You knew the knives would be out for The Idol early on. The series opens with Jos showing more skin during an album cover photo shoot than her nudity rider allowed, prompting a squeamish "intimacy coordinator" in a man bun to comically attempt to intervene. (Nipples are no good, but "side boob, underboob, and the side flank" are all fine, according to her enlightened knight.) His complaints make little sense—no one is being exploited here; the star herself is the one pushing the envelope; if The Idol wasn't allowed to show Jos's nipples each episode would be about 15 minutes shorter—yet he demands that the shoot shut down until she revises her rider and waits 48 hours to make sure she really wants to take her clothes off. This prompts co-manager Chaim (Hank Azaria, sporting a fantastically comic Israeli accent) to lock the adviser in a bathroom and pay a passerby $5,000 to keep the door shut so they can do the nude scene in peace.

One thing I've long admired about Sam Levinson, the executive producer and director of four episodes of the show, is his willingness to work out his personal-professional beefs in the context of his work. It's one reason so many critics hated Malcolm & Marie, his two-hander for Netflix shot during the pandemic in which one of the characters (a director, as it happens) rants about an idiot film critic for the Los Angeles Times (a newspaper whose critic had savaged one of his films, as it happens), who mistook one cinematic technique for another. That level of pettiness—and the howls of outrage he knows it is likely to prompt—is almost admirable; as a connoisseur of spite, I know the good stuff when I see it. One can only imagine Levinson's annoyance with coordinators of intimacy on the set of Euphoria, his show about the scuzzy world of young adult sexuality. And one can't help but laugh out loud when an intimacy coordinator said, likely with tears welling in her eyes, that she was "appalled," that she "felt really betrayed," that she couldn't believe anyone would dare "[use] us as the butt of a joke." Some things are just off limits, you know.

The Idol is a mildly frustrating show because it's really two shows, one of which is quite interesting and the other of which is… tolerable.

The more interesting show is the one that revolves around Chaim, his fellow co-manager Destiny (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), manipulative record label exec Nikki Katz (Jane Adams), and the desperately put-upon, yet still somehow exploitative Live Nation representative Andrew Finkelstein (Eli Roth, in the role he was born to play). When The Idol is at its strongest, it's following these characters as they try to navigate the exceedingly complicated world of pop stardom. Talent matters, of course, but as Nikki understands all too well, these pop starlets are almost interchangeable (and, indeed, she tries to exchange a new bright young thing for Jos when Jos is hesitant to perform the song the label has procured for her). More important than manipulating the public and the press—a hovering Vanity Fair reporter watches the season unfold, and it's kind of funny to see both how much fear her presence inspires and easily influenced she is—is steering the whims of the singer herself.

The Idol is a little like a demented version of Entourage, one in which we're not really supposed to sympathize with the star and her hangers-on like Leia (Rachel Sennott) so much as pity them as they attempt to survive Jos's mood swings and her abusive new boyfriend-cum-producer, Tedros. Which brings us to the second, less-interesting half of The Idol: the relationship between Jos and Tedros, which has one giant, glaring problem. The show presupposes Tedros as this amazingly charismatic figure, and I have no doubt that sort of individual exists in Hollywood—perhaps The Weeknd is that charismatic in real life!—but it simply doesn't show up on the screen. The frustrating thing is that Tedros is an interesting character and I kinda-sorta understand what The Weeknd and Levinson were going for with his harem of talented, discarded young people like the nymphet Chloe (Suzanna Son), who is prone to playing piano in the nude, or the Sisqó-like Izaak (Moses Sumney). But he completely lacks the onscreen magnetism needed for us to buy that Jos—who is played with a fascinating variety of dead-eyed sensuality by Lily-Rose Depp that makes her both appealing and mildly terrifying—is the sort of person who might fall under his sway.

And while you might chalk up the late-season reversal—in which she becomes the dominant player in their pair, in which the full grotesquerie of their codependency is revealed, in which we see how her status as an idol allows her to abuse the abuser—to that very lack of magnetism (turns out pop stars were the real cult leaders all along, don'tcha know), it doesn't change the fact that the pairing fundamentally breaks the willing suspension of disbelief in the early going.

The final two episodes of The Idol are borderline great: There's something darkly alluring about watching Jos turn the tables on Tedros even as Tedros manipulates the Hollywood press to get Jos's movie star ex-boyfriend falsely accused of sexual assault, and the interactions between Finkelstein, Chaim, and Nikki in the final episode are laugh-out-loud funny. One can't help but wish there had been a slightly less bumpy path to getting there, however.

Sonny Bunch is culture editor of the Bulwark, where he hosts the podcasts Across the Movie Aisle and The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, and is a contributing columnist at the Washington Post.

The post REVIEW: 'The Idol' appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Turns out that image is more than symbolic: Sly was taking calls from the president himself on the set of Rambo III.

"One day I got quite angry," Rambo III director Peter Macdonald told The Last Action Heroes author Nick de Semlyen. "I said, ‘Where the fuck is Sly?’ They said, ‘He’s on the phone to the president.’ I thought it was the president of [production company] Carolco, so I said, ‘Well, tell him to put the fucking phone down and come here and talk. I didn’t realize he was talking to Reagan, not Andy Vajna or Mario Kassar.’"

Reagan and Stallone had much to discuss, given that the star had asked the president for Secret Service assistance when he became the target of protests—and death threats—in Europe as the face of a resurgent, newly confident America. It’s that optimism, that confidence, that had catapulted Stallone to stardom at the end of the 1970s as the working class mook made good, Rocky. The shocking success of Rocky, both critically and commercially, suggested America was tired of the downer cinema that had served as a hallmark of the decade prior, an age when flicks like Easy Rider, Papillon, and Nashville could be smashes. Great movies, yes, but they suggested a sense of, well, malaise.

Malaise and weakness were out; confidence and musculature were in. Stallone, jacked as he was, was dwarfed in the latter department by Austrian bodybuilder-cum-movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who racked up huge box office bucks as Conan the Barbarian and as a Terminator and as a commando and as a running man and as the predator (killer). Commando in particular felt like a real turning point in the action movies of the 1980s, one that added a sort of self-aware humor, Arnold whipping out one-liners like Henny Youngman zinging random audience members.

"Watching him in Commando was like witnessing some kind of prehistoric beast unleashed," writes de Semlyen. "His acts of violence, free of any bothersome emotion or consequence, yielded a cathartic secondhand high." That contact high will be seconded by anyone reduced to giggling hysterics by Arnold’s Austrian intonation of "Let off some steam, Bennett" after impaling a villain with a length of pipe, or the deadpan delivery of "don’t disturb my friend, he’s dead tired" after having covered up a corpse with a blanket on an airplane.

Schwarzenegger and Stallone were indisputably the top dogs of the era, at least until Bruce Willis showed up with Die Hard toward the end of the 1980s, and their feuding was legendary; de Semlyen’s book opens with them bickering over who will be the last, and thus most important, to enter a blockbuster Cannes party thrown by Carolco in 1990. The two fought over roles (Schwarzenegger used this to his advantage, tricking Stallone into making the legendary bomb Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot) and public acclaim, only coming together when there was money to be made in the form of Planet Hollywood (and, later, The Expendables).

As interesting as these heavenly bodies were the smaller satellites in orbit around them. Some, like Dolph Lundgren, became stars in their own right after starring opposite the bigger guns. Others, like Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Steven Seagal, found their way into action stardom by dint of their own martial arts prowess, becoming human special effects able to perform all manner of action on the big screen.

If I have a complaint about The Last Action Heroes, it’s that at 333 pages (288 pages before the index) it’s stretched too thin. There’s arguably a book to be written about each of these guys. Lundgren’s a literal genius, at least as measured by IQ; it took Chan the better part of a decade to break through in the United States; and Van Damme comes off as the most personable of all of them, in his own weird way, having lived on the streets of Los Angeles after abandoning his wife in Europe to live the American dream, eventually falling in with Norris and his camp.

The star who comes off the worst in the book is Seagal, a braggart who, famously (and possibly apocryphally), wasn’t able to back up his big talk when confronted by a stuntman tired of his yapping. Given what we know of the film and its disastrous reception now, you can’t help but smirk at Seagal’s clueless braggadocio at the premiere of On Deadly Ground: "I had many of the greatest directors on earth come to my premiere. … And I wasn’t really too nervous about it, what they’d think about it, because I was proud of my work." Michael Caine’s comment was pithier, in a backhanded sort of way: "I really didn’t think it would be anywhere near this good."

Norris, on the other hand, comes off the best: steadfastly decent and hardworking; willing to take a chance on a young man with talent like Van Damme; even turning the other cheek, Christlike, when confronted by a drunk in a bar who didn’t have any idea who Norris was when he picked a fight with Walker, Texas Ranger himself.

But it’s the big screen work that lives on, and here too Norris is a legend of sorts. In Romania. Where, according to screenwriter James Bruner, the movie Invasion USA was "an underground sensation." Bootleg copies of the film were passed around, samizdat-style, inspiring the rebels tired of Ceausescu to storm the palace and string him up.

"They use the poster, to this day, in Romania when they protest against the government," Bruner told de Semlyen. "Ultimately, action movies are about freedom. Overcoming evil, in whatever form it may be. To find out that was one of the inspirations for them to become free, it was really nice. Never in a million years would I have expected it."

One imagines Ronnie might have seen it coming.

The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage
by Nick de Semlyen
Crown, 333 pp., $28.99

Sonny Bunch is culture editor of the Bulwark, where he hosts the podcasts Across the Movie Aisle and The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, and is a contributing columnist at the Washington Post.

The post Get to the Chopper! appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

"The Oscars should be celebrating merit regardless of profitability, and they should be lifting up small movies," he writes, rather than "contort[ing] itself in trying to be something it’s not." The emphasis is in the original, and it’s worth lingering on momentarily because so much of Schulman’s book is about the ways in which the award was made to serve other purposes than a pure celebration of artistry.

Indeed, AMPAS itself was founded in an effort to head off not only government censorship, a growing problem for the nascent art form, but also negative publicity in the movie colony of Hollywood as scandals like the murder of William Desmond Taylor plagued showbiz. The Oscars themselves were almost an afterthought, "wedged among" higher priorities like "tak[ing] aggressive action in meeting outside attacks that are unjust" and snuffing out labor troubles.

Fighting off the nascent labor unions was an early goal of the academy, one that caused no shortage of trouble for the organization. Eventually, it fell to Frank Capra—the immigrant success story who saw winning an Academy Award as his ticket into the establishment but feared that the organization would be destroyed if it went to war with the Screen Actors Guild and the Directors Guild—to break the union-breaking power of the academy once and for all. By 1937, the academy officially washed its hands of labor negotiations; "a decade after its conception as Hollywood’s League of Nations, the Academy was now, thanks to Capra, little more than the body that gave out statuettes."

