The Director's Chair

The Director’s Chair – Don Bluth

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There are a number of animators who manage to rise up to the ranks of directors that become household names.  Today, you see the likes of Brad Bird, Chris Sanders, Pete Doctor, or the team of Christopher Miller and Phil Lord become well known in the film industry beyond just the field of animation.  But for the longest time, being an animation director was not much of a step above just being an animator.  The early days of animation often left the director’s name out of the credits of the cartoons that ran in theaters alongside feature films, and the only name associated with the shorts were the names of the people who own the studios that made them.  When you saw a short cartoon, you would be seeing a Disney Cartoon, or a Fleischer Cartoon.  Warner Brothers didn’t even have a name attached to their shorts, just calling them Looney Tunes or Merry Melodies instead.  It was only in the post-War years where animation directors were given more credit, but even still, they were known mostly just to animation aficionados.  Chuck Jones emerged out of the Looney Tunes shorts factory to carve out his own name in animation, particularly with his work on the holiday short How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966).  Wolfgang Reitherman, one of Walt Disney’s treasured Nine Old Men, would take the reigns of animation at the studio, directing most of the features at Disney after Walt’s death, from The Jungle Book (1967) to The Rescuers (1977).  And of course, Richard Williams was becoming a legend in the animation world for a movie he would never finish called The Thief and the Cobbler.  But, household named directors from the animation world has been a relatively new thing, and even in this case, it’s still a rarity.  An animation director that you can really point out as the person who helped to break through and make a name for himself both in animation and in Hollywood in general was an ambitious animation pioneer named Don Bluth.

Don Bluth began his animation career right out of college working as an inbetweener at Disney.  After a couple years, he was made an assistant animator for Disney Nine Old Man legend John Lounsbery and he got to contribute to the animation of movies like Sleeping Beauty (1959).  He left Disney not long after that to go on a mission for the Morman Church, and after that he did a lot of freelance work as a layout artist for Filmation.  In 1971, he returned to Disney to work alongside his old colleague John Lounsbery on films such as Robin Hood (1973) and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977).  He was promoted to directing animator The Rescuers, and many believed that with the upcoming retirements of the aging Nine Old Men that Bluth would be one of the heirs to the Disney Animation studio now that the old guard was leaving.  Sadly, his mentor John Lounsbery also passed away suddenly during this time.  Bluth was also butting heads with the higher ups at Disney, voicing his displeasure at their lack of creativity during the post-Disney years and relying on safe projects like Pete’s Dragon (1978).  While Bluth was working on the Nativity themed short, The Small One (1978), him and a team of his fellow Disney animators were covertly working on a secret independent project called Banjo, The Woodpile Cat (1979).  Disney was not happy with Bluth’s independent work, and Bluth decided that his time at the Disney Studio was over.  He quit and took a huge chunk of the Disney Animation staff with him, leaving Disney’s animation department devastated.  Bluth, along with his key cohorts Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy, established Don Bluth Productions and they began work on their first feature as an independent studio, called The Secret of NIMH (1982).  Eventually getting released by MGM, NIMH was a huge success for Bluth and established him as rising star in animation.  Soon after, Steven Spielberg became interested in working with Bluth, and he signed with Amblin Productions for a two film deal, making An American Tail (1986) and The Land Before Time (1988).  It was an opportune time for him, with his rise and Disney’s struggles with The Black Cauldron (1985).  It looked like Bluth would soon become the biggest name in animation since Walt himself.  And then something changed.  After All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989), Bluth’s track record got spotty just as Disney was beginning their Renaissance.  He got a second chance in the late 90’s with a new set up at 20th Century Fox, making the ambitious musical fantasy Anastasia (1997) but even this was short lived as the studio closed after the failure of Titan A.E. (2000).  Bluth hasn’t directed a feature since.  Below is a look at the different spotlights of his animation style and a career, and how they continue to define him as a key figure in animation.

1.

DARKER THEMES IN FAMILY ENTERTAINMENT

Of all the things that drove Don Bluth away from Disney it was perhaps his belief that the studio had abandoned it’s roots that became the biggest area of contention.  Bluth believed that Disney should’ve been taking bigger risks in the post-Walt years, citing the way that Disney’s earliest films were bigger gambles than the play-it-safe films that they were making at the time.  In particular, he believed that animation shouldn’t be afraid to tackle darker themes and tones.  Disney’s earliest movies all had moments that were much darker and sometimes terrifying, such as “Night on Bald Mountain” in Fantasia (1940) or the Pleasure Island sequence in Pinocchio (1940).  With Disney making films like The Aristocats (1970) and The Rescuers (1977), it was clear that they were retreating away from scary moments and were catering to a much younger crowd.  For Bluth, he believed that there was a way to make animation darker and more mature without alienating family audiences.  The very first film he worked on, The Secret of NIMH, is perhaps the best illustration of his mission statement.  The film is harrowing and at times violent, but it still maintains a sense of enchantment that young children could still be invested in, and it had it’s own colorful cast of animal characters to keep the story whimsical too.  The slate of films Don Bluth made during the 80’s in many ways continued this blend of family friendly warmth spiced with a hint of danger and at times scary imagery.  But, also Bluth was also not afraid of bringing in a bit of tragic consequences into his stories as well; something he took inspiration from in early Disney movies.  It’s undeniable that the death of Littlefoot’s mother in The Land Before Time was inspired by the similar loss of a parent in Disney’s Bambi (1942), and it also may have later inspired a similar moment in Disney’s own The Lion King (1994).  It was this commitment to bringing animation back to it’s riskier roots that helped to distinguish Don Bluth’s movies from those of other animation studios.  It’s kind of ironic that at the same time Bluth was flourishing with his darker themed movies that Disney tried to do the same with their film The Black Cauldron, and they failed miserably.  It was definitely a power shift in animation that no one had expected.

2.

HIGHLY EXPRESSIVE ANIMATION

Don Bluth is one of the animation icons with a very unique way of drawing movement into his characters.  You can see it’s beginning in some of his work at Disney, with characters like Elliot the Dragon in Pete’s Dragon, where he animates his characters with a lot of expressive movement, particularly with the mouths.  The lip flaps of his characters are distinctively exaggerated, which at times can look a little strange.  You don’t get a lot of subtlety in his character animation, and that’s not entirely a bad thing.  It’s yet another element that sets his movies apart from those of Disney and other studios, as every character in his films are all drawn in that distinctive Don Bluth way.  But, even minus the subtlety, the characters that he does bring to life make up for all that with enormous personality.  Fivel from An American Tail for instance stands out with that highly expressive animation because it fits with his personality as a restless child.  The manic expressions he animates also work well with some of the physical comedy, particularly in a movie like All Dogs Go to Heaven which has a lot of slapstick moments.  But, when he needs to bring more emotion to a scene, his team can deliver that as well.  There are some truly heartbreaking moments in An American Tail and The Land Before Time that Bluth’s animation definitely manages to nail down.  Unfortunately over time, his films would lose some of that manic spontaneity and become more complacent as he tried to attempt more natural animation in an attempt to catch up to Disney during their Renaissance.  Thumbelina (1995) featured the least exaggerated animation of his filmography, and of course it is the dullest movie he ever made.  He also attempted subtlety with Anastasia (1997), but at least it was more balanced with a more substantial budget and some more creative freedom used on the less subtle animation of the villain Rasputin.  Still, the Don Bluth style of animation is truly unique and unlike any other style found in animation anywhere else.

3.

EMBRACE OF THE BIZARRE AND RANDOM

One tradition in animation that Bluth continued to hold onto in his films was the use of songs to tell his story.  The Secret of NIMH avoided musical numbers, but An American Tail fully embraced the trope, and the majority of his films since also continued to act as musicals; the exceptions being The Land Before Time and Titan A.E.  But it’s in these musical numbers that we see Don Bluth really branch out into some surreal territory.  In a sense, this is another thing that he was inspired by early Disney, as he seemed to particularly be drawn to the weird and over the top musical sequences that some of those early films would delve into every now and then.  In particular, I think he was deeply influenced by the “Pink Elephants” sequence in Dumbo (1941), and it’s surreal dreamlike presentation.  All Dogs Go to Heaven in particular has some of the oddest musical sequences found in any animated movie.  Set aside that he had actor Burt Reynolds do his own singing as the main character Charlie (a strange choice on it’s own), but the movie stops dead in it’s tracks halfway through the film so that there can be a Busby Berkeley style musical number with a giant, big-lipped singing alligator (voiced by the late great Ken Page of Oogie Boogie fame).  And beyond that strange musical sequence, Bluth seemed to follow that up with a whole movie based around random musical sequences called Rock-a-Doodle (1991).  Even in the more straightforward Anastasia you get a musical sequence like the villain song “In the Dark of the Night” where Bluth is able to let things get a little strange for a bit.  There’s something definitely appealing about how his movies don’t have to follow a logical path, because animation allows for creative flights of fantasy to take place.  For some of the greatest random creativity seen in any Bluth animation though, the best place is to find it is not on the big screen but rather the arcade.  Bluth was a pioneer in video gaming as well as in cinematic animation with the creation of the Laserdisc based Dragon’s Lair (1983) and Space Ace (1983) video games.  These fully animated playable movies feature some of the most insanely bizarre animation that Don Bluth’s studio ever made, and they are truly something wonderful to behold.

4.

CONTEMPORARY FANTASY

One of the common threads in Don Bluth’s movies is the presence of magic found in the present, or near present day.  Unlike Disney films that relied on adaptations of well known (and public domain) fairy tales dating back to their very beginning with the likes of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), Bluth’s movies were mostly original stories, or based on a recent YA novel like The Secret of NIMH.  Even with the more contemporary settings, his movies are still filled with magical elements that take advantage of the limitless potential of the animated medium.  All Dogs Go to Heaven literally has the manifestations of Heaven and Hell brought to life in the story, with Hell being especially terrifyingly realized in the infamous “Charlie’s Nightmare” sequence found in the movie.  Magic also plays a significant part of Rock-a-Doodle, with a live action human boy named Edmond being transformed into an animated kitty cat by a sorcerer owl named the Duke (voiced by Christopher Plummer), in one of the many bizarre elements of that movie.  You even have the cross section of magic and real world events play out in Anastasia, with the Russian Revolution getting an assist from a magical curse cast by Rasputin on the Romanov family.  Quite a few of Bluth’s movies take on these fantasy elements, even in grounded films like An American Tail, where a storm at sea even takes on the appearance of a monster at one point.  But, only in one case did he ever attempt to adapt a known fairy tale, the aforementioned Thumbelina.  For the most part, he uses magic as a way of giving his own original story ideas a more inventive element that allows for more flights of fantasy in animation.  Sometimes it works to the movies’ benefit, like the imaginative All Dogs Go to Heaven or the bizarrely fascinating Rock-a-Doodle.  But then there is the film A Troll in Central Park where the fantasy feels a bit lazy.  Even still, it’s clear that Don Bluth found it essential for his movies to have a good amount of magic within their stories, and it often made his films that much more entertaining.

5.

JOURNEYS OF SELF-DISCOVERY

One other story element that Don Bluth would include as a part of his movies is the journey towards self-discovery for his characters.  In most of his movies, his character set out for a destination or goal, and in the process gain a further understanding of who they are and how powerful they can be.  This is something that especially defines the story of Mrs. Brisby, the main heroine of The Secret of NIMH, who goes from a concerned mother trying to protect her children to wielding a powerful magical force by the film’s end, something that she never realized she was capable of until she had no other choice but to act.  For some of his main characters, he sends them on literal journeys.  Fivel becomes separated from his family and must navigate his way through his new home in America in order to find them again.  The Land Before Time sends the orphaned Littlefoot on a journey to find the Great Valley and along the way he meets other stranded misfits like himself who must rely upon each other in order to survive, and in the process, they become an inseperable unit themselves.  For these characters, they are coming of age stories, as the young protagonists must learn to grow up fast in order to survive on their own.  For the character of Anastasia, she literally is on a “Journey to the Past” to rediscover who she was before she lost her memories of childhood, which might connect her to being the long lost Romanov princess.  But you also see these self discovery journeys happen in a reverse direction, where a scoundrel like Charlie in All Dogs Go to Heaven begins to change his ways after literally having a brush with Death.  The reason why Don Bluth seems drawn to these kinds of stories is because they are always a valuable way of building his characters.  The best animated movies always involve the character wanting to have something, which is something that definitely defined the films of Disney’s Renaissance.  But for Bluth’s movies, it ties back to his attraction to darker themes in his films, as he sets out to really put his characters through the wringer.  His characters must go through a lot of darkness before they see the light, and for the most part that journey will inevitably change them.  Littlefoot becomes a leader by the end of his ordeal.  Fivel, much wiser and closer to his family.  And Charlie learns the meaning of sacrifice and acceptance of his ultimate fate.  For a lot of young animation fans that grew up on his movies, we still look at his movies as some of the most enriching and life-affirming tales ever put into animated life.

It’s unfortunate that Don Bluth wasn’t able to sustain the momentum that he had during his early years as an independent animation director.  That run of the 1980’s is still iconic to a generation of animation fans.  It’s strange that he only partnered with Spielberg for just those two films, An American Tail and The Land Before Time.  There’s never been an explanation for why they fell out of that partnership, but had he stayed at Amblin beyond those films, who knows how different the animation landscape would have been in the years that followed.  Bluth might have been able to sustain his creative output in the renewed competition he faced during the 1990’s with the Disney Renaissance.  Strangely enough, his abrupt departure from Disney may have actually benefitted Disney more in the long run, because when he took a whole generation of animators with him, it was the new recruits just out of CalArts that stepped up to take the reigns of Disney Animation.  The young and eager to show what they were made of animators at Disney soon put a ton of new creative effort into movies like The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991) and The Lion King (1994), which would change the animation landscape even more than what Don Bluth was doing.  Throughout the 1990’s, it was Bluth that was having to play catch-up, and the quality of his films unfortunately suffered.  Then came the new threat of computer animation pioneered by Pixar, which a traditionalist animator like Don Bluth had no answer to.  Titan A.E. was an attempt to bridge both worlds, with hand drawn characters existing in computer animated environments, but it’s an experiment that didn’t pan out.  Since then, Bluth has retreated mostly out of the animation industry as a whole.  With his studio closed, he has since only done small commissioned projects, such as the short The Gift of the Hoopoe (2009), made for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  He did launch a Kickstarter campaign with his longtime producer Gary Goldman to get a new animated feature based on the game Dragon’s Lair made, but sadly even after reaching his initial funding goal, not much movement has been made on getting the project off the ground.  And with Bluth now in his mid-80’s, it’s becoming more unlikely that we’ll see him get a chance to direct one last film.  But, he still remains a beloved figure in the world of animation.  He’s even reconciled with Disney, and has been a welcomed guest back on the lot, with many current talent there crediting him as an inspiration.  Indeed, without his push for more challenging animation in the early part of his career, who knows where animation today would be.  The Disney Renaissance certainly would not have happened they way it did had he not shaken up the establishment in the first place.  That in itself makes him an essential figure in the history of the animated medium, and at the same time he has been an imaginative voice that created some truly beloved classics in the process.  His journey has been it’s own American Tale, and like the lovable characters he made popular in his films, he was an underdog worth rooting for.

Top Ten Lists

Top Ten Movies of 2024

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The year that has passed has now been entered into the history books, and with 2024 behind us it’s time to look back at how the year went as a whole.  For Hollywood, it was a recovery year, after the strikes of 2023 brought the industry to a dramatic halt.  Some of the effects of those strikes were immediately apparent, but the long term effects may take years to fully manifest, but 2024 overall represented a year of adaptation for both the production side as well as the exhibition side.  Hollywood continued to move around their films on the calendar, with some of the most anticipated movies of the previous year finally getting their release in the last year.  Movie theaters also had to get more creative in the last year in order to bring audiences in more frequently due to the backlog of new movies that the strikes created.  This was the year where novelty popcorn buckets suddenly became a viral craze, with the ridiculous designs for Dune: Part Two’s and Deadpool & Wolverine’s buckets getting social media attention for which one looked more like a adult oriented product.  Regardless of the oddities of the designs, these must buy items were a welcome money generator for movie theaters in need of extra income, and more importantly it prompted more people to come to the movies again.  We saw the revivals of struggling brands like Disney, Pixar and Marvel, all getting huge box office wins this year.  The indie film market also saw a major boost, with indie labels like Neon and A24 seeing their biggest box office successes ever in 2024.  And then there was the record breaking Thanksgiving weekend this year, which saw Wicked, Gladiator II, and Moana 2 almost pulling off another Barbenheimer effect with their shared success.  So, while there are still a number of problems that are plaguing the movie business overall, there are also a number of positive signs about the resiliency of the cinematic experience.  And the hope is that many of those positive signs continue into the next year and beyond.

Of course, like every year, I’s sharing my personal picks for the Top 10 Movies of the year, as well as my choices for the bottom 5.  This year I broke my own personal record of seeing over 120 movies in a theater setting, so I had a very wide pool to choose from.  A couple of the movies that made my list were very easy, but there were a few hard cuts as well.  So, below are the honorable mention movies that I think are worth spotlighting, listed in alphabetical order: A Real Pain, The Apprentice, Bird, Blitz, Boy Kills World, Challengers, Conclave, Deadpool & Wolverine, Flow, Hit Man, Juror #2, Kinds of Kindness, Maria, Monkey Man, Nickel Boys, Nosferatu, Queer, Saturday Night, Sing Sing, Strange Darling, Thelma, Wicked, and The Wild Robot.  All of these movies are definitely worth seeing if you can, but the 10 selected below were the ones that stuck with me the most over the course of the year.  So, let’s take a look at my picks for the Top Ten Movies of 2024.

10.

LOVE LIES BLEEDING

Directed by Rose Glass

Starting off with the first of multiple A24 movies you’ll see on this list (it was a very good year for them), this sophomore directorial effort from Rose Glass was also the year’s most interesting love story as well.  Set in a grimy New Mexico town in the 1980’s, the movie presents a romance between a lady bodybuilder and the daughter of the local crime kingpin.  During the course of the movie, both girls have to confront the bad pasts that they’ve been trying hard to break away from, which leads them down some dark roads.  And yet all the while, there is an almost fairy tale aspect to their love affair that helps to pull them through.  The movie feels very much like a gritty and yet quirky crime thriller that would have come from the likes of the Coen Brothers in their early days, but director Rose Glass is also not afraid to take things in a surreal direction, blurring the lines with what’s real and what’s not in some very inspired hallucinatory moments.  But what helps this movie stand out is the cast.  Kristen Stewart continues to impress in her post-Twilight career as a risk-taking actress, and this film finally gives her a chance to play a queer romantic lead in a film, opposite Katy O’Biren who delivers a star making role as the bodybuilder that she falls in love with.  Ed Harris also delivers an amazing and terrifying performance as the crime family patriarch and father to Stewart’s character, standing out as one of the best cinematic villains of the year.  But it’s the twists and turns that Rose Glass takes with this story that make the whole experience truly unique and memorable.  It’s also strangely magical in the end and works in that oddball way that only an A24 movie could pull off.  The chemistry between the two leads really pulls it all together and it becomes oddly sweet by the end, even though the journey there can get strange at times.  It shows that not all the best love stories need to be rose tinted and elegant.  They can also involve a lot of bullets and blood as well.

