By: Henry J. Fromage –
Yes, I finally watched all that stuff that everyone’s talking about and nobody’s buying tickets to this week.
552. Joker: Folie a Deux
Joker was about a severely mentally ill loser with grand delusions. Joker: Folie a Deux is about a severely mentally ill loser with grand delusions, except this time they’re musical numbers and Lady Gaga’s severely mentally ill love interest takes part. I’m not sure what else you expected, but I have to admire Todd Phillips for sticking to his guns and probably throwing his career away for the next decade-ish to do so. I actually kind of all-around dug it. Three Beers.
553. Megalopolis
I’m not sure if this Six Pack is a mark of shame or a mark of honor, and probably never will. What you can’t deny is that Francis Ford Coppola puts it all out there exactly as he wanted to, in all the crazy, obtuse, goofy-ass glory that entails. This is like Neil Breen was given the resources to do his own remake of Winter’s Tale, and yet by the time a distinctly Dame Judi Dench-coded Jon Voight is yelling about his erection I was pretty much sold. For likely good or possible ill, we’ll never see its like again. Six Pack.
554. The Apprentice
Controversial for different reasons, but just as unlikely to make much of a buck is this origin story for The Great Orange Scourge. Sebastian Stan, who’s starting to establish himself as a deceptively great character actor, underplays all those Trump tics we know too well, creating arguably more of a credible human being than the raving lunatic on the news every night. It’s Jeremy Strong, though, who commands every scene as the pure evil fixer Roy Cohn, who takes Trump under his wing and teaches him all his tricks for never losing, or at least never admitting you have, until the inevitable point in which he sees the loaded double barrels of this craven worldview turned back on him. Two Beers.
555. Wolfs
Yeah, the long overdue reunion between two of our biggest movie stars of the last 30 years isn’t some kind of challenging art piece. It’s pulpy entertainment, and I for one was entertained by the story of two lone wolf fixers who find they’ve been called to the same job cleaning up the body of a young man from the hotel room of a powerful woman. There are plenty of twists from there, but it’s all about the crack comedic rapport between these two, which is as easy and effective as always. Let’s not let it be another 16 years this time. Three Beers.
556. The Wild Robot
This is shaping up to be the best-reviewed major studio animated film of the year and a chief contender for the Oscar, but frankly it left me a bit cold. I admired the blended photorealistic and painterly animation that’s starting to become a DreamWorks Animation hallmark and the story about a robot who learns to love thanks to the forest friends she makes when stranded far from civilization, but to me all the strings are a bit too visible to get as emotionally invested as the film is angling for. Three Beers.
557. Lee
I missed this Kate Winslet passion project at last year’s TIFF, and found it curious it was held until this year’s awards season, but in watching it the mystery dissipated. This is a straight up the middle historical biopic play like they don’t usually make anymore, largely for the better- something Harvey Weinstein would probably have landed 3 Oscar nominations for back in 1999, but which feels airless today. That’s not to say the subject matter is uninteresting- Lee Miller was a hell of a woman- nor that the acting is any less than predictably excellent, even the rare dramatic turn from Andy Samberg. It’s just all so point-to-point in its progression that everything plays less than a sum of its parts. Four Beers.
558. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
On one hand, it’s great to see Tim Burton deliver something with as much energy as this after so many years in the wilderness. On the other, this is pretty much exactly the movie you’d expect from a legacy sequel to Beetlejuice directed by Tim Burton. There’s a bit of Ghostbusters sequel energy to the whole enterprise, although this is far more entertaining on the whole, largely due to Michael Keaton’s undiminished madcap energy. Three Beers.
