Tron: Ares (2025)

Director: Joachim Rønning

Cast: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jeff Bridges

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. It’s a long-ish story, but I’m definitely entering an era when the big blockbusters—or at least the hyped, big IP, predominantly Disney ones—are not appointment viewing for me anymore. I’ll catch them later from any number of streaming services for which I’m already paying.

That’s before we even get to my—and America’s?—fundamental reticence to see Jared Leto in anything.

Did I Like It: This thing has been on Disney+ for what feels like the better part of a year, so why not break down and finally watch it?

It’s that Leto, man. I’m happy to say that, despite being the clear lead and one of the creative forces behind the picture—barely makes much of an impression in the film. In other films, that might be a detriment. Here, I’m relieved.

That leaves the rest of the film to be a generic actioner of this era. If the Mouse House decided to jam one of the Avengers in the middle of the movie, I’m not sure most people would notice**. Was anybody else bothered by the entire plot hinging on finding a MacGuffin that allows programs to live longer than half an hour in the real world, when if I remember right Olivia Wilde’s character in Tron: Legacy (2010) was a program who joined the real world?

No? Didn’t think so.

The biggest disappointments are where the film runs a little withholding. The aforementioned Boxleitner-lessness makes the movie series increasingly poorly titled, but there’s more. I was told Gillian Anderson is in the film, and she barely is, doing her trusty Margaret Thatcher impression without the makeup. Excited to see Jeff Bridges again? He appears about as much as Wolfman Jack does in American Graffiti (1973), which is to say, not much. He does appear in a sequence that takes place in the frankly more visually interesting environment of the first film, but both the wisp of Kevin Flynn and the full-retro flashback are gone before you even get the chance to enjoy it.

*Not appearing in this film, by the way. Why this series couldn’t make peace with somebody like Bruce Boxleitner, I’ll never know. Made me want to go back and watch the original Tron (1982).

**OK. People—especially those who really care about all things Tron—might care, but I don’t think the movie would stay around in our memories long enough for it to become any kind of moment about which we all are going to be required to have an opinion. Give it all some kind of multiverse-thing, and those people might even applaud it.

Obsession (2025)

Director: Curry Barker

Cast: Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless

Have I Seen It Before: Never. I will say this for a week without air conditioning, it certainly inspired me to get a little better caught up with what’s new in horror.

Never mind that the theater experience was lousy. One really ought to stick to the rivers and the lakes that they’re used to, I suppose. It’s tempting to reveiw the crowd and the house, but let’s not. Let’s get to the movie itself.

Did I Like It: It’s an interesting dichotomy. I had a perfectly pleasant experience watching Backrooms (2026), but the movie itself wins the second annual Weapons (2025) Award for “What the hell is everyone else so into about this?” Here, the theater made me long from the 85 degree heat of my house, but the movie itself is one of the best of the year.

I guess my problem with Backrooms stems from the fact that the further they descend into the liminal spaces, the more I’m wondering why they keep doing it. Here, our main character (Johnston) starts out on the road to damnation innocently enough. How could he know that the One Wish Willow would work? How could he know that it would go as far as it did?

He sure seemed okay with it far longer than he had any right to be, but that’s a minor quibble. The nerve-wracking, unsettling uncertainty that lurks in the shadow of his bedroom sets ones teeth on edge. Navarrette’s performance as the dream girl who is compelled by forces unknown to become a nightmare, even to herself is truly one of the great horror movie performances in recent years. We’ve opened the gates to films like this receiving awards attention, and there is zero reason her perfectly tuned ability to shift from terrifying to pathetic, to completely normal, and occasionally wind up being all three should be ignored.

Robocop (2014)

Director: José Padilha

Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Samuel L. Jackson

Have I Seen It Before: Sure. I was essentially obligated, wasn’t I? Although one could imagine me sitting in the theater, stone-faced and with my arms crossed, waiting for disappointment to unfurl.

Did I Like It: Even now, I’m sitting at the keyboard and ready to trash the film. On spec, a PG-13 remake of Robocop (1987) should be one of those ideas that just shouldn’t be. The kind of thing that Rob Zombie is content to ignore, and Zemeckis has protections against written into his contract*.