9.

CIVIL WAR

Directed by Alex Garland

2024 was a contentious year to say the least when it came to politics in America.  Every election year is as well, but tensions this year have been especially high.  Into this tempest came a new movie from Alex Garland, a filmmaker known for making some provocative movies in the past through the lens of science fiction, and the subject for his new film was as big of a lightning rod you could build in year such as this one.  Many people tried to pick apart the movie to decide what kind of message it was going to deliver about the state of the world as it is right now, and the answer to that was, nothing.  Civil War was a very misunderstood movie that was not about the politics today, or of any era for that matter.  It uses a hypothetical scenario about a modern day Civil War breaking out in the United States as a backdrop for the narrative that Alex Garland was really interested in telling, which was about wartime journalism.  Garland depicts the daily grind of what war photographers and on the scene investigators go through in order to chronicle a war as it happens.  They are there in the thick of it, standing behind the firing lines all in the pursuit of capturing the reality of what war is like.  Sometimes they are doing it for the sake of preserving the truth, while some are doing it purely for the adrenaline rush.  But with the characters portrayed by Wagner Moura, Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny and Stephen McKinely Henderson, we witness the often unsung bravery that these individuals display in order to witness war and make sure that history is captured.  I especially like the way that Garland breaks up the mayhem of the battle scenes with the silent abruptness of a camera’s snap shot.  In these moments, we are given a window into what is behind those snapshots of war that we see printed in a newspaper or tagged onto a webpage, and it makes us consider the toll of war and the dangerous life that war journalists have.  The politics of this movie really are irrelevant, though there are slight hints about where the director stands on current events.  What matters in this movie is the affects that war has on the people in the middle of it, and the reason the movie sets it’s conflict in a modern day American setting is because we so far have not seen this kind of carnage on our own door step in a modern era, and the hope that this movie delivers is that we can hopefully avoid it again.

8.

PERFECT DAYS

Directed by Wim Wenders

Technically, this was a 2023 film that only finally got a wide release in 2024, but even still, my first viewing was in this last calendar year and it managed to stick with me all the way to the end.   This was last year’s nominee for the Oscar for International Feature from Japan, but it was directed by a legendary German director Wim Wenders in a strange confluence of cinematic forces.  The filmmaker behind classics like Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1988) applies the same grounded but poetic style to this tale about a Japanese man who cleans public toilets for a living.  There isn’t a whole lot of drama at play in this film; it merely observes the daily life of this man who takes his civil service seriously and enjoys the simple comforts of his life.  The only drama comes out of the unexpected arrival of his estranged niece, who forces her uncle out of his simple routine, though not in a way that fundamentally shifts his overall life.  It’s a profound film that speaks a lot about the simple things that make an impact in our lives, including something as simple as a game of Tic-Tac-Toe with a complete stranger you never meet.  Wenders apparently was inspired to make this movie after his visit to Tokyo where he was astonished by the variety and creative designs of the public restrooms found throughout the city, and it led him to craft this story about the kind of person who would be tasked with upkeeping these public facilities.  Honestly, you’ve never seen a movie film public toilets in such loving way and that’s part of the charm of this movie.  In addition, actor Koji Yakusho (who won the Best Actor award at Cannes in 2023 for this film) delivers a beautifully soulful performance as the caretaker Hirayama.  Wenders also fills the movie with a great soundtrack of classic rock standards, including the Lou Reed song that gives the movie it’s title.  Definitely the coziest watch of 2024 and a great life affirming piece of cinema that people will hopefully get to discover more in the years ahead.

7.

DUNE: PART TWO

Directed by Denis Villeneuve

Denis Villeneuve and Warner Brothers took a major risk when they began production on the movie Dune (2021).  Villeneuve split the famous Frank Herbert sci-fi novel into two parts, and only got Warner Brothers to greenlight the first part.  That meant that the completion of the story was contingent on the success of the first movie; which was a major departure from other franchise productions like The Lord of the Rings, which had all the films produced together.  Had Dune not succeeded, we may have been left with an awkward, unresolved half of a complete story.  To make matters worse, the first Dune had to deal with the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw it’s release delayed a year and was truncated by the dual streaming and theatrical release plan that Warner Brothers enacted under the failed Project Popcorn in 2021.  Thankfully, the movie gained enough critical and box office success to convince Warner to greenlight Part Two, so that we could finally see the complete vision of Herbert’s legendary narrative.  But, the strike made a further delay in the completion of this cinematic epic, and it was finally released in the Spring of 2024.  Thankfully, it was all worth the wait as Denis Villeneuve managed to land the plane successfully and complete the story that he had long dreamed of bringing to life on the screen.  Dune: Part Two more than lives up to the promise of it’s predecessor, and surpasses it in many ways.  It’s bolder visually, has an even grander epic heft to it, and even has moments of great emotion between it’s characters.  All the returning cast is at the top of their game, with Timothee Chalamet continuing his win streak as a movie star on the rise.  Zendaya has the most significant upgrade in her screen time in this film, and she brings a lot to the character Chani that helps to elevate her presence in the series.  But perhaps the most surprising standout is Austin Butler playing the villainous Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, one of the best cinematic villains to emerge in a big Hollywood film in a long time.  Denis also ups the ante in the scale of the film, with the iconic worm riding sequence being an especially epic experience to witness on a big screen, preferably in IMAX.  Far and away the strongest cinematic achievement from mainstream Hollywood in a year that surprising delivered very well in terms of popcorn entertainment.

6.

HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS

Directed by Mike Cheslik

There’s always that one movie that takes you by surprise every year that demands attention because it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.  This high concept comedy is one of those films, as it is a strange beast of a film.  It’s also one of the most inventive movies I have seen in quite some time.  And to make things even better, it’s gut-bustingly funny as well.  The movie has the aesthetic of a silent film, but mixed with the cartoonish antics of a Looney Tunes cartoon.  The main protagonist, an apple famer named Jean Kayak (played by a hilarious Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) seeks revenge against a pack of beavers that destroyed his apple jack brewing business, and over the course of several chaotic scenes of hijinks, he learns that the critters are more cunning than he thought.  The whole movie is a beautifully created homage to the cartoons of classic Looney Tunes, as well as to the silent classics of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, but it’s also an impressive feat of cinematic storytelling as well.  Through some clever cinematic tricks, the movie comes pretty close to feeling like a cartoon brought to life.  The funniest part is that all the animals are depicted with mascot costumes, adding to the surreal absurdity of the whole piece.  The antics are hilariously chaotic and at times also surprisingly mean-spirited as well, in a good way.  It’s also refreshing to see a comedy that uses visual gags as the primary means of making us laugh, rather than inane banter that we see most comedies today using.  We’ve kind of lost the art of visual comedy over the years, where the filmmakers use the cinematic tricks to get a laugh; something that the silent masters pioneered, but were also carried along into the latter half of the 20th century by great comedians such as Jacques Tati and Mel Brooks.  Hopefully Hundreds of Beavers is that kind of transformative comedy that inspires more filmmakers to try more inventive visual gags in the future.  Easily the year’s best comedy, and I’m already happy to see that the film is already generating a cult following.

5.

GHOSTLIGHT

Directed by Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson

This little seen film that emerged from this year’s Sundance Film Festival managed to be one of the most surprising dramas of the year, and a profound statement about the healing power of art.  The film centers around a family that is broken apart by a recent tragedy and they find surprising solace in the form of theater, after the father ends up joining a small acting troop that’s putting on a staging of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  The film stars Chicago based theater actor Keith Kupferer in a breakthrough role as the grieving father, and the deconstruction of his rough exterior through the embrace of performance is superbly conveyed in his work here, giving his character a very grounded and vulnerable presence.  His performance is matched by the actors playing his family, who just so happen to be Keith’s real life wife and daughter, Tara Mallen and Kathrine Mallen Kupferer respectively.  This real life family of actors are all astounding, and they are complimented very well by a scene-stealing Dolly De Leon (Triangle of Sadness) as the head of the theater troop.  Their journey towards staging the play, as well as the confrontation they face with regard to their past tragedy is all delivered in this movie with a beautifully poignant sense of authenticity.  And the finale of the film is going to knock a lot of people over with it’s emotional wallop; a tearjerker in the best sense of the word.  Keith Kupferer has been playing bit parts in Chicago shot films for many years, including The Dark Knight (2008) and Road to Perdition (2002) as well as a variety of TV appearances in addition to his acclaimed stage work.  Ghostlight is his first ever lead role in a movie, and he makes the most of that opportunity.  Hopefully Hollywood takes notice and gives him more substantive roles in the future, along with this talented family.  It’s a performance that I wish more people had seen as the film sadly had a very limited release.  It left an impact on this critic, and I hope more people discover it in the years ahead.

4.

LONGLEGS

Directed by Osgood Perkins

2024 was the year where I discovered my preferred type of horror movie.  I watched more new horror movies this year than in any year prior, and the film that stood out the most showed me that I have an inclination for slow-burn, atmospheric horror.  That movie was the new film from Osgood Perkins called Longlegs.  This film is definitely not your standard, shlocky horror flick.  There is a surprising lack of gore in most of the film, and for the most part it’s also free of other horror clichés like jump scares.  What it has instead is a very methodical pace to it that starts things off quiet and foreboding, before escalating more and more through the film until it hits a crescendo at the climax.  And that’s the kind of horror that I vibe with; one that envelopes you in that sense of building dread.  It’s been described as Satanic Silence of the Lambs, and that’s a worthy comparison to make.  It has that same kind of unsettling undertone of the Oscar-winning Silence of the Lambs, but also combines it with much more of a paranormal element.  Demonic possession is a genuine thing in this movie as we come to learn, and the slow-build of that realization also helps to make it’s emergence all the more creepy.  And speaking of creepy, Nicholas Cage gives a truly terrifying performance as the titular Satan worshipping serial killer, showing us that his over the top style of acting can indeed work wonders in a role that’s tailor made for it.  Osgood Perkins comes from a strong pedigree of horror filmmaking, as his father Anthony was famous for playing Norman Bates in Psycho (1960).  This is his most successful film to date and it shows that he indeed is one of the most interesting voices in horror filmmaking right now.  Too many horror films intend to shock us rather than scare us, and Perkins has created the first film that I’ve seen in a while that’s truly scared me.  Much like great horror classics such as The Exorcist (1973), Longlegs feels like you are actually witnessing true evil on the screen, and it’s not done with any flash, but rather with a carefully constructed sense of foreboding atmosphere.  I know it’ll be horror movies like this one that I’ll be pursuing more in the future, because it’s the one that hit that sweet spot of terror in my imagination.  Hopefully, Osgood Perkins will continue to be one of those filmmakers that continues to deliver in that terrifying mode of horror cinema in the years ahead.

3.

INSIDE OUT 2

Directed by Kelsey Mann

This past year also marked a triumphant return of one of the vanguard names in animation.  Pixar Animation has had one of the roughest rides of the decade so far, suffering a sudden halt to the release of their film Onward (2020) in the early days of the pandemic, and then having their parent studio Disney use them as a guinea pig in the early years of the streaming wars, with movies like Soul (2020), Luca (2021) and Turning Red (2022) all being denied theatrical runs and being dumped onto Disney+ instead, all the while the other animated films from the studio got to play in theaters.  This was a sad mistreatment of an animation brand that had once been the envy of all of Hollywood.  Now Pixar had to claw back their way to the top, and it didn’t help that movies like Lightyear (2022) and Elemental (2023) underperformed.  It should be understood, Pixar was still making great movies, but they were being denied the chance to prove themselves again in a post-pandemic market.  Thankfully, a savior came in the form of a sequel to one of their most beloved films.  Inside Out 2 not only reversed the fortunes of Pixar Animation, it broke every possible record there is for an animated film.  Grossing over $1.6 billion worldwide, the movie was the undisputed champ of the 2024 box office, and proof once again that Pixar is a force to be reckoned with.  And it deserves it too, as Inside Out 2 not only matches it’s beloved predecessor, but even surpasses it in many ways.  One of the best improvements with this film is that it makes the character of Riley, the girl whose mind is the home of the emotions that are the stars of the movie, a much more rounded character.  You really feel her agency a lot more in this film, and she becomes more relatable as she goes through her awkward puberty phase.  The returning emotion characters are all great and given even more weight in this story, but the newer emotions are just as interesting too.  The character of Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawke) may be the best new addition to this movie, as she becomes a truly chaotic new force that raises the stakes in this story.  It’s easy to see why this movie was such a box office juggernaut, because it helped remind everyone what we love about Pixar movies in the first place; their commitment to emotional story-telling and visual innovation.  It’s profound in all the right moments, while also being immensely funny along the way.  And Disney definitely owes Pixar an apology for underestimating their value as a key part of their company.

2.

ANORA

Directed by Sean Baker

Sean Baker has been a filmmaker to watch over the last decade, and he’s been a re-occurring presence on my top ten lists ever since 2017’s The Florida Project.  This year, he released what may be his most assertive film yet with Anora.  It’s definitely the one that has gotten the industry’s notice the most of all his movies, as he became the first American filmmaker to win the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in over a decade; the last being Terrence Malick for The Tree of Life (2011).  Since then, the movie has been building up a lot of awards season buzz, and it’s very much deserved.  Sean Baker definitely is a filmmaker with a distinct style and interest, focusing on people who live just on the fringe of the American dream (such as the outskirts of Hollywood in 2015’s Tangerine and outside of Disney World in The Florida Project) in a neo-realistic mode of storytelling.  Anora certainly has those elements too, but Baker also delivers here with a more polished, assured production.  Filming with 35 mm stock rather than his usual digital cam or 16 mm graininess, he manages to create a vibrant looking film that still retains the neo-realist character of his earlier films.  At it’s center is a breakout performance from Mikey Madison in a star-making role as a New York stripper who falls madly in love with the wrong boy, and quickly get entangled in his dangerous world of oligarchs and criminals, though they have their hands full trying to control her too.  Its a performance that will almost certainly earn her a well deserved Oscar nomination.  Her performance as the title character is a force of nature, and she continues the same tradition of compelling, flawed characters that are always at the center of Baker’s movies.  It’s also impressive how well Baker manages shifting tones in this movie, as the film evolves from a quirky romantic dramedy in it’s early moments to full on farce in the second act to a somewhat melancholy and tragic denouement in it’s final scene.  Sean Baker is a director who maintains a signature style, but is also showing a lot of growth as a storyteller and filmmaker as he takes on more complex stories.  Anora is his most profound cinematic statement yet, and it’s easy to see why so many people (including myself) see it as one of the best cinematic achievements of the year.  It will be interesting to see if the Academy agrees as well.

And my choice for the best movie of 2024 is…

1.

THE BRUTALIST

Directed by Brady Corbet

This year was a year of bold statements on the big screen.  Some were big swings and misses (like Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis) but in some cases, there were a few attempts at bold filmmaking that actually connected this year.  And no other movie in 2024 managed to wow me personally as a filmgoer than this new epic from director Brady Corbet.  Watching this movie was like witnessing the birth of a new American cinema classic.  This is the kind of movie that I feel is going to be discussed in film studies for many years to come.  And even more remarkable, Brady Corbet was able to make this three and a half hour epic, complete with an overture and intermission, on a $10 million budget.  Hollywood should honestly take note of this movie and what it accomplishes, as Corbet was able to make a $10 million movie look like it cost around $100 million.  The movie reminded me a lot about another film that also topped my list the year it came out, which was Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007).  Like that movie, Corbet is able to create a profound, intimate portrait about the human experience, in this case an immigrant architect schooled in the titular style of architecture, and have it become this profound statement about the American experience and all of it’s unseen flaws.  Adrian Brody gives a remarkable performance as Laszlo Toth, the architect at the heart of the film, delivering his best work in years.  He’s also matched by a scene stealing Guy Pearce as the heartless industrialist who funds Laszlo’s vision while also taking increasing possessive control over his life.  And like all the best 3 hour plus epic movies, it’s run time breezes by because Corbet has such a strong command of the narrative that you never feel it lag once.  By the time the intermission started, I was shocked by how quickly 100 minutes had already gone by.  It’s enormously impressive how Brady Corbet can craft a movie that features very economical film tricks (shooting in places in present day Hungary that look like 1950’s Philadelphia so they don’t have to build new sets, for example) and make it feel grandiose in a way that films like The Godfather has been seen over the years.  It’s the kind of movie that Hollywood used to make before getting cold feet after the failure of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate.  The movie even stays true to the architectural style it celebrates, with the music and even the style of the opening and closing credits feeling in character.  It’s the most impressive film that I saw all year and hopefully it becomes a blueprint for a more economical way of making epic movies in the future.

So, with my Top Ten Movies out of the way, it’s time to briefly go over the Bottom Five movies that I saw this year.  Keep in mind, I technically like to avoid bad movies when I can; I chose to not watch Part Two of Zack Snyder’s awful Rebel Moon for example, after having to sit through Part One in 2023.  Given the breadth of so many movies that I saw this year, it was still unavoidable watching a few of them.  So, here are my picks for the Five Worst Movies of 2024:

5. JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX –  Consider this the year’s most disappointing film.  It was kind of stunning to see the drop off this movie faced after the enormous success of it’s predecessor. The first Joker movie made over $1 billion worldwide and got it’s star Joaquin Phoenix and Oscar win for Best Actor.  All the same people returned to make this sequel, including Phoenix and director Todd Phillips, and they were also adding Lady Gaga to the mix.  But, nothing worked.  Making it a musical was not a bad, outside-the-box idea, but the execution was severely lacking.  It doesn’t have anything profound to say about comic book movies, the glorification of violence in society, or much of anything else.  It’s just a string of prison and courtroom movie clichés mixed in with musical numbers.  By the end, the movie even provides you with the final insult that (spoiler) the Joker in this movie isn’t even the Joker that will eventually face off against the Batman.  It’s one of the biggest squandering of cinematic potential that we’ve seen from Hollywood in a while, and is only saved from the bottom of this list by having just a little bit of quality craftmanship in it’s production design, but not much else to save it.

4.  DRIVE AWAY DOLLS – This road comedy about two lesbians in trouble with the mob may be more easily dismissed if it wasn’t for the fact that this was made by one of the Coen brothers.  This movie marks the solo directorial debut of Ethan Coen, who co-wrote the screenplay with his wife, editor Tricia Cooke, and it’s very clear that he is not well adept at making movies on his own without his brother Joel, whose own solo effort The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) was a much better film.  The screenplay is a painful exercise in plot and dialogue, clearly showing a middle aged man trying to approximate the lingo of a younger generation, and failing.  It’s also a horrible waste of good talented actors, with Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Colman Domingo, Pedro Pascal, and Matt Damon all delivering some of the worst performances of their careers.  Hopefully it doesn’t take long for Joel and Ethan Coen to reunite and start making films as a team again, because they are clearly not cutting it solo; or at least Ethan isn’t.

