Movie reviews

I went into Boot Riley’s I Love Boosters with some trepidation. Sorry to Bother You, Riley’s previous and first movie, felt so distinctive. So subversive, so slyly goofy, so warmly funny instead of resentful. It felt so much like one person’s voice, one person’s bottled-up inside joke finally escaping. How could Boots Riley possibly capture that same grinning lightning-in-a-bottle quality a second time? Surely he’d written and directed his masterpiece and from there on out, it would be iterations or sophomore efforts all the way? What could possibly top LaKeith Stanfield’s rap performance for Armi Hammer, which has aged in such wonderfully uncomfortable ways since 2018? 

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Her life is a fairy tale, the music insists. She strolls from room to room, her visage fixed and ghastly, a lipsticked rictus struggling to assert humanity with its rigid approximation of warmth. Her halting and barely comprehending voiceover mimics intimation in jagged English. Everyone surrounding her is anxious and tentative, showing her fabrics and dishware and deference, a hushed cadre of aides and security, caterers and tailors, servers, servants, attendants all. She is the center of everything, uncaring, grotesquely regal, a gaudy reminder of something we thought had washed away long ago, now discovered clinging to the shoe of history. The tailor retreats behind a curtain to fetch something else and now a Laotian immigrant speaks about coming to America. Melania, who wore a jacket emblazoned with the words “I really don’t care” to a child immigrant detention center, waits through the woman’s too many words. Her eyes, holding back daggers, flick to an aide off-camera: how much longer will this take?

Her father’s handheld camera pokes in like a court jester with nothing to say because it’s all already too ridiculous anyway. Brett Ratner cuts to some faded family photos in ornate frames pretending classiness. Michael Mann’s longtime cinematographer Dante Spinotti angles into the light to break out a spangle of celebratory lens flare. The music reminds you it’s all as magical as a goddamn fairy tale. You don’t even know, it patters. You can’t even believe. Absolute fucking magic, it moans, whorishly brittle and insistent, into your ear.

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Why do some people love sausages and other people hate sausages? No fucking reason. 

–Rubber, by Quentin Dupieux

Absurdism is the sausage made by feeding European flesh into the machinery of industrial slaughter. Before World War I, it had found expression among various high-falutin’ philosophers who explained that searching for meaning is futile. All is vanity, etc. But the horrors of World War I cultivated a global zeitgeist, kicking off the celebration of the non sequitur as a learned response to enormity. It was all the rage on French stages. The sort of thing you might learn in Paris, like drinking absinthe. Which is probably why I first encountered it doing student theater. You give a student a stage and some actors, and there’s no telling what kind of nonsense they’re going to make happen. Genet, Ionesco, Sartre. Then absinthe at cast parties.

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Seven-year-old Tommy Chick was drunk with excitement at the prospect of seeing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It would be on Wonderful World of Disney, channel 7, this Sunday night. For as long as he could remember, he had doodled pictures of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, often in the clutches of a giant squid. And at last, it was going to play out before his very eyes!

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As Killian Maddox strolls out into the parking lot with his groceries, his mind squirms with the enormity of what-ifs and could-haves. If only he had… What might have happened if… It could have been that… But out of the turmoil, he comes to a decision and a halt, all at once. A car’s tires screech mildly, followed by the unmistakable car-on-car tump of a fender bender. 

Surely the sound effect is something Magazine Dreams director Elijah Bynum added in post-production. The timing is just too perfect. It happens exactly as Killian makes his decision. The effect onscreen is almost invisible, but it’s there: Maddox’s resolve has all the force and nuance of a minor car accident.

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Anemone establishes itself vividly, confidentally, and almost entirely non-verbally. A man prays and then leaves his family on an urgent mission. Another man waits alone in a remote cabin, clutching a nearby axe when he hears a noise at the door. The stakes seem high, the tension almost unbearable, the characters grimly determined. Something desperate is afoot. A suicide mission, a sleeper cell, a secret plot? Rain and violence are in the air in equal measure. Anemone is a movie about an approaching storm.

But when the clouds finally burst, part of the revelation is that this boldly directed movie is built on a facile script. The collapse is so disappointing that it’s hard to believe the writer is also the director. Ronan Day-Lewis shows a keen understanding of cinametic language, so why doesn’t he understand that his story is so pedestrian? How can someone so comfortable with sweeping grand imagery and bold symbolism resort to such threadbare melodrama? As Anemone gets down to the business of revealing its characters’ motivations and resolving their dramatic conflicts, it’s sense of ingenuity and daring falls away. What’s left is the stuff of workaday TV. The Day-Lewis heir has no clothes. 

What a terrible waste of Daniel Day-Lewis, our director and screenwriter’s father, returning to acting after nearly ten years away. To his credit, he throws himself into the maudlin monologues and pointless fisticuffs. He gamely rolls around in the narrative and the literal mud, bring the same ferocity he showed in There Will Be Blood, treating the material as seriously as if this were a Lincoln biopic, committing himself as madly as if he were wearing a tophat in a Martin Scorsese movie. And Sean Bean keeps pace with him faithfully, both men wearing their years proudly, looking every inch the grizzled veterans they are. Samantha Morton eats from a bag of crisps as well as either of them. There are also a couple of younger actors.

