joshua discovers that this weapon is a robot child later named Alfie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). His superiors, like the robot-hating Howell (Allison Janney), want Alfie immediately terminated. But Joshua can't do that. Unable to pull the trigger on this mechanical youngster, Joshua is now on the run with Alfie. Joshua is consumed with a desire to reconnect with somebody from his past all while walking alongside a child who could be the future incarnate.

The screenplay for The Creator, penned by Edwards and Chris Weitz isn't reinventing the wheel. Certain character beats and plot points won't register as grand surprises to experienced viewers. Later on, the more traditional climax contains features some strained set-ups for emotional moments that take the viewer out of the moment. You can see screenwriters trying to get a specific pathos-oriented end goal rather than the characters acting organically. It's easier to swallow some familiar storytelling material, though, when The Creator delivers so well on its visual ambitions. It's been a long year of blockbusters exclusively filmed in basements in Atlanta, Georgia covered in green screen. To see a new sci-fi movie that actually feels like it inhabits the world we know and makes unbelievable automatons so believable is a balm for the soul for sci-fi fans.

A bevy of gorgeous locales in countries ranging from Vietnam to Thailand provide stunning environments for this heightened story to operate in. Cinematographers Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer serve these backdrops well with their default epic scope to framing the world of The Creator. This is a grand film told through expansive wide shots that deftly communicate how Joshua inhabits a world far bigger than himself. Plus, the lenses and cameras they utilize really make the textures of this movie seem extra tangible. This is a virtue that's especially helpful in two of my favorite scenes in The Creator; a pair of montages where voice-over dialogue is set to random shots from across this film's world. There's a quasi-Terrence Malick quality to listening to John David Washington comment on the connectivity between organisms or answer existential questions from Alfie as we see robots cuddle with cats, monkeys scurry across bridges, and other throwaway moments of everyday existence. There's a larger world out there that the character of Joshua has closed himself off from. In these poignant and visually rich montages, we begin to see the elements of the wider world that are creeping back into his existence.

Those introspective moments are thoroughly enhanced by Fraser and Soffer's style of palpable camerawork relying heavily on natural light. These two montages are also the sort of contemplative detours that many other blockbusters wouldn't dare execute. Such scenes would be considered "too boring" or "slow" for lesser big-budget fare. Thankfully, Edwards recognizes the value of stopping to slow down and appreciate the world Joshua and other characters are navigating. Perhaps that's why some of the overly familiar narrative and story arc elements feel more digestible in these confines. The Creator sometimes treads recognizable ground, but at least it does so with some moving pathos and lots of gorgeous imagery. Those two elements go a long way to making Joshua and Alfie's rapport something you can get involved in.

The more intimate qualities of The Creator also allow John David Washington to flex his chops as an actor, especially in how much emotion he can pack into subdued line deliveries. His scenes with Madeleine Yuna Voyles' Alfie are also extremely well done, especially their earliest scenes together where Washington amusingly depicts Joshua straining to be both some kind of paternal figure and an on-the-lam criminal. Washington and Voyles anchors a rock-solid cast that turns in some mighty fine work, with Allison Janney especially being a welcome presence as a tough-as-nails military veteran with a hatred for robots. It'd be nice if Gemma Chan, the highest-billed lady in the cast, had a more substantial part to play with the character of Maya, but what she is given benefits from her greatest strengths as a performer. Certainly the innate magnetism of Chan means you can never take your eyes off Maya whenever she's on-screen.

Blockbuster movies are known for juggling lots of moving parts. Yet it's often the simplest things that separate the Mad Max: Fury Road's from the King Arthur: Legend of the Sword's. The Creator is nowhere near up to the standards of the greatest blockbusters of all time thanks to a reliance on some overly familiar narrative elements. However, it's got lots of low-key and subtle details, especially in its visuals, that make it a rewarding experience, especially when viewed on a big IMAX screen. Sci-fan cinema fans especially will likely greet this one with cheers after so many underwhelming 2023 entries in the genre like 65 and Landscape with Invisible Hand. Never fear fellow sci-fi nerds, Gareth Edwards has delivered the goods on The Creator to wipe the taste of Quantumania out of your mouths.