3. ARGYLLE – There was a time when Matthew Vaughn could do no wrong as an action filmmaker.  From Layer Cake (2004), to Kick-Ass (2010) to Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015), he was setting himself up as one of the most inventive and entertaining action filmmakers in the business.  And then something happened that changed all that.  The Kingsman sequels that followed were nowhere near as entertaining as the first film, and things have only gotten worse with this year’s Argylle.  This should have been a strong return to form for Vaughn, taking his favorite cinematic formula of using actors not known for action roles and turning them into iconic action characters in his movies, which he was trying to do with Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell.  But neither actor had quite the same transformative performance like the one we saw from Colin Firth in Kingsman.  Instead, their performances are drowned out by a terribly overblown CGI extravaganza that never manages to connect with it’s audience.  All of the action scenes feel hollow and the comedy is stale and lifeless.  Matthew Vaughn is at that point where he should really re-consider his choice in film, because this kind of Kingsman style of quirky, violent action just isn’t cutting it anymore.

2. BORDERLANDS – Undeniably one of the laziest attempts at launching a movie franchise that I’ve seen in while.  Based on the popular video game series, this film fundamentally fails on nearly every level.  Directed by a mismatched Eli Roth, the movie feels like a poor man’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and features none of the same wit or creativity.  It’s characters are irredeemable jerks that never have that spark that allows for their edginess to be endearing.  Really talented actors, including Oscar-winners Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis, just look lost amid all the mayhem.  The film is also aesthetically ugly to look at, washed out in browns and neons that try to emulate the look of the video games, but come across as pale imitation.  At a time when video games are starting to gain some respectability in Hollywood as potential franchises worth investing in, such as with Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog, Borderlands reminds us that it is often better to leave some video games off of the big screen.

And the Worst Movie of 2024 is…

1. MADAME WEB – Thank god the Sony Spider-verse is being put out of it’s misery, because this was an especially bad year for them.  It’s bad when you can say the only highlight for them this year was the Tom Hardy starring threequel Venom: The Last Dance, and even that was a lackluster movie.  Kraven The Hunter even closed the year out with a whimper by being one of the biggest box office bombs of the year, nearly wiped out of the cineplexes in just three weeks.  But no movie demonstrated the folly of Sony’s failed attempt to build a cinematic universe around obscure characters loosely tied to Spider-Man than the movie Madame Web. This film starring Dakota Johnson as the titular character was the hardest movie sit through that I’ve had since Dear Evan Hansen (2021).  It was astoundingly bad on every level, and it nearly made me want to walk out of the theater.  It gets everything wrong; the comic book lore, the dialogue, the performances, everything.  There was no question that this movie would be my choice for worst film of the year, and it held that distinction from as early as February all the way to the end of the year.  Thankfully, it looks like Sony is putting this Spider-verse thing to rest, at least with live action as their animated films still are performing strong, and are getting ready to relinquish the full Spider-Man stable back into the creative control of Marvel themselves.  Madame Web was an astounding failure that may end up being one of the worst movies of the decade, and I hope it doesn’t get any worse than this in the years ahead.

So there you have my picks for the Best and Worst Movies of 2024.  It was an interesting year to say the least.  The big winners I would say were the indie film studios, particularly Neon and A24.  They accounted for half of the movies on my Top Ten alone (Love Lies Bleeding, Civil War, and The Brutalist for A24 and Longlegs and Anora for Neon).  It wouldn’t surprise me if these two independent labels will also be the top competitors during this upcoming awards season as well.  It wasn’t just Indie producers that had a great year either.  Disney had a spectacular year that helped to lessen the blow of the box office woes they faced in 2023, and it was led by the financial and critical triumph that was Pixar’s Inside Out 2.  Warner Brothers had a mixed year with box office bombs like Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Joker: Folie a Deux being mixed in with the successes of Dune: Part Two and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.  Universal may have also found their new big franchise with the immensely successful Wicked, which may also help revive the box office potential of Broadway show adaptations in Hollywood.  The hope is that 2025 will continue to deliver on the good progress that was made in the last year.  I’m interested to see what kind of effect a movie like The Brutalist will have on Hollywood.  It’s been an industry that has been plagued with a problem of bloat, with movies costly far more to produce now than they have in any era before, and that’s leading to a reduction in what kinds of movies get produced, which in turn leads to an overall reduced number of films at the box office.  I hope The Brutalist and Anora become the dominant Awards season favorites, and that they help convince Hollywood that movies can feel grand and important again without breaking the bank to make them.  There’s a lot of lessons to learn still, and hopefully we see this kind of trend bear fruit in Hollywood in the years ahead.  So, let’s hope 2025 is another stellar year for the movies and the movie going experience.

Movie Previews

The Movies of Early 2025

After the turmoil of the last few years at the box office, 2024 felt very much like a rebuilding year.  Covid is now becoming a distant but still haunting memory, and Hollywood for now has settled it’s fights with labor after the crippling strikes of last year.  But even still, the blow of those back to back crises have taken their toll on Hollywood and especially with movie theaters.  The hope was that after being rattled for nearly half a decade that the movie theater industry would finally see a rebound.  But, with the strike pushing back so many productions in the pipeline, there was a fear that the backlog would cause the preceding year, 2024, to feel very empty.  Movie theaters needs an abundance of product in order to survive, and because of Hollywood’s internal problems, the theatrical market was looking to have a possibly light year.  However, some surprising things did happen.  One was the resurgence of Disney, who bounced back big after a disastrous 2023, which saw many of their films crash hard at the box office.  This year, they managed to be the first studio to cross the $3 billion box office mark this decade, thanks to mega hits like Inside Out 2 (2024), Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) and Moana 2 (2024), as well as with modest hits like Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) and Alien: Romulus (2024).  And that’s quite the feat considering that they didn’t even release a single film in the Spring.  The other studios managed to fare well with some of their tentpoles too, with Universal scoring big with Wicked Part One (2024) and Warner Brothers doing well with sequels like Dune: Part Two (2024) and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024).  There were however some shocking flops as well, with once believed to be sure fire hits like Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) and Joker: Folie a Deux (2024) both becoming massive flops.  And while there are positive signs of recovery, movie theaters are still expressing concern about the lack of consistent business throughout the year, and are hoping that Hollywood ramps up their production line once again to help keep the lights on at the movies.

As 2024 comes to an end, it is now that time once again to look ahead at what the next year brings.  With the re-building year that we experienced these past twelve months, which saw fewer movies but in general stronger performance from those that did stand out, the hope is that the groundwork has been set for an even bigger rebound in 2025.  Like past years, I will be taking a look at the upcoming movie of the Early 2025 season.  This includes my picks for the Must Sees, the ones that have me worried, as well as the movies that are worth skipping.  My choices don’t always pan out like I initially thought they would, so there might be a few surprises here.  My previews are purely my own gut readings about these movies based on how much interest I have in them based on the effectiveness or lack thereof of their marketing.  So, with all that said, let’s take a look at the movies of Early 2024.

MUST SEES:

CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD (FEBRUARY 14)

You can always count on Marvel to deliver spectacle on the big screen, and given that they found some of their mojo again in 2024 thanks to the success of Deadpool & Wolverine, the hope is that they can carry some of that momentum into the new year.  2025 is going to be a major year for Marvel Studios, with three big tent-poles planned.  We will have to wait until the summer for Thunderbolts and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but this winter season we do get a new chapter in the Captain America franchise started on the big screen.  Post Avengers: Endgame (2019), the dynamic of the character has completely changed, with Chris Evans retiring from the role of Steve Rogers (the original Cap) and the superhero known as the Falcon now picking up the Shield and assuming the role, with actor Anthony Mackie now getting that top billing.  It will be exciting to see how well Mackie does under the new title.  We already saw a glimpse of him as Captain America in the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier where he managed to pull the part off pretty well, especially with the falcon wings now combined with Captain’s red white and blue uniform.  But what is interesting with this film is that it’s signaling a return for Marvel to a more hard edge thriller style for the franchise, like what we saw with Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014).  There are some interesting new elements they are bringing in, like Harrison Ford assuming the role of Thaddeus Ross, which had previously been played by the late William Hurt.  Here, we finally see the payoff of the Red Hulk plot-line for Ross that was made famous in the comic books, and it’s pretty impressive so far from what we’ve seen of Harrison’s transformation into a Hulk from the trailers.  The effects used for Anthony Mackie’s flying moments also look intense and visceral as well.  I’m also interested in seeing how they finally pay off the return of Tim Blake Nelson’s villainous Leader, 17 years after he was first introduced in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk.  Hopefully Marvel starts the year off strong with this blockbuster return of one of their most important Avengers.

PADDINGTON IN PERU (FEBRUARY 14)

A very different change of pace from the latest from Marvel Studios.  The first two Paddington movies have managed to earn the reputation of being some of the best family films ever made.  Some would even claim Paddington 2 to be one of the best sequels ever made, period.  Given that, the expectations are very high for this third film in the series.  The lovable marmalade eating bear returns once again, but this film has him returning to the place he originally came from; the jungles of Darkest Peru.  It’s a refreshing way to change up the formula for these movies, and hopefully the same good humor that defined the first two movies translates over as well.  Unfortunately, this film did not carry over the director of the first two, Paul King, who was busy at work creating the hit musical Wonka (2023).  It did carry over much of the same cast though.  Ben Whishaw continues to give Paddington his warm and disarmingly kind voice.  Hugh Bonneville is also once again on board as the frustrated but kind Mr. Brown.  This movie does bring in some exciting newcomers into the cast, including the always charming Olivia Colman as a singing nun, and Antonio Banderas as a river boat captain.  The only worry I have with this film is that the last movie maybe has set expectations too high, and that this threequel may not live up to what has come before.  Hopefully the film still remains entertaining.  It’s that rare movie that is meant for kids, but is so clever in it’s execution that it also provides a lot of entertainment for adults as well.  I think as long as they remain true to the heart of the characters and their story, this third Paddington movie should still manage to be a fun time at the movies.  And taking him out of his comfortable domestic life in England and putting him back into the perils of the jungle may just be the exciting little adventure this series need to keep itself going.

MICKEY 17 (MARCH 7)

So here is a movie that I already talked about at length over a year ago.  The reason I’m talking about it again is because shortly after my last preview, Mickey 17 got pushed back a full year and more from it’s original release.  Now closer to the actual release, we actually have a lot more information about what kind of movie we are getting, and it’s a bit of a surprise.  Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho is known for making films with a darker tone, so it’s surprising that with this new sci-fi film that it appears he’s making a comedy.  It’s certainly not what you’d expect as the follow-up to something like Parasite (2019).  But, at the same time, it looks like it’s going to be a fun movie as well.  What really gets me in this trailer is the performance that Robert Pattinson is giving.  Pattinson has been spending the last decade trying to shake off his Twilight past, and he’s managed to make it work out by taking on all these quirky character roles, and his work here in Mickey 17 is very much a huge departure from his Twilight films.  I love the weird, high pitched voice he’s giving Mickey here, because it sounds like nothing you’d expect someone like him talk like.  The fact that he’s so jaded about dying, because he keeps being replaced with new clone bodies, also is a hilarious aspect he’s added to this character.  But the question will be if Bong Joon-ho manages to nail the tone of this film.  He’s had comedic moments in this movies before, but I don’t think he’s embraced this kind of level of absurdism.  It’s definitely an experiment for the groundbreaking director that’s worth checking out.  I’m also excited to see how actors like Mark Ruffalo, Toni Colette, and Steven Yuen also work within this story.  Hopefully the extra year of waiting was worth it, and the extra information we now have about this movie gives it a whole new level of intrigue that I hope makes this a truly unique film experience.

SINNERS (APRIL 18)

Perhaps the most mysterious movie lined up for release in the next couple of months, this new film from Black Panther director Ryan Coogler looks to be a very provocative cinematic experience.  Sinners reunites Coogler with his frequent leading man Michael B. Jordan (whose appeared in all of his movies so far) and shows him playing a man desperately trying to survive some evil presence in what looks to be the Prohibition Era American South.  What the characters are up against remains vague so far; Zombies, vampires, we haven’t been told yet.  But Coogler is certainly paying homage to horror movies of the past like Night of the Living Dead (1968) with some of the visuals he has shown briefly so far in the trailers.  Coogler has proven himself to be a capable genre director in the past, with his Black Panther movies perfectly displaying his command of the super hero genre.  It will b really interesting to see how well he applies his skills to horror.  It’s also interesting what film stocks he’s using here.  The movie looks like it’s being shot on film with large formats in mind.  The dramatic scenes appear to have been shot with 70mm Panavision, giving that extra bit of super widescreen like what we saw with Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015).  And meanwhile, the action scenes have been filmed in 70mm IMAX.  So, with those two large formats being used, it seems like Ryan Coogler wants this movie to be a major spectacle, and I am excited to see the finished results on the biggest screen possible.  It’s a good move trying to sell this movie on it’s atmosphere and sense of mystery, rather than just spelling out what kind of danger is lurking in the shadows.  And hopefully that fruitful collaboration between Coogler and Jordan continues to yield success for both of them here.  Let’s hope that when this mystery unravels that it makes for one hell of a scary movie in the end.

WOLF MAN (JANUARY 17)

One of the best decisions that Universal Studios has made in the last 10 years was to abandon their DOA Dark Universe plans, and hand off their stable of classic movie monsters over to more capable hands in the horror genre.  Blumhouse has become the beneficiary of the classic Universal monsters, and they began their successful collaboration in 2020 with their adaptation of the Invisible Man.  The modern day re-imagining of the classic movie monster created one of the best horror movies of the last few years and it showed Universal that you don’t need to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into this kind of franchise in order to create a cinematic universe.  All you really need to do is make your movies scary, and as Blumhouse has demonstrated with their own house style, less can be more.  The director of The Invisible Man, Leigh Whannell, has been granted yet another classic Universal monster to work with; the Wolf Man.  Just like what he did with Invisible Man, Whannell is stripping the story down to just the basics and using all of his tricks in building suspense and atmosphere in deliver the scares.  I like the fact that the movie is a simple cabin in the woods story focusing solely on a single family.  Christopher Abbott is the father whose bloody encounter with the monster leads him to go through a terrifying transformation, causing him to become the titular Wolf Man.  It’s a smart way to tell this story, by keeping things personal, with the father coming to the horrible realization that he’s slowly loosing his humanity, and his wife (Julia Garner) becoming increasingly terrified that the man she loves is becoming more and more a threat to the safety of her and their daughter.  I hope that Leigh Whannell manages to deliver again with this re-imagining of the Wolf Man story, and that both Universal and Blumhouse continue to work with their remaining stable of characters in this same simple but effectively creepy manner.

MOVIES THAT HAVE ME WORRIED:

SNOW WHITE (MARCH 21)

This remake of Disney’s very first feature length animated film has been contentious to say the least.  It’s coming out at a time when audiences are generally growing tired of Disney’s trend of remaking their old classics, viewing many of them as shameless cash grabs.  Currently, the sequel to one of those remakes, Mufasa: The Lion King (2024) is struggling at the box office, showing that the era where these kinds of movies were able to mint money for Disney may be over now.  At the same time, this movie has been plagued with production woes, which caused the budget to swell out of control and led to a delay of over a year from it’s originally planned Spring 2024 release.  It’s been said that in order to recoup their costs, Disney will need this movie to gross over $600 million, which is going to be difficult given that audiences seem to have moved on from the Disney remakes.  And if all that weren’t bad enough, this movie has become a hot potato subject in the annoying present “culture war” debates, purely because the film’s star, Rachel Zegler, has been outspoken about her feelings about what it means to be a Disney Princess in the modern era.  Zegler is certainly entitled to her opinion, and I honestly have no problems with the things she has said, but there are plenty of other bad faith critics out there online who are grinding their axes anxiously waiting to tear this movie apart.  I myself have a lot of worries about this film, mainly due to my own lack of enthusiasm for the Disney remakes trend.  But, at the same time, I also had these same worries about their The Little Mermaid (2023) remake last year, and ended up being pleasantly surprised and charmed by that movie.  My hope is that Snow White  will surprise me in the same way.  I like Rachel Zegler as a performer and I think she can pull off the role of Snow White well enough, especially as a singer.  The casting of Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen also looks to be interesting.  Can’t say I admire the CGI dwarves though; hopefully they work better in the final film.  Things may turn out bad for this one, and I’m dreading the discourse around it.  After the good year that Disney had in 2024, I don’t want to see them end up with another black eye at the box office.

DOG MAN (JANUARY 31)

One thing that has bothered me in recent years is the inconsistency that we’ve seen from Dreamworks Animation.  Once one of the vanguard studios in the animation industry, the brand has taken a hit with quite a few misfires in recent years; much more so than their rivals Disney, Pixar, and Illumination.  Sure they still put out a hit film every now and then, like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) and this year’s The Wild Robot (2024), but these hits will often be offset by a lackluster sequel like Trolls: Band Together (2023) or a full on flop like Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken (2023).  My worry is that this will also be the case for their next film, Dog Man.  Based on the popular children’s book series, this new film copies the illustrated look from the novels, which does look appealing enough.  But it also seems like it retains the same entertainment level of the books as well, which is mainly catering first and foremost for kids.  There’s nothing wrong with choosing that as the target audience, but Dreamworks Animation at their best doesn’t just make movies for younger audiences; they make them for all ages.  As stated before, there are movies like the Paddington films that transcend their G-rated appeal and are able to give enough entertainment to audiences no matter their age.  Many Dreamworks movies in the past have done that as well too.  But with movies like Dog Man, they seem to be pandering to a specific audience, and that to me says that they are limiting their creativity in the process.  I could be wrong, and this movie may in fact have just as much humor and charm to appeal to both the parents and their kids.  It’s just not coming across like that in the advertisement.  My hope is that Dreamworks manages to find that spark again to bring them up to the level of Pixar and Disney, especially at a time when both of those studios are delivering billion dollar movies again.

LOVE HURTS (FEBRUARY 7)

It has been pleasing to see the career revival of Ke Huy Quan in recent years.  The former child actor famous for playing Data in The Goonies (1985) and Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) has made a remarkable comeback as an adult, especially with his Oscar-winning turn in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022).  Now, he gets to be a top billed star in his own action movie.  Having worked as a stunt coordinator for several years, Ke Huy Quan is no novice when it comes to performing action scenes, and it appears that many of the set pieces in this upcoming film feature him doing many of his own stunts, which is impressive.  I think another plus is him putting a upbeat, happy-go-lucky spin on the character, which could make it a fun time.  It’s also great to see in the trailer that Ke’s fellow Goonie Sean Astin has a supporting role in this film, possibly marking the first time they’ve actually been in a movie together since The Goonies almost 40 years ago, which would be quite the reunion.  The only thing I worry about is that this kind of genre may have been played out too much already.  The John Wick films constantly has to refresh itself with every film to keep the premise from growing stale, and the plot for this film feels a little too close to the Bob Odenkirk film Nobody (2021).  Hopefully, Quan’s magnetic charm is able to carry this film.  It’s not so much the performance that I worry about but rather the action scenes themselves.  Hopefully, given that this movie is from the same production company behind Nobody and Violent Night (2022), they are going to keep things fresh and make the action set pieces unique and fun to watch.  They definitely have the right actor in place, who knows a thing or two about fight choreography, and he’s at a point in his career where people are excited to see him on the big screen again.  He’s long overdue for a starring role, and hopefully Love Hurts is that fun kind of violent spectacle that lives up to the high standards of the genre.

