Movie Review Wind River

Wind River (2017) 

Directed by Taylor Sheridan 

Written by Taylor Sheridan 

Starring Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olson, Graham Green, Gil Birmingham, Q'Orianka Kilcher  

Release Date September 8th, 2017 

Published September 8th, 2017 

Wind River is one of the most emotional experiences I have had at the movies in 2017. The modern western from writer-director Taylor Sheridan is a cold and harsh drama about a cold and harsh place where these characters don’t merely live, they survive. The film also shines a devastating light on the plight of Native Americans and the criminal lack of care we give to their living conditions and well-being. That it takes a white writer-director and two white movie stars to get this story told says nearly as much as the movie itself.

Wind River begins terrifyingly with a young Native American woman running through a barren, snow covered valley. You can feel the cold simply from her manner and the way Sheridan films her running at a distance. Upon closer look your fear for her amps up as it is revealed that she is not wearing shoes or gloves. She collapses and tries to get up and keep going, she’s bleeding. The scene fades to black with her running toward a forest on a mountainside.

The body of the young girl, Natalie, is found a day later by Corey (Jeremy Renner), a hunter employed by the US Fish and Wildlife Administration as he is tracking mountain lions that have been attacking livestock. Corey knows the young girl and her family, they live on the reservation where he met his now ex-wife (Q’Orianka Kilcher). The dead girl was a friend of Corey’s late daughter.

Since the death happened on an Indian Reservation, the jurisdiction is murky, somewhere between County Sheriff’s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the FBI. The FBI is represented by Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olson), an inexperienced agent from Las Vegas who is ill-prepared for the frozen conditions of Utah; she is somehow the closest available agent for the job despite being stationed nearly 400 miles away.

Read my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Leap

Leap (2017) 

Directed by Eric Summer, Eric Wann 

Written by Eric Summer, Laurent Zeitoun, Carole Noble 

Starring Elle Fanning, Nat Wolff, Maddie Ziegler, Carly Rae Jepsen

Release Date February 24th, 2017 

Published February 25th, 2017 

It’s bizarre to me at times the things we feel are alright simply because they are animated. Take for instance the new animated family movie Leap which, while it tells a lovely story of an aspiring ballerina, spends a portion of its third act following a crazy woman as she attempts to murder two orphan children. Now, I get it, they’re animated but the choice made here is so incredibly forced and horrible that it doesn’t feel like Elmer Fudd’s failed attempts to murder Bug Bunny but something far more grim, ugly and worst of all, unnecessary.

Leap tells the story of Felicie (voiced by Elle Fanning) and her friend Victor (voiced by Nat Wolff) who escape from an orphanage on the outskirts of France and head to Paris to achieve their dreams. While Victor dreams inventing a way to fly, Felicie dreams of being a dancer and her dream is what drives the plot as she quite literally stumbles her way into the most prestigious dance company in Paris. There she meets Odette (voiced by Carly Rae Jepsen) who becomes her mentor and mother figure.

After Felicie nabs an invitation to attend the famed dance company from a talented but bratty rival (voiced by Maddie Ziegler) she begins attending classes while Odette begins to train her in secret. Odette used to be a dancer herself and in one of the film’s many abandoned plot strands, her background as a famed dancer is barely mentioned before it is pushed aside. Eventually, Felicie’s ruse is uncovered by the evil mother of her bratty rival (voiced in typically over the top manner by SNL star Kate McKinnon), and Felicie must fight for her chance to remain in class and in competition for the lead role in a major production or end up being sent back to the orphanage.

There are lovely moments in Leap but for each lovely moment there is a head-scratchingly awful moment such as a montage of Victor regaling Felicie with his own Paris adventure which he describes as triumph while we suffer/watch footage of him stumbling, falling and at one point lighting farts. Yes, this lovely movie about a young girl dreaming of life in the ballet contains a scene where a young boy lights his fart. Because, apparently, Hollywood hates your children

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Classic Movie Review Enter the Dragon

Enter the Dragon (1973) 

Directed by Robert Clouse 

Written by Michael Allin 

Starring Bruce Lee, John Saxon, Jim Kelly 

Release Date August 19th, 1973 

Published August 19th, 1973 

This week’s classic on the Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast is Enter the Dragon, the final film in the all too short career of the legendary Bruce Lee. I have had little exposure to kung fu movies in my nearly 20 years as a film critic. Aside from some 80s cheese like The Last Dragon or the work of Jackie Chan, I have mostly ignored the genre having written it off based mostly on the stereotypes built from years of Bruce Lee knock-offs and cash-ins that soured more than just me on the idea of kung fu movies as anything other than the sad side of the B-movie genre.

Watching Enter the Dragon for the first time sadly is no revelation for me. While I came away with a great deal of respect for why fans took so much to Bruce Lee as a performer, I found the film not all that special. Lee’s magnetism goes a long way to making the otherwise predictable, bordering on silly story worth watching but the screen time spent waiting for Lee to start kicking butt is quite tedious and I found myself drifting.

In Enter the Dragon Bruce Lee stars as a martial arts master, also named Lee, who is recruited by a shady intelligence organization to attend a martial arts tournament run by the kind of super-villain that only exists in martial arts movies, Mr. Han played by former Drunken Master star Shih Kien. Mr. Han owns his own island in the Pacific and despite the best efforts of this intelligence agency they aren’t sure if he is amassing weapons or not.

