‘Jungle Cruise’ is a boring, homosexist dumpster fire

Posted on August 13, 2021 by reelentropy
Because when you’re the producer, you get a makeout arc with Emily Blunt. Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

1/10 Jungle Cruise is a limp imitation of past Disney success that nobody seemed to know what to do with.

1917, as diseases that were responsible for a third of all military casualties in the Great War ravage the trenches- English botanist Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) believes she has found a map to the Tree of Life deep in the Amazon rainforest, the leaves of which she assumes will revolutionize medicine. She and her brother MacGregor (Jack Whitehall), who serves as her surrogate to operate in men’s spaces, steal away to Brazil and hire skipper Frank Wolff (Dwayne Johnson, who also produces) to see them downriver, but they are pursued in a U-Boat by Prince Joachim Franz Humbert of Prussia (Jesse Plemons), who wants to claim the tree’s power for Germany. As they progress into the jungle, they also anger the undead conquistadors who charted their initial path.

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Stop what you’re doing and go see ‘Snake Eyes’

Posted on August 12, 2021 by reelentropy
Two betrayals. Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

9/10 Snake Eyes is the movie people like to pretend MCU movies still are.

An underground street fighter known only as Snake Eyes (Henry Golding) drifts from job to job down the West Coast looking for the man who killed his father. A Yakuza boss named Kenta (Takehiro Hira) offers him the information in exchange for a complex service. Snake dives into a treacherous international underworld, playing both sides in a family grudge between the Yakuza and the Arishkage clan, keepers of an infinity stone the Jewel of the Sun, a fist-sized citrine with the power of, oh it’s just an infinity stone.

Coming up on two years ago now, legendary director Martin Scorsese lit the internet on fire when he said Marvel movies aren’t “cinema,” which led to a lot of different takes. Snake Eyes is the character-driven, within-boundaries offering that still scratches the itch for that gaudy, cartoon-come-to-life feeling, the 2021 proof that these elements can coexist. Comparing it to something like Black Widow, Snake Eyes laps it both in terms of human drama and crazy comic book action.

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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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