THE LEGEND OF OCHI (FEBRUARY 28)

When it comes to A24, you certainly take a risk with what kind of movie you’re going to end up watching.  And that has been the appeal of A24, the fact that they do make the kinds of movies that no one else will make, mainly due to so many of them being just so insanely weird.  But, not all of their movies are home runs.  Sometimes you do get that odd movie that just doesn’t land.  This new fantasy film sees the studio launching into a more family friendly territory than what we usually see from them.  The movie definitely takes it’s inspiration from family adventure films like E.T. The Extraterrestrial (1982), but with a much more art house flavor to it.  There are things that I find really appealing about this film.  One, you can’t go wrong with Willem Dafoe in your cast.  And second, I like the fact that the creature in this film looks to be a physical puppet instead of a CGI creation.  It’s nice to see one practical effect used in this film.  The only thing that bothers me is that there seems to be a vaguely AI art feel to the film, particularly with the impressionistic environments.  I’m hoping that this is an intentional artistic choice, and not the filmmakers trying to cut corners using AI in place of actual hand made effects.  The practical effect of Ochi tells me that this film is leaning more into real effects than CGI, so hopefully it’s just a coincidence that the art style looks like AI art.  The problem is that AI art is at a phase where it creates this odd blended look to it that softens the image and makes it feel in a way soulless, because it’s created by algorithms and not by a trained artistic eye.  It unfortunately reflects bad on a movie like this, where a softer look is probably intentional.  My hope is that the visuals work more cohesively in the finished film, because it does look like a charming movie, and another example of A24’s commitment to unique visions in cinema.

MOVIES TO SKIP:

A MINECRAFT MOVIE (APRIL 4)

It’s kind of insane how many movies based on video games have included actor Jack Black in them.  He played Bowser in The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) and also voice Claptrap in this year’s Borderlands (2024), and neither film was very good.  The same seems to likely also be the case with this adaptation of the popular block building game, Minecraft.  Given that the game itself is just an open world sandbox, there isn’t much of a narrative to draw from, so the makers of this movie just decided to copy the Mario Bros. formula instead.  Jack Black plays the avatar character of the game, Steve, who we learn here came from the real world and has been living in the Minecraft world because of reasons we don’t know about yet; nor really care either.  The film also brings in a weird assortment of supporting characters, including the additions of Jason Mamoa and Danielle Brooks to the mix.  Jack Black is there to be his same old persona, which I guess you’re getting what you paid for with that.  He’s a fine comedic presence sometimes, but man I wish he would stop taking paycheck roles like this and actually make something that better uses his talents as an actor.  I get the feeling that too many of the jokes in this movie will fly over the heads of people who have never played the games.  The re-imagining of the world itself even feels off, adding more textural detail to a game whose mass appeal is it’s retro simplicity.  Coming off of the massive failure that was Borderlands, Jack Black probably doesn’t want to be associated with yet another failed adaptation of a video game, but that’s sadly what may end up being the case again here.  And this time, he can’t hide himself behind a CGI animated character anymore.

FLIGHT RISK (JANUARY 24)

Another film that I talked about before in a preview, before it got switched to a later release date after I published the article.  In general, my feelings towards this movie hasn’t changed in the interim.  I still see it as a major step down for both Mark Wahlberg and director Mel Gibson.  Gibson continues to burn through all the good will he may have had left in Hollywood with his self-indulgent choices as an actor and filmmaker, and it seems like this is the only kind of movie he’s now capable of making.  He’s gone from the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Braveheart (1995) to making a B-movie action thriller.  Mark Wahlberg is also seeming to be an actor just spinning his wheels as a performer, taking safe familiar roles that coast on his name rather than actually doing anything challenging.  Hopefully both men get out of their own bad habits and actually make movies that are better suited for their talents.  This movie looks like it’s dead on arrival, and it doesn’t surprise me at all that Lionsgate pushed it out of the competitive Fall Season and left it in the dumping ground that is late January.  We’ll see if it’s better than it looks on the surface, but something tells me that this one is not going to be lighting up the box office, and hopefully it makes the two men behind it become more reflective of how their talents are being wasted.

NOVOCAINE (MARCH 14)

In contrast with Love Hurts, here we have an action comedy example of trying too hard.  The film’s premise is that the main character feels no pain, so he’s able to fight without the experience of pain affecting his state of mind.  Jack Quaid is a likable enough actor, but here I don’t quite buy into him being a capable action star the same way that I do with Ke Huy Quan.  With Quan, you already know going in that he has martial arts training and a background in stunts.  Here, Quaid definitely is not the one doing the stunts.  What you have to rely upon then for this film’s premise to work is it’s sense of humor, and again judging by this trailer, that seems to be lacking as well.  This kind of premise could work, but it requires more believable stunts as well as an actor with a bit more of a off-kilter personality.  Jack Quaid seems to be playing this character as too much of a milquetoast every-man.  Perhaps there might be a bit more to this movie, but it just looks to be playing it too safe.  This needed a far more absurdist take on the material.  In a genre now dominated by the John Wick’s of the world, your action comedies need to stand out more, and that requires taking a whole lot more chances.

So, there you have my preview of the movies coming out in Early 2025, pending any last minute release date changes.  One thing that’s noticeable is the lack of major tentpoles in the month of March.  Sure, there’s Mickey 17  and Snow White set for release, but it’s a noticeably emptier month than what we have usually had.  It’s the key Spring Break period of the year, so the studios have used March as a way of generating some early box office wins while people on on their holiday.  This past year we saw this as the place where blockbusters like Dune: Part Two and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024) were able to find their audiences and generate some strong box office.  But this year, things feel a lot less bountiful in the Spring.  This might be the residual effect of the strikes, as the backlog of projects has created a gap in the pipeline of movie releases, and Hollywood no longer has any movies left available that they were able to delay until the strikes were over.  Hopefully, this doesn’t leave the rest of the year in a weaker state.  2024 was a year with a lot of positive signs of recovery for the theatrical business, and the hope is that this momentum will continue into 2025.  Big movies like Marvel’s Captain America: Brave New World and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners should help give the box office a boost, but movie theaters will need many more movies to outperform expectations going into the new year.  The hope is that by the time Summer rolls around that things will especially begin to sizzle at the box office and that hopefully movie theaters will able to endure what may be a lighter than usual Spring season.  In any case, there are a lot of movies that I personally am looking forward to in 2025, and in some cases I won’t have to wait too long as some of my Must Sees are definitely found in these early months ahead.  So, have a Happy New Year and let’s all have a fun time going to the movies in 2025.

Movie Reviews

Mufasa: The Lion King – Review

The trend of Disney re-makes of their classic animated films has become a, shall we say, contentious thing within the fandom.  While some animation fans are happy to see these classics re-imagined in a live action, plenty more are not so happy.  The argument is that Disney is not adding anything new to these movies, and that their creation is purely for a cynical cash grab.  While there is merit to those arguments, I for one try to judge each of these remakes on their own.  The best remakes are the ones that can justify their existence, and make the case that a live action version of a classic animated film is there to compliment it rather than overshadow it.  Disney, for the most part has been all over the place with their re-makes.  Of the movies, I would say one is an improvement over the original (Pete’s Dragon), while quite a few are just as good (Cinderella, Jungle Book) and some that are not better but were decent in their own way (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin).  But, then we have the re-makes that absolutely fail at being anywhere near the same league as the originals (Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, Pinocchio, Dumbo).  But this trend of Disney “live action” remakes hit it’s pinnacle with the release of 2019’s The Lion King.  Pinnacle in terms of box office yes, with a world wide gross of $1.5 billion, but also pinnacle in it’s absolute worthlessness.  I ranked the film as the worst of the year, and that was because I thought it represented the worst of the remake trend under Disney; a pure copy and paste job that paled against the original in every way and was the most blatant cash grab that I had ever witnessed from Disney, which is saying a lot.  So, you can imagine that I had a lot of worries and resentment on my mind when I learned that Disney was preparing another film in the same world of their Lion King remake; a prequel centered around the character of Mufasa.

I get why Disney was doing this.  Shareholders were pleased with the box office results of the first Lion King remake, and they wanted Disney to do it again.  It didn’t matter that the first remake was critically panned (including from yours truly) and that it didn’t even register in awards season.  The billion dollar gross was what mattered, so Disney was looking to find a way to follow up their mega-hit.  But, what direction would they take.  There were direct-to-video sequels to the original 1994 Lion King, but those films aren’t as beloved, so doing yet another copy and paste job wasn’t seen as ideal.  They would have to go a more original route.  Unfortunately for Disney, the director behind the first Lion King remake, Jon Favreau, had already moved over to the Lucasfilm side of the company to work on The Mandalorian series on Disney+, along with a slew of many other Star Wars projects in the pipeline.  This was going to leave him unavailable for some time, so a new director was needed.  Surprisingly, Disney went far outside their stable to look for a new director, and they found the unlikeliest of filmmakers to fill that role.  Barry Jenkins was considered to be an art house filmmaker, having made a name for himself writing and directing Oscar winning films like Moonlight (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018).  Going into the new decade he was deep into production of his ambitious mini-series for Amazon Prime, The Underground Railroad, when Disney approached him with the prospect of working on their follow-up to The Lion King, and he was surprisingly receptive to the offer.  After gaining a strong reputation as a prestige director, was he gambling that good will by taking on what many saw as a corporate cash grab, or was he seizing an opportunity to bring his artistic style to a bigger canvas that would have broad appeal with worldwide audiences?  It would all depend on if he could elevate this story beyond it’s predecessor and create something that both creatively satisfied himself as well as fulfilled the obligation that Disney had entrusted him with.  And so, the result is the prequel backstory of Mufasa: The Lion King.

When Simba (Donald Glover) and Nala (Beyonce) must leave Pride Rock for a day, they entrust Timon (Billy Eichner) and Pumbaa (Seth Rogen) to babysit their daughter Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter).  A sudden storm causes the trio to seek refuge in a cave, where they also find Rafiki (John Kani) meditating.  In order to help calm the rattled lioness cub and her companions until the storm passes, Rafiki begins to tell the story of how Kiara’s grandfather, Mufasa, became king.  Young Mufasa (Braelyn Rankins) is washed away by a river and separated from his family.  He ends up many miles away in the territory of another pride of lions.  Their cub prince, Taka (Theo Somolu) helps save Mufasa from the perils of the river and brings him to the pride’s nesting grounds.  Taka’s mother Eshe (Thandiwe Newton) takes Mufasa under herwing, but the father Obasi (Lennie James) doesn’t trust Mufasa because he is an outsider.  Many years pass, and grown up Mufasa (Aaron Pierre) and Taka (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) have become as close as brothers.  The peace of Obasi’s pridelands is shattered however when a pack of white lions invade.  While protecting his adoptive mother, Mufasa kills one of the male white lions.  The dead lion turns out to be the son of the white lions’ king, Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen), who now has a vendetta against Obasi’s pride as well as for Mufasa himself.  In order to secure the bloodline of the pride, Obasi sends his son and Mufasa away for their protection.  Forced to seek out a home of their own, Taka and Mufasa venture into the wilderness.  Mufasa convinces Taka that they should seek a vast green valley called Milele which he remembers his mother talking about when he was little.  On the road, they encounter other travelers, including the lioness Sarabi (Tiffany Boone) and her bird companion Zazu (Preston Nyman), as well as a young Rafiki (Kagiso Lediga).  But, their journey is not without more peril, and Kiros and his minions are following their tracks every step of the way.  Can they stay ahead, and does the presence of Sarabi drive a wedge between the Mufasa and Taka that shatters their brotherhood?

Given my distaste for the first Lion King remake, I didn’t have a lot of high hopes for this prequel.  My interest did perk up though when I learned that Barry Jenkins was tapped to direct.  Jenkin’s involvement could indeed bring some much needed depth and character to what otherwise was a soulless corporate product.  But, was Disney going to let him cook, or was he going to be another promising filmmaker swallowed up by the machine.  The expectations were already low, and my hope was that the movie wouldn’t be any worse than the first film.  And thankfully, it isn’t.  At the same time it’s also not a whole lot better either.  Mufasa: The Lion King is an improvement in many ways, but it also suffers from a lot of problems that are just inherent in the presentation itself.  Let me start with the positive, in that it is refreshing that this movie is not just another copy and paste job like the last movie.  The Lion King remake was one of the laziest big studio films that I had ever experienced, because it was a purely shot for shot remake, minus all of the soul that you get out of traditional animation.  I’ll talk more about my issues with the animation later, but at least story-wise it was refreshing watching this movie and not knowing what the story beats would be from scene to scene.  Now, the story was a still a tad bit on the predictable side, but at least they were building from scratch and not with the same exact script from another movie.  It’s a risk taking on a prequel, because you ultimately know the destination it’s heading towards.  But, the backstory of Mufasa is something that Disney has never really explored much in any media, so if there was any fertile ground to mine out of this franchise, this is where they found it, and Mufasa is a compelling enough character that the movie does manage to justify it’s own existence, merely by finally giving us something we haven’t seen yet out of this world.

Where the film falters though is in it’s inconsistent execution of the story.  The biggest flaw of the film is it’s framing device.  The film pulls away from Mufasa’s story constantly to remind the audience that they are being told the story second-hand by Rafiki.  I have a feeling that this was a studio mandated addition to the film that Barry Jenkins was forced to put in there, just to break up the seriousness of the movie’s tone in order to inject more kid friendly comedy to stay with the shot attention spans of younger audiences.  Each time these cutaways would happen in the film, it would grind the movie to a halt, and rob the movie of any dramatic heft.  And the cutaways to the present would be excruciating too, because it involved very unfunny comedy relief from Timon and Pumbaa.  Seriously, I hated this framing device so much because of what it was doing to the story proper.  Even worse, they were making meta jokes about The Lion King movie, the Broadway play, and Disney in general that felt horribly out of place in this world and just seemed like a desperate ploy by Disney creatives to make themselves look more clever than they really are.  They should have just let Barry Jenkins work with the story he was given and not feel the need to spice it up with pop culture puns.  You could cut out all of these cringey interstitials and the story would’ve flowed so much better.  It may not have been the greatest story ever told, but the tone wouldn’t feel all over the place and you would get a more cohesive experience.  It’s where the film felt like it was compromised the most.  While watching it, I found myself managing to appreciate the story when it found it’s groove, but then I’d grow frustrated again every time Timon and Pumbaa butted in.  It’s the worst instincts of studio interference sabotaging whatever kinds of improvements that this movie was attempting to make in response to the first movie’s mistakes.

Overall, Barry Jenkins does attempt to bring some improvements, but it also feels that he had his hands tied.  But there were just some things that were also impossible to fix in general.  The photorealism of the movie is still a major problem, because of how it robs the character out of the animation.  I talked about this a lot in my original “live action” Lion King review here, but this film too suffers from the lack emotive animation that the traditional style can offer.  When you use traditional, “cartoony” animation, you can give everything from humans to animals to even appliances expressive facial emotions.  This goes a long way towards helping an audience connect with these characters on an emotional level, because the animators are able to display emotion purely through expression; conveying things that dialogue along can’t deliver.  When animating with photorealistic animal characters, you lose that creative license because animals like lions don’t have a wide array of facial expressions in real life.  A lion’s face is emotionless by nature, and trying to get that kind of character model to emote in a movie like this while still maintaining that photorealism just doesn’t work.  The animators try to push expressions just a little bit more here compared to the first film, but the movie still can’t quite get there.  It doesn’t help that Jenkins is also a novice when it comes to animation, so he isn’t able to push the medium beyond it’s comfort zone.  There are some impressive shots of landscapes in this movie, and I do appreciate the diverse amount of locations that Jenkins tries to bring into this world, including a beautiful passage through snow capped mountains.  But the photorealistic presentation also just keeps things feeling impersonal when it should be awe-inspiring.  The thought that kept crossing my head throughout the movie was that all of this might have made for a better movie if it was a prequel to the original animated movie and animated in that style instead.  It may not have been as good as that 30 year old classic, but it would have had a lot more character to it than what we got here.

The film is also a mixed bag in terms of the vocal performances.  For one thing, I really was not digging the shoehorned way that the orginal film’s cast was brought into this movie.  It just reminded me about the waste of talent that the first remake was.  Donald Glover still sounds unremarkable as Simba, and I think Beyonce just gets one line total in this entire movie (and still manages to be one of the top billed stars).  Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen were especially grating this time around and really wanted them to shut up every time the movie cut back to them.  But at the same time, I thought the movie had some strong performances from the newcomers.  The best performance by far comes from Aaron Pierre, who had the unenviable task of playing Mufasa.  He had enormous shoes to fill, as he’s tasked with taking over the role from the late great James Earl Jones, an actor so iconicly tied to the role of Mufasa that he voiced him twice, both in the original and the remake.  Pierre manages to pick up that mantle in a way that is respectful to Jones’ performance, but also allows for the actor to make it his own.  I also viewed Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s performance as Taka to be a far better take on the character that one day becomes the villain Scar than Chiwetel Ejiofor’s phoned in performance in the original remake.  Of course, both still pale compared to Jeremy Iron’s original performance.  Speaking of villainous turns, Mads Mikkelsen reliably brings some appropriate menace to the character of Kiros, and helps the somewhat one-dimensional villain stand out just a bit better.  One other thing that this movie has going for it is that it features a new score of original songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda; Disney’s current in-house hit maker.  While the songs here are passable, they aren’t quite as strong as Miranda’s other recent work and certainly no where near the quality of Elton John’s work in the original animated classic.  But, at least Barry Jenkins has a voice cast here that’s capable of singing and doing the Miranda songs justice.  You don’t have to listen to Eichner and Rogen mangle “Hakuna Matata” anymore.

Whatever issues Disney still has with their production of live action remakes, none of them are going to be solved by the results of Mufasa: The Lion King.  Certainly bringing Barry Jenkins on board to direct this movie was a bold move, but even a great filmmaker like him can only do so much to lampshade the problems that are inherent in the production to begin with.  I can see the kernels of the more enriching story about destiny and finding yourself through adversity that Barry Jenkins was trying to strive for in his telling of Mufasa’s story, but I also see all of the meddling from Disney executives who seemed to get cold feet from this more mature storyline and tried to shoe horn in more stuff for the little kids.  The most redeeming thing about this film is that it has more originality to it than a straightforward remake.  Barry Jenkins doesn’t use any pre-built template here and tries his best to craft something new. In some fleeting moments, he succeeds, and the movie actually rises above it’s mediocrity.  But too often, you feel the cynicism of the studio trying to milk this franchise out of all the money they can get from it.  My hope is that Barry Jenkins is able to use this exercise to grow as a filmmaker and make something bold and ambitious for his next film.  The worst case is if it ruins his reputation and he just becomes a director for hire in the future, no longer driving his own artistic style but rather just finding the work that he can get.  He’s a very unique voice, and it’s a risk for someone like him to work within the machine like he’s doing here with Mufasa.  I give him credit for trying, and you do see flashes of creative brilliance here.  But Mufasa just has too many flaws that hold it back.  It is an improvement over the first remake, but I argue again why they don’t just take this story and apply it to the original animated style.  That’s where this story truly belongs, and I feel like The Lion King’s place is less in a real world aesthetic and more in the realm of escapist fantasy that hand drawn animation can provide.  Stop trying to strip away the color and animation out of this storyline and let this Lion King truly roar.