The agency needs Lee to participate in a deadly martial arts tournament hosted by Han on his island and find out if there are indeed illegal weapons that would allow international military to attack the island. Lee agrees to the mission and then finds out that the mission has a personal component for him. We meet Lee’s father and he informs Lee and us that Lee’s sister was murdered by Han’s thugs in a seemingly random killing.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Logan Lucky

Logan Lucky (2017) 

Directed by Steven Soderbergh 

Written by Rebecca Blunt 

Starring Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Katie Holmes, Riley Keough, Daniel Craig, Hilary Swank, Katherine Waterston, Sebastian Stan 

Release Date August 18th, 2017 

Published August 17th, 2017 

Being a fan of the American history podcast The Dollop allows me to watch a movie like Logan Lucky and never for a moment find the story implausible. Take a listen to them tell the remarkable true story titled Jet-Pack Madness and you will find within it a story every bit as brilliant as a Coen Brothers comedy. Everything in Logan Lucky feels completely plausible when you compare it to such historic silliness as what transpired with the Jet-Pack or the L.A Freeway Shootout or The Human Taco.

The Dollop has nothing to do with Logan Lucky but I could not help thinking of how Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds would tell this story if it were true. I imagine it would be just as good as the movie Steven Soderbergh has made, a crazy story of crime, family, pride, NASCAR, and the South. That Logan Lucky is also a heist movie is nearly incidental, as if these characters existing as they do might make for a good enough story but that they happen to pulling off a multi-million dollar NASCAR-themed heist certainly makes things even more colorful.

The Logan family is cursed or at least that is what little brother Clyde Logan (Adam Driver) believes and he would be happy to regale you with his tragic family background while he pours beer at a West Virginia bar called Duck-Tape. Older brother Jimmy (Channing Tatum) doesn’t buy into the curse, though Clyde’s point is understandable, he’s just back from losing an arm in Iraq while Jimmy lost a scholarship to play Quarterback at LSU when he blew out his knee and just as we meet him, Jimmy is fired from his job working construction underneath the famed Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Nevertheless, Jimmy doesn’t buy into Clyde’s curse talk, especially since he’s decided to pull off a multi-million-dollar vault heist and doesn't need the bad juju on his mind right now. Having been fired from his job where he operated an earth mover beneath the famed North Carolina race track, Jimmy has found out where all the money from the stadium concessions goes and how it gets there. The only thing standing in his way is the vault but Jimmy happens to know a guy who can help, if they can get him out of prison.\

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review The Hitman's Bodyguard

The Hitman's Bodyguard (2017) 

Directed by Patrick Hughes 

Written by Tom O'Connor 

Starring Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Salma Hayek, Gary Oldman, Richard E. Grant 

Release Date August 18th, 2017 

Published August 17th, 2017

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is a very divisive film. Not because it has any challenging themes but rather because it is both a laugh riot and quite a bad movie. At once, The Hitman’s Bodyguard is very, quite intentionally, funny and quite poorly directed. I call the film divisive not because audiences will either love or loathe the film in equal measure but rather because I am divided personally by the fact that I repeatedly laughed quite loud during the film and by the fact that the film’s green screen effects, storytelling, and casting are so shoddy that at times I physically wretched.

Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson co-star in The Hitman’s Bodyguard, with Jackson as the hitman and Reynolds as the bodyguard (the too clever by half poster parodies the Whitney Houston-Kevin Costner movie). Jackson is the world’s most wanted hitman, Darius Kincaid. He’s been captured by Interpol after they arrested his wife, Sonia (Salma Hayek) and threatened to hold her in prison until he turned himself and testified against world renowned terrorist and Belarussian dictator Vladislav Dukovich (Gary Oldman, so bored of this role he can barely keep his terrible makeup job from falling off from his obvious, repeated eye-rolling).

When Interpol is compromised by the single most obvious mole in history, played by Joachim De Almeida, who might as well walk around with TRAITOR tattooed to his forehead, Agent Amelia Roussel (Elodie Yung) calls in her ex-boyfriend, Michael Bryce (Reynolds) to take Darius to court. Naturally, this court happens to be all the way across Europe and the two mismatched pals must road trip through Vlad’s terrorist gang to get to their destination.

Yeah, this plot is terrible, ludicrously, painfully obvious and extremely played out. The Hitman’s Bodyguard is forced, clichéd, and predictable to the point of torture for anyone who’s seen more than one movie in their lifetime. Director Patrick Hughes then makes matters worse by topping his bad plot with even worse direction, including special effects that make the rear-projection in Saturday Night Live skits look great by comparison.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Classic Movie Review The Big Easy

The Big Easy (1987) 

Directed by Jim McBride 

Written by Daniel Petrie Jr. 

Starring Dennis Quaid, Ellen Barkin, Ned Beatty 

Release Date August 21st, 1987 

Published August 21st, 2017 

This week in 1987 The Big Easy starring Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin and directed by Jim McBride was released nationwide following a brief run on the awards circuit in late 1986. The film tells the story of a corrupt New Orleans Police Detective named Remy McSwain, played by Quaid, who’s about to learn that corruption doesn’t really pay. Ellen Barkin is a District Attorney tasked with investigating Remy’s corruption and that of his fellow New Orleans brothers in Blue.