Schulman details some of the storied fights over those little statues, like the effort in 1935 to get Bette Davis a trophy for her work in Of Human Bondage, a performance that had earned raves but fell prey to studio bickering and the machinations of the producers eager to get their own stars nominated. Following a concerted protest, the academy’s awards committee announced they would allow write-ins, which in turn led to trade rag intrigue. Those of us who have paid attention to this year’s Oscar campaign and heard whispers about the supposed illegitimacy of Andrea Riseborough’s nomination for her work in To Leslie—a grassroots effort that seemingly came out of nowhere—can sympathize with the wags of the 1930s.

The question of campaigning is a tricky one. The section of the book I found most riveting detailed the rise of Harvey Weinstein and the ugly fight between Miramax and DreamWorks SKG during the 1999 season. It is one of those races that escaped the gravity of Los Angeles and became fodder for the general public, particularly after Shakespeare in Love shocked the world by defeating Saving Private Ryan in the best picture category.

Weinstein and Miramax had spent years perfecting their Oscar game plans. Say what you will about Weinstein ("sure, he’s a monstrous sexual deviant who deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison, though aside from that…"), but he understood the Oscars had little to do with who or what "should" win and everything to do with what sort of narrative you could craft. One of his favorite tricks was getting his awards-season movies wrapped up in some sort of political or social cause. It’s why Daniel Day-Lewis went to Capitol Hill to screen My Left Foot during the debate over the Americans with Disabilities Act.

It’s also one of the reasons Weinstein was such a generous donor to Democratic politicians: the ability to call in big guns at key times. The flip side of the phrase "Washington is Hollywood for ugly people" is the idea that the Oscars are presidential races for Hollywood. And when Weinstein was trying to figure out how to turn Sling Blade’s Arkansas-born-and-bred Billy Bob Thornton into an awards-winning savant, who better to get on the horn than another Billy boy?

"I was so appalled that the president of the United States would spend half an hour with us on the phone," a Miramax staffer told Schulman. Weinstein had gotten then-president Bill Clinton to give him some pointers on making the Arkansan palatable to the Hollywood set. "I lost all respect for him well before Monica Lewinsky, because I could see how much access the Clintons were giving Harvey."

As any good politician will tell you, it’s not enough to have a good message or a good story generally: You have to have one that resonates with the voters you’re trying to convince, specifically. A congressman in Missouri is speaking to a different voting population than a congresswoman from the Bronx. And, as we learn in Schulman’s book, changing demographics within the academy itself is a repeated story of the Oscars. We’ve seen it most recently in the aftermath of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, during which activists argued that the Academy Awards—one year removed from awarding 12 Years a Slave best picture—was irreparably racist because there were zero black nominees in the acting categories in 2015 or 2016.

A diversity initiative kicked into high gear; the membership rolls were expanded to include a younger, more diverse, more international voting body, and older members were not-so-gently pushed aside. Outrage ensued, open letters were written, angry campaigns were initiated… but all of this has happened before, and it will, likely, all happen again. In 1967, faced with declining TV audiences and a slate of nominees that could only be described as stodgy, AMPAS president Gregory Peck oversaw an initiative to get new blood into the academy. Two years later—after outrage, letters, and campaigns—Peck did what he thought needed to be done with the aid of the then-starlet Candice Bergen to freshen up the rolls.

In terms of attracting audiences, the movies themselves are only half the battle, of course: The show itself has to offer some entertainment value, though the question of both "entertainment" and "value" are somewhat tricky. Schulman argues that the reaction to 1989’s opening number with Rob Lowe and Snow White is overblown, more the inevitable product of an era of excess than anything else. (People forget, but the previous year’s proceedings had featured Robocop getting into a shootout with PeeWee Herman.)

The debate over the show remains ever-relevant, at least in part because the modern equivalent of blockbuster hits like The Godfather, Titanic, Braveheart, and Forrest Gump now have almost no chance of winning. The reasons for this are multiple and complicated: Hollywood has largely abandoned the mid-budget movie for adults because adult audiences have largely abandoned theaters; streamers have gobbled up prestige directors and given them budgets traditional studios could never dream of; modern blockbusters are more focused on spectacle than storytelling; middlebrow crowd pleasers like Green Book, the last movie to win best picture that comfortably fits in this category, are seen as passé, old-fashioned, the modern equivalent of Oliver!

This brings us back to the question of what the Oscars should be in the business of rewarding. But there is, perhaps, another question underneath that question. Oscar Wars documents with style an era in which movies were the biggest element of mass media, the apotheosis of American monoculture. But what do the Oscars mean when films are subordinate to streaming and prestige TV, to video games, to TikTok and YouTube? When the monoculture is irreparably shattered? When the industry itself splits off between "big and dumb and profitable" and "small and unwatched but inarguably artistically superior"?

If the answer to what should be rewarded—what is only really worth rewarding—continues to drift toward "movies seen by few and judged to be excellent by even fewer," it’s hard to imagine the ceremony remaining relevant to anyone other than committed cinephiles.

And our number, sadly, seems to be shrinking by the year.

Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears
by Michael Schulman
HarperCollins, 608 pp., $35

Sonny Bunch is culture editor of the Bulwark, where he hosts the podcasts Across the Movie Aisle and The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, and is a contributing columnist at the Washington Post.

The post And the Award Should Go To… appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

I mean this in the best way possible, as Quentin Tarantino is one of the most interesting filmmakers on the planet. He’s an inveterate raconteur, less conversationalist than lecturer, one whose head is overflowing with trivia about which Los Angeles dives were playing which cut-rate exploitation pictures at what point in his childhood. And much of the book’s early going is concerned with those dives and those exploitation flicks, as well as the cineaste’s own earned bravado.

"Because I was allowed to see things the other kids weren’t, I appeared sophisticated to my classmates," he says after recounting being taken to the theater by his folks (and, later, his mom and her suitors) to see films like M*A*S*H and The French Connection as a tween. "And because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood, they were right, I was."

Again, if you’re familiar with the man’s voice, you can practically hear him saying those lines, perhaps emphasizing "because" in each sentence, eyebrows arching and voice inflecting a notch higher on the "they were right." It’s almost eerie. I loved every page of it.

Cinema Speculation is part memoir, part critical essay, part lament for a past that has departed. Early on he discusses his mother’s theory of violence onscreen—that the act itself is less important than the context in which it occurs—and notes that "this would be a conversation I would have for the rest of my life," this push and pull between decency and outrage, between scolds who think you shouldn’t blow a guy’s head off in the back of a car and cineastes who appreciate the dark humor in it.

This book is for the appreciators; the scolds can go stew somewhere else.

There are two keys to understanding Tarantino’s body of work in this book, two passages that turn the tumblers and help you make sense of his artistic project. Passage the first:

Bullitt is about action, atmosphere, San Francisco, [director Peter] Yates’ great location photography, Lalo Schifrin’s jazzy score, and Steve McQueen, his haircut and wardrobe.

Nothing else matters.

Tarantino has always been a master of the Cinema of Vibes, of making sure what we’re watching onscreen looks cool and composed. Vincent Vega cruising in his convertible as he zones out on some high-grade heroin while The Centurions’ "Bullwinkle Part II" plays in the background; Bobby Womack’s "Across 110th Street" playing as Jackie Brown drives out of Max Cherry’s life; the melodramatic strings and vocals of "Malagueña Salerosa" after the Bride has been reunited with her daughter at the end of Kill Bill Vol. 2. Some folks criticized Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood for being extravagantly long; certainly, we didn’t need shot after shot of Brad Pitt driving through late-1960s Los Angeles, did we? But this misses the (or at least a) point of the film, which was to re-create that city’s vibe, to suffuse you in it, to see what was lost when the horror of the Manson murders infected La La Land.

The next section comes from a chapter in which Tarantino gushes about the Sylvester Stallone film Paradise Alley—the movies he chooses to praise, the movies he chooses to damn are always amusing—and why it would be impossible for modern audiences to stumble onto Rocky today and receive it the way it was received on initial release. Passage the second:

But the real reason that the film Rocky could never have the impact it did in 1976 is because to have that same impact, you had to live through the tough, gritty, downbeat, pessimistic films of the early seventies to be floored by the feel-good catharsis of Rocky. You had to live in a world where a movie like Papillon was a Hollywood blockbuster.

When even crowd-pleasing comedies like The Longest Yard included the brutal death of characters.

In a Hollywood that had forsaken the Old Hollywood happy ending as bullshit propaganda from "the Man".

When the senseless death of your hero at the climax was the vogue (Easy Rider, The New Centurions, Electra Glide in Blue, Hustle). When even popular audience movies like Three Days of the Condor counted on a certain amount of cynicism and paranoia from the popcorn eaters.

Consider that passage in the context of Tarantino’s body of work. Ever since Reservoir Dogs—a movie that echoed early-'70s cynicism, with its tragic Mexican standoff ending, and thus played perfectly with the early-'90s Sundance set trying to recapture the spirit of New Hollywood—Tarantino has made movies in which the "good guys," such as they are, "win." Sometimes that victory is mixed (in Pulp Fiction one of our black-suited hitmen buys it on a toilet, while the one who pledged to walk the righteous path lives on) or bittersweet (again, Jackie Brown driving out of Max’s life). More recently these victories have been gloriously bloody and done in a way that either literally (in the case of Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood) or figuratively (Django Unchained) rewrites history.

It will be amusing to see how many podcasts this book spawns; I can envision some brave soul attempting to do an episode on every—single—movie Tarantino mentions, even in passing. But one of the joys of Cinema Speculation is seeing the artistic underpinnings of Tarantino’s work; he’s a master of pastiche, and these are the raw materials.

It’s fun to read Tarantino push back against the notion that Dirty Harry is some brand of fascist agitprop while simultaneously understanding the law-and-order appeal it held for audiences ("it is also a plea for New Laws for New Crimes. The serial killer phenom to be exact"). He has an intuitive sense of what works and why, as in his criticism of The Getaway’s choice of actor for the villain ("it’s not that he’s a bad actor or gives a bad performance. It’s more I find his performance physically repellent. … It’s still a movie. I still should want to watch the movie and enjoy it").

And in one of the nicest chapters of the book, Tarantino sings the praises of Kevin Thomas, the Los Angeles Times’s second-string critic whose focus on genre films was both generous and serious-minded. "It would appear most critics writing for newspapers and magazines set themselves up as superior to the films they were paid to review," Tarantino writes. "Which I could never understand, because judging from their writing, that was clearly not the case." Thomas, however, had a keen and discerning eye; a good review from him could help a director get out of Roger Corman’s ghetto and into the world of "real" movies. Praise for movies like Caged Heat, The Howling, and Nomads helped a bevy of Hollywood talents (respectively: Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, and John McTiernan) get going.

Filmmaker, audience, and critic: We all have our part to play. And some of us, like Mr. Tarantino himself, can play all three parts just about perfectly.

