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Weapons of Mass Distraction

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Like most other bored, overheated Americans, I spent the third Friday of July hiding from the sun in my neighborhood movie theater, watching an all-day double feature.  I didn’t directly participate in the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, though, partly due to scheduling inconvenience and partly out of general bafflement with the incongruous pairing.  As a longtime movie obsessive, it was wonderful to see more casual audiences out in full force, dressed up to participate in a double feature program; or it was at least a more endearing moviegoing meme than its recent “Gentleminions” predecessor.  I still like to program my double features with a little more consideration to tone & theme, though, and I can’t imagine that either Nolan’s or Gerwig’s latest were served well by the pairing – which was essentially a joke about how ill-suited they were for back-to-back binging in the first place.  However, I’m not immune to pop culture FOMO, which is how I wound up watching Oppenheimer in the first place.  Nothing about the film’s subject, genre, or marketing screamed out to me as essential viewing, other than the assumption that it was going to be a frequent subject of movie nerd discourse until at least next year’s Oscars ceremony.  So, I dragged my old, tired body to the theater at 10am on a weekday to sit down with Christopher Nolan’s three-hour rumination on the placid evils of nuclear war, and then paired it with a movie I suspected I would like just to sweeten the deal – the ludicrously titled Mission: Impossible 7, Part 1 – Dead Reckoning.  It was essentially the same dessert-after-dinner double feature approach most participating audiences took with Barbenheimer (which, considering that sequence, likely should’ve just been called “Oppie”), except applied to two feature films on a single subject: the abstract weaponry of modern war.

As you surely already know, Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy as the titular nuclear physicist, credited for leading the development of the atom bomb at the end of WWII.  His story is told in two conflicting, alternating perspectives: his own version of events in full color (as told to a military security-clearance review board) and a black-and-white version recounted by a professional rival (as told years later in a Congressional hearing).  It’s an abrasively dry approach to such an explosive, emotional subject, even if Nolan does everything possible to win over Dad Movie heretics like me in the story’s framing & editing – breaking up the pedestrian men-talking-in-rooms rhythms of an Oliver Stone or Aaron Sorkin screenplay with his own flashier, in-house Nolanisms.  Oppenheimer strives to overcome its limitations as a legal testimony drama by drawing immense energy from a three-hour crosscutting montage and relentless repetition of its own title at a “Gabbo! Gabbo! Gabbo!” rhythm.  After so many years of tinkering with the cold, technical machinery of cinema, Nolan at least seems willing to allow a new sense of looseness & abstraction into the picture to disrupt his usual visual clockwork (starting most clearly in Tenet).  Young Oppenheimer’s visit to an art museum as a student suggests that this new, abstracted style is inspired by the Cubist art movement of the setting’s era, but the editing feels purely Malickian to me, especially when covering the scientist’s early years.  My favorite moments were his visions of cosmos—micro and macro—while puzzling through the paradoxes of nuclear science, as well as his wife’s intrusive visions of his sexual affair while defending himself to a military panel.  These are still small, momentary distractions from the real business at hand: illustrating the biggest moral fuck-up of human history in all its daily office-work drudgery.  Most of the movie is outright boring in its “What have we done?” contemplations of bureaucratic weaponry-development evil, no matter how much timeline jumping it does in its character-actor table reads of real-life historical documents.

In all honesty, the most I got out of Oppenheimer was an appreciation for it table-setting the mood for the much more entertaining Mission: Impossible 7.  To paraphrase Logan Roy, I am not a serious person.  The great tragedy of Nolan’s piece is watching a Jewish, Leftist man’s attempts to stop his people’s genocide get exploited by the American military’s bottomless hunger for bigger, deadlier bombs – ultimately resulting in a new, inconceivable weapon that will likely lead to the end of humanity’s life on planet Earth (if other forms of industrial pollution don’t kill us first).  Oppenheimer doesn’t realize until it’s too late that his team’s invention did not end WWII; it instead created a new, infinite war built on the looming international threat of mutual self-destruction.  The immediate consequences of the atom bomb were the devastation of two Japanese cities, leaving figurative blood on the haunted man’s hands, which he attempts to clean in the final hour of runtime by ineffectively maneuvering for world peace within the system he helped arm.  The long-term consequences are much more difficult to define, leaving a lingering atmospheric menace on the world outside the theater after the credits roll.  Instead of sweetening that menace with the pink-frosted confectionary of Barbie, I followed up Oppenheimer with a much vapider novelty: the latest Tom Cruise vanity project.  Speaking of history’s greatest monsters, I was also feeling a little uneasy about watching the latest Tom Cruise stunt fest (especially after suffering through last year’s insipid Top Gun rebootquel), but credit where it’s due: Dead Reckoning was a great time at the movies.  Unlike Oppenheimer, M:I 7 is built of full, robust scenes and complete exchanges of dialogue instead of the de-constructed Malickian snippets of a three-hour trailer.  It’s a three-hour frivolity in its own right, but it’s an intensely entertaining one, and it immediately restored my faith that I can still appreciate mainstream, big-budget cinema right after Nolan shook it.  Also, there was something perverse about it doing so by toying around on the exact Cold War playground Oppenheimer mistakenly created.

If there’s a modern equivalent to the abstract, unfathomable power of the atom bomb (besides, you know, the still-growing stockpiles of nuclear weapons in many countries’ arsenals), it’s likely in the arena of digital espionage and the development of A.I. technology.  The seventh Mission: Impossible film runs with the zeitgeisty relevance of killer-A.I. weaponry at full speed, creating an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-everything-everywhere A.I. villain that looks like a vintage iTunes visualizer.  It’s about as well defined as the young Oppenheimer’s intrusive visions of nuclear particles, but neither Cruise nor his in-house workman director Christopher McQuarrie are especially interested in figuring out the scientific logic behind it.  Dead Reckoning‘s A.I. villain—referred to simply (and frequently) as The Entity—is mostly just an excuse for the creepy millionaire auteur behind it to stage a series of increasingly outlandish stunts.  By some miracle, the new Mission: Impossible nearly matches the absurdly convoluted humanity-vs-A.I. combat of Mrs. Davis and the absurdly over-the-top espionage action spectacle of Pathaan, making it the most entertaining American action blockbuster of the year by default.  Unfortunately, like a lot of other American blockbusters this year, it’s also only half a movie, ending on a literal cliff-hanger that won’t be resolved until a three-hour Part 2 conclusion of the miniseries reaches theaters in a couple years.  Since that double feature isn’t currently screening in its entirety, I had to settle for pairing it with Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which at least helped give its over-the-top A.I. espionage theatrics a sense of real-world consequence.  The only recognizable threat behind The Entity’s abstract swirl of LED lights is that it’s smart enough to fool & manipulate nuclear-capable governments.  It could bring the world to an end with the weaponry we’ve already created ourselves, and it wouldn’t be too surprising if Dead Reckoning, Part 2 includes a gag where Cruise diffuses an actual, active nuclear warhead while riding it in the sky like Slim Pickens before him.