Director Jim McBride is best remembered for his 1982 remake of Jean Luc Godard’s iconic Breathless, with Richard Gere in the Jean Paul Belmondo role, Valerie Kaprisky in the Jean Seberg role and Las Vegas standing in for Paris. McBride, it seems, had a longstanding fascination with the French New Wave as not only did he remake Breathless, but in The Big Easy he tells the kind of American crime story that directors like Godard, Truffaut and Melville cite as their earliest influences.

Does that make The Big Easy good? Eh, it gives it a perspective, I guess. The problem with The Big Easy isn’t necessarily the movie, it’s time. Time has not been kind to movies in the crime genre. In the last 30 years’ dozens of films have trod upon similar ground, enough to make The Big Easy feel like just another copycat. That McBride may have been attempting an homage to his French New Wave influences is nice, but the only thing French about The Big Easy is its locational relation to the French Quarter.

Mr. McBride directs The Big Easy not like the dispassionate French crime stories but rather exactly like the old 40’s Hollywood pictures that the New Wave ate up. When the New Wave remade those pictures their French-ness made the stories feel fresh and innovative. In 1987 when McBride crafted his crime movie homage his only innovation was R-Rated sex and violence. Nothing about The Big Easy feels fresh anymore as a zillion other pictures have come along and were better at portraying corruption, sex, and violence.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Classic Movie Review Bob Le Flambeur

Bob Le Flambeur (1956) 

Directed by Jean Pierre Melville 

Written by Jean Pierre Melville, August Le Breton 

Starring Roger Duchesne, Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, Guy Decombie 

Release Date August 24th, 1956 

The classic on this week’s Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast is, arguably, the very first film of the French New Wave, Bob Le Flambeur, translated as Bob the Gambler. Bob Le Flambeur is a classic American style heist film seen through the lens of a French admirer of American movies, Jean Pierre Melville. It is Melville’s French sensibility, the way he focuses not on the heist but on the atmosphere of a heist that separates Bob Le Flambeur from American heist movies which had and have turned safe-cracking and men smoking in back rooms leaning over complex drawings into classic film tropes.

Bob Le Flambeur stars Roger Duchesne as the calm, cool and collected, Bob Mantagne. Bob is a well-known and respected former gangster turned well-known and slightly less respected gambler. I shouldn’t put gambler second on Bob’s résumé, as betting seems to Bob as breathing is to the rest of us. As he recounts in the story, Bob was born with an Ace in his palm. Gambling is Bob’s only skill after he lost several years of his life behind bars after blowing a bank heist that killed a friend.

That friend’s son, Paolo (Daniel Cauchy), is now like an apprentice to Bob; a young hustler soaking up Bob’s aura while Bob works to keep the kid from making the mistakes that got his father killed. One of those mistakes would be teaming up with Marc, a pimp with an eye toward building a gangster portfolio by pulling one high-end job. Paolo is narrowly rescued from being at Marc’s side when he’s arrested for beating one of his working girls. Here the film shifts focus from Bob to impart important plot information that I will leave unmentioned here.

The scene is also a further introduction to Inspector Ledru (Guy Decomble) who happens to consider Bob a good friend despite his gangster past. Ledru is the key figure in the dramatic structure of Bob Le Flambeur and the most notably filmic character, a rarity in what is otherwise a less than straight-forward adaptation of the American style gangster movie. Ledru is a requirement of the plot and his arc is significant to the emotional underpinnings of what is otherwise an exercise in cool, French homage.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Challengers

Challengers (2024) 

Directed by Luca Guadagnino 

Written by Justin Kuritzkes 

Starring Zendaya, Mike Faist, Josh O'Connor 

Release Date April 26th, 2024

Published April 26th, 2024 

Sexuality is non-binary. Full stop. Sexuality is a spectrum on which we all exist. The notion of straight or gay as a binary dynamic of sexuality is outdated to the point of being silly. That's not to say that people's desires, what turns them on, can't be just one thing that happens to adhere to the notion of straight or gay, it's merely an acknowledgment that sexuality for anyone can be a fluid concept depending on circumstance. This opening paragraph is triggering a lot of straight men, I can feel the discomfort as they click away in anger. 

Challengers is a rare film that explores the idea of sexuality as a spectrum. The three protagonists of Challengers, two men and a woman, have a brief, exploratory experience that gets at the heart of how circumstantial sexual preference can be. The film also reframes what sex can be in an orgasmic final showdown that reveals these three characters true desires in a fast paced, eye-catching, and breathtaking final few minutes. Director Luca Guadagnino appears to be making the case that anything can be sex its if the circumstances align. 

Challengers stars Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a tennis prodigy caught up in a love triangle with a pair of fellow prodigies. Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor) have been friends since their early teen years spent at a tennis academy. Both are gifted players in very different ways. Art is methodical and well practiced, Patrick gets by on brut strength and determination, along with an unusual serve. The two young men compliment each other and when each falls for Tashi, it becomes not unlike a tennis match filled with strategic points and breaks. 

But Tashi is no mere ball at play among these two players. She's their coach, teaching them both the game. Literally, she becomes Art's Coach as his career advances while Patrick seeks her as a Coach later in his career. The film shifts through time effortlessly layering in the story to build toward that remarkable final act tennis match where Art and Patrick are playing the game of their lives with Tashi acting as mastermind and the prize for the winner while losing herself in the excitement of tennis. 