Cinema Speculation
by Quentin Tarantino
Harper, 400 pp., $35

Sonny Bunch is culture editor of the Bulwark, where he hosts the podcasts Across the Movie Aisle and The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, and is a contributing columnist at the Washington Post.

The post Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema of Vibes appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

As I learned when I interviewed Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, the authors of They Shouldn't Have Killed His Dog, the creators of oral histories are aware of, and mildly frustrated by, these concerns. Altman said he and his coauthor are trying to curate the world's most interesting dinner party, while Gross highlighted the structural issues of fitting all the snippets together to tell a cohesive story without the Godlike authorial voice. Putting together a good oral history is like completing a jigsaw puzzle; you want to make sure all the pieces snap together just right.

Readers should approach books like this—or James Andrew Miller's Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, or Kyle Buchanan's Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road—as they would a talking-head documentary. Doing so pays great dividends: Accepting the stylistic conventions of the form will open up a world of information and important primary source materials to you.

They Shouldn't Have Killed His Dog is almost two books in one. The first is a truncated history of action cinema—from the initial moment audiences were captivated by an onrushing train or a robbery therein to the serials of early cinema to the rise of James Bond to the Asian influence of Gun Fu and the over-the-top action style of John Woo and his imitators, it's a good, quick look at the films that laid the foundation for John Wick and its sequels.

More than that, it's an introduction to the theory of filmmaking embodied by David Leitch and Chad Stahelski, the two guys whose backgrounds in stunt choreography and frustration with the sloppily shot and stitched-together-in-the-editing-bay nature of modern action cinema led to their founding of 87eleven.

"Chad and I formed 87eleven to facilitate that desire people had for the actors to be more involved," Leitch says. "Train actors, get them to do the choreography, teach them real martial arts, get them far along in the process so we could actually shoot the action in a compelling way that people wanted." Keanu Reeves's work on The Matrix (where Stahelski was Reeves's stunt double) and the way the actors in that film took part in as many of the fights as possible were an inspiration, but the effort Reeves puts in is the exception, rather than the rule, in so many Hollywood productions.

Audiences can tell the difference when a sequence is meticulously planned and when an actor has done the work needed to participate; it's one reason people reacted so viscerally to Charlize Theron's work on Leitch's Atomic Blonde. "We celebrate women fighting like women," Theron says. "We're smart about what body parts we will be using—that we know we can't really punch, because we will break every bone in our hand, but that we can fight just as hard with our elbows, with our heads, with our knees."

It is practically restating a truism to say that John Wick and its sequels work because of the thrilling choreography and gunplay, the fact that it's a seamless and utterly compelling blend of nearly cartoonish excellence and real-world competence. And that's why the most intriguing interviews in They Shouldn't Have Killed His Dog, at least from my point of view, are those with producer Basil Iwanyk and writer Derek Kolstad.

In addition to being a handy crash course on the history of action cinema, They Shouldn't Have Killed His Dog also will teach you some basic lessons about the business of making movies that are cheap but don't look or feel cheap.

"I was on the market for action movies," Iwanyk says. "Action movies you could make for $25 million, plus or minus 5. It's the most obvious thing in the world, but nobody seems to understand that. If you hit the number right, which is not hard to do, your downside's protected, but you still have a tremendous upside." Shooting in New York on that sort of budget is dicey—a couple of days of overtime in the City that Never Sleeps can blow your budget—but you get what you pay for.

"When you don't have a lot of money to make a movie, everybody told me, 'Shoot it in Cape Town or Baton Rouge.' And they're right, you’d have five or six million more dollars," Iwanyk says. "But I wanted this movie to feel big, and I wanted it to feel gothic. I look at it differently: If I don't have a lot of money, and I shoot you and an actor talking, it's small, but if I shoot it with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background, it feels like a big movie." That sort of production value isn't free, but it's a cheap way to make a modestly budgeted movie feel like a blockbuster.

Kolstad's constant refrain in the book is that he wasn't reinventing the wheel with his script, which was initially written and conceived with an older actor in mind: Clint Eastwood in his Gran Torino phase, maybe. "The idea in the screenplay, and again none of this is new, but the idea that he's far removed from the life—he's left it—and yet he'd go to the back porch and he could see the city in the distance. So he's left it, but he's still in its shadow, and they beckon each other," Kolstad says. "That's why we love these movies. You look at Nicholson in Chinatown—he ain't leaving that city. That city is in him and he's in it. And I love that kind of stuff. Westerns are the same way."

It's that combination of the familiar (a revenge archetype that's been a mainstay of action cinema for years) and the revolutionary (shooting action with specific intent rather than hoping to cobble it together after the fact) that turned John Wick and its sequels into sleeper hits on home video. We have DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD sales to thank for the continuing adventures of John Wick—according to Kolstad, "it was the home video division of Lionsgate saying, 'We need John Wick 2.'" That sequel would in turn out-earn the blockbuster hit The Fate of the Furious on home video despite grossing a billion dollars less at the global theatrical box office.

Which, in a way, brings us back to an earlier time in the history of action movies, when cheap action flicks were cranked out to fill VHS rental halls and a generation of kids desperate for something different checked out the latest Gun Fu and wirework martial arts from Hong Kong. As They Shouldn't Have Killed His Dog ably demonstrates, John Wick has more than earned its place in the action movie pantheon.

They Shouldn't Have Killed His Dog: The Complete Uncensored Ass-Kicking Oral History of John Wick, Gun Fu, and the New Age of Action
by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman
St. Martin’s Press, 261 pp., $28.99

Sonny Bunch is culture editor of the Bulwark, where he hosts the podcasts Across the Movie Aisle and The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, and is a contributing columnist at the Washington Post.

The post Wick-ipedia appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The first had to do with the film's lurid violence, its obsession with penetrative bloodletting, and then, finally, its shift into truly gonzo bloodshed. Bones splintered, blood spattered: I may have cackled quietly to myself a handful of times as things ramped up. Though Malignant largely lacked his visual panache, the carnage—combined with the film's thematic preoccupations with identity, siblings, and parentage—made me think "this feels like a Brian De Palma film, in that I'm not entirely sure what's going to happen next."

The second thought was an immediate answer to the first: "Well, I guess I am entirely sure that there won't be anything approaching a De Palma-esque sex scene. Not in a mid-budget picture for a major studio in the year 2021."

Sure enough, the closest Wan gets to sexy in this movie is having a mousy crime scene investigator flirt harmlessly with a detective trying to solve a serial killing while the detective's older partner rolls her eyes and reminds them they're on the clock. It wasn't surprising: a confluence of cultural and commercial factors render anything steamier than this off limits.

But it was a little depressing.

It was another HBO Max movie that recently brought all this to mind: One evening in search of something new, I stumbled onto 10 to Midnight, a classic (or maybe a "classic") Charles Bronson feature made by the exploitation-friendly label The Cannon Group. It was, like Malignant, a little bit bonkers, something akin to Friday the 13th by way of John Wayne Gacy. Bronson played a hard-ass cop who wasn't opposed to violating a few civil liberties if it meant keeping people safe from a serial killer who stripped nude before doing his evil deeds on similarly nude coeds.

It's not a good movie, exactly, but it is pleasingly disreputable. There are lots of movies released these days that one could describe as "not good, exactly," but very few that are as transgressive as 10 to Midnight feels today. When I included it in my newsletter for the Bulwark as that week's assigned viewing, I felt as though I was pushing the boundaries at least a little. It's not the sort of movie people are supposed to watch anymore; it's certainly not the sort of thing you should recommend to polite company.

A friend texted to ask why such movies—the low-budget sleazefests like 10 to Midnight that have disappeared along with the mid-budget shockers like Species and the high-toned erotic thrillers in the vein of Basic Instinct—are so rare now. The answer is twofold.

First off, there's the commercial factor. It's expensive to release movies in theaters, and I don't mean because of production budgets: Anything opening wide requires a low-to-mid-eight-figure ad buy, at least, more if you really want to pop on that opening weekend. The increased cost of advertising means fewer films get released in general, and those few need to be home runs, not singles. And it's harder to hit a home run with an R-rated movie than a PG-13-rated movie.

(Congrats: You're caught up on the last 30 years or so of the theatrical exhibition business.)

A PG-13 movie isn't just easier to sell in America; it's also easier to sell overseas—particularly in China, where films forbid all sorts of things. Ghosts, weirdly. Depictions of homosexuality. And nudity is a no-go too. So, if you want to try and recoup any of your investment in the Middle Kingdom, better make sure you're not going to have too many nude scenes to cut out.

Indeed, discomfort with sex lines up nicely with the rise of the comic book movie and the sexless action flick. Writing all the way back in 1976—practically a hedonistic paradise compared with now—Pauline Kael highlighted the rise of the cop movie and the ways in which police partnerships subbed in for real romantic relationships. "It doesn't have the hidden traps of the relationship between man and women, or between lovers of the same sex," Kael wrote in "Notes on Evolving Heroes, Morals, Audiences." "Two human beings who are sexually and emotionally involved cause pain to each other, and it takes more skill than most writers and directors have to deal with that pain."

Why bother showing men and women connecting emotionally and sexually when you can rake in billions by having Steve Rogers and Tony Stark punch aliens—or, occasionally, each other?

Commercial factors aren't the only reason for the shift. There's a critical and cultural component as well.

Like time, Twitter is a flat circle. If you're on the social media service long enough, you'll see the same tweets go viral, the same arguments flare up, the same rebuttals be offered, the same dunks thundered home with Dr. J-like authority. One such circularity on Film Twitter, our modern Cahiers du Cinéma, goes a little like this: A Zoomer will say with supreme confidence that no movie has ever needed or been improved by a sex scene, which will receive tens of thousands of likes and retweets from similarly puritanical Letterboxd scholars. This will, in turn, result in an exhausted Gen Xer or Elderly Millennial or even the occasional Boomer to screenshot the offending tweet and retort, "How could modern movies be any more sexless, you freaks have already won, no one in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has ever even contemplated sex, every birth that has ever happened in that realm is virginal."

My cohort of The Olds is correct, of course, but it often makes me grimace a bit. Because the Zoomers are simply living in the intellectual world we made for them. What did we think would happen when we spent decades screaming about The Male Gaze and how film's treatment of women inherently objectifies them?

Briefly: "The male gaze" is a critical theory promulgated by Laura Mulvey suggesting that the patriarchy and its cinematic extension was, by its nature, kinda creepy. "The extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world," Mulvey wrote in her classic essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative in Cinema." "Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire on to the performer."

In short: We (that is, men) are conditioned to make and watch and force upon society movies with nudity because it's the only socially acceptable way we can act like a Peeping Tom.

There's something to this idea of cinema as voyeurism. Allow me to again reference the work of Brian De Palma, whose Dressed to Kill opens with an extended sequence of a woman in a shower. It is a private moment, a moment of ecstasy we are illicitly looking upon. But it is also a misdirection, a dream sequence, an effort by the woman in question to conjure up sexual feeling for the man who has climbed atop her and is thrusting away. Far from objectifying this (admittedly attractive; she's played by Angie Dickinson, after all) woman, De Palma is creating empathy with her by putting us in her head space, showing us her desires, her needs.

