Knee-jerk review: "The Substance"

1. We've been trying to limit these "knee jerk" posts solely to theatrical releases we see in a darkened theater, but, more and more, Hollywood makes distribution deals with streamers that limits traditional releases just long enough to make movies eligible for awards.  We had to rent this one from something called Mubi even though Demi Moore just won a high profile Golden Globes award for her performance.  
2. We hate streamers.  Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Disney+... they all ruined Hollywood with the lure of quick bucks that in the end has completely undermined the box office model for movies and the syndication/rerun model for television and, along with it, killed most of the traditional entertainment economy in Southern California.
3. So here's the deal with The Substance.  The first 3/4 is mostly a masterpiece of unsettled dread, queasy satire, and icky body horror about the absurd lengths women go to in chasing youth and popularity because of cruel social pressures.
4. We won't spoil how exactly this all plays out.  There's a black market experimental drug that does something to Demi Moore's character.  That's all you need to know.
5. We learned after the fact that the writer-director is French, which makes sense.  This is a movie with a dark, cynical European sensibility.  And a lot of full frontal female nudity that an uptight American director would never dare include.
6. What also makes sense is that the director apparently calls David Cronenberg and David Lynch among her inspirations.  If you know anything about those two filmmakers, then you know what kind of movie The Substance is.  Everything's a little off and weird like Lynch - it looks like our world, but it's a generic sort of simulacrum.  And then things also get gross and squeamish like Cronenberg - bodies are abused and mutated and transformed in gross ways.
7. To offer an example for how this movie is Lynchian, two locations feature ridiculously long narrow hallways that are completely impractical and totally weird.  But the characters treat them as perfectly ordinary.
8. It's that last 30 minutes or so that really spoils the whole thing.  Our best comparison is Danny Boyle's sci-fi movie Sunshine (2007), which we found to be a brilliant and masterful movie for the first 90 minutes before the wheels totally came off in the last act.  With The Substance, writer-director Coralie Fargeat goes way over the top for ending, then decides to go even further in pushing her premise to extremes.  Audacious without a doubt.  But also completely off-putting.  Which, admittedly, is probably her point.
9. Not much dialogue, really.  This is a very visual movie.  The art direction is top notch.
10. And considering it's a movie about Hollywood and show business, the cast is pretty small too.  There's a claustrophobic, lonely vibe to it all that works.
11. The horror elements of the movie are getting all the attention, but the most powerful sequence comes when we see Demi Moore struggle with debilitating anxiety and self-doubt as she prepares to go on a date.  As objectively beautiful as she may seem, she only sees an old ugly woman in the mirror.  It's tragic.
12. Dennis Quaid chewing the scenery.  Good for him.
13. If a scary organization tells you that the weird drug they supplied you is for a single use only, believe them.
14. We are suckers for movies like this about secret underground companies with hidden entrances and mysterious leadership.  One of our favorite movies is The Parallax View, which features a secret company that recruits assasins.  Other favorites: The Game which offers customized experiences for the wealthy, and Old which involves an unethical clandestine lab seeking medical cures.  Another variation of this is the entire community (complete with rules and bureaucracies) of killers in the John Wick universe.
15. The yellow coat is a symbol for an egg yolk, right?
16. "What has been used on one side, is lost on the other side. There's no going back."  Scary.
17. Special recognition to the opening sequence that uses a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to chart the familiar rise and fall of the lead character.  Brilliant.
18. Demi Moore probably deserved that Golden Globe.

Tweet

Knee-jerk review: "Wicked Part 1"

