There’s no more palpable bromance in Hollywood right now than the one between Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart. Their electricity is palpable and joyous, and the Jumanji co-stars seem to have endeavored to work together more as time has gone on. With one starring in DC League of Super-Pets as Krypto the Superdog and the other as Ace the Bat-Hound, it seemed like a nice way to kill an afternoon. I don’t want to do a full analysis of a movie about talking animals with the celebrity voices – I’m 30 years old, that’s not fair, but there’s this one thing, this one small thing about it –
10/10 Sometimes, a fresh pair of eyes is all it takes.
After his marriage dissolves, documentarian Dean Fleischer Camp (himself. Camp also writes, directs, edits and produces) moves into an Airbnb, but discovers it is already inhabited by Marcel (Jenny Slate, who also writes and produces), a conscious shell with shoes on. Marcel was part of a collection of shells belonging to a family that used to live in the house, but they were separated, and he now spends his time in relative isolation doing chores around his massive environment taking care of Nana Connie (Isabella Rossellini), his only remaining relative who is showing early signs of dementia. Dean makes a Youtube documentary about Marcel, becoming an internet sensation.
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is the feature-length culmination of several stop-motion shorts – Slate and Camp have been working on these characters for 12 years. The story goes that, both early in their careers when they were sharing a hotel room at a wedding with five other people to save money, Slate started speaking in a tiny voice, and Marcel came to life on YouTube 48 hours later.
2/10 I’m now having to realize how strong my instinct is to spell gray with an “e” and looking at the history of the two acceptable spellings and thinking about what a trash language English is, and it’s all over this horrible train wreck of a TV movie.
In a distressingly COVID-less 2021, a CIA assassin codenamed Sierra Six (Ryan Gosling) runs around doing things. Six has information that could be damaging to his new boss, and so they hire Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans), a former agent who was kicked out of the agency because he likes torture too much even by the CIA’s standards, to find him. The plot is Suicide Squad meets Bourne Identity, it’s very straightforward.
The Gray Man is a three-way head-on collision of creative forces who all agree on exactly one thing: they want a product with their names on it. How much they care about what that product actually is varies.
8/10 Writer/director/producer Jordan Peele couldn’t resist releasing Nope, his follow-up to a film about doppelgangers riddled with 11:11 imagery, on a Friday the 22nd in 2022. Even his release dates are ripe with metatext.
Agua Dulce, California- OJ and Em Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) run Haywood’s Hollywood Horses Ranch. The family, who claim to be descended from the black jockey who was the subject of the first ever moving picture and the only black-owned horse handlers in Hollywood, have fallen quickly on hard times after the death of their father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), and are selling horses to stay afloat. When they discover a flying saucer that has made a home on their ranch, they decide to team up with renowned IMAX cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) and local Fry’s Electronics sales tech Angel Torres (Brandon Perea) to get “the Oprah shot,” what Em posits will be indisputable proof of alien life.
Just like Get Out and Us, Nope is full of big ideas. It’s a movie about the clash between man and nature and the nature of that relationship. For all the crazy stuff that happens in Nope, what the movie thinks is even crazieris the compulsion to point a camera at it. In Nope, getting the shot is salvation and purpose. Getting the shot is what will protect the Haywoods, somehow, and it’s the driving force for their helpers, another project for a lifelong cameraman for Holst and a distraction from a mundane day job for Torres.
That’s some pretty healthy hair for living in the marsh. Images courtesy Sony Pictures Releasing.
6/10Where the Crawdads Sing is the first movie to try to fill the vacuum left by the Fifty Shades movie franchise, or certainly the first theatrical release, but anyone who watched those movies can tell you that’s a hole that didn’t really need to be filled – perhaps more importantly, so could anyone who took a cursory glance at those movies’ numbers.
Barkley Cove, North Carolina, 1969- Catherine “Kya” Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones), known as “the marsh girl,” is on trial for the murder of town quarterback Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson), who fell to his death from a notoriously unsafe fire tower in the bog on a night when prosecutors can’t prove anyone else was there at all and when Clark personally was in Greenville 90 miles from the coast. Over the course of a prosecution that would be laughed out of any courtroom in America long, long before the trial stage, Clark flashes back to her abusive family abandoning her in the marsh, developing her ability to support herself and her relationships with Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith) and Andrews.
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