Tag: Scott Haze

Quick Thoughts – October 2021 Round-Up: ‘Dune’ ‘The French Dispatch’ ‘Last Night in Soho’ ‘Antlers’

It’s been a long time since I talked about multiple contemporary movies at one time, but it feels good to be back to it; gives me a particular sense of normalcy that I haven’t felt in a while.


Honestly, I wasn’t even remotely interested in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune until I happened to see David Lynch’s Dune (which Lynch famously disowns) earlier this year (because God knows I’ll never read any of Frank Herbert’s novels, though I mean him no disrespect).

This makes it tough for me to both evaluate and recommend the Dune of 2021 (now confirmed as Part 1 of at least a duology, if not a trilogy).

I knew what was happening in the 2021 version because I knew what happened in 1984’s adaptation, but I’m not totally sure how an uninitiated general audience member would feel.

That said, one thing I can say with assurance is that Dune might just be Denis Villeneuve’s best-looking movie, which is really saying something after, you know, Blade Runner 2049, but it’s true.

Frankly, if all this movie is is a visual update on the 1984 adaptation with significantly more time to tell its story, that’s enough, especially in IMAX; however, as somebody who actually enjoys Lynch’s version, I wouldn’t call Villeneuve’s update leaps-and-bounds better, but it’s more than worthy.

I certainly haven’t heard many complaints from fans of the novels, for whatever that’s worth.

Rating: ★★★★☆


It’s Wes Anderson. What do you want?

Honestly, The French Dispatch might be his worst movie, but in the end I still liked it [just enough to revisit it again somewhere down the road].

Now, nothing about The French Dispatch is going to sway anyone who isn’t already a Wes Anderson fan. Compared to his last two live-action efforts in particular (Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel), it doesn’t even compare in charm and amusement, but his filmmaking style is still unique among his peers, which is worth seeing, and, as I would say of all his features, there is a heart to it, even if it’s noticeably slow to reveal itself this time.

If you do decide to see it, see it on the biggest screen you can, as centered as you can, because the aspect ratio and color change frequently, even if the camera itself is usually locked down.

As the saying goes, every frame is a painting, but some frames are more compelling than others.

Rating: ★★★½ (out of five)


This is going to sound strange, because they are VERY different movies, but I’d compare Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho to Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, in that there are undeniable hallmarks of both directors’ styles in each film, but on the whole, they are far from the hypothetical versions of the movies that we would have gotten from them, say, fifteen years ago (in other words, they’re maturing).

Specifically to the style of Last Night in Soho though, I’d call it a cross between Wes Craven (e.g. Nightmare on Elm Street) and Dario Argento (e.g Suspiria).

However, I won’t say anything about the plot in particular (not that I usually do anyway), because one of my favorite things about the movie is how it just throws you in without explaining a whole lot.

In the end, it’s not my favorite from Edgar Wright, nor do I think it’s his best overall work (though it is a triumph in terms of the visual nitty-gritty: set design, costumes, etc.), but I appreciate his effort to evolve (and I think having a writing partner definitely helped this time), so I will both strongly recommend Last Night in Soho and be excited to see what he does next.

Rating: ★★★★☆


Antlers is being marketed with Guillermo Del Toro’s name (apparently he was a producer on it, as was multi-time Christopher Nolan collaborator, David S. Goyer), but I couldn’t care less.

I was always in on this movie for one name and one name only: Scott Cooper.

Not that he has a flawless filmography as a director (Black Mass in particular was more like Black Mess), but after Hostiles (one of the best Westerns of recent vintage) I was down for whatever came next, and, for the most part, I was not disappointed.

Based on the short story “The Quiet Boy” by Nick Antosca (who also worked on the screenplay), itself inspired by a particular piece of Native American folklore, Antlers feels like a slightly more contemporary version of a 1980s Stephen King adaptation (Silver Bullet, Christine, et al) with its small town, slow burn feel.

(I would also describe it as A24’s version of The Pit, but if that doesn’t sway you just forget I said it.)

My only real disappointment is, for one, the movie probably could have been trimmed down to a solid ninety minutes, but, more importantly, there’s some creature imagery that I wish would have been done 100% practically, or just straight up Hitchcockian (shadowed/obscured); the film still would have worked without the “money shots”.

Still, for where the horror genre is these days, Antlers is pretty solid.

Rating: ★★★½ (out of five)



New and Old Twofer – ‘Venom’ and ‘The Blob’ (1988) – Oozing on Through

Venom

Directed by Ruben Fleischer
Written by Scott Rosenberg & Jeff Pinkner (screenplay and story), Kelly Marcel (screenplay), and Will Beall (screenplay), based on the Marvel comics by Todd McFarlane & David Michelinie
Cast: Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, Scott Haze, Reid Scott, Jenny Slate, Michelle Lee, Mac Brandt, Sope Aluko, Wayne Péré, Scott Deckert, Marcella Bragio, Christian Convery, Sam Medina, Ron Cephas Jones
Soundtrack: Ludwig Göransson

Another week, another Riz Ahmed movie, and another big surprise.