Still, the suggestion that the male gaze is the be-all and end-all of cinematic sexuality has had perverse side effects, one of which is the sort of puritanism we see from the Zoomers and others uncomfortable with onscreen nudity. Every generation gets the scolds it deserves, and there's something refreshingly old-fashioned about this brand of bowdlerizers. As Camille Paglia (no fan of male gaze theory, she; "utter nonsense from the start … the 'victim' model of feminism applied wholesale to works of culture") put it in Sexual Personae, "sex has always been girt round with taboo, irrespective of culture. Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges."

As such, we see mild freak outs now and again when a writer or an artist injects an "undue" amount of sexuality into their work. The most amusing of these, by far, was when the New Yorker's Anthony Lane found himself under fire for, well, you'll see:

Take your seat at any early-evening screening of Incredibles 2 in the coming days, listen carefully, and you may just hear a shifty sound, as of parents squirming awkwardly beside their enraptured offspring. And why, kids? Because Mommy just leaned over to Daddy and whispered, "Is it just me, or does Mrs. Incredible kind of look like Anastasia in 'Fifty Shades of Grey?' You know, the girl in the Red Room, with the whips and all?" And Daddy just rested his cooling soda firmly in his lap and, like Mr. Incredible, tried very hard to think of algebra. As for how Daddy will react later on, during the scene in which Helen and the husky-voiced Evelyn unwind and simply talk, woman to woman, I hate to think, but watch out for flying popcorn.

As the Cut noted, Lane has a long history of doing the unthinkable—specifically, noting that the women who grace our biggest screens, be they animated heroines or flesh-and-blood Scarlett Johanssons, are also, frequently, very attractive—but there's something especially absurd about getting offended on the behalf of a cartoon subjected to the Dread Male Gaze, crueler a villain than any faced by Elastigirl and her family of superheroes. Just as there's something deeply weird about the lengths to which critics will go to avoid saying that, say, Anya Taylor-Joy is one of the most interesting women to look at on screen because she has something akin to the almost-alien beauty many supermodels have. Just as there's something odd about how it only really becomes appropriate to talk about how sexy actresses are after they pass a certain age.

The only time it really becomes acceptable to talk about sex onscreen is when there's too much of it. Hence the sad decline of Game of Thrones, a series that for its first four or five seasons came under withering fire for the frequent way in which it mingled sex and violence and set scenes rife with expository dialogue in brothels, leading to the rise of the amusing-but-degrading term "sexposition." Chastened by critical uproar, the show's creators pulled back a bit. But when a program about "tits and dragons," as guest star Ian McShane once colorfully put it, jettisons half that equation, decline becomes almost inevitable. People say the show lost the plot because they didn't have George R.R. Martin's source books to guide them, that the last couple of seasons were deeply unsatisfactory on a storytelling level.

Allow me to suggest that, perhaps, the real problem was that audiences started paying too much attention to the silliness of the plot in general because they didn't have other, ah, distractions on the screen.

There are undoubtedly other factors adding to the decline in onscreen sex—the rise of instantly accessible and increasingly degrading pornography reducing the need for titillation in a public setting; the increasingly personal-yet-communal nature of nudity in the form of the shared selfie—and it's not like it has disappeared entirely from feature filmmaking. But such movies, like Sydney Sweeney's The Voyeurs, are often relegated to streaming (Prime Video in that case) or VOD, as in the case of Julia Fox's PVT Chat.

And that's too bad. Sexiness and tawdriness are both fundamental parts of the human experience and should be celebrated and explored on the biggest screen possible. There shouldn't be any shame in watching onscreen shamelessness.

The post Where Have All the Sex Scenes Gone? appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Spidey’s dwarfed by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the sneakiest, scariest person on the planet. He’s swallowed up by Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), the Stark Industries majordomo making the moves on Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), who is twice Spidey’s width. Spidey may be the first superhero whose potential significant other towers over him: his would-be girlfriend, MJ (Zendaya), has a few inches on him. He’s just a little guy, a runt, an underdog whose powers are greater than the responsibility he wants to shoulder.

In short (haha): He’s perfect as the friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man, the least-likely Avenger.

Now, Holland’s not actually THAT diminutive. He’s only a hair shorter than Robert Downey Jr., if Google is to be trusted. But Downey’s outsize personality imbued Iron Man and Tony Stark with a larger-than-life persona that led to it eclipsing much of the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One of the reasons that Far From Home’s predecessor, Spider-Man: Homecoming, worked as well as it did was that it was, in many ways, a story about Tony Stark as much as it was a story about Peter Parker. This wasn’t an Uncle Ben-driven rehash of the radioactive spider’s fateful bite. Rather, it was about Stark’s effort to find an heir apparent, someone with brains and personality who could be trusted to do the whole superhero thing right.

The ghost of Tony Stark looms over Far From Home. Literally, in a way: murals of Stark in his Iron Man getup dot New York City’s skyline and Venice’s waterways with equal regularity. Which is only fitting: He saved not only Earth but all of creation, concocting the plan to resurrect half of the universe’s population following Thanos’s finger snap and then sacrificing himself to wipe out the purple-skinned Titan’s hordes at the climax of Avengers: Endgame. The creators of Far From Home had the unenviable task of trying to pick up the pieces, and do an admirable job of getting it to all make sense.

Helping matters is the fact that they have an inherently ludicrous background to play with: high school. Snapping people away for five years and then bringing them back is bizarre in most any circumstance, but in high school, that land of puberty and puppy love and locker-stuffing bullies, forcing kids who have been blinked out of existence for half a decade to figure out how to go on with exams is just another indignity.

While touring Europe with his friends, Parker is roped into helping Nick Fury and Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal), codenamed Mysterio following his public debut in Italy, defeat a quartet of superpowered villains wreaking havoc across the continent. The Elementals—living embodiments of water, earth, fire, and wind—destroyed the Earth on Beck’s partition of the Multiverse, and he has come to Parker’s Earth to ensure we do not suffer the same fate.

Gyllenhaal is clearly having a fine time with the role of Beck, gliding seamlessly between inspirational hero and infuriating huckster as the movie progresses and more of his plan is revealed. Special credit must be given to the effects team, which brings to life Mysterio’s trippy, perception-altering powers in a way once thought unimaginable for a live-action film. That being said, Far From Home doesn’t quite rise to the level of Homecoming if only because Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio doesn’t have quite the same pathos or reasonableness of Michael Keaton’s Vulture.

Still: There’s action and adventure and special effects with a bit of mystery and a dash of subterfuge thrown in for good measure. That is to say, it’s an effective summer blockbuster. A good time is had by all, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe begins its move into a post-Robert Downey Jr. existence by giving his (tiny) heir apparent room to grieve—and grow.

###

And now, some personal news: This will be my final movie review for the Washington Free Beacon. After seven-plus years as an editor—first managing, then executive, possibly a title in between that I’ve forgotten about—and seven almost exactly as its film critic, I am leaving the Beacon to join CINESTATE, a movie studio based in Dallas, to help them build a new digital brand and publication that will be dedicated to … well, movies. I couldn’t be more excited for this amazing new opportunity.

The brainchild of Dallas Sonnier, CINESTATE is probably best known for producing S. Craig Zahler’s excellent trio of films: Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99, and Dragged Across Concrete. They also released The Standoff at Sparrow Creek, which I quite liked, and via the resurrected FANGORIA brand, a handful of horror films. Given what Dallas and FANGORIA EIC Phil Nobile have done with that storied mag over the last year or so, I’m honored to join the CINESTATE team and start a brand-new venture.

I am of course, sad to be leaving the Beacon: having been here since day one, this new opportunity is bittersweet. But I’ll still be doing the Sub-Beacon podcast with Vic Matus and Jonathan V. Last, so you haven’t seen the last of me on these digital pages. (I’ll also continue writing my WashingtonPost.com column and will still appear on the Hugh Hewitt show every Friday morning during the 6:50 A.M. segment.) I shall forever be grateful to Matthew Continetti for offering me the chance to join the Beacon on my wedding day and to Michael Goldfarb for not only bringing this outlet into existence but also introducing me to Bone Tomahawk.

That being said, I’m thrilled to be joining CINESTATE and can’t wait to share what I and the rest of the team are up to. Twitter is probably the best place for news on this front: follow me at @SonnyBunch and the studio at @Cinestate.

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This is not a novel observation, but part of the boringness resulted from the fact that the formula Bohemian Rhapsody aped has been done to death and parodied with merciless accuracy and mirthful glee in films like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. Early struggles with a disappointed family lead to surprise success which in turns leads to access to drugs and money and sex precipitating a disastrous decline that is usually compounded by a health scare before, inevitably, a glorious rebirth.

Rocketman hews to this formula, naturally, but it manages to avoid the deathly dullness of some of its recent predecessors by adopting the style of a Broadway jukebox musical. The songs of Elton John (played by Taron Egerton in the film) serve as a soundtrack for the life of Reggie Dwight, a piano prodigy who chances into a lifetime collaboration with lyricist Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell) and becomes the worldwide sunglass-wearing sensation we all know and love today.

Again, the formula is adhered to perfectly. Little Reggie is unloved by his father (Steven Mackintosh) and dismissed by his grotesque of a mother (the generally delightful Bryce Dallas Howard, who feels a bit miscast here as the increasingly puffy gargoyle mommy). He discovers himself in song, attending the Royal Academy of Music, before hitting local joints as the piano player for a small band and a backing musician for an American tour of soul singers. Success with Bernie leads to drugs, drugs lead to excess, yadda yadda yadda, one rehab stint later and everything turns out okay, more or less.

Punctuating each of these moments are big flashy dance numbers and little bits of surrealism. The surrealism I don't mind so much—Does Elton John turn into a literal rocket while he sings "Rocket Man," blasting off into the sky, getting hiiiighhhhiiigh as a kite? You bet your sweet ass he does!—but the song-and-dance numbers do get a bit tiresome. Sure, "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" lends itself to a Jets-Sharks style snapoff in the middle of a carnival, but you don't have to indulge every cinematic whim. If I wanted a Broadway spectacular I’d go to a Broadway spectacular.

Still, these moments of spectacle manage to attract the eye and appeal to the ear. I was certainly never bored by what director Dexter Fletcher was conjuring up. And I appreciate screenwriter Lee Hall’s efforts to wrap the formula in a shiny new package, though I'm not entirely sure the framing device he settled on—the film is technically a series of flashbacks from a rehab session—quite works. Rocketman may not be the formula-busting success some are suggesting, but it's certainly a step up from recent snoozefests.

