You got to respect that Oz Perkins deserves to chuckle every now and again, although there is part of me who misses his typical atmosphere of deep, suffocating psychological dread from his previous films.  Maybe Nic Cage gave him some advice to try and have a little more fun.  And, suitably, Stephen King's "Monkey", a highlight from one of best anthologies Skeleton Crew, is a pretty silly tale at heart, divorced from King's similar sense of dread.  And Perkins' decision to make it a more flagrant farce, almost Raimi-esque, makes for an excellent contrast from something like Darabont's maximalist miserablism in his Mist (the other highlight from King's anthology), a film that could benefit from taking itself a lot less seriously.  I also imagine that Perkins' sardonic switch may be a result of some of the script's less necessary, and not entirely coherent, augmentations, like inventing a twin brother.  (Perkins is credited with the script, but he complained that a previous draft, which was given to him by the producers, was "too serious".)  Or maybe Perkins just wanted to piss off producer James Wan, a far-less accomplished film director, with no discernable sense of humor, but who still had the balls to give himself billing over Oz Perkins in the poster.

Plus, Oz Perkins had the good taste to give himself a choice role as an ill-fated uncle here.  His leery reaction to his nephew's emotional ourburst at a funeral is a perfect epitome of the film's rather perverse detatchment from any sincere emotional stakes.  Perkins still provides a number of striking shots and taut sequences, but it's not really much of a horror film.  That doesn't mean that it's not a lot of fun.

8/10





I guess this was a modest enough hit in theaters, because this week it was announced that WB will be allowing the small distributer, Ketchup Entertainment, to also release Coyote v. Acme, the other discarded production in WB's complete, even hostile, negligence towards its Looney Tunes properties.  (WB's MAX has also recently pulled all of the classic Looney Tunes cartoons off of their streaming platform.)

The good news is that we get to see these films at all, because WB had threatened to shelve them indefinitely, and The Day the Earth Blew Up is a perfectly charming throwback to the original Daffy/Porky cartoons of '38-41, where the more manic Daffy was truly looney and Porky was his long-suffering mild-mannered straight man.  Here, the pair find themselves at the center of an intergalactic plot involving zombies, chewing gum and an asteroid hurtling towards Earth.  WB apparently didn't want the film because they don't want to put any cartoons in theaters that they couldn't slap a 3D surcharge on, and these staunchly 2D filmmakers stood their ground.  I can suspect that the WB bosses were also unimpressed with the film's utter absence of marketing and merch opportunities, being content as it is to simply be a refreshing slice of popcorn entertainment.  It's pretty much the exact kind of film which modern studios most resent.

8/10
 

Yeah but which one’s hotter lol

This film is more limited than its confined premise - a taxi ride from JFK to midtown Manhattan - would suggest.  The script tends to slip into cliche, and it entertains some rather conservative sexual politics, but the worst is the ending which drags about five minutes too long into an epilogue dripping with stale sentimentality.  Despite all that though, the strength of the dual performances between Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson transcend these limitations more often than not and ultimately make the film worth watching.  Just turn it off after the tip though.

7/10




A ghost story from the perspective of the ghost, this film is more or less a cinematographic gimmick, although not a bad one on those terms.  It sure as hell is a lot better than something like Paranormal Activity.  Again, the script (from the always iffy David Koepp) is rather limited.  I can always admire Soderbergh for taking chances and seeking out films that allow him to expand his skill set.  This film will ultimately be considered one of his minor experiments.

7/10
 

Was scrolling quickly and mistook the poster for Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.

It becomes apparent pretty early on why this film, as superficially prestigious as it seems, has fallen out of popular film consciousness, hardly ever cited among Newman's work of the time.  The film (and original novel) seems aimed towards the Hitchcockian thriller, with a script from Ernest Lehman (North By Northwest), concerning political intrigue at the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm.  Director Mark Robson, a veteran of Val Lewton's thrillers (Seventh Victim, Ghost Ship, Bedlam) but would later be better known for such popular melodrams like Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls, proves to be no Hitchcock here.  The film's humor, for one thing, is very stale, very corny, certainly not as sly or dry as Hitchcock would have played it.  I can imagine why Hitchcock, who made The Birds in the same year, would have had little interest had he been offered the project.

