DDT Pro Wrestling: A Family Company.

I haven’t babbled about wrestling in awhile, but I’m bored so let’s fix that problem shall we?

So New Japan Pro Wrestling, the number 1 Japanese promotion in the world, hasn’t been it’s old self lately. A lot has been said about this, but it’s been pretty clear that ever since Tetsuya Naito won the IWGP Intercontinental and Heavyweight titles on night two of Wrestlekingdom the company over all has felt a bit different. Some would point out that the five month shut down, travel issues with foreign talent, and the restricted clap crowds have been the reason for this. Those assumptions are not wrong as the shows have felt stale due to the silence from the limited crowd, and the featuring of a lot of unpopular talent as place holders for the ones not allowed in the country.

Yet it’s not the only reason the company has felt different. By the end of 2020 most of the foreign talent had made their way back in for tours, and the crowd sized did increase as they began to run larger buildings. All culminating with another two nights at the Tokyo Dome to a little less than half capacity. Though the crowds still are forced to remain silent and are only allowed to clap which sucks. The build up to this years Wrestlekingdom event once again was full of overly complicated booking that made little sense, and was only to shoehorn in two title matches at the top of the card with the same three men who were entwined with the title the year prior. The only one left out was company Ace Katzuchika Okada as they are still keeping him out of the title picture to establish some new top stars. The matches themselves were fine (great even), but I was overcome with a sense of malaise watching them as I wasn’t nearly as invested in any of the matches, save for one. Even though it was the crowing of Kota Ibushi finally getting a shot with the big belt, literally a decade in the making, I felt nothing.

So while I still keep one eye on the promotion that made me love Japanese pro wrestling, I’ve continued to be more engrossed with a lot of the other promotions on the island. I’ve written about them before, but after the match I just saw this morning I had to talk more about DDT.

DDT Pro Wrestling (Dramatic Dream Team) has become one of the big four or five promotions in the scene. A lot of people argue it’s become the number 2 promotion in the country, but I still think that’s Dragongate. Though it’s not hard to see why people, especially here in the states, think so highly of the promotion. It’s drawn in sell out crowds from all over the past few years, has ties to people currently in AEW and WWE, and since 2017 is owned by a large corporation called CyberAgent, which in Japan only happens when you’re a success (New Japan is owned by Bushiroad) and a proven money maker.

Not bad for a company that started as a small indie totally in the shadow of both All Japan Pro Wrestling and it’s eventual offshoot NOAH. In fact CyberAgent recently purchased NOAH and it now airs it’s show in DDT’s streaming service along with it’s sister promotion Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling and a few others. So the times have changed. DDT made a name for itself slowly. They ran small venues with a lot of freelance talent, but once the original owners left in 2005, the promotion began to make moves and began to create it’s own legacy. By 2009 just as I was starting to get into indie wrestling, I began to hear about this weird japanese promotion that would do shows at local water parks or baseball fields, and by shows I don’t mean in a ring. The wrestlers would fight in and around the entire park using whatever was around. At the same time I would also hear about these crazy good matches with people I never heard of like Kenny Omega and Kota Ibushi.

By the time I began to get into Japanese Wrestling I knew what DDT was, and had checked out some of their shows through various means on the internet. At the time it was hard to follow because it was and still is a very promo heavy promotion. It’s not uncommon for a match to just stop, the lights go out, and a video plays that’s somehow related to what’s happening but since I don’t speak Japanese I was lost. This was kept mostly in the opening matches where a lot of the comedy wrestlers worked. Then after intermission the more serious matches would start. At the time I didn’t realize that this was a parody to how most Japansese promotions book shows. Most promotions open with maybe a young boy single or tag match, but then you’d get a series of multi man matches that were either one offs or a set up to a big angle or even a glimpse at a future singles match up. Then after intermission you’d get the buisness end of the card with all the big single matches and title matches. So it’s kind of funny that DDT uses the same time to just fuck around cause honestly who cares about senseless tag matches?

Speaking of titles, DDT also bucked the trend when it came to theirs. Their top singles title The K-OD (King of DDT) Openweight Title has been the top prize for years. This title is typically held by the top person in the promotion and is booked similar to other main titles in Japanese Promotions. Then you have the K-OD Tag titles as well as K-OD six man titles. Some promotions like Dragongate, and soon AEW, have six man titles, but DDT is the only one that also has 8 man tag titles as well. The K-OD 8 Man Titles have bounced between various lower mid card and comedy wrestlers since their inception. As has probably the second most known title in the company the Ironman Heavymetal Championship. A title that is defended under 24/7 rules meaning the champion has to defend the title wherever and whenever even if they are asleep. This title has been held by such illustrious people as a ladder, a birthday cake, a book, and even a wrestling doll. The title has also been defended overseas numerous times. This is of course a parody of the old WWE Hardcore title which was also defended under 24/7 rules and used as a source of comedy. WWE even recently tried to recreate this with their 24/7 title. DDT uses it much the same way, given jobbers and other lower mid card talent something to fight over.

