Reviews: Films Old and New
Megalopolis, Wolfs, Deadpool and Wolverine, Kill, and others
Megalopolis
46% on Rotten Tomatoes. 5.0 out of 10 on IMDb. 55% on Metacritic. Opening weekend box office gross of $4 million against a reported $120 million budget (multiple that number by 2 or 3 to come up with a total cost that includes marketing and distribution). These numbers are not encouraging, right? And yet …
Despite the massive success of the Godfather films, Francis Ford Coppola has always been an experimental filmmaker at heart. Most of his films have aged very well, with popular opinion swinging in their direction as time passes. It will be the same for Megalopolis.
The film is visually overwhelming. The ambition is galactic. There were more than a few moments when I thought I was seeing things on screen that I had never seen before. There were times when I thought to myself, “This is the antithesis of popular culture today, a film that’s actually trying to say something other than ‘Buy the action figures, Lego sets, and collectible popcorn buckets.’”
Not everything works, but not everything worked in Apocalypse Now either. Some of it is downright silly - but a lot of it isn’t. I left the film thinking that it should have either been an hour shorter (to bring the story into better focus) or three hours longer (to better understand the characters and their motivations). I would even go so far as to suggest that this might have faired better as an 8-hour limited series on Netflix (although I suspect that Coppola’s ego didn’t allow him to consider such an option).
The bottom line is that I liked it - a lot. I was tempted to go back to see it the following weekend. I’ll wait for the digital release. I think I’m going to like it more on the second viewing, and the tenth.
Deadpool and Wolverine
I saw this when it first came out and enjoyed parts of it. I watched it again the day after watching Megalopolis and I barely made it to the end. Yes, I enjoyed the snark and the constant breaking of the 4th wall. I enjoyed the faux irreverence initially shown to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (ugh) before it eventually flipped a switch and fell into line. I hated the fact that large segments of it would be virtually unintelligible to someone who hasn’t watched the last 47 MCU films and 832 MCU TV series.
There are only two ambitions at play here - to make money (it is now the highest grossing R-rated film ever) and to entertain (for most people it succeeded in that). There’s nothing wrong with that. But don’t put it up to be anything more than that. It has the same artistic significance as Jerry Lewis singing The Beatles’ Help on Hullabaloo in 1965.
Eastern Promises
This 2007 film was the collaboration between the great David Cronenberg and Steven Knight (the creator of Peaky Blinders). Cronenberg steps away from his usual science fiction and horror themes to deliver this story of Russian gangsters in London, with fantastic performances from Viggo Mortensen, Armin Muehler-Stahl, and Vincent Cassel (and an okay performance from Naomi Watts). It seems authentic and real, almost up until the end, when an unanticipated plot twist leads to an ending that I felt took away a lot of what came before.
Wolfs
Why “Wolfs”? Why not “Wolves”? I’m going to guess that it has something to do with the re-teaming of George Clooney and Brad Pitt 17 years after Ocean’s Thirteen in some bizarro-world tribute to Harvey Keitel’s “The Wolf” character from Pulp Fiction.
Clooney and Pitt both expressed disappointment when Apple decided against giving this film a full theatrical release, putting it into theaters for just one week before it started streaming. They made the right decision. Without the two leads’ star power, this would have quickly disappeared. Instead, it has gone on to be the most-watched film in Apple TV+’s history.
Kill
Once this mega-violent ultra-gory Indian action film gets going, it never stops. Think of The Raid: Redemption on a train. It goes further than I would have expected, with some genuine surprises to go along with the inventive fight choreography. I loved it.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
I recently finished reading Robert P. Kolker’s and Nathan Abrams’ excellent biography of Stanley Kubrick. It discusses his years-long struggle to come up with a finished story and screenplay for this sort-of-Pinocchio tale. It’s entirely possible that had he not died before completing Eyes Wide Shut, this would have been his next film. Instead, the project was picked up by his friend Steven Spielberg, who couldn’t quite crack it either. There are moments in this film that are darker than anything Spielberg did (before or after) and moments of tremendous sadness. It’s worth seeing but it doesn’t stand the test of time, and not just because of the way technology has moved forward since then. (Trivia: Ken Leung, “Eric Tao” from Industry, has one line in the film.)
Arrival
Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve had graduated to the big leagues with the trifecta of Prisoners, Enemy, and the almost-flawless Sicario. Arrival represented his first foray into science fiction. (After this he would go on to direct Blade Runner 2049 and the two Dune films.) The plot itself doesn’t seem all that promising - 12 alien spaceships land on Earth and a linguist has to figure out how to communicate with them. And yet, not only is it never boring, it manages to go far deeper emotionally than anyone might have rightfully expected. It handles the time-related twist as well as anything Christopher Nolan has done. Also a special tip o’ the hat to Johann Johannsson for a fantastic score. Nominated for 8 Oscars (winning only for sound mixing), this is intelligent and deeply emotional science fiction.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
People love this film, don’t they? 8.0 rating on IMDb. “Rules? In a knife fight?” “I am still in the employment of E. H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad!” The jump off that cliff. The chemistry between Newman and Redford.
I think what they forget is that there are a lot of horrible moments. The entire bicycle/Raindrops sequence. The photo montage of them in New York with the Burt Bacharach score that seems copied out of the 1967 version of Casino Royale. The film was immensely popular in its time. It was nominated for 7 Academy Awards and won for screenplay, cinematography, original song (yes, Raindrops) and original score.
It galls me to this day that the vastly superior The Wild Bunch was released in the same year but this is the film that got all the attention.
In Brief
Blink Twice - actress Zoe Kravitz makes her directorial debut in this slow-burning horror film about a tech billionaire who owns his own island, and what he does there. She sticks the landing but takes her time getting there.
The Killer’s Game - I like Dave Bautista. Really. But not as the lead in a romantic action film.
Midsommar - my third time watching it, I hated it the first time, I liked it the second time, I loved it the third time. Yeah, it’s long, it’s strange, it’s shocking, and it’s memorable.
Napoleon: Director’s Cut - From 2 hours and 38 minutes to almost 3 and a half hours. Sometimes when Ridley Scott goes historical (Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Kingdom of Heaven), he soars. Sometimes (1492: Conquest of Paradise) he falls flat on his face and fractures his nose. This is somewhere in the middle. The recreations of the famous battle scenes are as good as anything Scott’s ever done. The decision to show Napoleon as humorously obsessed with sex is just weird. Overall it’s too episodic; probably attempting to tell this story in a single film was too ambitious - maybe that’s why Kubrick walked away from it 50 years ago.