Screening Room: Godzilla x Kong, Steve! (Martin), Easter Bloody Easter & More
Tag Archives: Hope Madden
The Sexual Tension Is Palpable
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
by Hope Madden
Remember how good Godzilla Minus One was? Did you see the black and white version? Glorious!
It’s almost too bad that Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is really competing with the memory of that 2023 Oscar winner rather than his own moderately entertaining 2021 hit Godzilla vs. Kong. Because as a straight up sequel, G x K feels a little streamlined, a bit punchy. Dumb but moderately fun.
Writer Terry Rossio returns, teaming with longtime Wingard collaborator Simon Barrett, as well as Jeremy Slater. They prune most of the Godzilla storyline to focus on Kong and his search for family. That brings Dr. Andrews (Rebecca Hall) and young Jia (Kaylee Hottle) back into focus.
When the Doc needs help understanding Jia’s connection to energy spikes in Hollow Earth (Kong lives there now, remember?), she turns to podcast conspiracy spewster/world saver Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry). Together with a veterinarian who’s in touch with his emotions and really bad early 80s rock (Dan Stevens), Dr. Andrews, Jia and Bernie head to Hollow Earth to lend Kong a hand.
There’s a lot of Planet of the Apes going on in this movie. Kaiju action takes a back seat and, though brightly colored and relatively fun, it’s never central to the film. But Wingard can create a fake looking but fun creature fight and Hall gets to explain what’s going on frequently to her dumb company, which makes it easy for every the most sugar-hyped family members to follow the story.
What she’s doing in this franchise continues to be a head scratcher, but she can certainly act, which never hurt a movie. Henry and Stevens bring levity—or try. Both are also inarguable talents and they share a sweetly enjoyable onscreen chemistry, but nothing happening in G x K is as much fun as Wingard thinks it is.
Kong: Skull Island was fun. That was a popcorn muncher for the ages: the soundtrack, the shot choices, the monster carnage, the humor and pathos. And don’t even compare it to Minus One, that just wouldn’t be fair. But for a greenscreenapalooza of dumb monster action, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is adequate.
Play Me a Memory?
They Shot the Piano Player
by Hope Madden
An unusual hybrid of documentary and narrative, music and animation, They Shot the Piano Player pulls you into a political mystery.
Jeff Goldblum voices the character of a New Yorker journalist writing a book about bossa nova, or so he thinks. He travels to Brazil to dig into the history of this groundbreaking musical movement and finds himself drawn to the story of one particular pianist.
Inside the chaos of color, vibrant animation and remarkable soundtrack, directors Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba unveil a particularly turbulent moment in history. The discovery and quick popularity of Brazilian bossa nova—literally the “new wave” of samba and jazz fusion—ran headlong into a continent-wide collapse into violent, oppressive military regimes.
Goldblum is one of a handful of actors whose fictional storyline collides with archival interviews with some of the musical movement’s greats. Little by little, the investigation sidesteps music to focus on the 1976 disappearance of Francisco Tenório Júnior.
The filmmakers bridge audio commentary concerning the disappearance, the desperate search, and the inevitable truth with Goldblum’s fictionalized storyline. The result, much elevated by Goldblum’s characteristically offbeat performance, generally works. The filmmakers attempt to do more than uncover one of hundreds of thousands of stories of innocent lives lost to Central and South American despots beginning in the 1960s.
Mariscal and Trueba want you to know Tenório, to see all that was lost when he was disappeared: father, friend, artist. And with him, the entire beautiful new wave of music and art that had been blooming across the continent.
Unruly and fresh as the music it dances to, They Shot the Piano Player sometimes loses its train of thought. The outright documentary content is probably compelling enough—even if told via animation—to omit the fictionalized sleuthing. But the way Mariscal and Trueba couch the heartbreaking loss of one life within the larger artistic loss of an entire art form is melancholy magic.
Fright Club: Telephone Horror
We welcome our Fave Five From Fans podcast buddy Jamie Ray back to the Club to talk about horror movies that make the best use of phones. This was Jamie’s topic suggestion and he brings five titles of his own, so please be sure to listen to the full podcast!
In the meantime, here are our five favorites.
5. The Black Phone (2021)
Ethan Hawke plays the Grabber in Scott Derrikson’s take on the Joe Hill short story. With his top hat, black balloons and big black van, Grabber’s managed to lure and snatch a number of young boys from a small Colorado town. Finney (Mason Thames) is his latest victim, and for most of the film, Finney waits for his punishment down a locked cement basement with a cot and an unplugged black rotary dial phone.
Time period detail sets a spooky mood and Derrickson has fun with soundtrack choices. But the film’s success—its creepy, affecting success—is Hawke. The actor weaves in and out of different postures, tones of voice, movements. He’s about eight different kinds of creepy, every one of them aided immeasurably by its variation on that mask.
Derrickson hasn’t reinvented the genre. But, with solid source material and one inspired performance, he’s crafted a gem of a horror movie.
4. Black Christmas (1974)
Sure, it’s another case of mysterious phone calls leading to grisly murders; sure it’s another one-by-one pick off of sorority stereotypes; sure, there’s a damaged child backstory; naturally John Saxon co-stars. Wait, what was different? Oh yeah, it did it first.
Released in 1974, the film predates most slashers by at least a half dozen years. It created the architecture. More importantly, the phone calls are actually quite unsettling. Director Bob Clark was onto something with the phone calls, as evidenced by the number of films that ripped off this original convention.
3. When a Stranger Calls (1979)
With a very simple premise, director/co-writer Fred Walton delivered genuine shocks and dread.
Carol Kane is Jill, garden variety high school babysitter type. The kids are already in bed, Jill just needs to be there in the house until Dr. and Mrs. Mandrakis get back. She does homework, talks on the phone, watches TV. What she does not do—however often the rando phone caller asks—is check the children.
The first and third acts are the killers, while Act 2 is a lot of police procedural thriller, but there’s a reason people still bristle when they hear, “Have you checked the children?”
2. Scream (1996)
Wes Craven’s return to horror—aided immeasurably by a sly and daring script from Kevin Williamson—revived the genre. And you knew it would be an incredible movie from the opening moments.
Drew Barrymore—easily the most recognizable name in the cast (also a producer)—answers the phone. She’s home alone, making popcorn, readying to watch a horror film. She gets roped into a flirty anonymous game of “what’s your favorite scary movie?”
The voice (Roger Jackson) became iconic, as did his line.
1.The Ring (2002)
“Seven days…”
Gore Verbinski’s take on Chisui Takigawa’s 1995 film embraces the already-retro tech—VHS tapes and landlines—to ground a supernatural tale of curses, horses and bad parenting.
Nowadays when you see “PG13” attached to horror, you may roll your eyes. But The Ring brings plenty of terror and tension, and it all starts when that phone rings.
Screening Room: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Road House, Immaculate, Late Night with the Devil & More
Bustin’ Makes Me Feel Okay I Guess
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
by Hope Madden and George Wolf
Three years ago, Ghostbusters: Afterlife conjured a mostly winning mix of nostalgia and new ideas—until a sledgehammer finale of fan service nearly derailed it all.
Frozen Empire thankfully dials it back on the fandom, but overcompensates with a slow building and convoluted narrative that just takes too long to be fun.
After a prologue set in 1904, we catch up with the new GB’s—and the originals—dealing with the aftermath of unlocking an ancient artifact that holds a nasty surprise inside.
The cash-hungry Nadeem (Kumail Nanjiani) sold said artifact to Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and didn’t look back, but he also might be essential to defeating the demon that finds its way out of it.
Afterlife director Jason Reitman is again writing with Gil Kenan, but this time lets Kenan (Monster House, City of Ember) take the helm. We still get some laughs, but also a script that takes on too much.
Traditional characters are often forced into a storyline that seems most assured when young Phoebe Spengler (Mckenna Grace) is sharing adolescent angst with a teenage ghost named Melody (Emily Alyn Lind).
Paul Rudd delights, as always, and his chemistry with Grace continues to be dear. Nanjiani is a welcome addition and Carrie Coon continues to shine. But while it is nice to see some of the older faces (Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts), the film squeezes in too many characters and too much exposition for much of anything to stick. (Plus a wasted 13 Ghosts opportunity!)
The second hour finally brings the fun and much of the funny. If Kenan could have trimmed 20 minutes from the film—and maybe three characters—Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire might have been a high energy bit of family fun. Pacing and bloat keep it from ever reaching the heights of its predecessors, and viewers looking for the tear-jerking of Afterlife will have to look elsewhere. But it’s got some charm, some laughs and those funny little marshmallow men.
Our Lady of Fury
Immaculate
by Hope Madden
Does Immaculate benefit from low expectations? Maybe, but I’ll tell you what, I did not hate this movie.
First of all, it looks great—and not just because it stars Sydney Sweeney. Sweeney plays Sister Cecilia, a Michigander transplanted to rural Italy in time to take her vows to become a nun. Her Italian is not very strong, and she sometimes feels like she’s being left out of conversations intentionally, but she takes her vows anyway: poverty, chastity, obedience.
For a lot of people, those first two seem like the tough ones. Nope. It’s the last one you have to avoid. (Note for the uninitiated, priests do not have to take a vow of obedience. And I don’t just mean in this movie.)
Anyway, miracle of miracles, Sister Cecilia finds herself pregnant.
Immaculate is not the first film to tread such unholy ground. Agnes of God, The Innocents, Deliver Us—it’s actually a pretty long list. And sexy nuns, well that list is even longer and more sordid. Though Michael Mohan’s film certainly falls into the sexy nun trap (because it is, in fact, possible to hire women between the ages of 19 and 45 who are just ordinary looking), it’s rather surprising all he gets right.
The science gets dumb, but the self-righteous torture, that is spot on.
Working from a script by Andrew Lobel, Mohan mines the desperate helplessness of Rosemary’s Baby. And Sweeney does a fine job of swimming the murky waters of faith, innocence, and the wisdom born of innocence lost.
What’s most stunning is how well two male filmmakers channel female rage. And I don’t just mean the rage of having to sit through beautiful, nubile virgins bathing together in soaking wet white nighties. That too, but also the good kind of female rage.
Immaculate digs into the way organized religion constrains, punishes, silences, bullies, vilifies and oppresses women and then unleashes glorious fury. Fearless, cathartic, bloody, beautifully sacrilegious fury.
Singing in the Rain
You’ll Never Find Me
by Hope Madden
A somber experiment in atmospheric horror, Josiah Allen and Indianna Bell’s feature You’ll Never Find Me waits out a storm with a couple of curious characters.
Patrick (Brendan Rock) sits quietly if unhappily in the kitchen of his trailer. It’s late—after 2 in the morning—and he seems a tad morose. When a persistent knock on his door punctures the noise of the storm, he ignores it as long as he can.
Eventually, he admits a stranger (Jordan Cowan), barefoot, drenched and shivering. She was caught in the storm and just needs a ride to town.
At this time of night?
What’s really going on here?
The film feels lost in a dream—the lighting, the silences, the pair’s lonesome and broken expressions. The co-directors linger on the actors’ faces, allowing the paranoia to shift so you’re never fully sure of either character.
Everybody in You’ll Never Find Me moves slowly. Everything moves slowly. You don’t know who to trust because neither of these two seems to trust the other, and you can’t judge either of them for it. Surely, they’re not both up to something nefarious.
Maxx Corkindale’s sometimes roving camera reveals something creepy in the trailer’s tidy, tightly enclosed ordinariness. The sound design is hushed and foreboding, blending with Darren Lim’s score to work the nerves. The result allows the film to suggest something supernatural, although all other signs point to very human crimes.
A slow boil like this requires committed, compelling performances and both Cowan and Rock deliver. Eventually the gender politics on display unnerve, and what’s what the film is more than truly scary. It’s unnerving.
The third act doesn’t entirely deliver on the promise made earlier in the film, but Bell and Allen have crafted an unsettling and spooky feast for the senses.
Screening Room: Arthur the King, Love Lies Bleeding, One Life, Snack Shack, Knox Goes Away & More
Juiced Up and Sloppy
Love Lies Bleeding
by Hope Madden
Awash in the stink and the glory of new passion, Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding treads some familiar roadways but leaves an impression solely its own.
Lou (Kristen Stewart) and her mullet work a shitty job in a low rent gym in a nowhere town, looking with disdain toward essentially everyone. Until Jackie (Katy O’Brian) blows into town from wherever and Lou can’t take her eyes off her.
But every stranger has a backstory, and that’s the rub of romance movies, isn’t it? Everybody’s fresh and clean. Not Lou and not Jackie, but for now, it’s all good. Jackie wants to go to Vegas and compete in body building finals. Lou wants Jackie.
Glass blends and smears cinematic gender identifiers, particularly those of noir and thriller, concocting an intoxicating new image of sexual awakening and empowerment. She routinely upends images of power and masculinity, subverting expectations and associations and fetishizing the human body anew.
For Lou and Jackie, love is a wild and dangerous drug, heady and unpredictable. The same sentence describes Glass’s film. She likes to make you uncomfortable, and as soon as you acclimate to one type of confrontation, she’s on to the next. But her style has energy to burn, and her leads are just as explosive.
The supporting cast—Jena Malone (obviously destined to play Stewart’s sister at some point), Dave Franco (with an even more impressive mullet), and the great Ed Harris—command attention with dimensional, damaged and damaging performances.
Glass is not out to break new ground, plot wise. The story is rock solid but delivers essentially a smartly crafted hillbilly noir thriller—a la Red Rock West, Blood Simple, Killer Joe— but with few truly surprising plot turns. The execution, however, is something you’ve never witnessed.
Anyone who’s seen Glass’s magnificent 2021 horror Saint Maud may be better prepared for the third act than newcomers to the filmmaker’s vision, but it’s a wild and unexpected turn regardless. It’s quite something—bold, original, and wryly funny in the most unexpected moments. There’s heartbreak and horror, sex and revenge, a little magic and a lot of steroids. Glass’s juice has the goods.
