Rodriguez’ ‘80s action movie ‘Hypnotic’ written in ‘00s, released in ‘20s

Posted on June 19, 2023 by reelentropy
Images courtesy, and I am not making this up, Ketchup Entertainment.

5/10 Hypnotic, writer/cinematographer/editor/director/producer Robert Rodriguez’ sci-fi/noir action thriller starring Ben Affleck may have been a box office bomb and an objectively bad film, but it’s still a guilty pleasure of mine. I know now that it’s a cheap knockoff of Memento and The Matrix that has so much overlap with Inception as to be completely eclipsed by it, but I can’t help it! I have such strong memories from when I saw it first in 2003.

Sorry, that’s a typo – I meant 2023. This movie just came out.

Austin, Texas, summer- Austin Police Department Det. Danny Rourke (Affleck) is in occupational therapy to recover from the abduction of his 7-year-old daughter and subsequent divorce. Soon after he leaves the office, a bank robber called Dellrayne (William Fichtner), who seems to be able to command bystanders to do his bidding, implies that he knows where Rourke’s daughter is. Rourke descends into a world of “hypnotics,” powerful government-trained psychics, hoping to find his daughter.

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‘Beau is Afraid,’ the Odyssian anxiety attack

Posted on June 13, 2023 by reelentropy
Images courtesy A24.

9/10 In the first shot of Beau is Afraid, Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix and Armen Nahapetian) is born.

47 years later, Wassermann, who has grown into a man ruled by breathtaking anxiety and paranoia, is getting ready to visit his mother, Mona Wassermann (Patti LuPone and Zoe Lister-Jones), to commemorate the death of his father, who died before Beau Wassermann was born, but as he’s getting ready to leave his apartment, his keys and luggage vanish. The film sets off on an odyssey divided into four roughly equal legs – first, Wassermann manages his anxiety while he tries to find his apartment keys and make his flight. Then, after being run over, he is trapped in a surgeon’s home. Then he runs off into the woods for a stretch, and then he finally hitchhikes his way to his mother’s house, where the final leg takes place.

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I just rewatched ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and had a lot of feelings and now you have to read about them

Posted on June 5, 2023 by reelentropy
“I am Oz, the great and terrible,” spoke the beast in a voice that was one great roar. Images courtesy Loew’s Inc.

I remember precisely the first image I saw of Star Wars. It’s the shot of Darth Vader, lightsaber ignited, standing in a Death Star hallway waiting for Obi-Wan Kenobi to arrive. This would have been 1995 or ‘96, after the prequel trilogy had already been announced and it popped up on the television. I’ve got no context for the samurai I’m looking at or the World War II homage I’m about to see in the climax, I have absolutely no understanding of what anyone’s saying, I just know it looks and sounds so cool.

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Struggling to ‘Blow Up a Pipeline’

Posted on June 3, 2023 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Neon.

8/10 Swedish ecology professor Andreas Malm published “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” in 2021 as an examination of the history and philosophy of political violence and a criticism of both pacifism and climate fatalism within modern liberal politics. How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t so much an adaptation as it is an abstraction, translating those themes into an onscreen narrative. It’s a serviceable heist movie made great by how well it captures the strange mood here at the cusp of the end of the world and what the people willing to change that actually look like.

West Texas- For various reasons mainly relating back to legalized land theft, pollution and enforcement of poverty, a group of eight disaffected youths independently conclude that the fossil fuel industry and all of its customers are destroying the world because it’s the cheapest thing to do and that sabotaging the entire supply chain to the point that it becomes too expensive to maintain is the only option. They come together to blow up a pipeline.

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‘Renfield’ stays in toxic relationship with Marvel movies

Posted on June 3, 2023 by reelentropy
Renfield’s title font was inspired by the 1931 Bella Lugosi adaptation of Dracula, which it pays nice homage to, but holy crap does the font look out-of-place in a digitally shot color film. Images courtesy Universal Pictures.

2/10 Renfield ranges from boring to completely unwatchable aesthetically, and it expresses an incredible hatred of its own characters that’s deeply angering to watch play out.

New Orleans, present day- After traveling the world, sucking as much as he can out of every city until he’s finally driven out, Count Dracula (Nicolas Cage) has settled in the Charity Hospital that was abandoned after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans with his familiar, R.M. Renfield (Nicolas Hoult). Renfield has also been sucked dry and is looking for a way out, but he keeps using the powers granted to him by Dracula to bring Dracula people to eat due to a combination of his own inertia, apathy and lack of self-respect and active manipulation by the vampire.

Also, a significant amount of the scant 93-minute runtime is dedicated to the Lobo crime family, and the mother and son play out a similar relationship to Dracula and Renfield’s, and also there’s a traffic cop whose father was killed by the Lobos because he was the only honest cop on the force, and she’s got a grudge, and, what? We’ve got a vampire, not just any vampire but Dracula himself played the greatest actor who ever lived, and we need this drug dealer plot, why? The way Tedward Lobo (Ben Schwartz) is used as a foil for Renfield turns out to be one of the better parts of the movie, and that’s not a compliment.

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