My disparate reactions to Oppenheimer and Dead Reckoning likely have more to do with personal taste & disposition than the movies’ objective qualities.  Whereas self-serious lines of dialogue like “How can this man, who saw so much, be so blind?” and “Is anyone ever going to tell the truth about what’s happening here?” had me rolling my eyes at Oppenheimer, I was delighted by Mission: Impossible’s equally phony line reading of “Ethan, you are playing 4D chess with an algorithm,” delivered by Ving Rhames with the same unearned gravitas.  Maybe it’s because I don’t expect much out of the big-budget end of mainstream filmmaking except for its value as in-the-moment entertainment.  I don’t think Oppenheimer‘s internal wrestling with its protagonist’s guilt over inventing The Bomb or our government’s mistreatment of his professional reputation in The McCarthy Era amounts to all that much, except maybe as a reminder that the threat of Nuclear Apocalypse is an ongoing Important Issue.  It obviously can’t solve that issue in any meaningful way, though, unless you put a lot of personal meaning into Hollywood’s ability to convert Important Issues into Awards Statues.  It’s a movie, not a systemic political policy.  I personally see more immediate value in Mission: Impossible‘s ability to delight & distract (both from the real-world horrors of nuclear war and, more maliciously, the real-world horrors of its star), since that’s using the tools of mainstream filmmaking for what they’re actually apt to accomplish.  Oppenheimer is a three-hour montage of Important Men played by “That guy!” character actors exchanging tight smirks & knowing glances in alternating boardroom readings of historical testimony.  Dead Reckoning, Part 1 is a three-hour Evil Knievel stuntman roadshow punctuated by abstract info-dumps about the immense, unfathomable power of A.I. technology.  The closest Nolan comes to matching Cruise in this head-to-head battle in terms of pure entertainment value is the visual gag of a doddering Albert Einstein repeatedly dropping his hat. 

-Brandon Ledet

Virtual Combat (1995)

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It’s well established by now that Tubi is the people’s streaming service – the only platform offering a century’s worth of high-brow cinema & cheap-thrills entertainment at an affordable price point: free with ads.  Even the bigger players in the business want what Tubi has, with more robust services like Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, and Peacock now dabbling in an ads-supported model the industry has been resisting for years (but without matching the immense depth of Tubi’s streaming library).  I can’t say I’m totally happy about that development.  I appreciate Tubi for being one of the few streamers with a historical view that extends past the 2010s, something you’ll usually only find in hoitier, toitier art cinema streamers like Criterion, Kanopy, and Mubi.  Still, there’s something deflating about watching a New Hollywood classic or an avant-garde Euro art piece with out-of-nowhere ad breaks where the State Farm hunk or the Geico lizard interrupt the flow of the picture.  Tubi is arriving to the scene well after the Netflixes of the world have fully “disrupted” traditional modes of at-home film distribution and, like with all tech industry “disrupters,” the only thing streaming has really accomplished is replacing a perfectly functional industry with a near-exact, buggier copy.  What I mean to say is that Tubi provides the 2020s equivalent of the TV movie, and as a stubborn old man I need my TV movies to be cheap & trashy enough to justify being downgraded to that platform.  Tubi is great for watching Lifetime thrillers, DTV action schlock, and ancient re-runs of Project Runway.  For anything more artistically substantial than that, I usually put in the effort to pay for a VOD rental or drive to the library for an SD transfer on DVD.  Anything to avoid watching the Charmin bears wipe their asses in the middle of a movie I genuinely care about.

By that standard, 1995’s Virtual Combat is quintessential late-night Tubi programming.  Half a VR-themed Mortal Kombat mockbuster and half a VR-themed softcore porno, it’s the exact kind of video store shelf-filler that would be forgotten to time (and to jumps in physical media formats) if it weren’t for the archival diligence of the basement-dwelling genre freaks who upload this stuff to platforms like Tubi, YouTube, and Amazon Prime.  It’s a movie that marvels at the vague concept of Virtual Reality video gaming with the same naïve awe as The Lawnmower Man, at least three years past the novelty’s expiration date.  It’s a movie where a 30-second gag featuring Rip Taylor as a virtual carnival barker in the shape of a Zordon-style floating head counts as a celebrity cameo.  It’s a movie that treats a Paul W.S. Anderson adaptation of a video game as if it were as major of a Hollywood player as a Stephen Spielberg blockbuster starring animatronic dinosaurs, ripe for a rip-off. To be fair, Mortal Kombat was the biggest hit of Anderson’s career, making $120 million on a $20 million budget.  There was clearly a market for Virtual Combat‘s video game fight tournament premise among young men in videoland, especially if you could rush it to Blockbuster shelves for the brief time when every local VHS copy of Mortal Kombat was already checked out.  Adding gratuitous shots of naked breasts could only juice those sale & rental numbers too, as softcore-director-turned-action-schlockteur Andrew Stephens surely knew in his bones.  Every creative decision in Virtual Combat is driven by either production budget desperation or mockbuster market exploitation.  Therefore, it’s perfectly suited for crass commercial breaks in a way a Godard or Buñuel classic could never be (although I’m sure both appreciators of the crass & the absurd would’ve been fascinated by the random intrusions on their work).

Don “The Dragon” Wilson, World Kickboxing Champion (as he’s credited in the end scroll), stars as a Nevada border cop in the far-off future of 2025.  No lazy pig, his physical training regimen involves fighting a series of increasingly formidable, entirely digital martial artists in a virtual gaming realm.  Virtual Combat goes a step further than Mortal Kombat by setting its video game fighting tournament inside an actual video game, represented onscreen in weirdly artificial sound stages decorated by smoke machines & laser lights.  Because the nearby city of Las Vegas that houses this immersive fighting game is itself an artificial sin pit, that same VR tech is also used for simulated, legalized sex work that allows tourists to have “cybersex” with virtual hunks & pixelated babes.  The future’s looking pretty bright at first, until an overreaching scientist develops a way to “clone” the AI cybersex workers into physical real-world bodies, taking the technology a step too far.  Things go immediately awry when the invincible Final Boss of the cop’s favorite fighting game escapes into the real world too and uses his robotic voiceover hypnosis to recruit all the other newly birthed VR clones into his own personal digi militia, hell bent on Las Vegas (and perhaps world) domination.  Because this is a severely cheap, limited production, there are really only two other major AI players besides the fighting game’s Final Boss: a nudie mag Babe Next Door and a viciously militant dominatrix, whip in manicured hand.  These digi facsimiles of human beings are obviously no match for the real-world street smarts and world-class kickboxing skills of Don “The Dragon” Wilson, and so his face-kicking road to victory is not all that exciting or surprising. Most of the film’s novelty is in the absurdity of its first-act set up and in its weirdly fetishistic detail.