Surely, this film, long before The Flash (2023) puts The Michael Keaton Rule** to the test.

And yet, here it is. No, it’s not as good as the original. Few things are, not just in this franchise, but on the planet earth.

Is it a passable action film? Sure. Should anybody be embarrassed that they cashed a check from this? Na, although exactly nobody is here for any other reason. Does it have anything to say about the nature of the ghost in machine that has only become more relevant in the decade plus since its release? Not really. If it did, it would have re-entered (or entered for the first time) the cultural conversation long before I broke down and re-watched it for review. Is it forgettable? Yeah, pretty much.

It isn’t bad, necessarily. Then again, maybe it’s awful and certain elements manage to save it. Maybe the Michael Keaton Rule works better than even I thought.

*Which probably makes up for a lot of his future missteps.

**My notion that Michael Keaton automatically improves a film’s quality by 15%. Whereby I still apologize for The Flash, and consider Multiplicity (1996) to be the mathematically—if not emotionally—perfect film.

Basic Instinct (1992)

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Cast: Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, George Dzunda, Jeanne Tripplehorn

Have I Seen it Before: You know, never. I’m 7 when this thing comes out, and it always, even thiry-plus years later it feels somewhat scandalous to watch it. Even now, my wife comes into the room right in the middle of the interrrogation scene, asks me what I’m watching, and there’s a sustained seven seconds worth of “Uh…” before I remember I’m 41 and don’t have anything to hide.

Did I Like It: There’s so many obvious things one can say about the movie. Joe Esterhaus clearly has a lot of issues with women. Sexual politics have changed so much since the 1990s that the movie may only be suitable for anthropologists now. Just because Catherine Tramell (Stone, at perhaps her most Sharon Stone-y) doesn’t kill Curran (Douglas, at perhaps his most Michael Douglas-y) just then, doesn’t mean he’s he’s not going to fall asleep in twenty minutes and she’ll do it then.

There are even some moments of fun in the film. I saw that Rob Bottin was involved as the opening credits unfurled, and I couldn’t fathom what he would have to contribute to such a film, and then some poor schnook gets an ice pick through the soft parts of his face.

But what I really want to talk about is one of the deepest, most unrelenting laughs I’ve had while watching a movie in a long while. The noir-ish elements of the plot have to eventually come together, but did it have to come together as Douglas looks at two different pictures of Jeanne Tripplehorn, one of which is so spectacularly obvious in its attempt to photo-shop a blond wig onto her head? He even flips back and forth between the two, just so America of 1992 can clearly see what is going on, and 2026 America can’t help but keep laughing.

Vanilla Sky (2001)

Director: Cameron Crowe

Cast: Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, Kurt Russell, Jason Lee

Have I Seen it Before: I mad a point to really insist I liked it back in my teenage years. I had been a fan of Say Anything… (1989) and Jerry Maguire (1996) and felt like if I just pretended to like it real hard, I’d eventually get it and get there.

I never really did.

Did I Like It: The question becomes, then, considering how much I enjoyed Maguire on re-examination*, that even if this one doesn’t quite measure up, I still would surely have a new appreciation of it.

And it really isn’t there, unfortunately. Cameron’s other movies—so at least I can stop harping on Maguire—beg us to feel more, where this film keeps us at a distance, even and especially in the final act when David (Cruise) is supposed to be either, or simultaneously losing his mind or becoming a better person. That feeling is only reinforced after reading a little bit about the production and getting the distinct sense that remaking the spanish Abre Los Ojos (1997) was something closer to a cinematic experience than a real artistic impulse. I suppose, in that sense, we got off lucky. Crowe could have done a shot-for-shot remake of North by Northwest (1959) when he decided to go into the movie laboratory just for the sake of the laboratory.

Removing a degree of authorship from Crowe, the film does appear to be interesting on a whole other level than it was originally, or to my mind has ever really been discussed. The unravelling of this human soul, the simmering contempt for the psychiatrist (Russell), and the eventual realization that only Tech Support will be able to set our hero free, may make this Tom Cruise’s response to Battlefield Earth (2000). Can a film be accidetnally about Scientology? Maybe, but not with Cruise starring and producing.

