A ticking time bomb story that never quite feels like the timer is running – maybe they have 90 minutes until showtime, but the movie takes 110 minutes to get there. Lots of people playing famous people with uncanny valley impressions just strong enough to remind me how much talent the actual people had.
Just a silly, fun movie. The wildest part was watching Jim Carrey as “the other alien- no not that one, the OTHER other alien.” Bonus: According to Julie Brown (who did a Q&A after the show), Jim Carrey was a really good kisser.
I think Megalopolis broke my movie judgement. I’ve seen two movies since watching it. First was Joker: Folie a Deux, which most people hated and I thought was okay. Today was A Different Man, which is getting strong positive reviews… and I thought was just okay.
I had no problem with the handwave science that gives Edward his new face – the movie is a look at appearance versus perception, not a fact-based medical procedural – but I did struggle with some very strange choices made by the characters. Also: there’s an early scene where the doctors make a lifelike mask of Edward’s face, supposedly for reference. As soon as they made it, I thought “well, he’s going to miss his old face later and put that on.” And you’ll never guess what happens.
I think I need a willfully silly movie to reset my film brain. Good thing I’m going to a special screening of Earth Girls Are Easy tomorrow!
Also: this is the third “person deals with an alternate version of themselves” movie I’ve seen in two weeks.
Spoilers below. Frankly, I’m not sure how I could talk about this movie without giving away at least one major plot point.
I’m going to write using a bunch of one- or two-sentence paragraphs to give anyone who might read this a chance to bail before they read something they don’t want to see.
First of all, the biggest surprise of the film: I didn’t hate it. It wasn’t great, but I thought it held together better that the first film.
Second: Despite what Todd Phillips might say, this absolutely is a musical. A jukebox musical where the male lead isn’t a very strong singer, but a musical nonetheless.
Joker (2019) showed that Fleck is a VERY unreliable narrator. This movie doesn’t try to hide that. Almost all of the musical numbers are imaginary. That’s fine and good, but they were too timid about Fleck’s grasp on reality. I really wanted more “wait- is this real?” scenes.
There are some really silly moments – including some very unlikely decisions by the judge about courtroom behavior, and by some guards about inmate interactions – but the movie mostly stays in “real world” mode.
Okay, let’s do the big spoiler.
The spoiler for the end of the movie.
Seriously, the last scene. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know how it ends.
At the end of the movie, Fleck has declared that Joker was completely made up, and has admitted to killing six people. As he walks down a hallway, another prisoner stops him to tell Fleck a joke. As he tells the punchline, he stabs Fleck multiple times. Fleck falls and dies, and out of focus in the background the other inmate laughs and cuts his mouth to match Heath Ledger’s scars in The Dark Knight. Were these movies secret prequels to Christopher Nolan’s Batman films? Is that random prisoner the “real” Joker, and Fleck just a setup? It doesn’t quite make sense, and it doesn’t really need to. It’s also pretty funny for a director to say use the last five minutes of his film to say “By the way, nothing you saw up to this point had anything to do with the character you thought you were learning about.”
Years from now, Megalopolis might be seen as Francis Ford Coppola’s greatest work, a first step into a new level of film-making.
But not right now.
It’s full of stiff, arch acting that was clearly a directorial choice, not a lack of acting skill. Some of it is beautiful; some of it looks like a SciFi Channel series. The story just. keeps. GOING. Two and a quarter hours that felt like three. A magic mystery material with a name that sounds like a Godzilla villain.
But my biggest regret about the movie (other than Shia LaBeouf playing a guy named “Clodio”) was that I didn’t go to an “ultimate” screening. For that version of the movie, there’s a part where a live actor interacts with characters onscreen. Some people are going to have to explain why their resumes list “talking to a thirty foot tall Adam Driver head.”
…and why was Aubrey Plaza’s ass more visible in this than when it was the title character of “My Old Ass?” Movies are weird.
It turns out stories can be powerful when told well, even if you already know them. Anyone who saw the trailer for The Wild Robot – hell, anyone who has watched a few “uplifting and emotional” movies – could guess the broad strokes of the story, but that doesn’t matter here because it tells its tale so well.
And it’s not without surprises. There are some graphic deaths early in the film, and they’re not off-screen or silhouettes. They’re small, and not the more anthropomorphized creatures, but they still surprised me.
Oh, this movie. It makes no sense, but it’s a lot of fun.
Why doesn’t Vicki Vale know what Bruce Wayne looks like? What’s the time frame for the film? It feels like it’s a few weeks at most, but then how does the Joker have time to pull off his cosmetics mass murder? Why can’t Batman turn his head? Why, after Alfred casually gives away Bruce Wayne’s secret identity, is the focus less on “holy crap you’re Batman” and more on “I thought we had a love connection”? Why is Batman, flying a plane with machine guns, missiles, and precision targeting systems, unable to hit a man standing still in the open, but that man can take out his plane with one shot from a comically long handgun? Why is Robert Wuhl?
But Michael Keaton is a strong Bruce Wayne, much harder than being good at brooding in a rubber suit. Jack Nicholson is best when he’s playing more dark and creepy, but he’s not bad at manically chewing the scenery, either. Gotham City is dark, industrial, and very tall & claustrophobic. The Batman cartoon refined the look and feel, but it all starts here.
Oh, and this Batman definitely kills people. Throws them over rails, drops bombs at their feet, and ties gargoyles to them so they fall from great heights, all without a word.
Welcome to the second half of my Women Interacting With Alternate Versions of Themselves Weekend Film Festival! Today’s movie is a stylized fable about aging (particularly as a woman) told as a horror story.
I’m not the guy to fairly comment on this film; metaphorical (allegorical? English is hard) horror is not usually my thing. I saw the trailer and thought: “This has an interesting premise. Maybe this one will work for me!”
Not really. Moore is great, Qualley is great, the production design is fun, and it’s fun to watch Quaid do this slimeball producer thing knowing that he’s also in a current hagiography playing Ronald Reagan, but I am not the audience for this film. I saw someone say this is like a fancy episode of Tales From The Crypt, which is pretty accurate. If that sounds like something you’d like, you’ll probably like this.
It was exactly what the trailer presents it as: a mostly lighthearted coming-of-age movie that features sort-of time travel caused by recreational self-medication. Like most time travel scenarios, the whole “if I take enough mushrooms I can conjure my future self” thing makes no sense, but the Elliotts acknowledge that they don’t know how it works and let it go.
Bonus: it doesn’t overstay its welcome. A sharp ninety minutes that gives all the story it needs to give and moves on.
When I saw this movie during opening weekend, I when with Mike and Jon, two friends from elementary school. Mike and I were Star Trek fans. Jon wasn’t anti-Trek, but didn’t really watch the show. After it ended, I excitedly said “Let’s stay and watch it again!”
Mike said “Yeah!”
Jon said “What? Why? No!”
Can you believe he was bored by the movie? The philistine!
When I watched again today I thought “Man, how could he not be bored by this?” It’s a fan service movie. There are ten minutes of gliding around the Enterprise so you can see the new design! No dialogue, no action, no plot development- just Kirk and Scotty slowly flying around the ship in a pod that looks like the eraser end of a pencil. Characters show up like you should already know them. And then: more slow flying, looking at stuff!
There’s a lot I enjoy in this. It gives us the theme, the new look (and accidentally the language) of Klingons, and some fun ship designs. It also easily could have been a single episode of a Trek show.
One more thing. This is the original poster for the movie:
Q: How is this poster like a chicken nugget?
A: It has no Bones!
DeForest Kelley must have been thrilled to be replaced by a newcomer.