Movie Review Dreamin' Wild

Dreamin' Wild (2023) 

Directed by Bill Pohlad 

Written by Bill Pohlad 

Starring Casey Affleck, Zooey Deschanel, Walton Goggins, Beau Bridges 

Release Date August 4th, 2023 

Published August 1st, 2023

The story of Donnie Emerson is a remarkable one. In the 1970s, he and his brother, Joe, made a record. It got recorded and it was made available on vinyl and everything. It appeared that Donnie, if not Joe, had a bright future ahead of him as a singer songwriter. Circumstances conspired and Donnie never found stardom. Then, in 2008, a copy of Donnie and Joe's album was found by a man in Spokane, Washington. He made it his mission to get the record to as many people as possible. The efforts of this man, Jack Fleischer, brought the record to the attention of Light in the Attic records, an indie label that managed to track down Donnie and Joe. 

In an improbable twist of fate, Dreamin' Wild, their 1978 record, found a new life. Donnie began a second act as a respected and revered singer songwriter and now, writer-director Bill Pohlad has brought the amazing story of Donnie, Joe and their family to the big screen in Dreamin' Wild. It's an inherently cinematic underdog story but the typical elements aren't as interesting to Pohlad as the inner turmoil of Donnie Emerson, a man who was racked with guilt over the failure of his music career and struggled with intense mistrust, insecurity and fear over trying to once again live his dream. 

Casey Affleck stars in Dreamin' Wild as Donnie Emerson. A father of two, Donnie's recording studio is struggling to stay afloat. Donnie and his wife, Nancy (Zooey Deschanel) support their family and business by playing covers at weddings and other small venue events. Donnie is facing an uncertain future when this random phone call changes everything. Matt Sullivan (Chris Messina), a record company flack for Light in the Attic Records has moved mountains trying to find Donnie and his brother, Joe (Walton Goggins). 

Somewhere in Montana, someone found a copy of a record called Dreamin' Wild. The record was recorded by the Emerson Brothers in 1978 and it had been mostly a failure. It did lead to Donnie briefly getting a record deal and traveling to Los Angeles, but he soon ended up back home. That's a story that we will eventually uncover as Dreamin' Wilde lays out its story. For the moment, it's nothing but good news for Donnie's family, including his loving and supportive father, Don Sr. (Beau Bridges). The only one who seems reticent about this sudden new discovery is Donnie. 

Find my full length review on Beat.Media

Horror in the 90s Gremlins 2

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) 

Directed by Joe Dante 

Written by Charles Haas

Starring Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, John Glover, Robert Picardo, Christopher Lee 

Release Date June 15th, 1990 

Box Office $41.5 million dollars 

I'm convinced that the only cultural reputation that Gremlins 2: The New Batch has comes entirely from the cache earned from Key & Peele. The brilliant minds of Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele performed a sketch on their Comedy Central series in which Peele as a Hollywood Sequel Doctor, played by a flamboyant Jordan Peele, enters the writers room for Gremlins 2 and proceeds to take suggestions for wild ideas to add to the Gremlins 2 story. What he comes up with are actual characters from Gremlins 2 that are so outlandish and dumb that they seem to have been made up. It's a brilliant sketch but it sets a standard that the movie simply cannot match. 

As wild as this Hollywood Script Doctors ideas for Gremlins 2: The New Batch are, the movie never feels that wild or outrageous. Instead, it feels deeply disjointed, often desperate, and unfunny. Gremlins 2: The New Batch has the feel of a sequel that was thrust upon director Joe Dante who responded to the burden by trying to sabotage his own movie. Dante comes up with several bad ideas, executes them poorly, and delivered a final cut that I can only imagine left everyone mortified but unable to not release the movie. Trying to cull a plot description together seems like a fool's errand but here we are. 

Gremlins 2: The New Batch returns Zach Galligan as everyman Bill Pelzer. Billy is now working and living in New York City with his small town gal-pal, Kate, played by an also returning Phoebe Cates. Also having moved to New York City is Gizmo, the cutest of the Gremlins. How and why Gizmo is now in New York City is a plot contrivance. He's needed in New York for this dimwitted plot to unfold. A Trump like developer named Daniel Clamp (John Glover) is eager to buy the shop owned by Mr. Wing, a returning Keye Luke, so he can continue to reshape the New York skyline in his tacky image. 

When Mr. Wing dies, Clamp gets his wish and Gizmo is left homeless. By coincidence, Gizmo is found by a pair of twin scientists who work for Daniel Clamp's top scientist, played in utterly bizarre fashion by Christopher Lee. He's eager to experiment on Gizmo but a further series of coincidences, including Billy happening to work in this building and offhandedly hearing about the cute creature in an upstairs lab, leads to a Billy/Gizmo reunion. Naturally, things go off the rails pretty quickly as Gizmo gets wet from a malfunctioning water fountain and dozens of new Gremlins are born and wreck havoc. 

Not a single one of the new Gremlins, who use the chemicals in Christopher Lee's lab to genetically alter themselves to vary the species design, are funny. A Gremlin with Spider Legs is a pretty good horror visual but since Gremlins 2 is clumsily straddling the line between horror and family friendly, kid friendly, comedy, the horror elements are drearily watered down. That all of the Gremlins described in the Key & Peele sketch are indeed real provides a semblance of fun but that's coming from the absurdity of Key& Peele's comedy magic and nothing that the movie is doing. 

Read the full length review at Horror.Media 

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