*It’s intuitive to compare the two films, given their star and director and relative proximity to one another in time, but they really are like films from different planets.

Backrooms (2026)

Director: Kane Parsons

Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Haven’t seen the youtube series, either. But I’m bound by blog magic to acquiesce to any special requests made*.

Did I Like It: And I was willing to say that a large part of my distraction during the film is that I was not in on the whole mythology, wondering if this was how most people felt when they watched a Star Trek film.

But I’m not sure there even is any sort of deeper mythology here. The internet would be tripping over itself to tell me how the story of the film ties in with the web series, which in turn would tie in to the originaly memeification of the original 4chan posts.

Wait a minute. I watched a horror movie based on a meme? I watched a horror movie originally, sort of, even arguably based on 4chan posts?

All right.

The titular backrooms are set up to be a slow pitch down the middle for a novice horror movie cinematographer. Move the camera slightly in almost any direction and something can leap out of the shadows. That’s fine. I don’t have a problem with jump scares. They work, and work more reliably than almost any other scare tactic in the movies. Over-using them can be a problem, but piling them one on top of another like a warehouse of BOO! renders a film as just one long repeat of the last few minutes of The Blair Witch Project (1999). Even that’s not the worst approachfor a horror movie—the last few minutes of Blair Witch are the only ones that really approach working—but eventually I stop asking “What the hell was that?” and say “Oh. It’s a pirate. He wants to sell me a bedroom set, or bite me in the shoulder. Got it.”

*Feels like maybe I shouldn’t have revealed that.

Elizabeth (1998)

Director: Shekhar Kapur

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Christopher Eccleston, Joseph Fiennes

Have I Seen It Before: Yes… Although memory does fade. I do remember bits about the beginning, and friends in middle school—we were a weird crowd, I’ll admit—turned their nose up at Shakespeare in Love (1998) in favor of this movie, despite them both having almost identical casts.

Did I Like It: And its those memories I can’t help but think of when watching the film now. It’s the average biopics that grab your attention in the early minutes, and then are content to rest on their laurels while the script goes through the bullet points of a wikipedia article* while an actor goes blindly hunting for an Oscar. It predated this film, and the one I’m about to mention, but I’ve come to think of it as <Napoleon (2023)> syndrome. In that later film, Robespierre (Sam Troughton) fails to succesfully shoot himself in the face, and there’s two and a half more hours of Joaquin Phoenix diligently avoiding speaking French.

Here, before Blanchett spends an entrie movie kinda, sorta looking like the painting of the Queen, we are treated to an absolute horror show of the reign of Bloody Mary (Kathy Burke). The final days of Henry VIII’s first daughter as depicted hin this film might have inspired a strongly-worded letter from the Catholic League, the prior queen was also depicted like a Burton-style Batman villain. Cancer is terrible, but it looks to be an absolute nightmare beyond imagination in a time before decent painkillers and when the future of England’s ties to the Vatican are at stake.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie follows the rest of Napoleon syndrome and there is not a lot of structured story left to tell about the early reign of Elizabeth. At least Shakespeare in Love is trying to tell me a story.

*Or Encarta. Whatever the hell we used back then.

Jerry Maguire (1996)

Director: Cameron Crowe

Cast: Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding Jr., Renée Zellweger, Kelly Preston*

Have I Seen It Before: Sure. One of those “grown up” movies that was pretty near the top of the list of things to see for myself after people couldn’t stop me. My biggest memory of the early days of the film was in 1996 seeing the re-release of Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) at a second-run theater while my parents watched this movie. The reel broke in the middle of Empire, and I always thought I could hear George Lucas crying all the way from the ranch, and swearing to never let that happen again. I ask: Where’s the fun in that?

I never mentioned that in my review of Empire, and I wondered if that might be my last chance.

