movie review – Page 2

Movie Review: Being Frank

June 27, 2019 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

For Hollywood in Toto, I reviewed the movie Being Frank:

Starring comedian Jim Gaffigan, Being Frank is a dramedy that is hard to forget, for all the wrong reasons. It’s impossible to convey how horribly both the writer and director fouled up the tone of this film. Not only was it aggressively unfunny, but it toyed with serious issues like a nine-year-old plays with matches, and the viewer will have to carry the charcoaled remains in memory for some time.

The story is a compelling one: Philip, the teenage son of strict, emotionally distant father Frank (played with near-malevolent glee by Gaffigan), sneaks away for a wild Spring Break vacation, where he finds that his dad actually has an entire second family, complete with wife, house, and two other kids. This discovery, and the antics that follow, comprise the remainder of the film.

What do the filmmakers do with this premise? Click to find out!

HiT Movie Review: Loopers: The Caddie’s Long Walk

June 6, 2019 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

I reviewed a documentary for Hollywood in Toto:

Loopers: The Caddie’s Long Walk is a documentary about golf caddies.

Wait! Keep reading. I swear, this movie is a lot of fun, even if you have as little interest in golf as someone like myself, who knows names like Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, but doesn’t know a bogie from a double eagle.

It’s the hallmark of an objectively good film if it can entertain, teach, and make an uninterested observer care about the subject matter. “Loopers” does all three with style, pathos, and humor. Dryly narrated by Bill Murray, a former golf caddie himself, it’s a quality presentation that, through interviews, news footage, and even animation, shows the viewer how even the most skilled golfers from decades past to today wouldn’t enjoy half the success that they do without caddies. Caddies don’t just pull clubs: the best in the business become confidants, assistants, advisors, and even friends both on and off the course.

Click to read the whole thing!

Sickbed Reviews

January 9, 2019 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

My 2018 holiday season was delightfully uneventful until a gastrointestinal ailment struck me down on the first of the year and hasn’t entirely let up even today. I will spare you the details.

So what did I do during this time of illness? Watched TV, of course. Too sick to do anything else. Let’s go over what I saw.

Diablero: A Netflix series that can be summed up as the Mexican version of Supernatural, complete with demons, humor, demons, family, demons, and tortillas. I was attracted to it because of the setting (Mexico City) and the style, which was entertainingly colorful and frenetic. Despite that it’s a Mexican production, it follows the new American horror tradition of Us vs. Evil, where demons are defeated by techniques and weapons instead of faith, and all the clergy are fallen or otherwise criminal. Despite this, it’s a fun show. The acting’s fine, the characters are likable, and the story’s got punch. Its attempts to integrate Aztec gods into Christian theology were less successful, but worth watching anyway. I’d like to see a season two.

Travelers Season 3: I’ve talked about Travelers before (having watched the first season during another illness; go figure) and how much I liked it. Season 2 was good: expanded the mythology, deepened the characters, included an overarching plot that was dark and disturbing. Season 3 was great until the last couple of episodes, where they ruined it such that I’m not sure I’m going to bother looking for a season 4. This is your spoiler alert. What they did with season 3 is turn the reason why the Travelers came into a global warming screed. They had to time-travel to the 21st century because this is when global warming becomes too horrible to stop. Which is stupid. Really stupid. I enjoyed the show before because it didn’t poke us with the standard Hollywood issues. Now it has and the bloom’s come off the rose. Not only that, but the screenwriters continued to write themselves into corners and then cheat their way out of it, starting with the first episode and ending with the last, where they’re essentially going to return to an earlier save point in the space-time continuum. Disappointing across the board.

The Frozen Dead: There’re not a lot of new ideas in The Frozen Dead, but it works pretty well and you wind up liking all the characters, which is a rarity on television shows. Set in the French Pyrenees, it starts with the murder of a horse and gets pretty dark from there. The madman in the asylum: is he pulling the strings? Is the lead detective drinking too much? What about the nosebleeds? And the wealthy industrialist? You get the picture. Comparisons to Hannibal Lecter are fair, but won’t get in the way of your enjoyment of the show. Think of The Frozen Dead as a frozen pizza: they’re always pretty good, they satisfy your hunger, and there’s always one around if you want a no-trouble meal. At six episodes long, what have you got to lose?

