#movie #Review #Megalopolis is a Mess [Stephen Abbott's blog]

Thinking, probably correctly, that Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis movie would be out of theaters next week so, I went to see it Tuesday while it's still in theaters. 

The famed, 85-year-old director of The Godfather series and Apocalypse Now self financed, directed and produced the film over the last few decades or so because no studio or distributor would touch it with a 10-ft pole. He spent $135 million on the film, which in its opening week has only pulled in $4 million. I was alone with a stranger in the theater. Critics that I've read have been overwhelmingly negative about the film, but on Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 48% positive rating from critics but only a 34% rating from audiences.   its critics often calling the film "a mess."

This disjointed, 2-hour movie seems about an hour too long, it was the most visually stunning but confusing and bizarre film I've seen in a ,long time. It could have used a tighter narrative-style plot, better dialogue,and even better acting from some of the high-powered stars in this film.

Taking place in "New Rome," which looks like a combination between the ancient Rome and its modern parallel, which is meant to be New York City/America, many critics often calling the film "a mess."  However, one must say that the steampunk look of the city, the retro looking cars, and often beautiful costumes are high points.

Adam Driver is Cesar Catalina, a young artist/architect who does more talking in the film than building. He's very chatty, speaking about 80% of the entire film dialogue, from the opaque statement, "Don't let the Now destroy the forever." To the more profound but rather bland truism, "We're in need of a great debate about the future."

Society in New Rome is messed up, with Cesar saying he has been appointed head of a design commission, but we also learn his major opponent is the mayor Franklyn Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito (Gus Fring from Breaking Bad!) who just won reelection, but is said to be extremely unpopular and losing power by the day. If you know anything about politics, that doesn't make any sense.

 If he was losing power and is unpopular how was he reelected? And he would have made more sense as a state senator, like the Cicero of ancient Rome was a senator. (Did Coppola even think this through?)

Nathalie Emmanuel is the mayor's daughter, Julia, who happens to be dating Cesar. After a whirlwind romance, they get married in an elaborate ancient Roman style wedding. Latin phrases and words are spread throughout the film, to drive home the point modern day America is like the old Rome. In a wedding reception after the ceremony, vestal virgins appear in order to dance for the attendees.

The analogy we are meant to draw is between a corrupt and falling ancient Rome and a modern-day America. Audiences will have a hard time missing the point, but that is the only thing clear in this movie.

Also in the film, but barely making appearances, are Shia Lebeouf,  Aubrey Plaza, Jon Bought,  and in a complete waste of this great actors talents, Laurence Fishburne plays the mayor's driver and aide throughout the film.

If you find a discount night at the theater, where someone buys your ticket, go ahead and see this while it's still there, just to show that you did see it. Otherwise, wait until it's streaming in a month or two.

#Movie #Review Civil War [Stephen Abbott's Blog]

Writer/Director Alex Garland (the Beach, 1995, Ex Machina, 2014) has brought Civil War to the screen. This odd, slow and at times pretentious film is part political warning, part gore fest, but falls clearly on the side of bloody war movie, with some rather cringe-worthy scenes to remain in our memories. 

It also contains some real head scratchers. Such as in the beginning of the film, we learn that as part of several renegade regions of the USA that have launched a war against a tyrannical Federal government, California and Texas have joined in a "Western Alliance" to fight Washington D.C.  Such politically and culturally different states joining in any way is so Laugh-out-Loud ludicrous that laughing is what happened throughout the theater when the set-up was announced. 

The story is told from the perspective of three journalists,  and a young aspiring one.  Kirsten Dunst is Lee, a veteran photojournalist, who meets up with Joel (Wagner Maura) who has agreed, without her knowledge) to let a younger aspiring photographer, Jessie (Cailee Spaeney) tag along with them as they head from Pennsylvania to the war-torn Capitol in Washington to interview the president, whom Lee states likely has less than two months to survive, with the government falling soon after to armies of the Western Forces, it's implied.

The small group is rounded out by an elder journalist,  Sammy, (Stephen McKinley Henderson) whose character chimes in occasionally, but otherwise isn't given much to do. 