The post 'Rocketman' Review appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Blade (1998) served as proof of concept for the idea that Marvel's intellectual property could be mined in a compelling and profitable way, but 2000's X-Men was Marvel's first real big budget effort to adapt a hugely popular series in a manner that wouldn't be seen as instantly embarrassing. Its release was legitimately exciting for those of us in the comic book community (read: dorks). Here was something we'd always envisioned and hoped for, but had never really seen outside of a few mediocre Superman movies and two decent Batman flicks.

Excitement gave way to disappointment, as the creative team switched from the steady hand of Bryan Singer (whose X2 remains one of the genre's highlights) to Brett "The Big Butt Book" Ratner (whose X-Men: The Last Stand remains one of the genre's jokes, though I'd argue this is a bit unfair in retrospect). Comic book fans are eternally arguing about creative teams—which writers truly understand their characters; which pencilers give books the realism and excitement they need to entertain—and movie fans were happy to do the same.

Then came the spinoffs: Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) earning standalone movies of their own, just as they had earned standalone comic book titles years earlier. Sure, this diluted the brand a bit, but fan favorites are fan favorites. Then came the reboots and retconning in the form of X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past, which in turn led to disappointment (X-Men: Apocalypse, just terrible on every level) and, at last, the final stage of comic book fandom: boredom.

The problem with X-Men: Dark Phoenix isn't so much that it's bad. It's not good, exactly. Weird things go under-discussed. I'm not entirely sure I could explain to you the powers or the weaknesses of the alien race headed by … well, Jessica Chastain—I guess, I can't really remember the character's name—that is stalking Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), who has gained some sort of cosmic power. For that matter, I'm not sure I could explain to you the powers of cosmically powered Jean Grey, other than to say she can do a lot. The action scenes are wholly under-baked, especially in comparison to some of the series' highlights like Nightcrawler's assault on the West Wing in X2 and the opening battle in Days of Future Past, one of the few action films I've ever seen utilize 3D effectively.

For the most part, Dark Phoenix is a perfectly competent bit of X-Men action, a movie where Professor X (James McAvoy) preaches the need for mutants and humans to live in coexistence while Magneto (Michael Fassbender) argues it can never happen.

This, of course, is the real problem: the series has never moved beyond that dichotomy. It can't move beyond that dichotomy. These characters are hamsters stuck on a wheel: There's only so much for them to do, so many world-threatening forces to defeat, so many speeches about tolerance that can be delivered. As any reader of serial superhero books knows, things have a tendency to repeat, to veer toward redundancy. There's a limit to the number of stories you can tell when you have a single theme (equality!) and a single mode of storytelling (epic action!).

This is why the MCU succeeds and endures: They are making many different types of movies (epic action, yes, but also buddy comedies and space operas and heist flicks) that aren't really weighed down by ideas. Boredom has yet to set in because super-producer Kevin Feige has, like Daenerys Targaryen before him, broken the (hamster) wheel.

Feel free to skip Dark Phoenix. It's the sort of movie only completists need to see. But take a moment to remember the X-Men franchise as it fades into oblivion.

*If I had to guess, The New Mutants movie that keeps getting pushed back will never be released as a feature film in theaters.

The post 'X-Men: Dark Phoenix' Review appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

It has a giant lizard and a giant moth and a giant fire bird and a giant three headed snake-dog and it has all of these things punching and biting and stinging and spraying each other and sometimes those things shoot fire at each other and also it has ecoterrorists who want to save the world by destroying it and military jets shooting missiles at some of the aforementioned monster things and a nuclear bomb.

Sometimes King of the Monsters feels about as coherent as that run-on sentence and, much like reading that aloud, it will occasionally leave you out of breath as you try to figure out what, exactly, is going on while images assault your eyes and roars blast your eardrums. But this was intentional? Godzilla: King of the Monsters succeeds at what it sets out to do, which is overwhelm and excite.

I don't particularly care about the family drama at the heart of the film, though Vera Farmiga and Kyle Chandler are their usual charming selves as a divorced mom and dad and Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things's Eleven), who plays their child, has mastered the ability to have a single tear roll down her cheek while emotion clouds her face. Thomas Middleditch and Bradley Whitford are solid comic relief. Ken Watanabe adds a dose of pathos to the proceedings as a scientist who just wants everyone to get along with Godzilla. Charles Dance is amusingly villainous in his role as an ecoterrorist whose time as a member of the British armed forces taught him that humanity was beyond redemption. That's right: I'm excited to announce that environmentalists continue to make excellent movie villains.

You'll note I'm not bothering with character names, because who cares. All of the human stuff is good enough. Fine, acceptable, pleasantly extraneous glue that holds the script together, more or less. Because we're not here to watch people work through their problems, not really. Emotions are wasted on this audience. We're here for the spectacle of it all. For the giddy thrill of watching impossible beings do impossible things. For the horror of cities reduced to graveyards, immolated wastelands where nothing could survive. For the reminder that there are forces beyond our control, events we cannot stop, tragedies that we cannot curtail—and heroes who can save us, if we let them.

And on that front, again, Godzilla: King of the Monsters more or less delivers. I probably could have used somewhat fewer cutaways to O'Shea Jackson Jr. and Aisha Hinds, who play military hands coordinating human efforts to aid civilians and combat the Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms (MUTO) unleashed around the world by the ecoterrorists hoping to restore ecological balance. Then again, this movie gives us more than ten (10) minutes of Godzilla and his famous friends onscreen, so I'm not sure I'm going to get too sniffy about the interruptions of the hot MUTO-on-MUTO action we paid top dollar to watch.

The post 'Godzilla: King of the Monsters' Review appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Sure, it's a completely unnecessary bit of corporate cannibalism combining nostalgia for a beloved piece of intellectual property and a beloved Hollywood star. Yes, if it's a hit, it's likely to further diminish the universe of filmmaking by trapping us deeper within the cycle of reboots and remakes. Granted, it's at least 20 minutes too long, clocking in at almost 40 minutes longer than its predecessor. Yeah, you're probably better off staying at home and watching the original cartoon (assuming you own a physical copy; it doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere for the nonce).

If you're able to set all that aside, Aladdin is occasionally charming, especially when Will Smith is allowed to do more than imitate Robin Williams, who voiced the original cartoon's genie.

Assuming you're familiar with the 1992 original, you're familiar with the bare bones of the story here: Agrabah street rat Aladdin (Mena Massoud) falls in love with Princess Jasmine (Naomi Scott) and is convinced by Vizier Jafar (Marwan Kenzari) to enter the Cave of Wonders and retrieve a magic lamp, inside of which resides the genie (Will Smith). Aladdin and the Genie, who longs for freedom, conspire to win Aladdin the hand of Jasmine, yada yada yada, hijinks ensue, true love wins the day, as always.

It is, frankly, impossible to consider this film on its own merits, given that it is a remake of a beloved property—often a shot-for-shot, if not quite note-for-note, remake. And Aladdin is at its worst when it is trying to ape the jokes and songs of its predecessor. Why hire someone like Will Smith and then try to get him to sing like Robin Williams? It just sounds off. He's flat, or maybe he's pitchy, or maybe he's both, I dunno, I'm neither a singer nor a singing coach. But I do have ears, and he sounds all wrong.

But only when he's singing. When Smith's rapping—when he's in rhythm, when he's more natural—he sounds great. Likewise, when Smith is asked to do an impression of the Williams-voiced cartoon, it comes off as flaccid and insincere. But when Smith imbues the genie with his natural charm, the whole enterprise almost feels like it has a reason for existing: I laughed out loud several times when Smith played the Genie less like a Robin Williams impersonator and more like matchmaking expert Hitch. Will Smith's star may have dimmed a bit over the last decade, but he's still incredibly charming when director Guy Ritchie lets him be.

As are Massoud and Scott as the lovestruck couple; Scott in particular has a set of pipes (though asking her to sing a terrible grrrl power anthem about speaking her mind, an original song for this film, was probably a misstep), and the two get along famously. Kenzari is appropriately villainous as Jafar, and Nasim Pedrad is entertainingly deadpan as a handmaid for Princess Jasmine. The cast is top notch; no complaints there.

Considered all on its own, Aladdin might be a completely acceptable big budget family-friendly piece of entertainment: occasionally charming; a bit overstuffed. But, again, we can't really consider it on its own here. It's beholden to the past, a shadow of its predecessor. It can only be compared to the original.

And since that's the case: If you have the choice, why not stick with the original?

The post 'Aladdin' Review appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

You might remember the moment. The dunderheaded H.I. (Nicolas Cage) is forced to fight a pair of bank robbers (John Goodman and William Forsythe) who have decided to kidnap the baby boy that H.I. and his wife Ed (Holly Hunter) have themselves kidnapped. H.I., displeased by this turn of events, puts up a fight in the cramped confines of the family's mobile home. What follows is a masterpiece of comic action: Goodman banging his head on a low-clearance light fixture; Cage screaming in pain after scraping his knuckles on the popcorn ceiling while he attempts a double ax-handle on Goodman; Goodman's elbow smashing through a window while he winds up for a punch that goes through a closet wall.

The Coens understood that what made this fight work for viewers was the cramped quarters, the lack of space: In this case, it was funny because it looked and felt real.

Similarly, I think a reason that the action scenes in the John Wick movies work is because Chad Stahelski has a keen understanding of space and how to use it effectively. You see this most clearly in the John Wick: Chapter 3's opening set piece. Picking up moments after John Wick: Chapter 2 ended—Wick (Keanu Reeves) has an escalating price on his head and his violation of the rules of The Continental means he is excommunicado, lacking the services provided by hotelier and assassin-whisperer Winston (Ian McShane)—Parabellum's first fight takes place in the stacks of a library.

Wick and an enormous Serbian goon (NBA player Boban Marjanovic) make the most of their cramped quarters, gaining leverage from bookshelves and using codices as cudgels while trying their hardest to kill each other. The whole thing is darkly funny—the packed audience with whom I saw the film escalated "oohs" every time a blow landed and giggled every time a stroke was thwarted by the confined space—and deeply entertaining, even if you know how it has to end. (Spoiler: John Wick wins.) It's a perfect tone-setting introduction: everything you're about to see is going to be both ridiculous yet strangely believable, from the knife fight in a gun shop to the utilization of war dogs by Sofia (Halle Berry) in an airy Moroccan courtyard to the final assault pitting Wick and Continental concierge Charon (Lance Reddick) against an army of body-armored thugs commanded by the High Table's Adjudicator (Asia Kate Dillon).

Adjudicators, High Table, Excommunicado: that's right, there's world building! We learn more about the world of assassins first introduced in John Wick, though sometimes this goes a bit overboard. It's not clear to me that we needed Berrada (Jerome Flynn) to explain to us that the gold coins are not a measure of value but an expression of the social contract, an exchange of favors that keeps the system running. The system itself might have used a bit more elucidation—there's the High Table and its emissary, the Adjudicator, but also a man above the high table whose power seems unlimited yet also does the work of the High Table—and one hopes that might be revealed in a future installment.