For Tashi, life is tennis. Her relationship with Patrick falls apart when he refuses to talk about tennis while the two are becoming intimate. Her relationship and eventual marriage to Art is tethered in part to his success on the tennis court and she's not afraid to tell him that if he can't maintain his high standard of play, she will lose interest and leave him. This constant pressure from Tashi has made Art one of the most successful players in tennis, a grand slam winner, and a favorite for the upcoming U.S Open. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024) 

Directed by Guy Ritchie 

Written by Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Arash Amel, Guy Ritchie 

Starring Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Eiza Gonzalez 

Release Date April 19th, 2024 

Published April 23rd, 2024 

It's the flippancy of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare that rubs me the wrong way. I feel like we've grown so used to minimizing the dangers of war and the real risk of life and limb, that we risk removing the human element from war entirely. The new Guy Ritchie movie, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare plays a role in this dehumanization by taking a mostly true story and rendering it something akin to the Quentin Tarentino fantasy of Inglorious Basterds, minus the artistry. Tarentino side steps the flippant reimaging of World War 2 because he's not working from a 'based on a true story' archetype. The soldiers of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare were very real and really risked everything for their country. 

To take their story and render it like some action movie fantasy feels like a disservice that denigrates the genuine bravery and hardship of these real life heroes. These men, and one woman, didn't do what they did to be cool, they did it because it needed to be done. Rendering them as shallow action movie stock characters removes their complexity and humanity. This is the kind of needless revisionism that is obscuring real history far too often and despite my appreciation for the actors and the mostly solid direction of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, I can't fully enjoy or appreciate the film because the real story is way more interesting to me than the action movie tropes of the movie. 

Henry Cavill portrays Gus March-Phillips, a wild eyed Englishman with a taste for the finer things and a willingness to get his hands dirty. As we meet him, Gus has been in jail for repeated instances of insubordination. He's a menace to commanding officers and politicians alike. He's perfect for the job to be assigned to him, one that cannot be directly overseen by anyone. Gus' mission involves crippling the Nazi supply chain for U-Boats and thus opening the ocean for the Americans to enter the war. It's an entirely off the books mission as Winston Churchill's top military brass don't believe such a mission is possible, it violates the code of an ethical war. 

Thus, Gus and his team are assembled in secret by General Gubbins (Cary Elwes) who advises Gus that if he is caught by the Nazis, they will die and if they are caught by the English Navy, they will be arrested. Now, about Gus' team. Anders Larsson (Alan Ritschson) is a brutish Swedish man whose pasttime is killing Nazis. Henry Hayes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) is the son of a very good friend of Gus's from back in the day. He keeps Hayes close to keep an eye on but he's also a whiz with guns and explosives. Speaking of explosives, Freddy Alvarez (Henry Golding) knows everything when it comes to blowing things up. He's been in and out of prisons across Europe for blowing things up for fun and profit. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Classic Movie Review Horror of Dracula

Horror of Dracula (1958) 

Directed by Terence Fisher 

Written by Jimmy Sangster 

Starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Michael Gough 

Release Date May 7th 1958 

Published April 25th, 2024 

If you're going to talk about Dracula and sexuality, you're not going to start with Bela Lugosi. Lugosi's monster may have sexual overtones, Dracula has always been a metaphor for sex, often a symbol of non-consensual sex or used as a fetish figure who represents male sexual dominance or merely a figure representing the seductive nature of taking power over others. But, Bela Lugosi isn't hot. He's not a bad looking dude, per se, but there are few if any people who look at Bela Lugosi and are overcome with a form of erotomania. 

On the other hand, Christopher Lee has that going on. Though he is unconventionally attractive, he has a towering, powerful presence. Lee's eyes appear to be devouring those he's looking at. His every action, every look on his face is filled with a confident, overbearing sense of his own sexual prowess. In the most crass and basic sense, Lee's Count Dracula is a Dracula who F***s. Lugosi's approach was more asexual, leaning on his desire for power over others to be his driving dramatic force. For Lee, and even more prominently, Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker's Dracula, the driving force is eroticism, it's metaphoric sex. The desire for blood is both for sustaining life comfortably and about a forceful sexuality barely concealed. 

1958's Horror of Dracula is a showcase for Christopher Lee's overwhelming presence. It's about those eyes that bore into yours. It's about him looking down at his victims and them looking up at him to subtly and not-so-subtly underline the power fantasy and dynamic at play in Lee's take on the character. Where Max Schreck's Nosferatu is like an incel take on Vampire lore, Lee's Dracula is like a proto-Andrew Tate or one of those pick up artist guys constantly touting their power over women, and sometimes men. Lee's Dracula isn't about murder, he doesn't actually kill the women he covets, he turns them. His intent is keep them and use them against their will for his pleasure, that's his kink. 

Making a woman do something she doesn't want to do. That's the driving force of Lee's Dracula and it's bizarre how that parallels with our modern culture of Alpha Males. The Alpha Males often talk about the power they wish to wield over women. It's about bending a woman to that will, getting them to submit to what the man wants in a relationship, it's their fetish, just as it is Dracula's fetish in Horror of Dracula and as portrayed by Christopher Lee. It's not about blood or murder, it's kink. It's a power fantasy and an appealing one for the Alpha Male types as they could never achieve this kind of control over women, but they can live vicariously through Lee's Dracula. 

