Here we have Keanu Reeves’s second appearance as an unconvincing attorney of questionable moral character scrutinizing the validity of rape accusations. And, boy, is this sub-genre a lot less fun without Al Pacino as satan!

The Whole Truth is stealing from everywhere. From the outset, it feels like the filmmakers wanted to make a John Grisham adaptation, but decided they didn’t want to pay the man. It’s adorned itself with indistinct Southern accents and a protagonist who’s going to take off his suit-jacket, roll up his white button-up, and get the job done.

I love seeing South Korea dramatize its own history, and that’s what led me to watching this film in the first place. They tend to do it with a lot of verve and panache, and I also get inspired to read a bit about their history. The years of instability and political upheaval between the Korean War and the finalization of its democratic constitution (1953-1987) are to me the most fascinating.

Hotel Transylvania is the debut feature of Cartoon Network legend Genndy Tartakovsky. It is bursting at the seams with ideas. However, these ideas seem to mostly be coming from the SNL brain trust that this film rests its foundation upon. You’ll find few similarities between this and Tartakovsky’s television work.

Everything that glitters is not gold. Some delights of childhood innocence are best left unexplored. The Chocolate Factory is not one of them.

I believe I had already revisited this as an adult, but there was something magical about it this time. Details emerged that I was always too distracted by the eye-popping everything to notice—the sublime lunacy of the entire world’s obsession with Wonka, Charlie’s tender heart, and how explicit many people were in conspiring with Slugworth (Grandpa Joe included!).

Much like the Space Jam films that were produced under the same Warner Bros. Animation banner, there is such a tonal disconnect between the live-action and animated sequences that it feels as if we’re channel surfing between two separate films concurrently.

The Farrelly brothers are the top name attached to this project, but they apparently only contributed the live-action sequences—which is very clearly the worse half of the film. There’s absolutely no sign that they were supervised by an established director. One would assume they were just assembled by whatever second unit television director was available each week throughout the production schedule.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this. Perhaps a bad film is just a bad film. There’s been Oscar-bait for decades. But it wasn’t until very recently that people started thinking of films as justice. It wasn’t until very recently that people began to qualify negative criticism with, “this story deserves to be told, but…” Perhaps I think too little of film for a cinephile. I see it as a great success as an empathy machine, but as entirely limp when it comes to enacting change in the real world—and that’s the only place you’ll find justice. Justice at the movies is killing Hitler in Act III of Inglourious Basterds. It’s a bit of catharsis.

“Elements, man,” I said in my review of the original, in praise of how far topic and tone can carry a film.

National Treasure 2 seems to exist purely to call that conjecture into question. It’s certainly got it all—adventure, treasure, espionage, secrets hiding in plain sight. But this sequel finds that there’s a ceiling. Book of Secrets, like many a sequel, does the same thing (and, boy, does it do the same thing) but more, bigger, and faster. Unfortunately, the original was teetering on the edge between silly fun and just plain silly. You wouldn’t have to turn the knob very far to turn a good thing into a bad, and that knob was turned from 11 to whatever comes after 11.

Can you do satire of a past era? That is a question prompted by a viewing of Y2K. Perhaps to truly answer that question, we should be using a film better than this as a measuring stick, but it’s caught in my mind nonetheless. It seems so shallow and cheap to reduce an era to a stereotype and then poke fun at it, but that is Y2K’s formula: identify a 90s trend, imbue a character with it, and… laugh? I’m genuinely confused how much of this was supposed to be a mockery of the era and how much was supposed to be a trip down memory lane. Regardless, both are losing strategies.

Elements: those things that are attractive to a prospective filmgoer, which even if jumbled together haphazardly are still bound to pass on a non-zero amount of pleasure. These are settings (camel riding in the desert—ooo!) scenarios (heist planning sequence—nice!) and story archetypes (a crusty old man finds his soft spot—aww!). These are the foundations of escapist entertainment.

“Kill me.”

“We always find greatness in the dead. In the end, we forgive them. I don't want anyone to forgive you.”

At some point during Babygirl I began to wonder what the film would have been like with someone other than Kidman in the lead role. Kidman has a trademark psychopathic coldness that she imbues in every performance she’s ever given. She’s undoubtedly the iciest movie star that’s ever existed—the polar opposite of what a movie star is ostensibly supposed to be.

{I saw this at a screening put together by the band a couple days before a performance.}

Dengue is a special act. They’re the only group doing revival work that’s genuinely important. It’s been a decade now since I fell in love with Cambodian rock after hearing the first few seconds of Jam 10 Kai Theit (Wait Ten Months More) from the Golden Voice herself, Ros Serey Sothea on The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Cambodia. The melding of East & West sensibilities was perhaps never better than it is on that track though there is a gold mine of little heard songs from that era.

They don’t make them like they used to. That’s a sentiment tossed around more and more frequently in an era of ever-increasing change. In some respects, you wouldn’t be unwarranted in thinking that I was going to call Novocaine a form of old-school, mainstream entertainment—the kind of thing that could be, somewhat derisively, referred to as a “dad movie.”

This is what Hollywood should be churning out: original yet familiar ideas that are entertainment with a dash of commentary. The film paints in broad strokes and creates a pulpy, bombastic ride. It’s simple, it’s joyous, it’s entertainment. Any deeper message is going to get lost in the shuffle—at least on a first viewing.
This is quintessential Bong Joon-ho; only he could blend a hundred different ideas into a film—often within the same scene—and make it feel tonally uniform and maintain rhythm. How Bong can swerve directly around a serious beat to punt a killer line sky high into the air is just sublime.