Screening Room: Fall Guy, Unfrosted, The Idea of You & More
Tag Archives: MaddWolf
Battle In Battle Creek
Unfrosted
by George Wolf
Boy, Jerry Seinfeld knows how to get clicks before a new movie drop, doesn’t he?
In case you missed his recent impression of Grandpa Simpson yelling at a cloud, Seinfeld has taken his talents from the stifling confines of sitcoms to Netflix for Unfrosted, his debut as a feature director.
Also writing the script with regular contributors from both Seinfeld and Bee Movie, Jerry returns to the familiar ground of cereal for a silly and star-studded riff on the 1960s space race.
Jerry plays Bob Cabana, top exec at Kellogg’s during their reign as the kings of breakfast. But Bob and his boss Edsel Kellogg III (Jim Gaffigan) are worried about what Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer) and her crew are suddenly cooking up: a breakfast pastry.
As quickly as Jerry can say “xanthan gum!” exactly like “Newman!,” Bob is back together with old partner Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy) for a mission to launch their own handheld breakfast innovation (“Fruit Magoos”? “Heat ’em and Eat Ums?”) before Post can.
Some snappy production design adds to the inspired concept of this Battle Creek, Michigan battleground, which takes off on a Forrest Gump-like history lesson littered with famous faces and absurd antics.
One of the best is Hugh Grant playing Thurl Ravenscroft (voice of Tony the Tiger) as a snobbish master thespian ready to lead his fellow mascots in revolt. But there’s also Christian Slater and Peter Dinklage as members of an “organized milk” syndicate, a group of Taste Pilots that includes Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan) and Jack LaLanne (James Marsden), and a visit from two very well-known TV characters that is better left unspoiled.
And somehow, a couple of dumpster-diving pre teens (Bailey Sheetz and Eleanor Sweeney) nearly steal the whole show.
The Boomer-centric nuttiness comes fast and furious (yes, that is Toucan Sam singing “Ave Maria” at a funeral with Full Cereal honors), and, as you might guess, not all of it lands.
As an actor, Jerry’s still playing Jerry. And as a director, he seems most comfortable with sitcom pacing that’s well-suited for streaming. But Jerry takes a rule that Seinfeld perfected – surround your star with a group of more memorable characters – and pops it in a toaster set to ten. What doesn’t work is quickly erased by another absurd opportunity, and then wrapped with a full song-and-dance finale.
I wouldn’t call it well-rounded, healthy or even balanced, but Unfrosted is eventually able to serve up just enough real laughs for a satisfying plate of silly.
Man On Fire
The Fall Guy
by Hope Madden
From the first notes of the Kiss classic playing behind a montage of stunt moments across cinema’s recent history, The Fall Guy defines itself as a love story. This movie loves stunt performers.
And why not?
It’s pretty clever in getting audiences on board by casting maybe the most lovable movie star working today, Ryan Gosling, as Colt Seavers, hapless stuntman. (Yes, that is the same name used by Lee Majors in the kitschy 80s TV detective show, but mercifully the PI angle is dropped for the feature.)
Colt, longtime stunt double for megastar Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), is smitten with the camera operator on his latest film. But an accident takes him out of the stunt game and out of Jody’s (Emily Blunt) life. That is, until producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham) comes calling: Ryder’s missing and Colt must fill in on set or Jody’s first film as a director, Metalstorm, will go bust.
When David Leitch made his feature directing debut in 2017 with Atomic Blonde, his decades in stunt work and stunt coordination showed. His instinct was not just to string together one fascinating piece of stunt choreography after another (though he did do that). He took advantage of his cast’s natural physical abilities to help sell the action.
And where Charlize Theron is grace, strength and ability, Gosling and Blunt are goofy and adorable. That’s the vibe from start to finish. The leads share a sweet, infectious chemistry. Winston Duke is underused but fun as Metalstorm’s stunt coordinator and Colt’s bestie, and Taylor-Johnson’s full-blown McConaughey riff is a riot.
The film has some glaring problems, though. The Fall Guy’s heart is not really in its plot, and that’s fine. But at a full and noticeable 2 hours, the film needed to prune. The opening third of the film could easily lose 15 minutes because the sheer chemistry between Blunt and Gosling carries the love story without the heavy and lengthy exposition.
It’s too long and it feels it, but there’s still much to be delighted by. The set pieces are fun, funny, practical and quite impressive. And they lead to a climax that lets a full cast of stunt performers and technicians just go to town.
The Fall Guy is not the most memorable way to spend two hours and 9 minutes (you will want to stick it out through the credits, BTW), but it is mindless—if overlong—fun.