They make they're way southward, where they run into danger with two renegade soldiers, whose allegiance is unclear, who shoots two people they encounter on the empty highway, and one of the four is shot. 

They follow Western Forces troops on the last leg of invading D.C., as they assault and invaded the White House. There, they find and kill the President, after he spits out some not-very-memorable final words for Joel.

The film's opening scene is this unnamed US president, played by Nick Offerman, struggling to prepare for a speech that will reassure a war-weary nation that victory is near, which for the central government, is clearly not the case. And everyone but him seems to know this. This is a painful reminder, to me, anyway, that we've had several presidents now who could not string words together coherently.

The film is bleak, and is meant to be, from a suicide bombing in New York City near the beginning of the film,  where Lee meets Jessie, to senseless random shootings by the roadside and mass graves. Fuel shortages, hyperinflation, mass power outages are scattered thru the film, as background details to illustrate a failing nation. 

Is this a prophesy of future turmoil? One hopes not. It's unclear if its meant to signal a Left-leaning or Right-leaning war, but in this election year, both sides are likely to use it as a warning, if the film is remembered at all.. It's doubtful it will be a box office success, but it has made back its $50 million budget, earning 90+ million since it opened April 12. It has a 71% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and 81% critics score going for it.

If nothing else, the film is a warning to politicians and media pundits to tame their extreme,  inflammatory rhetoric, which this year has run from "the end of democracy" or "the end of America " if Trump or Biden win the White House. But the film doesn't betray a political bias either way.

#Movie #review #Dune Part 2

SPOILERS BELOW:

Director Denis Villeneuve's long-delayed (due to the Screen Actor's Guild strike), and long-awaited sequel to 2021's Dune, has already been widely praised as a masterpiece, and deservedly so. Epic, and not just for its nearly 3-hour run time, its a beautiful film, much of it being filmed in a vast desert.

The script is well written and actors Timotheé Chalamet as Paul Atreides, and Zendaya, his desert lover, Chani, return from Part 1, to fill the screen with youthful energy from the film's first moments, claiming it as their own. "Elvis" actor Austin Butler plays the nephew of Baron Harkonen, a worthy antagonist who also was well cast here, strutting with arrogance and hate on his family's dimly lit planet, where even fireworks appear black in the sky. 

Odd to see Christopher Walken as Galactic Emperor Shaddam IV, who seemed a bit sullen and detached here, but that suited his character.  Shaddam IV has watched from afar as the Atreides family became more and more powerful,  and he eventually acts by allowing their rivals on the desert planet Arrakis, the Harkonnens, to slaughter the Duke Atraides and his family, missing only the son,  Paul, who flees to the desert sands and comes to see himself as a messianic figure, and after discovering the emperor's role in his family's demise, a rival to the emperor,  himself, as Paul seemingly abandons his desert love for a strategic marriage alliance with the emperor's daughter, Irulan, played by Florence Pugh.

The films (two of three planned in a trilogy by the director) are based on books by Frank Herbert, who was a giant of the Golden Age of Science Fiction - the early 1950s thru the 1960s. His world-building skills were epic and detailed, peering thru the script here in details such as mentioning that the Atreides family had 90 "Atomics" hidden for generations in the mountains of the planet. 

The empire itself is thousands of years old, and yes,  the Herbert books influenced other works of science fiction such as Star Wars.

As one can tell, this is a lot to absorb, but seems lighter fare than the first part, which was just as long but was mostly background to the empire, the families and the Spice, which is mined from large Worm creatures that exist only on Arrakis, and somehow power or guide all spaceships in the Galaxy.

The sheer power of the story is evident mostly in its second half, as The young Atraides publicly proclaims himself Duke and leader of both his family and embraces prophesies that he will turn the planet into a green paradise.

His mother, Lady Jessica, (Rebecca Ferguson) widow of Duke Leto Atraides, has taken the position of leader of an all-female religion known as the Bene Gesserit order. She stokes talk of her son as a prophet, often to Paul's disdain and annoyance, before he, himself begins to believe his own propaganda and embraces the religious aspect of his mission.

