Movie Review Fast X

Fast X (2023) 

Directed by Louis Letterier 

Written by Dan Mazeau, Justin Lin 

Starring Vin Diesel, Jason Mamoa, Tyrese, Charlize Theron, Paget Brewster, John Cena, Michelle Rodriguez, Ludacris, Sung Kang, Jason Statham, Helen Mirren

Release Date May 19th, 2023 

Published May 19th, 2023 

What is there to say about Fast X? If you aren't fully onboard with the utter nonsense that is the Fast and Furious franchise at this point, why are you bothering? I happen to be fully on board for this nonsense. I fell in love with the silly, testosterone fueled nonsense in 2001 and have remained in love with this nonsense as it morphed from being about street racers pulling small scale criminal heists -they literally stole DVD players and VCRs out of semis in the original- to today when everyone is basically an immortal superhero. 

You have to accept a lot of B.S when you accept the Fast franchise. Take, for instance, where we begin in Fast X. Dom (Vin Diesel) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) begin the film back in L.A, back in what may be their old neighborhood. These are people who still live with a deep, paranoid fear that people are trying to kill them and they are living exactly where anyone trying to find them will find them, very easily, with little to no effort. 

The movie openly admits this as the plot kicks off with the person who has hunted them for the past two films, Cypher (Charlize Theron), finds their house and knocks on the door. Cypher is battered and bruised. She's bleeding from some sort of wound to her abdomen. She tells Dom and Letty that she sought them out because the person who did this is even more evil than herself. He's so evil that she wants to join their side to fight him. 

That man is Dante Reyes (Jason Mamoa) whose father, Herman Reyes (Joachim De Almeida) was killed during Fast crew's heist of a vault full of cash in Rio De Janeiro, as seen in flashback here and in full in Fast Five. Dante doesn't want to kill Dom, he wants to make him suffer. That means targeting Dom's family and trying to kill anyone who has ever help the Toretto family. Why he doesn't just roll into the L.A suburbs and do his business, I have no idea. 

Instead, Dante, being all kinds of extra, decides to blow up the Vatican and frame Dom's crew for the crime. It's as brazen and silly as that sounds. A portion of Vatican City is destroyed but exposition newscaster, one of the unsung heroes of this franchise, tells us that no one was killed. A giant bomb took out a portion of a massive tourist destination and no one was killed. Everyone in the Fast universe is a superhero. I don't know if this 'no one was killed' nonsense extends to the cops chasing Dom and his crew through the streets of Rome but if they didn't die, there is no death in this universe. 

This sequence is utterly bonkers and I loved it. I did. I loved it. It's total, non-stop, nonsense but it's so much fun. The bomb is a giant ball that rolls out of the back of a semi-truck and will not stop rolling as if Rome were nothing but a tilted table. At one point, the bomb rolls over a gas pump and the pumps explode. Dom uses his car to shield people on the street from the explosion. The bomb continues to roll but is now on fire as Dom chases it in his super-car. It's gloriously stupid and I love it. 

If Fast X lacks, it's due to director Louis Letterier who leans too far into the dour, sourpuss, self-seriousness of Dominic Toretto. Where Justin Lin and F. Gary Gray got how silly this series is and embraced the giddy stupidity, Letterier takes things in the direction that Diesel wants to go, treating the nonsense seriously and threatening to upend the strength of this franchise, how it is embraces its own nuttiness and leans into the criticism of it being the loudest, brainless franchise in Hollywood. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review The Mattechine Family

The Mattachine Family (2023)

Directed by Andy Valentine

Written by Andy Valentine, Danny Valentine 

Starring Nico Tortorella, Juan Pablo Di Pace, Heather Matarazzo, Emily Hampshire 

Release Date May 12th, 2023 (SIFF) 

Published May 12th, 2023 

Movies like The Mattachine Family are necessary correctives to the historic record of gay men on screen. This story of a man struggling with a desire to be a father and the strain of a relationship at a breaking point is authentic and relatable human story regardless of whether the lead is gay or straight. One of the things that so often gets lost in the midst of trying to satisfy people's expectations of stories of gay or straight people, are the basic humanity at heart. The Mattachine Family may be about a gay man but it is mainly about a human being with relatable human problems. 

