‘Searching’ a great story, not right for its gimmick

Posted on October 3, 2018 by reelentropy

Searching does a wonderful job of turning computers into scary things. In moments like these, Kim appears to be visibly lost amongst the windows. Image courtesy Sony Pictures Releasing.

6/10 When I saw the first Unfriended, I thought it had the potential to advance film as an art from in a way that very few movies can. Four years later, Searching, which is also entirely composed of shots on various computer screens, comes careening into cinemas out of Sundance with some pedigree, an apparently serious take on the new gimmick.

Two years before Searching, David Kim (John Cho) lost his wife to cancer, and he and his daughter Margot (Michelle La) grew distant. One night, Margot leaves for her study group and never comes back, leaving her father with only three midnight missed calls and her forgotten laptop to work off of. Detective Rosemary Vick (Deborah Messing) believes Margot ran away, and Kim begins to take matters into his own hands.

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‘The Nun’ is 90 minutes of unvarnished nonsense

Posted on October 3, 2018 by reelentropy

This split promotional image is literally the only creative visual associated with this movie, and it has barely anything to do with the story. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

1/10 Imagine if The Evil Dead 2 took itself seriously. That’s The Nun. The Nun is that bad.

“The darkest chapter of The Conjuring Universe” – because aping the language of its sister Insidious series wasn’t enough, they also had to steal from the MCU – begins with the Vatican learning that a nun of the Cârța Monastery in Romania has seemingly hanged herself. To investigate, Rome sends its worst – Father Burke (Demián Bichir), a priest disgraced after an exorcism gone wrong, and Sister Irene (Taissa Farminga), a novitiate nun who is solicited because of her “familiarity with the territory.” What is meant by this is never explained.

These two obviously underqualified exorcists journey to Southern Transylvania, where they meet Maurice “Frenchie” Theriault (Jonas Bloquet), the local who first made the horrific discovery. Together, they journey to the monastery, which to their great alarm, they find completely abandoned.

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Unheralded ‘Little Stranger’ one of the year’s best

Posted on October 3, 2018 by reelentropy

Image courtesy Focus Features.

9/10 Lenny Abrahamson’s The Little Stranger didn’t even make $1 million – after a three weekend release, it’s wallowing at $713,143 domestic while most of the country was watching Crazy Rich Asians. Given how well The Nun would do just afterward, I think a lot of people genuinely wouldn’t understand what they missed out on.

In 1947, Dr. Farraday (Domhnall Gleeson, Oliver Zetterström as a child) is summoned to Hundreds Hall, home of the wealthy Ayers family, to tend to the family’s last remaining house maid Betty (Liv Hill). It is not the first time Farraday has seen the mansion. He was there when it first opened in 1919, when his mother was one of a host of the family’s servants.

The house of Ayers has fallen into extreme disrepair in the 30 years since, both in wealth and political power and in its physical manifestation, Hundreds Hall. The mansion’s entire upper floor has been abandoned. Its master Roderick (Will Poulter), who returned from the war with horrifying burns on most of his body and a mangled leg, believes a menace is lurking in the halls. “There’s something in this house that hates us,” he says.

Indeed, as Farraday treats Betty, then Roderick, then moves on to the family matriarch Angela (Charlotte Rampling) while taking a romantic interest in her last remaining child Caroline (Ruth Wilson), more and stranger misfortunes begin to befall the Ayers family. Angela is convinced that the spirit of her favorite daughter Susan (Tipper Siefert-Cleveland), who fell suddenly ill and died the very day in 1919 that Farraday first glimpsed the mansion, is haunting them from the abandoned upper floor.

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‘Operation Finale’ doesn’t show you the goods

Posted on October 3, 2018 by reelentropy

Don’t get me wrong — this scene is very much worth the price of admission all by itself. Image courtesy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

5/10 Operation Finale was supposed to be a heavyweight talkie matchup between two of the best actors in the world, but the film minimizes that element in favor of some much less appetizing subplots.

In 1960, the Israeli government receives intelligence that Adolf Eichmann (Ben Kingsley), one of the last high-ranking Nazis to escape justice at the Nuremberg Trials who had been responsible for the logistics of the Holocaust, was hiding in Buenos Ares, Argentina. A 10-man Mossad team is sent to retrieve him, but Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac) and company find themselves trapped in hostile territory – not only are they violating Argentinian sovereignty, but the country has become a haven for fugitive Nazis. The team spends 10 days in an Argentine safehouse while Malkin attempts to convince Eichmann to authorize his extraction to stand trial in Jerusalem, effectively his own death warrant. 

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‘Happytime Murders’ less Muppets, more McCarthy

Posted on October 3, 2018 by reelentropy

Image courtesy STX Entertainment.

2/10 I was optimistic for The Happytime Murders. Director/producer Brian Henson, Jim Henson’s son, is obviously more a Muppet guy than a Melissa McCarthy guy, and I was hoping this would be more of a Muppet movie than a Melissa McCarthy movie.

Again, my hopes were dashed.

The Happytime Murders tells the tale of Phil Phillips (Bill Barretta), a disgraced Los Angeles cop turned private investigator. Los Angeles suffers from an intense racial divide between puppets and humans – in the movie, it mirrors the divide between white cops and black Angelenos so closely that I can’t tell if it was meticulously planned or lazily drawn from the closest available headlines – and once, Phillips was the first ever puppet to become a police officer. On a case, he becomes entangled with a serial killer stalking the cast of The Happytime Gang, the a cultural touchstone from the ‘90s that helped mend relations between people and puppets. Phillips and his former partner, Detective Connie Edwards (McCarthy, who also produces) are thrust together to find the killer before the entire cast is exterminated.

Finding the killer likely means finding one of the castmates, all of whom stand to benefit from each other’s deaths – The Happytime Gang is about to go into syndication, at which point a massive royalty will be divided evenly among the surviving cast members. All of the former stars have fallen on hard times, and Phillips’ and Edwards’ investigation leads them on a tour of the darkest depths of Los Angeles puppet depravity.

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