Classic Movie Review Benny & Joon

Benny & Joon (1993) 

Directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik 

Written by Barry Berman 

Starring Aiden Quinn, Johnny Depp, Mary Stuart Masterson, Julianne Moore 

Release Date April 23rd, 1993 

Published June 7th, 1993 

When Johnny Depp took on the role of looney romantic hero Sam in Benny & Joon he'd been engaged in a desperate effort to abandon the Teen Beat, leading man personas that Hollywood was attempting to impose upon him. Having become a teen idol on the teen cop show 21 Jumpstreet, Depp found the Hollywood spotlight for too overwhelming and limiting to his talent. Thus he set out to take roles that would defy expectations and reshape his career the way he wanted it. 

This upending of expectations started in 1990 when Depp starred in the wild and wonderful John Waters indie flick, Crybaby. No one in Hollywood wanted one of the biggest heartthrobs in the world to work with John Waters and that's likely part of what drove Depp directly into the embrace of Waters and his wild 50s aesthete and outre humor. That same year, he defied expectations in the mainstream as well with an entirely unglamorous, but slightly more commercial friendly film, Edward Scissorhands. 

Depp took that role specifically because he got to wear a lot of makeup and prosthetics and Hollywood marketers could not market the film based on his looks. This defiance of expectations continued as Depp took 1992 off and rejected high profile roles in blockbuster features. When he did decide to work again, he chose yet another defiantly odd and unconventional role. Despite still being one of the most sought after leading men in Hollywood, Depp accepted a supporting role in Benny & Joon while turning down the leading man role in the eventual blockbuster, Indecent Proposal. 

The gamble paid off as Depp delivers some of his most charming and dynamic work in the role of Sam, even as he's not the leading man. Sam is a wildly unconventional bohemian film lover whose persona is based on silent film heroes such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Depp takes this idea of a character and fills out the character with a mostly silent, terrifically physical performance. It's a role that threatens to be a little too twee, but Depp brings depth to the character by making the most of the few lines of dialogue the character has. 

The Benny & Joon of the title are brother and sister, Benny played by Aiden Quinn, and Joon, played by Mary Stuart Masterson. Benny is the responsible older brother who owns a business and cares for his sister and her unspecified medical condition. Joon is an artist who is prone to manic episodes, depression, and jumble of other mental health afflictions that seem to indicate that she suffers from either Schizophrenia or is merely on the autism spectrum. It's a bit nebulous but the film is delicate about Joon's condition which helps keep it from being overly problematic. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Classic Movie Review Dave

Dave (1993) 

Directed by Ivan Reitman

Written by Gary Ross

Starring Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Frank Langella, Kevin Dunn, Ving Rhames, Ben Kingsley 

Release Date May 7th, 1993 

Published June 7th, 2023 

Dave is one of the nicest movies ever made. This is such a good hearted, sweet, sincere movie that it feels entirely anachronistic a mere 30 years after its release. Politics in America has gotten so much uglier, nastier, and mean over the last 3 decades that Dave feels like a throwback to the 1930s rather than the 1990s. In Dave, politics is still filled with pit vipers and vile men with self-interested aims, but good is seemingly on an equal footing with the bad guy and more than capable of defeating the bad. 

That feels quaint today where it's nearly impossible to believe in or remotely trust anyone in an elected office. In 1993 director Ivan Reitman and writer Gary Ross were able to get away with making a political movie that never once mentions a party affiliation. The film is about the United States President and yet we never learn if he is a Republican or Democrat. The politics are able to somehow be so fuzzy that it could be either party in charge. This would be considered cowardice in this day and age and Reitman and Ross would be castigated by both sides. 

Dave is perhaps one of the last signposts of a pre-internet era of politics, a time where the lack of a constant need to feed the beast that is social media, allowed for the kind of political crossroads that seem impossible today. In the pre-internet era, parties crossed over party lines to vote what they believed in. Today, party lines are so strict, members are rumored to be leaving their party if they even consider voting against the party line agenda. The politics of Dave are, of course, secondary to the humorous conceit and central romance of the movie but it's still quite a notable indicator of just how far things have changed for the worse in Washington D.C. 

