Category: 2024

Dub’s Take: Fear and Desire (1952)

A spoiler-free movie review.

1.5 out of 5

If only Stanley Kubrick knew how, decades later, his acolytes would give credence to his debut feature, when he thought the negative itself should be burned. “Fear and Desire” is a trade photographer’s exercise in the world of narrative film, and of not much value otherwise, were it not for the retrospective knowledge of what its creator would go on to do (and to a different degree its cast, including “Harry & Tonto” director Paul Mazursky in a key role).

Fear and Desire has come back to consciousness with the discovery of the Venice Film Festival cut, longer by a mythical 10 minutes.

OOO! I’d be lying if I said those 10 minutes didn’t make me more interested to see the film than I was initially. Kubrick (particularly “A Clockwork Orange”) was my childhood gateway to “cinema”, but I’d never seen Fear and Desire before. As a result, I watched what I got, which is the widely-available 60-minute version.

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Dub’s Take: Godzilla x Kong (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

I think we’ve confidently reached the point where the “kaiju” in a Godzilla movie can easily hijack the film from its human cast. Never was I more malaise-stricken than during the live-action scenes in “Godzilla x Kong”, where capable actors who put in a good performance every time regardless of pay or cast heading (like Rebecca Hall or Brian Tyree Henry) couldn’t save their loquacious appearances from making-plain the techno-babble that rationalizes the film’s monsters & their “world”, in a language understood by us surface-dwellers.

Who cares? Aside from the parallels between the little deaf tribal girl “who holds the key” and all the non-verbal grunting going on between the titans, scenes with dialogue are quickly shoved under the bed when the Big Boys start stomping around.

These action scenes, with decent special-effects even five movies on, are antithetical to those in the recent “Dune 2”: fights have a beginning, middle, and end, without cutaways; they’re generally framed in-full so viewers can see the blows and their consequences; and they weren’t finely-minced in the editing room. The broad stokes of the production design also seem to have some thought put into it: there’s good squish when Godzilla heat-beams into another beast’s mouth; a bridge of bones over a river of lava; a “mini-Kong” that plays like Gollum to King Kong’s Frodo; and the gangly movements of an “evil-Kong” that recalls the uninhibitedness of Mark Hamill’s Joker from the nineties’ “Batman” animated series.

But it’s all still not very original, isn’t it? How many more of these “Monsterverse” movies (and by extension TV series’) are we going to get before audiences get sick of them, or their diminished budgets start to affect what we see on screen, or are remade again? And while the wider design is fun, the details could have used some work: in the climax, the Great Pyramids seem to get destroyed three times over and yet are still standing in the background by the end of the scene. Considering the work that looks like went to the rest of the picture, that’s a big oversight. Doesn’t change that I was entertained.

2.5 out of 5

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Are you a Legendary, or even a Toho, “Monsterverse” fan? Do you think all this talk of “Hollow Earth” dilutes these movies, or is it the most believable alternative to the titans being products of nuclear testing, or extra-terrestrials? Do we even “need” an explanation? And why do audiences seem so concerned with the number of civilian casualties in a superhero movie when even the friendly kaiju seem to take out thousands here (and yes, I know from the “Monarch” show that there’s an Amber Alert in place)? Leave a comment below!

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Dub’s Take: Ghostbusters Frozen Empire (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

I’m not a “Ghostbusters” fan. The first film was not in my childhood rotation, although it was a clever idea that could have only come from the renaissance of ’80s cinema. I did see “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” (2021), but I don’t agree with bringing dead actors back digitally, so I thought the ending was a cheap excuse to wring a wet rag of nostalgia over viewers’ heads. We saw the cast we wanted back (sans Rick Moranis) plus the Ectomobile & proton packs, and the script regurgitated all the flashy pseudo-science that made the first film’s screenwriters Dan Aykroyd & the late Harold Ramis giddy in ’84. And since it made money, now we have ANOTHER ONE.

For the first 75 minutes of “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire”, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a John Cassavetes picture: there’s minimal “busting”; a girl-crush with a ghost; quick flashes of what the old crew is up to; the tribulations of new, inexperienced management taking over an old, established operation; and, ultimately, the triumphant bureaucracy of William Atherton’s Walter Peck. After the small-scale atavism of the last instalment, the only thing producers had to do in this sequel was up the stakes. Yet, so little of consequence actually happens in the first hour-and-a-bit of “Ghostbusters 5” that it feels more like melodrama than the supernatural action-comedy team-up throwback it should be. It’s boring.

It all segues to a big finale that is heavily-spoiled in the trailers. All the new & old actors show up for the one camera shot audiences are all expecting (in uniform walking toward the camera in slow-motion), but the final fight takes place inside the cramped studio corridors of a firehouse when they should be outside in, you know, the world of ice (I thought it was cheaper to shoot against a green screen)? And when our heroes exit to their adoring public in the epilogue, the old actors mysteriously disappear. The final half-hour smells so foul of behind-the-scenes scheduling coordination, and contract negotiation, and cost-saving measures, that its equivalent would be watching a dramatization of the film’s accounting spreadsheet.

Maybe this is all you want out of another Ghostbusters sequel: to see everyone again, one last time. And if they make another one again, then maybe you’ll get to see them all one last time again, forgetting of course we’ve already been through this a few times already. But I’m done with busting. Not that busting ever made me feel good.

1 out of 5

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Am I being overly critical? Do I need to chill out more and appreciate that Paul Rudd can turn in a consistent, median-emotion performance whenever he wants? Would you be as awkward as Finn Wolfhard looks in the pre-show interview sitting next to a blond, long-haired Mckenna Grace? Leave a comment down below!

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Dub’s Take: Late Night with the Devil (2023)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

Actor David Dastmalchian is an odd duck. He has a long face weighed down by the pressures his characters carry and the secrets & desires they harbour. Even when his role selection leans toward weirdos & villains (Polka-Dot Man in James Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad”; Piter in “Dune” (2021); Murdoch on TV’s “MacGyver” revival), Dastmalchian’s work sidesteps mockery for sympathy.

David’s casting as a talk show host in “Late Night with the Devil” is inspired, in one of the most “normal” portraitures that I’ve seen out his filmography. However, I think directors the Cairnes brothers do their lead a disservice by making David’s Jack Delroy a Carson competitor, placing the character in the same pantheon as contemporaries Leno & Letterman. Dastmalchian’s subdued Delroy would have played better as a Charlie Rose/ Dick Cavett type, even if that meant no additional texture in the form of a studio audience. I won’t say David’s Delroy is uncharismatic, but maybe a little too first-season Springer for the subject matter (the character deliberately transitioned his show to tabloid trash for ratings, so more cockiness would have played to that).

As someone who enjoys “lo-fi” vaporwave, “Late Night” was an aesthetic feast, with visuals mimicking live television from the 1970s, the on-stage orchestra with its oboes & saxophones, and crusty title-cards. In-between these moments of found-footage were black & white “behind-the-scenes” takes that are framed perhaps too much like a movie and took away from the purity of the “live” footage. Other details – such as the stoic Cavendish ad-reps sitting in the front row, or the boom-mic dipping into shots – counterbalanced the pretence of authenticity.

Does the film succeed as horror? I would say it succeeds at constantly-mounting dread: Ingrid Torelli as Delroy’s young, demon-possessed guest is incredibly cute & effectively spooky, and there’s a brilliant (and earned) sequence involving worms that plays with audience perspective. As far as the ending, it could have gone a number of different ways but I was not disappointed with what the filmmakers chose narratively: only underwhelmed by the out-of-place CGI work and abrupt aspect-ratio change (although it was a very cool creature design in the climax).

Overall, Late Night is effective in healthy fits-and-bursts, it’s a transient 90-minutes-long, and may play better via home streaming than in theatres.

2.5 out of 5

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Much like an evil djinn, do you think you need to be very specific when making a deal with the Devil? Wasn’t Ian Bliss’ substitute for the late James Randi a pretty money enactment? What’s your favourite David Dastmalchian role? Do you agree with the Matt Zoller Seitz review that says the film would have been more effective had they left out the documentary-style preamble? Leave a comment below!

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Dub’s Take: Road House (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

The original “Road House” (1989) is a cult classic. That doesn’t mean it’s any good: it means a very niche group think it’s excellent, my wife & I included. It’s full of bloody, cathartic, testosterone-fuelled violence that still holds up 35-years-later, even if some of the dialogues or procedural bits may be dated by today’s standards. So when I say the Road House remake is “hot one-and-done garbage”, it’s because at its core, it isn’t “Road House”.

What works about the remake are the villains: they are exceptionally cast. Contemporary UFC titan Connor McGreggor is one-note as the primary tough guy, but he looks like he’s having fun, so the viewers have fun, too. Billy Magnussen takes the Ben Gazzara role from the original as the whiny suit, and JD Pardo from TV’s “Mayans M.C.” is a brash biker with cropped bleach-blond hair: they, too, realize they are acting in a Road House movie, and thusly are also fun to watch. The original Road House is, above all, fun.

What doesn’t work is everything else. Like February’s “Argylle“, “Road House 2024” tries to trend with young, current audiences (in Argylle, we had a female-led cast & non-sequitur humour; in RH2024, we have MMA-based fighting & post-produced “awkward” pauses) but without the budget, the star-power, or the script to make it truly memorable.

Action scenes are quite-clearly CGI-enhanced, including a ghastly prologue with Post Malone fake-punching, and at least two fake car accidents. Jake Gyllenhaal as hero Dalton is miscast, spending too much time in his own head method acting when the role shouldn’t have called for it. Maybe things would have been different had his Dalton received a satisfactory back-story, or if the screenplay concentrated on some of the modern challenges of being a bouncer, but the script does neither. As a result, Gyllenhaal is working when he should be having fun. The film is also poorly-lit in its night scenes, and so roughly edited you can’t tell whether a gator eating somebody is a failed rescue or a murder.

Streaming has its detractors (RH2024 director Doug Liman being one of them), but you have to admit it has its perks, such as downvoting things so your service knows you hated it. Getting sent direct to streaming is the best thing that could have happened to the Road House remake.

1.5 out of 5

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Will you say “critics be damned” and watch the stupid movie anyway? Even if a movie is reviewed poorly by a majority, do you still reserve judgement? Or were you like my wife & I, waiting for it to come to theatres, only to see it was available immediately on Prime for instant gratification? Let me know in the comments below!

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