Movie Review Civil War

Civil War (2024) 

Directed by Alex Garland

Written by Alex Garland

Starring Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura, William McKinley Henderson, Nick Offerman

Release Date April 12th, 2024 

Published April 12th, 2024 

So, war is bad. Don't do war. If you do war then we won't have internet or even electricity. People will have live in tents in football stadiums, it's all bad. There is no NFL, no NBA, no March Madness. No movies, no Marvel, no Disney Plus. War truly sucks. 0 out of 5 stars for war. Are you enjoying my sarcasm? I'm laying it on pretty thick. On a very surface level, this is the thesis statement behind Alex Garland's new movie Civil War. Lot's of people will die and nothing good will happen if we let our country slip into a civil war. 

Civil War stars Kirsten Dunst as veteran photo journalist, Lee Smith. Lee and her reporter colleague, Joel (Wagner Moura) are planning a perilous journey to the White House from New York City. This is dangerous because the so-called 'Western Forces' of Texas and California have moved the frontline of the Civil War to the President's front door. To get to the White House and the chance to interview the President (Nick Offerman), will mean crossing the almost invisible line between Americans fighting the government and government forces fighting on behalf of the embattled President.

Which side is right or wrong is not part of this conversation. We will never learn why the two sides are fighting. You can make your assumptions and perhaps try to make the President out to be a Trump-like figure who is clinging to power against the will of the American people, but the movie doesn't have a rooting interest, it doesn't take a side. The movie Civil War is simply opposed to war of any kind and that's something that the movie and I have in common. Indeed, that is something that most people have in common, we don't want to be in a war. 

Find my full length review at Swamp.Media 

Classic Movie Review Four Weddings and a Funeral

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) 

Directed by Mike Newell

Written by Richard Curtis 

Starring Hugh Grant, Andie McDowell, John Hannah, Simon Callow, Kristen Scott Thomas 

Release Date April 15th, 1994 

Published April 15th, 1994 

Four Weddings and a Funeral is exactly what the title says it is, four weddings and one funeral over a period of about a year in the life of a group of British friends. Charles (Hugh Grant) seems to attend a wedding a week these days. Despite his deplorable record as a ladies man, which will play out through the series of weddings that occur, Charles keeps getting invited to weddings and goes in with the hope of hooking up. He's cynical about love but secretly a romantic. We will learn this via his strange and strained relationship with Carrie (Andie McDowell). 

At the first of four weddings Charles attends he's the best man. Naturally, he nearly ruins the wedding by forgetting the rings. Thankfully, his friends, Tom (James Fleet), Gareth (Simon Callow), Matthew (John Hannah), and Fiona (Kristen Scott Thomas), along with Charles' sister, Scarlett (Charlotte Coleman), are able to bail him out. Narrowly avoiding that disaster, Charles stumbles into a potential non-disaster when he meets Carrie. For Charles, it's love at first sight. For Carrie, she seems to like the floppy Englishman but it takes a minute for her to warm to him. The two end up sleeping together, after some shenanigans, but then she's off, back to America. 

Cut to wedding number 2. Charles is just a guest this time and instead of nearly ruining the wedding, the universe appears to be ruining Charles' day. Not only were he and Scarlett nearly late to the wedding, they always are, he ends up at the reception sat at a table with not one, not two, but three of his ex-girlfriends. Each takes the time to tell a story about Charles, ones in which he appears to insult one of the other two exes. It's a catastrophe but one that he hope might be mitigated when he sees that Carrie has come to this wedding as well. This too however, is a disaster as Carrie is here with her new fiancée. This doesn't stop Charles and Carrie from hooking up but it's certainly not a good indication of long term plans. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media

Movie Review The People's Joker

The People's Joker (2024) 

Directed by Vera Drew

Written by Vera Drew, Bri LaRose 

Starring Vera Drew, Lynn Downey, Christian Calloway, Scott Aukerman, Bob Odenkirk, Tim Heidecker 

Release Date April 19th, 2024 

Published April 17th, 2024 

The People's Joker is pure punk rock anarchy filtered through the lens of an auteur unlike any we have seen before. Vera Drew is the visionary behind this almost indescribable takedown of the Batman/Joker legend and lore. Entirely outside of the purview of permission, Drew and their collaborators took the well known characters of the D.C Universe and turned them on their heads in the most unique and unpredictable fashion. Not one minute of The People's Joker is predictable, it's a train running down the tracks with Drew at the helm and the whole thing in flames with no slowing down. I loved every minute of it. 

Trying to describe the plot of The People's Joker is a rather futile effort, not that the movie is plotless, it's just deciding where to start that's the problem. In this dystopian future, Vera (Vera Drew) is from Smallville but dreams of going to Gotham City where a show called UCB Live is the biggest show in the world and Lorne Michaels rules comedy with an iron fist. It's also where a retired Batman still dominates the headlines despite no longer being the caped crusader. On UCB Live, Vera is assigned the identity of a Male Joker. In the harsh world of UCB Live, you are either a Male Joker with a distinct identity and able to perform on the show or a female Harlequin and designated as only a background dancer. 

