9/10Inside is the new definitive icon of the COVID-19 crisis in film that explores the psychological damage of isolation and the way attitudes change toward the comforts of home when you’re trapped in it.
That’s Willem Dafoe in Vasilis Katsoupis’ Inside, not the other one.
Times Square- Professional art thief Nemo (Dafoe) breaks into an art collector’s penthouse to steal three works from Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele. He gets in fine, but his attempts to leave trigger the penthouse’s security features, and he becomes trapped in a “Robinson Crusoe” esque fight for survival, not against the elements on a deserted island, but against his own body in a penthouse that has been emptied of food and water.
You know what? This is a nice wood dragon. I can’t give Fury of the Gods credit for designing it, but they absolutely picked the correct 15-year-old “World of Warcraft” design to steal and reskin. Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
7/10 In 2019, Shazam! was one of the first popular successes for the DCEU, which was already long-dead by this time. It’s fun and flighty, but from a franchise this desperate that holds this tight a grip on its movies, you kind of already sense that a bloated, overboard sequel was on the way.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods never quite earns my excitement, but it does earn my respect. It’s not perfect, but there’s a lot of meat to this movie.
9/10 The Creed sub-series has been a direct arc upward from unimpressive-but-promising to impressive and finally to Creed III, an inspired directorial debut from star Michael B. Jordan.
Los Angeles- Seven years after Creed II, Donnie Creed (Jordan, who also directs and produces) has retired on top as heavyweight champion of the world, content to leverage his name on gyms and merchandise, but he is confronted outside his gym by Damian Anderson (Jonathan Majors), an old friend from the foster care system. “Diamond Dame” Anderson was a couple of years older and a top-tier amateur boxer who taught Creed everything he knew at the time, but was sent to prison for 18 years for pulling a gun to protect Creed. Creed would be lifted out of poverty by his father’s widow and set on the path to success some time after.
Anderson, in his late 30s but without the wear-and-tear of a boxing career, wants a shot at the title, but Creed can’t give it to him overnight, so Anderson resorts to dirty tricks in and out of the ring to make it happen. Their tension builds into the ring when Creed comes out of retirement to reclaim the title from Anderson.
It’s always a bit of a tell-tale when promotional imagery is much more distinctive than anything in the actual movie. Images courtesy Universal Pictures.
3/10Cocaine Bear is the most important film of 2023, perhaps the most important of the past five years because it’s such a perfect indication of not only how filmmaking practices have stagnated and toxified, but how it affects the final product. It should be a permanent display in a museum of lazy filmmaking from this era.
The Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest in Northwest Georgia, Sept. 11, 1985- former Lexington police officer-turned drug smuggler Andrew C. Thornton II (Matthew Rhys) gets high on his own supply on a low-altitude flight from Columbia to St. Louis and starts dropping gym bags full of cocaine several hours early over Georgia. On Dec. 23, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation discovered a dead black bear surrounded by opened, scattered packages of cocaine. Affectionately known as Cokey the Bear or Pablo Eskobear, her taxidermied body remains on permanent display at the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington, where she is certified to officiate weddings.
The 2023 film Cocaine Bear imagines that she didn’t immediately overdose and die and instead goes on a bloody rampage, tearing apart every human she comes across in search of more cocaine. The movie feeds her some tourists, Sari (Keri Russell) is in the park looking for her kids who’ve wandered off, there are a few hoodlums hanging around sticking people up, there’s a park ranger and some paramedics, and Syd (Ray Liotta) and a couple of his guys have come down from St. Louis to recover his drugs.
Part of the solution for Ant-Man’s unpopularity has been to add more characters, and you end up with this “Power Rangers” array of Ant-people. Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
3/10 Oh, Ant-Man. What did you do to deserve getting stepped on like this? In that iconic moment in an iconic movie when the Avengers assembled onscreen for the first time, Ant-Man was already the butt of the joke. He was the Avenger all the “geek culture” magazines, such as they were all those centuries ago in May 2012, were baiting clicks with. Do you know which original Avenger didn’t appear in The Avengers? “Wow” all your friends and distinguish yourself as the true geek among all the bandwagoners with this one bit of trivia!
Ant-Man was the first Marvel movie to openly suck. Of course the Captain America movies left me wanting and everyone can admit the Thor movies are a letdown, but Ant-Man was the first one that felt skippable, and a lot of people skipped it. Its $57.2 million opening is pitiful by MCU standards, only the second-worst at the time to the Incredible Hulk movie that still barely registers as part of the series.
The Avengers was followed by a weighty year-long pause, the longest we would go without an MCU release until the COVID-19 crisis, and then Iron Man 3, which engaged directly with the series’ most popular character’s PTSD from the immediately preceding film. Avengers: Age of Ultron was followed up two months later by a new character who’d already been introduced as the butt of a big joke.
Reel Entropy 