Movie Review Haunted Mansion

Haunted Mansion (2023) 

Directed by Justin Simien 

Written by Katie Dippold 

Starring LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny Devito, Chase W. Dillon, Jared Leto, Jamie Lee Curtis 

Release Date July 28th, 2023 

Published July 31st, 2023 

There is a lovely idea at the heart of Haunted Mansion that gets lost among the muck of trying to make a wide appeal blockbuster family movie. At the core of Haunted Mansion, director Justin Simien, creator of the ingenious, Dear White People, appears fascinated by the concept of grief and the ways it manifests in negative ways for many people. Losing someone you love is a life altering event, it can lead to any number of negative manifestations if it is not dealt with and processed in a healthy fashion. It manifests in Haunted Mansion via LaLeith Stanfield's Ben, an astrophysicist who gave up everything after his young wife died. 

Stanfield is unquestionably an actor who can handle this kind of heavy material but the heavy nature of Haunted Mansion unfortunately drags on what is otherwise intended to be a summer blockbuster version of a Disney theme park ride. While Simien is working in the emotional space of Stanfield's grieving widower, the rest of the movie appears to be going for something broad, campy, scary and yet family friendly and the tonal dissonance is a big part of the overall failure of Haunted Mansion. By attempting to serve a number of ideas, the film ends up serving none of those ideas particularly well. 

Ben (Stanfield) was once a very successful and happy Astrophysicist shyly using his unique profession to hit on women. One of those women is Alyssa (Charity Jordan), a tour guide who leads haunted tours through New Orleans. Ben, being a man of science, doesn't believe in ghosts but he still falls hard for Alyssa and the two end up getting married at some point, we don't see that part. What we do see is that Alyssa is no longer with us, a mystery that will be unsatisfyingly resolved later in the film, and Ben is floundering. Having given up all aspects of his previous life, Ben now leads Alyssa's tours while drunk and being entirely uninterested in indulging and any notions of ghosts being real. 

Ben's trajectory is altered forever by the arrival of Father Kent (Owen Wilson). Kent knows Ben by reputation. He knows that Ben had, years earlier, invented a camera that could theoretically, take pictures of the dead. He has a job for Ben. A single mother, Gabbie (Rosario Dawson), has moved into a decrepit mansion on the outskirts of New Orleans. Gabbie, and her son, Travis (Chase W. Dillon), are also dealing with the fairly recent loss of Travis' father, a loss that neither mother or son has fully processed. The parallel of both Ben and Gabbie having lost someone is used as something of a shorthand to bring them together as love interests but the love story feels rushed and forced. 

That's the thing about Haunted Mansion, I am this far into this review and I haven't mentioned any ghosts. That's because none of the ghosts or scares in Haunted Mansion are very memorable. Jamie Lee Curtis is perhaps the most interesting of the spooks. She plays a dead psychic who was killed and her spirit was trapped inside of a crystal ball. The visual of Curtis's head in the crystal ball isn't bad but its not very elaborate. It's fine, like far too much of Haunted Mansion is fine, it's there, it exists, but it doesn't have much of anything interesting about it. 

The big bad of Haunted Mansion is the Hat Box ghost, played by Jared Leto. The Hat Box Ghost is a remarkably weak villain. The ghost's real name is Crump and the lame comparisons between Crump and Donald Trump are not stated out loud but are very clear. It's a lame non-joke, clearly intended but not well executed at all. It stands out as a bad idea because Leto's performance as Hatbox Ghost is half-hearted at best. The same can be said of the weak CGI look of the character which is scarier in a single drawing by a sketch artist in the movie than it ever is alive and moving around in Haunted Mansion. 

Incidentally, the Police sketch artist in Haunted Mansion is played by Hasan Minaj, a very funny man who is wasted in a nothing performance. Minaj is there to skeptically poke fun at Stanfield and Devito's claims about a ghost and he's offscreen in less than 3 minutes. And, Minaj isn't the biggest waste of talent in Haunted Mansion. Dan Levy and Winona Ryder both make appearances in Haunted Mansion and you are left to wonder if they owed someone a favor and that favor was being in this movie. Levy, one of the most dynamic comic personalities working today gets less than 2 minutes of screentime and his outfit is funnier than anything his character does. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media

Classic Movie Review Robin Hood Men in Tights

Robin Hood Men in Tights (1993) 

