B | An alien hunter lands in 18th century Dakota amongst Comanches and French trappers. Directed by Dan Trachtenberg Starring Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, and Dane DiLegro Review by Jon Kissel |
Of all the things to get irritated about in the last three years, the release of Luca direct to Disney+ streaming is extremely low on the worthiness scale, but that Pixar release was some of their best, most atmospheric work and I watched it at home, as opposed to in a theater. It’s not a question of Covid either, as it was released in a post-Alpha, pre-Delta period where even Covid maximalists would’ve been fine going out to see it. Instead, as they have for four of their last five releases, Pixar and their corporate monopolist masters dumped Luca on streaming. I’m an old-school cinephile, and skipping theaters feels like disrespect. The same can be said for Prey, a film shot on location in Alberta with practical effects that contains all the cathartic, chest-thumping moments that characterize the action genre. A film that would’ve done great in theaters instead lands on Hulu, and the world gets a tiny bit smaller. Prey, the fifth and arguably best entry in the Predator franchise, deserves better than it got, but what’s to be expected from a company that is increasingly shunting work it acquired through Fox off to the side in favor of gray CGI sludge and in-house production.
0 Comments
It’s Robert Pattinson’s turn to put on the cowl and the cape in The Batman, Warner Brother’s latest crack at its foundational superhero. Befitting a franchise reboot, director and writer Matt Reeves takes Batman all the way back to his early days just like Christopher Nolan did with Batman Begins, though this is no origin story. Reeves has the difficult task of rebooting a story that most people on earth are familiar with by this point, of trying to find something new in a ubiquitous character. He reaches into a broader cinematic past and the dark anti-elite/anti-institution present for the right combination, and makes a film that, though universally regarded as too long at three hours, provides an introduction to the cast and the tone that’s going to carry the character through the next several years. Batman’s gone from being relatively grounded in Nolan’s trilogy to a cosmic character who fights next to or against Superman with Zach Snyder’s films. Reeves strips the character down to when it was most recently successful, and then strips it down some more for a gritty crime/serial killer drama that, if given its druthers, would jettison the part about a guy who goes out at night dressed like a bat.
The family-friendly adventure gets a modern update with Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Waititi’s fourth film and easily his best gives him a larger budget, but large within the context of New Zealand independent cinema. For a mere $7.5 million, Waititi creates a kinder Goonies and a funnier Stand By Me, the equivalent of an 80's Amblin film in a setting outside of American suburbia. By this point in his career, Waititi has honed his golden Simpsons ratio of 90% comedy and 10% pathos and is about to cash a big check from Marvel, all while demonstrating a creative strength behind the camera that makes his film look more expensive than it is. His transition away from New Zealand micro-budgets and into major commercial and critical cinema has yielded mixed results. The fulcrum of Hunt For the Wilderpeople is the height of one phase of his filmmaking career that later phases are measured against, and come up short.
Wes Anderson meets Downfall in Jojo Rabbit, a film that, to its credit, I’m still turning over long after I’ve seen it. Something rankles in Taika Waititi’s self-described anti-hate satire about a young German boy who can’t make himself into the perfect Nazi soldier he aspires to be. The balls required to make a film about a member of the Hitler Youth who has Hitler himself as an imaginary friend are considerable, but they shrivel up when confronted with a tone that can’t decide on stakes or jokes and in turn undercuts both. Armando Ianucci provided Waititi the way forward with his miraculous comedy The Death of Stalin, but Soviet war crimes have a harder time translating to the Third Reich.
With Thor: Ragnarok, the last of three 2017 Marvel films, the dominant superhero studio fully commits to idiosyncratic directors instead of the workmen guns-for-hire they started their extended universe with. No more Alan Taylors or Louis Letteriers churning out empty eye candy. Instead, Marvel has turned the keys over to weirdos like James Gunn and the refined vision of Ryan Coogler, and their films are all the better for it. Taika Waititi, the director of Ragnarok, splits the difference between the two, borrowing the wacky space opera flare from the former and the stealth critique of great powers from the latter. Waititi also happens to be the strongest comedic director Marvel’s worked with, and it’s no surprise that he would make a raucous action flick on par with something like Midnight Run or Hot Fuzz. That Ragnarok can be so much fun while also being about something beyond capes and magic powers marks it as one Marvel’s best outings. |
AuthorsJUST SOME IDIOTS GIVING SURPRISINGLY AVERAGE MOVIE REVIEWS. Categories
All
Archives
April 2023
Click to set custom HTML
|