Did I Like It: There’s something magical in re-watching a film after many years and having it hit differently. It is heralded as a romantic comedy, and one of the greats of that genre, but it is far more at its core (and if you take away the famous “You complete me” scene, almost entirely**) about the need to unite the passion of what you do with the passion for who you’re with. It’s almost as if the workplace-drama as romantic comedy that Aaron Sorkin keeps whacking away at was finally perfected by Crowe early in his work.

I love my wife. I love my life. And I wish you my kind of success. That’s really what the Joker should have been quoting, if you ask me.

*Not to speak ill of the dead, but do you suppose the vibe on the set is different when two Scientologists are sharing the same scene? A cynical question, perhaps, for a film that begs us to let go of our cynicism, but it weighs on my mind all the same.

**It’s absolute canon in The Dark Knight (2008) that the Joker (Heath Ledger) caught this movie at some point. That… had to be a strange screening. Then again, maybe he doesn’t watch movies at all, and the 1996 zeitgeist leaked into his brain, just like it did for everybody else. It was either refer to this or have him break out into the Macarena.

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (2021)

Director: Robert B. Weide, Don Argott

Cast: Kurt Vonnegut, Robert B. Weide, Jerome Klinkowitz, Sidney Offit

Have I Seen it Before: Never, but it’s been on my radar for what seems like forever, or at least since I catalogued a poster for the film at Circle.

Did I Like It: I’m left slightly torn by this one. The uninitiated will learn the bullet points of Vonnegut’s life, although not much more than the domestic details that wouldn’t have already been learned from reading Slaughterhouse Five. Weide is given a wide degree of access to Vonnegut, and we see flashes of him outside of the books. He was so completely obliterated by the sins of the second Bush administration, one can’t help but wonder what he might have had to say about the horrors of the now, even if it meant he had to suffer the indignity of living to 100. I walk away from the film feeling as if I got to know Vonnegut a bit better, and liking him all the more.

But that’s also where the problem (possibly) comes into play. Is this a film about the wonder that was Vonnegut, or is it a film about Weide’s friendship with Vonnegut over the attempts to make the film. Normally, I would be tempted to say that if its the first, its a fairly flawed film, with the documentarian intruding on the documentary at hand, even as he is not terribly insistent in his objections to such a development.

With a directing partner in tow, though, I’m prepared to forgive the film for becoming a little bit about Weide as well as Vonnegut. It does tend to give the film an occasional lack of focus, but this proves to be a slight, and not fatal flaw in an film that otherwise proves to be essential watchign for anyone interested in Vonnegut, his work, or American letters at large.

Heathers (1988)

Director: Michael Lehmann

Cast: Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Shannen Doherty, Kim Walker

Have I Seen it Before: Never, and I accept your recriminations. I really should have by now, right? Given the masterful job of subversion that screenwriter Daniel Waters pulled off in Batman Returns (1992)* one would think that it would be at the top of my movies to watch decades ago.

Did I Like It: But there’s a problem. Sure, I can enjoy a John Hughes film as much as the next person, but I run into a bit of a block when it comes to high school films:

There were things I cared about in High School, but I didn’t really care much about High School itself. I didn’t go to senior prom, opting instead to catch X2: X-Men United (2003)**. In subsequent years, I have not regretted that decision in the slightest. I didn’t get a senior picture taken, and remember with great relish being threatened with being cut out of the yearbook entirely if I didn’t comply. I was truly the phantom of the class of 2003.

So, perhaps inevitably, the absolute obsession that most teen movies have with their present circumstances always rings some degree of hollow to me. If what we do in life won’t matter in 100 years, what we do in High School will—in most cases—last about twenty minutes.

So, imagine my relief when the film embraces every bit of the dark humor that Waters is capable of, and ends in survivng characters being nicer to one another, opting to rent movies and pop popcorn instead of going to the prom.

*Is now the time to talk about the abject tragedy of Catwoman (2004)? I just checked with the editor of the site and, yes it’s fine. Waters was ready to go for a second helping of Pfieffer and turned his script into Warner Bros. the very same day that Batman Forever (1995) was released, virtually guaranteeing that his script would be summarrily ignored. What we could have had…

**Is anybody else alarmed by the sheer amount of references I’ve made to superhero movies in this review? Just me. Okie-doke!