There’s not much on Virtual Combat‘s mind, thematically speaking.  Its vapid sci-fi pondering of AI technology never goes too far beyond the frustration of defeating a soulless enemy that you’ve trained yourself through pattern recognition as a user, kind of like how corporations are currently attempting to put writers & visual artists out of work by mining their previously published art through algorithmic synthesis.  I get the sense that it was a lot more interested in the sex trade end of that AI conundrum, though, especially by the time it gets to the sequence where Don “The Dragon” Wilson teaches a buxom VR clone about autonomy & consent so that she can immediately consent to having sex with him – of her own free will of course.  Everything else is action movie novelty and fetishistic titillation.  There’s no particular reason, really, why the corporate bad guys had to control their VR sex clones via shock collar, except the obvious reasons why men would write that detail into the script.  The sexual politics are just as quaintly dated as the real-world simulation of video game fighting (boosted by cheapo CGI credited onscreen to Motion Opticals), a novelty that demands the hero declare “Game Over” to the inevitably defeated Final Boss.  Surprisingly, there are a few fun smash-cut edits too, like when a poor victim’s snapped neck is immediately mirrored by the swing of a kicked-open door, or when cybersex being insulted as “sex with a machine” is immediately followed by the tacky casino lights of Las Vegas in montage – a city-size sex machine.  There’s nothing especially memorable or substantive about Virtual Combat beyond those minute-to-minute novelties, though, and its relative anonymity is exactly what makes it such a perfect candidate for streaming on Tubi.  In fact, Tubi goes out of its way to emphasize its anonymity by suggesting you watch an identical-looking movie titled Virtual Assassin as soon as the credits roll.  I’m sure it’s a hoot, just as I’m sure it’s better suitable to commercial breaks than the last movie I remember watching on the platform – Un Chien Andelou.

-Brandon Ledet

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

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Is nostalgia a disease? If you ask the internet (which one should rarely or, perhaps, never do), there are vigorous discussions about whether the fact that the term “nostalgia” was created to describe a disease of the mind is relevant or not. To wit: “a psychopathological condition affecting individuals who are uprooted, whose social contacts are fragmented, who are isolated and who feel totally frustrated and alienated” (source). I think that, depending upon its gravity, it can be either a harmless diversion or a sign of actual disordered thinking. There should never be any confusion about certain things, and one of them is this: within the narrative of Western history, our current host of problems are generally better than they have ever been in the past. We’ve tainted every bit of progress with nonsense, of course — what benefit is it to a society that can save lives a hundredfold more successfully than three centuries ago if the law allows for the use of such lifesaving measures to act as a middle-class bankruptcy manufacturing system? What good has it done to raise generations to see the consumption of meat at every meal as a sign of financial security and an unquestioned right, when it means that we’ve sausaged ourselves into a climate collapse? Still, in general, things are better than they were one, two, and three hundred years ago (at least until the last few years, jeez). Cutting your foot on a rock in a river isn’t a death sentence, and even though your dumb relatives who think climate change is a hoax think that crime is out of control because of shoplifting, crime is actually going down, with violent crime on a decline for a while now — with stories as far back as 2000 citing constant decline year after year that we’ve only seen more of since. 

Nostalgia for a time when things were “simpler” is a normal part of the human experience, because people (who didn’t experience daily and consistent traumas as a child) look back on that period of their life as having a simplicity that they do not recognize as false. Failing to acknowledge the inaccuracies of their recollection is the danger; in so doing, one fails to recall the banal wickednesses of the past and learn from them. Each generation remembers the simplicity of their childhood when the time period about which they reminisce saw the AIDS crisis in full bloom, or the quotidian threat of nuclear death sending an entire generation of kids cowering for cover underneath their desks, or every class had several kids who had lost relatives in Vietnam or Korea or Normandy, or undisguised bigotry was 9/10ths of the law, or people were trapped in abusive relationships because of the draconic nature of divorce laws, or … you get the picture. The difference between that kind of nostalgia, which leaves one open to being manipulated into thinking that reversion to the values of a bygone era simply because of coercive aesthetic or ideation (while ignoring its attendant prejudices), and the kind that pumps out something like, I don’t know, Turbo Kid, can be imperceptible when you’re caught up in the moment. Recent years have shown us that appealing to the nostalgia of the masses in order to draw them to the banner of political hatred in the name of their lionization of a false past can be effective. The algorithm can take your dad from watching reruns of Barney Miller straight into Kyle Rittenhouse apologism pretty damn fast, so there’s not not a reason to be concerned about, say, a 15-years-later sequel to a 19-years-later sequel to a trilogy of classics (your mileage may vary). Of course, when that nostalgia trip has the cathartic element of watching Nazis get absolutely fucking wrecked for two and a half hours, who am I to say that it’s wrong? 

It’s summer 1969, and the now elderly Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is a professor of archaeology at Hunter College in New York. His days of dashing adventures against the footsoldiers of the Third Reich and defying death in search of ancient treasures to unearth are long over, and in a world whose focus is on the future (embodied in the presence of a ticker tape parade for the returning Apollo 11 astronauts and counterposed by the apathy of his students for his historical lectures), he’s a man stuck in the past. His personal life is also rocky, as he’s estranged from wife Marion (Karen Allen) for reasons that become clear later, and his seemingly forced retirement from Hunter College means he will no longer have academia to fill his empty days. Enter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Indy’s godchild and daughter of heretofore unmentioned friend Basil Shaw (Tobey Jones). At the tail end of WWII, the elder Shaw and a digitally de-aged Indy had an encounter with Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) during which they came into possession of half of Archimedes’s Antikythera, a kind of orrery that was theorized to be capable of charting rifts in time. Helena’s reappearance in Jones’s life is to acquire the artifact, and hot on her trail is the still-living Voller, having presumably made his way to the U.S. as a part of Operation Paperclip. Thus ensues several multi-party chases and races against time to reach the other half of the dial before Voller and his henchmen (Olivier Richters and Boyd Holbrook) can use it to change the outcome of WWII. Indy is aided in this by help from old friends that we know like Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) and those we don’t like Renaldo (Antonio Banderas), while Helena has her own Short Round-style sidekick in Teddy Kumar (Ethann Isidore), and all are pursued by CIA agent Mason (Shaunette Renée Wilson). 

I was looking forward to a real treat when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out. I grew up watching the original movies, but some of my earliest memories are also of watching not only the now largely forgotten Young Indiana Jones Chronicles but also the enduring image of Kermit as Indiana Jones in The Muppet Babies. When that Crystal Skull trailer came out, I was naively exhilarated for what I thought was to come, and when I went to see it, on my birthday, it was perhaps one of the great media-related disappointments of my life. (I know that film has had some late-stage revisionist reappraisal in recent years, but not from me.) Having been burned on that stove before, I was more reticent about this one, especially with septuagenarian Ford being called back into service to perform a duty in which, from all appearances in Crystal Skull, he had no interest. There were no weeks of anticipation, just a realization that it had been released and a midday holiday weekend expectation of a moderate amount of thrills. Perhaps this says more about how low my expectations were than about the quality of the film overall, but I was pleasantly surprised overall. The opening sequence in 1944 is a bit prolonged, but I was less put-off by the uncanny nature of the de-aged Ford to play a younger Jones than by other recent abominations, and I appreciated the grafting of Waller-Bridge’s character into the story quite a lot. I’m sure that many of the reviews popping up online are already spouting all the usual aphorisms and cliches that every manchild says about a self-possessed woman in a movie (here’s a tip: if you hear someone say that she’s annoying and that person is also the most annoying person you know, those things are not as disconnected as they may seem). I find her rather likable, and she adds a bit of flair to the proceedings as someone who is solely concerned with opportunities to cash in on her father’s research and no regard for history as anything other than a means to an economic end. This could go too far, but the inclusion of Teddy humanizes her and makes her seem more impishly roguish than her initial monetary focus makes her seem. Even the child actor is pretty good, and that’s rare praise from me. 

