Netflix’ crown jewel ‘Power of the Dog’ shines

Posted on June 6, 2022 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Netflix.

9/10 The Power of the Dog came onto my radar around its November 2021 release as “the toxic masculinity movie,” which was an immediate turn-off because I have a lot of difficulty with that term. It’s a very specific condition that gets thrown around a lot more than feels appropriate, and I always end up consuming the media through a filter of how to prove it was inappropriately applied here, but then it usually is applied appropriately, and I have to come to grips again with how big a problem this very narrow phenomenon of externalized male insecurity is in modern American society. Thinking about these things, I don’t get a great read on the movie itself. 

Fortunately, The Power of the Dog was released on Netflix, so I could just watch it again.

Montana, 1925- Widowed hostess Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst) and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) move in with her wealthy new husband George Burbank (Jesse Plemons) and his brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch). Phil Burbank is such an insufferable prick that he turns daily life on the ranch into a question of how best to avoid him.

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Long-awaited ‘Top Gun’ sequel soars

Posted on May 28, 2022 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

8/10 Top Gun: Maverick is an audacious, historic photography project unlike anything that’s ever been done before or is likely to be done after. This is the type of sensory experience for which theaters were built.

NAS North Island- After 30 years, Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise, who also produces) has been called back to the Top Gun academy for elite Navy pilots. This time around, he trains a dozen recent Top Gun graduates for a suicide mission that calls for several of Maverick’s unique skills and ways of thinking. The trainees include Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), son of Maverick’s former radio intercept officer who died during a training exercise in the original Top Gun.

Still feeling responsible for the elder Bradshaw’s death, Maverick devises a plan that is theoretically impossible, beyond the limits of both the F/A 18F Super Hornet and the human body, but might get everyone through the mission alive if they can make it work.  

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‘Multiverse’ runs wild and mad as my love-hate for MCU deepens

Posted on May 8, 2022 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

8/10 The history of the MCU and the Disney empire generally is a history of the struggle between directors and what has effectively become a second studio system. Massive names like Jon Favreau, Edgar Wright, Gareth Edwards, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Joss Whedon and James Gunn have all been dismissed or otherwise undercut from Disney projects in recent years.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness started out telling the same tale. The first Doctor Strange way back in 2016 was written and directed by Scott Derrickson, a longtime fan of the psychedelic comic line who basically had the entire film storyboarded out and ready to shoot just for the job interview. It’s not exactly a masterpiece, but passion shines through, and he was reportedly excited about taking the sequel in a full-on horror direction. Instead, he was fired over those dreaded “creative differences” before he got to write a single draft and kept on as an executive producer so he couldn’t complain about it publicly.

Then this empire with a soul-crushing history of and apparent dedication to being as bland as possible gave the project to Sam Raimi.

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‘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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