Lot of content this week.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
My introduction to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wasn’t the comics or the Saturday morning cartoon, but the action figures. I remember my dad would buy them for me at Costco, along with X-Men, Batman, whatever, cause they’d come in these giant jumbo packs (as everything Costco do). I liked my Batman and X-Men toys just fine, but there was something about the inherent goofiness, creativity and bright colors of the TMNT line that my five-year-old ass found absolutely delightful. Well, I guess (as seen below) some were a bit culturally insensitive, but I was a super problematic five-year-old.
I remember when I was six or so, up in Connecticut visiting my Hungarian step-grandma (who later abandoned the family) and she got me two things for my stay – a shitload of lemon tea Snapple and a VHS copy of 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I watched the FUCK out of that movie during my trip. It was the polar opposite of what those action figures represented – it was dark, brooding and shot like a Gordon Willis project. I took the VHS home with me and enjoyed it for a couple more months before my mom surprised me with a VHS copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, a vastly inferior film that managed to make eating pizza seem like the most disgusting thing on the planet. Alas, I enjoyed parts of that movie quite a bit even if it didn’t hold a candle to the original. Later on, my mom bought me Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, set in 1600s feudal Japan where the turtles time traveled using this dumb thing that looked like a portable lamp. It was a travesty, I HATED IT – the stupid villain from Lethal Weapon 3 was so dumb and above all else, it did not feel like a Ninja Turtles live action movie.
I never got into the cartoon (was a Batman: The Animated Series stan) and I was terrible at video games so I never really got into the games. Years passed and my film and TV tastes developed far beyond “cowabungas” and “splinters.” They released the dumb looking Michael Bay TMNT movies while I was working at Walmart (low-point) and during my last year there they’d play it on the TV’s in the electronics section (real garbage). Then Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the minds behind Superbad and The Green Hornet said they were making an animated TMNT movie and that it was going to be great. I was skeptical because of The Green Hornet but decided because of Superbad, it may be good. I’m here to tell you that it wasn’t good – it was FUCKING GREAT.
Sure, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem isn’t at the level of “filmmaking” as say Oppenheimer, but it might be the most fun I’ve had in a movie theater this whole summer, even more so than the Tom Cruise movie. First, it casts actual teenagers (Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown, Jr., Nicolas Cantu, Brady Noon) to voice the teenage turtles and that finally, after all these years, gives the property the proper feeling that these motherfuckers are just kids. They pivot April O’Neil (the newscaster not the porno person) to be a high school student newscaster instead of a 30-year-old woman, cause that would be weird for a bunch of 15-year-old boys to be hanging with a woman old enough (in some unfortunate circumstances) to be their biological mom. She’s voiced by The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri and it’s a refreshingly different take on the character. Splinter is voiced by Jackie Chan which is also refreshing, but not as refreshing as casting basically unknowns as the four mutant turtle kids – with he exception of Good Boys’ Brady Noon who gives us a very good Raphael. There’s also a slew of celebrity cameo voices from Maya Rudolph, Paul Rudd, Giancarlo Esposito, Seth Rogen and John Cena as Bebop and Rock Steady, and Ice Cube as SuperFly, the movie’s surprisingly complex villain – at least for a relatively low-stakes animated action movie.
What makes this TMNT so special is how likable the characters are and for the first time, how different the four teens are from each other – they don’t need color coded bandanas differentiating them, you can just tell them apart by how each character reacts to something. At 100 minutes, there is never any pacing issues and while some of the jokes don’t land, some land pretty spectacularly including an exploding vomit sequence that’s an all timer. I feel like I’ve spent so much of my time as a critic writing about how annoyed I am with the industry’s obsession with sequels and remakes and requels and really just any already existing intellectual property, but TMNT: Mutant Mayhem is a franchise I can totally get behind. I say that now but by the fourth or fifth one I imagine I’ll be praying for a way out. Grade: B+ (In Theaters)
The Righteous Gemstones Season 3
The Righteous Gemstones is revolutionary television because it’s the first show I’ve seen to successfully merge non-stop, raunchy, dick-balls-and-poop slapstick humor with poignant and incisive family drama. With its third season, it managed to hit a new peak, becoming a screamingly funny and genuinely moving mediation on family and our obligations to them. It succeeded in not only fully developing every member of its large extended family but taking it a step further by gleefully breaking through the walls of established reality. I don’t think any other show could get away with the choices this televangelist satire does, but Gemstones keeps us invested with how honest and grounded its family dynamics are.
