No matter what you thought of Justice League 1.0, the mere arrival of this “Snyder Cut” is fascinating on multiple levels.
It’s more than the Everest of fan service. There just isn’t any way Snyder’s DCEU epic – this version of it anyway – would exist without the Snyder/Whedon mashup mess of 2017.
It’s four freaking hours, people! You think Snyder’s gonna get that (and the extra millions for reshoots) without the whole hashtag campaign? But while the extended time and money giveth, they also taketh away, meaning that first JL debacle can take some ironic credit for all that’s better – and worse – about round two.
But it is indeed better.
More than anything, it’s a singular vision. The first was nothing if not a super-sized compromise, but this is Snyder unbound, no compromises. The 4:3 format is enriched with greatly improved CGI, specifically the “armor of scales” appearance of Steppenwolf (voiced by Ciaran Hinds), the underwater depths of Atlantis and the complete absence of Superman’s (Henry Cavill, again a perfect Clark Kent) distractingly altered upper lip.
The character development – as you would hope with this run time – is much more satisfying, especially with the two justice leaguers we know the least: Flash (Ezra Miller) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher).
And while truly important moments (Superman’s death and rebirth, for example) get the extra time they need to resonate, Snyder can still linger too long (those mini music videos, ugh) when he could be moving on.
Ben Affleck reminds you he’s a fine grizzled Batman, Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman gets more badass moments and fewer leering camera angels, and at its core, the basic plot remains the same. Steppenwolf is seeking to unite the three “mother boxes” that will conquer another world for his master Darkseid (voiced by Ray Porter). But with the nurturing of return characters and the welcome appearance of new ones (like Darkseid), the chaptered storytelling feels more natural and complete.
Yes it is dark and brooding, and this League may hold the mother lode of daddy issues, but it never becomes tedious. And while you can’t quite call it fun, it is super, and heroic, and sometimes thrilling.
The stinger (actually an epilogue)? It’s a humdinger (nothing rhymes with epilogue), one that will more than satisfy the die hards while setting a major hook for more justice, darkly served.
After nearly three years of lawsuits, allegations, finger-pointing and false starts, City of Lies lands in theaters as an engrossing attempt to untangle a web of conspiracy.
Based on LAbyrinth, Randall Sullivan’s non-fiction best-seller about the investigations into the murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (aka Biggie Smalls/Notorious B.I.G), the film leans on stellar performances and solid construction to advance its very clear agenda.
Johnny Depp stars as Russell Poole, the LAPD detective who collaborated on the book, with Forest Whitaker as journalist “Jack” Jackson, a fictional character modeled after Sullivan.
It was Poole’s belief that members of the LAPD conspired with Death Row Records mogul “Suge” Knight to murder both iconic rappers. Poole’s case is not a simple one, but director Brad Furman and first-time screenwriter Christian Contreras are able to deconstruct it and then reassemble the parts with a satisfying amount of thriller intrigue.
Employing shifting timelines and a touch of voiceover narration from Depp, Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer, The Infiltrator) and Contreras find numerous avenues to inform us organically. As the case does come to resemble “a riddle inside an enigma,” our own sense of discovery is consistently nurtured, which naturally increases our investment in what Poole is selling.
Depp and Whitaker make their characters’ gradually increased trust authentic and well-earned, though some of the film’s period detail (especially in the wig and makeup dept.) isn’t exactly on point.
More curious is Furman’s late game decision – just when similarities to JFK are impossible to ignore – to roll out some grainy, slo motion footage that feels wildly misplaced.
And, much like Oliver Stone’s playbook in 1991, there is little interest in leaving equal time for rebutting Poole’s conclusions. Armed with strong accusations that hardly seem like a stretch anymore, this is a film with a complicated story it wants you to hear – and hopefully believe.
But believe it or don’t, City of Lies tells that story in a compelling fashion that doesn’t waste your time.
Our son Donovan joins us this episode, so obviously the best idea is to look into horror movie families that make ours look downright wholesome. Check out the boy’s band, NEW PLAGUE RADIO!