In Order of Disappearance: A Norwegian crime thriller/comedy starring Stellan Skarsgård as a man who drives a snowplow. I know, I know. Thing is, it’s good. Funny, exciting, exactly what you’d want from a movie like this. Vegan crime bosses, Serbian thugs, and stoic Stellan in the middle, dealing with the murder of his son. The more I tell you the more I’ll spoil it, so just take my word for it that it’s a movie you should see, and you’ll have a good time. That’s why we watch movies in the first place, isn’t it?

Cannibal Holocaust: My Take

October 31, 2018 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

In the wake of a relatively recent post where I discussed the made-in-2000 movie Battle Royale, I figured I’d go deeper into horror’s cinematic past and talk about the notorious 1980 film Cannibal Holocaust.

Very much a movie before its time, Cannibal Holocaust describes the trek of an American anthropologist (porn actor Robert Kerman, complete with porn ‘stache) into the South American jungle to find out what happened to a documentary film crew that had gone missing on their search for primitive cannibal tribes. After various adventures, the anthropologist finds the film crew’s movie reels, which show their unbelievably disgusting exploits and horrific fate. So it’s an early found-footage horror film, and movies like The Blair Witch Project (plus countless others) owe something to it in style, if not theme.

There’s no question that Cannibal Holocaust‘s overarching theme is media manipulation: documentary makers and news crews have a tendency to, if they can’t find footage to make their predetermined point, create the footage (or creatively edit it to fit the narrative they’re looking to develop). Viewers familiar with Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth will understand how unscrupulous filmmakers produce fiction and call it fact. In Cannibal Holocaust, the documentary film crew burns a tribal hut down (with the villagers in it) to tell the false story that this tribe was at war with another tribe. Later, and more disturbingly, they rape a young village girl and then impale her on a wooden stake to create the false impression that the tribe killed her for being impure. So when the tribe finally rises up to take their awful revenge, it’s almost a relief for the viewer. Almost.

Cannibal Holocaust‘s filmmakers killed a number of animals on-screen, including a pig, a turtle, a couple of monkeys, a snake, a tarantula, and a coatimundi. That was horrible and disgusting. I’d seen Bear Grylls murder a turtle on one of his shows years ago, but the movie’s turtle-disemboweling scene was unbelievably bloody and hard to watch. I felt awful for the little pig and the monkeys. They didn’t deserve that. But it worked. The graphic and real animal-killing scenes made you want to believe that the later human-killing scenes were real instead of staged.

You need a strong stomach to watch this film, so it’s not for everybody. I’m not even sure it was for me. But it’s effective. By now, the movie’s notoriety precedes it: my guts started knotting the moment the opening credits rolled. Still, it has weaknesses: the voices were horribly dubbed, the ending was a bit too pat, and the message was lost from time to time in a welter of pig guts and fake blood.

It’s still relevant, particularly today. There’s a reason why many, many films were patterned after it.

Movie Review: Gosnell

October 18, 2018 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

One of my concerns with conservative culture outlets is that they tend to grade on a curve. We need to support right-leaning content creators, conservatives say. I’m all for that, but I’m not going to recommend substandard work, no matter who’s writing it or why. If you get on the field, you have to compete with the big boys, whether you’re left, right, or somewhere in the middle.

Last week, my wife and I went to see the movie Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer. Written by Andrew Klavan and directed by Nick Searcy, it stars Searcy, Dean Cain, Sarah Jane Morris, and Earl Billings. The film tells the horrific story of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who murdered babies born alive during abortions by cutting their spinal cords with scissors (called “snipping”), and was responsible for the death of at least one adult patient. If that sounds awful, it gets a whole lot worse; there’s no way to describe what went on in his disgusting clinic without wanting to vomit.

