Films and Feelings

I suppose we owe some respect to the new film adaptation of The Long Walk . Based on one of the earliest novels by Stephen King, this sort of ancestor to The Hunger Games sees a group of boys, living in an authoritarian society. willingly entering an annual state-sponsored competition in which they all embark on a nationwide walk, all maintaining a consistent walking pace. If they fall below that, they get a bullet to the cranium. Last boy walking wins. Full credit, there aren't a lot of studio films that stitch together a solid piece of entertainment with such basic materials. There's minimal computer-generation and only a handful of actors, none of whom are really household names. (The obvious exception being Mark Hamill.) Much of the film is portrayed in relaxed long-takes that really let the actors' charisma shine. This movie proves that creative film language can be enough to turn a walk down the country road into a full-on warzone.  But the movie has a system error t...

    I'm going on the record to say that, even with the devastation wrought upon Wanda's character in "Multiverse of Madness," WandaVision is one of the best things we've gotten from any stage of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And that has to be the main reason why Marvel enlisted Matt Shakman to pilot their premiere Fantastic 4 film (stealing him away from Star Trek 4 ...), the film that was going to rescue the studio from their post-"Endgame" stupor. There are probably all sorts of soundbites about this being the first real version of the story to get the machine to work, and I wouldn't disagree.     But in the context of Marvel's larger rehabilitation,  The  Fantastic 4: First Steps reads less like the great MCU reset and more like an elaborate gymnastics routine, an attempt to splice Marvel's Thanos era with its Not-Iron-Man era. Graciously, this works better than it sounds on paper, but it does kind of purchase this at the expense of ...

      I feel like it's essential that I establish early on in this review that this marks my first time seeing a Superman movie in theaters.      The Zack Snyder saga was actually in swing while I was in high school and college--back when I was in what most would consider in the target audience for these films--but that kind of passed by me without my attention.      And I'll be clear that I take no specific pride in this. I wasn't really avoiding the films by any means. My buddies all just went to see them without me while I was at a church youth-camp, and I just didn't bother catching up until much, much later.  I'm disclosing all this to lay down that I don't really have any nostalgic partiality to the Superman story. Most of my context for the mythology comes from its echoes on larger pop culture.     I know, for example, that Clark Kent was raised in a smalltown farm community with his adopted parents, and it was them who...

     I had a mixed reaction to  Jurassic World: Rebirth,  but it did make for one of the most enjoyable theater experiences I've had in recent memory.      I have to imagine that a part of this is because my most common theater appointments are matinee screenings, but I had the opportunity to see this one at a fairly well-attended midnight screening. And there's nary a film more tailored for surround-sound roaring and screens wide enough to contain these de-extinct creatures. ("Objects on the screen feel closer than they appear.") It was natural for me to cap the experience by applauding as the credits stared to roll, even if, as usual, I was the only one in the auditorium to do so.     Yes, I am that kind of moviegoer; yes, I enjoyed the experience that much, and I imagine I will revisit it across time.      That's not to imagine the movie is beyond reproach, but I suppose it bears mentioning that, generally , this i...

    Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth.      There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true.      The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space?      But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

      In seminal romantic comedies or dramas, the mark of great writing was in artfully burying the lovebirds' insecurities and hangups in artifice. Pretense. The lovebirds didn't know how to honestly approach their own feelings at first. The distortion revealed the personality of both the situation and the relationship. What's more, it was just fun. The film would slowly thaw this facade until Cary Grant and Irene Dunne finally had, what Materialists calls, the ugliest parts of themselves laid bare for one another. Only then were they ready to embrace.       Yet with Materialists , out this weekend, even in moments when the situation calls for vulnerability, the characters are oddly empirical and clinical with describing the things about them that they are ashamed of. These players might as well be performing a passionate reading of a Walmart receipt. Yes, Materialists is very obviously about the transactionality of the dating scene, but the movie ...

       By now the system errors of Disney's live-action remake matrix are well codified. These outputs tend to have pacing that feels like it was okayed by a chain store manager trying to lower the quarterly statement. They also show weird deference to very specific gags from their animated source yet don't bother to ask whether they fit well in the photorealistic world of live-action. And combing through the screenplay, you always seem to get snagged on certain lines of dialogue that someone must have thought belonged in a children's movie ("Being gross is against galactic regulation!").      These are all present in this  summer's live-action reinvention of "Lilo & Stitch." But mercifully, this remake allows itself to go off-script here and there. The result may be one of the stronger Disney remakes ... whatever that's worth.     The 2002 animated masterpiece by Dean Deblois and Chris Sanders (who voices the little blue alien in b...

