10/10Pig is a satire and correction of modern filmmaking, this new age of movies put together on an assembly line without anyone directly involved seeming to take ownership of them, and of modernity in general.
Oregon- Legendary Portland chef Rob Field (Nicolas Cage, who also produces) lives alone deep in the forest with his prize truffle pig, selling the fungal delicacy for top dollar to be used in the city’s hippest restaurants. One night, he’s attacked, and his pig is stolen. Aided by his contact, Amir (Alex Wolff), Field returns to Portland to find his pig.
6/10 Production for Space Jam: A New Legacy ran June to September 2019, pre-pandemic, so this movie that seems like a purpose-built advertisement for Warner Bros.’ post-pandemic business model never had the pandemic as the reasoning behind it. Was this the plan all along?
In Space Jam: A New Legacy, LeBron James (himself, also serving as producer) turns down a deal to be the spokesperson for Warner Bros.’ new multimedia platform, insulting the idea. In revenge, the algorithm who came up with it, anthropomorphized and self-styled as Al-G Rhythm (Don Cheadle), sucks him and his son Dom (a fictionalized version of LeBron’s youngest son, Bryce, played by Cedric Joe) into the studio’s universe of beloved media properties, which is literalized as a pocket solar system with different planets for Harry Potter and DC and Game of Thrones and so forth. The algorithm gives LeBron 24 hours to assemble a basketball team to defeat him, or promises to trap him and his son among WB’s star-studded lineup forever.
As LeBron assembles his team of classic Looney Tunes characters who have been scattered cinematically across Warner Bros.’ impressive list of franchise offerings, the algorithm grooms and turns his son against him by nurturing the interest in video game development his father had pushed aside, and when LeBron and the Tunes engage, it isn’t a traditional game of basketball, but the alternative-rules game Dom James has been working on, to be played against horrible half-human monsters of his own design.
Zola’s failure to live up to its potential has at least something to do with its potential being well-publicized. As the project was ditched, it eventually fell to a smaller studio in A24, but they’re the masters of movie marketing right now and they’re making a bit of a powergrab as theaters recover from COVID-19, so Zola’s profile only rose. Images courtesy A24.
6/10 With Twitter threads, like movies, it’s how you tell the story that makes it good, and neither Zola’s 2015 Twitter saga or the resulting new movie @Zola are told well.
Detroit, 2015- Hooters waitress and part-time stripper Aziah “Zola” King (Taylour Paige) meets another stripper named Stefani (Riley Keough), who invites her on a trip to Tampa, Florida a day later. Zola is prepared to dance, but discovers Stefani is actually a prostitute and has come down to Tampa with her pimp, referred to only as X (Coleman Domingo), because there aren’t any Johns in Motown, I guess. Stefani’s boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun) is also along for the ride, for some reason. Zola spends most of the trip uncomfortably watching X abuse Stefani and trying to minimize her role.
One of the things I was looking forward to about this installment was the movie having a real soundtrack – the lack of a distinctive, unifying score is one of the MCU’s longstanding criticisms, and Black Widow featured a nice sting that played over all its marketing. It’s horribly absent in the film itself. Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
6/10 It’s finally here! After almost 20 years of development, 11 years of the character existing in the background, seven years of that with an infamously mangled backstory, and more than a year of pandemic-related delay, Black Widow finally has her own solo feature, and it’s another Marvel movie. It’s another Phase – man, I don’t even know what phase this is anymore – Marvel movie full of overwritten, over-crazy action sequences, smaller fight scenes that are unwatchable as a stylistic choice and filled out by imitation-Joss Whedon dialogue.
Russian assassin Ylena Belova (Florence Pugh) is exposed to a synthetic gas that frees her from the chemical mind-control agent she and other widows are kept in check with. For safekeeping, she sends vials of the gas to Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson, who also produces executively), her government-assigned older sister and a defected former widow herself from an earlier version of the program that did not involve chemical mind control, who is currently a fugitive laying low in Norway after the events of Captain America: Civil War. The pair rendezvous in Budapest, where Romanoff thought she’d destroyed the program forever, to mass-produce the gas and finish the job, all while on the run from a small army of other widows.
3/10F9: The Fast Saga parks itself in a completely incomparable place in movie history. With a $70 million debut followed by a $29.1 million performance over the long Independence Day weekend, it is this movie that christens the post-pandemic era of the U.S. box office, not Black Widow, which released with a same-day streaming option, not Godzilla vs Kong in March, and certainly not Tenet, which attempted to spur a new wave of releases in September and failed. This is a once-in-a-lifetime – hopefully – flash photo of how we conceive of blockbusters at this point in history, both the movie that kick-started the box office after a year of dormancy and, more importantly, the franchise that was counted on to do it.
There’s no uncertainty about it anymore: this is what we want from movies now.
Reel Entropy 