The Mattachine Family stars Nico Tortorella as Thomas, half of a couple in the midst of a wrenching experience. Thomas and his husband, Oscar (Juan Pablo Di Pace), have lost their son. The child hasn't died but the agony is similar. Thomas and Oscar were acting as foster parents when the boy's mother came back into the picture. The details are hazy but she's capable of being a mother, and a good one, and thus she has successfully petitioned to get her son back. She's grateful to Thomas and Oscar for taking care of her son when she could not but she intends to raise him away from where they are. 

As we will learn through the story of The Mattachine Family, the idea of being a father was completely foreign to Thomas before he met and fell in love with Oscar. It's easy to forget that gay marriage and adoption are so new that millennials like Thomas are still taking in the idea that they can be married and be parents. Specific to Thomas however was simply that he never considered parenthood until it happened. Now that it has ended suddenly, Thomas finds that he can't just go back to who he was before. 

Oscar, on the other hand, is traumatized but not willing to talk about it. He can't bring himself to be there when his son was returned to his mother, nor is he willing to discuss trying to be a parent again. Oscar is coping by focusing on work. Being a former child television star who lost his career when he came out as gay at a very young age, Oscar now finds himself with a chance to get back in the spotlight. The only complication is, the job is filming somewhere in Michigan, far from his and Thomas's home in Los Angeles. 

The escape may be what Oscar needs but not what Thomas needs. Thomas has a circle of friends who provide a support system he really needs, especially now. He loves his husband and is willing to sacrifice for their marriage, but when Oscar completely shuts down the idea of trying to be parents again, it may be the breaking point of their relationship. Most of The Mattachine Family will turn on this particular conflict and it proves to be a very compelling conflict. 

The Mattachine Family is a warm, inviting and charming film. It's an achingly human story that deals with serious relationship issues with a maturity and care I really appreciated. It's also a film populated by terrific characters. Thomas is surrounded by wonderful friends played by Emily Hampshire, Garrett Clayton, and Cloie Wyatt Taylor, who form the kind of found family that we should all hope to have. Found family, for me, is as important as blood relations, if not more, and The Mattachine Family captures that beautifully. Found family in the LGBTQ+ community can often prove to be even more important as many come from bigoted or merely unsupportive homes. 

The makers of The Mattachine Family are acutely aware of details like that while the film doesn't linger on making important points, the implications are clear and given depth by scenes depicting these friends being together and caring for each other. Another strong detail comes in the film's voiceover where we get lovely insights into Thomas's worldview. I normally have a rather low opinion of voiceover outside of very specific genre conventions but the makers of The Mattachine Family make it feel right for this story. 

Thomas tells us a lot of important things in his inner monologue and its mostly character details rather than simply a device to move the plot forward. It does function as a plot mover but not egregiously. No, rather, it smartly reminds those of us who don't share Thomas's background just how much things have changed for gay men in Thomas' merely 30 plus year existence. We certainly have not come to a place of equity for the gay community but Thomas' voiceover reminds us just how many possibilities have opened to men his age, legally speaking, in just the past two decades. 

Find my full length review at Pride.Media 

Horror in the 90s Nightbreed

Nightbreed (1990) 

Directed by Clive Barker 

Written by Clive Barker 

Starring Craig Scheffer, David Cronenberg, Anne Bobby

Release Date February 16th, 1990 

Box Office Gross $16 million dollars 

Clive Barker wastes no time; you see his monsters before the credits roll in Nightbreed. In terms of visual storytelling, a wall of cave paintings tells us that the monsters here are ancient, perhaps a pre-cursor to, or a compatriot of, early man. If these cave paintings are telling a story, that's unclear. Holy crap! Again, we waste no time. A mess of monsters are racing about to a classically Danny Elfman score. The scene is very... Andrew Lloyd Webber. The monsters and the choreography of the chase is, at the very least Broadway inspired. 