Dumb Money Is A Meek Call For Revolution

Dumb Money tries so hard to be anarchic and subversive, a cinematic middle finger to the financially powerful. On paper, it sounds like a fine atmosphere to evoke for a movie chronicling that early 2021 phenomenon where a bunch of folks on Reddit turned GameStop stock into a hot commodity, throwing the American stock market into chaos in the process. So why does director Craig Gillespie's execution of this film feel so hollow and rigid? The real-world events he brings to the screen were so unpredictable, yet the images comprising Dumb Money are incredibly lacking in verve. It's impossible to properly channel an unruly aura when your filmmaking tendencies are so beholden to cinematic norms. Any of the liveliness Gillespie brought to I, Tonya or even the campy Cruella is absent here. This is a paint-by-numbers execution of a scenario that was anything but routine.

Written by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo (whose script adapts the book The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich), Dumb Money begins with Keith Gill (Paul Dano), a financial analyst who spends his downtime running a YouTube channel. Going by the name Roaring Kitty online, Gill is known for his oddball pieces of stock predictions and advice, like urging people to invest in GameStop stock. This advice comes in July 2020, when the COVID pandemic is keeping everyone indoors and GameStop seems poised to shut its doors for good. Yet everyday folks like Jennifer Campbell (America Ferrera) and Marcus (Anthony Ramos) listen to Gill and act accordingly. By the start of 2021, these folks and other working-class investors have managed to "hold" their GameStop shares to send the company skyrocketing. This doesn't make hedge fund managers like Kenneth C. Griffin (Nick Offerman) and Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) happy. The status quo is getting shaken up...and Gill is in the center of all that mayhem.

If there's anything Dumb Money should solidify, it's that focusing on rich characters for a prolonged period of time won't suddenly make them as interesting as the Roy family members on Succession. Too much screentime in Blum and Angelo's script is dedicated to the everyday life of Plotkin and his phone calls with other wealthy people like Steve Cohen (Vincent D'Onofrio). Save for one amusing sight gag of Cohen letting a massive pig run around his mansion, there's just not much entertainment, let alone actual insight, to be gleaned by spending time with these uber-wealthy people. It's not shocking to learn that someone like Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan), the founder of the stock market app Robinhood, is weasely. The excesses of these well-off people are rarely depicted interestingly, as epitomized by a groan-inducing scene of Tenev and his business partner sauntering to their Tesla automobiles as Kendrick Lamar's "HUMBLE." blares on the soundtrack. If Dumb Money insists on spending so much time with hedge fund managers and other modern monsters, at least make their time on-screen absorbing in some fashion. Worse, good actors like Rogen and Offerman are never given enough substantive material in the script to turn these figures into interesting human beings.

Dumb Money's inclination to be as "comprehensive" as possible means it also wants to examine the powerful people upended by the GameStop stock snafu. In the process, the movie just wastes screentime that could be spent further developing the primary working-class characters. In a movie that begins to roll its credits before it reaches, the 100-minute mark, few of these scrappy figures emerge as fully-formed distinct personalities. Worse, neither the script nor the filmmaking is very good at alternating between wacky profane humor and more grounded emotional beats. This is especially apparent when it becomes clear that the audience is supposed to be invested in the strained dynamic between Gill and his younger brother Kevin (Pete Davidson). The duo's rapport is so surface-level that it's hard to care about their relationship. Plus, their dynamic is so removed from the GameStop stock stuff that it feels like Dumb Money has to grind itself to a halt to deal with these fractured siblings.

While this kind of writing lets down the performers of Dumb Money, these actors are also hindered by the film's rampantly realistic filmmaking style. This is a movie about Redditors who use ape memes to convey contempt for authority and revel in misspelling words. Bizarrely, Dumb Money opts to frame these souls in lighting and color grading that evokes a much lesser version of the grim aesthetic of Steve McQueen's Shame of all movies. This approach makes it utterly baffling whenever characters like Jennifer spout phrases like "diamond hands" in the real world. The internet-savvy dialogue and filmmaking style of Dumb Money are at war with one another and not in a way that benefits the movie as a whole. Embracing a filmmaking style rooted in grounded reality works when framing the world of a sex addict in Shame. It's less successful when you're telling a story about dudes in cat masks being oversized YouTube personalities.