If there are any complaints, it’s that the film runs a little long. Every chase scene is, frankly, excellent, with the only real set-piece that felt like “too much” being the swarm of eels that Indie must face while diving for a map on the floor of the Aegean Sea, and even that is, at the very least, visually distinctive from any other action sequence seen before in this franchise. It feels true to the spirit of the franchise and the character in a way that Crystal Skull barely attempts; one would expect there to be more fanservice-y elements present, but all the nostalgia factor was largely used up in the last movie, meaning that this one had to do some real lifting, and it does. The CGI on Ford’s face is apparent, but all of the other sequences feel real and practical (other than the horse chase through the subway, admittedly). The sins of Crystal Skull may never be fully painted over, but this one does a pretty good job, and even has a truly ludicrous final action sequence that strides up to the line of cartoonish but falls back at the perfect second, which is a lot of fun. I don’t know that you need to rush out and see it since the current timeline of theater-to-home-release is so short now, but if you need to get out of the heat and into a cold, air-conditioned vehicle for a while, at 154 minutes that never get boring, this one’s a pretty solid choice. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

65 (2023)

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There’s something adorably quaint about the recent sci-fi action picture 65, in which a sweaty Adam Driver going to intergalactic war with dinosaurs in Earth’s futuristic past.  Driver is technically playing a space alien, but he has no physical features that distinguish him from Earthling humanity: no antennae, no fins, no gills, nothing beyond his usual unique physique.  When he arrives on Earth, he removes his helmet and vocally declares the air breathable.  His weapon against our prehistoric planet’s dinosaur creatures is a ray gun.  Whether intentionally or not, 65 is essentially a dumb-as-rocks throwback to 1950s schlock.  It plays like a basic-premise remake of an MST3k punching bag with a title like Beasts of a Savage World or Journey to the Planet Earth, updated with modern CG but thankfully not softened with modern self-referential irony.  There isn’t much to the film beyond its bar napkin premise, in which Driver drives a spaceship into Earth’s dirt 65 million years ago, then fights off the dinosaurs (and dino-adjacent monsters) that attempt to eat him along with the only other survivor of the crash.  The film’s only real value beyond the novelty of watching Driver shoot laser guns at dinosaurs, then, is in comparing how differently modern action schlock handles the premise from how Atomic Age sci-fi might have over half a century ago.

The major modern affect that drags down 65‘s entertainment value is the compulsion to overexplain itself with expositional context.  Directed by the screenwriters of the similarly weighed-down A Quiet Place—Scott Beck & Bryan Woods—the film is seemingly fearful of YouTube fanboy criticism of its “plot holes” & fanciful outlandishness.  Because humanity evolved after dinosaurs went extinct, Driver must belong to another humanoid race of people to share the screen with the towering beasts.  Surviving a spaceship crash alongside a young adolescent passenger is apparently not enough motivation for him to protect her against this far-out world’s Jurassic beasts; it’s also explained that he has a daughter of a similar age back on his homeworld, whose diaries in his absence are doled out through a device lifted wholesale from Interstellar.  Between the film’s opening storybook narration informing us that these events occur “prior to the advent of mankind, in the infinity of space” and the unnecessary prologue set on Driver’s alien planet, it isn’t until 40 minutes into the runtime that our hero actually shoots a laser beam at a dinosaur.  And since the film is only worth the novelty of its one-sentence premise, that’s a huge problem.  If 65 were made in the 1950s, Driver would’ve been from Earth, crash-landed on a similar planet with its own dinosaurs, immediately opened fire, smooched an “alien” babe, discovered in a last-minute twist that he had merely time-traveled backwards, and the whole thing would’ve been wrapped up in 65 minutes to leave room for the next movie on the drive-in double bill.  The dinosaurs would’ve been stop-motion too, and maybe even borrowed from the footage of a better-funded picture.  Roger Corman is still alive & working somewhere out there, but Hollywood really doesn’t make efficient, delirious schlock like it used to, mostly because every fanciful creative impulse now has to be “justified” to keep online cynics at bay.

Still, I appreciated that this modern DTV action treatment of a retro pulp sci-fi premise never slips into winking-at-the-camera Deadpool irony.  Although Driver has a knack for comedic delivery, the world is better off being spared of his alien-invasion equivalent of Kong: Skull Island.  I suspect that happened because Beck & Woods are largely humorless in their craft and were somehow unaware that they were making 1950s sci-fi pastiche in the first place.  Whatever the reason, the movie’s self-serious tone is a great counterbalance to its glaringly unserious premise.  Its internal aversion to irony & camp does mean that it’s a little boring in stretches (especially in the dino-free opening half), but it’s a pleasant, cozy kind of boring.  65 is crash-landing on Netflix soon, but its ultimate, ideal presentation is in afternoon daylight programming on whatever basic cable channel dads nap to these days.  As a creature feature, it’s got a playfully unscientific approach to what counts as a “dinosaur.”  As an Adam Driver vehicle, it’s going to make for a delightfully odd footnote in what’s sure to be a delightfully odd movie star career.  It was also partially filmed in Louisiana swamps (the parts that weren’t filmed against green screens on New Orleans sound stages), which gives it an extra layer of novelty for local napping dads, too tired to find the clicker.

-Brandon Ledet

The Flash (2023)

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Hello there, reader! Because of the nature of this movie, the seemingly endless stream of (alleged) criminal acts that the lead star continues to perform, and the fact that a nearly-completed movie starring and helmed by creators of color was shelved for back asswards financial reasons while this one was still released to the general public despite starring an (alleged) criminal, I have chosen to forego a star rating for this film to prevent even the appearance of advocating for you to contribute to its box office or rental take. I myself had no intention of seeing this movie and contributing to it monetarily, but for reasons I cannot disclose, I was able to see it on opening weekend, and Warner Bros. footed the bill. For reasons of legal disavowment, I must reiterate that Swampflix and its affiliates do not endorse piracy, and the fact that I am bringing this up here is not a playful endorsement for pirating this film⸮ Wait, shit, what does that punctuation mark mean? I’ve never seen it before! Anyway, on with The Flash!

When I recently had the good fortune to visit with our fearless leader Brandon in real life recently, he recited a piece of wisdom that I’ve heard him voice before: CGI ages like milk. I don’t disagree, but in the case of today’s film, the CGI arrived rancid upon delivery, and the fact that it did so means that this film has no right to exist in the form that it does. I’m going to reference two pieces of media that, based on box office, Nielsen numbers, and anecdotal evidence in the form of responses to my general questions, you’ve probably never seen: 2013’s regrettable Sam Raimi Baum adaptation Oz the Great and Powerful Movie and the 2019 sexy Spanish drama series Toy Boy. In regards to the latter, the opening sequence of the show contains scenes from within the narrative, but with the characters and all surfaces rendered as if they are made of glazed ceramics (see it here, although it’s possible NSFW for sexy reasons); in the former, there is a character named the China Girl, an animate, living porcelain doll who joins the protagonist’s journey (see a clip here, although it’s possible NSFW for James Franco reasons). The reason that I bring these up is because what these two things are doing in earnest The Flash does blindly, blanketly, and with no remorse; so, so, so many of the images that we see here look like soulless, shiny mannequins as those glazed figurines that a certain generation of our elders collected. Some of the time, it could be argued, that the images are supposed to look like that (we’ll get to the time arena in a minute), but other times, they are clearly not – most notably and frequently, every time we see two different Barry Allens on screen, both played by Ezra Miller, it’s abundantly clear which of the two was played by a stand in upon whom Miller’s visage was pasted, based solely on how nonplastic and uncanny they look. 

