‘Jojo Rabbit’ is good for the first half hour, then gets sad

Posted on November 29, 2019 by reelentropy

There’s a running gag where characters will express their enthusiasm for Nazism by forming a swastika with their bodies, like Taika Waititi’s imaginary Hitler does here. Image courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures.

4/10 At its outset, Jojo Rabbit is everything it’s promised to be, sort of like the most twisted Wes Anderson movie ever made. With cheerful colors, square compositions and sharply angled camera moves, the film opens on a Hitler Youth weekend camp, where young Aryans get to experience some of the things that the mighty Wehrmacht go through every day. The film skewers Nazism and white supremacy in general by making a genuine attempt to package and sell its ugliest and most violent realities as delightful and kid-friendly.

That’s the first half hour or so, and then the laughs kind of stop.

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Norton’s ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ a crass excuse to play Tourette’s, also an evocative and rewarding film

Posted on November 29, 2019 by reelentropy

Cornflower blue does not belong in a neo noir! Images courtesy Warne Bros. Pictures.

5/10 Motherless Brooklyn feels less like a movie and more like Edward Norton and his pals playing dress-up, and that’s not the worst concept for a movie I’ve ever heard of.

New York City, 1957- Lionel Essrog (Norton, who also writes, directs and produces), Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) and the rest of Minna’s firm grew up together at the local Catholic orphanage during the Great Depression, served together in World War II and now all work together at Minna’s private detective agency/car rental service. Minna is seen as a mentor and quasi-savior by all of them, and Essrog, who sees himself as otherwise unemployable due to his debilitating case of Tourette Syndrome but is used extensively by Minna for his incredible photographic memory, particularly reveres him.

That’s why Essrog is particularly devastated when Minna, who is notoriously tight-lipped about his cases even with employees, is murdered by a client early in the film, shot in the back with his own weapon. Essrog, with no help from his co-workers and now forced to do the front-facing work he’d been kept clear of for years, resolves to figure out who killed Minna, a quest that uncovers extensive corruption in the city’s development organizations lead by Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin), an thinly veiled caricature of New York City’s real-life master planner Robert Moses.

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‘Doctor Sleep’ made with love, pulled down by editing

Posted on November 29, 2019 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

6/10 As the ‘10s come to a close, the 30-year cycle of media nostalgia for the ‘80s is in full swing. The specific subset of romance for Stephen King media reaches its theoretical nadir with Doctor Sleep, both a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and an adaptation of “Doctor Sleep,” Stephen King’s sequel to “The Shining.” That may sound like the same thing, but because of King’s famous hatred for the Kubrick film, they’re essentially two separate projects at once.

While the resulting movie is better than it has any right to be, the fact that neither should ever have been made is clear within the runtime. 

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‘Harriet’ is the classy way to beg for an Oscar

Posted on November 19, 2019 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Focus Features.

8/10 Harriet is the platonic ideal of what all Oscarbate movies want to be and is genuine enough to not drive me up a wall.

The film follows the completely true life story of Harriet Tubman (Cynthia Erivo), born Minty Ross, a slave in Southeastern Maryland who escaped to freedom in Philadelphia along the Underground Railroad, then went back 13 more times and brought an estimated 70 more slaves back with her, then, during the Civil War, helped lead the Combahee River Raid, freeing hundreds more. 

Tubman believed she received visions from God that guided her on her journeys, which is speculated have been the result of brain damage from a severe beating she received as a child. Whatever the cause, she was noted by peers for her uncanny ability to avoid danger and became a semi-religious figure, even being known by the moniker “Moses” during her time as an outlaw. 

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‘Dark Fate’ just as trashy as all the other ‘Terminator’ sequels, but this time it actually means something

Posted on November 19, 2019 by reelentropy

There’s obvious appeal to bringing back Linda Hamilton for this, but she just looks tired the whole time. She hasn’t even been out of acting in the past 30 years either, she’s done some minor stuff, she just seems to have lost her fastball as a performer. Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

4/10 Terminator: Dark Fate is the third Terminator movie in the past 10 years that was seen by the studio as part one of a new Terminator trilogy, only to crash and burn critically and commercially. They’ve literally made a trilogy of failed trilogy starters.

It is the second direct sequel to the beloved Terminator 2: Judgment Day, with advertising focusing on series creator James Cameron’s returning involvement for the first time since that 1991 film and more or less angling itself as an apology for the unpopular installments that have come between.

And it’s the first follow-up that feels like it has even a little bit of merit for longtime followers of the franchise.

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