‘Raya’ another perfectly enjoyable product of an exhausting, cynical machine

Posted on March 10, 2021 by reelentropy
The concept art, at least, is spectacular. Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

7/10 Outside the theater for Raya and the Last Dragon, a survey company stooge hands out questionnaires in cheap plastic bags meant to reassure moms who don’t really understand how COVID-19 spreads. When asked, he tells me all the big movies are doing it. I’m something of an authority on what all the big movies are doing, and I don’t need to be to know that’s a lie, but he clearly doesn’t know anything beyond what he’s told, so I don’t grill him too much.

The survey itself though, which is all about demographic information and how well the viewer connected with each of Raya’s menagerie of characters, tells me plenty. Disney wants hard data on which characters to spin off and who to aim that media at. I can’t imagine why they think a pen-and-paper survey would be an effective way of gathering this data in the age of Twitter fandom, especially for a movie that was available to stream day-of for that hefty $30 premium charge, or why the stooge is handing these things out before the movie where they’ll be largely forgotten in the theater instead of directly after, but the priorities at least make sense.

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‘Tom and Jerry’ is listless and unfunny

Posted on March 3, 2021 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

3/10 Who was Tom and Jerry for?

Manhattan- In a world of cartoon animals, an alley cat named Tom scratches out a living as a street pianist, but is routinely assaulted, robbed and otherwise tormented by a mouse called Jerry. Jerry, who is between homes, carves out a residence on the 10th floor of the Royal Gate Hotel, and Tom, seeking revenge, follows.

At the same time, Kayla (Chloë Grace Moretz), a gig worker trying to make it in the city who’s between jobs and possibly also between homes, bluffs her way onto the staff of the Royal Gate over the suspicions of her new boss, Terrence (Michael Peña). On the eve of a high-profile wedding, Terrence assigns her to discreetly find the mouse that seems to have taken up residence at the hotel.

It takes about 20 minutes for it to become clear how the human plot will intersect with Tom and Jerry. That’s a perfectly acceptable amount of time for the plot to really get rolling, it just feels longer when you keep pausing to get more food.

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‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ is the urgent black story of 2020

Posted on February 24, 2021 by reelentropy
Yeah, I know it’s 2021, but the copyright for this movie is 2020. It was delayed, you know why. Images courtesy Warner Bros.

9/10 Three and a half years after the Charlottesville rally, after a year of grotesque displays of police violence, Judas and the Black Messiah is the story that puts these things in context, and it’s a fine film.

Chicago, 1968- Professional criminal Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) is caught red-handed stealing a car and impersonating a federal officer. Instead of sending him to prison, real FBI agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) sets him up as an informant. O’Neal spends a year or so spying for Mitchell on the Illinois Black Panther party and its chairman, Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), eventually playing a key role in Hampton’s assassination.

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A24 manufactures another masterpiece in ‘Saint Maud’

Posted on February 19, 2021 by reelentropy
Images courtesy A24.

9/10 When theaters closed last March and everything that was about to release was delayed, the biggest pain point for me was Saint Maud, set for an April 10, 2020 release and positioned as A24’s next horror masterwork. Now, almost a year after the bomb dropped, Maud has finally proceeded into American theaters, and she doesn’t disappoint. 

On the English coastline, a palliative care nurse who introduces herself as Maud (Morfydd Clark) begins working with Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a moderately famous American dancer dying of lymphoma. Maud had accidentally killed a patient when working at a hospital, after which she moved to private care and converted to Catholicism – she seems to have taken the name “Maud” as part of her conversion. Deeply traumatized, profoundly isolated and in constant stomach pain, Maud sinks rapidly into her mental and physical health crises, interpreting all her symptoms as communications from God and harming herself as a way to become closer to him. She determines to save the soul of Amanda, who is an atheist.

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‘Little Things’ great but eclipsed by classics

Posted on February 8, 2021 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

8/10 Warner Bros.’ moody new noir The Little Things is primarily being dismissed as too close to the 1995 classic Seven, and, yeah. That’s pretty much all there is to say. It’s a beat-for-beat remake of Seven with a significant helping of themes and imagery lifted from 2013’s Prisoners, and those are both far superior movies that you should watch instead. The Little Things is still quite good, though.

October 1990, California- A killer of women stalks Los Angeles County, and police are at a loss for suspects. Kern County Sheriff’s Deputy Joe “Deke” Deacon (Denzel Washington) makes the long drive from Bakersfield to Los Angeles to pick up evidence, bloody shoes being tested for DNA in a Kern County case. Deke left the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department acrimoniously five years ago, and there is friction between him and the department. Spending the night, LASD Det. Sgt. Jimmy Baxter (Rami Malek), Deacon’s replacement on the force, invites him to a fresh murder scene. The two become convinced that this murder is connected not only to the current spat of killings, but the case that caused Deacon to leave Los Angeles, eventually settling on Albert Leonard Sparma (Jared Leto) as a primary suspect.

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