‘Candyman’ reboot doesn’t capture moment after pandemic delays

Posted on September 9, 2021 by reelentropy
Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

The Candyman reboot is a comprehensive media package, not just a movie, and the main problem is it doesn’t need to be. A two minute trailer covers most of the movie’s ground.

Cabrini-Green, Chicago, 2019- 30 years after the events of the first Candyman movie have passed into Chicago legend, Cabrini-Green is in the midst of a renaissance, with new luxury residential towers rising above what remains of the projects. Struggling painter Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) wanders the slums looking for inspiration and stumbles on the legend of Candyman – a mixture of the stories of Sherman Fields (Michael Hargrove), who is credited as becoming Candyman after being murdered by police and carrying out attacks that viewers will be familiar with as the work of Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd) from the original films. Looking into the story of Candyman, McCoy is swallowed by the dark chasm of the history of lynchings in Chicago and across the U.S.

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‘Reminiscence’ blends film’s past with apocalyptic future

Posted on September 9, 2021 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

10/10 You shouldn’t trust me with Reminiscence. I’m weak to this film.

Miami- In the near future, the ocean has swallowed the city. It’s partially held back by a sea wall several stories high, but the streets that remain are permanently covered in a few inches of water. Personal tugboats have overtaken cars, and the city has formally become nocturnal, with banking and business hours at night, to escape the scorching days.

In this sunken city that scurries out of the sun, Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) runs a service that allows people to experience memories first-hand again, repurposing futuristic military interrogation technology for pleasure – though of course he makes his real money as a lie detector and interrogator for the court. In the wee hours of the night, a femme fatale called Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) walks into Bannister’s office looking for help remembering where she dropped her keys. She’s dressed to kill, but she only needs her eyes. Bannister becomes obsessed with her from there.

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‘Free Guy’ is a very strange movie

Posted on September 9, 2021 by reelentropy
It doesn’t help how much this all looks like Pixels. Images courtesy 20th Century Studios.

2/10 Movies based on personal senses of humor are always hit-or-miss, and Free Guy is a huge, wild miss.

In the open-world video game Free City, Guy (Ryan Reynolds, who also produces), a non-player character who works as a teller at a bank that players constantly rob, begins to buck his programming and start fighting with player characters in ways he wasn’t designed to. His development turns out to be the key to a outlandish conspiracy about prior builds of the game – no one in the writers room on Free Guy had any idea how intellectual property or video game moderation or servers work, so I’m not even going to try to describe what’s going on. It’s all too far removed from reality to make sense in summary, and it doesn’t make any sense during the runtime either. The point is, Ryan Reynolds is here, and he’s got jokes.

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Make a different movie.

Posted on August 30, 2021 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Suicide Squad (David Ayer, 2016) hit theaters after more than a year of fanfare, polarizing audiences who loved and hated it for a wide breadth of reasons.

Five years later to the exact weekend, The Suicide Squad (James Gunn, 2021), a remake/sequel/reboot meant both for the people who loved and hated the first movie, arrives like a burger you sent back to the kitchen because you asked for no mustard that someone clearly just scraped off with a knife and still has big flecks of mustard all over it. It is the exact same movie with many of the exact same problems.

Corto Maltese- To quell an unfriendly regime coming to power, a very stupid CIA agent called Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) assembles another iteration of Task Force X, a group of dangerous inmates who have bombs injected into their heads and perform dangerous missions in exchange for time off their sentences if they survive. Waller has the American military at her disposal, but she chooses to send a bunch of unwilling, untrained and undisciplined slaves who already hate her personally instead.

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It’s OK if you didn’t get ‘The Green Knight’

Posted on August 13, 2021 by reelentropy
It’s difficult to pull a single image out of The Green Knight – almost every image is bold, regal and immediately identifiable. Images courtesy A24.

9/10 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight completes the evolution of distributor A24 from a distribution conglomerate, which simply bought festival films to pump and flip into theaters, to a production company, to a brand and finally to its own genre of film, which this film demonstrates can now be built from the ground up instead of acquired. It’s a critical mass of surface-level similarities and personnel overlap with the production company’s most iconic horror films, particularly The Witch and Hereditary, so much so that it feels like it takes place in the same world as those movies, but applied to a completely different setting and intent.

Well, that’s sort of an illusion. What’s really going on is indie filmmaking has centralized on several distinct conventions, such as naturalistic lighting and color grading, slow pace, similar sound design, Old Testament anxieties and religious obsession, witchcraft and heavy use of blood – and semen! – across several directors and productions, and A24 is such a dominant player in the distribution scene of these movies in particular that they seem to be the ones driving this genre when it’s really a large-scale fashion trend coming organically from a fresh crop of filmmakers. A24 has in turn been dedicated to this crop of filmmakers, including Green Knight writer/director/editor/producer David Lowery, whose breakout critical success A Ghost Story remains an important part of this semi-genre’s iconography.

I didn’t really get A Ghost Story – in hindsight, it went completely over my head – and I don’t really get The Green Knight either, and that’s OK. Most movies I “don’t get” in one sitting feel like there isn’t much there, but there’s clearly a lot to The Green Knight.

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