Paul Newman is another complication.  Perhaps similar to his underwhelming turn in the later Hitchcock film Torn Curtain, Newman doesn't seem suitable in the Hitchcockian thriller leading man role.  He's even worse here.  Rather than relying on his own natural charm, his strained affectations as a drunk but charming intellectual novelist appear to be in pale imitation of a Cary Grant (again, the humor simply doesn't work), and Newman doesn't seem to have the confidence which elevated such contemporary roles in Hustler and Hud, more 'everyman' roles but both infused with his own brand of sharp wit.  Maybe Newman wouldn't be completely comfortable with his natural humor until later films like Harper, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy.  Or maybe the more formal theatrics of Robson and Lehman are simply not a good match for his strengths.

6/10




I haven't ventured into a whole lot of early Merchant/Ivory films, but for the esteemed filmmakers of later films (Room With a View, Remains of the Day) when the team would be synonymous with "prestige", I can only imagine that this film was an early mistep.  Some of the backstory suggests as much, with various edits and conflicted audience reactions.  The film's story is pretty slight.  James Coco plays a Fatty Arbuckle-type silent film comedian threatened with the arrival of "talkies", and decides to throw the "wild party" of the title in order to entice Hollywood investors and producers and keep his career alive.  This is one of those '70s films which is also nostalgically obsessed with the '20s-'30s era, and we get plenty of the era's music and dancing, only here with more drugs and nudity.  Ironically, Raquel Welch (who legendarily refused to ever go nude - for years holding the record for most expensive offer from Playboy) comes out the best in showcasing her dance/musical talents (and all the sexier for it).  But the rest of the film flounders into vacuous cliche, however risque it may have seemed at the time.  In fact, when I consider that this film was released the same year, just months prior, to the similarly set, similarly sexual and similar box office flop Inserts (which I wrote up a couple of months back), it's tempting to maybe place the blame on the more fatuous Wild Party for the ensuing failure of the more substanial and mature Inserts.  The number of other similar Depression Hollywood decadence films from the mid-'70s also suggest popular exhausion with the subgenre - Day of the Locust, Nickelodeon, Last Tycoon.  Wild Party would still amount to a pretty poor motion picture.  Presumably, the recent Babylon learned the hard way that audiences still don't really care.

The film collapses into pure ridiculousness by the end, but there's only one really truly distasteful aspect of the film's attempts to be edgy, which is by introducing Annette Ferra as a child dancer, no doubt in order to make the Arbuckle allusion more explicit, but it also makes the film extremely cringe-worthy.

5/10
 

Presence: Maybe somebody will one day take this decent idea of subverting ghost story tropes by letting the audience bear witness to family trauma through the vantage point of a haunting, because it doesn't work here at all. It needs a less slap dash script, or at least believable performances, or a sense of an actual reality that is being intruded upon to actually have any kind of impact. As it is, it's little more than a bad draught seeping into the house. Weak ass stuff, Soderberg.

And, yeah, The Menu was pretty bad too.

Ryan Coogler's dedication to period detail and cinematography is plenty handsome, ostentatious even, and Michael B. Jordan is fine in the dual twin brothers role (although Delroy Lindo is even better), but beyond the production excellence, there really isn't much of a script behind any of it.  For all of the projections of supposed social commentary, for what amounts to a Idlewild-cum-From Dusk Til Dawn remix, the film is not deep or subtle beyond the surface cultural signifiers (stereotypes?) it wears on its sleeve, and any deeper reading is foiled by some heavy-handed, and ultimately conservative, moralizing.  Enjoy the film for what it is - a rousing twist on Southern gothic mixed with action/horror tropes - but don't be fooled by what it is not - any meaningful comment on race, religion or culture.

7/10
 

Rock wrote:

I liked the movie, but some of the reactions where people are calling it one of the greatest movies they’ve ever seen and are going to see it multiple times in the theatre seem a little… performative.

Also the scene that everybody loves I found a little cheesy.

The history of music scene.  People are describing it as transcendent. Which, I dunno man.

Did Joe Don Baker manage to catch this before his demise?  One hopes.

Jeremy Saulnier is possibly the best young neo-noir filmmaker right now, capable of taut atmosphere and suspense, clean spatial action sequences and believable characters, while largely avoiding overly emotive cliche.  Here, the quietly intense Aaron Pierce runs afoul of a small-town police force - led by Don Johnson - in rural Louisiana while attempting to bail out his brother on a minor possession bust.  Things get worse pretty quickly.

Although the film never really lags, it does suffer the modern Netflix curse of being about 10-15 minutes too long.  The first 70 minutes, wed with the final half hour, are perfectly paced.

8/10