Documentary Review It's Quieter in the Twilight

It's Quieter in the Twilight (2023) 

Directed by Billy Miossi 

Written by Documentary

Release Date May 19th, 2023 

Published May 18th, 2023 

I was vaguely aware of the Voyager Spacecrafts. The Voyager mission launched one year after I was born. It would then bubble back up into the culture every couple of years when the mission reached a new milestone, traveling and providing the first up close images and data from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. What most people don't realize is that the Voyager mission never ended. Though Voyager surpassed Neptune in 1989, the mission continued and continues as we speak. 

The new documentary It's Quieter in the Twilight takes us through the history of Voyager via the people who have been with Voyager for the past 46 years. Many scientists and engineers have come and gone from the Voyager project over the years but a core of around 10 to 12 people have kept watch over this urgently important space mission for nearly 50 years. Director Billy Miossi brings those remarkable people into the spotlight in It's Quieter in the Twilight and they have a remarkable story to tell. 

The launch of Voyager was improbable. By 1977, going to space had already become something that Americans were used to. For years, each space launch and moon landing was broadcast live. The news led with stories of space travel and interviews with NASA scientists about how incredible space travel was. Voyager was one of the last times that many Americans gathered around their television to watch a launch and hear about what incredible discoveries we were going to make. 

Then, every few years, Voyager re-emerged and changed the way we saw the solar system. After launching in 1977, Voyager reached Jupiter in 1979. The following year, 1980, we saw the rings of Saturn for the very first time thanks to Voyager 2. Voyager 1 would bring us back to Saturn the following year. 1986, 9 years into its mission, Voyager captured the first up close images of Uranus and once again reshaped how we saw the universe. Three years, later, for many, Voyager's mission ended with Neptune and another historic moment in our unending attempts to understand our universe. 

But the mission did not end. Voyager continued on. Year after year a small but vital team kept collecting data from Voyager and, though most people were unaware, they kept making history. In 2012 Voyager became the first man-made object in interstellar space. It's hard for most, myself included, to fathom just how incredible that is. To its credit, It's Quieter in the Twilight captures the quiet awe of this achievement and the people whose life simply goes on revolving around Voyager and data points that Voyager is still capturing today. 

Find my full length review at Futurism.Media 

Movie Review The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid (2023) 

Directed by Rob Marshall 

Written by David Magee 

Starring Halle Bailey, Jonah Hauer King, Javier Bardem, Melissa McCarthy, Daveed Diggs 

Release Date May 26th, 2023 

Published May 26th, 2023 

I can't sit here and tell you I was a big of The Little Mermaid. I am not a fan of director Rob Marshall's bombastic, somewhat chaotic, and often wonky vision of this Disney classic. I was all set to write a mostly negative review of The Little Mermaid. Then, when the movie ended, I stood outside of the theater and watched the crowd making their way out of the theater and I was struck by the reaction of others. Specifically, I saw a uniformly joyous response from young girls leaving the theater. More than one said they wanted to be Ariel for Halloween. They were singing the songs, the choruses anyway. 

It was the best possible review anyone could give to The Little Mermaid. The young girls from 4 years old to 12 years were in universal praise of The Little Mermaid. And listening to that broke through my cynicism. Their joy reframed my context of The Little Mermaid. This movie is not to my taste at all, but it's not meant to be. If a movie can inspire this much joy in the audience intended to enjoy it, who am I as a middle aged dude to say that's bad. 

Halle Bailey stars in The Little Mermaid as Ariel, the youngest daughter of King Triton (Javier Bardem). Ariel is an endlessly curious young woman, her eyes filled with wonder, she explores the seas searching for human treasures that fall into the ocean. With her pal Flounder (Jacob Tremblay), she also finds trouble. While searching for treasure in one of the many sunken ships at the bottom of the ocean, she and Flounder narrowly and daringly escape a very hungry and determined shark. For Ariel, this is just another day of adventure. 

However, this is not just another day in her kingdom. This is the day that her sisters from around the world are visiting to meet with the King and when Ariel fails to show up on time, the rift between Father and Daughter is further exposed. King Triton wants his youngest daughter to be more careful. He especially wants Ariel to shake off her fascination with humans. According to Triton, it was human who murdered his wife, Ariel's mother and his grief has curdled into anger and suspicion of all humans. 