All that flat realism in the visual style established by Gillespie and cinematographer Nikolas Karakatsanis alone ensures that Dumb Money is a rudimentary cinematic exercise. The bog-standard screenwriting only compounds this problem as does a score by Will Bates. This composer is clearly channeling beloved films for The Social Network and Steve Jobs. Those features had scores that beautifully mixed traditional orchestral compositions with electronic flourishes to create the perfect auditory companion to stories about technology. Bates aims for the same thing here, but his compositions just come off as half-hearted retreads of what Network and Jobs did so well. Worse, the score often intrudes on, rather than enhancing, key emotional moments between the characters. It's already so hard to get invested in what's happening in Dumb Money without a Will Bates composition beating you over the head with how you're supposed to feel.

It's a good thing deeply talented actors like Paul Dano and America Ferrera are around in Dumb Money since they keep the proceedings from being totally disposable. Ferrera especially does great work communicating working-class anguish that makes it believable why Jennifer would put all her chips on the stock advice of an oddball YouTuber. Surely, though, fans of these actors can find better Dano, Ferrera, or Ramos movies to watch. Dumb Money isn't necessarily awful, it's just incredibly hollow. It's a routine recreation of modern history that fails to say anything meaningful or challenging about its subject matter. Worst of all, it doesn't even communicate a sense of simmering infectious rage against the financial status quo that could've easily salvaged a familiar script or unimaginative filmmaking. Instead, it's just a total flat-line too afraid to ever critique the larger systemic problems (like, say, capitalism) at play in its story. In other words, Dumb Money shows little of the often baffling but memorable gusto of the people it's chronicling. 

A Haunting in Venice Takes Hercule Poirot to An Uninspired Horror Movie

 

Once the credits begin to roll on A Haunting in Venice, the newest Kenneth Branagh-directed adaptation of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot novels, one might feel they need to summon up a detective to discern why they feel so underwhelmed. There's no noticeable aspect of A Haunting in Venice that's especially "bad" or "incompetent". Most of it's handsomely made and the actors are generally solid. So why does the whole thing feel so inconsequential? Why is something that's so determined to frighten the viewer barely leave a mark? Ultimately, A Haunting in Venice is just too stiff to ever get in touch with its freaky and scary side. Michael Green's screenplay wants to appeal to both the Downton Abbey and Insidious crowd here, but he can't quite nail the balance. 

Heavily expanding on a 1969 Christie novel entitled Hallowe'en Party, Poirot is now living out his days in Venice, Italy refusing to take on new mysteries. He's content to just spend his time a loner tending to his garden, but then old pal Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) shows out of the blue. This murder mystery author invites her detective comrade out to a seance occuring on Halloween night at the estate of opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly). Once all the local orphans are done with a Halloween party, Poirot, Oliver, and a gaggle of wildly varying personalities gather around Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), who can apparently communicate with the dead. The goal of this exercise was to contact Drake's deceased daughter. However, a new unexpected murder leads Poirot to reconnect with his detective side to figure out who among the few souls in this palace is a killer. This is complicated by Poirot, who is dubious of anything supernatural, beginning to see strange things centered around dead kids and vengeful spirits.

One strange element of Branagh's version of Poirot is the desire to give this detective lots of tragic backstories. This character not only has a dead wife named Katherine looming over his exploits, but the 2022 film Death on the Nile opened with an explanation set in World War I for the origins of the character's famous facial hair. These attempts to make Poirot "more realistic" or "believable" are always a little baffling, especially since they run counter to the innately and entertainingly heightened nature of murder mystery stories. Once again in A Haunting in Venice, Branagh and Green are too enamored with explanations for Poirot's behavior for their own good. None of the personal drama for the character in this installment is very original or interesting, intimate struggles are just not what the character of Poirot works best with.

More egregious in terms of flaws for A Haunting in Venice, though, is simply the lack of imagination when it comes to scares. There's a heavy reliance on jump scares and discombobulating editing here to bring home the frights, any of which could have been shipped in from separate movies. The best examples of eerie uncertainty come from some wonky camera angles embraced by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos. He also has fun tilting the camera or altering the lighting just enough to make Rowena Drake's lavish decor unnerving once the bodies start dropping. Otherwise, though, A Haunting in Venice isn't very interesting as a horror movie. The mind reels at all the fun or unhinged places a haunted house murder mystery could go to, but Venice is too preoccupied with coming off as "a real movie" to indulge in ridiculous entertainment. 

