when i’m on the clock,
i’ll talk back to a manager
no problem,
if i think it’ll get me anywhere
or not in trouble
or teased by female staff
but i won’t tell the guy
sitting in my reserved seat at the
movie theatre to
move over
please.
some words are too much trouble
for too little reward,
save my father and i getting
what we paid for.
he won’t say anything either.
//wd 12.20.2025
Original photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com.
To paraphrase Tarantino, a movie that successfully uses a piece of music, owns that music. Likewise, 1981’s docudrama “Mommie Dearest” (or MD) belongs to its lead actress, Faye Dunaway.
Audiences are fickle. As a broad example (pun not intended), Sydney Sweeney is objectively attractive, but sometimes we need to be reminded that her place in history – as a babe – will only occupy a small space: one inhabited by the ghosts of celebrity babes past, like Farrah Fawcett or Marilyn Monroe.
Same goes for legendary performances: they only become discourse if viewers put the proverbial poster on their wall. As much as I admire Dunaway, there’s only a handful of movies out of her six-decade career I can definitively name – most from one era.
[cont’d]
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!
Let’s consider the contentiousness between celebrity parents & their offspring: the Voigt/Jolie/Pitt’s; the O’Neal’s; the Barrymore’s…
The public only receives as much information that’s dished; often, that doesn’t include the forgiveness intrinsic to maintaining a healthy, life-long relationship with one’s family. That’s usually something us plebs experience ourselves, in time.
Great, then, for actor Kiefer Sutherland actually wanting to work with his late father & icon Donald. Kiefer hasn’t been featured on-screen so much since the height of COVID, what with his side-gig as a country musician. I saw him live in 2019 and, while I can’t remember his music, I think all of us in attendance were awed to see Jack Bauer/David the Daywalker in the flesh.
Where their filmography choices differ, father & son’s similar acting disciplines, and uncanny biology, can be felt in their shared scenes for the 2015 western Forsaken.
Forsaken has noble intentions – no doubt about that. It has a linear, easy-to-follow man-versus-himself redemption story, devoid of texture that doesn’t serve the plot. It has wonderfully verbose dialogue, recited melodramatically by its cavalcade of character actors (Demi Moore; Michael Wincott). It has a subversive epilogue, swapping a lovesick reunion for a tearful family goodbye. There really isn’t anything thematically wrong with it.
But it’s slow. Damn slow! Characterizations & script points are blander than superior genre examples, like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (Richard Harris’ English Bob vs. Wincott’s Gentleman Dave) and Ed Harris’ Appaloosa (the love triangle). Brian Cox as the villain is Brian Cox as the villain, doing his billowy, profane Brian Cox thing – though credit goes to director Jon Cassar for convincing the Shakespearean-trained thespian to die next to a big pile of horse shit. And it’s always a bit rocking to see close-ups of gory, chunky gibs in the last ten minutes when the previous eighty lacked such morbid details.
Although only an hour-and-a-half, Forsaken feels twice as long when its quiet moments insist on themselves, like endless wood-cutting, and rumours from the church social club. If there were fewer of those hyperrealistic pauses – so common in modern prestige television – perhaps Kiefer & Donald’s understated work here would have serviced the picture as a whole, as opposed to being ‘one effective element’ of a decidedly average film.
If you want to see peak cinematic familial synchronicity, Forsaken is a low-calorie – if forgettable – clone.
Poster sourced from themoviedb.org. As of publication, Forsaken is available to watch for free in Western Canada on CBC Gem (unsponsored). What do you think? Leave us a comment 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!
theory of a daskeman 