COYOTE VS. ACME

Directing: B
Acting: B-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects / Animation: B+

There will never be another Who Framed Roger Rabbit, though multiple attempts have been made over the 38 years since that movie marked a pivotal point in film history. They have consistently failed to replicate that success, but it could be argued that Coyote vs. Acme comes the closest. It’s not a very high bar to clear, really, but this script, by May December writer Samy Burch (sharing story credit with James Gunn and Jeremy Slater), is surprisingly clever, and delivers pretty consistent laughs and chuckles. It might give you just the right amount of tickle.

Are the inevitable comparisons to Who Framed Roger Rabbit unfair? Maybe, but that was a film that pushed the industry forward with unprecedented technical accomplishment while also being both visually and narratively inventive. Coyote vs. Acme is made in an almost identical style, with cartoon characters existing in real-world environments alongside human characters. It does not, however, push the industry forward or feature unprecedented technical accomplishments.

And no one’s asking it to, for the record. But it’s hard not to feel like just a little something is missing, mostly due to pacing that would have done well to inch a little closer to that of actual Warner Brothers cartoons. It doesn’t have to be wall-to-wall zany, but the pace could be picked up a bit. With just a little bit more energy—Will Forte’s lazy-loser personal accident lawyer character Kevin Avery doesn’t exactly help things on that front—and some punch-ups with more gags in every scene, this could have been a modern classic.

Instead, Coyote vs. Acme exists in movie lore more as the movie that fans brought back from the dead: director Dave Green shot this in 2022; Warner Brothers announced in 2023 that they were canceling release of the completed film in order to claim a $30 million tax credit; controversy ensued, and after a sale to independent film distributor Ketchup Entertainment, it now has a wide release, four years after principal photography wrapped.

Was it worth the wait? I can’t help but mention Who Framed Roger Rabbit again, because that is a special film with historic importance. I would be hard pressed to call Coyote vs. Acme special, but it’s undeniably fun, and I was happy to have seen it. This is a world in which the rules of cartoon character existence are not really explored; they just exist matter-of-factly alongside humans. They hold jobs, they have opinions, some of them (like, say, a single-minded coyote desperately trying to catch a Road Runner) have clear purpose. And they consistently sideswipe the audience with left-field cartoon gags.

This is essentially a “real world” with cartoon rules, in which Acme is a giant corporation whose products never work—at least, not when cartoons use them. You name it, Wile E. Coyote has used an Acme version of it in his attempts to catch the Road Runner, and if you’ve ever watched Road Runner cartoons, you know he always fails. Enter Kevin Avery, who takes on Coyote as a client and sues Acme for all their defective products. Eventually this becomes a cartoon version of a court drama, which brings its own set of absurdist gags (including Luis Guzmán as the judge). Witnesses include CEO Foghorn Leghorn (voiced by Eric Bauza, as one of ten different cartoon characters here) and Head of PR Tasmanian Devil (Jim Cummings); John Cena plays Acme lawyer Buddy Crane, in honestly kind of a nothing part that could have been given far more humor but is never all that funny.

It’s always a delight to see monotone queen Martha Kelly, though; she plays one of Avery’s law office staff somehow with more verve than anyone else in the room besides Coyote. Coyote vs. Acme would have benefitted from more compelling human characters for sure, but its commitment to old-school Warner Brothers cartoon silliness still makes it pretty entertaining. The animation itself isn’t anything new or impressive, but the integration into real-world footage is well done. I’m not sure anyone is going to remember this film years down the road, but they’ll have an undeniably good time while watching it.

Look at all those drawn faces.

Overall: B

MUTINY

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Jason Statham and Gerard Butler should get together and do a movie about a survivalist ex-military man seeking vengeance against terrorists in the middle of a natural disaster. These guys have never worked together, but they have worked with multiple same directors: Ric Roman Waugh (Greenland, Shelter); Jean-François Richet (Plane, Mutiny). So what are they waiting for?

The idiocy of Greenland: Migration (also directed by Waugh) notwithstanding, I seem to have a thing for these guys’ movies—quite literal B-movies in every respect, I tend to give them solid B grades (spoiler alert: it’s what I give Mutiny), because they are exactly what they state themselves to be, and thus solidly deliver on expectations. Mutiny is merely the latest in a line of these, the second by Statham this year alone, after Shelter. Last year we got A Working Man (the weakest of this recent stretch—not quite a B for that one); the year before that, the one that launched this stretch of Statham movies and still my favorite (albeit also getting a solid B): The Beekeeper.

I do wish the rest of these movies were more like The Beekeeper: self-aware, sprinkled with effective humor, leaning into its own preposterousness. I liked Mutiny a bit more than I expected, but was still slightly disappointed at its self-seriousness. We’re all here to see Jason Statham shoot a bunch of bad guys in the head, I get it, but would it hurt to make it a little more fun? I guess Statham is just cranking these out for a regular paycheck, and I don’t begrudge him that. I suppose my plea is more for the directors and writers. Beekeeper writer Kurt Wimmer has not written any of these other movies, and someone needs to pick up the phone and call him again. Apparently he wrote The Beekeeper 2, coming out next year, so that’s promising, at least.