The proof of my thesis about Alpha Males and their kink, their fetish for power, comes in an unlikely form, a woman named Pearl. Every now and then, a podcaster named Pearl goes viral for something she said or something that someone said about her. Pearl is often called a 'Pick Me,' a woman who is eager to submit to a male dominated hierarchy. Pearl has talked many times about how women have too many rights and claims that women are happier when they simply submit to the desires of a man. You might assume that the Alpha Males applaud Pearl and are eager to find a woman just like her, but that's not the case. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Classic Movie Review Clifford

Clifford (1994) 

Directed by Paul Flaherty 

Written by Jay Dee Rock, Steven Kampman 

Starring Martin Short, Charles Grodin, Mary Steenburgen, Dabney Coleman 

Release Date April 1st, 1994

Published April 1st, 2024 

There has been a minor reassessment of the movie Clifford in recent years. Famously, actor Nicolas Cage spoke about being a fan of the film in relating a story about meeting Martin Short. The idea that Nicolas Cage fan-girled at meeting Martin Short and peppered him with praise for Clifford is a better and funnier story than anything in Clifford. I think there are people who adopted Clifford as their movie simply to be different from the rest of the world which roundly rejected this bizarre failure. Other than Nicolas Cage, who is seemingly incapable of irony, no one actually likes Clifford, they like being the person who says that they like Clifford. 

Clifford stars Martin Short as the title character, Clifford, a deeply spoiled and entitled 10 year old boy. On a trip to Hawaii, Clifford manages to nearly crash a plane in hopes of landing in Los Angeles where he hopes to take a trip to Dinosaur World. Clifford's parents, desperate to get away from their child, drop Clifford with his Uncle Martin (Charles Grodin). The timing is fortuitous for Martin who needs to convince his girlfriend, Sarah (Mary Steenburgen) that he likes kids and has a special relationship with his nephew. 

Unfortunately for Martin, he is not aware that his nephew is a 10 year old sociopath. Clifford's single minded desire to go to Dinosaur World leads him to destroy every aspect of his Uncle's life including breaking up Martin and Sarah, getting Martin fired from his job, and getting Martin arrested for planning to bomb City Hall. All of this is revenge for Martin failing to take Clifford to see Dinosaur World. All the while, Clifford plays the innocent child when Sarah or anyone else is around while turning malevolent when it's just he and his Uncle Martin. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

 

Movie Review Asphalt City

Asphalt City (2024) 

Directed by Jean Stephane Sauvaire 

Written by Ryan King, Ben Mac Brown

Starring Tye Sheridan, Sean Penn, Mike Tyson, Kali Reis, Michael Pitt 

Release Date March 29th, 2024 

Published March 28th, 2024 

Asphalt City is the kind movie that mistakes wallowing in misery for drama. The film about a rookie EMT in New York City wallows in the bleak misery of suffering that, I am sure, will feel like gritty drama to some but felt punishing for this critic. I don't mind a good wallow, I was a big fan of Scorsese's similarly themed Bringing Out the Dead years ago, but I have my limits and Asphalt City pushed well past my limit for desolation that borders on post-apocalyptic. I realize New York City can be an angry and dark place but this borders on pornographic in terms of misery. 

Asphalt City stars Tye Sheridan as Ollie Cross a wide-eyed medical student whose paying his way through med-school by working as an EMT in New York City. Struggling with a terrible partner who hates rookies, Cross's spirits are buoyed when he's reassigned to work with an aging veteran, Gene 'Rut' Rutkovsky. Rut takes pity on the kid and sets about teaching him the job instead of just screaming orders at him. Where his previous partner, played by Michael Pitt, appeared intent on running Cross out of the job, Rut seems to take to being a mentor. 

This doesn't however, give the movie a boost in terms of the pitch black ugliness at play. Even as Rut proves to be kind, the runs they make in their ambulance are unendingly grim. EMT's deal with a lot of horrors but Asphalt City makes the job appear like the seventh circle of hell at all times. It's to the point that I just can't believe anyone would be able to do this job and since we have EMT's currently working in New York City, I can only imagine that they have found some way to preserve their mental health. This movie makes being an EMT akin to trying to survive Cormac McCarthy's The Road. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review In the Land of Saints and Sinners

In the Land of Saints and Sinners (2024) 

Directed by Robert Lorenz

Written by Mark Michael McNally, Terry Loane

Starring Liam Neeson, Kerry Condon, Colm Meaney, Ciaran Hinds

Release Date March 29th, 2024

Published March 27th, 2024

The opening moments of the Irish thriller, In the Land of Sinners and Saints is a breathtaking piece of suspense. Members of the I.RA have just planted a bomb outside of a pub. But, just as they are about to make their escape, a family, with very young children pauses in front of the pub so that one of the children can tie their shoe. One of the bombers screams in an attempt to get the family to move but they appear confused by the screaming one and stay rooted in place. The bomb goes off and it's clear that this family has been killed. 

It's a principal laid out by Alfred Hitchcock, the explosion isn't nearly as exciting as the ticking bomb itself. The tension isn't the damage that the bomb will do, it's heated seconds until the bomb does what we know a bomb can do that matters in a movie. We don't see this family get murdered and we don't need to, the horror is greater in our mind by implication than it would be if we saw blood and body parts splattered on pavement. 

Don't get me wrong, gore and bloodshed has its place and, in the right hands, it has been effective, but that's a different genre of film altogether than what In the Land of Sinners and Saints is going for. This is a cerebral thriller that builds its emotional tension underneath, allowing it to simmer and grow into a boil before exploding. As directed by Robert Lorenz, that simmering is compelling and the boil is riveting. Then, we wait with our breath caught and our hearts pounding as we anticipate the explosion to come. 