And yet the movie goes there.

Based on the book Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer by producers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, Gosnell the movie is graphic, but not lurid: Kermit Gosnell’s clinic is a cramped house of horrors littered with red medical waste bags, garbage, food detritus, and cat shit. The refrigerator is full of jars of severed babies’ feet. White patients got the upstairs exam room because it was less trash-filled than the downstairs exam rooms. Details like that, combined with deeply disturbing scenes in the grand jury and trial courtrooms, gave the film a disquietingly realistic feel.

But is it a good movie? Or is it just a good conservative movie?

It’s a good movie.

Deliberately patterned after the Law & Order structure, the first third or so focuses on police work: discovering Gosnell’s crimes, collecting evidence, and making an arrest. This is where Dean Cain shines, even though they didn’t give his character a whole lot to do other than react; he didn’t wrestle with any moral dilemmas, didn’t change from a pro-choicer to a pro-lifer or anything of the sort. His partner, played by Alfonzo Rachel, also did fine with little to work with. Sarah Jane Morris as assistant district attorney Alexis McGuire had the best role and did the most with it, particularly during the trial phase: as the mother of five children, including a baby boy, her character anchors the viewer to the subject matter, as horrific as it is. Earl Billings’s portrayal of Gosnell’s bizarre bonhomie was both sickening and eerie; unlike Hannibal Lecter, this was a real person who committed real crimes, and after this performance I doubt Billings will ever be able to do Aflac commercials again. Nick Searcy played the villainous defense attorney with typical panache, making up for his appearance in the execrable The Shape of Water.

As director, Searcy did a masterful job: the film moved briskly, building up to an absolutely wrenching climax during the trial. He wrung terrific performances from even minor characters, particularly the clinic nurse who, at long last, finally began to suffer pangs of conscience. Janine Turner’s portrayal of Dr. North, an abortionist put on the stand to testify on Gosnell’s behalf, was extremely hard to watch, which was the whole point.

In fact, the entire movie was hard to watch, and I experienced a great deal of it as a stomach-knotting squirm that did not let up until the end credits, and even then it wasn’t over: the filmmakers displayed real-life photos of Gosnell’s clinic and equipment during the titles. How could you hear the testimony of the clinic nurses describing the death of patient Karnamaya Mongar and not be moved? Or the death of Baby Boy A?

Luke Y. Thompson of Forbes dismissed the movie as “A feature-length Law & Order for conservative Christians.” So it’s safe to say that he wasn’t moved except to sneering contempt. I’m not a conservative Christian.

Michael Rechtshaffen of Los Angeles Times called Gosnell “sanctimonious,” even as he sanctimoniously dings executive producer Ann McElhinney for making “a documentary examining ‘global warming hysteria’”. He wasn’t moved, either.

At the time of this writing I haven’t seen any other of the larger media outfits address this film, which isn’t a surprise: it forces you to think, to examine the issue of abortion outside of protest chants and bumper sticker bromides. Who wants to do that?

I can’t promise you a rollicking good time watching Gosnell, but I can say that you’re not likely to forget it once you’ve seen it. The same people who called Brokeback Mountain “important,” “a landmark,” and a “near-masterpiece” are ignoring Gosnell, which tells you everything you need to know about them and it.

Go see it. Find a theater, buy the DVD, do something. But go see it.

(In my latest novel, The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel, several scenes took place in and around Philadelphia, including Gosnell’s clinic at 3801 Lancaster. I wrote the book long before I saw this movie.)

A Tale of Three Movies

October 3, 2018 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

The best things come in threes. Everyone knows that.

—

Alien: Covenant is both a prequel and a sequel. It’s a sequel to the execrable film Prometheus, which was the best screenwriting example ever seen where the plot only moves forward only because every character makes a series of unbelievably stupid decisions. It’s also a prequel, because it continues the story of how the alien from the eponymous Alien science fiction movie franchise got its genetic start.

