Tag: review

Dub’s Take: Better Man (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

2 out of 5

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!

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Dub’s Take: It Ends With Us (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1 out of 5

You are forgiven for thinking “It Ends With Us” (aka. IEWU) is an ‘important’ movie, what with all the rigamarole behind its scenes. Trust me to tell you like it is, and IEWU did not end soon enough.

Lion’s share of blame is awarded to director/star Justin Baldoni, and not for the same reasons as his now-mangled future career prospects: long passages are staged & shot flatly like community theatre, with a never-ending rooftop meet-cute beheading the pacing right out of the gate; line-readings recall Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” built on plot reaction rather than action; and Blake Lively’s Lily Bloom is fitted into tight, sexy tops that certainly made me envious of her current beau Ryan Reynolds, but are a betrayal of the self-taught defences of her character on-screen.

Original author Colleen Hoover ain’t no saint neither, and IEWU’s greatest fault is its disingenuous take on domestic violence. These handful of scenes are told with an unreliable presentation, tricking the audience into wondering whether Baldoni’s toxic neurosurgeon Ryle isn’t such a bad guy… until the contemptuous slow-motion reveal in the third-act spells it out.

It’s hard to say whether IEWU would have benefitted from an unflinching eye opposed to the choppy PG-13 implications we got here instead. What’s crystal-clear, however, is both leads’ reverse dramatic-irony that would be overanalyzed in literary form (such as Ryle’s shoulder-shrugging in the climax) lands here with a thud because of the meandering cinematic handling of the core narrative. The hot & heavy courting Lily puts Ryle through is starkly contrasted to how easily triggered she is, despite his adamance of love, and neither’s behaviour is ever studied beyond its broad strokes.

This isn’t to fault Lively’s performance, which is about as good as the material will allow, but I only ever had empathy for Amy Morton’s underused Mama Bloom. Certain people in life continue to make poor choices despite being compulsively aware of the signs, but a romance centered around these otherwise well-educated, well-intentioned one-percenters who all run their own businesses is perhaps the wrong podium.

It Ends With Us is an overlong message movie that fails in its amateur, sanitized telling. Only you, the potential viewer, know whether you would have paid full price to see this in theatres. At what point can I walk out and still get a refund?

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Keeping up with all the drama, I was expecting an oral sex scene after Lively’s lawsuit mentioned that Baldoni wanted more, only to find there wasn’t any simulated sex in the movie at all. Are you telling me that Justin wanted an oral sex scene just because? Does its feuding leads impact your impressions of the film itself? Are you like me, and the drama is the reason you decided to watch it in the first place? Let us know in the comments below!

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Dub’s Take: Kraven The Hunter (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1 out of 5

Remember in “Back to the Future”, when Marty is auditioning for the Battle of the Bands and Huey Lewis tells him he’s “too darn loud?” So quiet & subdued 80% of “Kraven The Hunter” was, that I could clearly hear the shakey leg of the phobic teenager sitting in the row behind me with their 10-person family entourage. They wanted to be anywhere else, too.

Let’s draw the same comparisons every other review is: between this & Chris Nolan’s “Batman Begins”. While their narrative direction differs, Batman’s opening salvo is tightly edited, dynamically paced, and Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack effectively ‘mickey-mouses’ every scene.

After Kraven’s prologue (freely-available to view on YouTube), there’s a twenty-minute passage with no music, no action, and non-stop dialogue. Aaron Taylor-Johnson eventually bites someone’s cheek off in a fountain of CGI gore, but it segues to another long section with tedious exposition, and Aaron’s incessant fourth-wall mugging.

Legacy director Quentin Tarantino says there are no more movie stars in modern Hollywood, and Aaron is a good thesis. He’s handsome, charismatic, and clearly committed to the role (physically-speaking), but the self-awareness of his line readings betrays the serious tone of the rest of the picture – particularly in Russell Crowe & Alessandro Nivola’s sobering villains. A dozen buffalo are graphically killed by poachers, but all Aaron has for them are poster quips.

Kraven betrays its audience in more overt ways than merely contemptuous acting & a lack of trust. Poor pacing may be covered-up in post-production, but bad timing is entirely a director’s fault, and J.C. Chandor (“A Most Violent Year”) has no clue how to stage action for the mainstream. At one point, a phase-shifting antagonist appears behind someone to shoot them, but when we cut to the reveal, it’s a full beat before the trigger is pulled. Why wait so long? Why is a ten-second throwaway bar shootout halfway through framed clearer than a climactic scene in a monastery? Why is a CGI cutaway of Aaron jumping out a thirty-floor window the most exciting single sequence?

Kraven’s two hours are only passingly engaging, no one looks like they’re having a good time except Aaron (and at the viewer’s expense), and Chandor is more concerned with pretentious drama than Christmas entertainment for the masses. I wanted to like it, but Kraven is lifeless, and not loud enough.

Movie poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Are you glad the Sony-verse of Spider-Man villain origin stories are over, for now? Do you think Aaron’s smugness will play better should he be hired as the next James Bond? Did you like Kraven’s CGI fuzz (including a tank of a lion, an inquisitive eagle, and a very hairy Russian bear) as much as my wife & I did? Leave your comments below, and Happy Holidays!