Reinvention
New Life
by Rachel Willis
From the first moments of director John Rosman’s film, New Life, you know you’re in for a tense thriller.
The film opens with the sounds of a woman in distress. Soon, the woman (Hayley Erin) is revealed, covered in blood and trying walk to quickly but nonchalantly down a quiet neighborhood street.
After this opening leaves you wondering just what is going on, the film slows down, giving our main character, Jessica, (and us) time to catch her breath. New characters are introduced, including a fixer named Elsa (Sonya Walger). Her task is to hunt down Jessica.
The reasons for Jessica’s bloody entrance, and the race to find her, are unveiled slowly. Flashbacks are worked into the film at perfect moments, revealing just enough to keep us intrigued until more is revealed.
As the focus of the film shifts between Jessica and Elsa, we learn a little more about each character, and Rosman effectively fosters sympathy for both. Not an easy feat when one is a hired gun, and the other is a walking time bomb. Erin brings a sweet naivety to Jessica; Walger’s Elsa is more pragmatic.
The film’s only poor moment is filled with too much exposition. What starts as a tense conversation with just enough information to answer a few questions, devolves into something more tedious. Rosman would have done better to show more of this information through additional flashbacks, but it is a small misstep in an otherwise finely crafted film.
There is also a certain cynicism to the film, whether intentional or not, that emphasizes mean world syndrome. Those who show kindness to Jessica suffer for that choice, and one wonders if this intentional. Are we really to believe that kindness is a liability?
Perhaps we are. As New Life heads toward its climax, our focus shifts away from Jessica and toward Elsa. Our pragmatist understands things in a way Jessica does not, and it’s an interesting dynamic that leads us through this world. For a first feature, Rosman has brought to the table a film that preys on some of our most innate fears, those that might be especially raw considering recent global events. Add in some truly disturbing and bloody practical effects, and we’re given a thriller that is effectively terrifying.
Lords of the Ring
In the Company of Kings
by George Wolf
Resting somewhere between personal memoir and an episode of ESPN’s 30 for 30, In the Company of Kings is buoyed by undeniable layers of passion and gratitude.
In a brisk 70 minutes, director Steve Read and producer/narrator Robert Douglas reveal the inspiration they have taken from legends of boxing, while putting the spotlight on 8 boxers with very personal stories of struggle, sacrifice and success.
Drawn by the lure of the fight game, Douglas tells of his move from Liverpool to a hardscrabble section of North Philadelphia. Feeling a kinship with those desperate to make it out, Douglas waxes poetic about his love for the men who found their ticket in the ring, with some impressively framed camerawork dotting the gritty landscape.
From legends such as Larry Holmes, Bernard Hopkins and Ernie Shavers to current prospect Tyhler Williams, the film delivers first person accounts of life in the fight game, sparked by intimate details of poverty, racism, hustle, crime and punishment.
Unsurprisingly, Muhammed Ali is the biggest obsession here. But though the filmmakers pay homage to the Greatest through time spent with promoters Don King and Bob Arum and manager Gene Kilroy, these segments only feed the scattershot nature of the film’s focus.
The passion of Read and Douglas is never in doubt, and while that passion sometimes threatens to run the film off the rails, it’s also provides the glue that keeps the film’s heart intact.
By that quick final bell, In the Company of Kings makes clear that it just wants to say ‘thank you’ for the fight, and the courage. More casual sports fans may not be moved, but those with a love of boxing—especially during the 70s and 80s—will take a few hits to the feels.
Desperate and Dateless
Prom Dates
by Hope Madden
Back in 2019, Olivia Wilde debuted Booksmart, a “smart, funny, raunchy yet quite loving tale of two besties.” It was maybe the best high school buddy comedy since Superbad, and held onto that coveted top spot until last year’s Bottoms.
Prom Dates, Kim O. Nguyen’s first feature after years of directing comedy for TV, treads similar hallowed halls.
Jess (Antonia Gentry) and Hannah (Julia Lester) have been BFFs their whole lives. Back in middle school they swore a blood oath that their senior prom would be the best night of their lives.
What? A blood oath. With actual blood. About prom. Who’s buying this?
Fast forward a few years. It’s the night before senior prom, and Hannah, who can bear no longer to pretend she’s heterosexual, breaks up with her clingy boyfriend (Kenny Ridwan) just as Jess finds her douchebro boyfriend (Jordan Buhat) cheating.
What?! They’re both dateless for prom! Which is [checks notes] how most kids go to prom anymore.