Liam Neeson stars in In the Land of Saints and Sinners as Finbar, a hitman who comforts himself with the notion that he only kills bad people for money. Finbar has killed a lot of people, hiding their bodies under freshly planted trees in a forest near his small cottage. Finbar has reached a point where he'd like to retire, give up killing, and take up a hobby like gardening. He also has his eye on a neighbor at a nearby cottage who is soon to be a widow. The pair have a sad chemistry that could become love. 

But, this is a world of consequence and the consequences of Finbar's choices are that happily ever after is highly unlikely for him. His potential happily ever after is soon threatened by the arrival of four newcomers in his village. Remember the terrorists from the opening sequence, they are hiding out in a nearby farmhouse. One of them has taken to abusing and harassing a young girl whose mother runs Finbar's favorite pub. Seeing that the girl is afraid to go home at night, Finbar intervenes. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Horror in the 90s Child's Play 3

Child's Play 3 (1991) 

Directed by Jack Bender

Written by Don Mancini 

Starring Brad Dourif, Justin Whalin, Perrey Reeves, Jeremy Sylvers 

Release Date August 30th, 1991 

Box Office $20.5 million 

The first 15 minutes of Child's Play 3 is a brief meditation on corporate greed. After nearly a decade away from making their Good Guy dolls, the Play Pals company have re-opened the factory and inadvertently, rebuilt Chucky, the malevolent doll body inhabited by the spirit of serial murderer Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif). We watch as corporate titan, Mr. Sullivan (Peter Haskell), ignores the warnings from his underlings about re-starting the Good Guys line. Sullivan's greed will be his downfall. 

As Sullivan is alone in his office, after the rest of the staff have called it a day, he's attacked by Chucky and brutally murdered. Though his death at the plastic hands of Charles Lee Ray is based more in Ray's single-minded obsession with killing Andy (Justin Whalin) and taking Andy's youthful body for his own, the underlying anti-capitalist message is clear. Without the dedicated greed of Sullivan and his corporate lackeys, the Good Guy doll would have languished, perhaps have been destroyed, and with it, the final vestiges of Charles lee Ray. But, because of their greed, evil flourishes and shows no mercy, even when confronting the evil that gave it back its life. 

That is perhaps, far too deep a reading of Child's Play 3, but it's a satisfying read. The idea of Chucky as the anti-hero of the socialist set is kind of fun. The notion that a corporately owned and crafted vehicle like Child's Play 3, itself a product of greed and avarice would, even accidentally, call out and punish unchecked corporate greed, is part of the naive charm of Child's Play 3. It's a vague sort of self-awareness that makes the movie just a little more interesting than the average third sequel to an ATM style franchise intended on mining nostalgia for profits. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media  

Movie Review Late Night with the Devil

Late Night with the Devil (2024) 

Directed by Colin Cairnes, Cameron Cairnes 

Written by Colin Cairnes, Cameron Cairnes 

Starring David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss 

Release Date March 22nd, 2024 

Published March 21st, 2024 

Late Night with the Devil stars David Dastmalchian, forever an actor out of time, as 1970's talk show legend, Jack Delroy. In 1971, Jack Delroy left the world of morning radio for the chance to compete next to Johnny Carson in the realm of late night TV as the show of Night Owls with Jack Delroy. For a time, it appeared that Jack might just eclipse the King of Late Night, Carson, but by 1976, things were no longer going Jack's way. Jack's beloved wife, played by Georgina Haig, died of cancer, not long after he had her appear on the show to share their struggle for ratings. 

After taking a month away to recover from the loss of his wife, Jack returned to the stage to try and salvage his show and his career. It's Halloween night and Jack has an idea that he hopes can get him back on top. Jack has booked a pair of guests with supposedly supernatural talents. Christou (Fayssal Bazzi) is a mentalist with a talent for speaking to the dead. He will demonstrate this talent on the show and then face off with a skeptic, a former magician turned debunker, Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss). Carmichael is based off of real life magician turned debunker, and 70s celebrity, The Amazing Randi. 

Christou may or may not be a charlatan, one that Carmichael can debunk with relative ease, but a greater challenge to the skeptic and the talk show host is booked next. Author and para-psychiatrist, Dr. June Ross Mitchell is bringing her patient, Lily (Ingrid Torrelli) on the show. Lily was the only survivor of a death cult that worshiped a Devil adjacent demon known as Abraxas. Dr. Ross-Mitchell has written a book about Lily's demonic possession by a demon that Lily calls "Mr. Wriggles." On tonight's show, Dr. Ross-Mitchell is set to place Lily in a trance and bring the demon out of her in front of the world and prove that demonic possession is real. 

What we know, and these characters do not, is that what we are seeing is recovered footage thought lost forever. The concept behind Late Night with the Devil is that this is footage of the most controversial live television broadcast in history, a test footage that was thought lost forever. The entirety of the story of Late Night with the Devil, aside from an opening prologue introducing us to the host, Jack Delroy, is portrayed a recovered recording directly from 1976 and being played back for the first time since it was broadcast. The look of the movie is a near perfect recreation of a 1970's television broadcast, right down to the grainy quality indicative of a live to tape broadcast from nearly 50 years ago. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Movie Review Lisa Frankenstein

Lisa Frankenstein (2024) 

Directed by Zelda Williams

Written by Diablo Cody 

Starring Kathryn Newton, Cole Sprouse 

Release Date February 9th, 2024 

Published February 12th, 2024 

Lisa is an awkward teenager who has been through terrible trauma. Lisa's mother was murdered by an ax murderer. Now, as we join her story, she's living in the suburbs, her father has remarried to a shrewish, bitter woman, played by Carla Gugino, and Lisa is struggling to fit in. At the very least, her new sister, Taffy (Liza Soberano), is sweet and supportive, to a point. Where Lisa is awkward and an outcast, Taffy is a popular cheerleader with everyone at school fawning over her. Of course, Lisa doesn't make fitting in easy for herself. Lisa's favorite thing to do in her new hometown is to hang out in a decrepit cemetery. 

There, Lisa makes art and chats with the dead. One gravestone in particular, that of a man named Frankenstein, featuring a marble bust of the man's handsome face, catches Lisa's attention more than the others. She decorates this grave and leaves gifts including her late mother's rosary. Thus, when Frankenstein's grave is struck by lightning and the man in the grave bursts back to life, he comes searching for his new friend. Lisa is perhaps the only person who could take this sort of development in stride, after a brief comic chase around her house as she thinks The Creature, as he's known in the credits, played by Cole Sprouse tries desperately to explain who he is without words. 

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Classic Movie Review Opera

Opera (1987) 

Directed by Dario Argento 

Written by Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini 

Starring Christina Marsillach, Urbano Barberini, Daria Nicolodi

Release Date December 19th, 1987

Published February 6th, 2024

The most captivating moment of the new Shudder documentary on director Dario Argento comes during an interview with his former leading lady, Christina Marsillach. Marsillach starred in 1987's Opera for Argento and the two had a deeply fraught relationship. In her interview in Panico Marsillach starts out talking about Argento as a father figure before taking her reminiscence in a decidedly different direction. Slowly she begins to talk about Argento's passive aggressive style in which he would not give her direct instructions but would have other members of the crew speak to her. 

Marsillach goes from painting a picture of a shy fatherly figure to portraying Argento like one of the villains of his movies, a tyrannical figure bent on getting his way at all costs. She appears to want to speak kindly of the director but then, in recalling her actual experience on the set of Opera, we get a short term psychodrama, a battle of wills between actress and director that she was not winning. It's captivating, there is no other way to describe it. I believe everything Marsillach is saying, based on what we see of Argento in behind the scenes footage, and yet her account of her work on Opera is oddly dramatic, not unlike an Argento movie, serene on the surface until everything comes to a boil.

Opera unfortunately is a wildly inconsistent piece of work. It's a slasher film set in the world of Opera with all of the pomp and circumstance of that world. The film stars Marsillach as a young diva who gets a shot at the big time after a big star walks out on an Avant-Garde take on Verdi's MacBeth. It's portrayed as a temper tantrum but it become quite serious when the Opera diva is struck by a car and is most assuredly not returning to the stage. Thus, a call is made to Betty (Marsillach), the diva understudy who now must step up and become a star. 

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Classic Movie Review Bird with the Crystal Plumage

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) 

Directed by Dario Argento 

Written by Dario Argento 

Starring Tony Musante, Suzi Kendall, Enrico Maria Salerno 

Release Date June 24th, 1970 

Published 

I find the simple tools of visual filmmaking to be incredibly moving. When used in the right way something as simple as a good edit can excite my love of film. Case in point a very early, very simple edit in Dario Argento's 1970 thriller Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The film is a thriller about a serial murderer in Italy. The simplicity of this moment, mere minutes into the film, demonstrates that you do not have to have the biggest budget or the showiest of modern camera technology to make a great movie. Sometimes, you just have to show the audience a pair of images next to one another to tell them all that they need to know. 

In this case, we've seen a man make a note to pick someone up and follow them to a particular location. Cut to a woman walking alone along a busy street. A light, airy soundtrack, she's oblivious to everything but her attendant location. She's unaware that anyone is following her. Cut to, a darkened room. Hands covered in black leather gloves, a man in a black leather jacket. A striking red handkerchief is lifted to reveal a set of knives of different shapes and sizes, displayed in a red velvet case. The implication is clear yet subtle, these knives are special, they hold a specific purpose. The gloved hands select one, examine it, and the scene changes. 

The visual link from the woman walking down the street, unaware that she is being watched and photographed and the man with the dangerous looking set of knives is made simply by the edit. Unconsciously, from this simple visual link, you know that this unnamed woman is in grave danger. The man with the knives has ill intent and the next steps in this story may or may not include her being attacked and possibly killed using this chosen implement of death, a long, lovingly caressed steel blade. The simplicity of this visual filmmaking is its secret genius. Great directors like Dario Argento understand this kind of simplicity. 

It's a shame the rest of Bird with the Crystal Plumage isn't quite as strong as the opening moments. The biggest flaw is the fact that this is murder mystery in which a witness and potential victim is given all the tools to investigate the murder that he witnessed. Tony Musante stars in Bird with Crystal Plumage as Sam Dalmas, an American writer who is finishing up his time in Italy. Or, at least, he was finishing up. When Sam witnesses a woman being attacked in an art gallery, and nearly watches her die after he becomes trapped between two glass walls, Sam is first a suspect and then, through convoluted means, becomes the lead investigator. 

Sam first becomes interested in clearing himself so he can recover his passport from a suspicious detective. But soon, he becomes obsessed with the case, even as he is nearly killed while heading home from an early investigation. Strangely, the actual lead detective, Morosini (Enrico Maria Salerno), encourages Sam's investigating, even helping him with access to a victim and a currently jailed potential witness. Sam even locates a piece of evidence about one of the first murders in this killer's series that the cops failed to find. 

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Movie Review Argylle

Argylle (2024) 

Directed by Matthew Vaughn 

Written by Jason Fuchs 

Starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Henry Cavill, Bryan Cranston, John Cena, Ariana Debose, Dua Lipa, Samuel L. Jackson, Catherine O'Hara

Release Date February 2nd, 2024

Published February 1st, 2024

The high concept premise of Argylle is relatively simple: what would happen if the spy novels written by an unassuming, shut-in, bestselling author, became a reality that forces the writer into the real life world of espionage, violence, and betrayal. Bryce Dallas Howard stars as the hapless best selling author Elly Conway. Elly's high flying spy adventure Argylle has become a worldwide phenomenon all while Elly lives a peaceful, slightly lonely, existence at a lakeside home far from the crowds of admiring readers. Elly's idyllic life of writing and spending time with her beloved cat, Alfie, is upended when she can't think of a final chapter for her fifth book in the Argylle series. 

Suffering from severe writer's block, Elly boards an Amtrak train headed to see her mother, Ruth (Catherine O'Hara) who she hopes will help her snap back into writing mode. Unfortunately, Elly is not going to make it home to mom. On her train ride, Elly finds herself in the company of Aiden (Sam Rockwell), a real life spy who saves Elly's life from a series of attempted assassinations aboard this moving train. Bodies pile up fast as Aiden whipsaws about the train snapping necks and shooting baddies right in the heart while he saves Elly and Alfie from assassination. 

As Aiden will eventually explain, Elly's books are somehow mirroring real world, geo-political situations in which a rogue spy agency is trying outwit a group of good guy spies working to protect the world. Caught in the middle, Elly doesn't know who to trust, Aiden and his CIA pal, played  by Samuel L. Jackson, or the head of a rival group of spies who Elly may or may not already be familiar with. It's a terrific premise and it's all building to a pretty nifty twist until director Matthew Vaughn twists us one too many times leading to a flat finish for an otherwise fleet footed action flick. 

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Classic Movie Review Car 54, Where Are You

Car 54, Where Are You? (1994) 

Directed by Bill Fishman

Written by Erik Tarloff, Ebbe Roe Smith, Peter McCarthy, Peter Crabbe

Starring David Johansen, John C. McGinley, Rosie O'Donnell, Fran Drescher, Nipsey Russell, Daniel Baldwin. 

Release Date January 28th, 1994

Published January 29th, 1994

If you think the Hollywood of today is fearful of releasing musicals, considering that both Wonka and Mean Girls were seemingly released without telling anyone they were musicals, you should see how scared of musicals Hollywood execs were in the early 1990s. Hollywood was so afraid of musicals in the early 1990s that they made two of them and then refused to release them as musicals. Two movies, released within one week of each other in 1994, began life as musicals and arrived in theaters minus most of their musical numbers. 

Naturally, that's not easy to do. In the case of the next movie I will be talking about for this series, I'll Do Anything, an entire film score written and performed by Prince, was scrapped after poor test screenings. This is deeply ironic as one of the songs was literally intended as the lament of a Hollywood movie producer character racked with angst over poor test screening scores. Hiring Prince to write and perform a film score is not cheap, scrapping it after paying him seems even more insane and expensive and yet that's what happened. 

The other musical that became not a musical just before being released in theaters was the film adaptation of the short lived 1950s sitcom, Car 54 Where Are You. The original concept for Car 54 Where Are You was as a painfully modern musical and an edgy reboot for one of the most edge-free sitcoms of Boomer youth. Instead of following the travails of cop buddies Toody and Muldoon as they try and trick their wives into letting them go fishing instead of spending time with their family, we have Toody, as played by David Johansen, delivering a hip hop infused dream sequence where he boogies while being celebrated as a neighborhood hero. 

This is one of two songs that producers felt they had to keep in Car 54 Where Are You. The other comes late in the film as Johansen jumps into sing a song that vaguely resembles his late 80s one-hit-wonder Hot, Hot Hot. All other songs have been excised, aside from a brief and deeply unfortunate scene where a pair of rappers encourage Jeremy Piven to attempt to beatbox. It's even more cringe-inducing than you imagine. Piven is a plot point character, a former mob account that Toody is assigned to keep safe. Naturally, our bumbling hero fumbles this task and the last act is trying to save Piven from a mobster played with dopey, broad, hamminess by Daniel Baldwin, the discount Baldwin brother. 

John C. McGinley is wasted in Car 54 Where Are You. Though the original series centered on the long term friendship and partnership of Toody and Muldoon, the movie transforms Muldoon into a no-nonsense rookie officer who gives tickets for Jaywalking or Spitting on the sidewalk. And, in another in a lengthy series of regrettable and poorly aged scenes, he tries to shoot a child suspect in the back as the child flees after stealing a $5.00 sandwich from a deli. Muldoon misses shooting the child and is lucky that he only shoots a watermelon as he fired into a crowd of people on a New York street. 

Click here for my review