I will admit, as I did last month, that it’s been such a down year for movies that I may well be grading on a curve at this point, but I will say unequivocally that in terms of new releases, Venom is the most fun I’ve had in a theater in 2018.  Big time critics may not value that (or even experience it), but I do.

The film is a horror-comedy-action-sci-fi mash-up that won’t work for everyone, but it won me over early and never betrayed my trust.  It’s certainly the best thing Ruben Fleischer (who I’d say I generally like) has done since Zombieland.

Now, you may ask, “Is there a lot of CGI in this movie?” and the answer is yes, there is, but, there is also a noticeable commitment to keeping things practical where they could.  For example, at the beginning of the film, there’s a spaceship that crashes, and when you see a response team at the crash site, they’re not looking at a blue screen, they’re looking at, as Daniel Craig’s James Bond might say, “A bloody big ship,” and that warmed my heart immediately; not to mention there’s some lovely use of San Francisco as a location.

As far as performances go, I’m not sure you can call whatever Tom Hardy is doing good or bad, it just kind of is, and since this isn’t Citizen Kane, I was fine with it; and, frankly, he pulled off the humor much better than I would have expected.

Beyond that, I like the way the Venom story and characters have been updated to present day-sensibilities (making Eddie Brock essentially a VICE reporter is particularly choice), and, even though the studio opted out of going for the R-rating (despite the success of Deadpool and Logan), it’s clear to me that the movie owes something, at least in spirit, to the 80s splatter films of Frank Henenlotter and Stuart Gordon (as well as Chuck Russell’s The Blob, which we’ll get to shortly), perhaps even Devil’s Express.

It’s not the most original screenplay in the world in terms of plot (hello, Iron Man), but it at least tries to do it’s own thing tone-wise.

As I said, it won’t work for everyone, but it’s certainly better than the critical reception would have you believe; perfect for a Halloween season comic book fix.

Rating: ★★★★½

 

The Blob (1988)

Original Release Date: August 5, 1988
Directed by Chuck Russell
Written by Chuck Russell & Frank Darabont, based on an earlier screenplay by Theodore Simonson and Kay Linaker, based on a story by Irvine H. Millgate
Cast: Kevin Dillon, Shawnee Smith, Donovan Leitch, Jeffrey DeMunn, Candy Clark, Joe Seneca, Del Close, Paul McCrane, Robert Axelrod, Beau Billingslea, Michael Kenworthy, Douglas Emerson, Jamison Newlander, Judith Flanagan, Art LaFleur, Sharon Spelman, Billy Beck, Jack Nance, Bill Moseley, Erika Eleniak, Ricky Paull Goldin, Frank Collison, Jack Rader, Clayton Landey, Noble Craig, Julie McCullough
Soundtrack: Michael Hoenig

Full disclosure, I saw this in a double feature with the 1958 original, which gave me an appreciation I might not have otherwise had (not that I hadn’t seen both versions before).  I’d give the original a review as well, but it was on a pretty faded archival print and I just don’t feel right about judging it in that way.

Anyway, in terms of 80s horror (and remakes in general), Chuck Russell’s The Blob is definitely up there.

It’s essentially a sliced, diced, sauteed, and smothered (get it?) version of the original (Blob comes to Earth in a meteor, eats a hobo, wreaks havoc in a small town, etc.), with more than a dash of Stephen King mixed in for flavor (no surprise there given Russell co-wrote the screenplay with Frank Darabont), and a refreshing attention to detail (no joke, I think even the cliche jump-scare cat is set up).  Seriously, if you like structure in your plot, this is the movie for you.

And, it’s properly gooey and gory and gross, although it’s amazing how some of the practical effects don’t look all that different from their counterparts thirty years earlier.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s not the best-acted movie I’ve ever seen (although that aspect is still an upgrade over the original), but I can forgive that based on the strength of the visuals and the story.

Overall, 1988’s The Blob certainly isn’t as strong as Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers or John Carpenter’s The Thing, but, for the genre and the time it was made, it deserves to be in the conversation of more-than-worthwhile remakes.

Rating: ★★★★☆

Twofer Movie Review – ‘Suburbicon’ and ‘Thank You For Your Service’ – The War at Home

I guess at this point I’ve now officially, completely come full circle.

The genesis of my writings here came in the wake of seeing George Clooney’s The Monuments Men, which I went into wanting to love but in the end just couldn’t, but I realized that I had a lot to say about it.  So, after a few months, I created this space to share my thoughts, and three-plus years later I’m still doing it.