Green's writing also has issues disguising dead giveaways to the real murderer as just ordinary dialogue. Awkward run-on sentences escape the lips of characters with neon signs announcing "remember this later" practically draped over every word. With minimal scares and no real unpredictable mysteries on hand, A Haunting in Venice proves watchable mostly based on its sharp production design and collection of decent actors. The rapport between Jude Hill as an uber-smart kid and Jamie Dornan as this youngster's shell-shocked veteran father is especially interesting. Branagh makes smart use of Hill and Dornan's familiarity with one another after collaborating on Belfast to make a parent/child dynamic that feels deeply lived-in.

Hildur Guðnadóttir's score is also another jewel in this composer's crown, with her various compositions often demonstrating more of a chilling quality and degree of thoughtfulness than anything else in the movie. Even with these commendable qualities, though, A Haunting in Venice registers as largely an average and disposable experience. Too much of the script and direction opts for the obvious rather than the unexpected, resulting in a murder mystery that rarely pulls you to the edge of your seat. There are a lot of pop culture properties out there right now about idiosyncratic sleuths solving crimes. It's a level of ubiquity that would've made Agatha Christie happy. It's best to just catch up on Poker Face or revisit a Benoit Blanc adventure than catch up on the handsomely produced but frustratingly banal A Haunting in Venice.

Bottoms Carries On The Best Qualities of Queer Cinema and Comedy Movies

Gay cinema is weird. Why wouldn't it be? Being queer in most societies is a peculiar existence that can flip from being joyful one minute to full of sorrow the next. Tasks or events that are mundane for cis-het people are a matter of life and death for many of us in the LGBTQIA+ community. So many aspects of existing as a queer person are so conceptually absurd that it's no wonder cinematic reflections of this community would also be unorthodox. The likes of John Waters, Jamie Babit, Gregg Araki, Angela Robinson, and so many more have wrung incredibly entertaining cinema out of stories that alternate between wacky, depraved, and just plain weird. Their works perfectly capture the nuance and strangeness of queer existence while also delightfully eschewing the "model citizen" approach many cis-het people believe queer folks need to inhabit to secure "respect" and "acceptance".

Following in this grand tradition is Bottoms, a new sex comedy from Emma Seligman. It's an absurd farce of a movie that revels in the stylized world of High School movies and delivers some amazing horny chaotic lesbian representation. 

PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) are a pair of High Schoolers who would like to get laid this century. However, the pair keep striking out with any lady that catches their fancy, with Josie being especially enamored with Isabel (Havana Rose Liu). After accidentally hurting star quarterback Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), these long-time best friends conjure up a lie that they're overseeing a "self-defense club" at their High School. PJ is convinced that this scheme is a great way to get closer to hot ladies and finally get some action. The result of this madcap concept is that a lot of ladies begin punching each other regularly (to trait for actual attackers), Isabel and Josie keep finding chances to spend time alone together, and the deranged football players at this school begin getting worried that they're no longer the center of attention.

A few days before seeing Bottoms, I caught up with Strays, that new R-rated comedy about dogs who saw potty words. The most disappointing part of that movie was how rigidly it adhered to sentimentality and standard storytelling conventions. I should not be able to predict every single moment of a movie focused on a dog out for some genital-based revenge. Strays tries to pass itself off as "adult" and "edgy", but it's way too enamored with didactic dialogue about character defects to ever embrace its strange side. That's a problem with too many modern R-rated comedies, which often are too timid to ever get truly weird. That's, thankfully, not a problem with Bottoms, which crams a lot of oddball gags into its concise 88-minute runtime. There's no attempt here to offer up lengthy explanations for why PJ is the way she is nor does every character feel the need to laboriously explain every inexplicable thing that happens on-screen. Writers Seligman and Sennott understand that the bizarre and unexplained is the recipe for great comedy.

Bottoms is hilarious, full stop, and many of its best jokes come from Seligman and cinematographer Maria Rusche executing seriously funny visual gags. Tired of modern comedy movies pushing all their jokes to the foreground and overdosing every scene in bright lighting to adhere to the visual standards of Netflix cinema? Bottoms is the remedy for that, as nearly every scene delights with humorous background gags that encourage viewers to poke around in the corner of the frame. An assortment of darkly humorous posters scattered around the hallways and cafeteria will especially satisfy eagle-eyed comedy fans. There's a larger world going on at this school beyond PJ and Josie, which just makes this feature all the more delightful to watch.