As for Mutiny, I’ll give Jean-François Richet credit for pacing, and maybe most surprising of all, restraint. There is plenty of engaging action in this movie, but it’s not wall-to-wall with it; we actually get some semblance of a story. Statham’s ex-cop, Cole Reed, has been working for shipping company magnate Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram) for five years, and they’ve become close friends. Reed is even declared “family” by Campallo, who is retiring and handing the company off to his son, Kameron Campallo (Chaneil Kular). While Reed is driving Tibu home, they are ambushed—the first exciting action sequence in the film—and the rest of the film follows Reed’s quest for vengeance against the perpetrators.

Most of this happens on a container ship, making Mutiny feel like Captain Phillips if it were a dumb action movie. It’s not like we’ve never seen action sequences among shipping containers before, but having it be the setting of three quarters of the movie does lend it a small bit of novelty. We also get one female lead, Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis), a KMG employee forced to report to this ship at the last minute who is evidently the only crew member not in on the whole human trafficking scheme that is ultimately revealed. As the sole female principal cast member, Mutiny is far from passing the Bechdel test, but I’ll give the movie points for not putting romance anywhere in the story, and for making Ellis herself an ex-Navy woman who is more than capable and never needs saving.

So really, we get to watch Statham and Wallis kick a bunch of guys’ asses for a bit more than an hour, all on a container ship. It’s what I expected from this movie, it’s what I wanted, and it’s what it gave me. There’s also the primary villain in the ship’s captain, Marko Madsen (Roland Møller), who might be taking orders from a guy orchestrating all this, but he’s also the guy we all know Statham will have a final, climactic square-off with. Sure, this could just be called “Die Hard on a container ship,” but formulas are followed because they work.

It’s when people try to get too cute or complicated with formulas when they stop working. That’s where these movies smartly refuse to go. They are clearly mid-tier, mid-budget, and employ mid-level movie stars, but a movie like Mutiny is truly making the most of what it has to work with, sometimes slightly clever with its action sequences but never getting out over its skis with that cleverness. Statham’s final hand-to-hand battle is not wildly inventive, but is just inventive enough, as with the rest of the movie, to keep you inching closer to the edge of your seat. It’s why I keep going to these movies, even though they aren’t great—they’re not just good enough, but consistently so. If “working class action” is its own subgenre, Jason Statham was born to play in it.

Okay, fine: this makes her look like a woman in need of protecting. Blame the people who selected available screen shots! These two are equally capable of kicking ass, take my word for it.

Overall: B

TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

I’m starting to feel trolled by writer-director Jane Schoenbrun. Like, I’m not sure I will ever fully get their work—and maybe that’s exactly what they want? To say Schoenbrun’s latest two films have been wildly critically acclaimed would be an understatement; the cinephiles over on Letterboxd are not far behind. But, I was largely baffled by I Saw the TV Glow in 2024, and now feel a bit more of a direct connection to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which has a lot of similarities, is overall a bit more straightforward, and then veers toward the end into similarly surreal directions.

If nothing else, Schoenbrun clearly has a thing for 80s and 90s TV and movies, I Saw the TV Glow being about an obsession with a 90s TV show, and this one about an obsession with a long-running slasher movie franchise spawned in the 80s. In the world of Teenage Sex and Death, the Camp Miasma series is meant to have existed right alongside the likes of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and also similarly stretched well into the following decades with endless sequels and reboots, with diminishing returns. The opening credits are incredibly economical storytelling, the camera passing over a series of newspaper clippings about franchise stars, new movies, and “woke” reactions to the earlier films—particularly an overtly transphobic scene in the first one.

The villain in Camp Miasma is a person with a sort of helmet made of concentric squares that look like those of an air conditioning vent. This seems far less functional for a serial killer than even a hockey mask, but whatever. In the franchise world, this villain’s name is The Little Death. I can’t tell whether Schoenbrun is being tongue-in-cheek or deliberately on the nose here: the French phrase for an orgasm, la petite mort, literally translates to “the little death.” There’s a moment when all these old slasher movies are described as “about two things: flesh, and fluids.”

Much of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma feels like Schoenbrun fucking with us. The protagonist, Kris (Hannah Einbinder, great as always), is a filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the Camp Miasma franchise. She has driven to the middle of nowhere to meet with the “final girl” from the first film, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson, always a welcome presence), who never appeared in any of the sequels and now lives as a recluse. Kris feels that a meeting about potential collaboration will “unlock” her vision for a new film. Anyway, in one of Teenage Sex and Death’s best scenes, Kris is on a group video call from her car with several studio people, who go out of their way to oversimplify this vision: “It’s meta!” No, it’s not meta. “It’s allegorical!” No, it’s not allegorical. Except that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is so obviously meta—particularly in this very scene, when Kris literally says, “If anything, you are all characters in a movie!”—and allegorical. There’s another scene in which Billy Presley complains about how the Camp Miasma movies are discussed in such academic ways, and if this movie isn’t academic, then I don’t know what it is.

It may yet be that I don’t quite know what it is. This is apparently Jane Schoenbrun’s M.O. And by the end of Teenage Sex and Death, which is very much about both of those things but also adult sex and death, and transcending both sexual and gender repression, it becomes the very thing it is examining, all while sticking firmly to its allegory. I mean, as far as I can tell.