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Director: Ang Lee

Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen

Have I Seen it Before: Ok. So, here’s the thing. Two things happened simultaneously in the early 2000s. First, this film was huge. Second, I was resoundingly disinterested in martial arts movies.

Naturally, at some party that would barely qualify as a party by any reasonable adolexcent standards, I was forced to sit down and watch the movie. I remember bits of it. I strangely remember the end of it. I also remembered I was resoundingly unimpressed by the whole thing.

Remember, I can be wrong.

Did I Like It: And was. While I think I couldn’t quite get over the graceful movements of the characters, as if it were just a bit too theatrical, as if it were the action movie equivalent of characters breaking out into song in a musical.

Now, that’s exactly the kind of stuff I think is cool. Western action cinema may have briefly tried to ape this movie, but they were more content to pull from The Matrix (1999) but nothing could quite match its delicate balance of both whimsy and earnestness, including this film’s eventual sequel, which no one has even suggested I—to say nothing of force me to—watch.

It is that earnestness, though, that strikes me most clearly all these years later. I’m willing to admit it might just be a cultural film, but the restraint Li Mu Bai (Chow) and Yu Shu Lien (Yeoh) are more convincing in the their absolute lethal competence mixed with desperate desire to stop fighting than nearly every action or genre star in the western canon. Every move is an act of restraint, whether they are haunted by their love for one another or they (mostly him) are trying exact vengence for past wrongs.

Honestly, if you haven’t watched it, you just need to sit your ass down right now. We’re going to fix that. I’d like to watch it again.

About a Boy (2002)

Director: Paul Weitz, Chris Weitz

Cast: Hugh Grant, Toni Collette, Rachel Weisz, Nicholas Hoult

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. Every twenty years or so I go off the deep end of everything Nick Hornby, and this one ends up getting rolled up into the mix.

Did I Like It: There’s just something about Hornby’s novels—I did finish re-reading this one right before pressing play; like I said, deep end—where they are the opposite of most novels, and their cienmatic adaptation feels inevitable. High Fidelity (2000) can survive the indignity of being pulled from the UK to take place in Chicago, and still winds up being an exceptionally faithful, and strangely worthy adaptation of the source material. I tend to think of it as the Casino Royale (2006) syndrome. Try pitching making the original Bond movie, but excise Baccarat from the mix. Most purists would automatically turn their noses up and keep them there. Then, the film comes out, and it is a strangely faithful, and iminently loved adaptation.

Maybe British authors are just better at producing adaptable material.

Here, too, I’m struck by the fact that the book is not only begging to be made into a film, but begging to have Hugh Grant star as Will Freeman. The cadences of Will’s thoughts and speech are befuddled in the specifically Hugh Grant wavelength. Other British actors might have been able to do a commendable job in the role, but it wouldn’t appear to be such an easy, seemless performance.

The movie is certainly helped by the introduction of Hoult. Who knew he had a full-throated movie store living within him that was waiting for a growth spurt to be released? Here, he plays the awkward kid just past his cute phase with a similar ease. We should have known what he could do by his coming on the screen this self-assured.

The Invisible Man (1933)

Director: James Whale

Cast: Gloria Stuart, Claude Rains, William Harrigan, Una O’Connor

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: Sometimes I wonder if I’m going crazy, not unlike Jack Griffin (Rains) here. I actually wondered at some point during the screening of this film whether or not Whale is actually a great director, or if he was merely an absolutely master of casting.

It’s a crazy thought—Whale is undeniably a master, and to think anything else of he who wrought The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is, indeed deeply insane—but I think a lesser filmmaker of the era could glean a lesson from Whale’s casting that might be able to paper over their own deficiencies.

Honestly, if I stumble across a film and Una O’Connor* is in it, it is a good movie. She truly, absolutely is the Michael Keaton or Lupita Nyong’o of pre-1960 cinema**. She shows up in this, or Bride, or The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), or even later on in The Court Jester (1955) and the entire film around her disappears. Is she broad? Yes. Is she too broad for the movie around her? Never.

