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What is this Movie?

A musical, set in an apocalyptic world covered in snow and ice, where a small collective has been surviving very well off in a luxurious bunker.  While attempting to live out the rest of their days with silver-spoon syndrome an outsider separated from her family stumbles into their home and begs them to let her stay.  They reluctantly allow her to stay where-in she and their only son develop a romantic relationship.  But for everyone else, this outsider is a living reflection of their own shame and the atrocities they’ve committed and buried deep down in hopes to never resurface.

What is this Film?

It’s an apocalyptic musical.  It’s whimsical Silo.  It’s Blast from the Past if Adam never actually went back to the surface but instead contracted a strong case of jungle fever.  And then finds out his pompous parents are cowards and liars.  The End is a story about a group of people who delusionally parade about their aristocracy to distract themselves from the fact that the world has ended, and they might be responsible for it.  And this they were fine with, this disgrace all their own they had come to accept even maybe forgotten until one of the offspring of the last living survivors they abandoned decades ago forces them to wake up and remember who they really are and the horrible things they did for their own self-preservation.  Billions of people died, and these people all just buried their guilt and survivor’s remorse in walls of snow and ice surrounding themselves with meaningless privilege.  In a world with no poor, how can there be any rich.  What is power if there is nothing left to rule?  If you leave humanity to die, are you still human?

I couldn’t get enough of Moses Ingram as Girl, yes that’s her name, in this movie.  I had no idea the woman could sing.  Her duet “Catch Fire” with romantic co-star George MacKay has been living rent free in my head for days now.  Her conviction on screen is palpable as she struggles with her own survivor’s remorse after growing up in the cold is heart-wrenching.  Every time she sings I think I started melting away into a big ball of man tears.  Your boy is not a big musical fan but in an interview, George MacKay said something to the tune of “this was made for the big screen” and I have to agree.  This film deserves your full attention from the moment MacKay as Boy reveals his desire to experience anything of the world he never got to know.  He longs for the outside, longs to feel the sun, longs to express his emotions and talk about his feelings with his family, in hopes they reciprocate.  But this is just not to be. 

Dad, played by Michael Shannon, has an established order.  He treats Boy as if he’s preparing him for the world, a world where you work on manifestos and read them aloud in your study, because this bunker has a damn study.  Mom, Tilda Swinton, floats about from room to room nitpicking in the name of perfection.  You never know when guest might be coming over.  We must make sure there’s enough soup spoons for everyone.  And yet, you can see she’s unstable and full of contempt.  Everyone else in the house is just playing the role that keeps them sheltered. A Doctor, a Butler, a Friend, and Mary in addition to are all that makes up of what’s left of humanity in this world.  They even put on performances for entertainment where you can clearly see these people used to be people.  They used to have real worth but now have been reduced to props.

 Beautifully, the real story here is told through the music.  All of the emotions come out through song, which took me a while to pick up on.  At first I thought they would just randomly sing short snippets of songs depending on where they were standing in the house.  These aren’t long ballads but instead short melodies, where the vocalist through subtle metaphors reveal their internal conflicts.  They don’t really sing and then cut to the next season as a way of transitioning through the plot points.  They sing through the film, through the pain and angst, through all the shame and discomfort of knowing they’re all alone and this life they have is it, there is nothing outside left for them.  There is nowhere to explore as this place was their last escape.  This is expressed mostly by Boy who sings things like “I’m always too late.”.  And even when Girl tries to have hope, tries to connect with Mom and Dad, tries to find what little life and living is left in this cold, shallow place her advances are rebuffed by Mom whose shell is starting to crack. 

I think I could watch this film again and again, then maybe again.  Every watch would reveal some new genius sentiment about where our own humanity is headed due to climate change and the hand we play in it.  Or maybe I’d pick up another jab at the ridiculousness of our social customs in renowned societies of today that laude wealth as a natural born right.  Either way, this film was surprisingly good and left me feeling a bit overwhelmed.

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♦♦

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer

Starring: Moses Ingram, Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Michael Shannon

Synopsis: An apocalyptic musical about a wealthy family living out their End Days in a bunker when an outsider shows up on their doorstep begging for a place to stay, shattering the delusional image these aristocrats had created for themselves. 

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What is this Movie?

After the death of her mother, 17-year-old Gretchen moves from America to the German Alps with her father Luis, stepmother Beth, and mute half-sister Alma.  Gretchen isn’t very thrilled at her current situation feeling like the 3rd wheel in her new family, butting heads with her stepmother, harboring jealousy towards her younger half-sister, and feeling ignored and resented by her own father.  She’s offered a job by the local hotel manager Herr Konig, where things start to get a bit loopy.  Half-dressed women randomly showing up in the hotel lobby drinking sprite and vomiting, a beady, red-eyed hooded woman chasing her through the night dressed like she fell out of a Hitchcock film, and Alma randomly having seizures all give Gretchen the impression that Herr Konig isn’t just a hotel manager, and she might need to get the hell out of town before it literally kills her.

What is this Film?

Cuckoo is absolutely cuckoo.  From the moment this family shows up in the Bavarian Alps, you get why Gretchen looks like she’s being dragged here against her will.  Hunter Schafer pretty much carries this film until Dan Stevens fully shows up in the 3rd act, outside of a few creepy moments shared between he and Hunter earlier in the film.  You have this young girl who’s now forced to live in this foreign land, where one minute people are speaking German, and the next they’re speaking French.  The hotel she works at closes at 10PM for reasons no one wants to explain.  She’s constantly passing out in one place, then waking up in a totally different place.  This part could just be the editing and not necessarily indicative of her circumstance.  Aside from hotel guests, nobody in this town feels trustworthy.  Then there’s the old woman from Birds in a raincoat with the hood up and not a drop of rain in site that keeps chasing Gretchen all over town.  Multiple times she’s nearly killed, and her father could careless, even going as far as telling her go on ahead and get if she’s not happy there and wants to leave so damn bad. 

Then the late-night screeching starts.  Is that a banshee?  There’s a damn banshee in this movie!  This wild feral sound causes the audience to experience déjà vu in reverberation hell.  I thought my screener was fried or bootlegged.  It took 3 of these scenes before I realized the editing was done this way on purpose to disassociate the audience from time and reality.  The beauty here is while you’re experiencing these loops along with the characters on screen, you see them start to realize the déjà vu around the same time you’ve realized it and some of them know what this means.  Others aren’t so lucky.  The monster here is so menacing you just can’t turn your eyes away from the screen.  Add to that this was shot in 35mm film giving you that nostalgic late 70’s horror cinema where creepy things are way creepier and loud noises feel way louder, and you’ve got one of those horror films you start to resent watching alone.  This is definitely some bring a friend horror.

The story isn’t overbearing or too complex once you get deep into the 3rd act and Herr Konig is given more exposition.  But That still won’t keep you from either needing to watch this multiple times or at best rewinding it over and over again creating your own loops to help put the dark pieces together.  Not being able to figure out what the hell was going on is what made this movie so good to me.  I found myself at the climax of this film stumbling over the sense I couldn’t make of any of it and asking things like, “Wait that creature thing is a what?”, “These scientists are trying to do what with it?”, and my favorite “So is that person dead now?? 

Another film about women being sacrificed in the name of science and experimentation, I’m kind of starting to hate being a man.  And this one has a such a weird twist.  I finished it and started thinking we just might need to ban men from doing science stuff.  Mostly because we’re just terrible human beings.  But also because mother nature has to be sick of our shi..nanigans. By the end, you’ll either find it uncomfortably interesting, shamefully wishing you could see more to answer all the questions you’re left unanswered, or you’ll absolutely hate it for leaving you feeling cuckoo.

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♦♦

Director: Tilman Singer

Starring: Hunter Schafer, Jessica Henwick, Dan Stevens, Marton Csokas, Jan Bluthardt, Mile Lieu

Synopsis: A 17 year old girl struggles to survive an evil creature and uncover the truth about sinister things happening to her and her family after they move to a resort in a small German town. 

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The Wild Robot is a master class in blending ground breaking technology with animation to give us a gorgeously, heartwarming film that understood the assignment.  Lupita (Roz)  and Pedro Pascal (Fink) are a sensationally addictive duo surrounded by an amazing ensemble of voice actors who bring to life a wild tale of finding strength in family, protecting the things you love, and embracing heroism.

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♦♦

Director: Chris Sanders

Starring: Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Stephanie Hsu, Ving Rhames, Mark Hamill, Bill Nighy, 

Synopsis:  A Robot abandoned on earth who is initially treated like an outcast until she adopts a duckling who mistakes her for it’s mother, fights to protect her forrest family when her makers return and wage war in an attempt to retrieve her.

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A film that lives and dies by it’s leading cast made up of a Mother, her daughter, and a magic Macaw, Tuesday is a dark fantastical tale about how people cope with terminal illness and impending Death.  Lola Petticrew really gives an amazing performance here that will charm the audience audience even more than Tuesday is able to charm Death.  Arinze Kene voices Death and does some very captivating motion capture with his portrayal of the stuttering Macaw.  The film really hits the ground running especially when you toss in the unhinged performance from Julia Louis-Dreyfus switching gears and turning this into a dark comedy.  But ultimately the film falls flat when it doesn’t fully capitalize on the real world ramifications of Zora’s actions, and instead lulls it’s audience to very anticlimactic ending. 

It’s almost like the director knew exactly where he was going but didn’t fully grasp where things were headed. 

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♦♦

Director: Daina O. Pusić

Starring: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Lola Petticrew, Arinze Kene, Leah Harvey

Synopsis:  When Death comes knocking at the door of a terminally ill teenager named Tuesday, she uses her quick wit and insatiable charm to befriend the creature.  But when her Mother discovers the Macaw, she takes matters into her own hands and makes an unhinged decision that puts the entire world in dire straits. 

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Rachel Morrison and Barry Jenkins come together beautifully here to craft a big screen polished adaptation of the 2016 PBS Documentary, “T-Rex: Her Fight For gold”.  The chemistry between Ryan Destiny and Brian Tyree Henry portraying Claressa Shields and Coach Jason Crutchfield is so palpable.  A lot of heart and care went into this project.  So, while it may feel like the film doesn’t tell enough of Claressa’s story,  which continued far beyond her Olympic years, the gritty biographical story of a naturally gifted boxing phenom we do get here is unapologetically as inspirational as the real life boxing champion herself. 

This is the story of T-Rex.

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♦♦

Director: Rachel Morrison

Starring: Ryan Destiny, Brian Tyree Henry

Synopsis: Based on the PBS Documentary “T-Rex: Her Fight For Gold”, The Fire Inside tells the story of Claressa Shields, a young black female boxer from Flint, Michigan who’s will and determination take her all the way to the Olympics yet somehow not far enough away from the dangers of her home life. 

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If Disney is going to take a made for streaming series project and whip it up into a last minute theatrical release, they could at least give us Return of Jafar instead of Bambi 2.  Moana does a poor job of catching the audience up on what some of our favorite characters have been up too since we last saw them through an adventure in such a superficial way.  And once the film reveals itself to actually not be one-dimensional we’re sailing midway through the 3rd act of a story that hopefully James Cameron won’t feel the need to be inspired by since he’s already made a billion dollars doing it with less heart.  The songs aren’t really memorable.  The new characters aside from one we only get in the 2nd act aren’t very memorable.  The story we now know is actually part of a trilogy that might actually be going back to streaming after these box office numbers drop is also not memorable.  And the Rock sings.  There’s still a lot of people’s favorite things about Moana here, but this film deserved to be better and just doesn’t feel like it was treated as such by the House of Mouse. 

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♦♦

Director: Dana Ledoux Miller, Jason Hand, David Derrick Jr.

Starring: Auliʻi Cravalho,Dwayne Johnson, Awhimai Fraser, David Fane, Rose Matafe, Hualālai Chung

Runtime:  1 Hour 40 Minutes

Synopsis: Moana returns as a young adult encouraged by the water spirits to set sail on a new adventure to find the other lost tribes of the sea beyond her side of the reef. 

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Francis Ford Coppola has definitively proven that no amount of wine country monies can be thrown at a 30 year passion project to justify wasting two extra long hours of your life aging away in an IMAX theater struggling to watch it.  Megalopolis is so bad it couldn’t make it’s money back in a game of tic tac toe against a blind man.  A Megalodon of a mess, Coppola beats his audience over the head with his shallow progressive messaging literally carved in stone connecting some beautiful cinematography and provocative performances with some of the ugliest CGI and convoluted story progression I’ve ever experieneced. 

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♦♦

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Starring: Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Laurence Fishburne, Shia LeBeouf, Aubrey Plaza, Jon Voight, Giancarlo Esposito, Dustin Hoffman

Synopsis: Set in New New Rome, an idealistically driven, widowed scientific genius with the power to control time pushes back against the regressive regime in an attempt to create a golden utopia causing a violent social and political uproar. 

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MaXXXine is the ending to a trilogy we welcomed but didn’t ask for, and it almost took the director from Ti West to You Tried West.   Luckily, Pearl and X are just so strong that it pretty much makes MaXXXine the 3rd Back to the Future film.  A film that’s just as far from worthless as it is from worth it, mainly due to a nothing new here story, an unearned reveal, but still somehow a variety of perfectly casted supporting role performances.  MaXXXine gets so many things right yet still does nothing to push the genre forward. 

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♦♦

Director:  Ti West

Starring: Mia Goth, Kevin Bacon, Sophie Thatcher, Moses Sumney

Synopsis: A porn star lands her first big Hollywood break while being black mailed by a dirtbag PI who knows her dark X past, and stalked by an L.A. serial killer murdering everyone close to her. 

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Alien Romulus is proof that anything with a Xenomorph in it should only allow Ridley Scott on set as a Producer.  It’s a much needed return to the Xenomorph-verse that gives the audience nonstop nerve-wrecking action, just enough sci to fi, nostalgic easter eggs, and fun elements adapted directly from the more recent Aliens videos game like Alien: Isolation.  This film does an amazing job if amping up the anticipation for the upcoming FX TV Series, Alien: Earth.

Cailee Spaeny fills the shoes of Ripley very well and David Jonsson deserves all the praise for his performance as Andy, an android who gets an upgrade in autonomy. 

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♦♦

Director: Fede Alvarez

Starring: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Aileen Wu, Archie Renaux

Synopsis: Rain and her android Andy join a group of young workers and attempt to escape their indefinite indentured servitude by boarding an abandoned Weyland-Yutani  space station only to discover the station is the home of a Xenomorph with some new toys to impregnate. 

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