The key difference between Teenage Sex and Death and I Saw the TV Glow is that I was far more taken with this movie. I found it far more narratively inviting, even as it gets a little gonzo-weird in its final act. Gillian Anderson is excellent as Billy Presley, even as the film quite directly acknowledges, not once but twice, the character’s obvious similarity to Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond. Normal Desmond deluded herself into thinking she was still in the movies she used to make, but Billy Presley actually is.

It seems important to mention the transgender elements of this movie, which were an even bigger part of I Saw the TV Glow, in ways I wondered if I just could not quite get because I do no identify as trans myself. Schoenbrun uses the “Little Death” character itself to represent transness here, which felt to me a bit like a mixing of metaphors. I’m not sure if Schoenbrun intends for their work to be impenetrably academic, but it’s not difficult to imagine these films being analyzed to the hilt in Queer Studies courses. Maybe I’m just not smart enough, and perhaps I should sit in on one of these classes and have the with-it youth explain it to me.

If nothing else, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is well-acted, well-shot, and makes effective use of an obviously limited budget for its effects shot, which sometimes look like matte paintings but in a clearly intended way. Even with all its bonkers surrealism that got very close to losing me, the narrative kept me compelled—and, not for nothing, but people coming to this just for the slasher elements will get something way different from what they bargained for, but still get plenty of scenes of excessive and cartoonish violence and blood. As already noted, it’s about flesh and fluids, and in the end, how cinema historically stimulated those two things.

It’s not quite an orgasmic experience but it’s fun to watch someone else aspire to it.

Overall: B

SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B

I can’t for the life of me figure out why there seems to be this unwritten rule these days that superhero movies need to be two and a half hours long. It’s bad enough we’re all obligated to sit through the credits in order to see a tacked-on scene at the end; they have to make the movie over-long as well? Side note: the post-credits “scene” in Spider-Man: Brand New Day is arguably the lamest moment in the movie. I really didn’t think it was worth waiting for.

Was the rest of the movie worth sitting through? I guess. It was fine. There’s something to be said for Tom Holland in the role that made him a star (and no other role he’s ever had came even close to having the same effect), and the undeniable chemistry that he has with Zendaya, one of the most gifted actors alive. There’s even a kind of comfort in seeing Jacob Batalon yet again as Peter Parker’s friend Ned, even though, like all of them, he is noticeably older, and there’s been an understandable about of chatter regarding how the dynamics of Spider-Man change when he and his friends are no longer teenagers. He even says at one point in this movie, “I’m not in high school anymore.”

It would seem, however, that Marvel Studios have backed themselves into a corner, with this insistence on connective tissue, even after their content has long since saturated the market. The Spider-Man character does have a kind of appeal that is broader than most other superheroes, and as series fourth-installments go, this one actually is pretty entertaining and charming. It’s also over-stuffed, with not just John Bernthal as The Punisher, but Florence Pugh as “Thunderbolt” Yelena Belova, here using a sauna as her office; Michael Mando as The Scorpion, a bit under-used; Tramell Tillman as Head of Department of Damage Control Bill Metzger; The Bear’s Tramell Tillman as Detective Jean DeWolff, who seems to serve as replacement for JK Simmons in the previous three films (The Daily Bugle doesn’t even get mentioned here); and even Marissa Tomei in enough flashback scenes to land her eighth-billing in the credits.

And none of those are even the primary villain in this movie, played by Sadie Sink, her character being apparently such a spoiler that I won’t name her here, even though it’s also widely known. Suffice it to say she serves as even more connective tissue for the broader MCU narrative going forward, in a way many Marvel fans are thrilled about and I’m just like: okay, whatever, fine. I will say it’s a fascinating pivot to see one of those movies have a tiny, 24-year-old young woman as one of the most powerful villains ever.

“Most powerful” is always relative, of course. Mark Ruffalo also returns as Bruce Banner, AKA The Hulk, who is evidently indestructible whenever he’s Hulking out. This has always been my problem with superhero movies, and Marvel movies in particular: the characters are effectively gods, which saps them of any need for emotional investment. At least Peter Parker is undergoing an evolution of his powers this time around, which leaves him unmoored and vulnerable. Somewhat ironically, this aspect of the store is also underdeveloped, because writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers—who also wrote all three of the previous Spider-Man movies—had to pack so much shit in there.

It’s worth noting that the first three Spider-Man movies were all released two years apart: 2017, 2019, and 2021. I found the first two to be pretty generic superhero movies, but the third one, No Way Home, ran with the “Spider-verse” concept and became a cultural moment the likes of which Marvel had not seen since 2019 in Avengers: Endgame, and has not seen again since. And it’s been five years—half a decade—since No Way Home was released. That movie was a pretty spectacular climax a trilogy that would have been well served to be left alone; Brand New Day was reportedly intended to be the first in a new trilogy. Holland is a charismatic performer, but how many of these movies do we need? Not counting other Marvel movies the character appeared in, there have now been 11 of these movies in the past 24 years.