Rating: 6/10

What the Hell Was That?

What the Hell Was That? – Eight Crazy Nights (2002)

On thing that we know about Christmas movies is that there are a lot of them.  Literally hundreds.  And you have any type of Christmas movie you want; funny Christmas movies, sad Christmas movies, dark Christmas movies, and even violent Christmas movies.  But, the one other thing you’ll note is that the holiday season seems to exclusively belong to Christmas cinematically.  It’s not the only holiday that is celebrated during the peak of the Winter season, and yet if you had only the movies to go by, you would think that Christmas stands alone.  There are a variety of winter season festivals that mark the end of the year, but it’s perhaps the eight night holiday of Hanukkah that usually is celebrated alongside Christmas by the Jewish community that is the only other one known to most people.  Hanukkah, the Hebrew festival of light, shares the tradition of gift giving with the Christmas holiday, and in recent times it has risen up in esteem culturally as being a presence in the otherwise homogenous Christmas season.  It’s not uncommon today to see a menorah alongside a Christmas tree in public holiday displays, and as there are growing interfaith families across the world, the sharing of the season between the two holidays is becoming far more widespread as well.   And it is a great thing that culturally we are viewing the holiday season as a celebration of traditions from all over the world now and not just that of Christmas.  But, in terms of cinema, we still haven’t seen much change in the dominance that Christmas has over the season.  Though there have been some attempts, we haven’t seen a film emerge as the definitive Hanukkah movie that helps to cement it’s place as a classic in the same way so many Christmas films do.  Of course, one filmmaker did try, and it unfortunately turned into a monumental disaster.

One of the reasons that we haven’t seen a true Hanukkah classic emerge out of Hollywood is because so many Jewish filmmakers have used their talents to help shape the Christmas season we all know and love.  If you think about it, we have the Jewish community to thank for some of the best Christmas specials and songs that continue to remain essential parts of the holiday to this day (Rankin & Bass, Irving Berlin, etc.)  So it’s surprising that Jews, who make up a significant part of Hollywood history and continue to remain an important community in the industry today, have never been self reflective and put a spotlight on their own holiday season traditions.  Well, one of the reasons that it’s probably the case is that Hanukkah isn’t as important a holiday on the Jewish calendar as Christmas is to the gentiles.  Passover and Yom Kippur are far more important, so Jews probably never saw the reason to spotlight Hanukkah on the big screen as a big deal.  A lot of modern Jews even celebrate the secular aspects of the Christmas holiday alongside their non-Jewish friends, so it’s probably why many Jewish filmmakers gladly made movies and specials to celebrate the holiday season.  But, as Hanukkah has grown as a part of the season culturally in recent years, there are more filmmakers who have wanted to try to give the spotlight to the holiday.  One of those filmmakers turned out to be comedian Adam Sandler.  Sandler, who grew up in a Jewish household himself, played upon the absence of Hanukkah in the public eye during the holiday season, and worked it into a song in his act.  Dubbed “The Hanukkah Song,” Sandler’s tune made it’s first debut on a segment of Saturday Night Live, with Sandler using the song to spotlight a list of beloved Jewish celebrities.  It’s corny and doesn’t really give you any insight into the holiday itself, but in a way it’s also a fun way of showing pride in being Jewish that I’m sure was a major part in Sandler’s crafting of the song.  Perhaps to his surprise, the song took off and became a hit.  In a season dominated by Christmas, it seemed that Sandler’s joke song may have in fact finally enabled Hanukkah to finally crack into the holiday season songbook.

With a hit song, it seemed only a matter of time before Adam Sandler would capitalize on it’s success by making a movie.  And in the turn of the millennium, it was a good bet that he could get that movie made.  Sandler spent his immediate post-SNL years becoming a huge box office champ with movies like Billy Madison (1995), Happy Gilmore (1996) and Big Daddy (1999) all performing extremely well.  At this point in his career, he could get any film greenlit.  This eventually got him a meeting with Columbia Pictures had Amy Pascal, who was interested in producing a holdiay themed movie based around the popular Hanukkah song.  Sandler had an idea for his Hanukkah themed movie, but it was a major departure from what he had made before.  In perhaps the spirit of holiday specials like those from Rankin/Bass and classics like How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Sandler wanted his Hanukkah movie to be animated.  And not just any kind of animated; it was going to have Disney quality traditional animation, but still maintain the irreverent edgy humor that Sandler had featured in his earlier films.  It’s unusual that Pascal approved the project, given that Columbia at the time didn’t have an in-house animation studio like Disney had.  Also, traditional animation was already starting to lose it’s luster in the early 2000’s, where even Disney was struggling to find a hit with the medium at a time when CG animated movies like Shrek (2001) were starting to dominate.  Also, Sandler was uncompromising in having this film reflect his standard of adult humor, meaning that this film was likely not going to be marketed to younger audiences who normally would go to see an animated film.  But, the movie got the greenlight and the problems became very apparent as the movie finally reached theaters in time for the 2002 holiday season.

Titled Eight Crazy Nights, after the popular lyric from the song, the movie is a confused mess that neither works as a wannabe holiday classic, nor even as a vehicle for Adam Sandler’s comedy.  Fundamentally, the film really fails to accomplish what it sets out to do, which is to be a Hanukkah themed movie.  The festival barely is a factor in the story, and in the end it really just becomes another Christmas film, because it’s just unavoidable given the wintertime setting of the film.  The story centers around a character named Whitey who is the standard Adam Sandler protagonist; brash, loud and rude.  With this character, Sandler seems to be going for a Christmas Carol arc of trying to soften a mean-spirited jerk through the warmth of the holiday season, only the film never manages to successfully land that plane.  Davey remains one of the least funny and hatable characters that Sandler has ever played, and it’s due to the mistaken belief on Sandler’s part that the mean-spiritedness of the character is what makes him funny.  Perhaps the arc of his character would feel more genuine if there was effort put into showing his transition from heartless to compassionate over the course of the movie.  But no, we need scenes of him throwing another character down a hill in a port-a-potty because gross out humor was considered in during the late 90’s and early 2000’s.  It should be noted that gross out humor seems even worse in traditional animation.  Poop eating deer is bad enough of an idea in concept, but actually drawing it out makes it even worse.  That’s the level of humor you have to endure through the movie.  And what we get less of is anything heartwarming or endearing, which is kind of what you need to be remembered as a beloved holiday movie.

But Davey is not the worst character that Sandler plays in film.  There’s an elderly man named Whitey that takes Davey under his wing and tries to reform him, and Adam Sandler for whatever reason decided that he wanted this character to have the most grating and obnoxious voice ever.  Whitey is the second most prominent character in the movie, meaning you have to hear his voice through the majority of the film, and after a while it becomes an endurance test.  I don’t know why Sandler thought playing this character was a good idea.  Sure, goofy voices have been a staple of his comedy before, but in this case, the comedy is not translating.  I think it’s because the movie attempt to make the character sympathetic, being the one who takes the brunt of Davey’s abusive behavior, but Sandler undercuts all that sympathy by making the character unnecessarily obnoxious.  The character of Whitey needed to be a lot more grounded in order for the film to work, and that called for a much more subtle performance on Sandler’s part, or just the courtesy of allowing a different actor to play the role.  The thing is, we can still hear Sandler through the performance, making his vocal performance feel disingenuous, as if his own intent is to keep mocking the character even through the moments we are supposed to care for him.  There’s also a third voice that Sandler provides in the film, which is for Whitey’s twin sister Eleanore, but that role isn’t nearly as bad.  For one thing, Eleanore is not in the movie that much, and Sandler makes her sound unique enough that you wouldn’t initially know that it’s him playing the role.  If he was wiser, he would have given the role of Whitey to a different actor, like maybe a veteran professional that would’ve found the humanity in the character, and just left the funny voice part for himself for the role of Eleanore.  But, even with the awful performance he gives as Whitey, it’s still not the worst part of the movie, as freqent Sandler coat-tail rider Rob Schneider sinks to another low by playing an Asian restaurant owner with a typical stereotypical accent.  A typical low bar met with Schneider, but made even worse when you have to see it animated.

The most disappointing thing about the movie, however, is that the animation for it was actually really good.  Seriously, the animation team did an outstanding job making the movie look colorful and fluid.  When Adam Sandler demanded he wanted Disney quality animation for his film, he seems to have gotten his wish.  One thing that the production of this movie benefitted from was that it became a refuge for a time for a lot of out of work animators who came from the recently closed animation departments of Warner Brothers and Fox.  Many people who’ve seen this movie have noticed a lot of striking similarities between the animation of this movie and that of The Iron Giant (1999), and that’s because both movies shared many of the same animators.  And those who came to this film from Fox would have had the experience of working under the direction of animation legend Don Bluth.  The pedigree in this film’s animation team really was quite impressive.  It’s just too bad that Adam Sandler had them animating things like pooping reindeer.  It’s astonishing to think that some of these animators went from working on a masterwork like The Iron Giant to working on one of the worst animated films of all time.  The only good thing about this is that it helped a group of animators stay employed for just a little while longer.  The early 2000’s was not kind to the traditional animation industry as it was transitioning into one primarily geared towards computer animation.  Eight Crazy Nights was definitely not the film to help reverse the trend, and in the end it was another sign that the era of traditional animation was coming to an unremarkable end.  It may not have flopped as hard as Iron Giant or Disney’s Treasure Planet (2002), but it certainly failed to connect with audiences just like them.  But unlike the Giant and Planet, it didn’t gain a cult following over time, and has been rightfully dismissed as a failure that needed to be forgotten.

One of the other big failures of the movie is the fact that it even attempts to be a musical.  There are no less than seven original songs in the movie, each of them about as unremarkable as you’d expect.  Even worse, about half of them feature the character Whitey, so if you thought his voice was grating before, now you get to hear him attempting to sing as well.  But, you know what song is not here at all; the actual song that the movie was based on.  At least, it’s not in the story proper; you have to wait until the end credits to actually hear the song.  But it does make you wonder, why bury it in the credits when it should have been the centerpiece of the actual movie.  Sandler wanted to create a new holiday classic that celebrated the often overlooked holiday, so why didn’t he make the kind of movie that lived up to the spirit of the song.  A lot of his baser instincts as a comic probably got in the way, as he likely favored irreverent, offensive humor over heartwarming material.  The musical score also is fairly lazy from a composition standpoint.  Songs just start to be sung without reason in the story.  It’s like Sandler and company were just adding them in to meet a quota.  And they are generic as possible.  Sandler, as demonstrated with his Hanukkah song, can carry a tune, but here he particularly seems to phone it in, especially as Davey who just seems bored whenever he sings.  The weirdest and most out of place song comes from a scene when Davey breaks into the mall, and he hallucinates all of the different brand mascots of the stores coming to life to teach him a lesson; all of which is another blatant example of Adam Sandler using his movies as advertisement space for product placement.

Clearly, Adam Sandler was not the guy to deliver the definitive Hanukkah movie.  Eight Crazy Nights is a nearly unwatchable mess that doesn’t work in any way; not as an animated movie, not as a musical, and especially not as a holiday classic.  It’s just Adam Sandler doing his normal schtick but with even less effort and through the medium of animation.  Sadly, it wastes some really good work from talented animators, many of whom were at the time struggling to survive in a rapidly changing industry, which this film did nothing to help with.  It wouldn’t be Adam Sandler’s last foray into animation, however, and thankfully he has gotten better with working in the medium.  He found success with the Hotel Transylvania series and later his production company Happy Madison produced the acclaimed Leo (2023) for Netflix.  Sandler continues to perform the Hanukkah song on a regular basis, but the film it spawned has faded from the picture, and it’s probably for the better.  It’s just too bad that no one has picked up the mantle and created a memorable Hanukkah movie on the level of the Christmas classics we watch every single year.  It would be nice if a company like Hallmark maybe tried out doing a Hanukkah themed movie in their style of holiday themed, inspirational films.  With Hanukkah’s profile in the holiday season being elevated to where it is now, it’s beyond time to actually give it a worthy cinematic celebration.  At this point, we already know that Adam Sandler is not the guy to make it happen, but his failure shouldn’t dissuade others from trying either.  A lot of Jews helped to make our holiday traditions a little bit brighter.  It would be worthwhile to show some support for getting a spotlight directed at their own holiday for once, whether it’s in song, on television or on the big screen.  As the song goes, “Put on your yarmulke, here comes Hanukkah.  So much funikkah, to celebrate Hanukkah.”

Editorials

Gifts That Keep Giving – Why Hollywood is Spending Big on Christmas Movies

Like any other year, you’d expect at least one movie hitting the big screen that takes advantage of the holiday season and centers it’s story around theme of Christmastime.  This year is no exception.  We were greeted with a major one this year in the form of the action film, Red One (2024), which brings a bit of Michael Bay-esque mayhem to the Santa Claus mythos.  The movie also brings in two of the biggest action movie stars in Hollywood today, Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, to give it even more cinematic gravitas.  Unfortunately, even with it’s well-timed holiday season release date, the film failed to deliver the presents at the box office, becoming a rare misfire for the the two stars on the marquee.  But that’s not the thing that got the notice of Hollywood insiders.  What really sparked a conversation around this movie was it’s astronomical price tag.  The movie, which is based around an original concept centered on the mythos of Santa and holiday traditions, cost over $250 million to make.  That is an astonishingly high production budget for what is essentially nothing more than a Christmas movie.  Now, the movie was financed by Amazon Studios, which is part of one of the world’s wealthiest corporations, so it’s soft box office results will not exactly sink the fortunes of the studio, but even still, many are questioning why a Christmas film needed a quarter of a billion dollar budget.  It’s been speculated that the budget ballooned because of cost overruns due to the lack of professionalism on the part of it’s main star (Dwayne Johnson) who caused multiple delays, but it still doesn’t account for why the project needed to keep going despite all of the production issues.  The answer lies in the fact that Holiday movies have grown into a much larger business over the last couple years.

In the last few decades, we’ve seen a rise in what can be considered Holiday blockbusters.  Christmas films certainly aren’t anything new, as they have existed in Hollywood as far back as the early days with classics like It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947).  But it was with the success of Home Alone (1990) that Hollywood took notice that a Christmas themed movie could not only perform well at the box office, but also be dominant too.  Further Christmas themed movies would continue to emerge afterwards that were not only successful but could also lead at the box office.  There was The Santa Clause (1994), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) and The Polar Express (2004), all of which delivered surprisingly strong box office results.  In some of the cases, these movies succeeded not just because they capitalized on the holiday season, but because they connected with audiences in a way that transcended their holiday theming.  Home Alone especially stands out more for it’s comedic pratfalls than it does for it’s holiday aesthetics, because that’s what drove people to the theaters over and over again.  This is usually what separates the good holiday films from the bad, as not every holiday movie is a success at the box office.  Red One is proving that right now, as it does not have the legs to carry it through the holidays and will likely be out of theaters even before Christmas Day itself.  But, there is still a lot of signs that Hollywood is not weary of banking heavily in Christmas themed movies anytime soon even as movies like Red One continue to eat it at the box office.  What we are finding out is that Holiday movies are a far more resilient genre all on their own that have longer shelf lives than most other types of movies.

The reason why studios are willing to invest so much in new holiday themed films is because of something called the long tail effect.  This long tail effect is when a movie premieres in theaters or somewhere else and remains in the public view long after, You see it with movies that remain profitable many years later, helped by a healthy presence in subsequent television airings and re-releases.  Some movies get rediscovered this way too, such as It’s a Wonderful Life which had initially bombed at the box office and then later became a perennial classic.  While the long tail effect can happen to movies in any genre, it seems to more frequently happen with holiday films.  This has been an interesting phenomenon in recent years and it is beginning to be reflected in the way that more and more holiday films are being produced.  Hollywood certainly is more comfortable investing in something that they know is going to have long term value beyond it’s initial release.  One thing that has certainly changed in recent years is the frequency.  While it was common to see a new holiday classic emerge every couple of years, we now are seeing at least one new movie a year specifically be spotlighted with a Christmas theme at it’s center.  This year it’s Red One, a couple years ago it was the R-rated action comedy Violent Night (2022).  And I’m sure that the next couple of years will give us plenty more.  But what is interesting is that these movies are not just being made to solely rely on their theatrical box office.  Now, many more holiday movies are getting made with the intention of sticking around for many years.

What I think has contributed to this trend is the creation of programming blocks on cable television and on streaming.  These are special selections of movies centered on Christmas that are meant to cater to their audience’s desire to see holiday themed entertainment in the lead up to the special day.  The cable channel Freeform dedicates the entire month of December to playing nothing but Holiday themed movies and specials.  And on Christmas Day itself, the cable network TBS devotes it’s channel to a marathon run of one specific movie, 1983’s A Christmas Story, which has become an annual tradition all on it’s own.  On streaming services, there are specific specialty pages created just to help viewers find holiday themed movies and show episodes.  And what these specially selected programming blocks do is to keep the same holiday themed movies and specials in the public eye year after year.  These have definitely helped in making the long tail effect work especially well for holiday movies.  But, the programming blocks can’t just survive on the same small sampling of holiday classics we all know about.  They need new entries to help keep things fresh over time, though the best of them still remain an essential piece.  Sure, you’ll easily see evergreen titles like Home Alone or The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) in the mix, but every year there are newer movies that get added, whether created as an original by the station or the streamer in question, or became an essential addition due to it’s box office performance.  It’s too early to know if Red One will see that kind of future, though the fact that it was made by Amazon tells you that it’s almost a certainty that Prime Video will be spotlighting it on their front page for many Christmases to come.

While these programming blocks definitely take advantage of the holiday season as a whole, it’s hard to know what kind of movies will become perennial favorites.  The problem is that Hollywood is producing a glut of holiday movies every year, and most of them don’t stick the way that they hoped they would.  Hallmark has created literally hundreds of holiday themed movies, but I don’t think many people can name one right off the top of their heads.  Still, Hallmark’s holiday block of films are among the most watched on television every single year, so their business model is still working well for them, even if their Christmas movies all blend together into an indistinguishable holiday blob of entertainment.  The same thing is also happening with broadcasters that cater to the same crowd as Hallmark, such as the Lifetime network or Netflix.  These easy to digest, non-offensive holiday themed movies are good at capturing that holiday spirit, but they don’t stand out like the perennial classics do, and those are the ones that continue to drive the highest viewership during the holiday season.  People just have the desire to re-watch the best Christmas movies there are to get into the holiday spirit, but it’s a hard canon to add onto.  When the same movies continue to generate viewership year after year, why try to replace any of them?  Just like any other genre, it’s hard to know exactly what movies are going to click with audiences and holiday movies ae no different.  For some of the “perennial” Christmas films, they were likely created without ever knowing that they would take on another life as an essential holiday film.  And yet, Hollywood tries a lot harder than they should trying to manufacture the next big holiday classic.