6. The Woman (2011)
Forget Pollyanna McIntosh for one minute (if that’s even possible). One of many reasons that Lucky McKee’s powerhouse of horror is so memorable is that McIntosh’s feral cannibal (who must smell awful) is not the scariest person on screen.
There’s something not quite right about Chris Cleese (an unsettlingly cherubic Sean Bridgers), and his family’s uber-wholesomeness is clearly suspect. This becomes evident once Chris hunts down a wild woman, chains her, and invites the family to help him “civilize” her.
It doesn’t go that well for anybody, really, in a film rethinks family.
Well, patriarchy, anyway.
5. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Poor, unlikeable Franklin Hardesty, his pretty sister Sally, and a few other friends head out to Grampa Hardesty’s final resting place after hearing the news of some Texas cemeteries being grave-robbed. They just want to make sure Grampy’s still resting in peace – an adventure which eventually leads to most of them making a second trip to a cemetery.
But that’s not the family we’re after. The clan that will come to be known as the Sawyers begin humbly enough in Toby Hooper’s original nightmare: a cook, a hitchhiker, a handyman of sorts, and of course, Grandpa.
There are so many moments to recall. Maybe it’s the slamming metal door, or the hanging meat hook, or the now iconic image of the hysterical and blood-soaked Sally Hardesty hugging the back of a pick up truck bed as the vehicle speeds away from Leatherface.
Or maybe it’s dinner, when Hooper really gives us some family context. He uses extreme close up on Sally’s eyeball as she takes in the bickering family lunacy of a dinner table quite unlike any we’d seen before.
4. The Lodge (2019)
It’s Christmas, and regardless of a profound, almost insurmountable family tragedy, one irredeemably oblivious father (Richard Armitage) decides his kids (Jaeden Martell and Lia McHugh) should get to know the woman (Riley Keough) he left their mother for. A week in an isolated mountain cabin during a blizzard should do it.
Dad stays just long enough to make things really uncomfortable, then heads back to town for a few days to work. Surely everybody will be caroling and toasting marshmallows by the time he returns.
What is wrong with this guy?! And it’s not just him. Turns out his kids are pretty seriously messed up as well. But fear not (or fear a lot) because Grace has some profound family dysfunction to fall back on, and pretty soon it’s just a guess as to who’s going to out-dysfunction the other.
3. We Are What We Are (2010)
In a quiet opening sequence, a man dies in a mall. It happens that this is a family patriarch and his passing leaves the desperately poor family in shambles. While their particular quandary veers spectacularly from expectations, there is something primal and authentic about it.
It’s as if a simple relic from a hunter-gatherer population evolved separately but within the larger urban population, and now this little tribe is left without a leader. An internal power struggle begins to determine the member most suited to take over as the head of the household, and therefore, there is some conflict and competition – however reluctant – over who will handle the principal task of the patriarch: that of putting meat on the table.
Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are is among the finest family dramas or social commentaries of 2010. Blend into that drama some deep perversity, spooky ambiguities and mysteries, deftly handled acting, and a lot of freaky shit and you have hardly the goriest film ever made about cannibals, but perhaps the most relevant.
2. Raw (2016)
Justine (Garance Marillier, impressive) is off to join her older sister (Ella Rumpf) at veterinary school – the very same school where their parents met. Justine may be a bit sheltered, a bit prudish to settle in immediately, but surely with her sister’s help, she’ll be fine.
Writer/director Julia Ducournau has her cagey way with the same themes that populate any coming-of-age story – pressure to conform, peer pressure generally, societal order and sexual hysteria. Here all take on a sly, macabre humor that’s both refreshing and unsettling.
Because what we learn is not just that Justine’s sister will not be a good mentor, or that there is definitely something wrong with Justine. By the blackly hilarious final moments on the screen, we see the big family portrait.
1.Hereditary (2016)
What else?!
With just a handful of mannerisms, one melodic clucking noise, and a few seemingly throwaway lines, Aster and his magnificent cast quickly establish what will become nuanced, layered human characters, all of them scarred and battered by family.