And there will be a future installment, and I will be there for it. Set aside the frenetic action and the cleverness of the kills: I'm fascinated by the moral universe explored in these three movies. John Wick was asking a basic enough question: does justice exist? Yes, the plot was so simple it could be explained in its entirety via haiku.* Yes, that simplicity itself is now an in-universe joke; everyone who meets Wick semi-mocks him with their surprise that he has torn down his whole world for the sake of a puppy and a car. But there's nothing simple about justice, or the traps we set for ourselves while pursuing it.

John Wick: Chapter Two, meanwhile, looked inward. It is about the self and whether or not change is truly possible. "Can a man like you know peace?" a Russian mobster asks Wick early on. Wick's naïve reply: "Why not?" Wick's problem is that peace would be a violation of his core: He is a killer. Strike that: He is the best killer. And when someone is the best at what they do, the system will find a way to coopt him regardless of what he wants. Which brings us to Chapter Three, an examination of the natural order and the futility of efforts aimed at upending it.

Wick is a modern exemplar of arete, the ancient Greek notion that excellence and virtue are one and the same. He thinks this virtue is enough to separate him from the killers with which he has spent the last three movies contending. This belief, in turn, is why he always denies being anything like those who are trying to stop him. Wick supposes his excellence is his path to freedom. His power—his mythical ability to kill anyone, anywhere, like The Bogeyman itself—is unique to his person. He is different from, say, Winston, a man who relies on the system and its rules for his power and privilege.

But Wick's excellence is also his prison. The system cannot let him go because he is too useful to it, and useful men will always have a place in the system … even if they don't want it.

*Man's pooch slain, car pinched
He springs vengeance on culprits:
Dog was dead wife's gift

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As the opening titles explain, three kingdoms fought for control of the great city, Jing. Champions from two of the cities, Yan and Pei, battled. Pei's champion was grievously wounded. Yan and Pei then joined forces to defeat the third kingdom, leaving the Yan kingdom and their leader in control of Jing. Some time has passed, and The Commander (Deng Chao) is tired of living with the ignominy of his defeat and the abasement of his city: going against the wishes of his King (Zheng Kai), The Commander has challenged Yang Cang (Hu Jun) to a duel for control of Jing.

The King is outraged. He has traded face for peace, and demands his minions accept the corrupt bargain. The Commander's inability to hide his humiliation masks a darker secret: he is, in fact, a double (the eponymous Shadow, also played by Deng Chao), a doppelganger stolen from the city of Jing as a child and raised in hidden captivity in the chance that the Commander needed a stand-in. Only The Commander's wife, Xiao Ai (Sun Li), knows that the Commander's wound endured during the battle for Jing was so severe it has left him hobbled. The Shadow must master a new style of combat if the Kingdom of Pei is to unseat the Kingdom of Yan from the city of Jing.

Simultaneously epic and intimate, Shadow takes a little while to hit its stride; it isn't until The Shadow and The Commander spar with each other that we see the full beauty of Zhang Yimou's work. His camera rests overhead a taijitu, each fighter occupying one of the dots of the yin and yang; his camera occupies a low angle, the film shot in slow motion so the bamboo stick splashing through the water and the feet skipping through puddles look as if they're kicking up dust on a battlefield; his camera moves fluidly as The Commander's bamboo shaft spins off of an umbrella wielded by The Shadow, his defensive maneuvers eventually revealed to be inadequate to the task of defeating the stand-in for the Yang's sword.

Yimou's battle sequences are not stitched together in an editing suite via hyperkinetic cutting, nor are they over-planned, one-take, pseudo-masterpieces. They are instead elegantly designed—each shot serves a purpose, and that purpose is generally movement, either of the battle's participants or their weaponry—and easily discerned. He is guiding us through the fights, helping us understand the push and pull of battle, the physics of combat.

My issue with Shadow is my issue with many Chinese films: I feel that I'd understand it better if I had more than a rudimentary knowledge of Chinese politics. A film of this magnitude does not get made without the support of the government, and Yimou has gone from a filmmaker who sometimes earned the disfavor of the state to one who filmed the 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony in Beijing. His epic action film Hero, for instance, is a great martial arts film and a not-so-subtle shot across the bow of Taiwan, China's unruly prodigal child. I can't help but wonder what the message of Shadow—a film about a cowardly leader willing to trade his people's dignity and the honor of his sister for peace; a film about a hidden leader in the underbelly of a castle whose corruption consumes him—truly is. Let's go with "the Senkakus," and leave it at that.

Still, a superficial understanding of the film is sufficient if one needs no more than entertainment: Shadow is a gripping action epic, one that deftly combines Shakespearean courtside politics and Chinese swordplay.

The post 'Shadow' Review appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The film, which debuted at Cannes in 2018 and sat on distributor A24's shelf for a year before being dumped on VOD last week, is destined for cult status. It's a strange mixture of Mullholland Drive's unsettled view of Los Angeles, Inherent Vice's meandering shaggy dog mystery, and Neil Postman's portrait of self-induced decadence, Amusing Ourselves to Death. The tangential moments in Mitchell's film—which nominally concerns Sam (Andrew Garfield), a burnout Los Angeleno about to be evicted trying to track down his beautiful neighbor Sarah (Riley Keough), who has suddenly disappeared—are more interesting than the main thrust of the plot. Riffs on the nature of advertising, the lure and despair of being young and aimless in Los Angeles, and the vacuity of pop entertainment captivate for moments at a time.

Garfield is solid as a wide-eyed OCD case whose efforts to connect the dots do, eventually, pay off. He has a sort of sad twitchiness to him, a malaise that shifts harshly into manic fits. Keough is underused as Sarah, though her status as the missing woman in need of finding makes that somewhat inevitable. Strong bit performances by Topher Grace, Grace Van Patten, Zosia Mamet, Luke Baines, Jimmi Simpson, Patrick Fischler, and Don McManus ensure that the film is never dull. There's always an interesting face in the frame—or pair of legs or breasts, or a butt in short shorts, shot from a low angle to emphasize its curve. One is tempted to guess that Mitchell gave an extra a line about the devastating impact of "the male gaze" in order to inoculate himself from criticism for indulging relentlessly in it.

Having watched Under the Silver Lake twice now, I'm not entirely sure it works. Visually, it's a bit overcooked. Mitchell tends to use cinematic tools that don't quite fit the moment, as when he employs a modest dolly zoom following the death of a squirrel or when he places the camera at shin-height and speeds it through the aisles of a book store for no real reason or when he uses a dissolve to cut from an interior to an exterior instead of using it to demonstrate the passage of time (as he does effectively elsewhere, when Sam is driving and walking and paddle boating through L.A.). He also employs some flashy homages, as when he uses a split-field diopter shortly after we see a gravestone marked Hitchcock, that don't add up to much.

Perhaps this over-stylization represents Sam's more manic moments, and they will grow on me over the years. As I said, I'm a sucker for this sort of thing, and there's a chance that the sum of its parts will outweigh the soggy whole as years go by. Sam's trippy adventures through the heart of the Entertainment-Industrial Complex are all just strange enough to be entrancing: Mitchell's camera twirls around a party at the rooftop pool of The Standard hotel; Sam goes to war against the greatest musician of all time, a mysterious pied piper pulling the wool over the collective eyes of each new generation of teenager; threats of a murderous Owl Woman and a rampaging Dog Killer loom over the proceedings like twin harbingers of animalistic death.

I'm hesitant to outright recommend or reject Under the Silver Lake. Perusing the character names on its IMDB listing will give you a sense of whether or not this is the movie for you. Topher Grace plays "Bar Buddy," a "Balloon Girl" plays a key role in helping Sam unravel the mysterious disappearance of Sarah, and appearances by a "Topless Bird Woman" bookend the movie. On top of all that there's a fictional band whose work is performed by the very real and very Los Angeles-based Silversun Pickups—and whose songs contain secret messages that lead to milk.

If you're confused by what you've read thus far … well, that's kind of the point. And if you're bored by what you've read thus far … well, that isn't the point, I don't think, but consider it my attempt to offer a simulacrum of the Under the Silver Lake experience. It's a conscious artistic choice I've made, you see, one that you have to respect and roll with if you want to understand the true meaning of meaninglessness. If you can't handle that, man, it's on you.

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Game of Thrones is a show that reveled in darkness and unpleasantness and sadness and angst; a show where The Bad Guys Win and Good People Suffer and Expectations Get Subverted; a show where a pregnant woman is stabbed to death in the belly on the orders of a man who is later fed his own sons and who is himself working on behalf of a family whose patriarch dies violently on the toilet for the crime of seducing his dwarf son's prostitute lover. And in its most recent season, it has become a show where a beloved character gets a slow-clap after she receives the thing she's always wanted but has always been denied due to her society's blinkered thinking: knighthood.

My point, simply, is that the fan service that has crept into Game of Thrones over the last season-and-a-bit may be entertaining, but it is also unbecoming, a betrayal of the show's early spirit. Fan service is better suited for something like, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a crowd-pleasing mega-series of blockbusters that promised little more than a good time and demonstrated to generations of fans that the comics they grew up reading could be done, and done right, on the big screen.

Avengers: Endgame is the logical culmination of 11 years and 21 movies, each of which played into the next with post-credit stingers and in-movie Easter Eggs. Virtually every protagonist in the history of the series makes an appearance as the heroes who remain after Thanos's finger snap at the end of Infinity War attempt to undo his devastation. They hang out together, fight together, quip and banter together, play off each other's powers in unexpected and hilarious and exciting ways.

The film's pandering occasionally grows tiresome. There's one moment near the end, maybe two-and-a-half hours into the thing, that's so outrageously, jaw-droppingly condescending that you might be tempted to chuck your long-empty box of Jujubes at the screen in anger. Though I'm being intentionally vague here, you'll know it when you see it, and when you see it, I promise you'll think to yourself, "Sonny was right, he always is." But more often than not, it all works. This is a movie designed to spark childish wonder in even those of us who have grown cynical at the whole enterprise.

I saw someone describe Endgame as Marvel's monument to itself, and that might be true. It's a monument that Marvel, Disney, and head honcho Kevin Feige deserve. The movie wraps up the arcs of characters we've spent more than a decade with, demonstrates their growth and change and, in one case, regression. It's even compellingly moving at times. Fatherhood has rendered me utterly incapable of stoically shrugging off Dad Stuff, and this movie is filled to the gills with father-daughter/father-son relationships. The MCU has never had the intellectual chops of its counterpart, the DCEU, but it's always had a surfeit of heart. Endgame fills that heart and makes it burst.

Frankly, one wishes Endgame was the end of the MCU, period. Just as Christopher Nolan found a logical endpoint for his Batman saga with The Dark Knight Rises, so too does the land of Marvel find itself at the end of its story. Alas, the imperatives of capitalism demand that the show must go on: you don't simply pull the plug on billion-dollar-grossing films because of a little thing like the story finding a logical endpoint. Time will tell if the new generation of heroes has what it takes to keep this money train rolling.