The third season sees Eli Gemstone (the incomparable John Goodman) handing off his mega church kingdom to his three incompetent kids – the prideful Jesse (series co-creator Danny McBride), the foul-mouthed Judy (the brilliant Edi Patterson), and the underdeveloped Kelvin (Adam Devine). Shit goes south quick when the kids lose the faith of their associate preachers and their backwoods revivalist cousins come crashing into their life. There’s so many excellent performances on this show that it seems daunting to point them all out, but the ones I was most impressed with this season, other than Edi Patterson‘s continually stellar work as Judy, were guest star Steve Zahn as the kids’ raving, domestic terrorist uncle and the wonderful Tim Baltz as BJ, Judy’s mild-mannered husband who finally finds his mojo this season. Of course, there’s also Walton Goggins, whose estranged conman uncle, Baby Billy, provides some of the heartiest laughs of any season.
Co-creators Jody Hill and Danny McBride have been making comedies for HBO for the past fifteen years or so, but Gemstones feels like their masterpiece. It’s an unexpectedly sharp satire on religious fanaticism and the type of relatable, desperate real-life situations that can bring us there. It also has the BEST dick jokes on TV. Grade: A (Max)
Theater Camp
Coming off as not much more than the less funny child of Waiting For Guffman and Wet Hot American Summer, Theater Camp is charming enough once it stops trying to convince you that you should love it and like BE OBSESSED with it. You know? Cause you were a theater kid! You gotta love it! THIS IS WHAT YOU DID! REMEMBER?! It’s like the musical stuff you used to do!!!! FIVE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND— When in doubt, break into a song, remember?? My Christ, I remember why I switched to comedy. Not to say the theater didn’t teach me invaluable lessons on work ethic and community, but let’s be real, some of the people are A LOT, even if they often have their hearts in the right place. They don’t call it DRAAAAAMMMAAA for no reason.
There’s nothing too original about the movie’s set-up – a bunch of characters at camp try to give themselves individual closures as the feeling of this being the last summer the camp exists looms in the background. The characters are adequately drawn but none too original – two best friends (a straight girl and a gay guy) are theater camp counselors, with one wanting to go off and actually perform (Molly Gordon, also the co-creator of the film) and the other too afraid to leave the nest and just wanting to teach forever (Ben Platt – excellent as always, come on he couldn’t help that he looked too old for Dear Evan Hanson the movie, that has nothing to do with his acting abilities). There’s also The Goldberg’s Noah Galvin, MVP of the film by a long shot, as a stage manager longing to be a performer, and American Vandal’s Jimmy Tatro, usually very funny but not here, as the camp director’s bro son who tries to save the camp from going under. Cause of course, there’s a rich kid camp next door and they want to buy the theater camp because the camp is in financial trouble — you know, the story with all of these camp movies? There’s also a few quirky kids and teachers. The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri (also in TMNT) is really funny as an impostor teacher who lied on her application, one of the more interesting characters the movie confoundingly never explores that much.
