Somehow, the Snyder cut is even worse

Posted on March 23, 2021 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Warner Bros.

0/10 Zack Snyder’s Justice League opens with a title card reading “This film is presented in a 4:3 format to preserve the integrity of Zack Snyder’s creative vision.” The words “Zack Snyder” literally come before the Warner Bros. logo.

In 2017, I called the theatrical cut of Justice League one of the worst movies I’d ever seen, and it is, and I say to you unequivocally, the Snyder cut is worse in every imaginable way. If I were tasked with turning Zack Snyder’s Justice League into a passable movie, the first thing I would do is shave the hours and hours of fat until we were starting with something remarkably similar to the theatrical cut. Every addition is bad. Every single new thing in this cut makes the movie worse.

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A quarantine with The Master

Posted on March 19, 2021 by reelentropy

Several years ago now, I started systemically moving through the work of high-profile directors. This is part of the path from loud movie nerd to legitimate film scholar – film scholars actually study film, they don’t just write about it. The idea is to go over a director’s entire filmography in the span of about a month, completely immerse myself in the world as they see it and the techniques with which they use to convey it, in order to better understand them as individuals and more broadly how any individual would express themselves personally through this medium. Things were cruising along fine until I hit no. 5 on my list: Alfred Hitchcock.

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‘Chaos Walking’ solid, unique and urgent

Posted on March 11, 2021 by reelentropy
The passive image of the noise alone is evocative, the visual of Hewitt’s thoughts surrounding and overwhelming him. Images courtesy Lionsgate.

8/10 Chaos Walking is a troubled, inventive exploration of masculine crisis and fear of the self that executes its main hook cleverly and evocatively. It’s a valuable meditation for an era of men inundated by stories of our peers’ abuses and the abuse-as-political identity that characterized Donald Trump’s rise to power.

A seemingly unnamed new world, 2257- humanity is 23 years into the colonization of a strange new planet on which all sentient males are affected by “the noise,” a psychic field that constantly projects their thoughts around their heads. Females are immune to this phenomenon. From the books this movie is based on, “the noise is a man unfiltered, and a man without a filter is just chaos walking.”

Todd Hewitt (Tom Holland) is the last boy born before the sentient native species slaughtered all the colony’s women. He discovers Viola Eade (Daisy Ridley), herself the only survivor of a shuttle from the second wave of colonizers that crash-landed near Prentisstown. She’s taken in, but Mayor David Prentiss (Mads Mikkelsen) and Prentisstown’s all-male population quickly turns on her. Hewitt’s adoptive parents task him with protecting and escorting her to the next town over, despite him having been told that Prentisstown was the only surviving city.

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‘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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