This does not curb Ariel's curiosity however, and when she spots a ship caught in a storm and dashed on some rocks, she leaps in to help the ship's captain, Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer King). Saving his life, Ariel doesn't fully reveal herself to him but her voice is burned into his memory. He vows to search for the mysterious young woman who saved his life. Meanwhile, the scheming Ursula (Melissa McCarthy), has witnessed all of this and sees Ariel's desire to be a human as her chance to upend her brother, King Triton, as the ruler of the seas. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media

Movie Review The Machine

The Machine (2023) 

Directed by Peter Atencio 

Written by Kevin Biegel, Scotty Landes 

Starring Bert Kreischer, Mark Hamill, Iva Babic 

Release Date May 26th, 2023 

Published May 30th, 2023 

The Machine is a labored but amusing extrapolation of comedian Bert Kreischer's most beloved routine. According to Kreischer, as a college student, he traveled to Russia on a school trip. While there, he found himself partying with the Russian mob, first at his dorm and then on an ill-fated train ride. The winding and wild party story eventually finds Kreischer being called 'The Machine' for his prodigious ability to put away high proof alcohol without passing out, and finds 'The Machine' being enlisted by the gangsters to help rob everyone on the train. 

It's a classic piece of stand-up comedy but is it enough to stretch out to a feature length film? The answer is a bit of a mixed bag. The movie version of The Machine finds comedian Bert Kreischer, playing himself, struggling with his persona as a hard-partying, drug and alcohol imbibing comic and his real life as a husband and father of two young girls. Bert cannot seem to balance these two parts of his life and as we join the story, he's hit rock bottom. 

After a drunken episode of his podcast, Bert had his 15 year old daughter, Sasha (Jessica Gabor), drive him home. When she gets pulled over by Police and is subsequently arrested, the drunken Kreischer decides to livestream the debacle on social media, doing grave harm to his already strained relationship with his oldest daughter. This rock bottom moment causes Bert to go into therapy and quit drinking and partying entirely. Unfortunately, Bert's past is about to come back and haunt him as a Russian gangster has finally seen his stand-up routine and wants revenge for something Bert doesn't remember doing. 

Kidnapped during Sasha's 16th birthday party, Bert, along with his disapproving father, Albert (National Treasure Mark Hamill) are trundled off to Russia. Their kidnapper, Irina (Iva Babic), is the daughter of a Russian mobster and is at the heart of a struggle for control of crime in Russia. She needs The Machine to lead her to a watch that he stole while drunk on a train in college. Not the easiest thing to find, especially through the blurry haze of alcohol, drugs, and time. Nevertheless, if Bert and his dad cannot find the watch, a hitman is set to murder Bert's daughter. 

That's the premise for The Machine and it sounds a lot funnier than it really is. Sadly, stretched thinly over a feature film, Kreischer's funny, lively, and irreverent story takes on a highly conventional narrative that features many repeated jokes and more than a little dead time as exposition and needed stakes are set up. In fairness, the conventional plot and the stakes set, are relatively well executed. It's a standard bit of movie comedy. But that's also a bit of a problem as audiences might expect more from a performer with Kreischer's reputation for energetic and off-color humor. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Horror in the 90s Shakma

Shakma (1990) 

Directed by Hugh Parks, Tom Logan 

Written by Roger Engle

Starring Christopher Atkins, Amanda Wyss, Roddy McDowell 

Release Date October 5th, 1990 

Box Office Unknown 

Shakma has no right to be as entertaining as it is. This animal rampage horror movie, from the f*** around and find out tradition of horror films about man screwing with nature, manages to be wildly entertaining and modestly incompetent all at once. It's a weirdly delightful combination of low budget weirdness and inventive low budget filmmaking that manages to make a relatively unthreatening baboon into a mass murdering psycho beast through a combination of camera work, editing and terrible special effects. 

Shaka stars the King of Bland handsomeness, Christopher Atkins, as Sam, a medical student and researcher. Sam has spent the past year training a baboon named Shakma to follow commands and not be as aggressive as his species tends to be. Unfortunately for Sam, his Professor, Professor Sorensen (Roddy McDowell), doesn't have the patience to see if aggressiveness can be trained out of a Baboon. Professor Sorensen instead proceeds with an experimental brain surgery. It's a 50/50 bet that either Shakma will become a docile, friendly pet Baboon or a wild-eyed, aggressive killer. If that seems like a bad bet, congratulations, that's what the movie is about. 

No surprise, the surgery goes poorly and Shakma goes crazy, nearly killing a fellow student and rival of Sam, Richard (Greg Flowers). Sam is told to put Shakma down but he can't do it. Instead, he sedates his primate pal while expecting that Richard will throw his friend into the incinerator. Unfortunately for everyone, Richard is stopped by Professor Sorensen who wants to examine the corpse and instructs Richard not to cremate Shakma. This becomes important because the Med students are sticking around the school on this night to play a role playing game. 