It helps too that the actors assembled here know just how to tap into the unique unhinged vibe of Bottoms, particularly leading ladies Sennot and Edebiri. Having worked together before on multiple occasions, the duo share a familiar rapport that makes the eternal friendship of PJ and Josie incredibly easy to buy. In their standalone performances, Edebiri does remarkable work imbuing such authentic humanity into such a wacky character while Sennott puts the likes of Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler to shame in her rendering of a selfish horndog in over their head. That's a standard protagonist archetype for the American comedy movie but rarely has that type of person been realized with such precisely funny line deliveries and perfect body language as Sennott's work in Bottoms.

Of course, the MVP of the cast has to be Marshawn Lynch in a supporting role as Mr. G. Not only are all his lines so sharply written, but Lynch is just a riot playing a guy who says the most incredulous things with total confidence. Mr. G is often in his own little world and Lynch makes that detachment a riot to watch. The incredibly enjoyable nature of Lynch's performance and everyone else in the cast makes it shockingly easy to get invested in all the madcap mayhem of Bottoms. A sequence involving some revenge on Jeff set to a perfect 1980s needle drop is genuinely exhilarating. Meanwhile, a football field finale proves more exciting than many straightforward climaxes from this summer's costlier blockbusters. Best of all, some of the intimate scenes between Isabel and Josie are so tender and sweet. Much like how the "Beautiful Ride" scene in the wacky Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is more moving than anything in any other standard music biopic, so too does Bottoms excel compared to other movies less reliant on lunacy.

On top of all that, Bottoms even becomes the rare modern comedy movie to deliver a memorable score courtesy of Charlie XCX and Leo Birenberg. Their compositions are brash creations that delightfully complement the pronounced nature of the entire production. Though its score, cinematography, and overall direction show a lot more care than usual for a modern American comedy, the trait of Bottoms that truly makes it a must-see is that it's flat-out hysterical. The unabashed weirdness that defines so much of queer cinema serves the creative comedy of Bottoms incredibly well.

Gran Turismo Is PlayStation Marketing Poorly Masquerading As An Actual Movie

This review was written during the 2023 Writer's Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes. This motion picture wouldn't have been possible without the efforts of unionized artists who deserve fair liveable wages.

At the end of the 2006 motion picture Cars, Lightning McQueen observes that the Piston Cup trophy he’s been obsessed with for so long “is just an empty cup.” It's a moment that's meant to signify that this brash racecar has come a long way and realized what's truly important in life. This particular line of dialogue, though, could have also been referring to the new film Gran Turismo. Much like a Piston Cup trophy, Gran Turismo is also hollow and meaningless. Director Neil Blomkamp, after previously delivering original pieces of sci-fi storytelling, has now helmed a late capitalism nightmare that proudly boasts about being a commercial for massive corporations. This newest example of how subpar video game movies can be wields as much genuine compassion for the working class as a 2023 country song that debuts atop the Billboard Hot 100 charts and contains as much fun as your average trip to the dentist. 

Based on the video game series Gran Turismo and based on the true story of racer Jann Mardenborough, Gran Turismo begins with an explanation of the history of its titular video game that feels indistinguishable from a commercial. It's a very promising start. From there, Jason Hall and Zach Baylin's screenplay takes viewers into the world of Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a video game-obsessed twenty-something with seemingly unobtainable dreams of engaging in the world of racing. For this working-class guy, the closest he'll ever get is his treasured Gran Turismo video games. However, a new competition spearheaded by marketing executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) could give Mardenborough the chance he's been waiting for. Moore's concocted a scheme to have veteran racer Jack Salter (David Harbour) train a bunch of gamers to become professional racecar drivers. Satler is skeptical about the whole concept but the conviction and know-how of Mardenborough makes him believe that maybe this plan can go somewhere.

If there's anything audiences should take away from Gran Turismo above all else, it's that hinging so much of a movies drama on whether or not "sim-racers" (video game players experienced in "simulated" races) will be accepted by the racing world is a terrible idea. No matter how many times people say the phrase "sim-racers", it never stops sounding stupid. Any potential investment in the proceedings gets thrown out with the bathwater once those two words drop out of somebody's lips. It doesn't help that the underlying stakes of that acceptance never feel tangible or interesting. The intent behind this drama is that, if "sim-racers" are accepted into "snooty" races, maybe more working-class folks will be allowed into this sporting arena. With the surface-level execution of this script, though, Gran Turismo's plot seems to hinge solely on whether or not Mardenborough will be able to prove that more PlayStation promotion can exist at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