Find my full length review at Pride.Media 

Movie Review The Iron Claw

The Iron Claw (2023) 

Directed by Sean Durkin

Written by Sean Durkin

Starring Zac Efron, Holt McCallany, Harris Dickinson, Jeremy Allen White, Lily James, Maura Tierney 

Release Date December 22nd, 2023 

Published ?

Instead of reviewing what I think is a very bad movie, The Iron Claw, I am going to make a list of the many things the movie gets wrong combined with a list of things the film omitted that might have made the film better. As a wrestling fan, I am remarkably familiar with the controversies, the tragedies, and the triumphs of the Von Erich family. The misery porn that director Sean Durkin is engaged in in The Iron Claw is nothing compared to the real life tragedies and controversies that the Von Erich family were part of from the late 1970s and into the early 1990s. 

What The Iron Claw gets wrong: Spoilers ahead, it's based on a true story, but the movie fictionalizes so much that, I guess, this stuff qualifies as spoilers. 

The Timeline 

The Iron Claw proceeds essentially from 1980 when Kevin Von Erich, played by Zac Efron, met and married his wife, Pam, played by Lily James. While at Kevin's wedding, we see Kevin's brother, David, played by Harris Dickinson fall ill. He's vomiting blood and Kevin advises David not to take a trip to Japan the following week, advising David to get some rest first. David assures Kevin he will be fine and he goes on the trip to Japan. Cut to, Fritz Von Erich alone at his kitchen table, distraught. While on tour in Japan, David suffered from Enteritis and died in his hotel room. 

From Kevin Von Erich's marriage in 1980 to David's death from either Enteritis or a drug overdose, depending on whose story you believe, were four years. Four years in which David Von Erich had the biggest successes of his career. In 1980 he broke away from his father and traveled the country working in Florida, where he played a bad guy for a while, a rite of passage in the industry that would not have been afforded to him by his father. He also went to Missouri and was able to win the Missouri Heavyweight Championship, arguably the biggest solo honor of his short career. 

There appears to be little justification for compressing four years into one week and it only serves to remove the devastating emotional impact of David's death, which is reduced to a single scene of Fritz telling Kevin that David had died. Tell don't show is a plague on The Iron Claw as so many significant incidents in the lives and careers of the Von Erich's are either ignored completely or we are told that they happened offscreen. 

Kerry Von Erich's personal life 

In The Iron Claw you would assume that Kerry Von Erich was a lonely, drug addicted playboy whose only life was in the wrestling ring. That's partially true. But what The Iron Claw fails to tell you, I assume because they were cut for time, is that Kerry was married and had children. In the movie, Kerry's marriage and his children, including future pro wrestler Lacy Von Erich, are never mentioned and completely ignored. As Kerry spirals toward his tragic, far to young death by suicide, his brother asks him about some random woman that he'd brought home for the holidays. She was some woman he met on the road or something. He never asks about Kerry's wife or mentions his children as a reason for Kerry not to take his own life. 

More Timeline shenanigans 

If David's death happened a week after Kevin's marriage in 1981, then Kerry Von Erich won the NWA World Heavyweight Championship and at the David Von Erich Parade of Champions event a little over a month and a half later. And, according to the timeline in The Iron Claw, Kerry went out and got very drunk and crashed his motorcycle and lost part of his leg that same night. Naturally, that didn't happen that way. Kerry won the title in 1984, a little over a month after David died that same year. Kerry didn't suffer his motorcycle accident and the amputation of the lower part of his right leg until 1986, long after he'd lost the NWA world title. 

The remarkable and tragic story of Kerry's motorcycle accident. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Origin

Origin (2024) 

Directed by Ava Duvernay

Written by Ava Duvernay

Starring Anjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Vera Farmiga, Isha Blaaker

Release Date January 25th, 2024 

Published January 25th, 2024 

Origin is a big project. Adapting a non-fiction story tracking the origin of racial discrimination via the history of the caste system worldwide, is not an easy task. It's a roiling beast of a project that director Ava Duvernay is perhaps the only filmmaker could attempt to tame and tease into a familiar film drama. The book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, a bestseller for writer Isabel Wilkerson, is a deeply academic, research heavy effort that is far from the most natural book to be turned into a dramatic feature film. Director Ava Duvernay had to give a dramatic shape to the story and she found that shape in the author's life story. 

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor stars in Origin as Isabel Wilkerson, an author struggling with the idea for her next book. She wants to chart the origin of racism in America but her research slowly takes her in a new direction. What she finds is that racism isn't as simple as white people hating black people, though that is a big part of it. Rather, the true roots of racism are often economic in nature. The need for a class of people who exist to do the work that others don't wish to do leads to the owning class to create a caste system in which particular members of a culture are chosen to be that class of people who will perform tasks. 

Leaders in these cultures quickly realized that they could create the workers they needed by exploiting racial and religious differences. Demonizing people for the color of their skin or by the difference in their religious beliefs proved to be an effective way to find a cheap, pliable workforce, groups of people who have no option but to accept poor treatment, low wages, and terrible working conditions, just for the chance to survive. Thus, confronting racial differences required more than overcoming a specific prejudice based on color, it requires dismantling economic systems that have been constructed over hundreds of years that thrived off of this forced labor based on discrimination. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review The First Omen

The First Omen (2024)

Directed by Arkasha Stevenson 

Written by Tim Smith, Arkasha Stevenson, Keith Thomas 

Starring Nell Tiger Free, Sonia Braga, Ralph Inseson, Bill Nighy

Release Date April 5th, 2024

Published April 5th, 2024 

The First Omen isn't so much of a movie as it is a widget. I mean widget in its first definition, not the internet definition. The First Omen is a product created by a committee who were given budget and a deadline and told to create a sellable product. The people who made it may be of the highest talent and may create a terrific product, but there is no escaping the widget comparison. If The First Omen were not connected to a studio owned franchise, it would not exist and the people who made it, likely would never have worked together. A studio had a product that it wanted made. The studio chose a product manager, a team lead, and a group of people to run the factory floor and they crafted a product for consumption in the market place. 

You can say, that's most movies, and I don't disagree with you. But, you can sense when someone is making a passionate work of art, a deep expression coming from the soul of a genuine artist. And, you can tell when someone is tasked with producing a widget, when they are accomplishing an assignment with a budget and deadline and not a work of a passionate soul. This is not to simply say that by its nature, The First Omen is a bad movie, it's not poorly made. It's a terrific widget. But a widget will never be a transcendent work of art. It will always be a functional mass produced consumer product, no matter how good the effort was to create it. 

The First Omen stars Nell Tiger Free as Sister Margaret, a troubled young Nun who has come to Rome at the behest of her loving mentor, Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy). Cardinal Lawrence was once a humble Priest who helped Margaret survive a difficult childhood in a Massachusetts orphanage. Now, he's using his power as a Cardinal in Vatican City to get Margaret a place at a church run orphanage in Rome, in 19171. It's a heady change for Margaret who turned to God after growing up tormented so badly by visions that she thought she might lose her mind. She still occasionally has horrific visions of the abuse her mind tells her did not actually occur. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Movie Review Roadhouse

Road House (2024) 

Directed Doug Liman 

Written by Charles Mondry, Anthony Bagarozzi 

Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Conor MacGregor 

Release Date March 21st, 2024

Published March 25th, 2024

Imagine if someone tried to remake The Room without Tommy Wiseau. Imagine if they tried to take Wiseau's premise and treat it with seriousness and make it into a serious drama? Would it even still be The Room? No, the magic would be gone. It would be a boring soap opera. No, the magic of The Room is the unique alchemy that emerges from when Tommy Wiseau's outsized ambition crashes headlong into his complete lack of talent and is forged in the fire of his self-delusion. You cannot remake that. You cannot recapture that kind of magic. 

Roadhouse is like The Room. The magic of Roadhouse comes from the unique alchemy of director Rowdy Herrington's love of sleazy bars with sticky, beer soaked floors, holes in the walls from errant fists, and from Patrick Swayze's unmatched ability to be bizarrely emotionally detached and fully physically present in every scene. His Zen bouncer is a miscalculation in theory but in practice, it is cheeseball comic gold. He's funny but only because he has no idea that he's funny. The joy or Roadhouse is how deeply dedicated Swayze and everyone else is to this sleazy, cheeseball nonsense. 

In remaking Roadhouse, the fun is completely lost in favor of a desire to be taken seriously. The premise is played straight with the fun sucked out almost entirely. A deeply bored Jake Gyllenhaal replaces Swayze's Zen and so much is lost in that translation. Gyllenhaal is too good of an actor to understand the glorious silliness of being a Zen bouncer fighting rednecks over control of a small Kansas town. Instead of trying to be above it, Gyllenhaal just comes of bemused and self-satisfied and that's just not fun at all. Plus, he doesn't rip out a single throat. Not one. 

Road House begins in bizarre fashion, establishing that no one knows what they are doing here. Gyllenhaal's Dalton shows up at a bar where they hold an unsanctioned fight club. There, a bruiser, played in cameo by Post Malone, has fought and defeated 6 men. Dalton is set to be next but the bruiser smartly bows out, refusing to fight Dalton because he knows who Dalton is. He's also just fought 6 other people and is bleeding and exhausted. So, instead of establishing Dalton as a man of honor and toughness, he comes off as an opportunist and a coward. Not the best way to introduce our hero. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media