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Yet, go we do, even if we don't go to movies like The Best of Enemies as much as we might have in years past. It's a passé sort of picture, a liberal message movie about the ills of racism and the ways in which we can join together to improve our world. The theorists and the scolds do not care for it because it runs afoul of various sensibilities. The film seems more interested in its white protagonist, a Klan leader opposed to integration named C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell), than its African-American protagonist, activist Ann Atwater (Taraji P. Henson); the movie demonstrates racial progress via its impact on him rather than her. His change is what matters, not her efforts at improving the world.

And yet, like Green Book before it, The Best of Enemies strikes a chord with regular audiences. You see it in the A from CinemaScore; you hear it in the appreciative murmurs from audiences as credits roll. In a way, The Best of Enemies is, for all its supposed stuffiness and stodginess, a rather perfect example of why we "go to the movies." It's a trip into a past—not a distant past, less than 50 years, but one that is increasingly unrecognizable—and an artful reminder of the possibilities of change.

This is the power of cinema, the ability to transport us into another place and time. Too often that power is used to send us to a world in which musclebound supermen battle it out via computer-generated fakery. Here, though, writer/director Robin Bissell sends us to the world of 1971, with its vintage cars and its outré racism. This is a world in which Klan members armed with shotguns feel comfortable shooting up a home because the woman who lives inside dates a black man; in which African-Americans are expected to send their kids to a school literally smoldering from a fire that has largely destroyed it. The costume design screams South, from Garland Keith's (the great Nick Searcy) Colonel Sanders get-up to C.P.'s garage blues, unbuttoned just enough to give us a good glimpse of the dirty undershirt beneath.

The Best of Enemies concerns a "charrette," a community meeting during which opposing sides come together to solve Durham's segregation problems without heavy handed action from the courts. Bissell for the most part elides the specifics of the plans these activists and reactionaries argued for and against, choosing instead to show how the people on each side interacted and grew more comfortable with each other. He keeps the camera tight on Henson and Rockwell's faces as the community debates, their eyes and mouths wincing and grimacing to help us see the invisible changes taking place within.

Those who would argue that The Best of Enemies falters because it's yet another white savior movie are being a bit obtuse: Of course the Klan-leader-cum-desegregationist is at the heart of this story. He's the one who has to change. If he doesn't change, the world can't either.

Frankly, The Best of Enemies—as competently shot and as passionately acted as it is—isn't really my preferred destination when I'm going to the movies. The Highwaymen is more like it. Another jaunt into the past, this one more distant, The Highwaymen recounts Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and Maney Gault's (Woody Harrelson) pursuit, and killing, of the murderous bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde (Emily Brobst and Edward Bossert, respectively).

Director John Lee Hancock seeks to deglamorize the killers, focusing not on their youthful faces or swaggering mien or charming chatter, but on Bonnie's limp. The camera lingers on her leg, injured in an accident, as she drags it about between shootouts with the cops; we see her victims' bloody faces far more frequently than her own, her beauty reflected only in the adoption of her hat and hair by the masses bewitched by her myth.

Instead of the Depression-era hoods, robbin', Hancock focuses on the less glamorous Hamer and Gault. Texas Rangers forced into retirement after a progressive busybody took over the governor's mansion and disbanded their legendary unit, the lawmen must take down the pair of murderers. Hamer is hesitant, having retired to a comfortable life with a well-off wife. It isn't until he sees the killers lionized time and again in the newspapers that he decides something has to be done.

It's that adoration that gets to Hamer, the grotesquerie of killers and armed thieves being celebrated because they gave some of their loot to locals and took from banks that had been declared enemies of the people. You see his frustration after a gas station attendant wishes the duo "all the luck to 'em," since "they're only taking from the banks, who are taking from the poor folks, like me." Hamer gets back in his car and closes his suicide door, sitting there as the camera pushes in from the side to let us see both him and Gault. Hancock then cuts to a head-on view, isolating Costner, resting on him with a slightly jittery handheld shot that echoes the lawman hitting his boiling point.

He's had enough, and the beating he puts on that gas station attendant may earn some chinwags from those who frown at the idea of cops getting information out of a guy with their fists. "There's a peace officer who died in a puddle of himself back in Dallas," Hamer says, choking the grease monkey in a headlock. "He was trying to get the shells out of his pockets when his head was blown off Easter Sunday morning. His family will be on the breadline next week. All luck to 'em? All luck to 'em?"

You can understand the grease monkey's resentment, the frustration of the common people, given the world Hancock has transported us to. Like The Best of Enemies, The Highwaymen is a journey into our past and a reminder of how much things have changed. Poverty—real poverty, with hunger and dirt and fall-down-shacks-for-houses—is everywhere, shanties filled with roving migrants looking to earn pennies a day springing up by the sides of roads.

As James Lileks noted last week, the revulsion some critics feel toward Hancock's film because it dares subvert a Boomer cinematic classic by showing killers to be killers is faintly embarrassing. The lingering fondness for Bonnie and Clyde, immortalized by the beauty of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway all those years ago, isn't shocking, I suppose. People go to the movies to be transported into different bodies as much as different times. We can't be surprised when the images of beautiful killers resonate more than the grumpy old lawmen who ended their reign of terror. As much as America has changed over the last eighty-plus years, from the Depression to desegregation to détente to decline, some fads—like glamorizing murderous nutjobs—just never go out of style.

The post 'The Best of Enemies,' 'The Highwaymen' Reviews appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

After a brief prelude in which The Wizard Shazam (Djimon Hounsou) tries, and fails, to find a champion worthy of receiving his magical powers, we meet Billy Batson (Asher Angel). He's a tough, streetwise kid, one who's trying to track down his birth mother after years in the foster care system. Picked up by the cops, Billy is sent to live with yet another foster family, this one headed by Victor (Cooper Andrews) and Rosa (Marta Milans). Billy bunks with Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer), fast-talking but disabled, and obsessed with superheroes: He has a replica of a Batarang, an authentic slug stopped by the Man of Steel's chest, and a bevy of questions about which superpower you'd want if you were a metahuman.

After Billy proves his worth by saving Freddy from some bullies that seem to have transported through time from a 1980s teen comedy, The Wizard Shazam whisks him away to test his worth—and, as you have seen in the trailers and the commercials and every other piece of marketing, Billy succeeds, becoming the white-caped, red-suited hero, Shazam (Zachary Levi). By saying the magic word (Shazam), Billy switches back and forth between identities, a bolt of lightning serving as the proverbial phone booth. That quick change comes in handy when he squares off against Thaddeus Sivana (Mark Strong), a villain empowered by literal manifestations of the Seven Deadly Sins.

The most interesting character in the film, to my mind, is not Billy nor Shazam nor Sivana, but Freddy. It is through him and his obsessions that we see what it would be like to live in a world of super-powered, godlike beings. It's Freddy who comes up with a series of tests to determine what, exactly, Shazam’s powers are. It's Freddy who is inspired by the capes and the masks to try and make something more of himself. And it's Freddy whose disappointment in Billy causes the wayward boy to reconsider the gift he’s been given.

I've noted before that the Zack Snyder-overseen DC films were, at heart, an examination of the ways in which the world would change if gods were proven to be real. Freddy is a ground-eye view of this idea, a child whose world was shaped in horrible and wonderful ways. Shazam! is connected to the broader DCEU in minor concrete ways—the aforementioned Batarang and crushed bullet; toys in department stores celebrating the vigilantes* in their midst—but the ideas that animate the film are very much in line with the ideas that animated previous entries in the series. This thematic unity is more pleasing than any cameos or post-credits stingers could be.

Levi is fantastic as Captain Marvel (though I don’t believe he's ever referred to as such in the film, instead having jokey names like Captain Sparklefingers foisted upon him; one wonders if another universe's interloper threw up a legal roadblock). It's about time we had a movie in which a marvelous captain was portrayed by someone able to express an emotional range beyond smug self-satisfaction. Mark Strong's villain is mediocre, as far as these things go; it still feels weird that no one has quite figured out what to do with Strong in this type of role, given how good he is in films like Kingsman, Zero Dark Thirty, and RocknRolla. There's something about his intensity that just doesn't translate to these big, comic book roles (see also: Green Lantern).

*That's right: Murder Batman has his own line of toys in this universe, suggesting there’s less handwringing about The Bat Man’s justifiable homicide of various ne’er-do-wells in that world than our own. No word if toy Batmobiles come with Nerf chain guns.

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It may not have been the most unique picture ever made, but compared with some of its successors—notably the dreadful live-action Beauty and the Beast, a shot-for-shot remake of the superior original when it wasn't adding an extraneous 20-some minutes to the proceedings—Burton's Alice was a veritable bonfire of originalities.

Dumbo isn't as bad as Beauty and the Beast, but it lacks the mischief-making soul of Alice in Wonderland (to say nothing of the best of Burton's work). It is immaculately competent, a modest reimagining that maintains the innocence of the original while adding a dash of human connection and moving the story forward at a reasonable pace. It is also deeply, strikingly dull, the occasional inspired performance overwhelmed by the monotony of the story.

More important than Dumbo and his mom, Jumbo, in this film is the Farrier family. Back from World War I, minus an arm, Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) must reconnect with children Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins). Their mother dead from the Spanish Influenza, their father trying to find his way as a performer who has lost the ability to perform, the kids are largely responsible for fending for themselves … much like the baby elephant about to storm into their lives and steal their hearts.

Dumbo is all big blue eyes and floppy, unwieldy ears, remorselessly adorable in every way. Indeed, his absurdly cartoonish lovability renders the revulsion experienced by Max Medici (Danny DeVito) incomprehensible. The ringleader is horrified by the tot's giant lobes, suggesting the freak show is already full, that the pachyderm will have to join the clown act if he wants to earn his keep.

The ears do more than hear, of course, and soon enough Dumbo is wowing the skeptical crowds over with his fantastic flying act. Dumbo and the rest of the circus are soon bought by V. A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton), a scheming circus-owner-cum-amusement-park-visionary, whose monument to childhood whimsy needs a top shelf act to ensure the crowds keep pouring in. Dumbo needs his friends, the Farriers, to maintain his confidence. And the Farriers need Dumbo, to learn to love and be loved and be themselves and be a family and, I dunno, some other stuff, probably.

I do so love Keaton in his manic-squirrely mode, during which he tends to draw back his upper lip and kind of look away, just over the shoulder of whichever character he should be talking to, as if he's thinking about something else, mumbling an answer that makes no sense after someone has asked a rather straightforward question. Alan Arkin appears briefly, delivering his six-or-so lines in the most perfunctorily Arkinesque manner possible. One senses he's aware of the mess in which he's found himself yet powering through with a professional's devotion. Farrell, meanwhile, is wasted as Farrier. The Irishman has evolved into one of the more interesting actors out there—the dirtbag Sonny Crockett fiending for mojitos in Miami Vice; the suicidal hitman finding himself In Bruges; the crooked pol tiring of his family's line of work in Widows—but he's never been particularly charismatic as a pure straight man.