Nguyen’s episodic background shows, and writer D.J. Mausner’s years writing sketch comedy amplifies the film’s lack of cohesion. They stitch together one borrowed situation after another as the girls wildly seek a new date for the dance. Each attempt is meant to bring with it edgy hilarity—Shots! A stripper! Vomit! A cannibal (I’m sorry?)! Oh, the hijinks.
Ensemble performers are saddled with one-note caricatures (Ridwan is especially abused in his thankless role). But the reason Prom Dates doesn’t land the same way the others did is that the bond between Jess and Hannah never feels authentic or lived-in.
Lester elevates what she can with an instinct for earnest comedy, but every mistake Hannah makes has such a tidy resolution, you can’t help but feel the filmmakers’ sketch/TV influences.
As much as I wanted to like this movie, it’s simply a watered down Booksmart with no real stakes.
Fright Club: Art & Artists in Horror
Muse and madness, art and commerce duke it out in a slew of films that mine the depths of the artistic nature. We welcome author LCW Allingham, whose dark novella Muse looks at the darker side of art, to join us as we use a little fuzzy math to share our favorite horror movies about artists.
6. Devil’s Candy (2015)
Ethan Embry plays Jesse Hellman, struggling metalhead painter who, with his wife and pre-teen daughter, just bought a bargain of a house out in the Texas sticks. Why so cheap? Amityville shit.
Jesse’s a metalhead and a painter and writer/director Sean Byrne (The Loved Ones) mines the dark artist nature for all its worth in a film that benefits from a rockin soundtrack, and a slew of good performances (shout at the devil to Pruitt Taylor Vince).
A convoluted storyline that mixes supernatural with serial killer is a bit of a drawback. But clocking in at under 90 minutes, Devil’s Candy is a tight little rocker. The lyrics are familiar, but the riffs still kick ass.
5. House of Wax (1953)
An update of the 1933 Mystery of the Wax Museum and precursor to Wax Works (and, of course, the 2005 loose remake), this Vincent Price classic tells a campy fun tale that also resembles a lot of Price’s other films.
An elegant artist turned disfigured madman, Price’s Henry Jarrod creates masterful wax figures of historical horrors. But there’s a secret behind the realistic look!
Yes, you totally know what that secret is, but that diminishes the fun of this film not one tiny bit. Price is fun, Carolyn Jones is a hoot, Charles Bronson’s a wild piece of casting. And the whole bit of insanity boils down to the fact that an artist who wants to earn a living has to sacrifice their integrity.
4. A Bucket of Blood (1959)
Roger Corman’s riff on House of Wax sets this dark comedy in LA’s beanik community of the late Fifties. Dick Miller’s perfect as a dimwitted janitor who accidentally becomes the next big thing by turning a cat, then a police officer, then other people he kills into sculptures.
The more he makes, the more famous he becomes, and the more he rationalizes the murders. Corman’s tone is cynical but fun, working from Charles B. Griffith, who’d also write Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors. It’s a weird little gem of a film.
3. Stopmotion (2024)
There will be moments when you’re watching Robert Morgan’s macabre vision Stopmotion that you’ll think you see the twists as they’re coming. That’s a trick. Morgan, writing with Robin King, assumes you’ll catch the handful of common horror twists, but he knows that you won’t predict the real story unfolding.
Aisling Franciosi (The Nightingale) is Ella. She’d like to make her own stop-motion animated film, but instead she’s helping her mom finish hers. Ella’s domineering mother Suzanne (Stella Gonet, very stern) is a legend in the field, and she makes Ella feel as if she has no stories of her own to tell.
Stopmotion delivers a trippy, uncomfortable, and deeply felt tale of a struggling artist. This is a descent into madness horror of sorts, but it’s also the story of an artist coming to a realization about what scares her most.
2. Mandy (2018)
Writer/director Panos Cosmatos’s hallucinogenic fever dream of social, political and pop-culture subtexts layered with good old, blood-soaked revenge, Mandy throws enough visionary strangeness on the screen to dwarf even Nicolas Cage in full freakout mode.
Like Cosmatos’s 2010 debut Beyond the Black Rainbow, Mandy is both formally daring and wildly borrowed. While Black Rainbow, also set in 1983, shines with the antiseptic aesthetic of Cronenberg or Kubrick, Mandy feels more like something snatched from a Dio album cover.
When his artist girlfriend Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) is kidnapped and killed by a cult, Red (Cage) enacts a bloody quest for revenge.
Or is it all the story Mandy’s painting?
Either way, it is as badass as it can be.
