M. Night can’t handle interesting ‘Old’ premise

Posted on August 12, 2021 by reelentropy
One of the consistent downfalls of Shyamalan’s career has been his consistent branding as a horror filmmaker when his movies mostly don’t fit that genre at all. Part of the reason is his obvious talent for gruesome imagery, which he brings to full bear in Old. Images courtesy Universal Pictures.

4/10 Like many, I’ve spent the past year looking for shining glimmers of normalcy wherever I can find it. I took in the Super Bowl, like I do every year, hunting for movie trailers, listing who’s confident enough to shell out for this advertising space and whether or not they present something different for this broader audience. The only trailer in Super Bowl LV was for M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, which all the way back in February 2021 came with an aggressive “only in theaters” tagline.

In Old, a handful of vacationers at a tropical resort are invited to a pristine private beach that only certain clients are made aware of. The alcove is a trap, a singularity in time that causes anyone who enters to age at a rate of two years per hour, from which they cannot leave. The vacationers suffer and die as parents’ medical conditions, ranging from terminal illnesses to just the knicks and knacks of an aging body, rapidly accelerate, and their children gallop through puberty and young adulthood.

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In ‘Pig,’ a quiet memory of what might have been

Posted on August 12, 2021 by reelentropy
Image courtesy Neon.

10/10 Pig 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.

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‘Space Jam’ is a feature-length HBOmax advert, and was before WB made its move

Posted on August 12, 2021 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Warner Bros.

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.

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Outrageous black comedy ‘@Zola’ instead captures dour reality

Posted on August 2, 2021 by reelentropy
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.

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The MCU you loved has been gone for a while now

Posted on July 22, 2021 by reelentropy
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.

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