All this is to say, Brand New Day is at multiple disadvantages. In addition to how much older Peter Parker is, it’s inevitably a bit of a comedown after the thrill of how surprisingly well-constructed No Way Home was. Brand New Day will make a shit ton of money, which is precisely why they keep making these movies, but it never had any hope of living up to what came before it. So, it evidently doesn’t even try. There’s nothing especially clever about the story here, and getting back to the point of its excessive run time, it makes the inevitable mistake of engaging far too long with chaotic, CGI-fight battles. The visual effects aren’t terrible in this movie, but neither are they great.

It’s the cast that elevates the material. Holland and Zendaya are plainly irresistible screen presences, and most of the rest of the cast have complentary charisma (though I must admit The Punisher as a character does little for me). This is a movie that isn’t anything special, but neither does it disappoint. I got about what I expected out of it. I suppose enough other people will feel the same way to justify its existence.

Why don’t you just straight up rip off Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse while you’re at it?

Overall: B

MADDIE'S SECRET

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: A-

I am left a little bemused by Maddie’s Secret, an elaborate and sharply observed homage to 80s and 90s “movies of the week” set in the world of modern social media food content production—in which first-time feature writer and director John Early cast himself in the title role. As a straight, cisgender woman. In which he almost totally plays it straight.

In short: I don’t get it. Why was it necessary for him to cast himself in this part? It’s not like he’s channeling Divine—or even John Travolta—here; there is no camp to be found, although ironically I suspect John Waters would love this movie. Would it play differently had Early actually cast a woman in the part of Maddie? I can’t imagine the act of homage and the very subtle satire here would be particularly different in that case. So what was the point, then, aside from the fact that it gets more people talking about the movie?

And here’s the weirdest part. Early is good in this role. It actually doesn’t take very long to just accept him as this character, in spite of facial structure and detectable Adam’s apple, which are fairly obscured by the 38-year-old Early’s enviable softness of skin. When Early presents as himself, he presents as pretty culturally “male,” but he can shift into zones of androgyny with unparalleled ease. He speaks with a soft voice as Maddie, and surrounds himself with quite a number of women in supporting parts—even more than male parts. Every one of them seems to understand the assignment, even if I don’t.

The thing is, as good as Early is, I was still regularly thinking about the fact that this was a self-identified man playing the part of a woman. This could only take me out of the story at regular intervals, even though the superb production is just as committed to the loving homage of the TV movies of our childhood as, say, Far From Heaven was committed to the loving homage of Douglas Sirk films. The key difference is that it’s a bit easier to take the characters in Far From Heaven seriously, since it makes no anachronistic casting choices.

I keep thinking of Divine and John Travolta, who were cisgender men playing the part of cisgender women in John Waters films, and the presentation was similar in that they played it straight—but, those movies were far more heightened than this one, under the direction of a man who practically invented camp. John Early is working far more subtly, even if the final product is still heightened. Maddie works as a dishwasher where chefs record themselves cooking original recipes, and when she quickly becomes a viral star after posting some food content of her own, the suppressed eating disorder from her childhood begins to resurface.

Early is 12 years younger than I am, but I can remember the very movies he’s referencing here. I can remember watching TV movies about women with bulimia, and their exaggerated close-ups of them binge-eating before purging seared themselves into my memory. Seeing similar scenes in Maddie’s Secret (which are done shockingly few times, only once or twice) brought those memories right back, which I suspect was by design. There was a moment during this film that I thought: Is this movie going to take a turn? I thought, maybe it will suddenly get truly wild. It never quite does, though. Early has a stupendous hold on the fine line of tone that he was clearly going for here, and he consistently gives us just a taste of the melodrama without ever truly taking it over the top.

Does any of that qualify as something to recommend Maddie’s Secret, though? This is where I struggle. Were I to tell you that you should see this movie, I would struggle to tell you why—even though so much of it is so finely attuned, so competently put together. Is it funny, at least? Not really; that doesn’t seem to be what Early was going for, although there were a couple of moments that got me laughing pretty hard. They almost felt accidental, even though they were clearly very precisely constructed. I suppose, if pressed, I could say Maddie’s Secret is worth watching for the marvel of how Early basically disappears into a role that, by his own assertion, is not drag. Honestly it’s not campy enough to be drag. It has no connection to trans people, either, which puts this film into a deeply niche space that defies categorization.

Will I ever watch this again? I will forever be impressed by the perfectly imperfect flyaways of Early’s blonde wig, but nevertheless: not likely. Early has long been a peculiar performer for whom a choice like this weirdly makes sense, but I’m going to have to spend some more time pondering whether the final product makes much sense for the rest of us.

It’s not much of a secret anymore.

GAIL DAUGHTRY AND THE CELEBRITY SEX PASS

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

When a movie knowingly leans into how dumb it is, it’s always a tricky prospect, a truly fine line between genuinely entertaining and outright embarrassing. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass walks that line, with humor that lands maybe half the time. It does find its footing, at the very least, and eventually I was laughing pretty regularly in spite of how embarrassed I was for everyone involved.

There’s a sort of built-in defense of a movie like this “But that’s the point!” Well, the point only means something if it actually works, and unfortunately the first act works less than the rest of the movie does, which makes it easy to see audiences checking out early. I’m not sure it would even mean much if I assured you it’s worth the wait, especially since even I found it barely worth the wait, but there remains the fact that I did.