1. We saw Wicked on stage in Los Angeles years ago.  It was a pleasant experience, yes, but we barely remember it.  The songs didn't seem to be at all catchy or earwormy.  (We couldn't believe folks were in the lobby buying soundtrack CDs.)
2. So watching the movie adaptation was like experiencing the story for the first time.  Engaging, but maybe a little too forgettable?
3. Songs still aren't catchy.  Fun at the time but then gone from our memory banks.  (We had a similar problem with the otherwise fantastic La La Land.)  Where are the hooks?  Our four favorite movie musicals (don't laugh) are Grease, Chicago, The Greatest Showman, and Annie.  All with very sticky, very hummable songs.  Even the melancholic Billie Eilish Barbie song is at least memorable.
4. As an addendum, too often the lyrics in Wicked are hard to understand.  If it's not Ariana's high register, it's a goopy sound mix that buries the vocals.  Are our ears too old?
5. Pretty genius idea to take a infamous villain from pop culture and find ways to make her sympathetic and likable.
6. Until recently we mostly disliked pop star/tabloid darling Ariana Grande - despite her one banger radio hit "No Tears Left to Cry" - but a recent appearance on "Saturday Night Live" changed our mind.  She really does have a good sense of comic timing, self deprecation, and a killer voice.  And in Wicked, she's perfectly cast as a shallow, spoiled, boy-crazy, slightly ditzy Galinda.
7. Obviously, though, it's Cynthia Erivo who steals the movie as Elpheba.  Erivo seems like a bit of an weirdo oddball in real life, but as an actor she's a slam dunk in everything we've ever seen her in.  Don't judge a book.
8. Presumably, Shiz University is supposed to be a sort of college-style boarding school.  But every student there is in their 30s, which is kind of funny.
9. Michelle Yeoh cashing a paycheck and little more.
10. The production design, as expected, is fantastic, packed with layers of lush details.  Dig those golden gears that power the Emerald City express train.  How much time and money went into that for maybe five minutes of screen time?  This is Hollywood craftsmanship operating at very high levels.
11. Bonus points for invoking the 1939 Wizard of Oz title font.
12. Curious that in this polarized day and age, a box office smash like this deals in themes of dictatorships and disinformation.
13. At this point, Jeff Goldblum just sort of does his thing no matter the role.
14. Like most big movies, it's probably 30 minutes too long.  We appreciate getting original Galinda and Elpheba (Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel) in the movie, but we totally checked out during their convoluted number explaining the complicated history of Oz.
15. Amusing that the movie works so hard to reference as many Wizard of Oz elements as possible, the more obscure the better.
16. Always satisfying - and right out of Screenwriting 101 - for the protagonist to finally at long last get what they want... but realize that they no longer want it.
17. Yes, the animal rights business was part of the stage musical as well.  We were surprised as well.
18. Two standout sequences: the library dance (the circular book stacks!) and the cave club sequence where everyone laughs at Elpheba (we're not crying, you're crying).
19. Very good but... ultimately not great.  But, honestly?  That may well be good enough.

Tweet

Knee-jerk review: "Smile 2"

1. Too long perhaps, but fantastic.
2. You might chuckle at this notion, but actress Naomi Scott knocks her performance out of the park.  It's practically award-caliber.
3. The first Smile (2022) was a clever rip-off of scary "cursed chain" movies like The Ring and It Follows.  As they say, audiences want the same but different.  Smile checked those boxes.
4. Like so many high-concept horror movies, however, Smile didn't really know where to go or how to wrap it all up.  The explanation for the creepy, inexplicable weirdness is almost always a letdown.
5. The sequel is a huge improvement on every level... but the ending is still kind of a mess.
6. We had to go to Reddit discussion boards to figure out what exactly happened in the last 15 minutes or so.  What we found there makes sense.  We somehow overlooked a pretty clear explanation of the movie's internal logic.
7. Jump scares on top of jump scares.  You may or may not like that sort of thing.  They are cheats, yes, but they're also very effective.
8. The movie is so layered and well-developed that if you took the scary stuff out, you'd still have a very compelling drama about a tortured, recovering addict pop star unwisely trying to make a huge stadium tour comeback she's not ready for.  The pressure she feels from her icy stage mom, the tour's pushy financier, all of those hundreds of people depending on her tour for their jobs, is palpable.
9. We don't get out much, but it's been a while since we saw a movie this gory.
10. The peppy, obsequious personal assistant - who provided no value or skill beyond running around fetching things - was a fun character to hate.
11. Writer-director Parker Finn packs in a lot of glossy style.  Horror movies don't usually look this good.
12. The scene at the fancy socialite charity is something else.  Ditto the car crash at the end.  And the backup dancers in her apartment.  And the sequence with the stalker fan.  If you can string together four or five truly memorable scenes, you've pretty much done your job as a filmmaker.
13. Despite this, the 15-year-old Fry and her friend fell asleep for, like, 30 minutes during the first hour.  How is this possible?  We know why.  Because they go to the movies in slippers and pajamas and wrap themselves in fleece blankets like they're at a sleepover.
14. We have mixed feelings about movies like this that blur the line between fantasy and reality so that the hero (and the audience) can't ever be sure what's real.  But it mostly works here so we will allow it.
15. Naomi Scott.  Wow.

