Tag: review

400 Words on: The Amateur (2025)

or, “Bringing the Chicago-Wednesday Vibes”:
A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1.5 out of 5

In an effort to engage more with my fellow hobbyist writers, here’s a tip that’s been beaten over my head through the years: use a thesaurus. Getting started is as easy as searching “synonym for word” on Google, and sprinkling some five-dollar expressions like Meghan Sussex sprinkles edible flowers is a good thing.

Let’s tutorial this by deep-diving into a few curated terms that I would use to describe “Mr. Robot” & “Bohemian Rhapsody” star Rami Malek’s new film, “The Amateur”:

en’co’pre’si’tic

A made-up adjective from the medical diagnosis “encopresis”; or, as 2001’s “Rat Race” calls it, “prairie-dogging.” The Amateur made me feel encopresitic: it was engaging enough to have convinced me to hold it in, so as not to miss anything.

bull’shit

Oxford calls it “stupid or untrue talk… typically to be deceptive.” The last ten minutes of The Amateur are bullshit, and ruin it. There’s no twist; no full-circle; and no viewer catharsis, anticlimactically concluding with little more than a subdued conversation, and a “where are they now.” I held my poop in for that?

[cont’d]

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400 Words on: Tyler Perry’s Duplicity (2025)

or, “Waiting-Out Your Shift on the Toilet”:
A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1 out of 5

“Life is like an onion. Peel it back one layer at a time. Sometimes you weep.”

– Carl Sandberg

Recently, I went to a boring live drama where the players hardly moved – not even to monologue. In media, you shouldn’t have this problem because editors exist, where theatre fills that gap with the ‘live’ experience.

Jack-of-all-trades Tyler Perry’s new Prime collaboration “Duplicity”, however, is so top-loaded with actors in closed rooms retching phlegmatic dialogue, that Perry seems overwhelmed by his own cinematic mediocrity, and reverts back to his theatrical training. This results in stagers either sitting or standing across from one-another completely stationary, endlessly overstating their positions. It’s the filmmaking equivalent of waiting-out the end of your shift on the toilet.

[cont’d]

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400 Words on: The Alto Knights (2025)

or, “Running Around the Woods with Shrimp Cocktails”:
A spoiler-free mini movie review.

2.5 out of 5

There are few things more comforting to a cinephile than Robert De Niro calling someone an expletive & unloading an entire pistol clip into them.

It’s unwholesome, but this has been his playground for decades. The Alto Knights is an impassioned throwback to the Scorsese/De Niro collaborations of old, but lacks the oomph of those masterpieces.

GQ’s 2006 interview with Bob is required reading for anyone wanting an encapsulation of the stubborn actor. I’m not here to rag on De Niro: he’s had many legendary performances over his long career. But like any artist (*cough* senior), he’s set in his ways, rejects change, and becomes crotchety when he feels disrespected.

Now an octogenarian, Bob can’t just go back & retroactively change his De Niro-isms, no matter how much digital technology de-ages him (like in Scorsese’s The Irishman). Now forced into ‘grandpa’ roles that he may or may-not feel are beneath him (being a new dad at 81 certainly increases that obligation), audiences know exactly what to expect.

[cont’d]

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400 Words on: Snow White (2025)

or, “A Big Studio Budget Retained for Payroll”:
A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1 out of 5

Snow White 2025 is as much a product for consumer consumption as it is a snapshot of Disney’s current socioeconomic agenda – from Lion King’s Pride Rock in the background of their vanity card; to bookending sequences so similar to Beauty and the Beast’s you’d swear copycat if they didn’t both originate from the same company; to Dopey’s now-curable neurodivergence.

It attempts to redux the material as a feminocentric Robin Hood with a protagonist who’s ‘her own woman,’ but she’ll still drop everything to jubilate musically about her new White beau.

As the titular character, Rachel Zegler opts for the Queen of the High School Drama Department approach: she’s kinda hot and can carry a tune, but emotionally empty from crying about her now off-again boyfriend right before showtime. Watch her strain during the movie’s one big moment for her to act: like Zachary Levi’s recent dramatic try in The Unbreakable Boy, Zegler lacks the skill required to convincingly portray painful remorse. Go do some indies and get back to us.

[cont’d]

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400 Words on: Conclave (2024)

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)

[cont’d]

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