The film needs every minute of its nearly three hours, filled with Herbert's commentary on political intrigue, rapacious corporate captitalism, religious fundamentalism, environmentalism, and more.

#Movie #Review The Beekeeper Delivers Action

 (Mild to Full Spoilers throughout)

In the Beekeeper,  directed by David Ayer and fairly tightly written by Kurt Wimmer, Jason Stratham is a literal beekeeper who is tending bee hives and making jars of honey for Phylicia. Rashad, a retired teacher from whom he has been renting a barn and has been a good friend for an unknown amount of time. 

He is also retired, but his quiet life is ripped apart when his friend is the victim of computer fraud and is tricked into giving the anonymous people on the phone all her savings and those of a charity she created and manages. Distraught, she kills herself. That's when Stratham's Adam Clay springs into action, vowing to find and punish thise responsible for the theft. 

He rather quickly finds the call center that was responsible for bilking his friend, burning it to the ground. Clearly, Clay has had some connections, and paramilitary training. We infer (but it's not explicit until an hour into the film) that he is retired from a secret government agency that watches over all levels of society.  

He doesn't stop there,  though. Beekeepers, even retired ones, are tanacious. Like bees from which his kind take their inspiration. 

But he's not alone. While he is seeking vengeance,  his friends daughter, FBI Agent Verona Parker (played by Emmy Raver-Lampman) seeks justice for her mother, and keeps Clay in line. Sonewhat.

Derek Danforth (Hunger Games actor Josh Hutcherson) is next in Clay's sights, since his family's company, Danforth Enterprises,  runs srveral call centers. We soon learn that it's a very well connected company indeed. 

Danforth is a drug-using pretty boy, protected by former CIA Director Wallace Westwyld,  played by veteran actor Jeremy Irons, who is paid by the family to keep Derek out of troustarsWhen he discovers the truth about Clay, ven he's terrified.

Clay continues rampaging, attacking a Boston call center and getting info about Derek's involvement.  He's undeterred, spelling out what's to come.  

But Parker, also on the trail, has alerted higher ups, including the Deputy FBI Director, who gives her the resources she needs, and meets with the President (Jemma Redgrave) who happens to be Derek's mother.

No more details, because it's about the end when you realize who she is and what may come.  But there are a couple of surprises and it looks like as sequel and actual Beekeeper franchise might be set up by the ending. Let's hope so.

Violent? Yes, in parts. Some flaws? Very few. Big actors doing great acting? Definitely.  See it if you enjoyed Stratham in the Transporter film, see this.  

#Movie #Review #I.S.S.: A Good, Not Great, Space Drama

I.S.S. is the best movie about the International Space Station of 2024. And the only one. So far. Obviously. 

That's not to say I didn't enjoy much of it. Many didn't, tho. It has only a 43% audiencer"fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes (As usual, 63% of critics were more forgiving and gave it a "fresh" rating)  Gravity (2012) is a tighter adventure story, big namestars, and a better script. 

This film is directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, whose documentary film Blackfish exposed and embarrassed Sea World's treatment of whales in captivity, got a 99% fresh rating by critics on the famous "Rotten" site.  Clearly, she does better with documentaries.

The film starts with a few on-screen paragraphs and establishing shots of the station itself, floating on the edge of space for over 20 years, inhabited in this film by American astronauts and Russian Cosmonauts. It's frequently had some from other nations as well, and it might have been better to have add a mix of Canadians, Germans and Japanese, as in real life. But maybe not. It would complicate what follows. 

The action opens with two new astronauts arriving at the station, joining three Russians and one American already on board.

 This, too is routine in real life. 

The new arrivals are greeted warmly by them, and the new astronaut (an American woman, one of two women and three Americans of a six-person crew) is shown the ropes of living on the station. Again, it looks and sounds authentic, based on video we've seen of the real thing.

The backgrounds the crew are maybe too fleshed out by the movie's half point, but despite some weak writing, the FX are really good for an allegedly low-budget film. Anyone who has seen pictures of the views from the actual ISS will recognize this accuracy, instantly. Weightlessness and the cramped quarters are also portrayed well throughout the film. 

