Sorry folks, it’s been a while since I posted but I’ve been pretty busy with life stuff. I’ve been tired and fairly unmotivated to write beyond my 9-5 and freelance stuff. However, I’ve seen my share of new content over the past month, so I decided to do some mini-reviews for ya’ll – 7 films, 3 TV shows.

FILM

Godzilla Minus One

I had every intention of seeing this in theaters the first go-around, but as luck would have it, it was part of a ridiculously back-loaded year. Released in December 2023 amongst 75% of the year’s best films, it totally got lost in the shuffle. That’s why I was almost elated theaters decided to re-release it in multiplexes for a week, along with a black and white version. For a Godzilla movie, this was really good and showed that maybe for a franchise entry to work it needs to come from mother Japan. For the first time in a shit long time, there was actually almost three-dimensional characters and a coherent story spaced out between spellbinding and technically impressive sequences of the King of Monsters going bananas. Now, if you were to take Godzilla out of this equation and just focus on the story, there wouldn’t be enough there, but for a monster movie this had a surprising amount of depth. My only complaint is that I wanted a little more Godzilla, but kudos to filmmaker Takashi Yamazaki for bringing this scaly son-of-a-gun back in top form. Grade: B (Streaming Soon)

The Zone of Interest

More of an art installation piece that you’d see at the MoMA than an actual movie, Jonathan Glazer‘s impressively rendered but miserable-to-experience Holocaust art film is less concerned with history than it is with the present. Christian Friedel and Anatomy of a Fall‘s Sandra Hüller play Rudolf and Hedwig Höss, a seemingly average, boring upper-middle-class couple with kids and a dog who happen to be living next door to Auschwitz in the 1940s. Rudolf is the camp’s ambitious commandant, and Hedwig is a homemaker lusting for social status. They go about their lives in a purposefully rote fashion while static, non-moving cameras, like CCTV, capture their day-to-day life. Throughout the film, you experience the real lead character, Zone’s nuanced and terrifying sound design, peppered in throughout the family’s most mundane tasks. The scariest part is, much like Rudolf and Hedwig, you catch yourself tuning out this soundscape, comprised of trains arriving, babies crying, multiple gunshots, and then no babies crying.

This film is about turning a blind eye to the injustices around us and how we find ways to ignore the surplus of misery and bloodshed that fuels our lifestyles. The only flaw is that scenes go on too long. The movie is an hour and forty-five minutes and would have worked better at 80. However, the ending is such an effective, out-of-left-field punch to the gut that perhaps wouldn’t work as well as it does if Zone hadn’t taken the extra time to wear us down. This isn’t entertainment in the traditional sense, but it’s so well conceived and executed that I strongly believe it’s worth your time. Grade: A- (In Theaters)

The Beekeeper

I’ll tell you what David Ayer‘s The Beekeeper is going for – an experience so outlandish, quirky, and flat-out stupid that it’s a blast. While certainly more fun than The Zone of Interest, The Beekeeper is ultimately too tame and formulaic to be that level of so-bad-it’s-good. After about ten minutes, the itch of seeing something dumb is completely scratched. You’re left twiddling your thumbs watching a 100% unkillable Jason Statham dispense bad guys in tame, uncreative ways. That’s the thing, the filmmakers didn’t even take the action seriously, so you’re left with something that doesn’t even succeed as a shitty action movie. There is a line in the first three minutes where Statham looks at Phylicia Rashad and very dryly says, “Thanks for putting up with me and my bees.” I laughed so hard I got shushed. After that, it’s all downhill. Not even a ridiculous and almost inspired plot twist three-quarters of the way through can save The Beekeeper. It’s a ‘wait for free streaming’ movie at best. Grade: C- (In Theaters)