Farrell's miscasting feels like a metaphor for the whole film. He's often great, but not used well here. Tim Burton is a fantastic director with a great sense of the visually odd, yet everything feels so straightforward in Dumbo. The film's not a mess, nor is it as soulless or mechanical as some other entries in Disney's effort to remonetize its catalogue anew. It's just not particularly interesting or terribly entertaining, either.

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So, when the terrified family of Jordan Peele's latest—whose home has been invaded by doppelgangers bent on death and destruction—ask their identical twins "Who are you?" there might be, shall we say, a slightly less direct way for their monstrous twins to respond than by wheezing "We're Americans!" As if we could not discern that these are our nation's forgotten people from their prison-like overalls, their tales of woe, the fact that they emerge from the literal underground like CHUDs who have stolen the faces of the American upper-middle-class.

As if the title of Peele's film, Us—you or me and them; Us, U.S., the United States—was not a bright, blinding flare.

This is not to say that Us isn't entertaining, an aggressive mixture of scares and laughs generating alternating gasps and giggles from the audience so intense that significant chunks of dialogue were, at times, rendered unintelligible. The film begins in 1986, when Adelaide (Madison Curry) wanders off from her family at the Santa Cruz boardwalk. Ducking into a hall of mirrors to avoid a rainstorm, she comes across something so scary—herself, but not a reflection—that it strikes her dumb for months after.

Flashforward to the present, where Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) is returning to the beach with her family: husband Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke), daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and son Jason (Evan Alex). Adelaide is uncomfortable, suffering from a lingering case of PTSD, but the family guilts her into going down to the water so they can hang out with the Tyer family, obnoxiously oblivious upper-class types headed by puffy patriarch Josh (Tim Heidecker) and boozy matriarch Kitty (Elisabeth Moss).

Writer/director Peele is admirably efficient in mining dread out of the idea that our own scariest foes are ourselves. There's very little in the way of graphic violence or cheap jump scares once things start getting weird; the chills are more dependent on costume and makeup. The strange manner in which the actors move inspires revulsion. There's something deeply chilling about the just-off faces of the Wilson family's clones, the eyebrows that have been shaved off, the hair pulled back an inch too far. The way Jason's twin moves like a spider or Adelaide's twin floats with a dancer's precision is scarier in its oddity than any bloodbath.

There is blood, of course, plenty of it. There's also laughter. Tim Heidecker, best known for his brand of Dadaist humor on Cartoon Network shows like "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job," is the film's low-key MVP. As a sort of living avatar of white privilege—he's got a great house and a great car, his every move inspiring envy in his well-off-but-not-quite-as-well-off friend, Gabe—he's perfectly dorky. And Josh's double, which Heidecker plays as though he's the master of deadly dad jokes, is the funniest thing in the movie.

While Heidecker wears the clown mask, Nyong'o wears the tragic one. Adelaide and Red (as the credits call Adelaide's double) both feel like fully fleshed out characters, as opposed to the rest of the evil twins. They both have wants, desires. Red has suffered so much; Adelaide lived in fear for so long. Nyong'o's ability to shift from hate to terror and back to hate again, depending on the scene and the shot, is eerily beautiful and modestly heartbreaking. And yet, both radiate a mother's love for their wards. Hers is one of the most striking performances I've seen in some time; it will haunt me for quite a while.

Us doesn't really make much sense if you give it more than 10 seconds of thought; the brain transplants in Get Out are logically airtight, by way of comparison. But as fable-horror, a suggestion that nothing more than an accident of fate separates the winners and losers in our modern world, Us is striking and effective.

Like Us, Dragged Across Concrete—hitting VOD this Friday along with a few theaters—does not shy away from the obvious. Writer/director S. Craig Zahler has points to make, and he's not particularly interested in subtlety.

"Being branded a racist in today's public forum is like being accused of communism in the fifties—whether it's a possibly offensive remark made in a private phone call or the indelicate treatment of a minority who sells drugs to children," Lt. Calvert (Don Johnson) says to Detectives Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn), two real police about to learn how dangerous the so-called PC police can be after video of them roughing up a suspect goes viral. "The entertainment industry, formerly known as the news, needs villains."

Dragged Across Concrete is nominally a heist flick about a pair of lower-middle-class cops (the aforementioned detectives) who rob some bank robbers after getting suspended for doing their jobs. In actuality, Dragged Across Concrete is much more. It is an elucidation of the state of society, a lament against the ruin that change is wreaking upon the people forced to live in a world they neither recognize nor like. Zahler's film is as much about the forgotten and abused underclass as Us, but more successfully sells its message by getting us inside the skins of those made to suffer.

You see this in the way Zahler structures his film. We don't open on the racially insensitive cops but on an Henry Johns (Tory Kittles), an ex-con, fresh out of prison, experiencing the ways of the flesh for the first time in years. The hooker he is with is an alum from his old school—they liked each other in Mr. Lorenzo's class, apparently, they neither knew that at the time—both he and she forced into a life of crime and degradation by the lack of opportunity presented them. Henry is smart—he sees the angles even if his patois is decidedly of the street, a bit of camouflage to ensure he is underestimated—he just never had a chance. Not with his awful schools, his drug-addicted mother. As in Us, class, and not race, is the operative framework here.

There is probably a cut of Dragged Across Concrete that is less than 160 minutes long, keeps to a tighter storytelling path, and does not take 50 minutes to get to the action of the story. That's a cut that maybe avoids the long, perfectly framed takes in which characters sit around and talk to each other, feel each other out, learn what's going through their heads. There's a cut that focuses more clearly on the sporadic bursts of ultraviolence and the zippy one-liners.

It's also a cut that would likely lose the subplot involving Kelly Summer (Jennifer Carpenter), a bank teller headed back to work after maternity leave. Very reluctantly headed back. She doesn't want to go at all—but she's forced to. Her partner, standing behind a chained door, reminds her that she is the primary breadwinner. He's not worth as much in the marketplace as she is, so he's doing the good, progressive thing and staying home with the baby. He'll take good care of the kid, he promises. She has to go. Her tears don't matter as much as earning money. Gender equality demands that she put her maternal instinct aside and march to the office.

For this, she will suffer. And the baby will suffer and the father will suffer. Just as Henry's brother suffers, his mother turning to drugs to numb the pain of life and prostitution to pay for the drugs. Just as Brett and Anthony suffer after refusing to treat with kid gloves a drug dealer who lives in a nicer apartment than either of them could afford. Just as Brett's daughter suffers, assaulted five times in the span of two years by the influx of hoodlums in their increasingly crime-ridden neighborhood. This is what progress has wrought: suffering.

That Zahler's latest is reactionary is not particularly surprising. His previous film, Brawl in Cell Block 99, featured a guy who owns two American flags going up against Mexican drug dealers who hire a Korean abortionist to threaten an unborn child. His film before that, Bone Tomahawk, was a horror-western about an offshoot tribe of natives that were depicted as literally subhuman. Completely lacking in patience for political correctness, Zahler cannot be dismissed as a mere rightwing hack. His films may lack the showy tricks of a Tarantino, another elevator of B-movie tropes, but no one would deny that Zahler knows what to do with a camera. Each shot is composed like a painting, special thought given to lighting and the use of shadow to convey internal mood. This is one of the few movies I've resented having to watch on a laptop in order to write a review: It's too pretty to enjoy in that small a format.

Yes, at 160 minutes Dragged Across Concrete can sometimes feel a bit slow. But I can't wait to see it again—this time on a big screen.

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The characters are retired Special Forces operators. Pope (Oscar Isaac) is tracking down a drug kingpin in South America, serving as an adviser to local police forces in order to gain intel. Having learned the location of the dealer's home—which doubles as a live-in safe, given his distrust of banks—Pope gets in touch with his former squad mates. Redfly (Ben Affleck) is failing to make a living as a real estate agent. Ironhead (Charlie Hunnam) is giving motivational speeches to soldiers. Ironhead's brother, Ben (Garrett Hedlund), is whiling away the days as a semi-pro MMA fighter. And pilot Catfish (Pedro Pascal) is trying to stay out of jail on a cocaine rap.

The mission Pope is suggesting has a moral core: Lorea (Reynaldo Gallegos), the drug boss Pope is after, has turned his familial homeland into a borderline failed state, a lawless warzone where violence is a simple fact of life. We see the chaos he has created in the film's opening moments, a police raid turning into a bombastic battle at a moment's notice. The drug dealers are armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades; even if they can't withstand a full-on siege, they can turn local neighborhoods into abattoirs via collateral damage.

Taking out monsters like Lorea is the whole reason that guys like Pope and his team exist. Injustice and the desire to stop it provoke reflexively physical responses in them—at a cost. "The effects of committing extreme violence on other human beings are biological and physiological," Ironhead tells a group of soldiers in one of his pep talks, recounting the time he almost killed a guy in a grocery store because the guy failed to move his cart in a timely fashion. "That's the price of being a warrior."

These changes make it hard for them to do anything else after their service has ended. And the modest pay makes it hard to save for a better life. Which is where the moral question comes in: If they can do some good for the world by taking out Lorea, why can't they do some good for themselves by keeping his loot?

Triple Frontier tries to answer that question by showing that one ethical lapse inevitably leads to another, as excuses escalate and the group commits more crimes, more killings, in order to protect their ill-gained goods. I'm not entirely sure director J.C. Chandor, who cowrote the film with Mark Boal (Zero Dark Thirty), threads the needle as deftly as he needs to here: He wants us to like these guys, to empathize with them, even as we judge them for what they've done. Without spoiling too much, the result is a bit muddled in part because the ending is so pat. Punishment is meted out and reparations paid and everyone gets to look good, more or less.

What Chandor does do well is coax performances out of his actors. Indeed, J.C. Chandor is probably my favorite director of actors working at the moment. Oscar Isaac, who previously worked with the director on the critically acclaimed A Most Violent Year, conveys more feeling with a furrowed brow or a half-grin than most actors manage in an entire movie. That Isaac is great is no surprise; that Hunnam and Hedlund are also great is.

Charlie Hunnam is best when moved to the periphery of a picture. It allows him to tone down his alpha male swagger. I once joked that Hunnam looks as though he walks by throwing one shoulder in front of the other in order to generate momentum in the lower half of his body; he struts like he's a cartoon character. But that's only when he's front and center; taking the focus off of him seems to allow him to relax, to become a bit more natural. It's a better fit. Similarly, when Hedlund is asked to carry a film he seems self-conscious and stilted (e.g., Tron: Legacy). When he's allowed to do something a bit off-kilter, however—as when he played a maniacal gang leader in 2009's Death Sentence and as he is here—he sparks to life.

Triple Frontier has some pacing issues, and it felt like a few loose threads were left dangling. But it's a fine way to spend an evening at home, given the lack of thought-provoking action fare in theaters at the moment.

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