Category: Film

REVIEW: The Wild Robot

artsyramblings Leave a comment

Based on Peter Brown’s 2016 middle-grade novel of the same name, Universal Pictures’ The Wild Robot centers around ROZZUM-7134, or “Roz” (Lupita Nyong’o), a robot created by company Universal Dynamics to serve a variety of tasks in their cities. After her delivery ship is shipwrecked on an island, she forms a family of sorts with fox Fink (Pedro Pascal), and goose Brightbill (Kit Connor).

 

Lupita Nyong’o is fabulous here. Her voice-acting is pristine, and gradually gains emotional range and variation as Roz does, breaking from her pre-programmed expressions and knowledge in order to adapt to an environment which requires – and permits – it. The rest of the cast shines too: the names are generally big, but they don’t feel as if they’ve been cast just because they’re famous. They feel suited to the characters, and deliver engaging performances that feel real, enlivening the generally very good screenplay of Chris Sanders (who is also the film’s director).

 

Like its cast, the majority of The Wild Robot is excellent. The animation is a gorgeous watercolor-esque style, and almost every still feels like a work of art. The audience is generally trusted to understand information without it being spoon-fed to them. There is humor accessible to kids, humor for any adults watching, and not much toilet humor. Kids can enjoy the goofy possum kids who play dead and their squabbling; adults can enjoy the specificity of one of them explaining that their play-death was so slow because they were dying of meningitis.

 

The film weakens in its final conflict. Roz has been steadily breaking down – she’s not made for life on a human-free island, and she’s been sacrificing herself in order to raise Brightbill. Her worsening physical condition is shown throughout the film. This is not what the climax of the film is about. Instead, the movie opts for an evil robot attack, led by Vontra (Stephanie Hsu), who is sent to bring Roz back to the humans so that they can study her. The animals fight back, and defeat them, but Roz ultimately chooses to go back to the humans, so that the island isn’t attacked again. Presumably, she manages to get fixed there, as she seems fine the next time we see her. The humans’ motivations for their actions seem vague, and the whole thing just feels a bit as if it comes out of nowhere. It feels like it happened in large part because animals fighting evil robots seems cool. And it is cool. But the rest of the film manages to do cool and interesting things with a really strong focus on character, and this didn’t feel like that to me. It did manage to provide a pseudo-death for Brightbill to bring Roz back from through the power of familial love, but Roz was already falling apart, and he could have just brought her back from that pseudo-death instead – that could even have had more emotional weight, as her dying would have been linked more directly to him.

 

Final robot battle aside (and even that is quite good given that it happens), The Wild Robot is a witty and warm story with a largely strong script that’s got something for audiences of many ages to enjoy.

REVIEW: Saturday Night

Madi Hammond Leave a comment

It’s Saturday night in the city that never sleeps, and a frazzled Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) is trying to maintain his cool in the 90 minutes before the premiere of his magnum opus, a risque and revolutionary live television show. A head shorter than every musical guest, comedian and NBC executive, Michaels is faced with an angry censorship representative, wildly ballooning expenses, a show that is almost two hours too long and grumpy comedian Jim Belushi who refuses to sign his contract.

Saturday Night is a mythologized and loose retelling of the iconic cultural moment that is the first airing of Saturday Night Live, the NBC sketch comedy show now in its fiftieth season. The characters are real writers and cast from those early seasons, including Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase and Matt Wood as Jim Belushi. But the main point of tension, that David Tebet (Willem Dafoe) would switch to a Johnny Carson rerun tape instead, is mostly fiction. 

Just like how Michaels says his show is meant to encapsulate the feeling of being alive in New York City, the film – while not totally accurate – aims to encapsulate the chaotic and unpredictable nature of the earliest seasons of SNL. In the movie, several legendary stories from 30 Rock appeared in the 90 minutes before the show’s premiere, while in reality iconic scenes like Belushi ice skating in a bee costume occurred years later. Michaels did in fact meet legendary comedy writer Alan Zwiebel (Josh Brener) at a bar, but it was not in fact 20 minutes before the premiere began. 

