‘Marry Me’ is a thoughtful, sweet romance from an earlier moment

Posted on February 27, 2022 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Universal Pictures.

8/10 Marry Me is a romantic fairy tale set vividly in the real world. It’s detailed, thoughtful and pleasant.

Manhattan- International megastar Kat Valdez (Jennifer Lopez, who also produces) is set to marry her performing partner, similarly massive star Bastian (Maluma), onstage in a performance of their smash hit “Marry Me,” but just as she’s being lifted onstage for the climactic performance of both song and vows, she learns he’s been cheating. Dazed, she selects Charlie Gilbert (Owen Wilson), a disinterested middle school math teacher at the concert to impress a daughter he’s trying to earn custody of but holding a sign that reads “Marry me,” out of the audience to become her new husband. Out of a complicated combination of prior dissatisfaction, genuine attraction and respect and an attempt to minimize her humiliation, Valdez and Gilbert try to make things work.

Most of Marry Me’s brilliance is anchored in its premise, this crisp and often dark intersection of public and private love lives and all the sub-conflicts that come with it – the performative elements of romance and how having an actual audience changes them, the commodification of celebrities’ private lives, the mundanity and office-like banality behind the scenes of the entertainment industry as performers put themselves on the line.

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Pieces don’t come together for ‘Death on the Nile’ production

Posted on February 27, 2022 by reelentropy
As it leans away from its more interesting underlying themes, Death on the Nile leans hard into its fantastic glamor and soapy sensibilities. It certainly knows its audience, and it’s no crime that audience isn’t me. Image courtesy 20th Century Studios.

3/10 After a long list of production- and pandemic-related delays, the second installment in Kenneth Branagh’s Agatha Christie Cinematic Universe – seriously – is finally here.

Egypt, 1937- Renowned Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Branagh, who also directs and produces) attends the wedding of Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot). The celebrated heiress met her husband, Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer) in a London nightclub six months earlier when Doyle immediately dropped his similarly short-tenured fiancé, Ridgeway’s lifelong friend Jackie de Bellefort (Emma Mackey), a moment Poirot also witnessed by chance. The betrayed de Bellefort has haunted the couple’s steps through their entire romance, leading them first to hire Poirot for security, then to bring their entire wedding party on a private cruise down the Nile, a cruise de Bellefort infiltrates. Soon, murders start to compile onboard.

Death on the Nile is swingy. Parts of it are high quality and the cast is having a great time, but they’re very lenient with some technical details, and some moments you get a clear sense that they just didn’t have enough ideas to fill a movie. Having the camera move around in a circle does not a full scene of dialogue make, but we get into that more than a couple of times.  

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‘Moonfall’ is a feature-length Q drop, merchandise included

Posted on February 27, 2022 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Lionsgate.

1/10 If the frequent Qanon-related kidnappings and other stupid acts of violence are suddenly all being committed in the all-new Lexus NX, the only vehicle rugged and agile enough to get you through the coming storm, Moonfall will definitely be the reason why. 

In Moonfall, the new Qanon power fantasy from writer/director/producer/”master of disaster” Roland Emmerich, the moon begins to fall toward Earth, causing several problems. UC Berkeley janitor K.C. Houseman (John Bradley), a prominent “megastructurist” who believes the moon is a hollow, artificial structure, is the only one who notices that –

Well – the moon’s descending orbit is such that it’s barely noticeable for more than a decade, apparently even for Houseman, but then is all of a sudden three weeks from impact. It’s a movie, the math doesn’t have to work out. But, and this is the point, it creates a dynamic where the whacko who obsessively watches the moon for evidence of it being hollow notices just a few hours before NASA, and thus all his other assumptions must also be confirmed and the magical mathematics of his delusion become mission-critical.

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Hollywood: Back to normal?

Posted on February 20, 2022 by reelentropy

Is Hollywood back to normal?

Well, nothing is ever really going back to normal. We’ve all experienced almost two full years of life since the first lockdowns in the U.S. It’s impossible to just snap back to a pre-pandemic world and even more impossible to snap back to our pre-pandemic selves. We are all highly plastic bundles of nerves draped under intricate and remarkably vulnerable layers of flesh desperately sucking memory and evidence of some higher meaning out of the electrical signals our probes pick up as we march inexorably toward death, and unfortunately, the past two years of that march counted.

OK, but is Hollywood back on its pre-COVID course?

Oh! Also no. No, of course not, what a stupid question that is!

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‘Screaming’ in a post-satire world

Posted on January 26, 2022 by reelentropy
Image courtesy Paramount Pictures.

The first thing to notice about Scream 5 is that it isn’t “Scream 5.” Despite being a direct sequel in the same continuity, the number has been left off all official marketing material, and there couldn’t possibly be a better metaphor for a movie this lost in time and this lacking in its own identity.

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