Tweet

Knee-jerk review: "Alien Romulus"

1. Without a doubt, it's the best one since 1986's Aliens.  And we liked Alien Resurrection (1997) more than most.
2. It's the ninth movie in the Alien franchise - if you count the Alien Versus Predator movies - so along the way, as is so often the case now with sci-fi, the mythology and backstory behind both the origin of the alien species and also the machinations of the evil Weyland-Yutani company has gotten way complicated and shaggy.
3. It's a lot to keep track of, especially at the end when the story connects to the self-important, overwrought Prometheus and Covenant sequels.  The movies probably worked better when Weyland-Yutani was a powerful faceless behemoth.  The air of mystery helped.  The more we learn about what they're trying to do with the aliens, the more ho-hum familiar they seem.
4. Cailee Spaeny is decent, if a little dull, in the lead.  The same, frankly, goes for the whole cast.  Just fine all around, but no one really pops.
5. Spaeny at times gives off Natalie Portman vibes.
6. Spoiler alert: the decision to use CGI technology to make 1979-era Ian Holm one of the supporting characters is a huge misfire.  We can understand the desperation to do as much as possible to connect this movie to the other Alien movies, but it's a gimmick that is not needed here.  The movie crackles just fine on its own.
7. Aside from the creep factor of animating a dead actor and creating a performance from scratch without his involvement, the CGI that reproduces Holm just... isn't good.  Big time uncanny valley. 
8. And from a story point of view, Holm isn't playing the character he played in Alien.  This is a different character with a different name.  But they're both androids, so the suggestion seems to be that there's this whole line of androids out there that all look like Ian Holm.  That sort of makes sense, but it's way too distracting and needlessly meta for it's own good.
9. Script-wise, the opening ten minutes are lean and mean.  We meet the main character, see her terrible predicament, then watch her grapple with a crazy, dangerous choice that might be her only way out.
10. The "big bad" alien at the very end is wild.  The filmmakers really went for it.
11. The Swiss-watch plotting of James Cameron's Aliens is second to none.  Anything that can go wrong for our heroes goes horribly wrong, again and again, but always in completely plausible ways.  Nothing feels forced.  Romulus has that same sort of feel.  Nothing is easy for the characters.
12. Zero gravity clouds of acid alien blood?  Check.
13. There's plenty of scary action set pieces here, which is really all any of us need in a sci-fi horror movie.

Tweet

Knee-jerk review: "Trap"

1. Fifteen-year-old Lil Fry assessment of Josh Hartnett: "He's so fine."
2. The first 45 minutes or so unfold about as we expected based on the trailer.  Then the story takes an unexpected detour - a variation perhaps on that trademark M. Night twist? - that turns everything around.  One critic called it a Psycho-style shifting of protagonists, a clever observation we wish we'd been clever enough to have made.
3. It's a lot of fun so long as you don't peer too closely at the creaky wheels of the plot, especially in the way these supposedly crack FBI profilers make some really dumb choices that benefit the villain.  (No spoiler here if you've seen the trailer, but if the idea is to set a surprise trap at a pop concert for a notorious murderer, it makes no sense to stack the arena with cops before the show even starts.  Why risk tipping off your prey?  Bring in the SWAT after the house lights go down.)
4. The movie may not work as well as it thinks, but there's no denying the audaciousness of a major studio movie building a premise around a vicious and insane serial killer, played by a famous Hollywood heartthrob no less, living a double life as a normal suburban dad.
5. The filmmakers did not skimp on trying to accurately portray the huge pomp and circumstance of a Taylor Swift-style concert.  We've seen countless low-budget versions of this sort of thing that never ring true.  Here it feels genuine.
6. Will a secret password really help explain away an unauthorized visit to an arena roof?
7. Alison Pill is always good, but to us the real gem here is Ariel Donoghue who plays Hartnett's daughter with heartbreaking earnestness.
8. Sure can't hurt your music career if dad is a famous movie director.
9. Bonus points for a subplot involving the casual - and sometimes unintentional - cruelty among teenage girls.  The struggle is real.