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Dead Show Eulogy: CSI Vegas (2021)

A spoiler-free mini television review.

SEASON 1 RATING:
4 out of 5

SEASONS 2 & 3 RATING:
1 out of 5

After an underwhelming ‘series finale’ in 2015 (with creepy-guy Doug Hutchinson as the villain), that “CSI” we like came back in style with a standalone, limited-series revival in 2021. It was pretty good, too: cozy returning work from William Pedersen, Jorja Fox, and Paul Guilefoyle; a straightforward serial; and the successful casting of Paula Newsome (“Chicago Med”) as the department’s new supervisor.

I didn’t connect with the other new actors, but those secondaries weren’t the focus: there’s only so many episodic stories you can tell before details overlap, and CSI’s adroitness – from the 15 seasons of the original series to its various spin-offs – was the slow dishing of its characters’ personal info, only ever noting those beats as they pertained to the caseload.

Flash-forward, and – like all good things – executives misread the positive ratings as audiences wanting more. Pedersen, Fox, and Guilefoyle all left, with Marg Helgenberger & Eric Szmanda chosen to represent the old guard’s new bequest. Weeks would go by without fresh episodes, suggesting that focus-group proposals (including dumping an older, tired Szmanda after only three chapters) were being implemented in real-time: always a bad sign.

And both sequel seasons of “CSI Vegas” were pretty bad: staff writers just couldn’t get their priorities straight. Too much time was dedicated to Newsome’s recovery after an assault, and not enough to Lex Medlin’s Beau’s rehabilitation after getting spooked in the field. Helgenberger, like Szmanda, looked tired, and was only in half the episodes. Scribes instead pivoted to Matt Lauria’s Folsom and his poor decision-making (a three-way office romance; avenging his mother’s murder then having to regain the team’s trust), but Lauria played him without irony: his line readings were surface-level gruff, opposed to finding the Warrick-style pathos.

Season 3’s back-end was spent investigating a cyborg factory, which devolved into Newsome having one-way conversations with the suspected robot antagonist in her office. Catherine being a mentor to Sarah Gilman’s Penny was forgotten. And I would be remiss to not mention episode 2-06 (“Here’s the Rub”) as one of the worst-edited forty minutes of television I’ve ever watched – odd, since established director Mario Van Peebles’ filmography suggests a comfort with the TV format.

Relentlessly disappointing from-a-point and contemptuous toward longtime fans, CSI Vegas is now six-feet underground in the grave it dug itself.

RIP 2024

Poster sourced from thetvdb.com c/o Zeferovic. What do you think? Do you agree that Vegas peaked with its first season, or were you a fan of all three? Was it disrespectful of the original series’ legacy – particularly its treatment of Catherine and disregard for her history with Sam Braun – or have you never been a supporter of the CSI franchise? Let us know in the comments below!

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Dub’s Take: Subservience (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

4 out of 5

My 2007 grip & gaffing instructor Dave Gordon used the term “Golden Topping Land” (after the artificial popcorn butter) to denote a cinema audience’s suspension of disbelief, so long as nothing dumb happens in the story, or a microphone dips into the shot. It’s to “Subservience’s” credit that it had me in Golden Topping Land its whole duration, save two key points: trying to pass a black Tesla off as an electric Mustang, and Megan Fox’s lack of neck make-up.

I’m a chauvinist: there I was the morning after watching, recommending it to someone as “the Megan Fox sex-bot movie on Netflix”. Yes, Megan pretty-much shows as much of her body here that a R-rating & no-nipple clause will allow. But Subservience has more up its sleeve than mere sleeze, not the least of which its three leads: all of whom put out intense performances like they’re out to prove something.

It’s been easy to write off Megan’s acting career as ostentatious, but she does try serious work when & where the industry will allow (“Passion Play”; “Midnight in the Switchgrass”) and she presents great value to the role here, despite it being a robot, and another vessel in a filmography defined by transfixing the male gaze. Her gender-swapped body double Michele Morrone (“365 Days”) is here as well, playing Megan’s stooge, and Madeline Zima as Mike’s terminally-ill wife. Madeline shocked me since, growing up with “The Nanny,” I wasn’t prepared to see little Gracie fully grown & fully naked. She puts on a persuasive show, though, and could find work in more erotic thrillers moving forward, if that’s what she decides.

The most pronounced flaw is in the film’s otherwise-strong script, which introduces dynamic world-building that plays a passive second to the movie’s main focus, which is Megan usurping the family. A subplot about a construction crew being replaced raises valid questions about the world’s future labour force, but it doesn’t go anywhere narratively except to illustrate that Megan has murderous tendencies, when the same point is already proven in her attempts to kill Madeline.

Subservience’s on-the-nose dialogue about modern relationships is compelling enough without being overcomplicated by empty lore, or its two endings. Producers could have saved some money, too, had they just concentrated on the sex-bot in the house. That part of the movie is good, for reasons other than solely Megan, Michele, or Madeline’s smokey stares.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. I never thought I would say this, but Subservience’s broader strokes may have played better had the film been a limited series instead. What do you think? Why are the surgeons’ mouths sealed shut? What is the social structure of a society where all labour is replaced by automation? Just ‘what’ were those things on the soles of Megan’s shoes? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

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