Soon, despite assurances from veterans of the ISS that politics don't intrude on the station,  ostensibly devoted to science, both sides get messages that hostilities have broken out on Earth (verified by an American seeing what at first look like "volcanoes" out a station window. An American doing a spacewalk tells colleagues not to look out the windows on the ẁar- ravaged planet below.

Both sides are told in internet texts by their two governments to "Take control of the station. By any means necessary." Shortly afterwards,  communication is lost with earth, and power flickers.

The rest of the film is predictable, as a mini war erupts in space on the station. First with acts of sabotage, then murder, occurring. To the director's credit, it's not clear which, if any, of the six crew will survive, especially as the station begins to fall out of space - something all space agencies are planning to let happen in the next decade anyway, since it is cramped and outdated. 

In the meantime, it requires periodic  adjustments to keep it orbiting, 250 miles above the earth. For a while, it's uncertain if it will get one. Why it's important to "take control" of it, and what use it would have, remains unclear. A subplot of a crewman doing important, relevant research for a post-WWIII earth is a rare unbelievable note. 

It is good to know much of this science background before going to the theater, since I bet most Americans forgot we had a station and that we mostly share it with Russia.

The film ends showing which of the crew survive, but not going into "what's next" for the future of the crew, the ISS, or the earth itself, but following a clear nuclear exchange and bloodshed on the station itself, the future looks dim, indeed. 

All the crew dying or the station's destruction would have been a poignant ending. But it ends ambiguously.

Rated R for violence and some language. See it in the theater soon.  It will likely go to streaming quickly.

#Movie #Review #Babylon is Plotless, Vulgar and Long

Director Damien Chazelle brings to the screen a three-hour and nine minute film depicting a pivotal and interesting time in movie history: the difficult transition from silent films to "talkies." 

The problem is that, despite a star studded cast, the film puts vulgar sensationalism above all else, including a complete lack of plot structure and emotional resonance. In what is clearly meant to be both a love letter and expose of 1920s Hollywood instead comes across as a vulgar, plotless jumble of scenes that don't fit together very well.

Brad Pitt is the fitional Jack Conrad, a wildly successful silent film actor whose career is in rapid decline. He takes a young Mexican man, Manny Torres, played well by Diego Calva, under his wing, and he moves quickly into the film industry, which is in its infancy in the early 1920s.

Conrad and Torres first meet at a wild, debauched Hollywood party in the mid 1920s. There, they both meet Nellie La Roy, played by Margot Robbie, who is a wanna-be actress who crashes the party and also quickly crashes into the movie industry. 

The party sets the tone for the film, featuring sexual debauchery and drug use. I always notice incongruities in period pieces, and the entire crowd at the party wiggling freestyle, like it's 2020, seemed completely out of place. Even the music seems like 1940s jazz, not music from the 1920s. Not once did a character dance the Charleston or the foxtrot. Instead Robbie's character performed over-sexualized dances that wouldn't be seen on dance floors for another 60 or 70 years. 

Later, when she miraculously is inserted into a movie set, she is told to dance, and does the same thing, causing one of the male actors in the scene to have an erection in full view of the director.

I had to stop myself at that point and think about the time period of the film, and she may be on more solid ground than I first realized, because this was before the Motion Picture Production code came into effect in 1934. 

Late 1920s films were quite a bit more sexualized and violent than later time periods, and the movie industry, fearing government regulation was on the way, implemented a voluntary code of conduct that govern the film industry into the late 1960s.

None of this, of course, is explained in this film, but it does touch on the terrible working conditions for extras, the rauchous parties (though it's hard to believe that what the director portrays here actually occurred) and the racism of early Hollywood faced by minorites. Though a Hispanic man, an Asian woman, and a black man seem to have easily entered the Hollywood system in this film. Perhaps too easily.

A good chunk of the film attempts to tell the story of the difficult transition from silent films to films with sound. Some actors, like Conrad and La Roy (whose thick New Jersey accent pegs her as "low class") don't make the transition. 