Directed by Mel Brooks 

Written by Mel Brooks, Evan Chandler, J. David Shapiro 

Starring Cary Elwes, Amy Yasbeck, Mel Brooks, Richard Lewis, Roger Rees, Isaac Hayes 

Release Date July 28th, 1993 

Published July 25th, 2023 

Mel Brooks has a generational impact. For many, their Mel Brooks movie experience began with The Producers and proceeded to Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. My Mel Brooks experience, due to having been born late in the Gen-X generation, was a little different. My Mel Brooks movies were Spaceballs and Robin Hood Men in Tights. The earlier Mel Brooks classics came to me later. Thus, I think I hold both Spaceballs and Robin Hood Men in Tights in high regard because I simply saw them and fell in love with them first. 

This doesn't mean that I believe that Spaceballs and Robin Hood Men in Tights are better than the Brooks 1970s movies. It just means that I have a much softer spot for Brooks 80s period, one that many older Brooks fans do not share. Older fans of Mel Brooks have often stated that Brooks became a bit to reliant on referring to his past glory in the 80s and early 90s. They aren't entirely wrong. Both Spaceballs and Robin Hood Men in Tights rely heavily on referring to gags and characters that Brooks invented in his glorious 60s and 70s peak. 

That said, I still love Robin Hood Men in Tights and looking back on it 30 years after it was released, I was surprised to find that my love for the film is as strong as ever. Brooks' ingenious satire of Kevin Costner's dreary Robin Hood adaptation is also a loving homage to the original telling of Robin Hood on the big screen, that undertaken by the legendary Errol Flynn in the 1930s. Weaving nods to both of those Robin Hood stories, amid references to his own legendary canon, Mel Brooks created Robin Hood Men in Tights, a cocksure, headstrong comedy that stands on its own. Or was that the other way around? 

The brilliance of Mel Brooks is on display immediately in Robin Hood Men in Tights. Within moments of his credits sequence bursting on the screen with heroic music and the visual of fiery arrows being fired into the distance, Brooks begins breaking the fourth wall. The credits arrows have hit a nearby village, lighting the whole thing on fire as residents complain that this happens every time someone makes a Robin Hood movie. The very funny meta gag ends with the extras turning to the camera to tell Mel Brooks to leave them alone. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media

Classic Movie Review Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove (1964) 

Directed by Stanley Kubrick 

Written by Terry Southern, Peter George, Stanley Kubrick 

Starring Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens 

Release Date January 29th, 1964 

Published July 24th, 2023 

Dr. Strangelove is very much a movie of its time. When it was released in 1964 it was a boiling mad, raging cauldron of immediate satire of world events currently in motion. Imagine something like Oliver Stone's W, w a film made and released while George W. Bush was still President, and you can get the sense of how timely Dr. Strangelove was in 1964. It's also far better than W which was a desperately bland attempted polemic. There was nothing bland about Dr. Strangelove in 1964. The film was bitter and biting, savaging the powerful in a fashion that genuinely set the leaders of the day on edge. 

Powerful leaders in military and government would have preferred that audiences in 1964 not know just how desperately unsafe our approach to nuclear weapons was at the time. They wanted us to be reassured that their leaders were well prepared, thoughtful, and of sound judgment. The reality, of course, was that the people in charge of our nuclear program were human beings just as potentially flawed and failing as anyone else. Dr. Strangelove takes the idea of egotistical, deeply flawed individuals in charge of world destroying technology to its most ugly and terrifying yet logical conclusion. 

The thought experiment was thus: What if one of our military leaders happened to come unglued and decided to end the world? What would it take to stop this military leader from causing the end of the world? Was it possible for one crazed lunatic in our leadership to end the world? The answer was a very uneasy, yes. The fact of the matter, though we were never blown up by nuclear weapons during the Cold War, it was always a possibility. All it took was a couple of bad breaks and one determined nut to bring about a global catastrophe. 

Dr. Strangelove exposes the absurdity of this idea, putting the idea in your head and forcing you to understand the stakes of a Cold War. Cold War has become synonymous with a period of time from Post World War 2 through the fall of the USSR in the early 1990s. But the real definition of a Cold War was simply a war that didn't involve fighting battles with troops and guns. It was a war of behind the scenes maneuvering and global chess. It was a balancing of big egos, bitter words and unrelenting suspicion. The only thing keeping us all alive was the desire among our leaders not to die. Had they come up with a solution that they could have comfortably survived, they might not have been so good at holding back the nukes. 

