Ironically, the sets that do the most are the ones trying to do the least. Images courtesy Netflix.
⭐⭐
Rating: 2 out of 5.
What’s happened is writer/director/producer Guillermo del Toro has made the same movie he’s been making for 30 years and stitched a heavily altered Sparknotes version of “Frankenstein” overtop of it, just detailed enough that you’ll hear some of the main metaphors talked about, but with attention shifted to the point that they are now themes of a different story altogether. Del Toro’s film is about what all his films are about – cruel male authority figures and the lasting wounds they cause and uncomfortably conflated mother/maiden figures who want to drop everything fuck that monster.
In a painfully on-the-nose way, the patchwork of parts sourced from different narratives doesn’t really fit together.
With $40 million more to blow on Badlands, the film cranks the bass and spends a lot more time with the CGI-rendered fauna of Genna, as well as Dek, who spends most of the movie without a mask, his mandibles drawn on in post. Images courtesy 20th Century Studios.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
Predator: Badlands is a movie, a real one, the kind you grew up hearing about. It’s got everything – constant action, adventure to far-away lands, coming of age, complex relationships between technology and nature, rugged individualism weighed against a communal survival strategy and all the implications that has for the future of the human race, capitalism grinding against human connection and even some romance, if you really want to read that into it.
Genna- Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a young Yautja viewed as physically inadequate by his clan, has come to the most dangerous planet in the universe to hunt the Kalisk, an apex predator reputed to be unkillable, to prove himself. As he navigates the profoundly hostile environment, he brings along Thia (Elle Fanning), an android from the neighboring Alien franchise who’s had her legs removed by the beast, for advice and guidance.
Disney is trying to structure all of its franchises like they’ve structured the MCU, with a single executive who loves the property overseeing everything – obviously, it’s been hit-or-miss – and seems to have handed the keys to the Predator kingdom to director/producer Dan Trachtenberg. Two live-action films in, it’s been an astonishingly good choice. Predator: Badlands is a direct, big-budget upgrade over Prey, the Trachtenberg-directed Hulu original that quietly resurrected the franchise in 2022. They’re extremely similar films that use Predator lore to wrestle with toxic masculinity, which the creatures were specifically designed to mock. Screenwriter Patrick Aison, cinematographer Jeff Cutter, composer Sarah Schachner and producer John Davis all join Trachtenberg from film to film.
Megalopolis is the masterpiece at the end of time, the scrambled ramblings of an octogenarian who has watched the world rise out of and fall back into fascism, at once resigned, hopeful, crass, depraved, bitterly audacious and frequently laugh-out-loud funny with bizarre performances from an all-star cast, overindulgent and incoherent in the best possible ways. An epic for the ages. What a magical film.
New Rome- The greatest city in the world and heir of 2,000 years of democratic tradition writhes and groans as it races toward collapse, as it has many times before. Power has centralized under totalitarian mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), octogenarian head of Crassus National Bank, who become bitter rivals once they realize they are the only rulers left. Depravity, open corruption and urban decay, remarked on in passing by a disinterested media, are around every corner, and the screaming masses have long since accepted their poverty and dream not of revolution, but of enjoying the last few rays of New Rome’s hazy golden light. In this hour of monsters, unbeknownst to the people, their last hope is utopian urban planner Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a man in an ivory tower who can stop time on command for his own observation. Understandably, this has driven him quite mad.
Catilino is Crassus’ nephew, and as chairman of the Design Authority, he has almost dictatorial power to reshape the city, but only with the approval of Mayor Cicero, his ideological and personal rival who, as district attorney, investigated Catilino for his wife’s disappearance years before. The film’s main focus is the romance between Cicero’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), and Catilino that emerges within this grudge.
The Substance is an indie masterpiece destined to turn filmmaking on its head overnight with its furious satire, retro techniques and list of B-movie references so long it reminds me of Pulp Fiction, another Franken-movie built out of references to French New Wave, more than anything else. The newer movie is even more Franken, building itself out of ‘80s body horror movies with an injection of gender horror and a snap-back escalation of the practical effects that make these movies so beloved, as if decades of innovation had stretched on unbroken. Like many genre revivals, it immediately enters the conversation for best body horror movie ever made.
Los Angeles- Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), who has an Oscar and a star on the Hollywood walk of fame to help hold onto the distant memory of her career, is suddenly fired from her longtime gig as an ‘80s-era fitness instructor, studio executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid) arbitrarily deciding that she’s too old. Despondent, she is approached by a secret society testing something referred to only as “the substance,” which causes Sparkle to produce an “other self,” an imperfect younger copy of herself with which she shares a consciousness, who introduces herself as Sue (Margaret Qualley).
Last night, in another act of corporate cowardice in the late-night sector, ABC announced that “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” would be “pre-empted indefinitely” after FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened action against the company following on-air comments about right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated a week prior.
Kirk, who made a career out of workshopping hateful talking points on college campuses primarily targeting black and queer people, which were then recycled into the larger right wing media system, got his worthless racist guts splattered all over Utah Valley University campus in front of thousands of people. The investigation, such as it is, is in its early stages, and for now, the suspect’s motives remain a point of intense contention between the American political right and left.
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