Honestly, either you’re going to be up for a deeply silly movie like Gail Daughtry or you’re not. The tone is set immediately, when only minutes after Gail (Zoey Deutch) and her husband Tom Soursap McNoodleman (get it??—played by Michael Cassidy) agree on who their celebrity sex passes are, Tom has sex with Jennifer Aniston in the back room of a stop on her cook book tour in Kansas City. And therein lies the premise telegraphed by the movie’s title: the only way to even the score is for Gail to travel to Los Angeles with her bisexual hairdresser colleague and friend, Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) and have sex with her celebrity sex pass, John Hamm.

I will credit Gail Daughtry with this, my favorite thing about it: this is a movie with real affection for all of its incredibly dumb characters. In someone else’s hands, this movie would find ways to poke fun at Kansas City as much as it does Los Angeles and the people who live there, and it really does neither; not one of these characters is ever individually the butt of the joke. These are all people who are naive and yet somehow things keep working out for them, right down to a couple of Midwesterners who consistently meet Angelinos who are happy to help Gail in her quest to bed John Hamm. The more this aspect of the movie becomes clear, the more enjoyable it becomes.

Said Angelinos, by the way, include John Slattery, here depicted as a washed up actor who hasn’t had any work since he costarred with Hamm in Mad Men—which ended in 2015. He’s actually been in lots of stuff since then, but that’s not the point. Slattery is actually one of the principals in this film, but Jennifer Aniston is the first of countless, major cameos that might make one wonder how the hell whoever directed this managed to get them all on board. Well, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is directed and cowritten by David Wain, who happened to direct and co-write the 2001 film Wet Hot American Summer. And that film featured the much younger Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, and Michael Ian Black; he later directed the 2012 film Wanderlust, which featured both Rudd and Aniston. Guess who all appear briefly in Gail Daughtry? And this just scratches the surface of the wall-to-wall cameos here. This guy clearly has some pull, and tons of people are perfectly happy to appear in his new movie, even if maybe they don’t know whether it’s great or just . . . kind of fine.

Wain eventually draws an unsubtle parallel with The Wizard of Oz, slotting Hamm into the role of the Wizard—sort of. Gail is a kind of Dorothy (oh, did I mention Gail is from Kansas City?), and she assembles a ragtag group of friends, which includes Caleb (Ben Wang), the overly ambitious guy from Creative Arts Agency; Vincent the papparazzo (Ken Marino) who’s “white whale” happens to be a candid shot of John Hamm; and of course, John Slattery. This movie, of course, needs some knowingly contrived villains, which include Italian actress Sabrina Impacciatore as Ludovica, who is awaiting delivery of a suitcase full of all the paperwork plans for taking down the global financial system; and her two henchmen, played by Niccolo (Mather Zickel) and Sergio (Joe Lo Truglio, also a David Wain mainstay who was in all the aforementioned of his films).

While we get ridiculously pointless voiceover narration by Frank the Mailman (Fred Melamed), the evil Ludovica’s briefcase of paperwork is the subject of a mixup that serves as the plot’s deliberately flimsy excuse for finally getting Gail and John Hamm in the same room together. How does that happen, you might wonder? Aside from knowing it veers between comic sex and comic violence as a bit of spice sprinkled on all the cheese, you’ll have to watch the movie! Just go in with fairly low expectations, fully expect it to marinate in its own cornball sensibilities, and you’ll have a pleasant enough time. I did, and eventually found myself cackling in an otherwise empty movie theater. I just had to get to the point where I could surrender myself to what this movie was doing, and then it kind of worked out.

Midwestern hairdressers on a mission in Los Angeles just can’t help but to have fun with it all.

Overall: B

PRESSURE

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

It’s been said that Brendan Fraser is miscast as General Dwight D. Eisenhower in Pressure, a movie about how much the weather forecast went into play with the timing of D-Day, the 1994 invasion of Nomandy, France, which laid the foundation for victory over the Nazis. Look up photos of Eisnehower, and he looks a bit old and just this side of frail, almost too thin for his uniform. Ironically, Eisenhower was 53 years old on June 6, 1944 (spoiler alert! D-Day didn’t happen on June 5 as originally scheduled), and yet Fraser cuts a far more imposing figure at age 57, and a heigh of 6’3” as opposed to Eisenhower’s 5’10”. And to all this, I say: so what? If you’re bitching about how little Brendan Fraser actually resembles Eisenhower then you don’t understand how movies work. Just shave the man’s head and you’re good to go.

It’s the story that matters anyway, and how many people going to see Pressure are going to be hung up on what the real people the actors are playing actually looked like? Andrew Scott plays James Stagg, the Scottish meteorologist who made the critical weather forecast, and he’s far better looking than the real Stagg was. You don’t see me complaining!

Indeed, I have no complaints at all about Pressure, really, which is as down-the-middle an entertainment as you can get. There’s nothing in it particularly worth raving about, either; it just works. Your dad will like it. Your grandpa will like it. I liked it! If the two women in the aisle behind me are any indication, old ladies will like it. Possibly they loved it: they actually applauded when the movie ended, and this was in a theater with maybe fifteen people in the audience.

I suppose you could say they’re running out of the seemingly endless stories that have been told about World War II over the past eighty years—now they’re talking about the weather? Well, as we were informed in ending title cards, when Eisenhower was asked what gave us the edge on D-Day, he replied that was had better meteorologists than the Germans. Why not tell that story?