We look back on it now with a sort of wistful sigh of relief, as if we aren't still under threat of Nuclear annihilation. But, the fact is, Dr. Strangelove is actually still entirely relevant. Nuclear détente is still a thing. We still have a standing agreement with other countries capable of having nuclear weapons that we don't destroy each other but we all still could destroy each other. We just don't talk about nuclear weapons anymore aside from vague observations during Presidential election years when someone will allude to not wanting so and so to have the nuclear launch codes. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media

Movie Review Barbie

Barbie (2023)

Directed by Greta Gerwig 

Written by Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig 

Starring Margot Robbie, Helen Mirren, Ryan Gosling, Rhea Perlman, Simu Liu, Will Ferrell, America Ferrara 

Release Date July 21st, 2023 

Published July 23rd 2023 

Barbie is some of the most fun that I have had at the movies in 2023. The comedy is rich and thorny and the attitude is all sparkles and pink. It's lively, energetic and innovatively presented by one of our best working storytellers today, Greta Gerwig. I was highly skeptical and a bit perturbed that one of the best directors working today had turned their attention to directing a movie about Barbie. I should not have been. I should have just trusted that Greta Gerwig knew exactly what she was doing. The product of this highly commercial move into blockbuster product placement is a wildly funny meta-comedy about existence, purpose, and the desire to understand oneself. 

If any actress was going to be the right choice to deconstruct and uphold the legend of Barbie, it was Margot Robbie. She's ideal Barbie, an uber-talented, multi-hyphenate, who happens to look like a Barbie doll come to life. She's also among our most talented and versatile actors today so, of course, her take on Barbie is way more complex than anything you are anticipating. And it's that very complexity that brings the biggest laughs as invasive thoughts begin to consume Robbie's 'Stereotypical Barbie,' the version of Barbie you imagine when you think of Barbie Dolls. 

Of course, there have been dozens of different Barbies over the years. Barbies of different ethnicities, body types, and professions as vast and wide as Astronaut, Supreme Court Justice, and President Barbie. Each Barbie is played by a murderer's row of the best supporting players working today including Issa Rae, Hari Neff, Alexandra Shipp, Emma Mackey and Sharon Rooney. All of the Barbie's of this unique movie universe live in Barbieland, a magical place adjacent to the real world where Mattel, headed up by Will Ferrell, keeps pumping out market tested new versions of Barbie, as well as several Ken's. 

Oh, yeah, almost forgot about Ken. Ken is played by Ryan Gosling in a scene-stealing performance. He's stereotypical Ken and thus fated to love Barbie. But what happens if she doesn't love him? Meanwhile, several dozen other Ken's follow the lead of either stereotypical Ken or his nemesis, Ken 2 (Simu Liu). Both appear to be vying for Barbie's attention, much to Ken's dismay. Oh, and Alan (Michael Cera), is kicking around somewhere in the background. Alan is a long-discontinued pal of Ken and Barbie, a real Barbie character variation. The jokes about Alan are all hits throughout Barbie, even as Michael Cera portrays him quite sympathetically. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer (2023) 

Directed by Christopher Nolan 

Written by Christopher Nolan 

Starring Robert Downey Jr, Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett 

Release Date July 21st, 2023 

Published July 21st, 2023 

Oppenheimer is the kind of epic filmmaking that we've not seen in years. It's expansive, expensive, and visionary work that encompasses American history within a singular story. The story of J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of contradiction and controversy. Oppenheimer gave the humanity the ability to destroy itself and placed that power in the hands of egomaniacal world leaders. Then he spent his life trying to convince people to use this power responsibly. He was somewhat successful, we haven't been incinerated by Oppenheimer's creation. But that that is cold comfort, Oppenheimer's creation still hangs like the sword of Damocles over all of our heads, even as we all do our best to ignore it. 

The expansive story of J. Robert Oppenheimer exists in movie form in three separate threads. In the first thread, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) is facing a Congressional hearing over his appointment to a position in President Eisenhower's cabinet. Though a top aid to the President, played by Alden Ehrenreich, assures him his approval is a near guarantee, Strauss is concerned that his past interactions with J. Robert Oppenheimer, a former friend and subordinate, will cost him his position. As this story plays out there were many twists and turns in the relationship between Oppenheimer and Strauss and that we only remember one of them historically says a lot. 

