or, “Doing Away with the Chiller in the Thriller”: A spoiler-free mini movie review.
2 out of 5
I remember the trailer for Conclave last autumn, and I didn’t want to see it then, either.
Between the super-serious ensemble of Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow, and Stanley Tucci all speaking in soft whispers; to the frequent high-angle framing of old White men in robes walking briskly through courtyards; to the punctuated explosion, it simply did not look like a good time. It looked like someone, somewhere was trying too hard.
Lo-and-behold, Conclave’s advertising & creative choices are misrepresentational – this isn’t a nail-biter: it’s a procedural about what happens when the Pope dies, and finding the right person to replace them.
The subject matter at-large joins The Program & The International as a movie with a rich topic worth edu-telling the viewer. But here, that knowledge is at the expense of wasting my time! (with an overdramatized aesthetic suggesting a core mystery that doesn’t actually exist)
Watching “The Unbreakable Boy” (aka. UB) reminded me of Ben Stiller’s 2008 comedy “Tropic Thunder”, and Robert Downey Jr’s immortal words: “Never go full retard.”
Vulgarity aside, RDJ’s line signified that actors playing overly-challenged characters weren’t likely to win audience recognition. In the Real World, compassion is everything.
That being said, and with all due respect to real-life autistic/brittle-bone sufferer Austin LeRette (“Auz-Man”), the lisping imitation from actor Jacob Laval is so off-putting – transcending ‘cute’ into piteousness – that I couldn’t set aside my disbelief.
‘Uplifting’ genre flicks like this inspire pre-viewing expectations: maybe some bullying; some falling down stairs (like in Shyamalan’s “Unbreakable”)… I will give it to director Jon Gunn that he knows how to film scenes of bones breaking, as my wife & I both flinched at each mini-disaster and ones in-waiting.
But the third-act bullying is where I was done, and not because it was too cruel. Whether-or-not how the sequence plays out on-screen is actually what transpired between Auz-Man’s older brother Logan & the school bully ‘who became one of his best friends,’ it is the soppiest, most untenable bit of Hallmark reality ever. Logan should have just kicked the shit out of him and been done with it.
Laval’s representation of Auz-Man is dwarfed by Zachary Levi (both “Shazam’s”) as LaRette’s father. I wondered whether Levi could carry a serious movie with a belied filmography…
And he can’t, instead playing the hollow-headed goof we’ve seen from him time-and-time again. Not only that, but watch how much difficulty he has with sincerity in his climactic apology scene! Sorry, Zach: you don’t have the sauce.
There was kerfuffle with the new Captain America that it didn’t delve deeper into the modern zeitgeist (like its triple-the-length prequel miniseries). Indeed, my wife was adamant her main takeaway from UB was to be inspired by Auz-Man and fly her own freak-flag high.
UB doesn’t have goals of being disposable entertainment: it wants to be an important movie about faith & resilience. So why doesn’t it study some of the dad’s autistic traits more? Why does it give a middle-aged man an imaginary friend, and cutaways of his OCD & restless leg, without exploring them beyond passive freakishness?
The Unbreakable Boy is too timid to answer the big questions it asks, but calculated against the viewer constituting their own empathy. Never go full retard.
Poster sourced from impawards.com.What do you think? Are you choked that Patricia Clarkson & Amy Acker both went underused (again)? Are you surprised the finished film went three years without a release? Do you think Zachary Levi should get another chance at a dramatic leading role? And probably the most important question of all: as a viewer, do you lose empathy for characters that demand it? Let us know in the comments below!
You can blame Film School for my objectively watching movies wondering what I’d do different: “Well, if they had moved the opening flashback to the midpoint, flash-forward to the middle for a bit, then go back, cut the next twenty minutes…” and etcetera.
However, I’m sure the only way to fix “Wolf Man” would be to start over with new hires. To quote “Family Guy,” it “insists upon itself”: it’s innately serious with its body-horror aspirations à la Cronenberg’s “The Fly”, but lacks Jeff Goldblum’s humanizing arc or, plainly, anything else of interest.
What happened? I mentioned TV’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” in my negative review for Blake Lively’s “It Ends With Us”, but actress Elisabeth Moss’ time there – particularly the long close-ups of her character’s mental atrophy – made her the perfect actress to quietly communicate the fear of an abusive partner in director Leigh Whannell’s 2020 reimagining of “The Invisible Man”. A palatable discomfort made that project borderline-unwatchable, but its potency made me excited for what Whannell did next.
Well, next is here, and Wolf Man’s casting sucks:indie-darling Christopher Abbott and “Ozark’s” Julia Garner, as a bickering couple, have zero chemistry. Despite his character’s learned sheepishness, Abbott lacks primality as a father trying to break a cycle of toxic parenting. Garner equally trifles as the shocked city-mom out of her element, emptily channelling Moss’ internal acting successes. Putting Abbott & Garner together at their most unpleasant is like banging two coconut halves together and calling it a horse.
Bad acting can be charming if the story is still engaging, but Wolf Man’s specialty is its disengagement. Abbott’s character history isn’t fleshed out, leaving his father’s notes on hunting the lycan for no one to find and a neighbourly relationship undeveloped & whitewashed, a mother MIA, and a second-act twist without emotional resonance. We spend an inordinate amount of the first act with Abbott & Garner’s marital issues, and the transformation itself doesn’t start until the halfway point, prorating the rest with Abbott barricading only one of the two entrances into the farmhouse where the family is hiding, not including the windows.
Like a puzzle, Wolf Man’s pieces are all there, but there’s no ends tying the loose, disparate bits together, and what’s left doesn’t match the picture on the box: it’s poorly acted, poorly plotted, and goes nowhere fast. Next time, just remake “Van Helsing” instead.
Poster sourced from impawards.com.What do you think? Assuming there are always bits on the cutting room floor, should the filmmakers have swapped out scene-after-scene of Garner & her movie daughter running back & forth between the farmhouse and the barn with some actual backstory about Abbott’s father’s hunt for the lycan? Is it worth hypothesizing about movie scenes not included in the final cut, even if they didn’t exist to begin with? Do you re-edit movies while you’re watching them, too? Leave a comment for us down below!
What creative doesn’t love a contract, which includes being a good rep by spending your daylight hours fielding endless interview questions from a bevy of international reporters?
Much like film criticism, there’s a finite number of queries before you end up answering the same ones over-and-over again. But you still have to act like you’re chuffed no one’s asked you that one before, just like singer/songwriter/“Better Man” subject Robbie Williams and director Michael Gracey. Any conversation about Better Man is eventually going to devolve into an opinion on whether the monkey thing actually works or not. And much like questions at a press gala, if you have to ask so many of them to get the answer you want, then maybe it wasn’t so interesting to begin with.
Gracey says in the pre-show, “Whatever kind of movie you think (Better Man) is going to be, it’s not that movie.” But it is, following the same Sisyphean tropes that other biopics of its vein already have. While I can respect Williams’ tenacity of spirit, he hasn’t lived through anything the public hasn’t already seen from the celebrity sphere before. If Williams is this in-your-face in Britain then it’s no wonder his movie is struggling at the box office: the public already knows more than it wants to from the covers of tabloid magazines.
Better Man’s resilience, then, relies on its music & aesthetics which, for the most part, are successful. Despite some lackadaisical CGI (Williams’ avatar isn’t as detailed as those in “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”), the movie still looks good, including a solid visual metaphor for panic attacks. While I can’t see myself picking up the soundtrack album, the music was pretty good, too. If you go solely off the film’s cuts, you’d think Williams is a balladier like solo George Michael: these needle-drops work for the movie’s somber beats, but I longed for more up-tempo numbers like in the show-stopping Take That & Knebworth sequences.
At the film’s midway point, Robbie goes through a frosted-tip phase, but instead of solely colouring the monkey’s head hair blond, the filmmakers dye his face & neck hair, too. Does that mean his chest hair is blond as well? Where’s the walking on all-fours & clattering? Better Man gets points for trying something different, even if it’s a shallow template for another, more-bonkers film with superior follow-through.
Poster sourced from impawards.com.What do you think? Even if the film didn’t totally work, Williams & Gracey concocted some wild, “Across the Universe”-esque fantasy sequences, such as Williams & Raechelle Banno’s courting montage, when Williams is caught with heroin, or the left-field “Beowulf” climax. Would any of these scenes have played better with a human actor as opposed to a monkey? Should there have been more monkey-isms? Did the movie strike the right balance between monkey & man? Do you even care? Let us know in the comments below!
they exit the saloon doors one after another like a fashion show, or open functions on an AS400
or ants, out of woodwork marching vertically along split trenches of bark, their petite outlines shadowed by the street lights of the car park. i don’t know how much time has passed. i wasn’t keeping track, and i’m almost hooting ash.
when do i have to go back? so it looks more like i’m smoking
and less like a jackass? it’s a great excuse, to be so old-fashioned you’d rather you lived in an era you were able than every five minutes having to excuse yourself from the table.
theory of a daskeman 