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It should be no surprise that Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl, which she co-wrote with Sean Baker, has the same energetic ebullience and aching empathy as Baker’s movies: Tangerine, Florida Project, Red Rocket, Anora. It’s also grounded in the same social realism, which again, is no surprise; Baker and Tsou have been collaborating for over 20 years. But whereas Baker’s movies explore Americana, Left-Handed Girl is the story of a plucky family moving to Taipei, the cramped bustling capital of Taiwan to escape…something. What seems at first like an Asian Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore turns out to be so much more.

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It’s no revelation that some old timey songs can have a sinister subtext. One of my many issues with Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, a predictable and ultimately pedestrian mystery, is how coy she seems to think she’s being with her old timey public-domain soundtrack. For instance, the movie opens with the music to “Where or When”, an innocuous little Rodgers and Hart ditty about deja vu. The main characters are literally driving in a circle. Peggy Lee begins singing eventually: 

It seems we stood and talked like this before
We looked at each other in the same way then
But I can’t remember where or when

Then an earthquake cuts her off. What could it mean?

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Director Jaume Collet-Serra gave the original Orphan the Hitchcockian touches it needed to be more than just a throwaway evil kid movie. And it had a great cast. Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga know what they’re doing. But what made Orphan stand out was Isabelle Fuhrman’s performance. She was a new kind of evil kid. So innocent looking, of course, but so off-kilter with the Little Bo Peep ruffled dresses, the lace choker and ribbons around her wrists, and the Estonian accent. Who even knows what an Estonian accent sounds like? But the diminutive Miss Fuhrman — she was 11 years old when they shot Orphan in 2006 — was a powerhouse, and she carried the movie with ease. (To see her carry another movie, check out The Novice from 2021. She shows off a physical intensity you usually only get with action movies and fight scenes.)

So it’s great that she’s back in an Orphan sequel, right? Well, kind of. Since her character died at the end of the first movie, this has to be a prequel. But the actress is an adult now, so how can she play Esther, who is a couple years younger than she was in the original? I mean, yeah, the twist is that she’s a grown woman trapped in a child’s body, but no one would look at Isabelle Fuhrman today and mistake her for an eleven-year-old child, much less a nine-year-old child.

So Orphan: First Kill made the, uh, interesting decision to cheat.

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Hmm, something called Interceptor on Netflix. Here we go again, another half-assed action movie for their roster. I’m sure I’ll have completely forgotten about by the time it’s over, if not sooner.

Except that’s not what happened at all.

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The wrong way to watch Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of the 1946 novel Nightmare Alley is by reading the book first. Because then you’ll be one of those tedious “the book was better…!” people. Instead, just watch it as the elaborate period piece it is, none the wiser as to the missed opportunities and pulled punches. In fact, you should probably stop reading here, because I made the mistake of reading the book so this is a review by one of those tedious “the book was better…!” people. 

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When David Cronenberg adapted James Ballard’s car crash fetish novel, Crash, he made a movie about a bunch of weirdos I couldn’t possibly understand. Mainly because they seemed like nonsense ideas rather than actual people. Do actual people bond over recreations of famous car crash fatalities? Is there really a shadowy underground network that stages these things and then they all have sex with each other after they’ve evaded the cops? Are Rosanna Arquette’s leg braces supposed to somehow make her more or less hot? And do Canadians really say “penis” and “semen” when they’re doing dirty talk? Watching Crash was like accidentally stumbling into a Reddit group for some fetish that I never knew existed.  

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I’ve spent decades denigrating the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre as artless trash.  I’m not sure when I first saw it.  Probably in college, sometime around 1990.  That was also the last time I saw it.  Since then, I’ve seen Tobe Hooper’s other movies.  I’ve rewatched Invaders from Mars, Lifeforce, Eaten Alive, Funhouse, and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel in the last few years, and they’re all varying degrees of horrible (the conventional wisdom about Poltergeist, which is still great, is that Spielberg actually directed it).  It’s been my assertion all along that Tobe Hooper is a terrible director, and although there might be something raw and effective in his first movie, it’s artless trash.  

I was wrong.  So egregiously wrong.

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We can’t be letting city-slicker criminals murder kids out in the woods.  It’s just not right.  Fortunately, there are salt-of-the-earth outdoorsman types doing their part, some of whom are even ladies!  I consider this a subgenre in thrillers.  Movie about criminals in tracts of wilderness going up against people who are better than them at camping and whatnot.

For instance, Those Who Wish Me Dead, a thriller directed by Taylor Sheridan, a square-jawed TV actor who apparently had a drawer full of scripts.  

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I don’t mean to belittle dumb movies.  Some of my favorite movies are dumb.  But Godzilla vs. Kong is steeped in a special kind of concentrated studio inanity.  It stinks of dumb.  It is the most profoundly stupid “vs.” movie since Batman vs. Superman.  It’s not even worthy of Syfy’s Animal X vs. Animal Y movies, which can at least pretend they’re being deliberately campy.  Godzilla vs. Kong is so profoundly dumb that it doesn’t even know it’s dumb.

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