Dave stars Kevin Kline as Dave, the friendliest man in his neighborhood. When he isn't finding a job for everyone he's ever met via his temp business, Dave is opening restaurants and car dealerships portraying the President of the United States, President William Harrison Mitchell (also played by Kline), with whom he shares a striking resemblance. That resemblance is soon noticed by the White House who draft Dave to portray a Presidential double to protect the President as he leaves for a secret meeting. What Dave doesn't know, but we do, is that this meeting is actually an affair with his secretary, played by a young Laura Linney. 

Full length review at Geeks.Media

Movie Review Life With Mikey

Life With Mikey (1993) 

Directed by James Lapine

Written by Marc Lawrence 

Starring Michael J. Fox, Christina Vidal, Nathan Lane, Cyndi Lauper 

Release Date June 4th, 1993 

Published June 6th, 1993 

Michael J. Fox is a movie star. That's both a factual statement and an opinion that I can back up with evidence from his 1993 starring role in Life With Mikey. This is an objectively terrible movie. It has no third act. The film repeats the same comic beats over and over again. It's sloppy and lacking in conflict. And yet, I do not hate this movie. On top of being objectively not good, Life With Mikey is somehow a breezy watch that lands a few big laughs. It's wildly watchable and that is ONLY due to the star presence of Michael J. Fox. Only an actor as charming and likable as Michael J. Fox can make you forget you are watching a terrible movie. 

In Life with Mikey, Michael J. Fox stars as world class failure, Mike Chapman. A former child star, famous for his TV hi-jinks as TV's Mikey, Mike is a lonely bachelor and screw-up whose life is made possible by his past fame and the benevolence of his brother and business partner, Ed, played by Nathan Lane. Together, Ed and Mike run a child talent agency. Well, Ed runs the business, Mike shows up late and nearly costs the business its biggest client, the so-called 'Cereal King,' Barry Corman (David Krumholz). Ed is constantly putting out Mikey's many fires. 

The plot of Life with Mikey, such as it is, kicks off when a 12 year old girl steals Mike's wallet. Angie Vega (Christina Vidal) is a well practiced young pick-up artist capable of turning on the charm or the waterworks when she gets caught picking a pocket. Witnessing Angie try and talk her way out of being caught stealing a wallet, Mike is convinced that Angie would make an incredible actress. After helping her escape with a few wallets in her bag, including Mike's, Mike convinces Angie to give acting a try. She agrees and lands the job at her very first audition. 

This is what I was talking about when I mentioned that there is no conflict in Life with Mikey. She gets the first job she goes for. She is great at being a spokesperson for a cookie company. The company makes money. Things are good. A conflict seems to arise when the cookie company becomes irrationally angry over not knowing that Angie's dad is still alive. She had claimed that her father was dead. Her father, played in a cameo by Ruben Blades, instead of being upset that his daughter is spending time, including staying in the home, of a complete stranger, proceeds to thank Mike for getting his daughter into acting and taking good care of her. 

Yeah, by all evidence, Mike is a decent guy who does nice things for this littler girl. But, she's also a child stranger who does have a family, a deeply unfortunate and dysfunctional family, but a family nevertheless. It's bizarre how normal the movie thinks it is for a child to just start living with a single adult man she barely knows. And then, the movie has her father, a recovering addict, take this information in stride and thank this stranger for caring for his daughter. Yeah, this plot is just nothing but red flags that the makers of Life with Mikey present with zero comment or observation. 

Problematic barely begins to cover this plot. And yet, I willfully pushed past this very obvious problem with this movie because Michael J. Fox is so charming. He's Michael J. Fox, he's so warm and likable. He's playing a slob and a smoker in Life with Mikey and I didn't buy him as either a smoker or a slob but it didn't matter, I just really enjoy watching Michael J. Fox banter with a street smart little kid. It's adorable and their chemistry is terrific. They have conflicting personalities and their clashes in style are really the only tension in this mostly tension free comedy. 

Full length review at Geeks.Media 

Classic Movie Review The Boogeyman (1980)

The Boogeyman (1980) 

Directed by Ullli Lommel 

Written by Ulli Lommel 

Starring Suzanna Love, Nicholas Love, John Carradine

Release Date November 14th, 1980 

Published June 6th, 2023 

I often find myself fascinated by the rudimentary elements of filmmaking. There are very basic things that a director must be able to accomplish in order to achieve a level of professionalism and competence. Director Ulli Lommel demonstrates a level of professionalism and competence in The Boogeyman, at least in the first to scenes in the film, the best scenes in the film. Beyond that, he's a crazy person who crafted a bizarre screenplay, much of which feels as if he was whipping it up on set as the film were being made in a slapdash attempt to meet some arbitrary filming deadline. 