Jean Smart plays a savvy Hollywood gossip reporter who breaks the news to Conrad that his career is ending. Her soliloquy about Hollywood and the fact that those existing on film will live forever is one of the high points of the film. and succeeds in1 giving it some heart. 

But such high points have to compete with the raunchy humor of an elephant pooping on a man's head, Robbie's character barfing on a man's expensive rug, and a man being urinated on during the opening party scene. 

A scene in which Conrad and a colleague are ushed into an underground club of sorts by a gangster played by Tobey Maguire, features a would-be actor biting a rat in half could have been easily cut.

Because the director is trying to tell 10 stories at once, we hear about Sidney, a black jazz musician played by Jovan Adepo, whom Torres put in a movie of his own, but is quickly alienated by Hollywood when he, a somewhat light-skinned man, is told to put on black face in order to blend in with the other black musicians. This, like several other tales here, is only briefly mentioned as if they are SNL sketches.

Another character that flies into the film and quickly out again without much exposition is Lady Fay Zhu, played by Li Jun Li, a dialogue card designer for the silent films, who also checks the 2020s diversity box as a sultry lesbian caberet singer.

Chazelle wraps up this epically long film with a bizarre and oddly hurried ending that attempts to show the demise of the actors after Hollywood's transition to talkies. 

No spoilers here, but there are a few tragic ends in the film, just as there were tragedies in old Hollywood. 

The entirely predictable death of an actor, the death of a movie extra at the hands of another extra wielding actual weapons during a battle scene, an actor who overdoses at the opening party, and a sound technician on an early sound stage are all quickly touched on but aren't significant to the plot, because there basically is no plot here, to speak of.

The entire film could have been shortened by 45 minutes and still been understood, especially if the director had narrowed his focus to a single plot. Instead, he was so enamored with shocking his audience that he forgot to include one.

#Movie #Review #ViolentNight Is Cartoonishly Violent Fun

A few weeks ago now, I saw Violent Night, a rather cartoonishly violent Christmas themed movie by director Tommy Wirkola.

It tells the unlikely tale of an elite team of mercenaries who break into a family compound on Christmas Eve, taking the wealthy family hostage inside. However, they aren't prepared for a surprise visitor: Santa Claus is on the grounds, and he's about to whip out the naughty list on the bad guys.

• David Harbour plays a respectable and oddly believable Santa, who says he has been in the role of the jolly old elf apparently since the time of the Vikings, when he wielded a hammer, not a bag of toys. And he has a long memory when it comes to violence.
• Actor/comedian John Leguizamo portays Scrooge, the leader of a violent gang attacking a wealthy family on Christmas Eve. And he does it with credibility. This film really is violent,  but it's not nasty. 
• Beverly D'Angelo is well cast as Gertrude Lightstone, the family's matriarch, whom her children and grandchildren are desperate to impress, because they believe their inheritance relies on it. And it does. 

She is rude and mean to staff and family alike, and early on, we are not impressed with her attitude towards others. So when her basement vault is threatened by the invaders, who clearly have had an insider feeding them information, we are not sympathetic to her. Nor are we meant to have any sympathy for this wealthy family.

But her son's little girl, who believes in Santa, is very frightened by what's going on in the house on Christmas Eve, is a sympathetic character, and her hope that her two separated parents reunite as a couple after Christmas seems  delightfully naive, but offers a hopeful note. 

It should be mentioned, however that the "Violent" in "Violent Night" is not inaccurate, and this is not a film for little children, although clearly scenes battling the intruders were inspired by the '90s film Home Alone, and characters reference the film by name. The violence is all very over the top and cartoonish. But also some of it is quite graphic.

Once Santa and the little girl get together, they hatch a plan to attack the bad guys, who are confronted by Santa and are informed that they are, and have in the past, been on the "naughty list."

This leads to the interesting conclusion that the bad guys all come to believe that this is actually Santa Claus. But somehow, they don't turn over a new leaf with this epiphany.

This is overall and interesting little movie, but is not quite a replacement for It's A Wonderful Life. It's got violent, fantasy, and sweet elements,  not quite sure which kind of film this is,  but it all kind of works.