The movie is not meant to be a hyper-realistic documentary about the first time SNL aired. Rather, it is a depiction of the chaotic and unprecedented nature of this new style of live television and how it came about. 

The screen intermittently cuts to a time card ticking away the minutes until 11:30, when the show is supposed to start. While this is meant to add to the tension of time quickly slipping away, it doesn’t fulfill this effect. While ninety minutes is not a lot of time to pull together a live television show, it is a decent amount of time to sit in a theater and watch. This aspect could be cut, and the time pressure would still be felt through the nonstop dialogue and constant flow of problems.

In a bit of awkward exposition that is out-of-place amidst the jumble of conversations and barrage of problems on set, writer Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott) details the nature of her relationship with husband Michaels to her boyfriend, Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien). This is one of the more accurate aspects of the film, as it was widely known at the time that Shuster was both married to Michaels and openly dating Aykroyd. It humanizes Michaels, who is a constant flurry of stress, and part of the iconic web of SNL stories, but its integration was clunky.

There is so much going on in this movie that it would be impossible to recount it all. There’s almost too much, but that’s part of its charm. The film exemplifies the excitement and chaos by being exciting and chaotic, leaving the audience energized and inspired to take a trip to the Big Apple.

REVIEW: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Abigail Goodman Leave a comment

Right after watching “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” and right before a sleepless night of terror and anxiety, I had an argument with my friend. From my perspective, the film is a perfectly-constructed yet meaningless slasher movie exploiting an understanding of human psychology to menace audiences for no real reason. As Roger Ebert said back in his 1974 review, “it’s simply an exercise in terror.” From my friend’s perspective, the film is a master class of storytelling and theme, harnessing the horror genre as a vehicle through which to express family infighting, fear of disability, and the inherent dread of living in small-town Texas. 

I wasn’t buying that – what about the movie’s constant reversal back to tired old horror tropes to express these themes? That doesn’t strike me as very creative, or very revolutionary. “Abigail,” my friend said, looking at me like I just told her Marvel movies are the height of cinema, “‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ invented those tropes.”

Released in 1974 by director Tobe Hooper, “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” is the prototype of horror movie filmmaking that Gen Z’ers like me already know in our bones. In Tropedia, a wiki for artistic tropes, the movie is credited as a “Trope Maker,” the first example of themes that would eventually become wildly familiar. The movie follows Sally and her wheelchair-bound brother Franklin, who are traveling, along with three friends, through rural Texas to visit their grandfather’s grave. They’re on this road trip because of a string of grisly grave robberies that have been terrorizing and mystifying the town. 

Things get weird quick. The squad soon picks up a scary hitchhiker, who seems mentally ill and cuts Franklin with a knife. When they run out of gas and stop at a gas station, it is suspiciously out of fuel. After deciding to knock on a nearby dilapidated-looking house for help, the group is confronted by Leatherface, a deranged murderer, and his three cannibalistic accomplices. The group kills the kids off one-by-one, with only Sally emerging alive but traumatized. 

For the scaredy-cat in me, that plot is riveting enough. But for the snobby film reviewer, I’m amazed to watch the first seeds of the modern horror genre being planted. The abiding horror of remote southern towns? Sounds a lot like “Children of the Corn.” A group of rowdy youngins being picked off by a murderer? “Scream,” “Friday the 13th,” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” come to mind. That murderer using a chainsaw to run down his victims…does that remind anyone else of “American Psycho”?

Few movies are remembered for both spawning a whole genre and perfect cinematography. Shot after shot in “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” the tension is stretched, streeetched, streeeeetched – and then breaks. In one memorable scene, the camera zooms in on Sally’s terrified, vividly-green eyes as her assailants feast on human flesh around an elegant dinner table. “Yes please,” say artistic giants like Ridley Scott, Guillermo del Toro, Stephen King, and Quentin Tarantino, who have all praised and drawn inspiration from the film. This is the stuff of nightmares. And of history.