To be fair, the script, by David Haig and Anthony Maras and based on a stage play of the same name by David Haig, is pretty standard and by-the-numbers. I do find myself wondering how the play could possibly have been as fun to look at as the film with all its shots of stormy weather. Anyway, Stagg is the “genius” meteorologist recommended by Winston Churchill; Chris Messina steps in as Irving Krick, the antagonist American meteorologist who ignorantly insists that historical “analog” weather patterns are enough to be convincing forecasts. He’s very obstinate about this, because he has such a long track record of being right; he’s told more than once that the regions in which this worked so well for him have no relevance to the unpredictable weather patterns of Northern Europe. But does he listen? Of course not! We have a dramatic story to unfold here!

And that’s fine, I was into it. You go into this kind of movie knowing what to expect, and it delivers exactly that. It’s got a cast exclusively of men except for the one woman played solidly by Kerry Condon as Eisenhower’s secretary, and Tamsin Topolski as Stagg’s pregnant wife, who serves no purpose except to flesh out Stagg himself as a character. Otherwise this is entirely a men’s story, and that’s also fine given what the story and setting are. If “dad-core” were a genre, Pressure would be a prime example. There’s no need for you to see it in theaters, really, but you could do worse than to look for it eventually on one of your streamers. Watch it with your parents, you’ll all have a fine time.

Brendan Fraser is so dedicated, that’s his real scalp!

Overall: B

I LOVE BOOSTERS

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B

I Love Boosters is only the second feature film by writer-director-producer Boots Riley; the first came eight years ago, Sorry to Bother You, a movie I struggled to connect to or make sense of. I Love Boosters is largely more of the same, but at least I can make slightly more sense of it. “Slightly” is the operative word here.

Riley is clearly a guy with a thing for gonzo excess. In this film, Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, and Taylour Paige play Corvette, Sade, and Mariah, respectively, also known as the Velvet Gang, the “Boosters” of the title—people who shoplift from high-end fashion outlet stores and resell them at a discount price. They quickly get the attention of the billionair fashion maven and Metro Designer outlet stores owner Christie Smith, played by a perfectly cast Demi Moore, who, along with her 2024 film The Substance, is really going for it with out-there roles in her sixties.

Moore is hardly the only fun casting choice in I Love Boosters, though. Don Cheadle shows up totally unrecognizable as Dr. Jack, a guy selling a pyramid scheme. Will Poulter is pitch-perfect as Grayson, the snooty manager at the Metro Designer store where Corvette, Sade, and Mariah manage to get jobs in an elaborate plan to boost its clothing. Eric André gets barely more than cameo time as a character credited as “Futuristic Police Tank Cop.” And while we’re on the subject of credited character names, LaKeith Stanfield plays “Pinky Ring Guy,” and I can’t even remember anything about a pinky ring; only that at one point one of the women says “He looks like sex”—and she’s right: LaKeith Stanfield need only stand still and stare at the camera to put a stir in the loins of viewers of any gender. (I guess I’ll take this moment also to name-check Jason Ritter as “Upstanding Community Member”; Kara Young as “Crying Black Mother”; and Jermaine Fowler as “Based Young Dude.” These characters all show up on news feeds offering backward talking points in defense of billionaires and corporations.)

I Love Boosters is surreal to the nth degree, to the point where the Velvet Gang are soon joined by Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a Chinese factory worker who steals two prototypes of a device with three different functions, depending on the setting: “Teleporter,” “Situational Accelorator,” or “deconstruction,” which renders anything it’s aimed at into the elements that made it. The plot is so wildly convoluted it would take an age to describe it all, but suffice it to say that the corporation is using this prototype to send product from China to the U.S. to save on shipping costs, but Jianhu teleports herself to the U.S. to start sucking all the Metro Designer outlet merchandise through the teleporter and right back to China.

This is where I Love Boosters has a lot in common with Sorry to Bother You, in which low-level workers are revealed to be literal “work horses.” The metaphor there was very on the nose, and much going on in I Love Boosters is moving in that same direction. Boots Riley throws in a lot of stuff about seemingly disparate groups of people actually fighting the same cause, and sets quite a lot of scenes in the Chinese factory where they are assembling the fashion. I’d say that there’s something ironic about the money spent to make a movie like this, using studios that arguably represent the very thing the movie is purportedly speaking out against, but this movie was made with a budget of $20 million and has grossed less than $5. Maybe Boots Riley knows what he’s doing, wasting production studio money!

I Love Boosters even features a bizarre, surrealist turn rather similar to the “work horses” of his previous film, just this time with a group of characters running after the Velvet Gang as stop-motion bodies of nothing but muscle and bone—complete with dangling, skinless penises—after being forced to shed their “suits,” which turns out to be their actual skin. This isn’t even the most memorable image in the movie; that would involve “Pinky Ring Guy,” who turns out to be way more than a guy wearing a pinkie ring, and is featured in the single most unfortgettably wild and hilariously disgusting scene in the movie. (It might also affect how much you agree that he “looks like sex.”)