These are the kinds of thoughts that race through one's mind as Gran Turismo rolls through a cycle of familiar plot points with all the speed of a busted jaloppy. Something else that proves hard to dismiss? The pervasively ugly color scheme and visual aesthetic of the whole movie. Gray seeps into so much of the film and the big races always tend to take place in days dominated by overcast. Once he's entered the world of professional racing, Mardenborough walks from one sparsely decorated sleek space to another, with little in the way of bright hues or distinctive details in the various sets to exude a sense of personality to the character's various backdrops. It's all so drab looking and makes the racing world Mardenborough has always dreamed of entering seem so repellant. Who wants to spend their days working to the bone in places so sterile? Any of the tactility Blomkamp brought to his earliest directorial efforts is nowhere to be found throughout Gran Turismo.

Even the big racing scenes in Gran Turismo, surely the one saving grace of this subpar blockbuster, aren't anything to write home about. Blomkamp and cinematographer Jacques Jouffret really love using footage captured by drones for these sequences, which sometimes have a fun sweeping quality to them. However, generally, lengthy scenes where fast cars go zoom aren't realized in an especially exhilarating fashion. Even visual flourishes that translate details from the Gran Turismo video game onto the actual tracks Mardenborough is racing on aren't especially imaginative. Awkward cuts between actual automobiles and CG doubles for those vehicles as well as clumsy pieces of editing further undercut the potential excitement of these sequences. The latter element of the production, handled by Colby Parker, Jr. and Austyn Daines, is especially distracting whenever the camera is just capturing people talking to one another. Why does an early speech from Satler to the prospecting gamer racers have so many awkward cuts to random objects and people? Who knows.

There's little to capture the heart or captivate the senses in Gran Turismo, not even in terms of delivering thrills that temporarily exhilarating in the moment. It's so mechanically realized from top to bottom that its inspirational sports movie narrative beats never feel human enough while any stabs at human drama feel like a robot trying to mimic what "romance" or "male bonding" looks like. The aloof nature of the whole project only becomes briefly interestingly bad when Gran Turismo kicks off its third act with a miscalculated dark turn that brings grave mortality into the world of Mardenborough. A lengthy advertisement for PlayStation suddenly trying to grapple with an actual human being's death (and reducing this person to just being an unnamed plot point) goes about as well as you'd expect. It's staggeringly mishandled, but it's also a distinctively memorable poor choice, at least. The rest of the feature, save for Djimon Hounsou putting in a terrific supporting turn, is just a tedious slog that feels six times as long as Jeanne Dielman. If you love lengthy unskippable ads on YouTube, you’re gonna get your motor running over Gran Turismo.

Blue Beetle is rock-solid superhero fare leaning into low-key pleasures

This review was written during the 2023 Writer's Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes. This motion picture wouldn't have been possible without the efforts of unionized artists who deserve fair liveable wages.

There's been lots of internet chatter over how the new DC Comics feature Blue Beetle will impact future DC blockbusters. What I find more fascinating is how Blue Beetle relates to the last three DC motion pictures, Black Adam, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and The Flash. Each of these blockbusters was bloated messes that traded out any trace of humanity or fun for scale and a deluge of CG baddies. All three features wanted to have the scope of a David Lean epic and the wit of a James Gunn comic book adaptation, but none of them had the creativity necessary to live up to their aspirations. After so much excess, the low-key nature of Blue Beetle is as welcoming as a drop of water in the desert. A movie willing to just focus on just a handful of characters and being an enjoyable standalone excursion is a prime way to wash out the nasty taste of The Flash from one's mouth.

Blue Beetle begins with Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) returning from college to his hometown of Palmera City. Reuniting with family like younger sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo), dad Alberto (Damián Alcázar), and grandma Nana (Adriana Barraza), Reyes discovers that his loved ones are going through tough times. Their house is being foreclosed on and money is scarce. Desperate to help, Jaime Reyes tries to score a job at Kord Industries through the aid of Jenny Kord (Bruna Marquezine). However, instead of scoring a cushy job, Reyes gets a scarab that attaches itself to his body. This mystical entity gives Jaime Reyes a superpowered exoskeleton known as the Blue Beetle. Now an ordinary twenty-something is dealing with all kinds of incredible abilities while also contending with the villainous Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) and her bodyguard Conrad Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo), both of whom want the scarab for nefarious purposes.