Dumb Money

Speaking of generic, Craig Gillespie‘s (I, Tonya, Cruella) Dumb Money, based on the true story of how a cat-obsessed Redditor fucked over a bunch of hedge-fund douchebags by driving up the stock of GameStop, is maybe the most generic movie of the year. It lacks the baseline cleverness and wit of Adam McKay‘s The Big Short, another comedy tasked with explaining something super fucking complicated to its audience. Its hyperactive tone serves to confuse more than inform its audience. It’s packed with many Hollywood stars giving thoroughly unmemorable performances, from Pete Davidson to Nick Offerman to Seth Rogen to Barbie Oscar-nominee America Ferrera. Paul Dano fares the best as our cat-obsessed Redditor, but he doesn’t have the support he needs from the screenplay or the other players. Dumb Money is not a terrible movie, and it does fly by. Still, I need help remembering anything specific about it, and I saw it less than a week ago. Grade: C+ (Netflix)

Eileen

Eileen is the most frustrating of thrillers in that it’s so well made from a technical perspective – cinematography, costumes, lighting, set design – and so well acted by an inspired grouping of character actors – Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, Shea Whigham, Marin Ireland, Owen Teague. Yet, at least for this viewer, the story never comes together in a satisfying way. I can understand if a thriller doesn’t want to tie up everything with a neat little bow, and I understand if thrillers aim to function more on a metaphorical or less literal level, like Mulholland Drive or Enemy. Eileen grounds its story very much in reality, though. The filmmakers give you crucial information/clues without spoon-feeding you. Yet, when a massive twist comes in the film’s second half, the film fumbles the ball magnificently, and we’re left with a lame-ass ending that doesn’t work on either a logical or metaphorical one. I have a theory about what it all means and feel free to message me about it, but the filmmakers need to leave behind more breadcrumbs for viewers to connect the dots. Both Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway are good, but the real scene-stealers are Shea Whigham as McKenzie‘s cruel alcoholic father/former cop and Marin Ireland as a boy on death row’s mother. Ireland, in particular, is fantastic. She delivers a monologue at the film’s climax that stands as some of the best acting I’ve seen this entire Oscar season. This movie had all the potential in the world but ended up falling apart due to a few poor creative choices. Grade: B- (VOD rental)

Founders Day

Wow. Founders Day is an absolutely dreadful low-budget horror movie I’d never see under normal circumstances. However, I dragged my fat ass to Harkins Arizona Mills to watch the 7:05 showing because my roommate was having people over to the house to watch wrestling. Decidedly not my thing, and not wanting to be holed up in my room while vaguely hearing excited chants for muscly men I’ve never heard of, I drove down to the only theater showing this dumb movie at a time that quickly got me out of the house. 

I had heard little about this other than that it was independently financed and supposedly a political satire that a sizable portion of critics actually liked. It was awful – a super forced and remarkably unclever on-the-nose satire with more holes than a pound of baby Swiss. None of the characters made sense, and the ending made Scream 6‘s killer reveal look nuanced. Basically, Founders Day follows a small-town mayoral election that falls apart when a sociopath with a red mask, powdered wig, and a black robe starts violently murdering people with a big-ass judge’s gavel. There’s a bunch of teens, mostly the offspring of the two mayoral candidates, who seem to be on the receiving end of most of the violence, even though they thoroughly hate their politician parents and what they stand for. I can’t say much more about the plot or agonizingly stupid twists of Founders Day without revealing massive spoilers, but I can say that I’d be shocked if I see a worse movie this year. It’s supremely incompetent filmmaking in that very little to none of it makes sense, and a chilly reminder that these days, anybody can make a movie. Grade: F (In Theaters)

The Passenger

Red Letter Media recently did a YouTube video examining/reviewing three recent movies starring underrated character actor, Kyle Gallner. The Passenger, directed by fashion photographer turned filmmaker, Carter Smith, looked the most appealing of the three, so I decided to watch it. The movie definitely doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it takes a familiar premise, so familiar it was done this past year (the vastly inferior Nicolas Cage project –Sympathy for the Devil), and does it pretty well. A lot of this is due to the charisma and menace of the movie’s bad guy, Benson, played exceptionally well by Gallner. It’s also due to the fact that the movie never overplays its hand or take a misjudged leap into absurdism. For a movie about a fast food worker who goes on an insane rampage and murders his boss/all of his co-workers except one shy kid named Randolph (Johnny Berchtold), and then takes shy kid on a random road trip to evade the cops, The Passenger is fairly low-key. It’s refreshing to see a low-budget horror thriller so interested in its characters, and while these two guys aren’t super interesting on paper, Gallner and Berchtold have just the right amount of chemistry to push us through. There’s also a notable amount of gay subtext happening between these two characters, which might have made for a better or certainly more unique film if it had been actual text. Grade: B (Amazon Prime)