REVIEW: The Apprentice

Abigail Goodman Leave a comment

Roy Cohn is a malicious vulture on screen: he flicks his tongue over his lips, piercing eyes bulging out of the sides of his face, head bobbing as he sizes up his prey. His philosophy can be summed up as “play the man not the ball,” and he backs up that worldview with a hidden backroom filled with incriminating tapes he uses to blackmail the necessary judge, politician, or prosecutor. In “The Apprentice,” we see how he turned a young, ambitious Donald Trump into the former president America knows today.

Director Ali Abbasi’s fantastic Donald Trump origin story is shepherded by the acting chops of its two stars: Jeremy Strong, tragic figure of  “Succession,” as Roy Cohn, and Sebastian Stan, squared-jawed Marvel hero, as Donald Trump. When the two meet in an exclusive NYC club in the 1970s – Cohn already an established lawyer and Trump a real estate upstart looking to impress his draconian father – thus begins a relationship that will last decades. Trump is struggling with a lawsuit alleging anti-black discrimination against his tenants. Cohn, the shrew political operator, makes his problem go away. Perhaps he sees something in the young man desperate to make a name for himself. Perhaps he simply likes having the tall, blonde, handsome – as he says, “thoroughbred” – Trump around. Either way, the apprentice is born. 

Aside from the first meeting scene, which sets the stage, the plot zooms through key points in the Trump timeline. He’s buying the decrepit Commodore hotel! He’s fighting for a tax break from anti-corruption mayor Ed Koch! He’s being interviewed on TV! He’s buying casinos! He went bankrupt! He’s back again! Roger Stone is convincing him to run for office under the slogan “Make America Great Again”….well, we know how that ends up. 

Many Americans are only familiar with the third act of Trump’s story. “The Apprentice” introduces us to the first and second. The plot is certainly entertaining enough to captive audiences for its two-hour runtime. But the emotional core of the movie is the relationship between Cohn and Trump, played to perfection by both actors, and its evolution as Trump goes from apprentice to master of the universe. Trump’s intoxication with Cohn – who journalist Wayne Barrett described as having “the presence of Satan” – is plenty juicy. But Trump’s surpassing of Cohn, even betrayal of Cohn as Trump gains power, is much more poignant. 

Alongside actors Strong and Stan is an incredibly talented supporting cast. Fred Trump (Martin Donovan) is as terrifying as he is bushy-eyebrowed. Fred Trump Jr. (Charlie Carrick), Trump’s older brother who died young from alcoholism, should have his own movie. The best in the bunch is perhaps Maria Bakalova as Trump’s first wife Ivana, the Czechoslovakia-born powerhouse, who is a capable interior designer as well as socialite to the New York City elite. This hardworking drive would eventually lead to her divorce, with Trump, jealous of people seeing his wife as his business equal, leaving Ivana for his mistress. 

Obviously (at least in my opinion), Abbasi’s releasing of the movie just 25 days before the election is a political move. Trump’s campaign manager duly responded, calling the movie “garbage” and “malicious defamation” that “sensationalizes lies” about Trump. I certainly do not believe “The Apprentice” will sway any Trump voters to the other side. In fact, the movie will most likely contribute to his cult of personality. Who is this businessman, this charlatan, this leader of men, this future president, this bumbling idiot. To whom did we vest the most power in, perhaps, the entire world. Who is The Donald? Do we want to find out?

REVIEW: Joker: Folie à Deux

Abigail Goodman Leave a comment

When Joker was released back in 2019, some even called it a masterpiece. The film’s high-definition realism and bleak nihilism offered a topical, fresh take on the much-beloved supervillain. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), an isolated-yet-gentle failed comedian with mental health problems, is failed by every system that is supposed to take care of him. His descent into lunacy is a result of society’s failings, not an inherent evil or psychopathy. Gotham is burned to the ground, and Thomas Wayne, father to the future Batman, is dethroned as a bully and false emperor. 

