Category: now in theatres

Jay’s Take: The Godfather Part III (Coda, whatever)

A revisionist & spoiler-heavy movie review and personal analysis.

A Roman, divorced from his wife, was blamed by friends for the separation. “Was she not beautiful?” they chorused. “Was she not chaste?” The Roman, holding out his shoe for them to see, asked if it were not good-looking and well made. “Yet,” he added, “none of you can tell where it pinches me.”

– Adapted from Plutarch by Reader’s Digest

When I was in Grade 9, a few friends and I got together one afternoon and shot a movie on my Dad’s ancient Hi-8 Panasonic camcorder. Grade 9, how old would we all have been… 15? In this riveting independent feature (that took hours to film and only yielded 10-minutes of useable footage), there is a gang war between humans and bottles. Anthropomorphic, Ebonic-spouting plastic Pepsi bottles with angry faces scribbled on them in black Sharpie. There were three scenes: the prologue, with the bottles encroaching on the humans’ turf; a “driving” scene where the humans go to the bottles’ hideout (where all us underage-teenagers pretended to drive around in my friend’s mother’s sedan, which was parked in the garage); and a final confrontation where the humans kicked the shit out of the bottles. We win, The End. It sounds ridiculous just writing it here, and it WAS ridiculous, and a good memory. But – being the fledging cineaste I was – it wasn’t good enough. It could have been better. So I tried to “improve” it by adding 90-minutes of stock footage stolen from both poorly-converted VHS tapes of Hollywood movies and the public domain database that came off the editing software CD I was using.

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Jay’s Take: 100% Wolf

A movie review.

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Picture this: it’s Tuesday night. Tuesdays in my neck-of-the-woods means Cheap Movie Day at my local multiplexes (both makes). Not only is it Cheap Movie Day, but – quite clearly in a desperate & disparate state – it’s buy-one-get-one, as both brands mid-pandemic have fought long-and-hard over my email Spam folder to see which one has irritated me enough into going there. Let’s look at our options. On one hand, there’s “Landmark”: reasonably-priced food (except the pizza); electronic recliner seats; and reserved seating, clearly-marked with enough light on the row & seat to find your place. On the other, there’s “Cineplex”: outrageously-priced food (especially in the colossal failure that is their VIP lounge); old-school stadium-style rocker seats spaced close-enough together that anyone can use your shoulders as a footrest; and reserved seating – earmarked by Little Jimmy in Grade 11 and his Michael’s-brand label maker – where you can never see any of the row or seat numbers because the theatre lighting hasn’t been adjusted for the change and the seat stickers don’t stay on well to the plastic chairs and are literally peeling off. It’s a frightening state-of-affairs: not only has my local Cineplex all-but-ignored renovating since its VIP & D-BOX upgrades almost 10-years-ago, but 10% of its square-footage sits unused since the start of the pandemic; and its these malnourished arcade machines that formed the backbone of their new horizontally-converged “Rec Room” line they announced last year, and then subsequently forgot about. How do you keep those things clean? You don’t: half the appeal of going into an arcade now is scrutinizing what it was exactly you just touched.

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Jay’s Take: Possessor

A spoiler-heavy movie review.

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Know what really irritates me? Movie trailers containing critic quotes and awards notice. For a long time, I was indignant of this technique, which appears to only be reserved for film festival selections trying to make their way in the Big Scary World of the modern multiplex. I’d be watching a trailer for something that looks interesting, when all of a sudden they cut to a wall of text telling me that someone from the New York Times thought it was good, and so should you. If you can’t sell the movie on content alone and you have to bolster its status by telling us what the “professional movie-watchers” thought of it – before it’s available for mass-consumption – then my expectations of your product immediately drop. But readers, I think I’ve cracked the code. Let’s assume that the average trailer runs 60 to 90-seconds in-length, at least. If this is a Very Important film festival movie, then let’s also assume that you aren’t a big-budget production and you don’t have enough “money shots” in your film to fill a full-length trailer and sell the movie to a mainstream audience (Marvel movies now have nothing but money shots, and a 2 to 3-minute trailer without ruining the movie is entirely possible). Let’s assume further, that your low-budget film is only three actors in a room the whole time. You have enough intriguing shots to build a 30-second spot without spoiling anything, but anything more than that and your movie starts to look dull (like it’s three people in a room the whole time, which it is, but you don’t want Joe Cinema and his Scenetourage to know that). So you have to pad it with filler, and positive reviews are cheap filler.

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Jay’s Take: The Broken Hearts Gallery

A spoiler-heavy movie review.

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Yes, your boy Jay went to see a chick movie. There is no way around it: “The Broken Hearts Gallery” is for girls, through-and-through. And it was the only other major new release playing that my wife wanted to see for her birthday, that wasn’t subtitled (or I’d be all-over “Train to Busan 2”). But I was able to get through it like a champ. Allow me to explain: before the film, there was a trailer for “Ammonite”, which looks like the latest period-drama about an older, professional woman falling in lesbian with her much-younger assistant. It has Kate Winslet – who is fantastic – and Saoirse Ronan – who is mouth-gapingly pretty – so obviously it looked like something I would watch. My problem was that, hasn’t that particular film been done a few times now? It did seem awfully familiar. So it wouldn’t be in my best interest to assume (lest I be disappointed) that A: there would be steamy reel-to-reel sex, because there wouldn’t be, and B: that it would follow any kind of original plot or story-progression. There will obviously be some persecution; maybe the younger woman initially rejects the older woman’s advances; and the affair will probably ruin their lives, whether that means a lynching or a sad, lonely death at home like queer Alan Turing in “The Imitation Game”. Maybe the younger will leave the older for a man? Who knows. The point is, we’ve reached a precipice in cinema, where it doesn’t matter what you write, because it’s all been written before, either in books or on film, in English or any other language. So then it was all about how it looks; what directorial decisions are made; aesthetic choices that stand separate from whatever the writer originally intended behind their words.

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Jay’s Take: The New Mutants

A spoiler-heavy movie review.

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Hot on the heels of their characteristically-safe “Mulan 2020”, Disney has seen fit to release Josh Boone’s “The New Mutants”: a decidedly-unsafe choice for pandemic viewing. Sure, audiences may have been clamoring for something “different” in 2018 (its originally-intended release date) in a market that was saturated by “Star Wars” and Marvel & DC movie adaptations. But it’s two-years-on and people are finally starting to question their own culture, and a superhero movie where the “heroes” are disturbed teenagers unable to control their fledgling powers due to their combined childhood traumas is not necessarily upbeat family entertainment; especially if all anyone is looking for right now is non-binary escapism. Yes, The New Mutants is “different”, when compared to Twentieth Century Fox’s pre-Disney slew of X-Men movies. So “different” in fact that it probably scared producers, who feared making a return on an investment that toes-the-line between a “Netflix”-style teenie-bopper serial and an Ari Aster thriller. So it was shelved, pending reshoots to “lighten” its tone. Flash-forward two years and even star Maisie Williams’ “Game of Thrones” series had ended in the time-gap: everyone got older and moved-on. On top of that, Disney bought out Fox, and what we have now is the much-touted “original version”, presumably released as a stop-gap in an otherwise-vacant theatrical schedule. Because, content-aside, who really cares anymore?

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