15 years later, ‘Raping Indy’ again

Posted on July 20, 2023 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

3/10 In 2008, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas finally dusted off Indiana Jones after 20 years for his fourth of five appearances greenlit all the way back in 1979 with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It was not well-received. Probably the most prominent memory of the film is the way “South Park” codified audience reaction, reimagining the film as a traumatizing series of violent rape scenes with Spielberg and Lucas, both perceived to be on the downslope of their careers at this time, exploiting their old character sexually instead of just financially.

Now it’s 15 years later, Spielberg has moved on from nostalgia but kept his career in full swing and Lucas has pawned all his intellectual property off to Disney, and after immediately running Star Wars into the ground, the company has spawned more Lucasfilm filth with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and it’s the same damn movie. It’s a new director, a new production company, a new decade and a new paradigm of blockbuster filmmaking, and it’s the same movie down to so many of the worst details.

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‘Past Lives’ warrants a lot of early best-of-the-year noise

Posted on July 20, 2023 by reelentropy
Past Lives has been called “broadly autobiographical” from Korean-Canadian playwright and first-time writer-director Celine Song, and I’m not sure what that means, but in the last stretch, it obviously becomes a personal love letter to New York from the Columbia University graduate. Images courtesy A24.

8/10 Past Lives opens with a J cut, transitioning from sound on a black screen to a shot of the love triangle in one of the final scenes at the bar, the only shot in the film from outside the romantic leads’ perspectives. A background character behind the camera, whose point of view we assume we’re seeing, wonders aloud what their story is. Perhaps the entire film is this outside observer’s fantasy? It would certainly fit the airy mood and theme of worrying about multiple possible selves, but it undercuts everything else we see that this framing device, the possibility that not only is the whole thing some fantasy – of course it’s some fantasy, it’s a movie – but someone else’s fantasy, isn’t just included in the movie, it’s the first thing we see.

In South Korea, presumably 12-year-old classmates Na Young (Greta Lee and Seung Ah Moon) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo and Seung Min Yim) spend their final days together before Na’s family emigrates to Toronto. Twelve years later, Na has Anglicized her name to Nora and is a successful writer in New York City when Hae, still in Seoul, finds her on social media. They enter a de facto romantic relationship, but take a break when neither is willing to visit the other. Twelve years later, Nora is now married, and Hae finally visits New York.

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“Asteroid City” fully responds to COVID isolation

Posted on July 20, 2023 by reelentropy
Still picture-perfect, as always. Images courtesy Focus Features.

9/10 Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch was the crown jewel of a late-2021 explosion of pandemic-delayed works from name directors, but now at what appears to be the peak of his career, he didn’t stop working during the COVID-19 crisis, and so we have “Asteroid City,” another pandemic movie from the American auteur, this one made during and directly confronting the pandemic.  

1955- Viewers are treated to a filmed performance of the fictional play “Asteroid City.” In the play, five children and their families descend on Asteroid City, a ghost town near a nuclear testing site in the Mojave Desert known for its meteorite crater, where they are to receive awards from the military for various science projects. The play mostly focuses on war photojournalist Augie Steenbeck [Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzman)], who has not told his children of their mother’s death three weeks prior, who begins a relationship with Hollywood sex symbol Midge Campbell [Mercedes Ford (Scarlett Johansson)]. At the end of Act I, the grand awards ceremony in the crater is crashed by an alien [uncredited (Jeff Goldblum)], who drops in to steal the meteorite and traps everyone there in military quarantine as the U.S. government tries to stop any of this from getting out.

Between acts, a television host (Bryan Cranston) gives us an oral history of the performance and its writer, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton).

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‘Elemental’ catastrophe could mean the end for Pixar

Posted on July 20, 2023 by reelentropy
This is all pretty on-the-nose from director and story writer Peter Sohn, who was born to Korean immigrants in The Bronx. Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

8/10 Elemental might just end up being the last Pixar movie. There are two more movies in production now, but looking at these receipts, I can’t see any reasonable option other than to shut the studio doors immediately. At least the movie’s pretty good!

In Element City, a massive immigration port clearly modeled on New York City, inequity reigns. The water elementals, who arrived first, have claimed the best real estate and decided the most about the city’s layout, but the late-arriving fire elementals are mostly crammed into a slum across the river, unable to rise in the world due to both lack of economic opportunity and the physical danger the water-filled rich areas of the city represent.

Born into this environment, second-generation immigrant Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis) stands to inherit the family deli from her father, Bernie Lumen (Ronnie del Carmen), who stoked an abandoned building into a blazing cauldron of the community, but he won’t turn it over until Ember learns to control her temper, and his body is beginning to fail. Investigating a burst pipe in the basement, Ember Lumen meets city inspector Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), a water elemental who threatens to shut the deli down within the week over the problem, and the two fall in love as they investigate where the water, which shouldn’t be in Firetown at all, is coming from.

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‘Flash’ is really bad

Posted on July 20, 2023 by reelentropy
Also, his costume looks terrible. Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

1/10 The Flash is bad. The first action sequence where Flash has to save a neonatal care ward falling from the 43rd floor of a hospital is funny-bad – no matter how much the movie is winking here, I’m still very much laughing at, not with it – but for the most part, it’s just bad.

The Flash is the culmination of a very long history of desperate, idiotic decisions by Warner Bros. about how to make money with its comic book adaptation properties, and that history is written into the film. It’s fascinating for me personally to see all these decisions play out in a movie format, but I can’t recommend the movie for anyone else.

If you want to read about the history, here goes-

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