I know that Hayley Mills and Lindsay Lohan were never tasked with playing speedsters in their respective Traps, but the technology in the 1990s and the 1960s was more convincing at portraying reunited twins than this movie is at Ezra Miller walking down the street side by side with themself. And the Flash suit! It’s so … bad. Genuinely awful. I went on a bit of a tear just now in the middle of writing this to see if I could find any behind-the-scenes photos of Miller in the suit on set, and there are none, which almost makes it seem to me like they were never in the full suit on set at all, which would in turn explain why it never looked “real” for a single moment that it was on screen. And I’m not just talking every time that there was a fight scene and everything immediately started to look exactly like a super move from Injustice 2, but every time Barry was just standing around doing comedic bits, the suit looked like someone trying to 3-D animate amphibian skin and doing a poor job of it. Ryan Reynolds’s Green Lantern was at least supposed to look the way that it did; this one looks like a mistake that they decided to go ahead and leave in, which makes it completely bananas that this film was released in this form with this lead performer. It boggles the mind that executives were considering recasting the part of Barry Allen because of Miller’s (allegedly) many, many (alleged) crimes and then decided that they didn’t need to, because this looked good enough to put on the big screen. Bananas! Bananas!

Narratively, the film takes its inspiration from the comic Flashpoint, which was released in 2011 as a way to reset the status quo for DC comics, leading into a new continuity that was, in theory, supposed to make the material more accessible to new readers and thus increase circulation. In most recent versions of the Flash comic-book canon, he’s driven by the fact that his mother was killed when he was a child and his father was arrested and (wrongly) convicted of her murder. Since it’s been part and parcel of the whole Flash deal for a while that he can run so fast that he can either travel through time using his speed outright or by access to something called the Speed Force (let’s not get bogged down in those details), it occurs to Barry Allen to try and prevent the murder of his mother, leading to unforeseen consequences on the timeline. If you’re sure you’ve never read that story but it still sounds familiar, it’s because it also formed the basis of the third season of CW’s The Flash, which just finished its ninth and final season, or perhaps you saw the animated direct-to-video film Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox sometime since its release in 2013. It’s not exactly new territory at this point, is what I’m saying. We get an opening sequence that exists solely to trot out a couple of characters that we’ve seen before and establish that Barry sees Bruce Wayne/Batman as his mentor and that Bruce isn’t necessarily unwelcoming of the younger man but retains his normal aloofness; all of this is here to establish the status quo that they’re going to demolish completely before this movie is over. 

When it looks like Barry’s father (Ron Livingston) is about to lose his appeal, Barry takes off into the past to make one simple change: to make sure his mother (Maribel Verdú, one of the best parts of the film) doesn’t forget to pick up tomatoes at the supermarket the morning the day that she dies, so that his father isn’t absent when someone finds her in a house that they assumed would be empty. As Barry returns to the present, he sees how the wings of that butterfly have affected his life but, before he gets there, something else invades the Speed Force and knocks him out of his time bubble, straight into 2013, on the same day that he was initially struck by lightning and gained his powers. Only this time, since his parents are alive and Barry grew up with a happy childhood, he wasn’t driven to go into forensics to one day learn something that would help him clear his father’s name, so he won’t be in that police lab, so Barry has to take the younger version of himself—differentiated from Present!Flash by nothing more than his longer hair—to the lab to make sure that this happens, which results in the loss of his own powers. Past!Flash, lacking the maturity that Present!Flash had at the same age, grates against the older version of himself, who in turn has to give his younger self a crash course in Being the Flash 101 while powerless and stunned to learn that his little time travel event has affected things that happened even before the changes that he made, including that Eric Stoltz played Marty McFly in Back to the Future as originally cast (a gag that Fringe did once), which resulted in Michael J. Fox taking the leading role in Footloose, which in turn caused Kevin Bacon to play Maverick in Top Gun. Another of the changes he caused is that there are no other metahumans in this timeline, so there’s no one present to stop the Kryptonian invasion led by General Zod (Michael Shannon) that is happening concurrently, but unlike in Man of Steel, there’s no Superman here to stop them. There does happen to be a Batman, so the two Barries seek him out at Wayne Manor, only to find that he’s not the man that Present!Barry has come to know, literally. 

I’m about to reference another piece of media that I’m almost entirely certain you’ve never heard of: a 1984 desktop computer game titled Bouncing Babies, which I played on the very first computer that our family owned (I’m not that old, we were just that poor). In the game, wave after wave of babies are thrown from a burning building, and the player controls a group of paramedics who use a trampoline to bounce the falling babies into the back of an ambulance. The opening action scene of this film is … that? While Batman (Ben Affleck … for now) is embroiled in a high speed chase, Flash is called upon to help prevent the collapse of a hospital that was damaged; this hospital, as it happens, keeps all of the babies in a nursery on the top floor, and when one of the building wings collapses, they all go flying out of the broken windows as the building loses its bearings, and Flash has to whip around on all of the falling debris and such as they fall. One never feels that there’s a real threat, of course, since it’s PS4 Injustice 2 Flash running around saving PS4 Injustice 2 babies, but it’s a fun sequence nonetheless, and that’s something worth noting throughout the film: these are the best action cutscenes from a video game that you’ve ever seen, but there will never be a single moment that you think to yourself that you’re having a cinematic experience. 

And on top of all that, since this is a multiversal story, they end up bringing in soulless CGI golems made in the images of George Reeves and Christopher Reeve as their respective versions of Superman, staring out of the screen like they’re waiting for you to press start to open the game menu; there’s even a bit where a digitally de-aged (or a digitally everythinged) Nicolas Cage fights a giant spider, which was a major point of contention in the direction of the never-finished Superman Lives, with the implication being that there was a timeline in this multiverse where the narrative of that aborted film played out. It’s really banking on your nostalgia factor, which it has to, because while there have been a few good (or at least fun) eggs in this weird DCEU basket of mostly stinkers, there’s nothing iconic in any of these movies onto which one could anchor any meaningful moments. That they went back to the General Zod’s invasion well is very telling here. And if you somehow haven’t been spoiled on one of the big reveals in this movie (the best one, to be honest), I’m not going to ruin that for you here, but to pretend that it’s anything other than a great big nostalgia grab would be pathologically dishonest. 

There’s so much wrong with this movie. The (allegedly) criminal star, an utterly inconsequential love-story plot tumor, the way that Miller plays Barry not so much like someone who’s done some deep actor work on portraying a neurodivergent person as much as they play him like a bully mocking a neurodivergent classmate, the endless parade of ceramic fight sequences, and the way they managed to make poor Helen Slater look like a Lifeforce zombie (that woman deserves better than this, dammit). And yet … and yet …. Twice during this movie I leaned over to my viewing companion: first, during the sequence that adapted Bouncing Babies to the screen, I leaned over and said, with surprise, “I’m … enjoying this?” Later, during yet another action sequence, I said “I hate how much I’m enjoying this.” And, as we left the theater, I confessed: “I regret to inform you of this, but I had a great time.” However, I am once again advising that I do not endorse that you see it, at least not in any way that could contribute to the film financially. If your kids are demanding to watch it, now is the perfect time to trick them into watching the 1990s show starring John Wesley Schipp (I’m not going to link it, but a quick search shows that it’s on YouTube right now, probably illegally), and that will cost you nothing and buy you enough time to Google “how to talk to your family about Ezra Miller” and then just bide your time until this film becomes available in a way that’s free to you. Apropos of nothing, do you have a VPN? I use ExpressVPN, and I love it! (Not sponsored.)