In 2019, this version of Joker’s struggle for Gotham’s soul worked. Covid-19 was making its way to the United States, condemning us all to a long period of isolation and stress. Donald Trump’s presidency was emboldening hate groups throughout America. George Floyd’s murder in mid-2020 resulted in widespread protests that reflected the outpouring of anger in Joker’s final scenes. The film offered genuine insight into the public mood, and was rewarded with generally good reviews and box office success. 

Joker: Folie à Deux does not work. Directed by Todd Phillips and with the same creative team as the original, it’s hard to tell how the sequel went so wrong, so fast. The costumes and sets are high-quality. Lawrence Sher’s cinematography is wonderfully grimy and dramatic. Lady Gaga is skillful as the deranged Harley Quinn to Fleck’s Joker. Even the decision to make the movie a musical feels appropriate in the context of Fleck’s break from reality. But while Joker had a hero’s (or anti-hero’s) story, Joker: Folie à Deux’s plot of Fleck’s imprisonment in the brutal Arkham State Hospital and trial for murder meanders on with no purpose or obvious audience. There is no more cultural mood to tap into, no fresh take on an over-renditioned cartoon. It’s just a nothingburger of horror. 

Unlike in Joker, which witnessed a full character transformation and societal upheaval, nothing actually ends up happening in Joker: Folie à Deux. Fleck is marched back and forth between courthouse and cell, terrorized by sadistic guards, falls headfirst into a relationship with so little chemistry I cringed every time Phoenix and Lady Gaga were on screen together. Harvey Dent, played by a handsome Harry Lawtey, is cast as the prosecutor on Fleck’s murder case, but has none of the yummy capitalist greed as the original’s Thomas Wayne. In fact, we find ourselves rooting for him over the obnoxious and defeated Arthur, who never even does anything as Joker: not a crime, not a murder, just one tepid escape attempt that goes nowhere. The film’s ending is random to the point of absurdity. 

As for the musical scenes, I felt they were used as an excuse to break up a script mostly just killing time. Lady Gaga’s immense talent was put to use on limp songs seemingly unconnected to the plot, while Phoenix’s acting chops were given nothing to work with – just a Potemkin village of meaningless violence that had audience members checking their watches for when we could finally go home. 

If this film had a message to tell, I would be all ears. But Joker already made his stand. There was no need to drag this killer clown out for an encore. 

REVIEW: Spy x Family Code: White

Sappy Leave a comment

Spy x Family is one of my favorite anime, so I was super excited when I heard there’s a movie, especially since the end of the last season felt incomplete. Spy x Family is a comedy anime that follows the daily life of the Forger family. As the agency’s most talented spy, Loid Forger is tasked with Operation Strix: a high-risk mission that requires him to form a fake family to maintain world peace. He marries Yor Forger, unknowing that she’s a top-tier assassin, and adopts Anya Forger, a telepath.

In the new movie, Spy x Family Code: White, Loid is told by his superior that mission Operation Strix is to be transferred to a new agent, meaning that the Forger family is no longer needed. To stay in charge of Operation Strix, Loid must prove that he and his fake family are the most fitting for the role. The movie isn’t written by the author of Spy x Family, Tatsuya Endo; I didn’t know this beforehand, but it became obvious halfway through. While Loid and Yor didn’t seem any different, Anya’s shift in personality is what gave it away. I think the out-of-characterness was a tool to be more humorous but at some times it was too much. To be completely honest, it lacked the same charm the anime has in terms of storytelling and plot. The creators did a good job setting it up in the beginning, but in the homestretch, it became rushed and had some unexpected (not necessarily in a good way) twists.

It’s possible to watch the movie without having seen the anime, but it would help. I’d recommend watching the anime over watching the movie, which feels more like a fun addition rather than an essential story. I still had a lot of fun watching it though!