1. Candyman (2021)
For Nia DaCosta’s sequel to the 1992 classic, we go back to Chicago’s now-gentrified Cabrini Green housing project with up-and-coming artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), whose works have taken a very dark turn since he learned of the Candyman legend from laundromat manager William Burke (Colman Domingo).
DaCosta’s savvy storytelling is angry without being self-righteous. Great horror often holds a mirror to society, and DaCosta works mirrors into nearly every single scene in the film. Her grasp of the visual here is stunning—macabre, horrifying, and elegant. She takes cues from the art world her tale populates, unveiling truly artful bloodletting and framing sequences with grotesque but undeniable beauty. It’s hard to believe this is only her second feature.
By the time a brilliant coda of sadly familiar shadow puppet stories runs alongside the closing credits, there’s more than enough reason for horror fans to rejoice and…#telleveryone.
Screening Room: Challengers, Boy Kills World, Infested, The Beast, Humane
Triple Fault
Challengers
by George Wolf
“This is about winning the points that matter.”
Honestly, the relationship triangle at work in Challengers could probably work outside of a tennis court, but director Luca Guadagnino does wonders with the sports angle for a completely engrossing drama of intimate competition.
Anchored around a three-set challenge match between Art Donaldson (West Side Story‘s Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor from The Crown), the film drifts back and forth in time as it immerses us in their series of entanglements with tennis phenom Tashi Duncan (Zendaya).
Through Grand Slam victories, unrealized potential and one career-ending injury, writer Justin Kuritzkes examines how three distinct personalities push and pull throughout their young lives, and their differing views on the points that matter.
Kuritzkes is married to filmmaker Celine Song, and his script often feels like the cynical cousin of her Oscar nominated triangle drama Past Lives.
Guadagnino’s camera is a sumptuous wonder, often following the three leads like an on-court volley, and then coming in close to focus on sweat, bare skin, and the constant draw of physical contact. The tennis action itself is also intense and effective, buoyed by blistering forehands barreling down our sightline and some frenzied POV shots during the final set.
Zendaya, Faist and O’Connor deftly handle the growth of their characters from fresh-faced teens to hardened adults. All three deliver terrific, well-defined performances, and Challengers quickly becomes a film to get lost in, where you’re happy to be hanging on every break point.
Thinning the Herd
Humane
by Hope Madden
When Brandon Cronenberg decided to be a filmmaker—one keenly interested in corporeal horror—it felt both natural and brave. Natural because his father David is perhaps the all-time master of body horror. Brave for the same reason.
It turns out, Brandon Cronenberg is a natural. (If you haven’t, you should definitely see his films.) But the family affair doesn’t end with him. Daughter Caitlin Cronenberg’s feature debut Humane sets her slightly apart from the fellas, though.
Written by Michael Sparaga, Humane takes place in a near future where climate catastrophe requires that each country on earth purge itself of 20% of its population. A euthanasia program allows citizens to enlist, helping the nation reach its quota, helping the planet survive, and providing government funds to the family bereaved. But with numbers lower than expected, the nation is considering conscription.
Cronenberg’s tale focuses on one family in particular. Patriarch Charles York (Peter Gallagher), retired from a storied career as a TV journalist, invites his four adult children (Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire, Sebastian Chacon, Alanna Bale) home for an important dinner. Dad, and the kids’ stepmother Dawn (Uni Park), have decided to enlist.
With this dinner bombshell Cronenberg sets in motion a realistically cynical look at a government’s opportunistic manipulation of a thinning of the herd. She then zeroes in on the festering effect of privilege on the York children, simultaneously throwing shade at the “salt of the earth” types who are as violently judgmental as their position allows.
Gallagher’s great as the martyr desperate to leave a legacy, and Hampshire’s ferociously self-serving villain is a joy. Enrico Colantoni delivers the most fascinating, frustrating character, easily stealing every scene.
Humane makes two horror films in a row, following last week’s Abigail, where you don’t really root for anyone. Everyone’s terrible and it’s slightly disappointing that anyone survives at all. Worse, the big revelation that pushes characters toward the climax is unearned.
More problematic is that there are two fairly substantial omissions—not plot holes, just conveniently placed gaps in clarification that feel like intentional cheats. Beyond that, the writing often feels slightly behind the times. Jared York’s (Baruchel) claim that he “doesn’t see color” feels more suited to a tale set a decade ago rather than in a near-future dystopia.
These writing concerns don’t sink the effort entirely. An intriguing premise buoyed with darkly comedic performances, plus a brisk 90 minute runtime keep Humane entertaining, but it’s hard not to feel a bit disappointed.