Because yes, dear reader, it’s true, I do regret to inform you that I had a great time. I’m sorry that I saw it in a way that didn’t contribute to the coffers of the Pharisees that canceled Batgirl and that you don’t have that option available to you (yet). Just be patient. You’ll get to look into Superman’s dead eyes soon enough. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)

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Things sure do seem awfully final these days, don’t they? There’s a part of my brain lighting up right now that hasn’t been active since my last days of high school, alongside parts of my brain that hadn’t felt this flush with fear hormones since the last time I was worried about the Rapture. Past lovers have reappeared at a rate of about one per month since last summer like my own personal Broken Flowers, a succession of insights into the me that could have been. Things are so dark and bleak sometimes that I’m not really sure what to do with myself. So much of what I’ve been seeing and writing about lately are about completion, ending, and finalizing triptychs that it feels pervasive. Then again, I’ve always had an unfortunate tendency toward apophenia, and my brain chemicals have been all over the place since, within the past two weeks, I spent days upon days expecting that I was going to have to put down my elderly cat (he rebounded, the little comeback king—he’s dying, but not today, and not this week). It’s also theorized that the human brain is wired to find patterns even where none exist, and since the smallest number of “things” in which we can find patterns is three, it’s possible there’s something innate and instinctual in humans that causes us to see triptychs and trilogies and triads and three-part godheads as complete. We’ve known this for hundreds of years, given that Aristotle wrote in Rhetoric “Omne trium perfectum”—essentially, “Everything that comes in threes is perfect,”—in the 4th century B.C.E. Brandon and I texted about this recently, as he wanted to give me the chance to write about Beau is Afraid before he took a crack at it since I had covered both Hereditary and Midsommar. Also relatively recently, and more in line with what we’re talking about today, I wrote about how I went to see the most recent Ant-Man out of a sense of obligation to close out the third and final part of something that had relevant sentimental value to me as a person and as a member of this site. 

I wasn’t planning to see this movie in theaters, if at all, ever. No one’s public persona is 100% accurate to them as a person, but Chris Pratt’s bungling of the goodwill that Parks & Rec and the first film in this series bought him via (at best) poorly conceived social media posts has made me not really all that interested in seeing him in a big budget film. I don’t expect celebrities to adhere to an old-fashioned studio contract morals code, and I appreciate that people in the public eye are expected not only to tolerate the fact that they have virtually no privacy but to even use what little privacy they have to essentially buy more stock in the interest economy by posting their private moments to their verified social media accounts. I really do. But man, there was something about that post about having a healthy child with his new wife that left a really bad taste in my mouth, even if it wasn’t an intentional dig at ex-wife Anna Faris or a reference to their special needs son; it churned my stomach. On top of that, I just haven’t been able to make myself care much about the MCU, as I’ve mentioned the last few times I’ve covered it, and with that last Ant-Man being such a miss for me, I can’t work up the interest to check these things out most of the time, let alone the compulsion. But, on a night when all my friends had plans and I was facing some pretty strong writer’s block, I took my MoviePass down to the [redacted] and I got myself a hot dog and a blue ICEE and sat in a sparsely populated theater on what seems like it’s the last of these. And it was good. 

Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 opens on a downbeat note. Peter Quill (Pratt) is still in mourning for the loss of Gamora (Zoe Saldana) in Infinity War, a situation exacerbated by the fact that a different, time-displaced version of Gamora from before the two met now exists somewhere out there, not caring at all about his existence. The Guardians have settled in on Knowhere, which you may (and are expected to) remember as the severed head of a long-dead god-adjacent being. A depressed Rocket (Bradley Cooper) is forcing an entire settlement of people to listen to Radiohead’s “Creep” over the loudspeakers and as a former radio DJ who struggled with mental health issues, I have to say: relatable. His reverie is interrupted by the arrival of Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), who puts our little raccoon friend into a coma, and the Guardians are unable to use their handy automated medical equipment because there’s a kill switch on his heart. You see, the man who cyborgified Rocket in the first place, the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) left behind a failsafe to protect his proprietary interest in Rocket, whom he is attempting to recapture. Nebula (Karen Gillan) proposes that they reach out to one of her contacts who might be able to get the group inside the headquarters of the H.E.’s megacorp and get the shutdown code for the kill switch so that they can get Rocket medical help before he dies. This involves the rest of the team, including Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Groot (Vin Diesel), and Drax (Dave Bautista), reuniting with the version of Gamora who does not know them. It’s not as simple as all of that, of course, as the attempted heist goes awry and requires them to track down the Evolutionary himself, with all the unusual fleshy detail that we’ve come to expect from James Gunn, a jailbreak of nice Village of the Damned kids, a telepathic dog feuding with Kirk from Gilmore Girls, an octopus man selling drugs in a back alley, bat people, and unexpected needle drops from the likes of Florence + the Machine and Flaming Lips. As this plays out, extended comatose flashbacks reveal the extent of the torturous experimentation that left Rocket the difficult, bristly, prosthetic-obsessed sapient Procyon lotor about whom we’ve all been suspending our disbelief for the past eight years. 

There’s a lot more going on thematically in these movies than in the other recent products/content than this organization is creating, and as a result there’s a narrative cohesion here where all three movies are in greater communication with one another than, say, the Thor movies, which went from decent origin story to dour table-setting to wacky throwback comedy to whatever happened in Love and Thunder (I don’t know; I didn’t see it). On a very surface level, these movies, like a lot of Gunn’s work, can be described as a feature length Creepy Crawlers commercial, but there’s something that’s genuine here underneath all of that, and more moving than it really has any right to be. Personally, I think that the scenes in which we see Rocket bond with other more abominable abominations that have been experimented upon by the High Evolutionary set foot a few inches over the line into saccharine territory, but schmaltz, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It’s a foregone conclusion that the sweet otter character voiced by Linda Cardellini at her most warm isn’t making it out of those flashbacks alive, so you’re never able to relax and appreciate the scenes that they’re in because the other shoe is always hovering just out of frame, ready to drop. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that seeing the frail and dying body of Rocket hit me personally because of the resemblance to the recent extreme health situation of my cat; it ended up pushing too far into the treacly territory for me as a result, but that won’t be the case for everyone, and hasn’t been based on the reviews I’ve seen. 