One might want to focus on the stars of great films of the past. Karloff, Errol Flynn, Danny Kaye, whoever. But there is so much enjoyment to find in the bit players and character actors.

And as good as all of the rest of those actors I listed were, Una O’Connor was the absolute, unassailable best at what she did. The Michael Jordan of bit players***.

*Honestly, she is not nowhere near the top four credited actors in this film (as the in-hours Party Now, Apocalypse Later style guid dictates, but as that guide is largely a figment of my own imagination, I am perfectly poised to override it.

**I said what I said, or at least typed what I typed.

***See the previous footnote.

Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Cast: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich*, Ralph Fiennes

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Feel weird missing out this long on new Coen Brothers, but it has, indeed been one of the weirdest, most exhausting decades one might have been able to imagine. Some things are bound to slip through the cracks.

Did I Like It: It’s a strangely slight movie. Likable, sure. Funny in the strange ways one comes to expect from the Coen Brothers, sure. But a prestige film clocking in at less than two hours smacks of studio interference, as if something had been gutted from the core of the film to ensure that it could run a maximum amount of times on opening weekend.

But that just may be the movie projecting on to me. Maybe no movie ever needs to be beyond two hours in its runtime. It’s a scary thought to entertain.

It’s probably wrong. Where would Zach Snyder be with thinking like that?

The real thing I’m struck by as I watch this is a fundamental paradox at play. Fundamental rule of movies: Regardless of when a movie takes place—the time of Jesus, the here and now, in the far flung future—you’ll be able to tell when the movie was made. As the odyssey of Eddie Mannix (Brolin) unfurls, there’s never a moment where I don’t think that the film was made sometime in the last ten years. And yet, each and every time we see something of the movies Capitol Pictures is making in 1951, they are absolutely believeable as movies of the era, yet are populated with the likes of Clooney, Channing Tatum, and Scarlett Johansson.

How do they pull of a trick like that, and also not pull of a trick like that.

*An actor whose name I find it increasignly difficult to spell. You just through as much of the letter “h” as you can, and just hope everything works out.

Pearl Harbor (2001)

Director: Michael Bay*

Cast: Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, Cuba Gooding Jr.

Have I Seen It Before: Yes. I honestly can’t remember if I saw the film in theaters or later on home video. Considering in the the theater would be May of 2001, and on disc would have been December 2001, the movie would have played distinctly different in the spread of that half a year.

Do I have a memory of seeing it before? Not even in the slightest.

What could possibly go wrong?

Did I Like It: I’m about a minute and a half into this film when I first role my eyes, and I know I’m in for a long three hours. Another three minutes or so and I’m treated to the two main characters as children accidentally launching into flight in a crop duster. Between this and Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), was there a rash of kids accidentally taking flight in the late 1990s/early 2000s? I don’t remember that being a thing? Incidentally, I had enough material fro a review inside of the first half hour. Maybe I’ll add to it as the film proceeds**.

The movie proceeds from there positively groaning to strike a balance between Armageddon (1998)-style bombast and a legitimate docudrama about the world of 1941.

Guess which mode wins out?

Okay, so, at some point in the near future I’m going to have to build the skill of finding nice things to say about bad movies. It’s probably time to start here. Jennifer Garner is a delight as the nerdy, uptight friend of Kate Beckinsale. She should have been the lead, but she’s far more interesting in her few minutes of screen time than any of the other eye-candy women we have here.

That probably says more me than anything else, so I’ll just leave it there.

But let’s get back to a far more pertinent or profound question: Is there a rational reason to watch this film, when From Here to Eternity (1953) is perfectly available? If you’ve got an answer, then I will wait patiently for it.

And, no, “one is in black & white, and the other is in color” is definitely not a valid reason, in case you were wondering.

*I originally typed that as “Michael Nay” and got a deep enough chuckle out of that, it’s a solid bet it’s more entertaining than the rest of the film.

**I did(n’t?). For any of my other thoughts, probably best to go lookat my Letterboxd review. Haven’t we gone on long enough about this one?