In the second thread, we see J. Robert Oppenheimer rising through the academic ranks in the world of physics before ending up at Berkley. There he forms a friendship and partnership with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), the man who would take Oppenheimer's theory and turn it into a reality. Both men are brilliant and one doesn't succeed without the other, even as Oppenheimer is the one who goes on to infamy as the man who founded Los Alamos and led the charge to create the bomb. Nevertheless, without Lawrence, Oppenheimer may not have been sought to lead Los Alamos, it was Lawrence who joined The Manhattan Project first. 

The third thread finds Oppenheimer, known by colleagues as Oppy, though that always feels far to whimsical for a man this serious, takes charge of Los Alamos, essentially a town founded with the specific goal of uniting America's best scientists in one place in order to build the bomb. Here, Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves work as leaders and adversaries in the 2 billion dollar effort to beat the Nazis and then the Russians to the development of a weapon of mass destruction. The point of the Manhattan Project was beating the Nazis but the war in Europe is won before the bomb is built. 

This leads to a number of ethical debates about whether the the bomb still needs to be built. Oppenheimer here is shown as ineffectual in trying to make the case against developing the bomb. At a certain point, he just wanted to know if it could be done and this ambition allowed him to passively be convinced that dropping the bomb in Japan was a necessary evil intended to end the war in the Pacific and show Russia the full force of the American military. Oppenheimer was of two minds, understanding the bomb as a deterrent to future wars while also worrying that developing the bomb would cause a dangerous and divisive arms race. 

Simmering in the background is Oppenheimer's personal life which is divided between two women, among several he may have carried on relationships with. Oppenheimer's first love was communist author and psychiatrist, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). She tries to recruit Oppenheimer to communism but finding him noncommittal to the cause, she settles for a tumultuous affair with Oppenheimer that unfortunately collides with Oppenheimer's relationship with the woman who would become his wife and mother of his children, Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt). 

These two women reveal different aspects of Oppenheimer, aspects that cut to the core of the human being behind the pragmatic scientist turned unlikely patriot. From Jean Tatlock we learn about Oppenheimer's approach to politics but also to passion and how emotion can collide with his dedication to reason and education. Through Kitty we see the conflicted Oppenheimer, the vulnerable, awkward, self-effacing man behind the confident veneer of a world famous scientist. In the performances of these three actors we see this incredibly tense and passionate attempt to get Oppenheimer to open up and confront himself and his creation and we watch Murphy do everything he can to maintain composure in the face of world altering history on a very human scale. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media

Classic Movie Review Sleepaway Camp 2 & 3

Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers (1988) and Sleepaway Camp 3: Teenage Wasteland (1989) 

Directed by Michael A. Simpson 

Written by Fritz Gordon 

Starring Pamela Springsteen 

Release Date August 26th, 1988 and August 13th 1989 

Published July 19th, 2023 

I notably did not care for 1983's Sleepaway Camp when I watched it recently and said so, loudly, in a review, linked here. I found the film unpleasant, awkwardly crafted, and acted with all of the energy and life of your average commercial for a local funeral home. There are few if any redeeming qualities to the original Sleepaway Camp and if it didn't have it's shock ending, the reveal of Angela being a teenage boy who'd been abused into playing the role of a shy teenage girl, Sleepaway Camp would have ended up on the ash heap of horror history. 

That schlocky, exploitative and gross ending appealed to the low tastes of many more forgiving slasher fans and thus, we still talk about Sleepaway Camp 40 years after it was released. I guess I could also credit the film for the bizarrely watchable, high camp performance of Desiree Gould as Angela's wildly over the top Aunt and abuser, but that's a very minor bit of enjoyment amid the misery that is Sleepaway Camp. There again though, I must pause to offer one more positive regarding Sleepaway Camp; it gave us Sleepaway Camp 2 and 3 and the glorious performance of the sadly forgotten, Pamela Springsteen. 

Yes, Bruce Springsteen's little sister, Pamela, starred in Sleepaway Camp 2 & 3, taking over the role of Angela from young Felissa Rose. It's a major upgrade. Springsteen's chipper slasher killer is a dark comic delight. With her big toothy grin and unhinged dedication to the goodness of going to camp, Springsteen's Angela is a complete refresh of the summer camp horror movie. Springsteen's take on the character is absolutely delightful, a bizarre combination of blood soaked violence and the eager enthusiasm of the ultimate apple polishing, teacher's pet. 