Despite this, it’s an entertaining movie, the greater son of a lesser father. Michael Fassbender puts in his usual terrific performance, investing the dual roles of androids named David and Walter with both credibility and pathos. Billy Crudup as the unready, less-than-assertive captain of the deep-space colonization vehicle Covenant makes you believe beyond a shadow of doubt that his character couldn’t do a whole lot right if his and his crew’s lives depended on it, which is a more difficult role than you might think. Everyone else fills their trope-positions admirably, so not much else to say there.

The mythology behind the story and the character motivations all made a certain amount of tragic, disturbing sense, and the mysteries that the captain and his crew seek to unravel are compelling; you want to see what happens next and what’s going to happen afterward. There are some dumb parts, but not many. You like science fiction? You like the Alien franchise? You like blood and monsters? Take a look at Alien: Covenant.

I saw a lot of online praise for Mandy, starring Nicolas Cage as a man who gets revenge on the religious cult that murdered his wife. While the film was, for the most part, a fun watch, I’m surprised at how many plaudits it got. The story’s as pedestrian as they come; in fact, I can’t believe it hasn’t been protested out of circulation for use of the “they killed my wife so I’m going to kill them” trope. Most movie reviewers are male feminists (heh): aren’t they horribly offended by this movie? Where’s the woke backlash?

Much has been made of Cage’s excellent portrayal of Red, the protagonist, which is also strange: Nicolas Cage is great in every movie he’s in. Sure, he’s been in some terrible movies, but they’re not terrible because of him. He elevates them to watchable status simply because of his performance. Who’s more entertaining on screen than Nic Cage? Nobody. He’s both character actor and leading man in one package.

If you plan to watch Mandy I hope you like magenta, because you’ll be seeing quite a lot of it. It’s the director’s favorite filter. The film starts off extremely slowly, so much so that my wife fell asleep during the first forty minutes in and had to be nudged awake to see Cage get strung up with barbed wire. At that point it moves briskly enough, but I kept waiting for it to get to the really good part.

It didn’t. Still, it was decent, and I liked it. There’s enough blood and guts and dumb violence to get your motor running, if that’s indeed the thing that turns the ignition for you. And some funny parts. And a lot of weirdness.

The Cheddar Goblins commercial wasn’t as incredibly amazing as touted, but it was funny enough and did what it was supposed to do, more or less.

Over three years ago I reviewed Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, which purported to tell the story of the Biblical Noah. It was not a good movie, nor was it consistent with Biblical tradition. But I did kind of like it because it was a fun, if stupid way to spend some time.

Aronofsky’s second Biblical movie, Mother!, is a horrible, unwatchable mess from beginning to end, the kind of film that should end Aronofsky’s career the way Heaven’s Gate did to Michael Cimino. But because we live in a time where virtue-signaling and pleasing the right critics is far more important than decent filmmaking or entertaining an audience, we’ll no doubt be treated to yet another Aronofsky movie in the future. Maybe it’ll be better than Mother!.

It would have to be.

The movie metaphorically retells the Bible in around 120 minutes, though the runtime feels more like 120 days. It stars Javier Bardem, one of the few anti-Semites that Hollywood hasn’t run out of town yet, and Jennifer Lawrence, who thinks that hurricanes are the planet’s way of punishing people for voting for Trump. Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer are also in it, which is a shame because they’re both great to watch, but wasted in this bilge. Lawrence spends the entire film sporting the same bovine, open-mouthed mien that’s intended to express everything from shock to horror to sadness to joy, depending on the stimulus. She’s the titular Mother: Mother Earth. Bardem is supposed to be God. I’m sure he thinks he’s apt enough to play the role.

The exclamation point at the end of the title represents the chaos of the last quarter of the film. Just so you know.

Reasonable people often disagree about Biblical exegesis, but this is an interpretation of the Bible as told by the wokest Environmental Science associate professor who ever shared a spliff in the quad. It’s really not at all worth watching, not even as a curiosity.