This is a dream sequence which explains the highly theatrical production and the stage-setting for the action. Our lead character, Aaron Boone (Craig Scheffer) has awakened from a dream of these fantastical monsters and the way in which Cliver Barker self-inserts himself into the story is hard to miss here. Having his handsome main character dreaming up these fantastical monsters is a very obvious corollary to the writer-director-author who has, in fact, created these monsters for this movie. 

Nightbreed is based on the novel 'Cabal' by Clive Barker. Barker adapted the book into a screenplay and directed the film based on that screenplay from his own book. So, yeah, this is a Clive Barker joint through and through. I imagine having himself inserted as the main character, stopping just short of calling the character Clive and having him be a multi-hyphenate artist, won't be the last time we see parallels between Aaron, AKA Cabal, and his creator. 

Seemingly out of the blue we get a sequence of slasher horror that is among the best of the decade. Barker takes us to a random suburban home. A loving wife and her husband are laughing together and playful. They have a young son and he gives us the first sign of something unseemly occurring. The boy tells his mother that he's afraid and claims that he was kept awake by a 'bad man.' This bad man turns out to be the real deal, a slasher killer who makes an incredible first impression. 

Employing a a horror filmmaking trope, Barker has the mother open the freezer door in the kitchen. This serves to block a portion of empty space next to her. Naturally, the trained film watcher knows that when mom closes the freezer door, someone, or something, will be there and this scene will move jarringly from the suburban mundane to the terrifying. Here, since he's employing a familiar trope, Barker has to deliver something big. Something shocking. And boy does he deliver. 

A killer in one of the most terrifying masks we will see in 90s horror, is behind that freezer door. He immediately slashes mom to death with what is surely an incredibly sharp knife. The movement is swift and horrifying and your breath catches when you see it. The visual of the blood on the ground and the sight of apples that the mother was near or carrying covered in blood as the roll across the floor is a sublime horror visual. The gurgling of the mother character, having been slashed across the face and throat, and the seemingly realistic amount of blood, only serves to amplify the terror. 

Dad is next. The killer, wearing this incredibly scary mask and a long black trench coat, a look that evokes a much more frightening take on Claude Rains' The Invisible Man, enters the living room and shuts off the lights. In just a brief moment that superbly heightens the awfulness of what is to come, dad smiles to himself, assuming that his lovely wife has returned for more intimacy. He's wrong, of course, and that we know it and he doesn't adds another layer of deep dismay. Once dad is dead, the scene heightens again. 

Our mind flashes to that little boy at the top of the stairs. Knowing this, and taking remarkable advantage of our empathetic rooting interest, Barker chooses to move the camera to the child's perspective, looking down the stairs at the killer. Here, Barker masterfully pauses, giving us the brief hope that maybe the killer won't look for the boy, maybe the child will merely bea witnes to this terror. That hope is snuffed out as the killer's sickening gaze, through what looks like buttons where his eyes should be. The mask evokes another, much less well-known influence, 1976's The Town That Dreaded Sundown, a Charles B. Pierce directed film, and also a movie about a serial murderer in a mask. 

Does the child die? We don't know. in the moment but but it certainly did not appear that he had much chance of survival. I can't stress how great this scene is. In only his second feature film, following the less than stellar but entirely memorable, Hellraiser, Barker demonstrates masterful control over his camera, the patience of Hitchcock in letting his scene build while adding details to amp the moment, and an ingenious notion of how to end a scene thick with dread and intrigue. It's remarkable and I am shocked I've not heard about this scene before. 

Another example of Barker's growth as a director is his choice to follow this scene by letting off some steam. He needs to place his characters on a map for the story to proceed. Thus, Aaron is at work and his girlfriend, Lori (Anne Bobbi), drops in for a visit. She explains that she's going to be at a nightclub that night, performing as a singer. The dialogue is all exposition but it's not tedious as Aaron and Lori are making out almost the whole time, breaking for dialogue and an occasional breath. Scheffer and Bobbi have tremendous sexual chemistry so the making out is a good choice but we now also know where the characters are going to be and why. What looks like a superfluous scene then, is thus now a scene that has set the table for what is to come and established the couple even further as young lovers we want to see together again. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media