‘Northman’ a sloppy, gory mess of perfect filmmaking shot for the halls of Valhalla

Posted on May 2, 2022 by reelentropy
A full-throated scream of an action film. Images courtesy Focus Features.

10/10 The Northman is the wildest action movie since Mad Max: Fury Road. Film is art supposed to evoke an emotion, and the emotion The Northman evokes is incoherent screaming. Within the first half hour, I wanted to smash my head through a concrete wall.

The west coast of Norway, 875- There’s something rotten in the state of the North Atlantic. Fjölnir (Claes Bang) has killed his brother, King Aurvandill War-Raven (Ethan Hawke), and taken his wife, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), as his own. Prince Amleth (Oscar Novak) facing beheading himself, stows away to the land of the Rus. Years later, Amleth the Bear-Wolf (Alexander Skarsgård, who also produces) inserts himself as a slave of Fjölnir the Brotherless, now exiled in southern Iceland, to exact his revenge.

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The thing about bigots is they never stop telling on themselves

Posted on April 18, 2022 by reelentropy
You gotta have your cast all stand in a line. It’s not real unless they all stand in a line. Images courtesy Warner Bros.

Imagine there’s a woman – white, liberal, wealthy, you know the type. She doesn’t pay much attention to politics, but she knows Hitler was bad – she even seems to understand some of the reasons why – and she despises Trump. She pays a great deal of attention to everything he does and holds him up as the pinnacle of all evil, even if she doesn’t seem to understand the full context. She has no problem with queer people at all – “Sleep with anyone who’ll have you! Introduce yourself however you like,” she says, without a hint of condescension, and she’s definitely not a racist. She has a whole list of reasons she can’t possibly be a racist – she carries them around, actually, she gets accused of antisemitism all the time, for some reason.

Now imagine this woman is in charge of making Harry Potter movies.

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‘Sex is real:’ J.K. Rowling’s descent into hatred and the studio left in the lurch

Posted on April 18, 2022 by reelentropy

All is not well.

Over the past several years, J.K. Rowling, author of the widely beloved “Harry Potter” franchise that invented a literary genre and defined the childhood of a generation, has decided to spend her time, artistic ability and considerable wealth and fame advocating against the rights and dignity of transgender people. She’s done this in a difficult political environment where fascists foster allies out of any brand of bigotry and anti-trans disinformation is a primary recruitment method, but also one where media platforms have realized that racial and queer inclusivity is extremely profitable. 

We’ve written at length in this space about how Rowling has bound herself to this franchise. You can also check here for a purely theoretical rundown of what makes her such an interesting case study in how we interact with art. As with any issue that requires navigating Trump-era fascism, everyone who’s unfamiliar should peruse the spectacular series The Alt-Right Playbook for tools to better decode actors in this political environment, what they really think and what they really mean by what they say. 

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The long, strange walk down the hall from ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 2’ to Michael Bay’s ‘Ambulance’

Posted on April 14, 2022 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Universal Pictures. None from Paramount.

On Feb. 14, 2020, Paramount Pictures dumped Sonic the Hedgehog into theaters, a movie-product it handled for Sega, the video game company that developed Sonic in the early ‘90s. After an elongated marketing campaign highlighted by the character’s horrifying initial design, the correction of which pushed the movie back four months but ironically raised its profile, Sonic opened at just over $70 million in a nice, cushy Presidents’ Day weekend release slot, and a sequel was inevitable. The movie’s domestic box office climbed up to $140.5 million by March, but then something terrible happened.

As the coronavirus swept across the globe, infamous director/producer Michael Bay was one of many who had his production plans canceled. “God damn it,” he said to his agent, “I just want to get out and shoot something fast. I’m tired of being locked up at home.” Within a few months, the agent found somebody who’d let Bay play with their drones, and an entire feature-length movie popped out.

Last weekend, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 debuted at $72.1 million, while Ambulance pulled in just $8.7 million. There weren’t a lot of showtimes that lined up properly that Thursday, so finding a place I could see both of them was something I’d put effort into, I wasn’t at my usual theater and the irony was on my mind.

Actually, what I specifically kept thinking about was how much worse these Sonic movies are than Bay’s infamous Transformers franchise.  

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‘Morbius’ a disorganized, obviously incomplete disaster

Posted on April 1, 2022 by reelentropy
As usual, the visual effects drown where prosthetics would swim. Images courtesy Sony Pictures Releasing.

1/10 Morbius would be an absolute disaster if approached as a completed movie, but the reality of it is worse. Despite having been initially slated for release way back in July 2020, the theatrical release is obviously a work in progress, and it looks like no one ever intended to complete it.

Manhattan- Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Michael Morbius (Jared Leto, who also produces executively) searches for a cure to his extremely rare congenital blood – or DNA? I don’t know what’s going on – disease, so rare I guess it doesn’t have even a fictional name. In his desperation, he goes out onto the ocean and performs a dangerous experiment on himself, filling in the gaps of his DNA with that of a vampire bat and becoming a horrifying pseudo-vampire who must consume human blood multiple times a day in order to survive. Morbius, a medical doctor, is wracked with guilt over his condition, a conflict that only deepens when his “cure” is appropriated by his surrogate and/or legally adopted brother who suffers from the same disease, a difficult-to-identify character played by Matt Smith.

Morbius is one of the most disorganized theatrical cuts I’ve ever seen. It appears to have been cobbled together from footage of several different drafts of the movie – you see this all the time at the screenplay level, with different versions of a script built on top of each other, and that usually turns out fine, but this looks like it happened at the production level. Different scenes of Morbius appear to have been produced for completely different versions of the movie at different times and then mashed together, and it looks like nobody went through to iron it out. This feels less like a finished movie and more like a rough cut with samples of different approaches for a producer to look at, then send back for more editing. The movie is full not only of shifts in filmmaking style, quality and tone, but surface-level continuity contradictions and gaps of basic scene-to-scene information.

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