The Master (2012)

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymoutr Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern

Have I Seen it Before: I know I did. I don’t really remember having much of a reaction back then.

Did I Like It: It’s kind of fun to appraoch this film, if even for a moment, like the filmmakers and studio treated promoting the film. Is the film a post-World War II drama about a broken man (Phoenix) failing to—and failing to try to—find his way in the 1950s, or is it a thinly veiled roman à clef of the early days of…

…eep. I’m a little concerned I might get my own cease and desist letter if I finish that description of the film. You all know what I’m talking about.

If the film is more the prior description, it kind of sinks into the ponderous messes that Anderson is occasionaly guilty of making. Phoenix lurches his way through the saga of a deeply misanthropic man with the same somewhat jevenile approach he would later bring to bear in Joker (2019), almost to the point that I think dubbing that later film a rip off of Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1982), when Arthur Fleck clearly owes a lot to Freddy Quill as well.

When it is that… ahem… other thing, the film really comes alive. The targets are hit, especially Hoffman’s performance as a pulp writer turned religious figure. You know the type. His delicate balance between charisma and bleak, unrelenting cynic makes the man it is all (allegedly) based on that much more fascinating.

One could almost begin to see where people might start to devote themselves to such an organization*, when it has only Hoffman’s charisma to act as its guiding light. It also, thankfully, shows its hostility towards descent, and the absolutely ridiculous string of questions with which adherents must cope. It’s a delicate depicition of a cult before it even asks you to do something terrible, just when its being its most silly.

*They are the only western religion, after all, with a very clear stance of the motion blurring feature of modern TVs. There I go again, tipping my hand about what we’re actually discussing. In my defense, though: That bit was positive.

The First Omen (2024)

Director: Arkasha Stevenson

Cast: Nell Tiger Free, Tawfeek Barhom, Sônia Braga, Bill Nighy

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Been sitting on my to-watch pile for two years, and only just now got around to it, even some time after finishing the rest of the Omen series*.

Did I Like It: A horror series coming in with its fifth mainline entry after not having anything to say for itself in ten years, and ending its original run ove forty years earlier, it might be the most restrained act of franchise work ever in film. Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson, replacing Patrick Troughton from the original) is back, but it’s not like the last reel of the film has the narrative bending over backwards to have him where he needs to be during The Omen (1976). Aside from one of the characters handing another a snapshot of Gregory Peck, the entire film could have played out as a film on its own terms. I am legitimately at loss to think of a prequel or sequel which could 100% stand on its own without just becoming a complete reboot.

Maybe, maybe—and it would be a big stretch to try—one could make the case for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) but even that film hinges a gag on Indiana not being able to open fire on some swordsman hinges somewhat on your familiarity with Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

This allows me to judge the film on its own merits. As such, its a pefectly enjoyable little religious horror thriller. It’s one hell of a lot better than The Exorcist: Believer (2023). It also manages—give or take a haircut or two—largely looks more believably of the 1970s than most other period pieces can manage.

*Except for the fourth film. Even I have my limits. I had, of course completely forgotten there was a remake in 2006 (simply because no studio executive could resist releasing something Omen-related on 6/6/06, and had absolutely no awareness that the mythos had gotten the Bates Motel treatment back in 2016.

Lethal Weapon 4 (1998)

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Joe Pesci, Rene Russo.

Have I Seen It Before: I had to have at some point.

That probably tells you a little bit. Do we even need a review at this point. Well, we’ve come all this way. Might as well.

Did I Like It: You know what this movie reminds me of? The fourth season of Arrested Development. Everyone is here, there are even some new high-profile people to try and awkwardly fit into the mix, but it never seems like everybody had the same availability. Joe Pesci flits through the film that I seriously wondered if the twist at the end was that Leo Getz had been dead the entire time.

Alas, no.

What’s left is a movie that is all incident, and only occasionally interested in some kind of a story. That might be a fair criticism of the series as a whole, so maybe Lethal Weapon 4 is the inevitable culmination of everything that came before.

Which brings me to the inevitable, and perhaps unanswerable question: Should this be the end? Should any of us—to say nothing of the cast—be subjected to the long-threatened Lethal Finale?

