Category: now in theatres

Jay’s Take: Mulan 2020

A spoiler-heavy movie review.

mulan

In Disney’s ongoing venture to remake every property they’ve ever produced so as to hold the new generation upside-down by their ankles and shake all the money out of their pockets, here we have “Mulan”. You know already whether this is something you are going to watch, whether that be for the THIRTY DOLLARS Disney is asking its Plus subscribers right now to pay for the privilege (which was my burden to carry, thank my wife and pandemic-fatigue), or waiting until December when it will be available to anyone who uses the service and still gives a shit. Let’s get this out of the way right now: the $30 price-tag is obviously an experiment with no reasonable grounding in reality. When was the last time you paid $30 to see a movie in theatres? Even in my neck-of-the-woods, Cineplex’s shaky-seat D-BOX format is only $25, and you get a two-hour massage out of it too. Yes, I understand it could be worth it if you held a twenty-person viewing party (and so everyone is only retroactively-paying $1.50), but then your bigmouth neighbors would call bylaw enforcement and you would have a social gathering fine to worry about (which we were told could be in the thousands, but obviously depends on where you live and who you know). If Disney is successful in getting enough of their subscribers to pay, then it will be a dark day for movies-on-film champions like Chris Nolan: you could be looking at a multi-billion-dollar enterprise cutting out struggling theatre chains with a pricier alternative. Know what else isn’t grounded in reality? Mulan 2020.

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Jay’s Take: Tenet

A spoiler-heavy movie review.

tenet_new

Happy 100th Cumulative Post!

I have created a monster. I knew that my wife loved movies before we got serious, but all my talk of the Hollywood machine has permanently-ruined the conversations we have about what we watch together. Take, for instance, Christopher Nolan’s latest: “Tenet”. For a director who shies-away from the immediate-aftermath of violence, I was pretty surprised with how much violence against women was in the film: specifically against its leading lady Katherine, played by Elizabeth Debicki (who – ironically – praised the ground Nolan walks on in the theatre pre-show). Her character is married to the Big Baddie of the piece: a Russian arms dealer named Andrei, played by the superlative Kenneth Branagh; and her release from her husband’s abusive bondage plays prominently in the choices our unnamed lead (Denzel Washington’s son John David) makes in the film. I told my wife that the scenes of domestic abuse were unnecessary: I figured Nolan had done enough to show how ruthless and evil Andrei was without giving our otherwise-unfeeling hero the personal attachment in saving the battered wife. My wife, on the other hand, suggested that the extra-violence was because some European (and even Russian) audiences expect that gratuitousness as it fits in with their cinematic culture: she even cited the rape scenes from the Swedish version of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”, and how they were toned-down for the American remake. I said that Nolan probably has Final Cut now (after how much money he’s made Warner in the last 15-years), and the studio would be contractually-obligated to leave him alone and let him put whatever he wants in his movies without interference, even if that meant deliberately changing certain things for a foreign audience.

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Jay’s Take: Unhinged

A spoiler-heavy movie review.

unhinged

The biggest piece of criticism I can level at “Unhinged” – the Russell Crowe-vehicle that has the dissimilitude of being one of the first major releases after the Coronavirus lockdown – was that there simply was not enough screaming from its cast. Or yelling. Or raised voices at all, really. When I was still in my early-1s (10 or 11), I would lay prone at the top of the stairs that separated the second-and-third floors of our family’s home and listen to the movies that my parents would be watching downstairs while I was supposed to be in-bed sleeping. If you went by my word then, I would have thought all they ever watched were horror movies, because all I heard from my perch was 90% screaming. I don’t even know why I bothered: the volume was never loud enough to actually discern any dialogue, so I would literally only ever be hearing swelling music cues, gunshots, and screaming. I’m blown away just thinking about how many nights I would be there, through how many movies, fascinated by the idea of what they could be watching. And screaming always sounds more painful when it’s out-of-context.

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Jay’s Take: The Call of the Wild Double Feature

Two movie reviews.

callofthewild

I hate CGI. I know it, you know it. I love animals, especially doggos. I hate CGI animals. What is it about animal movies these days where you can get an experienced wrangler and real animals but instead they cheap-out and generate everything in a computer? Has it gotten to the point where we need to be making movies where cute animals are subjected to such unimaginable hardships that the only way to film it is to fake it? Are we scared for the animals themselves? The actors? THE PRODUCERS’ INVESTMENT? We all know Lindsay Lohan is expensive to insure: what if you made a movie where Lindsay Lohan played Jane Goodall and went into the middle of the wood with a bunch of living apes to shoot one of those handheld iPhone movies? FORGET IT. You would have better luck posting your movie to YouTube to watch for free let alone wide distribution in the slowest audience-attendance period of the theatrical year. Hollywood is cheap and stingy, and if something works then they will do that thing into the foreseeable future until a cheaper alternative is found. They found their alternative in CGI. Soon you won’t even need mo-cap actors because there will be cyborgs who do a better job of imitating Carrie Fisher than her own daughter. SOON YOU WON’T NEED ACTORS AT ALL. It’ll all be dead people, vomited-up from the grave and reconstituted on IBMs. Plus side: you could then get the dead animal actors such as ALL THE DOGS from ALL THE PREVIOUS FILMED ADAPTATIONS of Jack London’s book and reanimate them and have an unscripted reunion special on HBO. Invite the holograms of the original Benji and Old Yeller while you’re at it. Live animal wrangling for film is looked-down on in today’s world the same as those who perform in the circus and it looks like it may completely go the way of the dodo, like puppetry (if the dour and pointless Dark Crystal prequel on Netflix right now is anything to go by. LOW DIG).

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Jay’s Take: Dolittle

dolittlepsa

Rarely can I shut my brain off and simply enjoy a movie on its own terms: my thoughts will travel in a million different directions and any one of them can affect my impression. One can claim to be critically non-biased but if I have a bad day and I want to unwind by going to see the latest Jane Austin adaptation AND THEN I HATE IT (which I most surely will, if the trailer preceding this particular feature was anything to go by) then I have no one to blame but myself, don’t I? There are a minimum of three new domestic movies released EVERY WEEK OF THE YEAR, not including international films or re-releases. There will always be movies to see. If I had my choice, then, would I have seen Dolittle? The much-maligned reboot-slash-reimagining of Doctor Dolittle with an unshackled-from-Kevin-Feige’s-basement Robert Downey Jr? No: I would have sneaked into it for free. What do you want? It had terrible pre-screening reviews; worrisome press about “reshoots” and “retooling”; and then it was release-dumped in January: a time when no one wants to go to the movies because everyone is still exhausted physically-and-financially from Christmas and suddenly become very aware of how much popcorn should actually cost. Is your movie’s tone a little darker then you would like it and the Men In Suits pay you millions of dollars to reshoot the ending, only to have the new one ruin the continuity of the rest of the film? Dump it in January. Are you up against another Star Wars or Fast & Furious sequel on your current release date and all the big Studio boys have paid double then what you can afford for May-to-December slots? Dump it in January. Silly horror movie starring the only boy from that Netflix show who was willing to suck-a-dick for a career? January. Oscar bait? January. A foreign film re-edited by The Weinstein Company, and if that wasn’t bad enough Harvey gets slapped by your lead actress and he shelves the movie for three years? Nos vemos en Enero. Doctor Dolittle 2020? SEE YOU IN JANUARY. Guy Ritchie’s movies keep getting released in January: I’m sure he is not impressed. But my wife and sister LOVED King Arthur with Charlie Hunnam, and they were stoked for this “new vision” of the Dolittle story, too (which sadly is not directed by Guy Ritchie – but there is a “popcorn flick” for ya). Would it be like the Rex Harrison original, which my wife grew up on? The Eddie Murphy movies, which my sister grew up on? Or would it be closer to the books?

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