Originally intended as an HBO Max exclusive title (its release strategy was changed months before filming began), Blue Beetle's origins as a thriftier superhero tale are noticeable on-screen but not at all in a bad way. On the contrary, having less than half the budget of Black Adam at their disposal has inspired writer Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer and director Ángel Manuel Soto to make sure the character beats of Blue Beetle truly click. After all, there is no CG skybeam in the third act to distract audiences from unengaging on-screen personalities. Luckily, Jaime Reyes and his family turn out to be an enjoyable collection of characters to spend two hours with, especially Dunnet-Alcocer wisely pumps the brakes on the story occasionally to depict low-key interactions between these loved ones.

For instance, a moment where Jaime Reyes and Alberto sit in front of their house, talking about the future while looking at plants the latter character put into the ground years earlier proves mighty touching. Meanwhile, the action-heavy third act nicely avoids the problem many superhero movies struggle with. Titles like The Wolverine tend to deliver finales that feel divorced from the character-centric sequences that preceded them. Suddenly, all the pathos is jettisoned so that the protagonist can duke it out with a CG monster. Wisely, Blue Beetle keeps the family of Jamie Reyes front and center for the entire narrative, including the climax. Never losing sight of this superhero's relationship with his loved ones gives Blue Beetle a sense of narrative consistency even when superpowered beings are punching each other. 

Those brawls between Reyes and Carapax (the latter of whom initially has a suit of armor that makes him look like one of the Jaegers from Pacific Rim) are more perfunctory than the character beats of Blue Beetle. The decision to shoot the biggest action sequences at night robs these set pieces of a chance to engage in bright colors reminiscent of vintage comic books while the choreography and sound mixing in these Reyes/Carapax showdowns often feel too derivative of similar skirmishes in superhero fare like Iron Man. Anytime these fights lean into the silliness of Reyes conjuring up any weapon from his Blue Beetle suit (like axes, swords, blasters, etc.), the action scenes certainly get taken up a notch in excitement. Meanwhile, the initial tension between Reyes and Khaji-Da (Becky G), the entity inside the scarab, informs some of the most enjoyable action beats as these characters struggle to reconcile their opposing views on how to take out bad guys. Speaking of the suit, it looks great on-screen. The decision to realize it as a practical on-set outfit rather than something added in through CGI later pays off nicely, those blue hues just pop right off the screen.

Speaking of pleasant surprises, composer Bobby Krilic (a prolific musician and songwriter whose only prior film scores were limited to Triple 9 and the last two Ari Aster features) delivers a fantastic score for Blue Beetle that reinforces the distinctive personality of the overall feature. In an inspired move, Krilic has opted for an electronic sound in the score. This quality immediately differentiates the sonic landscape of Blue Beetle from other superhero movies, which often feature scores trying too hard to emulate the compositions of John Williams and Hans Zimmer. Save for occasionally distracting uses of that Inception "bwaaammm" noise, Krilic's score here is an idiosyncratic creation that could be enjoyed even divorced from the context of Blue Beetle. These tracks lend propulsive energy that proves fitting for a movie that's generally and enjoyably on the move, save for a second act that gets too bogged down in Blue Beetle lore and antics involving supporting character Rudy Reyes (George Lopez).

Sometimes, it's best to keep things low-key. Blue Beetle is a great example of this. Even just confining one's gaze to the realm of superhero movies, Angel Manuel Soto's feature isn't an all-time classic. It's too statically filmed and a tad too eager to embrace familiar superhero film hallmarks (like an action scene set to an 80s rock song, in this case, a Mötley Crüe ditty) to be the next The Batman or Spider-Man 2. However, that doesn't discount the fact that this is still a mighty enjoyable slice of blockbuster filmmaking that finds its best moments leaning into earnest humanity and comic book tomfoolery. What a welcome reprieve that is after The Flash and Black Adam beat viewers over the head with endless spectacle in place of any soul. Oh, it also must be said that it was delightful to sit in a packed house of moviegoers and witness people getting excited at references to pop culture properties like El Chapulín Colorado or watching Blue Beetle's equivalent to cheer-worthy superhero movie lines like "I'm always angry" getting delivered in Spanish. Those details reflect how Blue Beetle doesn't reinvent the wheel but provides enough unique flourishes to register as a fun time. Certainly, it's way better than Shazam! Fury of the Gods...