In a wildly elaborate game, Sam, Richard, Professor Sorensen, are joined by Bradley (Tre Laughlin), Gary (Rob Edward Morris), and Sam's love interest, Tracy (Amanda Wyss), in this fantasy game that has the students solving clues and following a path to the top floor where a Princess, Richard's younger sister, Kim (Amanda Myers), waits to be rescued. As the game gets underway, and the players go off on their quest, Shakma wakes up and goes on a bloody killing spree. 

I'm almost embarrassed by how much I enjoyed Shakma. Most critics hated this film and they aren't wrong about its many, many flaws. Nevertheless, as the Baboon went about its rampage, I was having an absolute blast laughing at the foolish humans who keep wandering obliviously into danger. There is a wonderfully rich tradition of horror movies where man faces off with nature but most of those happen in nature. The medical school setting of Shakma is both a cover for a low budget shoot and a weirdly refreshing setting for a man vs nature horror story. 

Full review at Horror.Media 

Movie Review Kandahar

Kandahar (2023) 

Directed by Ric Roman Waugh

Written by Mitchell LaFortune 

Starring Gerard Butler, Navid Negahban 

Release Date May 26th, 2023

Published May 24th, 2023 

Is Kandahar a good movie actually? I am not sure. As a film critic, I've seen so many terrible movies starring Gerard Butler and many awful, racist, terrible movies set in the middle east. I am kind of numb to both Butler and the tropes of middle east set thrillers. And yet, I don't feel like I hated Kandahar. The film moves as a terrific pace, the action makes sense, the stereotypes are tempered by a relative even-handedness that criticizes American meddling in the middle east and the necessity American intelligence has to monitor the potential for uprisings that could threaten not just middle eastern security, but world security. 

You can argue in the comments about your opinions of American intervention in the middle east, the politics, the greed involved, the corporate interests and so on. The bottom line is, Kandahar seems to give a fair perspective on the matter while telling a compelling story of survival via the tropes of an action movie. The movie pivots on an American mission in Iran that destroys a massive part of Iranian infrastructure related to the Iranian nuclear program. Intelligence regarding who was behind the mission is leaked to other middle eastern countries and it places the CIA Agent at the heart of the mission in great peril. 

Gerard Butler stars in Kandahar as Tom Harris. Having posed as a phone company operative, he's actually used access to Iranian infrastructure to plant a bomb. In a tense scene, he narrowly misses blowing his cover through a clever bit of misdirection involving his phone, faster internet, and soccer. This set piece sets a tense tone that will rarely let up throughout the rest of Kandahar. Having narrowly escaped with his life, Tom looks to be headed home where his wife is waiting with divorce papers. He does have a welcome home from his young daughter waiting for him but when a fellow middle eastern operative, played by Travis Fimmel, offers him a mission that could pay for his daughter's college, he delays the trip home. 

This is a fateful choice. Just as soon as Harris is on the ground in Kandahar, investigating the disappearance of several female teachers taken hostage by rogue Taliban forces, Harris' cover is blown worldwide. A leak of documents has exposed CIA operations across the middle east, including, and especially, Tom's mission in Iran. Now, Tom, along with his interpreter, played by Navid Negahban, are being hunted by several opposing middle eastern interests, each with their own motivation for wanting to capture and kill the American spy and his interpreter. 

The key thing that I was moved by in Kandahar was the relationship that builds slowly between Butler and Negahban. There are elements here that we've seen before but Negahban is a very compelling actor whose presence seems to smooth out some of Butler's meathead tendencies. He's still mostly just a killing machine, but the story brings a bit of unforced nuance to Butler's motivations and his growing connection to Negahban is a strong root for the survival story. Director Ric Roman Waugh, whose work I have never cared for before, smartly builds a couple of dramatic set pieces that genuinely got my pulse racing. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review Moon Garden

Moon Garden (2023) 

Directed by Ryan Stevens Harris 

Written by Ryan Stevens Harris 

Starring Haven Lee Harris, Augie Duke, Brionne Davis, Maria Olson 

Release Date May 19th, 2023  

Published May 24th, 2023 

A very young little girl falls down the steps of her family home after witnessing a particular nasty argument between her parents. What follows is a stirring, deeply emotional and somewhat magical journey through the child's imagination as she tries to come out of a coma. That's the essential context of Moon Garden, a remarkably artful and moving horror drama that centers its action around the mind of a child in a way that is wildly unexpected, full of surprises, and at times genuinely harrowing and terrifying. 

