Tag: warren daske

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!

Posted on by wd 0

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!

Posted on by wd 0

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.

Continue reading →
Posted on by wd 0

Dub’s Take: Dune (2021)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

Biases in the open: David Lynch’s 1984 movie adaptation of “Dune” is a childhood classic of mine, and I’ve never seen a Denis Villeneuve movie that I’ve liked. Denis’ films are “aesthetically pleasing” and favour “showing” rather than “telling” (all the Film School buzz words), but their runtimes are artificially inflated with superfluous texture, narratively esoteric, and none I’ve seen have satisfactory endings. “Dune Part 1” will impress Gen-Z yuppies who prefer style over substance, but it lacks the “space oddity” of Lynch’s version. Gone is grim but lush production design that suggests the evolution of man through the spice, and in its place sleek, clean CGI and “practical effects” you won’t notice surrounding a bunch of dusty celebrities.

In Lynch’s Dune, Kyle MacLachlan plays Paul as a young man who accepts his destiny and leans into myth: not the most considered arc, but there is never any question that he wasn’t ready for his responsibility. Timothée Chalamet’s Paul is an emo teen burdened by his birthright, who has no control over his actions because why bother if his future is already written? Timothy could have laid the angst on thicker rather than being so rigid and passive: look at the scene between Paul and his mother in the tent between performances and it’s clear who comes out as the born leader.

While I’m complaining: for a guy who said he’d stop scoring superhero movies, every Hans Zimmer-composed soundtrack since 2016 sounds like Batman music. Here, Zimmer layers on the tribal throat-yodelling that lets you know what you’re watching is really, really important (including such instant classics as the “I Will Miss Water” theme when we leave Caladan) while simultaneously sounding way too similar to Toto’s music from the ’84 film. And the movie’s final third of fishing for a good spot to put a cliffhanger ending is disrespectful of the viewer’s time: I’d have much rather had the fight with Jamis held-over, thus leaving the under-developed spiritual angle of the story for the sequel.

Frank Herbert’s original book came out in 1965. It’s ignorant to think that the movie industry isn’t going to remake or reboot properties for subsequent generations. It’s equally ignorant to think that new generations won’t latch on to what’s current and trending, and discount what’s old and lame. Dune Part 1 is acceptable, but it’s cold & distant in ways Lynch’s interpretation is not. If I had my way – rather than going with the wife – I would be skipping Part 2.

2 out of 5

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Are you a big Denis Villeneuve fan, and his making a Dune movie a dream for both him to make, and you to “experience”? Do you want to tell me to go watch “Enemy” or “Polytechnique” and then come back and still say I don’t like his movies? What else could you do to convince me that it wasn’t dumb as Hell to tie up “Blade Runner 2” with A.I. Sean Young & Harrison Ford? Didn’t Harrison say he hated working on “Blade Runner 1”? Comment, comment, comment!

Posted on by wd 0

assorted simple adjectives

(for mild-to-moderate foot fetishism)

A random poem about a sexy pair of socked feet.

some folks like it between their pits
and others like
the smell of their own shit –
as hard as i try,
i just can’t fight this feeling anymore:
i want you first with your socks on tight.

yes that’s right:
little pink ankle socks
for a grown woman’s lady feet,
bought wholesale
because they were cheap –
to see you soleless without your flats
left this man right out of breath.
i’ve never been a foot guy
but yours’ can’t be beat –
i want to watch you take them off
to turn up this winter heat.

can’t be beat,
up this heat,
this is a poem
about your cute feet.

Continue reading →
Posted on by wd 0