The Boogeyman opens on a visually striking set piece. An older woman is lying on a couch and calling for her lover. He approaches and she proceeds to place her stocking over his head. At this point, we glimpse two children outside the window of the home. Through visual and context clues, it's clear that these two children belong to this woman, and she has left them outside of the home specifically so that she can be alone with this man. Seeing the children through the window infuriates the man and he proceeds to punish the older brother. 

He ties the boy to a bed, and this leads to a terrific series of horror visuals. The little sister, all of three years old, goes to the kitchen and finds a very large knife on the counter. The knife catches the moonlight and the incongruousness of a small girl, and a large knife provides a terrific horror movie shock. From there, we see the knife again as the little girl stands in her brother's doorway. For a moment, we wonder if she's about to murder him. Instead, she cuts her brother loose and hands over the knife to him. This leads to a sequence where the camera takes the position of the boy as he walks down the hallway. 

We see his arm as if it were our own. He walks down the hall to his mother's bedroom where she and the man, still wearing a stocking on his head, are about to make love. The boy proceeds to murder this man, stabbing him repeatedly in the back. I believe that this is a terrific sequence. It's followed by another basic and formal bit of visual storytelling. The story leaps ahead in time. We know this because the visual style, the cinematography is brighter and more modern. Our main clue however to this shift in time is a very simple pan across a crowd inside a church. 

Immediately following the murder, we are thrust to a new location, a cemetery. The camera flashes across several gravestones before coming to rest on a church where the sound of the scene is coming from. We jump cut inside and listen to the Priest delivering a sermon. The camera watches the Priest briefly before beginning a slow pan over the crowd at the church. This is a well done and yet incredibly basic bit of film language. As a trained audience member, we know that when the camera stops, it will stop on the protagonists of the film. It's something we all know instinctively and is rarely thought of or pondered. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media

Horror in the 90s Arachnophobia

Arachnophobia (1990) 

Directed by Frank Marshall

Written by Don Jakoby, Wesley Strick 

Starring Jeff Daniels, Harley Jane Kozak, Julian Sands, John Goodman 

Release Date July 18th, 1990 

Box Office Gross $53.2 million 

Arachnophobia exists in two popular horror sub-genre: Man vs Nature and the Monster Movie. A new breed of spider is located by an arrogant scientist who believes he can control this uncontrollable element of nature that he hubristically believes that he has mastered. The monster movie then comes into play when the scientists creation gets away from him and begins to wreak havoc in a small time while working to perpetuate its species to take over the planet, essentially, the Americas at the very least. 

If you are skeptical that spiders could be considered monsters in a monster movie, you underestimate the talent of director Frank Marshall and his cast. Indeed, Arachnophobia functions as a movie that could induce a lifelong phobia of spiders, arachnophobia of the title. It's so effective at making spiders a horror movie monster that I honestly would not recommend showing this movie to children. I would especially not recommend this movie for anyone who already harbors a fear of spiders as this movie will only exacerbate that condition. 

Arachnophobia stars Jeff Daniels as a doctor who has moved his family, including his wife, played by Harley Jane Kozak, and their two kids, to a small town in California. Dr. Ross Jennings (Daniels) has been promised the role of the only doctor in this small town but things do not go as planned from the start. The elderly doctor he was supposed to replace has now refused to retire and Dr. Jennings' new home in the country is a money pit with termites and a crumbling infrastructure. 

Unbeknownst to everyone in this otherwise idyllic small town, a dangerously poisonous Brazilian spider has hitched a ride with a corpse to the local funeral home. Having killed a photographer working with Dr. James Atherton (Julian Sands) in Brazil, the spider, that Dr. Atherton had assured us was dead, arrives in this small town and finds its way to the barn owned by Dr. Jennings where it cross-breeds with a local spider and begins to create a mutated version of itself that is so deadly its population could wipe out North America in a period of months. 

Thus it falls to Dr. Jennings to first discover that we are indeed dealing with a killer Spider and then, in the final act, to have a face to face fight with the Spider Queen over the massive egg sack the Queen has laid in Dr. Jennings' new wine cellar. Did you know that wine is not flammable? Neither did this movie which seems to think Wine is an accelerant. Anyway, that aside, Arachnophobia has some silly elements but one thing the film gets right is the staging of spider attacks that kill character actors. 