The story of Sleepaway Camp 2 is incredibly basic. A new camp has opened not far from the former Camp Arawak and the campers and counselors are eager to share the legend of Angela/Peter and her bloody rampage. Just as a new group is sharing Angela's story, Angela just shows up and immediately sets about punishing those that fail to live up to her standard as a happy camper. There is no attempt to hide Angela's villainy from us while the cluelessness of the campers is another fun bit of either intentional meta-comedy or poignant bad movie acting. 

The film rides the line between knowing and too knowing incredibly well, especially in Springsteen's performance. Springsteen plays every scene with the same chipper dedication and her wild-eyed nuttiness is the key to taking throwaway horror cliches and refreshing them with new, for the late 1980s, energy. We'd simply never seen a performance quite like that of Pamela Springsteen's smiling, wacky, comic energy take on a horror villain. It felt fresh and new and it still stands out all these years later. I find her to be completely hilarious and it appears to be entirely intentional while still maintaining a level of gore that befits the genre. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Classic Movie Review Rookie of the Year

Rookie of the Year (1993) 

Directed by Daniel Stern 

Written by Sam Harper 

Starring Thomas Ian Nicholas, Gary Busey, Amy Morton 

Release Date July 7th 1993

Published July 17th, 2023 

As a kid, the idea of a movie featuring my Chicago Cubs was golden. I loved it. I was incredibly happy to throw down money to watch a movie featuring Wrigley Field and a hint of the magic of the Major League Baseball that I was obsessed with. Rookie of the Year existed in a pantheon of movies like Back to the Future 3 and Taking Care of Business that made a joke of having my lovably losing Cubbies winning the World Series, something the team hadn't done since 1908. For a time, the Cubs were a go-to reference for anyone wanting to reference long term losing or a poignant dedication to thankless endeavor. 

Rookie of the Year however, was a little different. The earnestness of this family comedy had the Cubs winning the World Series not as an ironic joke but as a genuine moment of unexpected triumph. It's about the ultimate underdogs overcoming the odds to do the impossible in a way that was inspiring and not meant to mock, even as it takes an over-powered kid pitcher to make it happen. Rookie of the Year's nostalgic appeal has lingered for me for 30 years simply because of the fact that it wasn't made with the intent of mocking the idea that my favorite team might actually win. 

It can be hard to wipe the nostalgia out of your eyes and see something for what it really is. Sadly, for the Everyone's a Critic 1993 Podcast, I forced myself to do just that and what I found is that Rookie of the Year is as obnoxious and insufferable as any movie in the last 30 years. It gets a break because it has incredibly low ambitions, being a movie for very small children, but watching it as an adult was a miserable experience nonetheless. The charm of Rookie of the Year has, for me, completely worn off and curdled into a spoiled bit of nostalgia that I would very much like to forget. 

Rookie of the Year stars toothy 12 year old Thomas Ian Nicholas, future star of the American Pie franchise. Here, Nicholas plays Henry Rowengartner a baseball loving nerd who lacks natural athletic gifts. This is despite the word of his mother who claims that Henry's dad was a ballplayer. Sadly, Henry's Dad left years ago and is barely a memory. Now, Mom is dating a weasel named Jack (Bruce Altman). We know he's a weasel because of his shirts, his unearned confidence, and his stupid car and haircut. 

The plot of Rookie of the Year begins when Henry suffers a broken shoulder. The break heals oddly and leaves Henry's tendons super tight. Soon Henry is throwing an incredible 100 mile per hour fastball. When he shows off his arm at a Chicago Cubs game by throwing a ball from the bleachers to home plate in record time, Henry catches the eye of the Cubs duplicitous VP Larry "Fish" Fisher. Fish tracks Henry down and cuts a deal with Jack to make Henry the newest star of the Chicago Cubs. This comes over much consternation from Henry's mom, and much to the excitement of Henry's best friends, George (Patrick Lebeque) and Clark (Patrick Hy Gorman). 

Less excited about this than anyone is the Cubs legendary pitching star Chet "Rocket" Steadman. He thinks Henry is a sideshow attraction and suspects that this publicity stunt isn't good for anything other than the Cubs' bottom line. Nevertheless, Chet will have to get on board as his manager assigns Chet to try and teach Henry how to control his 100 mile per hour fastball. Naturally, the standoffish Chet will slowly come around as a mentor for Henry and emerges as a love interest for Henry's mom. 

Read my full length review at Geeks.Media