This is a movie packed with gags, a ton of them visual, from Christie Smith’s office being in a leaning high-rise to the outfits worn by the Velvet Gang designed to contain all the clothes they’re boosting. A lot of the time, the gags work. A fair amount of the time, they kind of don’t. If there’s any signature trait to Boots Riley feature films—all two of them—it’s that they go in countless different wild directions and struggle to come together as a coherent narrative. I suppose a movie like this can work if you know what the very specific vibe is, and what it’s going for. I’m still not quite sure what I Love Boosters is going for exactly, but I picked up on the vibe. It worked better for me than Sorry to Bother You, but kind of barely. These movies are a lot, and you need to be ready for that. If you are then you’ll have a good time.

I Like Boosters Enough

STAR WARS: THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU

Directing: B
Acting: B-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B

Gather around, younglings. Let me tell you of a time very different from the one we currently live in. A time when a new Star Wars feature film release elicited palpable excitement. I’m not even talking about the prehistoric times of 1999, 2002, and 2005, when the Prequel Trilogy caused a global sensation in anticipation alone—only to disappoint millions (and yet delight viewers who were as young then as we were when the Original Trilogy was released). I’m talking just last decade—as recently as 2019, the appearance of the Lucasfilm Ltd logo elictited whoops from audiences. It’s worth noting that that was a full seven years after Disney bought Lucasfilm. But, it was at the end of their wildly misguided choice to flood the market with five feature films in as many years.

When I sat down to watch The Mandalorian and Grogu in a local theater, it was the first time I experienced that opening Lucasfilm Ltd logo and found it met with . . . silence. Everyone’s tired now. Star Wars is your parents’ franchise. The heyday has long since passed.

And yet: in a way, this helps The Mandalorian and Grogu, which is about as much fun as you can hope for with a feature film based on a television series, which was itself part of a broad franchise universe. It leans too heavily on action and is light on character development, but I have to say, most of the time the action is a blast.

There are many who act as though a lot is riding on this movie, and I’m not really convinced of that. I went in hoping for a good time that had no promise and no need to reinvent the wheel (or hyperdrive), and that’s precisely what I got. Perhaps more importantly, it gives a ton of screen time to that achingly cute character once known as “Baby Yoda” but whose name is actually Grogu, and it turns out that cuteness goes a long way. Even with a ton of screen time, Grogu never overstays his welcome. (For his part, Pedro Pascal gets one sequence without his all-important helmet on; they can’t have a star in one of the title roles without ever showing his money maker.) Having four new Anzellans, the small humanoid creatures who specialize in fixing things, doesn’t hurt either. The Anzellan Babu Frik was the best thing in The Rise of Skywalker, otherwise the one Star Wars movie to get worse with each viewing, and we didn’t get enough of him. We get plenty more of his kind in The Mandalorian and Grogu and it is always welcome.

All that said, there are elements of The Mandalorian and Grogu that are a bit of a mixed bag—namely, some of the casting. It’s bad enough that the opening sequence features several throwaway characters giving genuinely bad line readings, but this may be the worst I have ever seen Sigourney Weaver perform onscreen. It’s as though they just used the first take for every line she delivered, apparently having learned them just beforehand. How many science fiction franchises does Sigourney Weaver need to be in, anyway? Are Alien and Avatar not enough? Now she’s not only getting greedy, but apparently getting lazy. She genuinely feels out of place here.

The character around whom the plot turns is Rotta the Hut, a CGI character voiced by Jeremy Allen White, in a deepened voice that renders it unrecognizable. In which case, what was the point of casting him? At least Martin Scorsese’s voice is recognizable as Hugo Durant, a monkey-like character with four arms, odd a casting choice as that may be.

It’s somewhat of a miracle that Pedro Pascal is one of the few characters whose actual face we almost never see but who doesn’t seem like he’s phoning it in. Just as had been the case in the television series (but it should be stressed: you need not have seen the TV show to understand or enjoy this movie), there remains a delightful chemistry between him and the tiny puppet character—thank all the gods in the galaxy they never pivoted to rendering him fully in CGI—and that is truly the engine of this story, the reason to watch.

The Mandalorian and Grogu offers nothing particularly new, it doesn’t move the franchise forward in any real way, but it does prove it’s still viable. People may not be excited about this movie the way they were with previous ones, but this movie makes it easy to imagine one coming along that captures the public’s imagination again. Given the indelible nature of both the Mandalorian and Grogu as characters, it could easily be argued that this is better than Solo: A Star Wars Story, which made the mistake of making a Han Solo movie without Harrison Ford in it. The Mandalorian and Grogu has more potential for lasting impact, and is a fairly effective palate cleanser even seven years after The Rise of Skywalker squandered all the thrilling potential that came with The Last Jedi.

I do find myself curious about the way they title these movies. It feels a little like Lucasfilm backed themselves into a corner by retroactively making all official titles of any film in a trilogy start with the words “Star Wars,” and then making the subtitle to all standalone films “A Star Wars Story.” Except this new one is a standalone story and its official title is apparently Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu. Are they just sticking with “Star Wars” as the beginning of all feature films now and scrapping “A Star Wars Story”? Make up your minds!

The Mandalorian and Grogu heralds a clearly transitional time in Star Wars franchise history, which has had high highs and low lows, and a few movies, like this one, which are just fine. I kind of wish some of the special effects were better; occasionally movement onscreen is weirdly jerky. Other times, the picture rendered onscreen is stunning. Rotta the Hut is pretty standard-looking as CGI characters go, which qualifies as a disappointment: Star Wars is supposed to stand apart in these areas. If it’s not exceptional with its visual effects, how can it be exceptional at all?