       Ever since Star Lord and company discoed onto the scene in 2014, Marvel has basically been trying to chase the Guardians of the Galaxy high. And ever since we entered Disney+ era, that meant spray painting every project with a skittles color palette. And no situation couldn't be improved with a joke-- any joke.      The premise of Marvel's newest film, Thunderbolts* , even bears some cursory resemblances to Gunn's film: it's an ensemble piece about former criminals trying to make good. But it winds up taking the opposite lessons from "Guardians" that movies like "Love and Thunder" tried to pilfer. And in the process, it actually becomes the first movie to successfully implement the Guardians of the Galaxy magic in a long time.     In a world that has moved on from the Avengers, six B-level heroes, many of whom have criminal history, are put in a position to take down a shared enemy. What begins as a non-aggression pact transforms in...

    This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET ," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence.      But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi , does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else.  Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism.     On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of ...

     Here's a story:       When developing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , one of the hardest scenes to nail was the sequence in which the young princess is out in the meadow and she sees a lost bird who has been separated from its family. As she goes to console it, The Huntsman starts toward her, intent to fulfill The Evil Queen's orders to kill the princess and bring back her heart. The animators turned over every stone trying to figure out how to pull off this episode. They went back and forth about how slow he would creep up on her. When would he bring out the knife? When would the shadow fall on her? One of the animators reportedly asked at one point, "But won't she get hurt?"       That was the moment when Walt's team knew they had succeeded at their base directive to create pathos and integrity within the form of animation--to get audiences to care about a cartoon, such that they would worry that this tender-hearted girl wa...

     It's out with the 80s and into the 90s for Stranger Things alum Millie Bobby Brown.       In a post-apocalyptic 1990s, Michelle is wilting under the neglectful care of her foster father while brooding over the death of her family, including her genius younger brother. It almost seems like magic when a robotic representation of her brother's favorite cartoon character shows up at her door claiming to be an avatar for her long-lost brother. Her adventure to find him will take her deep into the quarantine zone for the defeated robots and see her teaming up with an ex-soldier and a slew of discarded machines. What starts as a journey to bring her family back ends up taking her to the heart of the conflict that tore her world apart to begin with.      This is a very busy movie, and not necessarily for the wrong reasons. This just a movie that wants to impart a lot. There is, for example, heavy discussion on using robots as a stand-in fo...

Coming into Mickey 17 having not read the source material by Edward Ashton, I can easily see why this movie spoke to the sensibilities of Bong Joon Ho, particularly in the wake of his historic Academy Award win five years ago. Published in 2022, it feels like Ashton could have been doing his Oscars homework when he conceived of the story--a sort of mashup of Parasite , Aliens , and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times . Desperate to escape planet earth, Mickey applies for a special assignment as an "expendable," a person whose sole requirement is to perform tasks too dangerous for normal consideration--the kind that absolutely arise in an outer space voyage to colonize other planets. It is expected that Mickey expire during his line of duty, but never fear. The computer has all his data and can simply reproduce him in the lab the next day for his next assignment. Rinse and repeat. It's a system that we are assured cannot fail ... until of course it does.  I'll admit my ...

     The thing about any figure as iconic as The Wolf Man is ... you already know how his story ends because there's only one way it can end. Much in the same way that any "King Kong" movie has to end with the ape falling off of the Empire State Building. Any other ending just feels incongruent. Grafted from some other story. The equation can only produce a single sum. As Maria Ouspenskaya warned us in the original Wolf Man, "So tears run to a predestined end."       I'll break the film critic's seal here a little and say that, if you love the Wolf Man figure, then you already know what happens to him at the end of Leigh Whannel's film, and you already basically know why.       But I don't for a second count that as a bad thing. Reinvention is easy. Doing your homework, that takes commitment. And Whannel's new film does its homework.     Here, our Wolf Man is Blake, a loving father living in the city with his daughter, Gi...

    To get to the point, Disney's new origin story for The Lion King 's Mufasa fails at the ultimate directive of all prequels. By the end of the adventure, you don't actually feel like you know these guys any better.           Such  has been the curse for nearly Disney's live-action spin-offs/remakes of the 2010s on. Disney supposes it's enough to learn more facts or anecdotes about your favorite characters, but the interview has always been more intricate than all that. There is no catharsis nor identification for the audience during Mufasa's culminating moment of uniting the animals of The Pridelands because the momentum pushing us here has been carried by cliche, not archetype.      Director Barry Jenkins' not-so-secret weapon has always been his ability to derive pathos from lyrical imagery, and he does great things with the African landscape without stepping into literal fantasy. This is much more aesthetically interestin...

   Way back in 2016 , Moana's quest to return The Heart of Te Fiti ran perfectly parallel to both Moana's own sense of unrest and her community's need to return to their voyaging roots, motivations that were all intrinsic--and also very well-established in that first act. The opposing forces were also clear--not just in the presence of lava monsters or killer coconuts, but in the attitudes she faced from her overprotective father and her swaggering demigod sidekick. Her ultimate discovery, that the island she was trying to restore and the monster she had to thwart were one and the same, was likewise an organic extension of her inherent compassion and discernment.       That first film understood the basic chemistry of the adventure narrative, and how it sang when thoughtfully applied to the Disney aesthetic, so they don't really have an excuse for bungling the mixture this time around.       For a film determined to fit in as many charac...