These movies are about fathers, and about god, and about the fact that we (in the west at least) form our images of what constitutes “god” around the concept of “father.” In the first film, Gamora and Nebula are constantly at each other’s throats to prove themselves to their shared father, Peter viewed Yondu (Michael Rooker) as his surrogate father even though the man had actually kidnapped him as a child, and Drax’s motivation to join the team was as vengeance for his lost wife and daughter. The second film saw Peter meeting his biological father, who was also, in many ways, a living god; Yondu sacrifices himself for his surrogate sons and finds meaning in bettering himself through fatherhood, and Gamora encourages Nebula to break free from the influence of their father as she has. Peter’s father being a nigh-omnipotent living planet was a kind of apotheosizing of that father-as-god concept. Now, in this third and presumed final film, the narrative is once again focused on the relationship between one of these characters and their father/creator, but this time it’s Rocket, and it plays out as a story about a god who, in seeking an ephemeral “perfection,” created something that he didn’t understand and which threatened his ego by demonstrating the ability to exceed the creator’s own intelligence. That’s not normally the kind of story that’s told through creator and creation; that’s the story of a father and the son upon whom he heaps all of his own insecurities and coping mechanisms. Beyond that, the jailbreak mentioned above ends with Drax finding himself with the opportunity to be a father again, in a new way.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I often divide finales/endings, at least of mass media, into two broad categories: the “Everybody goes their separate ways” ending and the “The adventure continues” ending. They’re both equally valid, conceptually, and the former is frequently the right narrative choice for a broad spectrum of stories; sometimes a piece of fiction ends in a place where characters have no choice other than to separate, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not sometimes bummed out by them. They can’t all be “God bless the brick house that was! God bless the brick house that is to be!” This is a definitive finale, and I don’t think it’s a surprise that the ending, despite concluding on an optimistic note, left me a little blue. That’s not to say that there weren’t jokes aplenty here (it took me until about the halfway mark for me to reach a point where it felt right to laugh, despite many gags throughout), but there’s a surge of love for the movie that feels more like people are just happy that there’s a good Marvel movie that everyone went to see rather than interacting with the text directly, because the text is weird in a way that mainstream audiences are normally more squeamish about. There were moments that made me think of Basket Case 2, of all things, which is a strange thing to say about a movie in this larger franchise, owned and operated by a monopolistic media empire. The consensus on this one is positive, and you can count me amongst that number, but at this point, these films have to advocate for themselves or not. This one does.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dasara (2023)

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As I mentioned when reviewing the Kollywood bank heist thriller Thunivu, my selection of newly released Indian action blockbusters has been severely limited in recent months, as I don’t currently have access to a car.  The only theater that screens the gloriously over-the-top action cinema I’ve taken for granted in recent years is all the way out in the suburbs, far beyond a reasonable bus ride, so I have to settle for whatever titles trickle down from its distant marquees to the streaming services I pay for at home.  Between Thunivu and the new Tollywood action-romance epic Dasara, Netflix has been the quickest to deliver the goods so far this year – give or take Pathaan, which I was lucky to catch on the big screen before it populated on Amazon Prime.  In Dasara‘s case, Netflix even premiered the film in its original language of Telugu, which isn’t always a guarantee for home viewing (even in big-name cases like S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali & RRR, which are still primarily presented in their Hindi dubs on the same platform).  As much as I appreciate Dasara making its way to my living room so quickly, though, I know in my stupid little heart that I would have enjoyed it much more had I caught it at the suburban multiplex.  The immense spectacles & body-rattling sound mixes of these movies demand the theatrical experience.  That environment makes a throwaway romcom like Radhe Shyam play like an action-hero riff on Cameron’s Titanic, crushing you so flat beneath its towering CG mayhem that you hardly have time to notice that the flirty jokes between its action sequences aren’t especially cute or funny.  For its part, Dasara also delivers the goods when it comes to large-scale CG action spectacle, but that can only carry you so far at home, so the lengthy lulls between its explosions tend to spoil the mood.  I’ve greatly enjoyed a few masala films I happened to see at home for the first time instead of the theater—Master, Karnan, Enthiran, the aforementioned Baahubali, to name a few—but they all would have been even more enjoyable & memorable had I seen them big & loud, which is an unignorable problem in more middling titles like Dasara.

Dasara details a lifelong friendship & romantic rivalry between a pair of mining-town besties.  After a youth wasted stealing coal off mining trains for liquor money and pining after the same childhood friend, the two ambitionless hedonists are forced to get serious about the politicians who poison their village – both through alcohol sales and through coal-mining air pollution.  The alcohol is treated as the bigger threat to local morale, in that it makes wastoid addicts out of every able-bodied man in their community (an anti-vice sentiment underlined by the opening credits’ health hazard warnings and a barn-burner monologue in the final scene).  Booze is also the main driver of local politics, as the powerful positions of bar owner & cashier are essentially treated as public offices, violently contested through rigged elections.  In establishing all of this big-picture conflict within the mining community, Dasara only leaves room for three major action sequences: a daring coal-train robbery, a vicious massacre of local drunks via machete militia, and a climactic act of revenge in which the evilest politician of all is decapitated via flaming machete after his goons are slaughtered one at a time.  There are some incredible moments & images in those sequences that highlight how India’s various film industries are regularly producing the greatest action movies on the market today, if not the greatest since Hong Kong action’s independent heyday in the 80s & 90s.  There is a lot of downtime between those moments, though, especially for a film with so thin of a moralist lesson (alcohol = bad) and with such cliché love-triangle tension.  A few weddings, cricket matches, and religious festivals liven up the dead space between the action payoffs, but not enough to make the picture especially worth seeking out at home.  Even when enjoying how its all-out explosive climax filled my TV screen with a wall of flames, all I could think about is how much cooler those flames would look if they were 30 feet taller and came with a bucket of popcorn.

Even though Dasara is a mixed bag overall, it’s really just one catchy composer short of being a stunner.  It’s got plenty explosive imagery, but its songs are mostly duds, so the time drags heavily between fires & beheadings.  To its credit, I was happy to see the musical numbers directly integrated into the narrative, when so many modern films in this genre separate them out as music video asides.  Unfortunately, they do so by adopting a plodding stage-musical songwriting style that never fully meshes with the score’s rapid, relentless percussion with any coherence.  Music is certainly one of the genre’s primary joys, but I’m not even sure that a louder theatrical environment would’ve helped the songs hit all that harder, even with the spectacle of dancers kicking up black coal dust in frantic choreography.  However, I do suspect that the constant coal-mine blasts of fireballs & air pollution would’ve been so much more vivid at the multiplex that I wouldn’t have cared about the mediocre music they interrupt.  Speaking from past experience, three great action sequences is usually more than enough to make one of these cheap-o epics worthwhile in that environment, whether or not the music is memorable.  Without that boost in scale & volume, Dasara is unraveled by its own thinness, which it appears to be aware of itself by the second flashback montage of earlier, more exciting scenes.  The action is too sparse for its songs to be this bland, and so the movie was only worth seeking out for the one week it screened at AMC Elmwood (or your local equivalent), when its few explosions would’ve stunned you for the longest stretches.  I don’t regret watching it at home, though, and I don’t think this experience will deter me from seeking out other Indian action streamers in the future.  In the past, I may have positively reviewed so-so masala films like Shamshera & Radhe Shyam for the enjoyment of the theatrical experience rather than the actual quality of the product, but that’s how they were intended to be watched.  Catching up with Dasara on my couch is only the Great Value™ equivalent of the real deal, and it will have to do until I have a car again or until one of the three remaining theaters in the city catches up with how fun these crowd-pleasers can be.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Yes, Madam! (1985)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Michelle Yeoh & Cynthia Rothrock action hero team-up Yes, Madam! (1985).