Characters actors James Handy, Kathy Kinney, Henry Jones and Mary Carver each appear in remarkably well-staged scenes where they are menaced by little spiders. These scenes are filled with genuine tension via simple, classic, filmic technique. Good choices in the editing bay and in the staging of each scene create a genuine tension while the familiar and kind faces of these character actors, people you've seen even if you don't recognize their name, add tension because we don't want to see them be killed by spiders. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Movie Review The Boogeyman

The Boogeyman (2023) 

Directed by Rob Savage 

Written by Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, Mark Heyman

Starring Sophie Thatcher, Chris Messina, Vivian Lyra Blair, David Dastmalchian 

Release Date June 2nd, 2023 

Published June 5th, 2023 

As I write this, I saw the new horror film, The Boogeyman, two days ago and I am struggling to remember anything about it. This could, perhaps, be a mental breakdown on my part, but my working theory is that The Boogeyman is such a boring movie that my mind didn't bother to find anything worth remembering about it. There is not a single original moment in the entirety of The Boogeyman. There is not a single memorable sequence that could make this movie worth remembering after you see it. The Boogeyman is so bland and generic it could be retitled as Nightmare Man and re-released to theaters and few people would notice or care. 

The Boogeyman stars a lovely young actress named Sophie Thatcher as Sadie Harper. Sadie and her little sister, Sawyer (Vivian Lyra Brown), are grieving the very recent loss of their mother. Chris Messina plays their distant and equally grieving father, Will. Will is terrified of being a single dad to two frightened and traumatized young girls so he throws himself back into his work as a psychiatrist while avoiding any kind of serious conversation with his children, especially Sadie who tries and fails to get him to open up. 

The plot kicks in when a deeply haunted and disturbed patient forces his way into Will's office. The patient is Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian), a man who is believed by many to have murdered his two children. Billings however, claims that a monster killed his kids. This monster attacks your children while you aren't paying attention. It also feeds on vulnerable children, kids who have, perhaps, suffered a very recent and painful trauma. You can see where this is headed. The curse that this haunted man carries attaches itself to Sadie and Sawyer and it will be up to Sadie to save her sister from this monster that comes to be known as The Boogeyman. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Movie Review Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) 

Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson 

Written by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, David Callahan 

Starring Shameik Moore, Bryan Tyree Henry, Jake Johnson, Oscar Isaac, Hailee Steinfeld 

Release Date June 2nd, 2023 

Published June 2nd, 2023 

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a gorgeous piece of animation. It's a visionary work in the feature animation realm, a treat for the eyes. The innovative style of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse evolves here into brilliant new combinations of art styles and storytelling adventure. It's exciting to watch as the artists behind Spidey press the boundaries of what we can expect from an animated feature. That alone would be worth the price of admission but thanks to the work of writers Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and David Callahan, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is far more than just gorgeous to look at. 

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse opens on Spider-Girl, Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld). She misses the friends she made when portals opened between worlds in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Worse however, is the fate of her best friend, Peter Parker, who, Gwen's world was a picked on pipsqueak who tried to change his lot in life through science. Peter dies in an accident at prom after his transformative medicine turns him into a monster and Gwen/Spider-Girl is forced to fight him to protect their classmates. His death happens just as Gwen's cop-dad arrives and sees Spider-Girl standing over Peter's fallen body. He assumes that she killed him. 

This scene is soon followed by the attack of a new and desperately out of place villain, a version of The Vulture, but not one from this universe. Someone or something is tearing new holes in the fabric of the universe and villains are bungling their way through to unfamiliar universes. Unbeknownst to Gwen, Spider-people from other universes are being brought together to try and repair the multiverse and via Spider-Woman (Issa Rae), and the leader of this group, Miguel (Oscar Isaac), Gwen is recruited to help save the multiverse. 

This is Gwen's chance to reconnect with her friend, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore). Miles has grown a few inches since the last time they saw each other but other than that, he's the same awkward, sweet, kind and strong young man she first met. Miles is dealing with school and his parents and a new villain who may be the key to why the multiverse is in grave danger. A villain calling himself The Spot (Jason Schwartzman) is found by Miles while attempting to steal an ATM from a bodega. The Spot has the ability to open tiny portals that he can climb through and arrive at different locations. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media