Art and life imitate each other to macabre degrees while family members strain to behave in the manner that feels human, seems connected, or might be normal. What is said and what stays hidden, what’s festering in the attic and in the unspoken tensions within the family, it’s all part of a horrific atmosphere meticulously crafted to unnerve you.
Aster takes advantage of a remarkably committed cast to explore family dysfunction of the most insidious type. Whether his supernatural twisting and turning amount to metaphor or fact hardly matters with performances this unnerving and visual storytelling this hypnotic.
Knowing that Cosmic Sin comes from the writers behind last year’s Breach probably won’t fill you with confidence about their latest sci-fi adventure.
But the good news is Edward Drake and Corey Large are improving. Very, very slowly.
Drake also takes the director’s chair this time, and coaxes a mildly interested performance out of returning star Bruce Willis (which Breach could never manage).
The year is 2524 (remember that) and Earth’s forces have formed the Alliance of colonies throughout the universe. Willis is General James Ford, renamed the “Blood General” after he wiped out one of the colonies with a “Q-bomb” and was stripped of rank and pension (ouch!).
But minutes after learning of first contact with an alien life form, General Ryle (Frank Grillo) calls Ford back to duty, where he’ll join a rag tag group of you know who to make a heroic you know what and save you know where.
Drake and Large (who also plays Ford’s sidekick) clearly blew the budget on Grillo and Willis (Grillis!), with a side of Costas Mandylor. 500 years from now looks a lot like next Tuesday, while planets light years away look like next Tuesday in Michigan.
And still, cinematographer Brandon Cox manages some slick deep space panoramas…that are often ruined by Saturday morning-worthy effects of our heroes flying through the stars and “pew pew pew”-ing in battle with the aliens.
Likewise, Drake and Large’s script toys with the meaty issues of war, sacrifice, and colonialism, only to abandon them in the name of heroic grandstanding. Potential threads (and Grillo’s entire character) grab our attention and then vanish at random, rendering much of the 88 minute running time a meandering mess.
Whatever it is, New York neighbors Richard (Rich Price) and Greg (writer/director Greg Naughton) are brought together by the fate of a fallen tree limb. Both are musicians, and after an eye-opening impromptu jam session they decide to throw caution to the wind.
Rich, a teacher and grad student, will blow off working on his dissertation, and the guys will take to the road. They’ll stop in Ohio to pick up Greg’s estranged girlfriend, then hit the Eagle Rock folk festival to play original tunes on one of the side stages.
So what are the odds weird hitchhiker Brian (Brain Chartrand) also plays guitar and can provide the missing voice for perfect three part harmony?
The guys sound great together, and they should, because they’re an actual group called the Sweet Remains. Taking inspiration from his real life, Naughton filmed his directorial debut over several years, shooting around the band’s touring schedule.
The result is a sweetly earnest and often funny ode to the simple joy of making music, and the value in even the most unlikely dreams.
So yeah, a fast-talking record exec (Richard Kind) hears the guys play and sets up an L.A. showcase, but give Naughton credit for adding plenty of unexpected, sometimes pretty clever speed bumps on the road to overnight success.
As actors, the three leads are all talented musicians, with just enough easygoing charm to get us rooting for their characters almost immediately. That’s a big help when those brand new songs sound polished on the first take, or when someone conveniently has an uncle who can get them out of the latest jam.
How much of Naughton’s art is imitating his life? Hard to say, but it hardly matters. In both cases, it took the guys some time to arrive, but now that they’re here, what remains is pretty sweet.
The Independents will be released virtually via LAEMMLE THEATRES and ANGELIKA CINEMAS for a special limited engagement beginning Feb 26, then it will be released via TVOD on March 9.
A quip about unnecessary sequels is just one of several “wink-wink” gags you’ll find running throughout Coming 2 America. And though the original was heavy in sexism (even for 1988) and light on LOLs, there’s little doubt that the film’s huge fan base has been anxious for a follow-up.
Eddie Murphy teams again with director Craig Brewer, which is reason for optimism, since Brewer helmed one of Murphy’s career highs – 2019’s Dolemite Is My Name. But screenwriters David Sheffield and Barry Blaustein return from the original film, and while they thankfully update the sexual politics, the humor is again scattershot at best.
Most of the cast is back, including 90 year-old James Earl Jones as King Jaffe of Zamunda. He’s ready to pass the throne to Prince Akeem (Murphy), but is worried that Akeem and Lisa (Shari Headley) only have daughters, and tradition calls for a male heir.
What’s this? The loyal Semmi (Aresenio Hall) has been keeping a very big secret all these years, which means Akeem and Semmi must return to New York to find Akeem’s long lost son.
That would be Lavelle (Jermaine Fowler), who makes the trip to Zamunda for royal training with his mom (Leslie Jones) and uncle (Tracey Morgan) in tow. The additional family is good for Lavelle, and for us, as Jones and Morgan’s “fish out of Queens” antics give the film its most consistently fresh and funny moments.
They’re just aren’t enough of those moments to pump real life into part 2. The girl power is overdue and and love lessons are generic, each as predictable as getting more insults from the barbershop guys and more R&B stylings from Randy Watson.
Buy hey, you go to see Sexual Chocolate, you want to hear the hits. And if you’ve been waiting for Coming 2 America for reminders of what you liked the first time, you’ll get them.
Well, it’s still a princess, unfortunately, so not that different.
But Raya and the Last Dragon marks an impressive step forward in a
number of ways.
Raya (Kelly Marie Tran) opens the film Mad Max style, riding some alien vehicle through a post-apocalyptic landscape, her face covered, her eyes darting to and fro in search of something–predator? Prey?
The apocalypse itself happened just six years earlier, and
Raya had a hand in the world’s undoing. Now here she is, at the beginning of
the journey that could put the pieces back together.
Tran delivers a heroine you can genuinely understand. She is logical, and when she tends to lean toward head and away from heart to make decisions, it’s hard to fault her.
Her sidekick, in grand Disney fashion, is the shapeshifting
but fantastically colorful dragon Sisu, voiced by Awkwafina. The comic’s brand
of endearingly self-effacing humor punctures the film’s preciousness at all the
right moments.
There is a central emotion, a powerfully executed conflict
in Raya and the Last Dragon that never feels as if it’s been watered
down or softened for younger viewers. The conflict speaks of the courage to
believe in people even when they have proven themselves untrustworthy.
It’s a notion that flies in the face of logic, really, but the
point of the film—and possibly of life—is that you cannot build a whole
community if all you have are fractured segments unwilling to take that leap.
There’s just so much stuff here.
The film runs a full two hours, and you feel it. The first
twenty minutes is burdened with piles of exposition, and the mostly magical
second act journey is overstuffed as well. Too many characters to keep track
of, let along get attached to, muddy the overall picture. Losing maybe half a
dozen characters and trimming 20 minutes from the film would have done wonders
for it.
There are problems with the execution, but not with the animation. Raya and the Last Dragon is breathtaking, its world building as gorgeous as it is meticulous. Animators deliver each South Asian-inspired community with its own unique look and feel—from a glinting desert wasteland to a torchlit floating city to a lushly forested community and more. The film is simply stunning and should be viewed on the biggest screen available.
But for all the Raya puts in the win column, it can’t shake the feeling that all four directors and the team of ten (10!) that built its script and story were culling from plenty of pre-owned parts. The Disney formula still has princesses, they’re just warrior princesses now.
That evolution may have been overdue, but it’s already starting to show some age.
Lucky takes a well-known horror trope – the masked killer whose “dead” body vanishes when you turn your back – and puts it in a freshly relevant light.
A gaslight, if you will.
May (Brea Grant, who also wrote the screenplay) is a self-help author living in the California suburbs with her husband Ted (Dhruv Uday Singh). They are working to get past a rough patch in their marriage when a strange, persistent threat presents himself.
Every night, a masked man (Hunter C. Smith) tries to break in and kill May. She fights him off – sometimes spilling plenty of blood in the process – but he always seems to get away. The police are on the case, but they’re more interested in why Ted doesn’t appear to be around anymore.
And they’d really like her to calm down.
Grant’s script is often smart and timely, and director Natasha Kermani peels enough layers successfully to hit a number of societal bullseyes. But an extended metaphor such as this is tough to keep constantly afloat, and some gaps of logic in the narrative work against the film’s subtlety and in turn, its overall power.
Grant and Kermani end up walking an entertaining line between subversive humor and metaphorical slasher. Lucky works best in that center, when May becomes a living example of that internet meme comparing what men and women do each day to avoid becoming a victim.
This is the final girl in a modern world of gaslighting and victim-shaming, where women form common bonds overs fears too often dismissed.
Google has meant a lot of changes, perhaps the most tragic is the end of the old library scene in horror. While we find ourselves settling for the new cliche of the quick online search to uncover the hidden history behind a haunted home or town tragedy, this never used to be the case. Countless horror films led invariably to the Act 2 discovery in the old library. Either a helpful librarian carried large, impressive volumes to our hero at their tidy, green lamp lit library table, or a plucky sleuth scrolled their way through the old microfiche via the big microfilm machine.
How much do we miss those days? Enough to look into the very best in library horror.
Big thank you to Jennifer Snoek Brown of Reel Librarians for dropping loads of knowledge.
5. Se7en (1995)
Countless horror films begin Act 2 with a trip to the library. Act 1 has something creepy happening that puts our hero (or, more often than not, heroine) on edge and there’s nothing that can put them at ease except a little information search.
But David Fincher is not like other directors. While the beats are all here: big books stacked on an elegant desk, green lamps illuminating pen-and-ink drawings of the macabre and unsavory, a montage of pages being copied. But here, by flashing back and forth between Somerset (Morgan Freeman) doing the research and Mills (Brad Pitt) simultaneously studying case files, we learn a great deal more about what has happened and – don’t overlook all those decapitation images – what will happen.
The music gives the whole affair am appropriately religious fervor. This is how you make that cliche library scene work.
4. It (2017)
Poor Ben. It’s not enough that he pines in poetic silence for the lovely Beverly. It’s not enough that he’s the lonely new kid without even a posse of losers to hang out with (yet, anyway).
Nope, now he’s got intel and he doesn’t even have anyone to talk to about it.
This is the traditional “digging up big ol’ books about my spooky new hometown” scene, complete with a very creepy librarian. (Keep an eye on her in the background while Ben’s reading.)
But then comes the balloon. I have come to learn that a red balloon is never a welcome sight in a small town library.
3. It (1990)
Normally, we don’t include TV horror, but this scene is just so good! The Nineties TV miniseries is inferior to the later big screen adaptation (Part 1, anyway) in many ways, but not here.
Part of the credit goes to the fact that this film does not recreate that same, tired library scene. No microfiche, no big books on the history of Derry. Not in this scene. Just lunacy, Prince Albert in a Can jokes, and exploding, blood-filled balloons.
Plus Tim Curry, who improves any scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmOLwrvH-Ag
2. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
Another film that takes what you know to expect and serves it up to you in the most delightful way, Behind the Mask is among the greatest of all horror comedies and satires.
This particular scene points out the inevitability of that library research scene in horror movies. That would be reason enough to appreciate it, but Zelda Rubenstein (of Poltergeist, obviously) is the icing on the cake. Ever the dramatic, weirdly helpful librarian that the genre relies on for all its historical towny gossip, Rubenstein shines as a woman who really wants to shine in the spotlight.
Just one more reason this film is such a treasure.
1. Ghostbusters (1984)
No, it’s not horror – but it is a scary scene! In fact, for most people it is the scariest scene in Ivan Reitman’s comedy classic.
What makes it perfect is the tension it generates before the jump scare because we know Pete Venkman (Bill Murray, perfection) is going to get in trouble. You just can’t keep talking like that in the library.