Ranking M. Night's movies (not counting his first two, pre-Sixth Sense films)
1. The Sixth Sense (1999), obviously
2. Unbreakable (2000) still feels somehow underrated
3. The Visit (2015)
4. Old (2021) is a guilty pleasure for us
5. Signs (2002), despite a very cheesy ending
6. Split (2016)
7. Trap (2024)
8. Knock at the Cabin (2023)
9. The Village (2004)
10 (tied). Lady in the Water (2006) and The Happening (2008) are total misfires

We never saw The Last Airbender, After Earth, or Glass.

Tweet

Knee-jerk review: "Longlegs"

1. The unsettled creepiness of the trailer for this movie did the trick.
2. Nicolas Cage is over the top as usual.  They hid his face - heavy with strange prosthetics - from all the promotional material, which certainly upped the curiosity factor, but what we imagined turned out to be far scarier than what he really looks like.
3. Definite echoes of Silence of the Lambs, of course (newbie female FBI agent brought in on a disturbing serial killer case) but if you're going to steal, steal from the best.
4. The tone of the whole thing just feels... off-kilter.  Eerie.  A low hum of dread. 
5. That doesn't mean the filmmakers are above employing a few traditional jump scares accompanied by a screeching music cue.
6. Lot of long takes and wide angles that makes one anticipate something's about to happen.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it's a fake out.
7. In other words, it's the kind of movie where a character sits alone at night researching scary things (our heroine apparently can't work on this case during the daytime) and the camera's pointed at them in a way that you can see an open window or door behind them.  So you're crawling out of your skin expecting something awful to appear in that window or door.
8. We've never seen Blair Underwood this gritty and terse.  Isn't he usually playing some variation of the suave charmer?
9. Things get stranger and stranger as the story unfolds.  The final reveal about what's exactly been happening with these serial murders is completely nuts.  But that's usually the case with these kinds of things (see also: most of Stephen King's novels).  The set-up is so weird and scary that there's no way to plausibly explain it all away.
10. We discussed the ending with the 15-year-old Fry on the drive home, trying to puzzle out some of the character choices at the end.  We thought we understood the rules of what was happening.  But then maybe not?  We finally decided this sort of movie is about mood more than plot.
11. For us, there's nothing scarier than someone knocking on your front door in the middle of the night.
12. The odd "longlegs" name we think is explained in a quick line of dialogue during the first encounter with the Longlegs character, but we didn't make it out.  He says something about how he didn't bring his long legs.  What the heck.  (UPDATE: apparently, the gag is that he's towering over the little girl he's talking to - using long legs - so he squats down to better communicate.)
13. The film geek in us 100% loved the gimmick of using a square aspect ratio to signal the flashbacks.
14. Obligatory scene of characters exploring a dark, scary place with flashlights.
15. A couple of allusions to T. Rex's "Bang a Gong."  No idea why.
16. If nothing else, it was a memorable experience.

Tweet

Knee-jerk review: "Twisters"

1. Traditional summer popcorn movie.  Whether or not you take that as a recommendation is up to you.
2. Glen Powell is a movie star.  Full stop.  Effortless charm, charisma, and cool.
3. A big sequence midway through depends on the audience believing that a small town in Oklahoma - surely as weather-aware as they come - can be caught totally off guard by the sudden arrival of a tornado.  Textbook definition of "suspension of disbelief."  Tornados don't appear out of nowhere like a boogeyman in the woods.  Forecasters usually know 2 or 3 days in advance that trouble is brewing.
4. We were unfamiliar with director Lee Isaac Chung, but this movie is as polished and slick as they come.
5. Never hide from a tornado under a highway overpass.
6. "If you feel it, chase it!"  If you think about it, that makes no sense.  Better is a line delivered later: "If you're afraid of it, ride it."
7. Is this ragtag community of nomadic screwball tornado chasers really a thing?
8. The most interesting element of the movie - unscrupulous land barons swooping in to take advantage of raw emotions to buy destroyed property at a discount - is so glossed over if you blink you might miss it.
9. Every amateur scientist surely has a giant laboratory in a rural barn, right?
10. Is it me or does Daisy Edgar-Jones look like should could be Anne Hathaway's little sister?
11. We remember seeing the original Twister back in the summer 1996 and liking it a lot, but aside from the crazy ending where (overrated) Helen Hunt and (always underrated) Bill Paxton are inexplicably able to ride out a tornado by hanging on to a standpipe, we don't recall many details.  And, of course, also the flying cow.  Oh, and also the terrifying prologue where Helen's dad gets sucked out of the storm cellar.
12. As a kid, we visited a relative's farm in rural Texas many times that had a storm cellar.  Like something out of The Wizard of Oz, just this set of metal doors set into ground right in the middle of the yard with a little ventilation pipe sticking up.
13. Are there really meteorologists who can just look at the clouds and figure it all out?
14. Some online chatter about whether or Twisters should have featured a character from Twister to make it an official, traditional sequel.  Not necessary.  It's not like these movies are offering some complex narrative tapestry.  (The metal Dorothy gizmos from Twister are featured.)
15. In sum, if you're looking for a movie with lots of tornados causing lots of damage, this is that movie.

Tweet

Knee-jerk review: Netflix's "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F"

1. Historically, the film snob cinepile is us has avoided commenting on streaming movies.  The local multiplex is where "real" movies belong.  But we're making an exception here.  We get why Netflix would want this sequel, but we can't help but wonder what the box office might have been if it had gone into theaters this July 4 weekend.
2. We were probably too young (12) to see the original Beverly Hills Cop, which was a pretty hard R, despite the humor: bloody violence (the cold-blooded execution of Axel's buddy that kicks the whole movie off was particularly shocking to a young Cheese Fry), extreme profanity, and as a final kicker, a lengthy scene in a strip club.
3. In many ways, the filmmakers have created an 80s action comedy in 2024.  It's all stunts and fights and jokes and cool moments with the barest thread of a plot to string everything together.  They have our respect.
4. Eddie Murphy, of course, has effortless charm and presence.  What has he been doing with himself all these many years?  A quick look at IMDB tells us he's mostly been toiling in streaming titles aside from his work as Donkey in the Shrek movies.  His last theatrical movie may have been Tower Heist all the way back in 2011, which was a pretty good caper movie if you haven't seen it.
5. Aside from Bob Seger's "Shakedown" and Brigitte Neilsen, we have zero recollection of what happened in 1987's Beverly Hills Cop 2.
6. We really didn't fully understand all of the convoluted plot nonsense here with drug smuggling and cargo trucks and nefarious activity at dark, seedy shipping docks.  It's not an 80s cop movie without nefarious activity at dark, seedy shipping docks.  But the mechanics of the plot aren't really what's important in a movie like this.  Everyone wants the Macguffin SD card that will prove the bad guys are bad and the good guys are good.  How and why wasn't completely clear.  But we went with it.
7. Kevin Bacon is in 100% mustache-twirling villain mode.  It suits him.  This is no spoiler.  As soon as he shows up, you'll know he's the Big Bad.  This isn't a movie of subtlety.
8. It's not a Beverly Hills Cop movie unless Axel has to bullshit his way into some exclusive location.  Good stuff.
9. While we appreciate bringing back Billy Rosewood and John Taggart, the actors playing them show their age (Judge Reinhold is 67, John Ashton is 76) in a way that unexpectedly made us face our own mortality.
10. This movie didn't really require a dramatic throughline, but the business with Axel trying to reconcile with his very estranged daughter definitely helped add substance.  Bonus points for really making it seem like their split was Axel's fault.
11. We suppose it was inevitable to bring back Bronson Pinchot's Serge character.  We honestly could have done without.
12. We remember ever less about 1994's Beverly Hills Cop III aside from the fact that it for some reason ended in an amusement park.  Not sure we even saw it in a theater. 
13. It's almost distracting how many different ways the movie arranges and rearranges and orchestrates the famous "Axel F" theme. 
14. Gold star for a pretty solid - and brutal - Beverly Hills street shootout, but we have deduct points for staging the climax in a fancy mansion that is a totally ripoff of the original movie's ending.
15. Way, way more fun than we were expecting.

Tweet

Knee-jerk review: "A Quiet Place: Day One"

1. It's not exactly what the trailer sold. The question is whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
2. Rather than an apocalyptic sci-fi horror movie with chases and jump scares, which is what we were expecting (people-eating aliens attack Manhattan!), it's more of a moody character piece about two lost souls finding each other in a time of tragedy (a dying woman finds a reason to live!).  It's not bad for what it ends up being... but it's not the traditional horror movie audiences might be expecting.
3. Even so, there are effective sequences of what might happen if all of Manhattan had to be cut off from the rest of the world.  And the aliens do attack our human heroes more than once, so that box does get checked.
4. We've never encountered a cat that obedient or that interested in helping/paying attention to humans.
5. Djimon Hounsou is always fascinating , no matter what he does.  Apparently, he's reprising his voiceover role from the second movie.
6. We're just not sure if these monsters can sustain a franchise.  Characters try hard to be quiet, then a character makes a noise, then monsters attack.  Is that enough? 
7. The first movie, of course, was top-notch on every level.  A modern classic.
8. There's still something chilling about a New York City scene involving an explosion that covers everyone in white ash.
9. Whatever weirdness was happening in that construction site with the aliens and the eggs and whatnot, it's surely laying the groundwork for A Quiet Place: Week One.

10. Wikipedia tells us that Patsy's Pizza is a real place.  
11. Is the presence of a clickwheel iPod suggesting an early 2000s setting?  We're too lazy to work out the timeline of the original movie to estimate when the original attack was supposed to have happened.  Cool detail, though.

Tweet

Potentially Better Ideas for a "Star Wars" TV Show

We don't hate "The Acolyte," the new Star Wars show that's running now on Disney+.  But we're not exactly excited by it, either.  It's... perfectly fine.  We suspect most fans will admit that only "The Mandalorian" (first season) and "Andor" have truly delivered the goods.  More often, the shows have ranged from "meh" ("Obi-Wan Kenobi") to embarrassing ("The Book of Boba Fett").  We would argue that part of the problem is that Star Wars producers and filmmakers mistakenly assume that the only interesting thing about Star Wars is the Force and the Jedi.  Ugly truth: we barely tolerated the goofy mysticism and pseudo-religious doublespeak of the Force in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

We've proposed this sort of thing in passing before, but now we want to devote a full blog post to it.  Why not transplant traditional TV genres that have proven the test of time into the Star Wars universe?  Don't dismiss this as a joke.  We are 100% serious.  Best of all, these premises will limit Jedi characters and Force usage to limited guest star moments in very special episodes.  And another thing: no more serialized seasons that drag out simple storylines across endless episodes.  Let's get back to the old school stand-alone episodes of yore.

* Blue collar workplace dramedy in an X-wing mechanic shop
* "Law and Order"-style police procedural in Cloud City (we thought "Rangers of the New Republic" might follow this idea before star Gina Carano went off the rails and the show got cancelled)
* Medical drama on the Death Star
* 20-something coming of age romantic comedy in the Rebel base on Hoth
* "Yellowstone"-style family melodrama on an Imperial Star Destroyer
* "West Wing" or "Game of Thrones"-style political intrigue in the Galactic Senate
* Underworld crime thriller set in that Mos Eisley cantina

You're welcome, Disney.

Tweet