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.
I’d bet when they first started filming this project that they thought the meat of the movie would be Will & Harper interacting with other people, particularly their famous friends; there are a lot of cameos from SNL alumni. But those appearances are cut to almost nothing. The meat of this movie is Harper and Will breaking down how “regular” people react to Harper, and how she is learning to be herself in the real world after decades of trying to fit in by suppressing who she really is. Well worth watching.
If you have to start your movie by announcing you shot it on 35mm film, you aren’t putting any faith in the method you’ve chosen to record your film.
If you have a non-linear story line and you number the chapters in the order they appear in the linear timeline of the story instead of in the non-linear order they appear in the film, you aren’t putting any faith in your audience’s understanding of the film.
This one’s for the advertising department: If your marketing explicitly states “nothing is as it seems,” your audience is going to figure out a lot of the twists early, especially when the twists aren’t as twisty as you imply.
You might have read that and thought I didn’t like the film, but I mostly liked it. It’s worth seeing, if only for the breakfast scene (to say more about that would spoil the magic).
You have to love a movie that gives each band and song opening title credits that are as large as the ones for the actors. It make sense, since the music is more important than the plot. Also: the movie started with a card informing the viewer that the British version of the MPA gave it an X rating, which it earns with a single disconnected scene that features still images of very graphic sex.
Oh, and Sting has a couple scenes as a gas station attendant who likes the music of Gene Vincent.
There have been multiple attempts to make a Beetlejuice sequel, and the final result seems to have come from throwing all the different scripts into a blender. Tons of disconnected stories that go nowhere, and lots of lazy writing. Example: when explaining why Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin’s characters aren’t in the movie, Lydia (Winona Ryder) says “we found a loophole that let them move on.” They never explain the loophole or reference it again. Also: Jeffery Jones, convicted as a sex offender for soliciting pictures from kids, wasn’t invited back for the sequel, but an animated character that’s clearly based on him has a major scene, and his photo is prominently featured in several major scenes, including one where altar boys sing “Day-O” at his grave. Creepy.
It’s fun to watch the cast play off each other, but it would be a lot more fun if the story didn’t feel like it was written in one draft by a second year improv team.
Fun side note: I teach at Luther Burbank Middle School. Tim Burton went here. He was not a fan.
Lover of Men: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln
The idea that Lincoln was gay is hardly new (as the Log Cabin Republicans would tell you), and the subject is a compelling idea for a documentary, but this film just doesn’t work. It meanders all over the place. The music is distractingly syrupy. There are far too many long, slow tracking shots and soft focus, slow motion shots. A short, focused look at the sexuality of Lincoln would be much more compelling.
And a side note: Just because David Bowie had a gender fluid life doesn’t mean it makes sense for this movie’s poster to feature Lincoln’s face with the Aladdin Sane lightning bolt.