This is probably the reason why holiday films are becoming bigger budget undertakings in recent years.  The bar has been set high by the movies that we recognize as a perennial holiday classic.  A movie like Red One attempts to hit those holiday tropes in a big way, and sadly comes across as too much of a manufactured product rather than a movie made with a lot of heart.  The movie banks on us knowing all of the mythos surrounding Santa Claus and the Christmas season, mainly through the secularized sense, and tries to use all that as the unique element added into a standard action movie plot.  It’s a mix that doesn’t work as intended because we can see the intention behind the film, which is a cyncial ploy to re-sell a regurgitated, standard action movie plot with a new gimmick, and hope it hits that holiday sweet spot.  This is certainly the response it’s getting in theaters, but separated from it’s box office disappointment is it possible that the movie will have a long shelf life as a title spotlighted on Amazon’s own streaming platform?  It’s too early to know, but that long tail effect has kept even bad holiday movies like Jingle All the Way (1996) and Eight Crazy Nights (2002) in the public eye for much longer than they should have been.  The huge budget that Red One received certainly gives it a grander feel, and that’s likely what the filmmakers were intending with their movie.  Because the bar is high for standing out in the genre, you’ve got to present your movie as something pretty special.  Maybe Red One accomplishes this on a visual level, but it remains pretty hollow as a story.  Still, it’s an indicator that holiday movies are getting more ambitious as they try to crack open that door into becoming a perennial favorite for the season.

The only thing is, a lot of the holiday classics became just that out of more humble means.  National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) was just a second sequel in a comedy franchise, taking the next logical step past the summer based vacation of the first movie, and managing to surpass it with it’s spot on holiday observations mined for comedy.  It certainly didn’t need a massive budget to do that.  A Christmas Story and Home Alone were also likewise modest projects that only grew in esteem over the years due to their perfectly executed storylines that tie into Christmas.  It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t even about Christmas for most of it’s run time, and only incorporates the holiday into it’s inspirational final act.  In all, it’s difficult to actually manufacture a perennial holiday classic, and even with a bigger budget and big conceptual gimmick, your movie is still going to face an uphill battle to be accepted as an essential part of the holiday season.  But, this season also gives more movies a chance than any other genre towards achieving that classic status, because there is a audience that is primed every year to expect something new over the holidays.  Being a Christmas movie definitely brings it’s own built in public attention because there are people out there who seek out holiday themed entertainment.  While that journey to the podium of all time classics is a very narrow one, the platform to launch that journey from is quite broad.  That’s why we see such a large annual investment from Hollywood towards making so many holiday themed movies.  And in the case of movies like Red One, they are getting to be bigger and more ambitious in the hopes of standing out.  But as we’ve also seen, the holiday audience is discerning  and more prone towards accepting past favorites over flashy newcomers.

The holiday season is becoming a much bigger deal when it comes to the movies that take advantage of it.  The reason why Hollywood considers it essential to invest so much money into creating new holiday films is because they hope that one or more will give them that long term success that holiday films typically bring.  With the case of Red One, the question arises about what is too much to spend on a holiday movie?  Red One is certainly going to be a prime example of how not to spend money on a Christmas movie, and will almost certainly leave Amazon in the red.  But, is Amazon looking at the short term box office or the long term viewership on Prime Video as as their barometer for the success of the film.  It may play differently as a permanent fixture on their streaming platform that they can re-promote every holiday season.  But, it’s just one example out of many.  None of the classics are ever likely to diminish over time, because they continue to hit that sweet spot for the holidays that we all appreciate.  The question is, what else may land in that special category of perennial favorites?  For the amount of money that is increasingly becoming a part of Hollywood’s plans for the holiday season, something of quality is likely to emerge.  The long term prospects for success the a perennial holiday film provides is what helps to drive new investment into the genre each year, and eventually something will land and become a new classic.  It may not be this year, but Hollywood will keep trying.  In any case, there is an excitingly open market during the holiday season that we all participate in as we search for new favorites while also indulging in what makes Christmas so fun.  And the classics will remain there as well to help give us that entertainment fix during the holidays.  I for one always have to catch Christmas Vacation once every year(in addition to Charlie Brown’s Christmas).  I’m sure that all of you have your go to essentials as well.  With the frequency that Hollywood is attempting to give us something new each year, let’s hope that another holiday classic is waiting to be opened under that Christmas tree very soon.

Movie Reviews

Moana 2 – Review

Disney Animation has gone through a bit of a reversal of fortune over the last 5 years.  After experiencing a resurgence in the 2010’s thanks to the like of mega hits such as Frozen (2013), Big Hero 6 (2014) and Zootopia (2016), Disney was back in top form in the animation world and were looking for big things in the decade that followed.  They finished the decade strong in 2019 with Frozen II (2019) which grossed well over a billion and a half dollars at the global box office.  But, things were upended by the Covid-19 pandemic the following year.  Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) which was slated for a Thanksgiving 2020 release was pushed back into the following spring, and given a hybrid streaming and theatrical release due to the theaters not being fully re-opened at that point.  It was more than what Disney’s sister studio, Pixar, received as their movies just went straight to streaming with no wide theatrical plans.  Raya did about as well as it could given the circumstances, but it was miniscule box office compared to what Frozen II pulled in.  Later that year, Encanto (2021) fared better, but was still short of the $100 million threshold that Disney had before surpassed quite regularly.  Not only that, but Encanto became a bigger hit on streaming than it did in theaters.  The following two years weren’t any kinder to Disney’s box office woes.  Their next film Strange World (2022) was DOA upon it’s release, and Disney’s ambitious 100th anniversary celebration film Wish (2023) was a failure with both audiences and critics.  For a studio that was once the envy of all of Hollywood, they were now in a bit of a crisis mode.  And animation fans were beginning to worry, because Disney had long been the gold standard for quality animation and their success would help uplift the industry as a whole.  The lack of success for the animation studio could ultimately lead the corporate side of the company to invest less on newer projects and instead shift their priorities into more streaming and less theatrical

A lot of the problems for the studio stem from the fact that their slate of films during this pandemic period were all original projects that had no prior built in audience familiarity, and solely had to be sold on the Disney name alone.  If things were running as smoothly as they were in the 2010’s, then these original titles could have had better luck at the box office.  But with everything thrown into rebuild mode post-pandemic, the Disney brand alone wasn’t going to salvage these movies.  In the end, only Encanto emerged as a modest enough hit for Disney.  The failure of Strange World and Wish combined has especially put Disney in a bind.  Pixar itself experienced the same downward trend, though their misfortunes were also self made by Disney’s misguided plan to shove them straight to streaming for 2 whole years.  But thankfully Pixar was able to reverse their misfortunes this summer with their first, much needed hit of the decade with Inside Out 2 (2024).  Now the highest grossing animated film of all time, Inside Out 2 reveals a strategy moving forward that may save Disney Animation too, though it’s one that’s unfortunate for the sake of progress in the medium.  While Pixar has also put out a string of original films, their salvation was found in the release of a sequel to one of the their biggest past hits.  For Disney, they may need to rely upon safe bet sequels to help salvage their reputation for a while, at least until they can prove to the corporate side that Animation is a medium of filmmaking that is still worth investing in.  But what movie sequel would work in this case?  Well, for Disney, the best barometer for knowing what sequel to make came from how their past films have been performing since release on their new streaming platform Disney+.  And one film in particular that has consistently outperformed the rest, and has become one of the most viewed movies not just on Disney+ but on all streaming platforms in general, is the 2016 hit film Moana.  Hoping to bank on Moana’s high profile with fans in order to generate some much needed box office momentum for the studio, Disney has quickly rolled out Moana 2 for this Thanksgiving weekend.  The only question is does it live up to it’s predecessor, or is it already lost at sea?

Moana 2 takes place a few years after the events of the original.  Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) has been sailing from island to island searching for signs of other tribes that populate the numerous islands of the vast ocean.  While her search has proved to be fruitless for the most part, she does find a pottery fragment on one deserted isle, proving that there are other tribes still within reach.  She returns back to her home island of Motunui, where her mother and father Tui and Sina (Temura Morrison, Nicole Scherzinger) both still reside, plus her baby sister Simea (Khalessi Lambert-Tsuda).  While sharing her findings, she is sent a message from her ancestors about a sunken island named Motufetu that once connected all the ocean currents together and was destroyed by a vengeful storm god named Nalo, thereby keeping all the people of the ocean separated.  Moana now seeks to find Motufetu, and assembles a crew to sail with her, heading towards an island that no mortal can find.  On her boat, she has brought Loto (Rose Matafeo), a crafty shipbuilder; Kele (David Fane), a disgruntled old farmer; and Moni (Hualalai Chung), a resourceful historian, as well as her animal companions Pua the pig and Hei Hei the rooster.  While neither she nor her crew have any idea where this mythical island may be, she does have a good idea of someone who might; her old friend, the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson).  Unfortunately, Maui himself has been imprisoned by one of Nalo’s enforcers, the demigoddess Matangi (Awhimai Fraser).  Can Moana rescue her powerful ally and get him to use his mighty fishhook to lift Motufetu out of the sea in defiance of Nalo’s curse and help reunite all the islanders that have been walled off from one another?

Moana 2 has a lot of pressure riding on it, given the state of Disney Animation at the moment, as well as the high expectations of an audience that treats the original as a beloved classic.  Sequels can always be a gamble, even when they are safe bets when it comes to audience familiarity.  One thing that should be noted about this movie is that it didn’t start out as a film at all, but rather began it’s production planned as a mini-series for the Disney+ platform.  It was only at the 11th hour that Disney decided to re-work the program into a single film.  It makes sense, because given the enormous popularity of the first movie both in theaters and on streaming, that having a theatrical roll-out would be more beneficial in the end for the project.  This is definitely a huge reversal of Disney’s pandemic era plans, which put streaming above all else.  You have to wonder if Disney left a ton of money on the table by going all in on streaming rather than building their brand up again through theaters.  The downside though is that bringing something from streaming to theatrical has it’s drawbacks too, as the quality of the product might take a hit.  Going from a story meant for multiple parts and trying to force it into a theater friendly run time under 2 hours is a difficult task, especially late in the game, and I would be lying if I said that some of those issues are visible in the finished film that we do get.  But, does it make the overall movie bad?  Not at all.  While it is far from perfect, and also less successful than it’s beloved predecessor, it still manages to function as a solid entertaining adventure.  If the movie has a fatal flaw, it’s that the truncated story feels like just that; something that was planned to be much larger in it’s original plan, but was reduced to just the bare minimum in it’s switch to theatrical.

The film definitely misses some of the key ingredients of the first movie.  For one thing, it doesn’t have the deft guidance of legendary filmmakers at the helm anymore.  The original Moana was directed by Disney Legends John Musker and Ron Clements in what would be their final film for Disney Animation before their respective retirements, culminating over 30 years of work at Disney that included classics like The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), and The Princess and the Frog (2009).  Moana 2 has an entirely new team of directors behind it.  Given the difficult transition that this movie faced, I do think the new directors Jason Hand, Dana Ledoux Miller and David Derrick Jr. did a commendable job of trying to make the film live up to original.  While they don’t have the same level of experience as Ron and John, they still keep the overall vibe of Moana’s next chapter feel tonally consistent.  While the episodic nature of the film belies it’s original format, and at times feels underdeveloped, there are still plenty of exciting big moments that have that right epic heft to them.  An encounter with a giant clam in the middle of the ocean is an especially impressive moment that certainly feels right at home on the big screen.  One of the things that definitely helps this movie is that it maintains the same screenwriter Jared Bush, who just recently was announced as the new Chief Creative Officer of Disney Animation after the departure of Jennifer Lee.  Bush never looses the thread of the story, even as he had to cut down so much of the original plot in order to re-work this into a film.  The movie puts it’s focus on Moana and her journey, which is what the film needs the most, although character development is unfortunately minimal, as she doesn’t grow much as a character here compared with the original.  It’s essentially just a further adventures kind of story and nothing too groundbreaking apart from that.  Still, the movie doesn’t reflect poorly on what had been built before.  It’s just more of the same.  That may be enough for some, but it will probably also disappoint many other audiences too who are expecting something that blows them away like the first movie did.

One of the other unfortunate aspects of the film where it falls short of the original is in the music.  The original was blessed to have the talents of Lin Manuel-Miranda working as the songwriter, just fresh off of his record-setting run of the Broadway musical Hamilton.  His songs for the original Moana have likewise become huge hits for Disney, earning their place on the charts as well as becoming standards in many people’s go to play lists.  The new songs written for Moana 2 are not what I would consider awful, but they are far from memorable like the Lin Manuel-Miranda songs.  The new songs were written by newcomers Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear and are at best serviceable to the story, but they definitely won’t be anyone’s new favorites in the years ahead.  But, even if the songs are subpar, the performers are still giving it their all when performing them.  Auli’i Cravalho particularly remains as powerful a singer as she was in first film.  The sequel thankfully sees her return to the role, along with all the other voice actors from the original.  One of the things that definitely helps Moana 2 in the overall picture is just how good Moana and Maui’s relationship remains enjoyable to watch.  Auli’i and Dwayne Johnson may not have recorded their lines together, but their characters’ chemistry is still just as strong as ever, and both are great to listen to throughout the whole movie.  Johnson even gets some surprisingly heavy moments to work with in this film, and he does a remarkable job there too along with all of his humorous moments.  The downside of the re-working of the film is that all of the new characters feel like their development got heavily truncated.  The characters themselves are not particularly bad, but their purpose in the story just feel superfluous with all their scenes left on the cutting room floor.  The worst example of a character that got especially truncated is the character Matangi.  It feels like she was being set up to be much more of a villain in this story than she ends up being.  She even gets what sounds like a villain song.  But, not long after we first meet her, she just as quickly disappears, and we don’t even see her at all in the climatic third act.  The Moana/ Maui dynamic still thankfully carries the weight of the film, but it does feel like a lot was lost in transition with all of the other characters, and that’s unfortunate given that a few of them could’ve developed into something really interesting.

One thing that definitely doesn’t feel underwhelming about the movie is the animation.  Even when it was under development as a streaming series, Moana 2 was always going to be worked on by the same team at Disney Animation that works on all their theatrical films.  The character animation is especially on point, as Moana, Maui and all the other islanders all remain wonderfully expressive.  I also love what they do with the animals too, especially  Hei Hei, whose realistic chicken like movements still remain hilarious in the context of the movie scenes that he’s used in.  But the movie also ups the ante a bit from the first film with regard to it’s sense of scale.  The aforementioned encounter with the giant clam is an especially harrowing moment, as is the climatic confrontation with Nalo at the very end.  The stakes definitely feel higher as a result, and the animation team makes it all look very impressive.  The only downside is that Moana 2 loses the more cinematic widescreen presentation that the first film had in favor of a more streaming friendly 2.00:1 aspect ratio.  The film still feels big, but the widescreen format might have also helped to reinforce that feeling on a big screen a bit more.  At the same time, there are some great animation touches throughout.  While the songs themselves are forgettable, the staging of them is still spectacular.  Matangi’s song in particular has some great trippy visuals thrown in, with a lot of the colors going wild in that sequence.  Maui’s song is also visually dazzling, although that one isn’t as uniquely visual given that it echoes a lot of the same style as his song “Your Welcome” from the first Moana.  It’s not exactly a huge step ahead in animation from anything else Disney has made recently, but the last time Disney went experimental, we got Wish, so it’s not exactly a bad thing right now for Disney to keep doing the things they are good at while they rebuild their brand.  And in terms of the animation here, the execution is key and Moana 2 is undoubtedly beautiful, if familiar, achievement for the Disney Animation team.

I get the feeling that people will be mixed with their feelings on this film.  Sure, the movie delivers on everything we’d expect for another adventure with Moana and Maui, but it doesn’t deliver on anything more than that.  It is the very definition of a safe sequel; it does the bare minimum without contributing much more.  It’s chopped up storyline may also frustrate people expecting to find a more engaging plot as well.  For many critics, this will be regarded as a disappointment.  For me though, I am filtering this mostly through my experience with Disney movies as a whole.  Is it a downgrade from the first Moana?  Objectively yes, but not by a lot.  For me, I did still have a good time watching it, mainly because I like the characters and the performances that the actors put into them, especially Auli’i Cravalho as the titular heroine.  As long as they got that right, along with some stunning animation, I would still put this as a movie I would recommend.  I certainly thought it was lightyears ahead of the soulless Wish that we got last year.  And as far as sequels to Disney movies go, this is also a big improvement over the disappointing Frozen II.  It does enough stuff right to make it serviceable companion piece to the first film, even if it falls short as a successor.  The movie definitely leaves room open for another sequel, and my hopes is that by developing it from the beginning as a theatrical film that they’ll avoid the pitfalls that befell the project in it’s late transition from series to movie.  Regardless of what I think or what other critics think, this movie is almost certainly critic-proof and is going to make a ton of money over the holidays.  And that in the end is what Disney was hoping for; banking on the familiarity of the Moana brand to help boost this new film in theaters.  The downside is that Disney may become too comfortable with sequels driving their creative output instead of original films.  But, if Moana 2 can help reverse the fortunes of the studio, then maybe they might be able to balance new titles along with more sequels in the future.  That the hope anyway.  For now, it’s a worthwhile trip across the seas watching the further adventures of Moana on the big screen, and it’ll be exciting to see how much further she will go.

Rating: 7.5/10

Movie Reviews

Gladiator II – Review

When the first Gladiator (2000) was released in theaters at the turn of the millennium, it was part of a much different cinematic landscape.  The decade prior was one of the last eras that a type of movie known as the “prestige blockbuster” would dominate the landscape.  The “prestige blockbuster” was a film like a historical epic or an intimate drama that could perform at the box office the same way that a blockbuster action film would.  These were the kinds of movies that would win a bunch of awards while at the same time making profits in the hundreds of millions for their studios.  These were also sometimes big ambitious movies too, but with a much more serious tone than the average blockbuster.  The 90’s weren’t the first period of Hollywood’s history where these kinds of movies would dominate.  You can look back all the way to Gone With the Wind (1937) to see an example of a historical epic being a blockbuster success, and the trend would carry over into the 50’s and 60’s, with widescreen spectacles like Spartacus (1960) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) became monster hits in addition to winning lots of awards and acclaim.  The 1990’s in particular feels like one of the last big eras where these kinds of movies would prosper, starting off with Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves in 1990, and continuing with films like Forrest Gump (1994) and Braveheart (1995) soon after, and eventually peaking with Titanic in 1997.  The decade that would follow would see a major shift away from the “prestige blockbuster” as big historical epics would fail to ignite like they did in the 90’s and other genres like fantasy and comic book films would begin to take over.  It was a dramatic shift that probably took Hollywood a bit by surprise and it would take several more box office bombs to seal the “prestige blockbusters” fate.  Sure, there are standouts that still work, like last year’s Oppenheimer (2023), but the “prestige blockbuster” really feels like an anomaly now rather than a common occurrence.  And the movie that really did feel like the last of it’s kind for a while was Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.