Thankfully, none of these things drag the movie down to any fatal measure. The truth is, in spite of its clear flaws, I genuinely had a blast watching this movie. I got a good many laughs out of it, and I can easily imagine enjoying subsequent viewings. It doesn’t feature a story with enough depth to make it a new classic, but it holds its own among the other decent offerings in the franchise.

This far into a franchise’s history, this movie gives us just enough of exactly what we want.

Overall: B

OBSESSION

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

Everything’s a riff on a riff on a riff anymore, but I suppose the thing that still makes the difference is whether it’s done well. I have to admit that Obsession kind of exceeded my expectations. Granted, I went in with the bar pretty low—I knew this film got positive reviews, but as a rule the horror genre just isn’t my jam. I don’t tend to be impressed unless the movie is great enough to transcend the horror genre. I’d be hard pressed to say Obsession manages that, but it’s got a specific enough vibe to make it stand apart in a surprisingly compelling way.

We’re now 124 years from the original W.W. Jacobs horror short story The Monkey’s Paw, but we’re still not done seeing variations on its premise. You could spend a week listing off all the stories people have written about a wish gone horribly wrong because it wasn’t worded quite right or the person making the wish didn’t think it through. Plenty of people have already compared Obsession to Big, the 1988 comedy in which a kid wishes to be “big” and gets more than he bargained for by turning into Tom Hanks. Obsession is a little bit like if Big and The Exorcist had a baby.

The other thing Obsession has in common with countless other films is a character changed or possessed by powers beyond their control. Writer-director Curry Barker offers a bit of a fresh twist on this by having the possessed character turn out to be the victim as much as the villain, someone conscious of what’s happening to her but still unable to do anything about it.

In fact, you could have a fun debate about this movie: is the protagonist, a young man named Bear (a truly fantastic Michael Johnston) really the villain? We learn in very economic storytelling in the first few scenes that he’s got a huge crush on a woman in his friend group, Nikki (an increasingly unsettling Inde Navarrette), but is too scared to share his true feelings. He goes to a store to find her a replacement for a lost crystal necklace, and finds a product called a “One Wish Willow.” The instructions are to snap it in half and make one wish, and in a moment of panicked desperation Bear does this and says, “I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the world.”

You can imagine where this heads, and it heads there surprisingly quickly, underscoring the immediacy of the wish’s effect. I went into this movie expecting a sprinkling of comedy, and I have to say, there was only a couple of times I chuckled, and that was only out of nervousness. Barker is good at unraveling tension, especially as Nikki becomes more and more unhinged. And yet, when she literally says to Bear, “It’s all your fault,” she’s actually right. And because he’s spent so much time being in love with her, Bear even spends a fair amount of time selfishly convincing himself he can somehow make it work.

I won’t spoil what happens thereafter, but it feels worth warning the animal lovers that Bear’s cat, who is dead the moment we see it onscreen, factors significantly into the plot, and in no good ways. The best I can say is that it turns out to have been Bear’s own mistake that Sandy, the cat, has died; it somehow got into his mess of pills, presumably for his plethora of anxieties. How a cat would have gotten into pills with a secure lid while also eating its own food remains a mystery, but whatever. Maybe Bear just didn’t replace the lid well enough and then it fell from the counter? These are oddly laid out details, and we merely find the cat lying on the floor next to its own vomit and cat food spread around the floor mixed with pills. And this all happens before Bear even makes his wish, so I suppose we’re meant to see his judgment has been impaired by the trauma. This doesn’t stop him from jumping at the chance to attend Trivia Night when he learns Nikki will be there. You’ll have to watch the movie to find out how Sandy figures into the story thereafter.

There are two other people in Bear’s friend group, all of whom work at a music store run by a middle-aged man played by Andy Richter, the most random appearance of a single semi-famous face in the movie. Megan Lawless plays Sarah, the store owner’s daughter who has her own unrequited feelings for Bear. And then there’s Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), the most annoying of them all, a guy who is never truly listening when people need him to. This friend group winds up with a lot more going on between more of them than it seems at first, and I’m not sure all of that was necessary, but I guess it’s a way to thicken the plot.

When it all comes down to it, Obsession is a relatively predictable riff on The Monkey’s Paw, but it has enough fresh twists to it to make it worth a look if you’re into these kinds of movies. The performances elevate the otherwise fairly average material, and certainly some of the dialogue, especially in the beginning when things come across as a bit more contrived. When things turn creepy, though, they turn genuinely unsettling, and eventually we learn that is the case for both Bear and Nikki, who find themselves in a metaphysical bind with no solutions—or at least, no pleasant ones. Obsession gets pretty gruesome in its second half, and should delight the audiences who are coming for exactly that—not to mention the jump-scares that I never particularly enjoy.

But hey, if nothing else, Obsession is everything it promises to be, and Curry Barker and his cast deserve credit for that. This is the kind of movie I usually actively avoid, and I feel like I’m paying it a compliment by saying I don’t regret having seen it.

Hey dipshit, be careful what you wish for!

Overall: B