Just when I was thinking of totally giving up on Theater Camp, the final 20 minutes happen which include an end-of-the-summer musical presentation that had me laughing really hard. Unfortunately, twenty minutes of big ol’ belly laughs just wasn’t enough for me to fully recommend this. Grade: C+ (In Theaters)
Sympathy for the Devil
I suspect the only reason Sympathy for the Devil was released on the scale it was is because of the involvement of Nicolas Cage. This is a really lame and poorly executed thriller that takes almost two-thirds of its runtime to get off the ground. The dialogue is trash for the most part and Joel Kinnaman (remake Robocop) struggles playing the “straight man” to Cage‘s predictably insane kidnapper character. Cage, sporting a super fake Boston accent half of the time, while half of the time just talking like Nicolas Cage, delivers a performance that is objectively terrible but subjectively amazing. It’s like something you’d do in an improv set once the mushrooms kicked in – it has no rhyme or reason but it’s captivating all the same. He’s the only reason to watch this dumb, frequently boring movie. Grade: C- (VOD)
Influencer
Look, Shudder isn’t exactly known for putting out great original horror movies, but Influencer is certainly one of the better ones I’ve seen. It’s a fairly traditional stolen identity thriller that has a few things to mildly say about the world of today but is far more interested in the frequent and frequently absurd twists and turns of the story. Fine by me. The acting is pretty solid for the most part with only the lead (Cassandra Naud) getting a shot at playing a character that is borderline three-dimensional. She’s very good given the material but the material works even without her delivering some show-stopping tour-de-force performance. The areas where Influencer struggles is when it tries to develop other characters and a romantic backstory. It feels like the movie doesn’t realize that it doesn’t have to do this and by attempting to do this, it only slams the brakes down hard on an otherwise commendable pace. It does, however, have something 90% of horror movies don’t have – a really good ending. Grade: B- (Shudder)
The Call
I usually don’t slap a three-year-old movie in these review articles, but I can’t believe I missed Lee Chung-hyeon‘s The Call back when it dropped on Netflix in 2020. Shame on my ass, because this is a very clever and wildly creative take on the Sandra Bullock/Keanu Reeves vehicle, The Lake House. Kim Seo-yeon (Park Shin-hye) is visiting her sick mother and staying in her old childhood home. After leaving her cellphone on the train like a total spaz, she decides she’ll just use her mom’s old landline. However, when she goes to use the old timey phone, she’s connected with the inhabitants of the house twenty years prior, before her family moved in, namely the abused daughter of an evil Shaman lady – Oh Young-sook (Burning‘s Jeon Jong-soo). What ensues is two solid hours of twists and turns and slow burn contextual evidence. This is a very well made chiller that loses its way a bit in the third act, but manages to pull off a satisfying ending. The clear stand-out here is Jean Jong-soo as the 1999 timeline daughter, she gives an incredible, multi-layered performance that scared the absolute shit out of me. Grade: B+ (Netflix)
BEST OF STREAMING*
TV
Abbott Elementary (Hulu)
The Bear (Hulu)
Beef (Netflix)
Better Call Saul (Netflix)
Fleabag (Amazon Prime)
Heartstopper (Netflix)
I May Destroy You (Max)
I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (Netflix)
Jury Duty (FreeVee)
Nathan For You (Max)
The Other Two (Max)
The Rehearsal (Max)
Reservation Dogs (Hulu)
The Sopranos (Max)
Succession (Max)
Vanderpump Rules (Peacock)
FILM
Aftersun (Paramount+/Showtime)
Amadeus (Amazon Prime)
The Apartment (Amazon Prime)
Blue Velvet (Max)
Burning (Peacock)
Drive My Car (Max)
High and Low (Max)
Hoop Dreams (Max)
The Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Netflix)
The King of Comedy (Paramount+/Showtime)
Lady Bird (Paramount+/Showtime)
The Master (Max)
No Country for Old Men (Paramount+/Showtime)
Only Yesterday (Max)
Paris is Burning (Max)
Raising Arizona (Starz)
Shoplifters (Max)
Spirited Away (Max)
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (Netflix)
There Will Be Blood (Paramount+/Showtime)
The Verdict (Max)
Margetis Movie Reviews 