When it first premiered, Gladiator was not exactly seen as anything special.  But after it’s modest opening in May 2000, Gladiator just kept sticking around, and by the end of that summer it was one of the highest grossing films of the season.  This was surprising given how old-fashioned it was.  It was definitely a throwback to the old sword and sandals epics of the past that had defined the last time the “prestige blockbuster” had ruled Hollywood.  Though it felt classic in it’s storytelling, it did feature some cutting edge visuals in it’s presentation.  The recreation of the Roman Coliseum in particular was a groundbreaking work of visual effects for it’s time, and the movie won it’s effects team an Oscar for the effort.  There was also the usual visual flair that Ridley Scott had been known for with movies like Blade Runner (1982) and Alien (1979) that helped it to stand out from other sword and sandal epics of the past.  But what I think helped to captivate audiences even more than that was the magnetic performance by Russell Crowe in the role of Maximus; the general who became a slave, who then became a gladiator who challenged an empire, as the tag line stated.  Maximus is one of cinema’s greatest heroes, and Crowe’s performance is widely praised even to this day.  The movie went on to win 5 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Crowe, though sadly Ridley Scott went home empty handed.  In the years since, Scott has tried many times to replicate the magic that he succeeded to capture with Gladiator, but to little avail, with movies like Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Robin Hood (2010) and The Last Duel (2021) all falling short at the box office.  Still, he remains an active filmmaker well into his 80’s without showing any signs of slowing down.  Even after making Gladiator, he contemplated a return to the same story one day, trying to come up with different ideas about how to continue the story into another chapter.  It wouldn’t be easy, given that (spoilers) Maximus is dead at the end of the film.  He went through numerous drafts of a sequel, including a supernatural one written by musician Nick Cave.  But, 24 years later, Scott has finally landed on a story that he feels does justice to the original and now we have Gladiator II releasing into theaters.  The only quest remains is if it is a worthy successor, or are we not entertained.

Taking place 16 years after the events of the original Gladiator, we begin in the midst of a battle between a free city on the Northern African coast and the might of the Roman naval fleet.  Led by General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), the Romans take the city in quick order and imprison the soldiers on the other side.  Now slaves at the mercy of Rome, the remaining “barbarian” soldiers are taken to the gladiatorial arenas on the outskirts of the city where they are going to be auctioned off to the highest bidder looking for more stock to showcase at the fights in the mighty Coliseum.  One soldier named Hanno (Paul Mescal) proves to be an especially skilled fighter, and he peaks the interest of Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a former gladiator himself who now makes a fortune as supplier of goods for the Roman armies.  Macrinus sees the fury in Hanno’s eyes, with a will towards vengeance, and he hopes to use him as a weapon in his own ambitions for the control of the Roman Empire.  Meanwhile, General Acacius is secretly plotting his own challenge towards stopping the corruption that has infected Rome, with the twin Emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) representing all the worst qualities of leadership in the crumbling empire.  Acacius is aided by a handful of senators who were loyal to the great Marcus Aurelius, as well as loyal to his surviving daughter Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), Acacius’ wife.  However, plans are turned on their head when Lucilla witnesses the gladiatorial fight set up to honor Acacius’ recent victory.  She sees Hanno fighting in the arena and immediately recognizes him as her son Lucius Verus Aurelius, the true heir to the throne of Caesar.  After the fall of Emperor Commodus and the death of Maximus in the Coliseum, Lucilla knew that her young son wouldn’t be safe in the power vacuum that followed, so she ensured that he would be taken far away from Rome so that he could survive.  But now he has return all these years later, with hatred for Rome in his heart.  And with many schemes all playing out in and around the heart of the Empire, what ultimate fate will Lucius bring to the the future of Rome.  Will he hasten it’s destruction or will he assume his birthright and end the corruption that has infected the Empire?

When the decision is made to do a legacy sequel to a beloved film many, many years after the fact, there are a lot of risks involved.  The primary risk is that the movie has to escape the shadow of the film that came before it.  People already have expectations about what they want based on what they love about the original film, and the sequel then has to both meet those expectations and then surpass them in order to justify it’s existence.  There are several examples of legacy sequels that hit their mark, like Creed (2015), Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and Top Gun: Maverick (2022), but there are also a lot of examples of sequels that completely dropped the ball like Blues Brothers 2000 (2000) and Independence Day: Resurgence (2016).  So, with 24 years in between the first and second films, how does Gladiator II stack up as a legacy sequel?  While it is far from being one of the worst legacy sequels ever made it is also sadly not very good.  The biggest problem with the movie is that it fails to escape the shadow of it’s far superior predecessor.  Ridley Scott’s original film had this operatic verve to it, with everything from the performances to the staging to the music all creating a spectacle that felt grand.  A lot of that is missing in Gladiator II.  While there are some things that Ridley Scott demonstrates that he can still do very well, namely directing the action set pieces, there are also many signs that he has lost a little bit of that golden touch as he’s gotten older.  Of course, it is still impressive that at the age of 86 that he’s still capable of pulling off a movie of this kind of scale.  At a time when many of his colleagues have either slowed down or have long retired, he’s still putting out a movie at the rate of one a year, which has only cemented his legendary status.  But, with Gladiator II and last year’s Napoleon (2023), Ridley is also showing signs that while he still has command over the visual style of his film he doesn’t quite have the command over the story anymore.

Where I think the problem lies is with the script to this movie.  It’s kind of remarkable that the original Gladiator, with it’s collection of three screenwriters (David Franzoni, William Nicholson, and John Logan) had a more coherent and memorable script than the one for the sequel written by a single screenwriter.  The original film had a singular focus to it’s story, and that was showing the incredible journey of Maximus as he goes from general, to slave, to a gladiator that challenged the Emperor.  Nearly a quarter century later, we still quote lines from Gladiator, and some of them are pretty profound.  One line in particular that I love is “What we do in life echoes in Eternity,” which this sequel also recognizes as a powerful statement as it gets quoted a lot.  The script for Gladiator II, written by David Scarpa (who also scripted Napoleon) doesn’t have anything profound to say, and it spends far too many scenes calling back to the superior writing of the original.  For the most part, the movie just ends up being a repeat of the first film; with Lucius following the same trajectory as Maximus.  And this leads to yet another big flaw with the film, which is the character of Lucius.  He is a pale imitation of the character of Maximus.  The film never allows him the time to develop as a character, other than just showing how he is driven by vengeance over the death of his loved one in battle.  Paul Mescal is certainly not a bad choice to play the role.  He’s a capable actor and he certainly has the impressive physique to play a gladiator.  But the script just gives him this hollow, ill-defined character to work with.  When Russell Crowe played Maximus, he created a iconic hero; a man you would want leading you into battle, and the movie clearly defined what motivated him, with his sense of justice and seeking to live up to the ideals of Rome that Marcus Aurelius instilled in him.  For Gladiator II, it seemed like Ridley Scott and David Scarpa were at a loss for how to continue on with the story since Maximus dies at the end of the original, and they just looked at the character of Lucius and decided he’ll do and tried to shoehorn his story into a Maximus 2.0.

While Lucius remains a sadly hollow focal point of this movie, there are still other elements of this film that actually help to lift it up from being a complete failure.  First and foremost, the presence of Denzel Washington helps to save this film.  Denzel is working on a whole different level than the entire rest of the cast, and he helps to breathe much needed life into the movie.  I love the fact that he doesn’t even bother doing an accent and just plays the role like it’s an extension of himself.  All the other actors are speaking with the usual dignified British accents that you hear in these kinds of period dramas, and Denzel sounds like he just walked off the set of American Gangster (2007).  It shouldn’t work, but it does and Denzel’s scenes are by far the best part of the movie.  You can tell he’s having the best time on screen as he gets to peacock around in flowing Roman robes.  He also gets all the best one-liners in the script, which he delivers with an incredible amount of swagger.  Sadly nothing else in the movie rises up to what Denzel is bringing into the film.  While it is nice to see Pedro Pascal present in a Roman epic like this, which he does seem to fit in well as that Roman soldier gear looks good on him, he sadly is underutilized in the story and his character General Acacius is kind of pointless in the grand scheme of things.  I kind of wonder if the movie would’ve been better if it centered on his character rather than on Lucius.  The performances of Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger as the twin emperors also feel like pale imitations when stacked up against Joaquin Phoenix’s memorably camp portrayal of Commodus in the original Gladiator.  And while it is nice to see Connie Nielsen return to the role she played 24 years ago in the first movie, she also does feel underutilized in the film.  Basically, in terms of the cast, the only ground where this movie surpasses the original is with the inclusion of Denzel Washington in the film, as he’s the only element of the movie that feels like something new.

In terms of Ridley Scott’s direction, he seems to be most at home with the battles in the Coliseum.  These moments are definitely the ones that feel most alive in the movie.  One thing that I was happy to see was Ridley Scott getting to finally realize an idea that he had to scrap in the first movie, which is a fight between the gladiators and a warrior riding a rhinoceros.  Probably due to the limitations of computer animation at the time, Ridley was not able to get a realistic looking rhino to work on screen in the original, but with the advancements over the last couple decades, he now is able to make this rhino fight look the way he wanted and it did work in this sequel.  There’s also a naval battle that takes place in a flooded Coliseum that while is completely at odd with the true history of the real arena nevertheless makes for an exciting moment in the film.  One thing for sure is that Ridley Scott is very good at making his movies look great on screen and Gladiator II is no different in that department.  The money put into the set designs and visual effects are all well spent and Scott can still deliver the goods in this regard.  But the sum of everything else just doesn’t gel together.  I’ll give the film this, it definitely doesn’t feel it’s 2 hour and 28 minute length, and it moves at a brisk pace.  But, the editing of the movie also doesn’t have the same flow as the original film does, which went a long way towards giving it that operatic feel.  Here, the editing is very basic and just becomes a means towards moving us from plot point to plot point.  Also a major downgrade from the first film; the music.  Hans Zimmer wrote the score for the first Gladiator, and it still stands as one of his greatest works, with tracks like “Now We Are Free” being some of the greatest pieces of music ever written for film.  Zimmer sadly didn’t return for this film, and instead Ridley Scott turned to Harry Gregson-Williams instead, who’s been writing the music for most or Scott’s more recent films.  He’s a decent composer, but his sound is a lot more basic than the experimental work that Hans Zimmer does with his scores, and that difference is palpable in this film.  The music just doesn’t have that grandiosity to it, and it even has the audacity to call back to Zimmer’s much better tracks in moments that don’t earn it.  It’s another element of the movie where you definitely notice the fall off from the first film, and it sadly also makes the experience that much more disappointing.

In the immediate years after it’s original release, Gladiator inspired this brief revival of the sword and sandals epic, with many of the big studios hoping to cash in on the same success that Gladiator achieved.  Unfortunately, it was short lived.  Warner Brothers struck out twice with both Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004) and Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004) back to back, and 20th Century Fox also failed with Ridley Scott’s own Kingdom of Heaven (2005).  Gladiator II feels like another one of those failed imitators that tried to be the next Gladiator but couldn’t muster it.  It seems like Ridley Scott himself has been trying to chase Gladiator many times over the years and always come up short, even with a movie that is directly tied with it.  While it is admirable that Ridley has managed to get this long in the making sequel across the finish line, it also will be looked at as an unfortunate footnote to one of his masterpieces rather than a classic that will stand strong on it’s own.  The only thing that stands out as better in this sequel is the performance of Denzel Washington, which gives this movie much needed life.  Otherwise, everything from the story to the characters just feels like a step down from the original film.  I don’t think it should reflect poorly on Ridley Scott.  He is a legend multiple times over and the fact that he’s still tireless in his old age is kind of inspiring.  But we can’t expect him to keep delivering Gladiator quality films anymore.  If anything, he’s been much better in recent years making movies that are different from his usual historical epic formula.  I really liked his historical drama The Last Duel (2021) which took an unconventional approach to the way it told it’s story through multiple points of view.  I think Scott can still deliver if he has an interesting script to work with.  Gladiator II just feels less like it’s own movie and more like an obligation.  Scott wanted to see if he could still make another Gladiator and he wanted to deliver on the promise that he made for a sequel to the original.  But honestly, he should have left Gladiator alone.  It was a perfectly constructed story that reached a definitive conclusion.  There was nothing more to say about the story of Maximus, and this sequel proves it with it’s own story just feeling like a hollow retread.  It’s not a complete, embarrassing failure as there are good things in it (namely everything Denzel bring to the film) but on the whole it will never be remembered as fondly as the original classic.  To sum it up, no I was not entertained.

Rating: 6/10

Editorials

Who’s Super Now? – 20 Years of The Incredibles and How Pixar Created the Blueprint for the Rise of Marvel and DC

The early 2000’s were an interesting transitional time for comic book movies.  After the crushing failure of 1997’s Batman and Robin, the genre as a whole went into a bit of a recession as it tried to re-establish what it needed to be.  The Batman franchise had evolved from moody and grim to campy and colorful, and it was not what audiences were looking for.  Heading into the new millennium, a different approach was looked at.  Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) got the ball rolling by grounding the super hero mythos in something that was more familiar to the world that we live in.  A couple years later, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) took the genre in a direction that made it’s adventure fun but not overly camp.  In many ways, the genre was heading in a direction that honestly was much closer to the comic books that these movies were based on.  Fidelity to the comic books was the guiding force now rather than the traditional standards of genre that had been present before.  And each comic book movie was able to have it’s own identity rather than follow formula, though there were still common tropes that still stuck around.  By the end of the 2000’s, the comic book genre had gone from being on life support to being the dominant force in Hollywood, and it would only continue to grow into the following decade and beyond.  But while the mighty forces of Marvel and DC were battling for supremacy in Hollywood, it could be argued that both have an entirely different source to thank for setting the tone right for the genre.  The movie that had the most profound influence on the super hero genre over the last 20 years (with impacts on everything from character development to the sense of humor present) didn’t come from Marvel nor DC, but rather from an animation studio called Pixar, which itself saw it’s own meteoric rise during this same period.

Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004) came at a pivotal time for both animation and super heroes.  For Pixar, it was a big leap forward for them in terms of animation.  Up to that point, they had steered away from depicting human characters, often leaving them to the background as they were far more difficult to model in a believable way.  You look at the early character models of characters like Andy and Sid in Toy Story (1995) and you can see why Pixar chose to center their early movies on stylized toy characters like Woody and Buzz Lightyear.  Animals or non-humanoid creatures also gave the studio more creative freedom with the primitive tools they had to work with, which was evidenced in the movies A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters Inc. (2001) and Finding Nemo (2003).  However, they faced increased competition from Dreamworks Animation, which struck a huge hit with Shrek (2001), which featured more human characters in prominent roles.  For studios like Dreamworks and Pixar, the dilemma was to find the perfect medium in animating humans that would avoid the uncanny valley pitfall that can often occur.  The solution that Pixar ultimately landed on was to treat their human characters less like perfect recreations, and instead look for ways to make them stylized in a way that would make them easier to animate.  And what better example to look for exaggerated forms of human physique than in comic books.  There are plenty of examples of comic book artists doing away with traditional character models and bringing their own unique stylistic twists to the looks of popular characters; in many cases creating body shapes that could only make sense as part of comic book art.  This is likely what inspired the artists at Pixar and drew them into the idea of making a super hero movie that felt very heavily inspired by the freeing graphic inventiveness of comic books.  Instead of characters with perfectly rendered anatomy, Pixar’s Incredibles would have humans with extreme features that not only made them stand out, but would also be perfectly accentuated to their personalities as well.

The interesting thing about how The Incredibles came to be at Pixar is that it marked the first time that the studio went outside of their own inner circle to green-light a new project.  Now, writer and director Brad Bird was no stranger to the Pixar team before he came to work for them.  Bird was part of the same class at Cal Arts that also included Pixar Animation co-founder John Lassater, and both men started out as junior animators at Disney in the early 80’s, so they were already familiar to each other.  Bird, however, left Disney fairly early on to pursue independent work.  He would work on projects such as Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories anthology series, as well as directing a couple episodes of The Simpsons, including creating key supporting characters such as Krusty the Clown and Sideshow Bob that still remain a part of the show to this day.  It was, however, when he made his feature film debut in 1999 with The Iron Giant that Brad Bird began to make a big splash in the animation industry.  Though The Iron Giant is celebrated as a masterpiece today, it did not have a great opening in theaters and ended up prematurely closed the studio that made it, which ended up making Brad Bird a free agent again.  Regardless of box office, the love for Iron Giant was strong across the animation industry so there were a lot of studios that were willing to meet with Bird during this time, and that’s when John Lassater decided to call up his old colleague.  It would prove to be fortuitous because Brad Bird had been developing this idea for a film centered around a family of super heroes that fit perfectly with the desire of Pixar to experiment more with stylized human characters.  Up to this point, the Pixar legacy team had consisted of the people who worked on the original shorts as well as Toy Story.  Lassater had directed the firs three features, while Pete Doctor and Andrew Stanton helmed Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo respectively.  The Incredibles would be the first new film by someone who had not come up through the ranks of Pixar, but as evidenced by the results, Brad Bird fit in very much with the Pixar community.

There are a lot of layers to what makes The Incredibles a perfect super hero movie.  For one thing, the film is not about the characters doing super hero things, but rather it shows us how they try to build a life outside of their super powered identity.  In the world of The Incredibles, super heroic acts have been made illegal due to a string of incidents where people have become collateral damage in the fights between super heroes and super villains and in turn have led to law suits.  As a result, super heroes have live anonymously underground, forced to suppress their abilities.  The Parrs, a family of “supers,” try to blend in with this new normal and this is the focus of the story.  The movie has fun with how the Parrs use their powers in this domestic setting, but it’s ultimately about how they function as a family unit rather than what they must do to save the world, which does come into play in the final act.  The movie brilliantly allows each character to have their own power type too.  Bob Parr, aka Mr. Incredible, has super strength; his wife Helen is super stretchy and goes by the alter ego Elastigirl.  And their children are unique as well; shy Violet can make herself invisible and creates a force field around her, while hyperactive Dash has super speed.  And the baby Jack-Jack, well, that would be spoiling too much.  The Parr family also has a close relationship with Lucius Best, whose freezing powers have earned him the name Frozone.  You can see the parallels with these characters with pre-existing characters from comic books, like Ice Man, Invisible Girl, or The Flash, but putting them together as a family was a unique way of framing their story and examining how being super would function in an average family narrative.  Super hero families aren’t a novel idea; Marvel has tried for years to make a Fantastic Four movie work, with attempt number three coming next summer.  But with The Incredibles, it’s a focal point for the story that works and helps to endear each of these super beings in a way that makes them relatable to the everyday average family.

But what was the thing that set The Incredibles apart as a super hero movie.  What Brad Bird did, in addition to directing an action packed film, was craft a script that in many ways deconstructed the very idea of being a super hero.  The brilliance of the story is that the super heroes are forced to suppress their powers in order to function as a citizen of society, and if a super hero can’t use their powers, what are they left with.  Bob Parr’s crisis in the film is that he has all this power, and yet he has to work a boring day job like everyone else.  What this motivates him to do is to break the rules just a little bit while still trying to balance his home life, with a wife who is more determined to keep him and the family in check.  We see that Bob is a hero to his core and wants to use his powers for good, but is foolhardy to the point where his desires don’t take into account the repercussions of what his actions may do.  By looking into this side of Bob’s character, we see how Brad Bird is examining the duality of being both a god among men and a flawed human being at the same time.  It’s a more introspective examination of the tropes of super herodom that in many ways has found itself worked into the whole genre at large.  When Marvel began their MCU, it was noticeable from the get go that they were taking a much more introspective look at the characters themselves.  The humor of the MCU is definitely more meta than super hero films of the past, and you can’t help but recall how a lot of their deconstruction of super hero tropes fell reminiscent of the ones from The Incredibles.  There’s a through line to be sure of the jokes in Incredibles about villains monologuing leading to 20 years later where Wolverine punches out a villain and says “Not everyone gets a speech,” as seen in Deadpool & Wolverine (2024).