So, thanks, George Clooney?

I’m certainly not going to thank him for Suburbicon.

Suburbicon

Directed by George Clooney
Written by Joel & Ethan Coen and George Clooney & Grant Heslov
Cast: Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, Noah Jupe, Jack Conley, Glenn Fleshler, Steve Monroe, Gary Basaraba, Ellen Crawford, Alex Hassell, Steven M. Porter, Pamela Dunlap, Robert Pierce, Vince Cefalu
Soundtrack: Alexandre Desplat

Perhaps someone else has already drawn this comparison, but I see George Clooney and Angelina Jolie as equivalents: fine leading actors who have made for less-than-stellar directors, each suffering from the same issues, namely tone and focus.

Suburbicon is not at all dissimilar from The Monuments Men (or Unbroken for Jolie) in that both are fantastic-looking period pieces with great casts giving quality but ultimately undirected performances, and both can’t figure out what kind of movie they want to be.

At the time, I gave Clooney some benefit of the doubt for Monuments Men because I figured maybe he had just taken on too much as the writer, director, and star.  For Suburbicon, however, he has no such cover, because he’s not in the film, so I’m left to conclude that he simply is who he is as a filmmaker.  In the case of both movies, they could have been great in the hands of different directors; specifically, Steven Soderbergh for Monuments Men, and the Coen Brothers for Suburbicon (who had some role in the script for both this film, and, again, Unbroken).

Regardless, Suburbicon is, in a word, unfulfilling.  It’s a satire with no punch, a dark comedy with no laughs, and a MacGuffin of No MacGuffin (which you can do if you’re the Coen Brothers, but Clooney is no Coen, as much as I’m sure he’d like to be).

Even worse though, it’s distasteful, as one of the through lines of the film is the introduction of Suburbicon’s first black family, the Mayers, whose arrival is greeted with shock, outrage, and, eventually, violence (all of which is a barely-veiled reference to the real-life William and Daisy Meyers, the first black couple in Levittown, PA, whose arrival was met with similar unrest).  If this was actually worked into the plot somehow, or if it was more than just the two children who had interaction, I probably would feel differently about it, but as it is it’s just kind of in the background, which feels plain wrong (not to mention the timing relative to current events is not great).

However, I will mention one silver lining on this thundercloud of Suburbicon doom, and that is Oscar Isaac.  His screen-time is all too brief, but his performance is fantastic, and his character is about the only one with any explicit motivation, so, kudos to him.

In the end though, Suburbicon as a whole is a failure, and I can’t in good conscience recommend it.

Sorry, George.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

 

Thank You For Your Service

Written and Directed by Jason Hall
Based on the book by David Finkel
Cast: Miles Teller, Haley Bennett, Joe Cole, Amy Schumer, Beulah Koale, Scott Haze, Keisha Castle-Hughes, Kate Lyn Sheil, Erin Darke, Kerry Cahill, Omar J. Dorsey, Brad Beyer, Allison King, Jayson Warner Smith, Tony Winters
Soundtrack: Thomas Newman

Another week, another based-on-a-true-story movie starring Miles Teller (he’s really carved out a niche there, hasn’t he?).

This is a hard movie for me to judge due to the subject matter.   I am for sure not a veteran, let alone a combat veteran of America’s most recent armed conflicts, so I understand that my opinion in this case carries less weight, and I’m always curious to see what consensus the military community comes to on this kind of film, but in the meantime, I just know what my eyes and ears tell me.

Thank You For Your Service is the story of a few soldiers attempting to adjust to life back home after returning from a nearly year-long deployment in Iraq, and is the feature debut of writer/director Jason Hall, who previously wrote the screenplay for American Sniper.

Right off the bat, I’ll say that I found American Sniper to be much more impactful, probably because Clint Eastwood is an infinitely more experienced filmmaker (not to mention he had a bigger budget and more action-driven material to work with).  Thank You For Your Service isn’t terrible, it’s definitely better than a movie-of-the-week production, but I’m reluctant to call it exceptional.

I haven’t read the book it’s adapted from, but I have a feeling if I did read it I’d often be asking, “Why did they put X in and not Y?”  I’m not unsympathetic; I know it’s tough to put everything you want into a film, it’s a condensed medium, but there was more I wanted to see once the movie ended that I felt should have been included, so that’s one strike.

Also, the core cast is fine (again, not great, but acceptable), but there were a few minor characters whose scenes took me out of the movie.  I get it, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, but if it’s in a movie, it needs to be believable for the audience (see: verisimilitude), so that’s another strike.