TV

The Curse

It seems hyperbolic for me to say, “you’ve never seen anything like it!”, but in the case of Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie‘s The Curse, you really never have. This is a truly bizarre but instantly familiar story about a young rich couple (Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder) hosting an HGTV pilot where they flip houses and try to breathe life into a very poor, predominantly non-white neighborhood. Playing almost like a subtle horror movie about white guilt and having a small penis, it becomes about the couple trying to convince the neighborhood, each other, and most importantly, themselves, that they are not monsters. Benny Safdie is equal parts hilarious and unnerving as their show’s producer and Fielder shows range we never knew he had. Ultimately though, the show belongs to Stone, which may very well be her best and most nuanced performance yet. Yes, maybe even better than Poor Things, because here she seemingly captures every little detail about a young, upper class white woman so desperately not wanting to be “the bad guy” while at the same time being so completely unwillingly to sacrifice any luxuries she can afford. It all comes to a head with an ending so far-fetched and obscure that I’m not entirely convinced I didn’t hate it, but still, you have to admire the show’s willingness to take a swing this big. Grade: B+ (Paramount+/Showtime)

Fargo (Season 5)

I’m happy to announce that Fargo‘s fifth season is the best the show has been since its second season. I’m not as happy to announce that while better than seasons 3 and 4 (from what I saw of it), it’s a far cry from top tier television. The biggest bright spot this season is Ted Lasso‘s Juno Temple as an abused former cult member in hiding with a new family and a new name. She’s running from MAGA-maniac Jon Hamm, who is somewhat miscast as a small town sheriff turned cult-of-himself leader who decides only to uphold the laws he finds relevant to “God” – read – himself. Framed as the real snarling villain of the season, I think this role would have been scarier and more authentic if played by a less charismatic and traditionally handsome actor than Hamm. While certainly good and baseline effective, I can’t help but think of how much more the stakes would be amped up if he was played with the chilly emotionally-removed ignorance an actor like Bruce Greenwood or Hugo Weaving could have brought to the table. 

Anyway, while some of the character relationships seem forced – like Temple‘s love/hate relationship with her new mother-in-law played by an even more miscast Jennifer Jason Leigh sporting an old-timey Southern accent that makes zero fucking sense – some of the relationships are nuanced enough to work like Temple‘s relationship with a clever female cop just trying to provide for her daughter, wonderfully played by Richa Moorjani. Another inspired casting choice is Kids in the Hall‘s Dave Foley as JJL’s crafty lawyer, while New Girl‘s Lamorne Morris is given almost nothing to do as another cop character. This season has a really cool supporting character no doubt based on No Country for Old Men‘s Anton Chigurh, a 500-year-old Welsh sin-eater moonlighting as a modern day hitman, played exceptionally well by Sam Spruell.

It’s a real mixed bag of a season, but it’s never not engaging or thrilling on the most basic of levels. Fargo season 5 might not be top tier television, but it’s compulsively watchable stuff. Grade: B (Hulu)

American Nightmare

Speaking of compulsively watchable, this three-episode true crime documentary series is just that. It isn’t great documentary filmmaking that takes narrative or stylistic risks by any means, but it’s a glossy, well-edited straight forward telling of a truly bizarre kidnapping case and the maddening, unethical way it was handled by a cop named – I shit you not – Detective Matt Mustard. What a fucking penis, this guy. Not much to say about this one besides if you have three hours on a Sunday this makes for wonderful way to pass the time. Grade: B (Netflix)