Riggs (Gibson) and Murtaugh (Glover) are playing things in this like aging is right on top of them*, can we even imagine them putting off retirement all the way into Gavin Newsom’s California? Would they be bickering pensioners brought into some case against their will and have to bicker along with a newer, gentler LAPD?

Or, worse yet, would some Syd Field three-acter try to steal the structure of The Godfather - Part II (1974) and we’d have to sit through alternating flashbacks, complete with CGI Gibson and Glover?

Better question: With the death of Richard Donner, are we really interested in Mel Gibson having the opportunity to have what might be a mainstream redemption?

Alas, no. Let’s leave it at this, shall we?

*Don’t make me write down the line.

The Night Cry (1926)

Director: Herman C. Raymaker

Cast: Rin Tin Tin, June Marlowe, John Harron, Gayne Whitman

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. I like to go to these silent movies at Circle. For brief moments, I can feel like I was there a hundred years ago. It’s fleeting, but there can be brief moments. Unfortunately, Scorsese might be right when he says that the behavior of audiences aren’t really holding up their end of the cinema experience, post-COVID. There were two fellas behind me who either enjoyed the film far more than one might have expected, or were just making a point of performing like people who were enjoying the film. That could be forgiven—or even damn me a bit as a bit of a grump—but the lady taking video of the organist pretty much ensured that I was never anywhere other than the 2020s.

Did I Like It: I think it’s a pretty good bet that—in any era—if you’re going to give a dog top billing, you’re opting for a crowd pleaser in favor of any kind of nuance. That’s okay. There’s room for that in any era of cinema. I’ve often thought that certain genres—comedy, horror, the occasional adventure if it can keep things moving—stand the test of time. While others—most dramas, romances, and inexplicably enough, most westerns—show their age.

This movie contains bits of comedy, a romantic subplot, more than a few horses, some stabs at drama, and an attempt or two at actual cliffhangers.. If it had bothered to include a few vampires or an epic-retelling of some part of the bible, it might just have become the ur-text of the silent movie…

…without ever really picking one movie to be. So, a mark against it for trying to reach a century past its relevance to continue trying to please everyone. But, a mark in its favor for managing to offer something for everyone. The end equation becomes: is the dog cute? Sure, the dog is cute.

Lethal Weapon 3 (1992)

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Joe Pesci, Rene Russo

Have I Seen It Before: Yes. The gulf between my review of Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) and this film is a little odd, as I started re-watching this one immediately thereafter, drifted somewhere in the middle of the hockey game sequence, and then five years passed before I came back to it.

Did I Like It: That probably tells you something. There’s at least some degree of difficulty finding Gibson charming when he isn’t trying to be feral. Naturally, someone like Mad Max is never going to be anything other than feral, but eventually now that Riggs has found some place to belong in the world and gotten as much revenge for the death of his wife as he’s likely ever going to get, what is left for the character to do? Domesticate himself? That’s never going to seem like anything less than genuine, and the whole film suffers for it.

Relying on Glover or Pesci to pick up the slack doesn’t seem like much of a recipe for a three-quel. Glover is doing the same schtick he’s been doing for three films now, and he’s a much better actor that the series was ever able to challenge him to display. Pesci provided the most annoying parts of the previous film, and I’ve got a couple of comments about whatever marketing report insisted he receive third billing behind Glover and Gibson. The buddy cup duo is a well-worn formula. The buddy cop and their friend building a trio was an awkward enough phrase to type for this review, to say nothing of trying to jam it into a poster or Syd Field’s three-act structure.

And this thing came out like a week and a half after the Rodney King riots. How could it possibly have played as anything other than tone-deaf, even in that magical, far away land of “another time.” Even the cartoonish treatment of Apartheid in 2 felt like something of a moral stance, not just random highlighting of stories from the Los Angeles Times.

No wonder Jeffrey Boam got credited three times for writing the film*. It’s a disjointed mess, and the film can’t even decide who’s responsible.

*Yes, I know how the credits got like that. There still has to be a point when the WGA decides what their rules dictate are just going to make them look like idiots.