Ultimately, while I feel it could have brought more to the table, Thank You For Your Service just barely gets on base because I think movies like this are important.  In an era where the gap between civilian and military has never been wider, we need films and other media like this to help understand and develop some empathy for what it really means when we send our troops into harm’s way, and the physical, emotional, and mental toll it takes on them.

Thank You For Your Service is far from perfect, but at the very least it’s a step in the right direction.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Twofer Movie Review – ‘Only The Brave’ and ‘The Snowman’ – Fire and Ice

Ordinarily I can find some kind of connection when reviewing two films at once, but I’m at a loss here, other than these two having the same release date.

Only The Brave

Directed by Joseph Kosinski
Written by Ken Nolan and Eric Warren Singer, based on the GQ article “No Exit” by Sean Flynn
Cast: Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges, James Badge Dale, Taylor Kitsch, Jennifer Connelly, Andie MacDowell, Geoff Stults, Alex Russell, Thad Luckinbill, Ben Hardy, Scott Haze, Jake Picking, Ryan Jason Cook
Soundtrack: Joseph Trapanese

A few weeks ago I woodshedded a pair of “based on a true story” films and I was not eager to do the same thing again this week.

Fortunately, I don’t have to.

I hesitate to call it great, but Only The Brave is very good.  A bit uneven perhaps, but it’s a fitting and deeply heartfelt tribute to a group of men who battled not flesh and blood, but rather the fierceness of nature itself.

In a word: wildfires.

If you’re unfamiliar with the world of wildfire firefighting, don’t worry, the movie gives you a pretty clear picture, so much so that I won’t even bother to provide a primer, but suffice it to say it’s not the sort of work for the faint of heart, to say nothing of the physical demands.

It sounds like the most obvious thing in the world, but Only The Brave has realism on its side.  I don’t know all the true life facts, I know for sure there’s some timeline shifting, but, on the whole, you don’t get the impression that there’s a lot of Hollywood-ing going on, which is nice for this sort of movie; and, outside of a few dream sequences for Josh Brolin’s character, nothing is even shot in a way that would seem unrealistic.

Speaking of Josh Brolin, this movie has a great cast (including Jennifer Connelly, who’s still as captivating as ever, and James Badge Dale, who’s probably my favorite actor who’s not yet a household name), and they all do solid work, though because it’s a feature film and not a miniseries, not a lot of people get much to do (there are twenty guys on the hotshot crew alone, let alone the other supporting characters, so screen time is at a premium for just about everybody).  It’s hard for me to be critical because maybe everyone is portraying their real-life counterpart perfectly, but if there’s one performance I found puzzling at times, it’s from Taylor Kitsch, but, again, I don’t know.

Given that I didn’t know the story going in, I’ll assume most people won’t know the story going in either, so I’ll leave that to be discovered, but it’s most certainly a story worth telling, and I think Only The Brave tells it well.

It may feel a bit by the numbers at times (I mean, Peter Berg has had a near-monopoly on this kind of film the past few years), but I’d say it’s a movie absolutely worth seeing theatrically.

Just make sure you bring some tissues.

Rating: ★★★★☆

 

The Snowman

Directed by Tomas Alfredson
Written by Peter Straughan, Hossein Amini, and Søren Sveistrup, based on the novel Snømannen by Jo Nesbø
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Val Kilmer, J.K. Simmons, Ronan Vibert, Toby Jones, Genevieve O’Reilly, James D’Arcy, Adrian Dunbar, Chloë Sevigny, Anne Reid, Jamie Michie, Alec Newman, Jamie Clayton
Soundtrack: Marco Beltrami

Boy, was this a disappointment.

The Snowman has pretty much all of the elements you need for a pulpy crime thriller: based on a novel (one book in an expansive series; if they were planning on a movie series, that ship has now sailed), a drunkard detective, a murderer with a gimmick, intrigue, flashbacks, and, perhaps most importantly, an A-list cast devoting themselves to B-level material (somebody even plays twins).

This could have been so-good-it’s-good, so-bad-it’s-good, or, at the very least, just some trashy fun, but the execution was totally lacking (and, if recent rumors are to be believed, so was 10-15% of the script).

Right off the bat, there’s a lethargy to this film that it never quite shakes, and I don’t know that it could be fixed purely with editing.  I was never so bored that I completely checked out, but, make no mistake, this was a bit of a chore to watch.

In contrast to Only The Brave, The Snowman thoroughly wastes its tremendous cast.  Honestly, there’s not one standout performance in the whole bunch, at least not in a good way.  Val Kilmer has a strange role that’s made doubly stranger by some truly awful dubbing, which I have zero explanation for, but that’s about it.

None of this really matters, however, because, in the end, this movie isn’t worth seeing or talking about any further.

I questioned whether it would be worth full price, but it’s not even worth a matinee.

Shame.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