But The Incredibles is far more than just examining the home life of super heroes.  The point wasn’t to just show what Superman does when he is only Clark Kent.  Brad Bird’s film is ultimately about embracing the special part of what makes us who we are; something that is a common theme in his films.  Some have criticized the movie for promoting an Ayn Randian objectivist point of view; where exceptional people should be held up as better than the rest of society.  The Randian elements seem most pronounced in the movie with Bob Parr’s frustrations over being held back by the anti-super laws, but I don’t see the movie as a validation of Randian beliefs either.  If anything, Brad Bird’s point in the film is not objectivism, but rather the way society scapegoats it’s problems on those who are different.  Ultimately, the Parr family realizes that just sitting on the sidelines doesn’t make society better either, and that the need to conform is not just restrictive to them, but it’s also preventing them from having a healthy family life as well.  When they get to be super powered in the open, they grow closer together as a family.  Exceptionalism, according to Brad Bird, is not in being better than everyone else, but in being the best version of oneself.  That’s something that he showed more definitively in his next film, Ratatouille (2007), where the motto “Anyone Can Cook,” reveals itself to be the idea that a great artist can be anyone, even the least expected.  And he also celebrates the idea that people who chose less power can often be the best representation of oneself; such as The Iron Giant choosing not to be a weapon and instead becoming “Superman.”  This is another idea that has helped shape the characterizations of super heroes over the last 20 years.  It’s the motivation that makes Wonder Woman walk into No Man’s Land and act as a human shield, or Spider-Man choosing to let everyone in the world forget who he is, or Thor letting his home world be destroyed in order to save it’s people.  Like the Incredibles family, modern day super heroes don’t just choose to be super to be better; in many ways they have no choice but to do what’s best for those they care about.

It’s the complexity of character that The Incredibles brought that certainly helped create ripples throughout the super hero genre, though there certainly were many cases before of complex characterizations.  One other thing that the movie had a strong influence on was the way it showcased the power sets of it’s characters.  The movie seems to have the most fun with Helen’s Elastigirl power set, as her stretching ability gave the animators a lot to work with.  One of the biggest highlights of the movie though is the sequence dubbed the “One Hundred Mile Dash.”  It’s a chase scene involving Dash as he tries to escape guardsmen trying to hunt him down.  Even to this day I don’t think super speed powers have been as showcased as well on screen as it is here, and we’ve had two Quicksilvers and one Flash in the movies by now.  There are many other great elements of the movie that the movie set a high bar for that I don’t think any other super hero film has been able to match.  One is the presence of the character Edna Mode (voiced by Brad Bird himself).  We see all these amazing super suits in Marvel and DC movies, but are never given an explanation about who makes them, with a few exceptions.  A character like Edna is a great addition here, and it makes sense that a person who designs suits for super heroes would be a type A personality herself.  She is easily one of the highlights of the movie and a character type you wish would be more present in the genre.  One other brilliant part of the movie is the villain, Syndrome; easily one of the greatest in all of Pixar’s canon.  Syndrome’s role is a great deconstruction of toxic fandom, where one’s fascination with super powers often leads to eventual loathing of not having control over it, and a desire to flip the power dynamic in their favor.  Syndrome wishes to create a society where everyone has access to super hero ability (which he will profit off of by selling it to them), so that in his eyes, “when everyone is super, than no one will be.”  He’s a character that has become frighteningly all too real in the last 20 years, as tech bro billionaires have used their wealth to bully their way into politics and culture.  Given Pixar’s close proximity to Silicon Valley, it’s almost like Brad Bird and his team knew what was coming and tried to warn us, but we didn’t listen and are now in a world increasingly run by Syndromes.

Unlike The Iron Giant, Incredibles was an immediate success upon it’s initial release.  The movie grossed a respectable $260 million domestic and Brad Bird won his first Academy Award for Animated Feature that year.  What’s more, it was a major milestone for Pixar Animation, as it helped them improve their style of animation and showed that they could tell a human story without having to be rigid in their animation of the human figures.  You know you’ve got great stylized human characters when each one’s silhouette alone conveys personality.  It also was a great leap forward in staging, pushing the medium of computer animation further into a cinematic mode, with the movie very much reaching epic heights in it’s sense of scale.  But at it’s heart, Brad Bird drove home the idea that this was a family film as well.  The heroes aren’t just defined by their deeds, but in how they act as a family unit as well.  And it contrasts so brilliantly with a villain who only sees the powers as the only thing that makes a hero who they are, completely missing the whole point of what heroism is.  While The Incredibles is working with tropes that were already there present in the genre, it did help us to look at them in a fresh new way, and that in many ways guided the shifting winds that would define the genre through the whole rise of the MCU and the DCEU.  One noteworthy contribution to the genre that definitely has a direct connection to The Incredibles is the contributions of it’s music composer Michael Giacchino.  After writing music for television and video games for years, Giacchino was able to make his studio feature film debut as composer for The Incredibles, with a mid-century jazz score reminiscent of the James Bond films. Cut to a decade later, and Giacchino is credited with writing the fanfare for Marvel Studios.  You now hear his music before every Marvel movie, which is quite a legacy to leave behind, and it all started with writing the score for The Incredibles.  Marvel even gave the longtime comic book fan a chance to make his debut behind the camera as director of the special Werewolf by Night (2022) for Disney+.  Even 20 years later and The Incredibles still remains a high water mark not just for animation, but for super hero films in general.  Even it’s sequel, Incredibles 2 (2018) performed like a MCU film at the box office, grossing over a billion worldwide.  Culturally, it is undeniably Brad Bird’s most influential film, and that’s saying a lot for a man with multiple masterpieces on his resume.  It’s an action packed ride, but also one where the heart is in the right place, showing how heroism in the end is not about personal glory, but instead about discovering the best way to use what you have for good.  It’s old school in that way, and there’s no school like the old school.

Editorials

Too Big to Stream – How Netflix’s Fight With Movie Theaters May Be Hurting Their Brand

There is no doubt the biggest disruptor in cinema over the last few years has been the company known as Netflix.  The Silicon Valley startup that had the novel idea of renting out movies through the mail from an online platform has since grown into a megalithic player in Hollywood itself, literally re-shaping the way that business is conducted within the movie industry.  It has also been one of the causes for a lot of destruction of the old standards of production and distribution.  The first casualty of Netflix’s rise was the video rental industry.  Blockbuster Video, which had itself leveled the competition to leave themselves in a position where they were the only video rental option in most markets, fell very quickly in response to Netflix’s easier to use service.  By the time Netflix was moving away from it’s mail service model to a streaming model, making on demand entertainment even more convenient, Blockbuster went from being a national brand to a ghost of it’s former self, now only open in a single location in Bend, Oregon.  The shift to streaming has also led to a significant decline in physical media in general, with most big box stores no longer featuring a movie aisle as most physical copies are now sold exclusively online.  Studios that once made a mint on selling their legacy titles on physical media have instead decided to play in the same field as Netflix, and launch their own streaming platforms instead.  There really is no other company that has changed the culture in the movie industry as much as Netflix has, and after leveling past juggernaut industries like that of home entertainment and video rental, they seemed poised to put another prominent column of Hollywood out to pasture as well; the movie theater industry.  However, this next step has taken some unexpected twists and turns that in some ways has put pressure on Netflix to rethink it’s whole business model.  Is it better for them to seek to destroy the theatrical model of distribution, or is there a better option for them in actually working with movie theaters?

One thing that has surprisingly emerged in the last couple of years in the wake of the streaming wars is that movies that released in theaters first actually perform better on streaming than the movies that were put out as streaming exclusives.  This has been the case with the studio run services like Disney+, Max, and Paramount+.  One noteworthy example is Disney’s Moana (2016), a film released in theaters 8 years ago, years before there was a Disney+, and even after all this time it is still ranked high on the all-time watched list for every streaming platform.  More recent films like The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) and Barbie (2023) have also given their streaming platforms a boost after their initial theatrical runs, which by the way both netted over a billion dollars each.  Which is to show that releasing the movies first in theaters does not decrease their viewership numbers once they are released on streaming after.  If anything, it shows that movies have resiliency.  Of course, I’m citing examples of movies that were universally beloved by audiences, and their repeat watching value certainly translated into viewership on streaming.  But, it’s also a sign that a theatrical roll out doesn’t hurt either.  In fact it is more beneficial in the long run for a movie to premiere on the big screen first because of the patterns of viewership that help to spotlight any certain film.  When a movie is in theaters, the choice is limited to the availability of screens, so the customer is making a very active choice in what movie they are going to see.  Whether the experience is good or bad, the movie goer still had a clear idea of what experience they were paying for.  Movies on streaming on the other hand don’t benefit from that factor of audience interest.  They are algorithmically spotlighted on a platform that customers usually spend scrolling through hundreds of titles in order to find something to watch.  At a cost between $10-20 a month, streaming gives it’s customers and abundance of options, but very few quick choices.  And naturally, the movies that people saw on a movie screen will be the ones that they actively seek first, while straight to streaming will tend to be buried.

This has become a contentious thing between Netflix and the movie industry now.  For years, Netflix has been spending billions on expanding their library of movies and TV shows, which was something they had to do out of necessity after studios like Disney and Universal began to remove their films and shows from the platform in order to consolidate for their own platforms.  And as part of this expansion of their in-house production, they also were trying to build their brand as a prestige name in the industry.  They did this by getting big name talent like Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, David Fincher, and Alfonso Cuaron to bring their next projects to their studio.  Netflix developed this reputation for being generous to filmmakers with movie ideas that probably were not going to work in the Hollywood business model as it was.  This attracted a lot of talent to Netflix and away from the other studios, who were starting to fret about the pull that Netflix was having in the industry.  And for a good while, it was working.  Netflix went from being an online streaming platform featuring films from all studios to a major studio within itself.  They were buying up real estate across Hollywood, including the legendary Sunset Bronson studio lot that was once home to both Warner Brothers during it’s early years.  They were beginning to frequently appear at awards ceremonies  including the Oscars and even racked up a fair amount of gold along the way.  But, the streaming market has definitely changed with all the other studios now running their own platforms.  And while Netflix still dominates as the streaming champion, their status as the ideal place for filmmakers to go has somewhat diminished.  Before, Netflix could persuade filmmakers to come to their offices with the appeal of getting their dream projects made, sparing no expense.  But now, the legacy studios of Hollywood are beginning to lure the filmmakers back with a different appeal that seems to be more ideal to them nowadays; that they can get their movie seen on the big screen.

One has to thing that filmmakers are making a calculated risk between these two options now.  One, they go to Netflix and get their strange, unconventional movie made without restrictions but also see it play exclusively on streaming and potentially be buried in the algorithm.  Or, they go to the studios and potentially face numerous obstacles from executive meddling, but eventually they’ll see their work play in front of an audience on the big screen.  But, there are those filmmakers who very much desire to have their movies screened for a wide audience and that’s becoming a more and more desirable option to some.  Box office is a very tangible measure of a film’s success, so it’s a great way to gauge if your movie managed to succeed or not.  On streaming, your movie becomes one of numerous titles listed simply as thumbnails on a smaller screen.  Most streaming platforms don’t even publicly state their internal numbers, so the measure of success is somewhat a mystery.  And there are just a lot of filmmakers out there who are still succeeding without even thinking twice about choosing to go theatrical first.  Christopher Nolan for example clashed with his previous home studio (Warner Brothers) after they were about to push his film Tenet (2020) to streaming during the pandemic against his wishes of waiting for theaters to re-open.  He jumped ship, went to Universal who gave him an assurance of a theatrical first release, and he made Oppenheimer (2023) to resounding box office and awards season success.  Tom Cruise likewise convinced his studio Paramount to sit on Top Gun: Maverick (2022) until the theatrical market recovered, and it payed off extremely well.  So, what filmmakers are seeing is that there is an added benefit to getting the movie seen in theaters to lots of people, because it gives their film an added spotlight that can be tangibly felt.  That’s why a lot more filmmakers are starting to demand a bit more on their distribution front, and ensuring that their film is not just made, but also viewed.

One of the biggest challenges recently to Netflix’s streaming first policy is a recent push by filmmaker Greta Gerwig to get her next film project set up at Netflix released on more screens nationwide.  After her success with Barbie, Greta inked a massive deal with Netflix to launch a brand new take of the Narnia books from C.S. Lewis into a major film franchise.  Clearly, Netflix sees this as a major potential win for them, but Greta Gerwig believes (rightly I’d say) that such a franchise can’t just thrive on streaming alone.  Narnia is a major title to produce, akin to The Lord of the Rings in scale and scope, which is what prompted Disney and Fox’s short lived run with the book series.  They are movies that demand a big screen treatment, and that’s why she’s putting pressure on Netflix to consider a wider release.  It’s not something new for Netflix to go wide with one of their films.  As part of their contract with director Rian Johnson, Netflix did agree to release the first of his two Knives Out sequels, Glass Onion (2022), in a wide theatrical release before it was put on streaming.  However, they limited the amount of time it played in theaters, and the film was gone after only two weeks.  This clearly limited the amount of box office it was going to take, and by all accounts, Glass Onion did pretty well in it’s short run.  Who knows how much money Netflix left on the table by pulling it after such a brief run.  Perhaps the Netflix accountants think that box office is miniscule compared to the $15 a month they currently get from their hundreds of millions of subscribers, but any box office is is helpful to the bottom  line, especially when it can off set production and marketing costs.  For Greta Gerwig, she actually has a powerful ally in her camp; the IMAX Corporation, who are interested in getting Ms. Gerwig’s Narnia films on their screens.  IMAX has a lot of pull in the industry, and have proven to be a big driver of box office for films because of the premium ticket price.  Greta clearly wants to get her movie seen properly on a bigger screen than just having it streamed on a platform; but at the same time, she is working with Netflix’s money, who ultimately have the final say.

Netflix has been defiant, but the other streamers have reconsidering their plans to put a bunch of their movies exclusively on streaming.  Paramount made a last minute choice to take their musical re-make of Mean Girls (2024) and put it into theaters in advance of it’s premiere on Paramount+.  The choice proved fruitful as the movie grossed over $90 million at the box office, making it a hit for the struggling studio that they otherwise wouldn’t have had if it went straight to streaming.  There is also an example of movie studios that were planning on making multi-part mini-series for streaming all of a sudden restructuring them into feature films for theaters.  Disney’s upcoming Moana 2 (2024) was one of those streaming series projects that got re-worked and now it’s being projected to be a box office winner for Disney Animation, which is really in need of one. But perhaps the biggest example of a shift back to the theatrical model that payed off big for a studio was Warner Brothers decision to take Tim Burton’s long anticipated sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) and put it into theaters after initially greenlighting it as a streaming exclusive.  To date, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has grossed nearly $300 million domestic and over half a billion worldwide.  Had they gone the streaming route, Warner Brothers would have missed out on a net profit of over $100 million on this film, which they definitely need after the box office flops of Furiosa (2024) and Joker: Folie a Deux.  But there are other examples of some studios doing the reverse.  After a string of box office disappointments like Napoleon (2023) and Argylle (2024), Apple Studios has opted to pull back from theatrical and release more of their films straight to streaming, like they did to the recent film Wolfs (2024) starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt.  That film was planned for theaters, with trailers already running in most markets, and in the eleventh hour the movie was shifted to streaming instead.  While there’s this case to prove a bit of the point to Netflix’s argument, the trend of movies going from streaming to theatrical is growing bigger.

In many ways, it comes down to what type of movie gets either the theatrical or streaming treatment.  The movies that seem to get the lowest bit of interest are the ones that studios feel safer putting out in streaming, meanwhile the safer bets and higher profile projects get the theatrical market.  But with Netflix, they seem content on going all in on streaming; at least up to now.  They only used limited theatrical releases to put their movie out for awards contention, since they still have to play by the Academy’s rules in this regard.  But still, that limits the visibility of their in theaters to just a handful of theaters, namely in Los Angeles and New York, where Academy voters mostly live.  Movies play differently on living room entertainment systems compared to the movie theater experience.  If Netflix wants their prestige movies to gain any traction in awards season, make it so that they have the highest profile in the grandest presentation possible.  When Netflix was starting to disrupt the industry in the 2010’s by investing in Oscar caliber campaigns, they certainly had the kinds of movies to back that claim up.  In some cases, their movies were garnering the most nominations in any year, led by movies like Roma (2018), The Irishman (2019) and The Power of the Dog (2021).  This last Oscars, they had only one nominated film, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro (2023), and it went home empty handed.  Couple this with the fact that straight to streaming films have garnered the reputation of being the new direct-to-video moniker of poor quality, and you can see that Netflix’s brand has somewhat diminished.  All of the Oscar worthy stuff they put out is now being drowned out by the deluge of bad films that get dumped onto their platform, whether made by them or licensed by another studio.   It may now be worth it for Netflix to clean up it’s reputation by putting their name out their more in a theatrical arena, showing that they can be competitive with the legacy studios in Hollywood.

Netflix should not be adversarial with the theatrical market.  It’s a resilient mode of distribution that Netflix has been unable to conquer in the same way it has so many other industries.  Even still, movie theaters are not fully recovered yet from the blow dealt to them by the pandemic.  The problem isn’t so much that people prefer to watch movies at home than go out to a theater.  We’ve discovered in the last couple years that there is indeed a reliable base of customers that will definitely make time to watch movies in theaters.  The issue today is that the movie industry is just not making enough movies in order to fill the demand of the theatrical market, and this is where Netflix could be a lot of help.  Not every movie they make is necessarily worthy of the big screen treatment, but there are a few that absolutely would benefit from a wide release in theaters.  Most people forget that Eddie Murphy made a new Beverly Hills Cop sequel this year exclusive for Netflix, because it never got a theatrical release.  Seeing how much a legacy sequel made so many years later ended up lighting up the box office this fall with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, perhaps Murphy and Netflix realized they missed out on a gold opportunity this year to bank on the nostalgia driving their movie.  Will Netflix make the change?  It’s hard to say.  In many ways, the streaming market is changing once again to something that favors a symbiotic relationship with the theatrical model and not one in opposition to it.  There are added pressures now for Netflix to reconsider their position, including more demands from filmmakers and more competition from other streamers that are benefiting from the theatrical to streaming mode of release.  Given that Netflix has more to gain than lose by just doing more in the theatrical market, it should be an easy choice.  There seems to be signs that some at Netflix value the theatrical experience; they did help save the legendary Grauman’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood after all.  Netflix needs to shake off the reputation they have as just a content mill, and actually show that they mean business as a new major Hollywood studio by showcasing what they can do on the biggest scale possible by getting their movies out on the silver screen.  They’ll still remain a top dog in streaming for years to come if people get interested in all their movies again, and not just the ones that the algorithm pushes to the top.    For many, nothing beats the theater experience, so for Netflix’s sake if you can’t beat it, join it.

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