Emma (Haven Lee Harris) cannot be more than 5 or 6 years old. She's lying comfortably in bed late one night when her mother comes in and tells her that they are going to 'chase the sunrise.' Context clues tell us that she's taking her daughter and leaving her husband behind in the middle of the night. The scene is filled with tension but not for Emma who, though tired, is ready for an adventure with her mom. Then, the scene takes a dark turn. Emma's dad hears the garage door opening and stops his wife and daughter from leaving. 

This is an exceptionally directed sequence. As tension filled as it is, writer-director Ryan Stevens Harris keeps us very specifically connected to Emma and her perspective. From Emma's perspective, two people she loves and trusts are acting strange and she doesn't quite understand it. Later, when she hears a scary noise, Emma goes running to her parents bedroom. Here is where she hears this nasty argument and in her haste to run away, Emma trips and falls down the stairs. 

The scene immediately following the accident is fascinating. Emma wakes up in a fantastical world. A place of wonder and of fright, loud noises and a strange, terrifying presence. A DJ booth rises from the ground and a ghostly pale-faced woman cranks up the noise as Emma plays with the buttons on the kit. We can hear dialogue, presumably from EMT's explaining Emma's situation. We can also hear Emma's frantic mother and equally concerned father as they trail behind the EMT's questioning their daughter's condition. 

The disorienting sound and visual style are remarkable. Writer-director Harris leaves you entirely unmoored, much like his leading lady. You are fully in Emma's perspective and you can't help but feel both her sense of wonder and her fear that she may never return to her family. Things then take a ghastly turn with the introduction of a villain, known in the credits as 'Teeth.' The villain has a blank, Slenderman-esque face, but most importantly, a terrifyingly large mouth inside of which are sharp monster teeth that we first glimpse sitting by themselves in some rundown corner of this unusual world. 

Find my full length review of Moon Garden at Geeks.Media

Horror in the 90s Mirror Mirror

Mirror Mirror (1993) 

Directed by Marina Sargenti 

Written by Annette Cascone, Gina Cascone, Marina Sargenti 

Starring Rainbow Harvest, Karen Black, Yvonne De Carlo 

Release Date August 31st, 1990 

Box Office Unknown 

There were a mere 6 movies directed by female directors in 1990. One of those films is this oddball horror movie about a haunted Mirror. It was Sargenti's first and only feature film credit. Soon after she moved to television features and picked up TV odds and ends until seeming to leave the business in 1997, at least according to IMDB. Regardless, she's notable for having been one of the few women to get the chance to direct a feature length horror film at a time when women were struggling to find a place behind the camera. 

It's a shame the movie isn't more memorable. Mirror Mirror is a shoddy, slapdash and odd film. The plot centers on a haunted mirror which uses some kind of demon magic to invade the mind of people who own it and causing them to kill. The demonic power presents itself as being on the side of the owner, allowing the owner to believe they are wielding some kind of magic power. Then, the killing spree begins and grows out of control until someone finally puts a black curtain over the mirror. Yeah, that's literally how this demon is defeated, that and... a good character making a wish? Maybe? It's a tad bit unclear. 

Mirror Mirror features a notable cast of horror convention staples including Karen Black as the mother of our main character, Megan, played by Rainbow Harvest. Alongside Karen Black we have Yvonne DeCarlo of The Munsters-fame. DeCarlo plays an antiques dealer who purchased the mirror only for the mirror to refuse to leave the home. She also takes a bunch of books written by the previous owner of the mirror. DeCarlo acts as a plot convenience/contrivance, someone to do the legwork of researching the mirror's evil for us in the audience and then dying tragically when she was needed most. 

Another notable horror staple is character actor William Sanderson who pops up in the role of a pet undertaker. The mirror happens to hate dogs and when the mirror brutally murders Karen Black's dog, Sanderson's uber-creep undertaker shows up and the two wind up hitting it off. She invites this man to dinner and things don't go well as Megan channels the demonic mirror powers to make Sanderson hallucinate that his food is full of creepy crawlies. He leaves and we never see him again. 

The co-lead of Mirror Mirror, alongside the memorably named Rainbow Harvest, is Kristen Dattilo as Nikki, a fellow outcast who serves as an early model of the role played by Amanda Seyfried in Jennifer's Body. Each film pits female friends against each other, a common theme in many genres when you think about it. At least they aren't arguing about boys, not the same boy anyway, but yeah, movies tend to want exploit female friendships for drama in a fashion that they tend not do in stories about male friendships.

Find my full length review of Mirror Mirror at Horror.Media