There’s ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ movies now?

Posted on May 4, 2023 by reelentropy
The movie spends a lot of its time in these fantastic spaces relaxing over a beer. It really helps bring the vibe of gameplay down into the story world. Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

7/10 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is fast and fun, much better than it has any right to be. The quote is “a great movie is three great scenes and no bad ones,” and there isn’t anything in this movie that sticks out too far in a bad way, so I guess that’s high praise.

The Forgotten Realms- Bard Edgin Darvis and barbarian Holga Kilgore (Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez) have lazed for two years at the Revel’s End arctic prison after their last job went sour. They bust out and head for Neverwinter, where their old crew’s rogue Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant) has set himself up as the lord, only to learn not only did he intentionally betray them and align himself with an apocalyptic cult of necromancers for power, but he has their daughter. The pair brings a new crew together to knock over the upcoming High Sun Games, a gladiatorial competition that Fitzwilliam has staked much of his lordship on.

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Willem Dafoe’s ‘Inside’ is the new definitive COVID movie

Posted on April 27, 2023 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Focus Features.

9/10 Inside 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.

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At the end of its life, DC keeps going back to poisoned well in ‘Shazam 2’

Posted on April 27, 2023 by reelentropy
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.

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‘Creed’ ends, Jordan’s directorial career begins

Posted on April 27, 2023 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer.

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.

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‘Cocaine Bear’ a crash of poor filmmaking

Posted on April 25, 2023 by reelentropy
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.

3/10 Cocaine 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.

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