00:00 Welcome

02:50 Night Visions (2001 – 2002)
07:25 Vibes (1988)
08:50 Beau is Afraid (2023)
25:40 Gossip (2000)
27:30 I Went to the Dance (1989)
31:00 Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie (1995)

36:00 Yes, Madam! (1985)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

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John Wick is back, folks. If you remember (and why would you, it’s been 4 years since the last one of these), at the end of John Wick 3, our antihero took a bullet and a tumble off of the New York Continental Hotel so that his friend Winston (Ian McShane) could maintain his management of the aforementioned locale. The Continental is part of the underground masquerade of the world of high class assassins, and Wick is being targeted for failing to uphold one of their many intricate rituals and rites, with Winston having sacrificed his position within that hierarchy to help his friend, a favor that Wick repaid by letting Winston shoot him in front of an Adjudicator so that Winston appears to maintain his allegiance to the so-called “Table,” which oversees this underworld. This appears to have been for naught, unfortunately; now, some half a year or so after being taken into the care of the Bowery King (Lawrence Fishburne), Wick has recovered and, before the ten minute mark, finds and kills the Elder, the only person who “sits above The Table,” resulting in Winston being confronted by a Harbinger (Clancy Brown) who tells him that the NY Continental has been deconsecrated and will be demolished, which is done within the hour. Our protagonists now have a new adversary, the Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård), a French aristocrat with a house-sized closet full of nice suits who has been empowered by the other members of The Table to bring John Wick down, based on his vow to do so by any means necessary. Wick, now (once again? still?) on the run from The Table and their machinations, must slay his way through armies, mercenaries, and mooks in pursuit of freedom from his debts to leaders of this underworld. This time, his flight is complicated by two players who are new to us: an upstart known only as The Tracker (Shamier Anderson) whose calculated pursuit of Wick is based on trailing him without apprehending him while waiting for the bounty on Wick’s head to get bigger and bigger; and Caine (martial arts legend Donnie Yen), a sightless assassin who is also John’s old friend. 

The third installment in this franchise was a little … muddled. I lumped John Wicks 1-3 all together into the #40 slot on my list of the best 100 films of the 2010s. I stand by that ranking, although after a few years, they have started to blend together a little. On the way to the theater to see 4, I mentioned to my companion that I was disappointed that Adrianne Palicki had been killed off and would not be reappearing, and was fairly insistent that this happened in the second film, when it actually happened at the end of the first. I also noted that there was a lot of time in Italy in the third film, but that was also a mistake; the Rome stuff is all in John Wick 2. I was still riding high on my experience of watching the third one when I wrote the blurb in the above-linked piece, because looking back now, the third one is difficult to recall, with its rapidly shifting locales and less cohesive storytelling that seemed intent on forcing as many celebrity cameos as possible, with the two things I remembered most being Anjelica Huston as the leader of an academy of ballerina-assassins and Halle Berry’s training of attack dogs that liked to go for the groin . Fortunately, although this film introduces more elements of the secret underworld that exists below and throughout the world that we civilians inhabit (Harbingers, one-on-one duels that are part of “the old ways” unto which even The Table are beholden, and even a Paris-based radio station that keeps listeners updated on bounties in between covers of apropos music), they’re much easier to follow than they were in the last installment. Wick can clear his debts with The Table if he kills the Marquis in a duel, the duelists are allowed to choose champions, etc. 

Of course, that’s not what most of this film’s audience is here for. I saw this on a Tuesday night, which isn’t exactly a prime movie night for most people, and there were perhaps twenty people in the screening other than my party, mostly college-aged men who came with their buds and several couples (although I guess I’m playing into heteronormative biases by assuming that none of the pairs of men who came to see the movie together weren’t couples, but I digress). My companion and I laughed much more than the others, and I firmly believe that the laughs we experienced were intentional jokes that simply flew over the heads of the others who were present; they did laugh, but only at some of the more crass jokes, with the most notable being that Tracker’s dog lifts his leg and pees on the corpse of a dog-hating assassin who recurred throughout the film, while many of Wick’s dry subtle jabs elicited not a peep. They’re here for the killing! And boy howdy, was there a lot of it. While I find the criminal underworld in these movies fascinating, there’s no denying that they exist primarily as a vehicle for extended (very, very cool) sequences of hyperviolence and novel martial artistry. 

John Wick 4 delivers on this, with various set pieces that thrill for minutes at a time (ages when it comes to screen time) without ever becoming boring or tiresome. After a great sequence in the Osaka branch of the Continental, we also experience a breathtaking fight that takes place in a Berlin nightclub that features multi-story waterfalls; at one point, there’s a shot of Wick being held by the lapels while his assailant punches him in the rain, and all I could think about was how much more satisfying this Matrix-esque image was than the actual Matrix sequel we got a couple of years ago was. The last hour of the film is one long fight as Wick tries to make his way to the Sacré-Cœur through a succession of Paris landmarks (the cowardly Marquis having hedged his bets by putting out a bounty that encourages all of Paris’s assassins to try and get to Wick, which the Marquis hopes will prevent Wick from making it to the duel in time and thus forfeiting). Each has its own distinctive flair: a battle that rages between Wick and his attackers, some in cars, some not, amidst the traffic flowing around the Arc de Triomphe; an impressively choreographed fight involving fiery shotgun blasts that is photographed entirely from above; and, finally, a grueling fight to climb the 222 stairs to the entrance of the Sacré-Cœur, which plays out like a brutally violent game of chutes and ladders. 

If I had one disappointment, it was in the lack of the late Lance Reddick in the film. There was a projectionist error at my local theater, resulting in the film already being played when I entered the theater several minutes before showtime, and I saw a pivotal early scene that, once the film was rolled back and played at the correct start time as planned, turned out to fall about 15 minutes into it. From that point on in the film, Reddick does not appear, and this was a shame. I was a huge fan of Fringe during its initial run (and I still am, in case that wording is confusing) and my erstwhile roommate and I watched The Wire in 2018 and it was every bit the masterpiece I had always been told. I was deeply saddened to learn of Reddick’s untimely death just a week or so ago, and I was looking forward to getting to see more of him in this, one of his last roles. I’m always hesitant to fall into even the slightest of parasocial relationships with media figures, but I can say without equivocation that he was a damn fine actor; in fact, many years ago, when I was fancasting a Star Trek: The Next Generation reboot in the vein of JJ Abrams’s films (before Paramount opted to go back to the franchise’s roots), I thought he would have made a perfect Picard. Although we will never get to see that now, I will miss seeing him. May he rest in peace. 

Perhaps our real world is violent enough without these fantasies, but maybe there is a place for this, too, in our cultural landscape. But if John Wick movies are something that you love, this one is another jewel in the crown. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Baahubali (2015 – 2017)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss S.S. Rajamouli’s two-part South Indian action epic Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) & Baahubali: The Conclusion (2017).

00:00 Welcome

00:42 Europe After the Rain (1978)
06:40 Images (1972)
12:36 The Murder of Sherlock Holmes (1984)
17:03 Crimes of the Future (2022)
27:20 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
30:41 Full River Red (2023)
34:36 Thunivu (2023)

37:23 Baahubali (2015 – 2017)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew