Movie Review Waiting for Dali

Waiting for Dali (2024) 

Directed by David Pujol

Written by David Pujol, Miguel Garcia Navarette

Starring Jose Garcia, Ivan Massague, Clara Ponsot

Release Date June 18th, 2024

Published June 18th, 2024

The story of Waiting for Dali begins in Barcelona, Spain, in 1974 with a revolution in progress. Workers at a local restaurant have joined a revolution against the Spanish government and are now facing persecution.  Albert0 (Pol Lopez) and his brother, the second top chef at their restaurant, Fernando (Ivan Massague), have no choice but to turn to a mutual friend and fellow revolutionary, Francois (Nicholas Cazale) for help. 

Francois's plan has the trio travel to the small Spanish village of Cadaques where Alberto and Fernando will have to swallow their pride and take work in a kitchen that is not under their leadership. It's an especially big step down for Fernando who was making a name for himself as a French cuisine expert in Barcelona. Now, he's a prep cook at a seaside restaurant called El Surreal. The owner, Jules (Jose Garcia), built the restaurant solely on the hope that one day he might get the famed artist, Salvador Dali to eat there.

Cadaques in 1974 was centered entirely around Salvador Dali who chose the town as his home. Dali's blessing was a make-or-break proposition for any business in town. Thus, when Jules opened his seaside restaurant, he hung his hopes on getting Dali to eat there. Each day, Jules ventures into the main part of town in hope of getting the famed artist to take his menu or try some free food. And each time, he's unable to get anywhere near Dali. Much to his dismay. 

Find my full-length review linked here. 

Movie Review Borderlands

Borderlands (2024) 

Directed by Eli Roth 

Written by Eli Roth, Joe Crombie

Starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt Jack Black, 

Release Date August 8th, 2024 

Published August 8th, 2024 

Borderlands is a bad movie in the least interesting way. Take, for instance, Trap, M. Night Shyamalan’s most recent film, as of this writing. I’m mildly obsessed with Trap. That is a film that is bad in a very interesting way. Trap is misbegotten. It’s a failure in every possible way but it's ambitious and unique while being objectively bad. Borderlands, on the other hand, is bad in ways that are indistinguishable from other movies. It’s boring, it’s derivative, and, despite an all-star cast and a video game playground, it lacks personality. 

Cate Blanchett stars in Borderlands as Lilith, an intergalactic bounty hunter who plays by her own rules. If I had a nickel for every time a movie had a character like Lilith, I’d have enough to open a savings account at a local bank that comfortably accrues interest over time. Borderlands is boring in the same way that local banking with a small amount of money is boring. Lilith isn’t a character, she’s a collection of traits that look good in a trailer. She’s got an odd haircut, she’s sexy because Cate Blanchett is objectively sexy, and she shoots first and asks questions later just like every other cliche badass sci-fi character. (Yawn). 

Lilith is an anti-hero because she takes money from an evil corporate guy, Edgar Ramirez, making bank on being the most basic-bitch, go-to bad guy in Hollywood, to find his daughter. She’s the key to an ancient blah blah blah on some distant yadda, yadda, yadda. You get the gist. Ariana Greenblatt plays Tina, the daughter in question. Tina has been kidnapped by a mercenary named Roland (Kevin Hart) , former employee of the boring corporate villain, who is perhaps also seeking the magic whatever it is on the wasteland planet something or other. 

Find my full-length review linked here. 

Movie Review The Substance.

The Substance (2024)

Directed by Coralie Fargeat

Written by Coralie Fargeat

Starring Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid

Release Date September 20th, 2024

Published September 19th, 2024

The Substance is one of the best movies that I have ever seen. It's the best movie of 2024, so far. And I do not recommend that you go and see it. I understand that that is a strange series of sentences, a legit dichotomy. How can I say that a movie is among the best that I have ever seen and in the same paragraph not recommend that you go and see it? I will try my best to unpack these seemingly opposing thoughts.

The Substance stars Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkles, a fitness guru of many years' experience. Imagine Jane Fonda from the 80s, including her Academy Award winning acting career and you have the basic template for Elisabeth Sparkle. Though she looks incredible for her age, she's being pushed out of her fitness empire by a sleazy male executive, played by Dennis Quaid at his most ingeniously grotesque.

After surviving a horrifying car accident, almost unscathed, Elisabeth is recommended a special treatment called The Substance. Essentially, The Substance will create a youthful doppelganger who will share Elisabeth's life, splitting things 7 days at a time. With The Substance, Elisabeth brings her younger, supposedly better, self to life in the form of Sue, (Margaret Qualley). She's Elisabeth but with the pert, supple, and perfect body of a twenty-something.

For seven days this younger, allegedly better, version of Elisabeth will get to do all of the things that societal expectations, and stereotypical perceptions prevent Elisabeth from doing. This includes taking Elisabeth's former job as a TV fitness guru, sought after as a model and an actress. All the while, the mysterious people behind The Substance offer only dire warnings about consequences if Elisabeth/Sue fail to adhere to the strict rules of The Substance.

Well, of course, they don't follow the rules and, of course, there are consequences. My friend, dear reader, you are not prepared for the consequences of breaking the rules of The Substance. I am a veteran moviegoer. I have been doing this more than 30 years. I have seen some things at the movies. I've not seen anything quite like The Substance. The body horror of The Substance is terrifying, gut-wrenching, and extreme. It's justifiably extreme, but extreme may be an understatement for just how effective the body horror in The Substance truly is.

I've never been physically ill while watching a movie, but The Substance had me on the edge. In the end, I suffered a pretty serious panic attack and, as I write this, I am still recovering from seeing The Substance. Only my therapist will truly be able to help me unpack the feelings inspired by The Substance. This movie ripped into my psyche and found fears and anxieties that I didn't know I had regarding aging and my feelings and fears for the women in my life who have endured the intense, scrutinizing gazes that I've never had to endure.

I am speaking only as myself, other men may feel that they have been scrutinized over their bodies and their attractiveness, that's never been my experience. I can't say I am comfortable with my body, but I have never felt the kind of penetrating gaze that comes with people openly assessing, describing and feeling perfectly justified in sharing their feelings about the way I look. That's a privilege I've had as a pretty average looking duded. Demi Moore, on the other hand, none of us can begin to relate to her experience in the public eye.

Reflexively, many men will accuse Demi Moore of asking for it, asking for the attention and scrutiny of her looks. That's true but only to a point. If you say she was asking for the level of obsession with her looks that came with her remarkable fame in the 80s and 90s, you're out of your mind and merely trying to hand wave away the hard and deeply revealing conversation to be had about the way our culture dissects and inspects women's attractiveness in public spaces.

Casting Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle is a master stroke that takes The Substance from being a great movie to a masterpiece. Not only is Demi Moore an incredible actor, but her lived experience in being one of the most scrutinized human beings in the world brings a disturbing verisimilitude to The Substance. Demi Moore's bold, brave, raw performance is an all timer. If she doesn't win an Academy Award for her work in The Substance it will be a grave injustice.

And I can say the same about her remarkable other half, Margaret Qualley. Qualley, ever an actress who is up for anything after working with the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos, Clair Denis, and Quentin Tarantino, goes even further in her fearless approach to exploring characters in The Substance. Qualley's particular talent in The Substance is laying the groundwork for her co-star's performance. Qualley and Moore don't spend much time in the same scene but in playing the same character in very different context, Qualley is incredible at creating the space that Moore will explore in other scenes. That's an underappreciated talent.

As I said, I believe The Substance is the best movie of 2024 and one of my new favorite movies ever. And I will never be able to sit through it again. This movie was emotionally exhausting. The excruciating details in the production design and the sound design are breathtaking and also way to effective. It's literally too good. I feel like some people won't be able to handle just how effective some of this stuff really is. I don't want to spoil any aspect of this for someone who wants this experience that I had but I want to help those who may not be able to handle this by giving you an example of what you are in for.

There is an early scene in The Substance, before the 'Substance' of the title has actually been fully introduced. It's a scene in a restaurant where Dennis Quaid's slimeball executive is firing Elisabeth without actually saying he's firing her. Throughout the scene, Quaid is eating shrimp, and the camera is in a deep, fish-eye close up of his face and mouth. The sound is getting every noise of chewing, crunching, swallowing and lip-smacking as he licks his fingers and dribbles food back onto his plate, his messy fingers throwing little bits of shrimp and sauce as he gestures. For me, this is a horror greater than any Saw movie has demonstrated.

And that's an early scene in The Substance. There is still plenty of extreme body horror to come after that that I won't go into. I could write a lengthy essay on just the food horror of The Substance as director Coralie Fargeat uses food so effectively that more than 12 hours after seeing the movie, my appetite has not returned. Elisabeth is gifted a French Cookbook in the movie and where many other movies have turned such food into works of art, The Substance turns food into horror that could put David Cronenberg off his dinner.

Writer-Director Coralie Fargeat is an auteur of the highest order. She's made a movie in The Substance that hit me harder than any movie I've ever seen. I will never forget seeing the movie Midsommar for the first time and feeling like I had seen movies for the first time again. The Substance gave me that same feeling, as if I am seeing movies with new eyes. I feel as if I walked into The Substance as one person and I came out a very different person. This comes not just from the remarkably horrifying visuals but equally from the grotesque sights and the depth of the ideas.

Click here for my full-length review. 

Movie Review Crash

Crash 

Directed by Paul Haggis

Written by Paul Haggis, Robert Moresco

Starring Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle, Terence Howard, Sandra Bullock, Thandiwe Newton

Release Date May 6th, 2005

Rotten Tomatoes Score 73%

IMDB Score 7.7 out of 10

Budget $6.5 million 

Box Office $98.4 million

Paul Haggis showed the depth of his talents as a writer with his Oscar nominated script for Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby. The natural progression of any filmmaking career has led Mr. Haggis out from behind the computer keys to behind the camera directing his first feature. Working from his own script, Mr. Haggis has crafted Crash, an intricately plotted and engrossing drama about the futility of violence, the helplessness of anger, and the politics of race.

As two well-dressed young African American men, Anthony (Rapper, Ludacris) and Peter (Lorenz Tate), walk down an affluent street in Los Angeles discussing race, they are the only black faces to be seen. Even as they dress and act like they belong here, Anthony can't help but note the most minor of slights from the lack of good service in the restaurant they just left to a rich white woman (Sandra Bullock) who crosses the street with her husband (Brendan Fraser) when she sees them.

Anthony asks Peter what makes them so different from all these white people aside from race? They provide an answer to his question by summarily bringing out guns and stealing the couple's SUV. This act touches off a series of events that envelopes a pair of cops played by Matt Dillon and Ryan Phillippe, a detective and his partner played by Don Cheadle and Jennifer Esposito, a locksmith and his family (Michael Pena) an Arab family headed up by Farhad (Shaun Toub) and a black married couple played by Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton.

When Sgt. Ryan (Dillon) and his rookie partner Hanson (Phillippe) get a call that a carjacking has taken place nearby, Ryan pulls over the next similar looking car he sees. Despite the fact that the SUV is clearly not the one they are looking for (Hanson points out that the license plate is different) Ryan stops it anyway after seeing the driver, Cameron (Howard), is black. The stop is marked by Ryan harassing Cameron's wife Christine (Newton) over the weak protest of Hanson. The incident is devastating to Cameron and Christine's marriage.

Peter happens to be the brother of police detective Graham Waters (Cheadle) who, as a result of the carjacking, is brought to the attention of the L.A District Attorney Rick Cabot, the victim of the crime along with his wife, Jean (Brendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock). Cabot wants a black detective on the case to avoid accusations of racism and he wants Detective Waters specifically to lead the investigation.

Meanwhile Jean is at home and, still shaken by the carjacking, she has had the locks on their home changed. Unfortunately, when her husband sent for a locksmith (Michael Pena) he did not know he was going to be a tattooed inner city Latino, something his wife notes immediately in accusing the man of wanting to change the locks in order to return later and rob her. For his part the locksmith is a good-hearted family man who has struggled to get out from under this sort of cultural bias all his life.

When the locksmith accepts one more late-night job at a grocery store before heading home, we get a very tense scene between him and the shop owner Farhad (Shaun Taub) , an Iranian immigrant who speaks very little English. What was a simple misunderstanding due to the language barrier very nearly turns violent and leads into yet another scene at the locksmith's home that may be the strongest moment in the film when you yourself see it.

The links between all of the various characters in Crash are tenuous in terms of actual interaction. However, in terms of themes, race and racism, they could not be more strongly connected. So bold are the themes and the characters that you can forgive the often-forced attempts to connect them physically in the same scene or plot strand. 

Crash is akin to Paul Thomas Anderson's extraordinary 1999 ensemble drama Magnolia. Both films share a reliance on chance and fate and sprawling casts of well-known and respected actors. Crash Director Paul Haggis eschews Anderson's esoteric flights of fancy-- there are no frogs in Crash-- but both films pack an emotional punch that will leave the theater with you. Crash is hampered slightly by not having Magnolia's extravagant run time of three plus hours at a mere 93 minutes itself; the film has far less time to establish its characters.

Haggis makes up for the lack of length by creating dramatic scenarios that are harrowingly tense and emotional. The scenes involving Michael Pena's locksmith and Shaun Toub's Iranian shopkeeper are an extraordinary example of Mr. Haggis's ability to craft confrontations that provoke fate without entirely crossing that thin line between dramatic realism and fantasy. Pena’s pained expressions and Taub’s despairing sadness are a powerhouse combination. 

Crash is ostensibly about racism, but it goes much deeper than that into an examination of the psyche of a broad expanse of people displaced emotionally by tragedy, by violence, by hatred and more importantly by chance. Chance is the strangest of all, the way people are sometimes thrown together in situations they never could have imagined. Chance breeds fear but it can also breed love. You can meet your end by chance or meet your destiny. Crash is about chance encounters, people crashing into one another and the way their lives unfold afterwards.

A brilliant announcement of a new talent arriving, Crash brings Paul Haggis from behind the writer's desk and into the director's chair in the way that Paul Schrader broke from his roots of writing for Martin Scorsese to direct his first great film American Gigolo. Like Schrader, Haggis will continue writing for others (he and Eastwood are collaborating once more on the upcoming Flags of Our Fathers), but with Crash, Mr. Haggis shows where his future really lies.

Movie Review Beauty Shop

Beauty Shop 

Directed by Billie Woodruff 

Written by Elizabeth Hunter, Kate Lanier, Norman Vance Jr. 

Starring Queen Latifah 

Release Date May 30th, 2005 

Rotten Tomatoes Score 38% 

IMDB Score 5.6 out of 10 

Budget $25 million 

Box Office $37 million 

Ever since her breakthrough role and Oscar nomination with 2002's Chicago, Queen Latifah has struggled to find material worthy of her talent.  Chicago has led to a string of awful movies like Cookout, Taxi, and Bringing Down the House, the latter being the only hit of the bunch and arguably the worst of them. None of these awful films, however, has dimmed the Queen's star presence. She is still a welcome presence onscreen even if her movies do her talent injustice.The latest example of Queen Latifah's star presence, the Barbershop spinoff Beauty Shop, is yet another bad movie where Queen Latifah outshines bad material.

In Barbershop 2 Queen Latifah introduced the character of Gina, a beauty shop owner who had the guts and talent to go toe to toe with Cedric the Entertainer's cantankerous old man Eddy. In Beauty Shop Gina has packed up her talent and attitude and headed for Atlanta where she works at an upscale salon and hopes to soon open her own shop. Gina's new boss is your typically effeminate diva stylist, Jorge Christophe (a nearly unrecognizable Kevin Bacon with a faux Euro-trash accent). Jorge constantly dumps his work off on Gina who earns the trust and loyalty of his clients because of her talent. However, when Jorge criticizes Gina in front of the entire salon, saying that he "owns her ass", Gina quits.

With the help of family, friends and an especially easy to please bank loan officer, Gina buys a rundown beauty shop in a questionable part of town. The shop comes equipped with a noisy neighbor/potential love interest, play by Djimon Hounsou, bad electricity, and a staff of oddball stylists not used to Gina's more upscale tastes. Among her new employees are the former owner, the Maya Angelou quoting Miss Josephine (Alfre Woodard, looking uncomfortable in this rare comedic role), Chanel (Golden Brooks) the requisite attitude problem or more precisely the bitch, and Ida (Sherry Shepherd) the dim witted one.

Thankfully also coming along with Gina from Jorge's is a talented stylist named Lynn (Alicia Silverstone, stymied with a bad southern accent), the one white girl in an all-black shop. Lynn is at the center of much of the film's uncomfortable racial humor. Back to the plot, Gina is lucky to have brought some of the upscale clients she met while working for Jorge with her to this new shop. Among those customers is the sweet natured Terri (Andie McDowell) and the bitchy Joanne (Mena Suvari).

The film's plot centers on finances as the titular beauty shop, as it was in the Barbershop movies, is constantly in dire financial straits. Everything is falling apart; the electricity is bad, and a nasty building inspector clearly has it out for Gina. That said, though, the plot is very much secondary to the interaction of this over-the-top group of characters, the plotless nature of Beauty Shop means that scenes linger longer than they should in search of a reason to exist beyond a weak punchline or dimwitted insult.

The one thing Beauty Shop has going for it is the star presence and charisma of Queen Latifah whose common-sense straight man never really gels with the caricatures that surround her. That is certainly not Latifah's fault.  She seems prepared to connect with the material throughout, especially in her romance with Djimon Hounsou's character, Joe. Though not a natural when it comes to romantic comedy, Hounsou makes up for his lack of comic chops by being ridiculously good looking with a terrific smile.

Unfortunately, there are too many other things wrong with Beauty Shop for Queen Latifah and Djimon Hounsou to escape the orbit of this otherwise bad movie. Music video Director Bille Woodruff (Honey with Jessica Alba) is too caught up with quirky characters to give Queen Latifah the attention she deserves. Queen Latifah is radiant and funny and a director with more imagination than Billie Woodruff might have forgotten about trying to make Barbershop 3 and focused the film on Gina and her romance with Joe.

Had Beauty Shop simply been a romantic comedy about Queen Latifah and Djimon Hounsou beginning to fall in love, it might have worked. Sadly, the desire of the studio to clone a gender flipped version of the Barbershop movies, killed the chances of Beauty Shop of feeling like anything more than aq brain dead rehash eager to

Movie Review Megalopolis

 Megalopolis 

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola 

Written by Francis Ford Coppola 

Starring Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Jon Voight 

Release Date September 27th, 2024 

Published September 30th, 2024 

I was very excited about Megaloopolis at the time it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. The reaction from critics and audiences at Cannes was divided to a remarkable extreme with some calling it a work of genius and others calling it a complete disaster. In my experience, movies that are that divisive tend to have value in that they are unlikely to be boring. As someone whose profession often centers around watching mainstream, cookie cutter, movies, the notion of a genuinely original and completely unpredictable movie is very exciting. 

What a disappointment it was then, to watch Megalopolis and feel nearly nothing for the movie. While I remain impressed by the intention and originality of Megalopolis, the dominant feeling I have after watching Megalopolis is apathy. Disappointment is a close second but not the disappointment of being let down by Francis Ford Coppola but rather, the disappointment that Megalopolis left me so indifferent. I wanted to feel invigorated by a feeling of either the joy of seeing a visionary epic or by seeing something so utterly incomprehensible as to cause awe. 

Neither of those feelings emerged. Instead, the lasting feeling inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s deeply personal $120 million dollar gamble is emptiness, a complete lack of any significant emotion whatsoever. And that feeling sucks. I know that isn’t the most elegant way of stating my feelings but it is honest and to the point. I hate that Megalopolis left me feeling next to nothing. Not pity for the actors stranded in Coppola’s muddled vision, none of the giddiness inspired by seeing something truly original, simply nothing whatsoever. 

Megalopolis stars Adam Driver as Cesar Catalina, a visionary architect with a dark past. Living in the country of New Rome, and functioning as the country’s chief designer, Catalina finds himself at the center of controversy over his newest creation, Megalopolis, a city of the future that may or may not displace many from the poor neighborhoods of the capital city. Catalina’s chief critic is the Mayor of New Rome, Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Cicero believes that Catalina is mortgaging the struggling present of New Rome in favor of the expensive pipedream of Megalopolis. 

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal.Media linked here. 

Classic Movie Review Manhunter

Manhunter (1986) 

Directed by Michael Mann

Written by Michael Mann

Starring William Peterson, Dennis Farina, Brian Cox, Kim Greist, Joan Allen 

Release Date August 15th, 1986 

Published July 16th, 2024 

The visual simplicity of the opening images of Michael Mann's Manhunter are sublime. We open on a flashlight falling upon a flight of stairs. It's pitch black other than the flashlight. This could be a home invader or an investigator at this point. Toys are strewn across the stairs in the haphazard way that young children carelessly like to play. The visual signs of life in a typical American home are all present. As the person with the flashlight climbs the stairs, it's light falling on more signifiers of life, we arrive at the top of the stairs. The flashlight pans into what appears to a be a child's room, seemingly empty. 

A few steps further and we arrive in a bedroom where we see our first evidence of people. A woman and a man are in bed and for a moment, it's not clear if they are alive or dead. The flashlight begins to hold steady on the woman who finally moves to signify that she's alive. The flashlight, now unmoving, continues to hold on the woman as it becomes clear that she's waking up. The fog of sleep still in her mind she finally begins to rise and just as she might be about to react to the sight of a stranger with a flashlight, we cut to the opening title of the film, Manhunter. 

The clear indication is that this person with a flashlight is about to commit a horrific murder. That Michael Mann uses a signifier as simple as a flashlight to toy with us, to give us hope that perhaps we are arriving at an investigation and not an invasion is part of the building tension, the rising suspense. The way the flashlight falls on the woman in bed and holds on her becomes the unsettling implication of a terrible crime about to be committed. Mann's direction is simple, the visual storytelling is electrifying and yet it's still just a person with a flashlight and visual context. That's pure film language. 

Over the years, Michael Mann will come to be associated with a style that is more bombastic and far less subtle. No less skilled or polished, but somehow more modern and garish for having a bigger budget, bigger stars, and bigger ambition. I'm not the biggest fan of Michael Mann's blockbuster era. I don't love the kinetic, overwrought style of Heat. I genuinely believe his movie Blackhat is one of the worst blockbusters of the last 10 years, but I still respect Michael Mann. I know that at any moment, Mann can still do what he did in Manhunter and blow my mind with his simple, straight-forward grasp of the language of film. 

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal.