Tag: english

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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Dub’s Take: Ordinary Angels (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

An uplifting, faith-based drama, with the religious rhetoric dialed way down; and believable performances from a multigenerational cast? Who knew?

At a breezy two hours, “Ordinary Angels” makes for an above-average date night, with some tears; some smiles; some “are you kidding me’s”; and sincere characters making choices based on compassion alone. It’s recommended, despite being completely predictable.

Some notes: Amy Acker should be rescinding the gift basket for her agent. The actress who so-effectively played Root on TV’s “Person Of Interest” has a starring credit as Alan Ritchson’s terminally-ill wife, but only shows up for five minutes right at the start before she dies – we only see her again in photographs. I found this disappointing, because Ritchson – who we know from Amazon’s “Reacher” series – is really good here, but a bit stiff in the prologue with Acker.

What I wanted were more flashbacks between the two, so I’d know if the walls Ritchson put up around his character were maintained consistently with his screen-wife (which would tell viewers either he was always the stoic everyman – even when she was alive – or he was a total suck around his wife when she was living). Even though such a scene never materialized, and his relationship with Hilary Swank’s Sharon remained platonic throughout, Ritchson is still credible as a father willing to do anything for his daughters.

Meanwhile, Swank is as reliable as ever. Regardless of how you feel about “awards”, she’s still won two Oscars and is an intense, committed actress – though not necessarily the first person you think of as a philanthropic hairdresser. Her Sharon Stevens is perpetually propelled forward by an unencumbered desire to help Ritchson’s family and less by the regrets of her own life, though she does have one or two things she is willing to share. Once you get used to the lack of a deep, dark history, Swank as Stevens is the rock that keeps the film from flying away on the wings of apathetic humanitarianism.

Also nice was the film’s excellent use of REM’s “Losing My Religion”. In fact, I’d wager to say it’s so well used here, that the scene it plays over sheds light on Michael Stipe’s otherwise-inscrutable lyrics. Good choices all-around!

4 out of 5

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Will you be watching this anytime soon? Are you wondering why I would give this a 4 out of 5 when “Dune 2” only got 1.5? Do you think there is more merit to the aesthetics of modern cinema as opposed to small-scale, done-to-death inspirational stories; or should critics continue to respect the basics of the medium like acting, dialogues, and direction? Comment down below!

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Dub’s Take: Dune Part Two (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

“Dune: Part 2” is the poster-child for “anti-climactic”, in ways other than it being the middle-child of a trilogy. There were fleeting moments when I really thought director Denis Villeneuve had pulled it off (finally), such as Jessica drinking the Water Of Life, or Paul breaking a sandworm. But these sequences of visual & auditory awe are constantly at odds with Villeneuve’s unrestrained desire to cut away from the action, and bring the audience back to the small-scale drama of its core characters: a drama by its very prophetic nature tensionless.

All of what I liked and didn’t about the prequel is back in-force: it’s well framed & shot, but its production design is too distilled for a Strange New World; Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack is campy and borderline plagiaristic of the music from the 1984 movie; and Timothée Chalamet’s “Paul Muad’dib Usul Atreides, Duke of Arrakis” is a blank slate of whiny flippy-flop onto whom the audience can vicariously live out the experience (although credit goes to Timothy’s fight double, who does a pretty-sweet triple roll off Feyd-Rautha in the climax).

This round, however, Villeneuve refuses to allow his action scenes the same breathing room he gives the human story. Yes, there are breathtaking individual shots of the conflict, but no magnifying glass brought up to it. The spectacle is only present long enough for viewers to recognize it as the canvas in which the drama is played out, but not long enough for it to be felt emotionally at the same extent Villeneuve treats the dialogues. Like the prequel, the scope that the story insinuates is lost in favour of the myopic problems of its celebrity actors. For a three-hour, $200-million movie in this day and age, audiences should demand more.

As much as I’m a softie for the ’84 adaptation, I’m the first to admit its patchwork second half (which was never properly finished) is probably not a good representation of the first Dune novel’s denouement. Here, Villeneuve had a limitless opportunity – financially & corporately – to actually conclude some of the story without struggling to condense too much one deemed “narratively important” into a studio-mandated running time. Instead, we got Frank Herbert as sifted through Denis’s litter box.

1.5 out of 5

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Are you just looking for eye-candy the same way the theatre full of seniors at my IMAX screening were? Are you sort-of, kind-of interested to see what happens in “Dune Part 3”, considering the only other adaptations were the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries’ from the early 2000s? Did you also get big “Star Child” vibes when Paul talked to his sister? Comment down below!

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after hours

A poem about The Power.

when i was a babe,
i used to dream of having
The Power
to make any girl sexually attracted to me.
oh yes.

more than all the social anxiety
that fame could potentially bring me,
sex is
was
has always been my One Thing –
thank the evolutionary progression
of having it broken down on a napkin
while i was still in my single digits.

i wasn’t looking for a reverse gangbang –
as a teenager, that’s unrealistic –
but i thought it would be nice
if they all lined up outside my door
in a clump,
bottlenecking just to be the first.
ain’t gonna happen, Warren.
ain’t gonna happen.

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