So it’s pretty clear that DDT is a place that can do some serious business while also keeping their tongue firmly planted in cheek. While I would parachute in for some of the bigger more buzz worthy matches DDT had or even their biggest show of the year Peter Pan, I can’t say that I was a fan. As much as I don’t mind comedy in wrestling, the language barrier made it hard for me to understand certain gags.

(Though I did see one match where a guy brought a nurse into the ring, and held his opponent down while she took blood from his arm, and I found that hilarious as i used to be someone who was afraid of needles.)

Then when it came to the main part of the show, I didn’t see anything that blew me away outside of the same top two guys who are the 1B and 1A of the promotion, Tetsuya Endo and Konosuke Takeshita. Everything else was just fine to me. So I hand waved really getting into the promotion despite all the hype.

Fast forward to last year, New Japan is shit, so I start looking around at the landscape. While I wrote about how NOAH and Dragongate is the top of the list for what I watched last year, DDT wasn’t that far behind. I started getting into them thanks to their K-OD tournament which really kept the comedy to a minimum and focused mostly on good singles matches, and if there’s ever a good way to learn about a promotion it’s by watching how they book a tournament. Tournaments are good ways to see how each person works, what their gimmicks are, and what spot they occupy in the company. Last years K-OD had a lot of fresh young talent with some established veterans, and it’s clear DDT is booking for the future, despite 50 year old living legend Jun Akiyama winning not only the tournament but also eventually winning the K-OD Openweight itself from Endo. The day prior Keji Mutoh, who is also in his 50’s, won the GHC Heavyweight title in NOAH. So the two main champions for CyberAgent are both legends in their 50’s.

It’s not unheard of for a Japanese promotion to use an established star to eventually get the new young star over. The old veteran hand versus young upstart is one of the oldest stories in pro wrestling. New Japan used Hiroshi Tanahashi, then a fifteen year veteran, to get over a young 24 year old Katzuchika Okada as the new top guy in the company. It’s also why the term Ace is now over used in every promotion.

While I can’t say the Mutoh reign has paid off since he’s already defeated the would be ace of NOAH, Akiyama is still getting established wins for his title reign. He beat one half of the tag champs Higuchi in a good match, but then he was challenged by all people Danshoku Dino.

Dino has been a DDT mainstay since he debuted as a wrestler in 2002. Over his career he’s mostly been known as a comedy guy, using gay tactics to either distract or overcome his opponents. He’s a take off of the old effeminate wrestlers that would come to ring with makeup on or their hair permed like Gorgeous George, Goldust, etc. In Mexico their known as Exoticos. The idea being that these wrestlers are attracted to their opponents and spend a lot of time in the match trying to sneak a kiss or grab. I’m not sure how well this would go over in todays day and age, but over seas and in Mexico it’s still pretty common to see at least one. Dino, however is a little different. Dino isn’t concerned with being pretty. In fact it’s quite the opposite. He’s more grimy and sleazy. The type of guy you may catch in the back of a dark porn theater. He’s pudgy and a little overweight, and he has propensity for sticking guys heads into his tights before dropping them on their heads. This is the guy who challenged for the biggest title in the company against a living legend like Uncle Jun.

When I say living legend, I’m not kidding. Jun Akiyama is a hall of fame level talent and has been for 30 years. He debuted in All Japan just as the promotion was on fire thanks to the four pillars of heaven (Misawa, Kawada, Taue, and Kobashi) becoming mega stars. Then Misawa leaves and starts NOAH, and eventually Jun goes with him. He spends about 20 years bouncing between the two promotions, but always as a top guy. He was main foil for Misawa and Kobashi, but was also an ace for All Japan. His career hit the skids as All Japan began to decline in popularity in the 2010’s. He took over as booker, and was able to create a star in Kento Miyahara but they never reached the heights of their peers. A problem that persists to this day. Akiyama meanwhile would quit/get fired for failing to bring the promotion back from the brink. Akiyama was then actually going to be spear heading a division for WWE in their effort to take over the wrestling world with NXT Japan. This was meant to take talent away from Japanese promotion or use freelancers while also training their own up and coming talent. Similar to what the intent was with NXT UK back in 2017. What it really is, is WWE trying to get a foot hold in the one place they haven’t dominated yet. Thankfully the pandemic put the kabosh on that, and now with the WWE Network going away in favor of Peacock who knows how things will shake out. This is how Akiyama lands in DDT, signing a multi year deal.

So this morning from the world famous Korakuen Hall we got to see Dino vs Akiyama. A world class talent versus a guy who wears a thong. How was it?

Look I’ll level with you, the match wasn’t great. There are people online saying it was good, but I’m not sure if they’re trolling or not. To me this was clear indication of giving Akiyama an easy win where he doesn’t have to work so hard because he’s over 50. The great thing about working with a comedy wrestler is you don’t have to take nearly as many bumps as you would in a normal match, and for a guy as old as Uncle Jun that’s a good thing. It saves him up for a better match down the line. However, what struck me during this match was how into DDT I had become without really realizing it.

I don’t watch every show that makes tapes, mind you. I’m not hopping on a plane and flying to Japan anytime soon (though I want to). I’m just saying that over the course of almost a year, I’ve gone from a casual fan cherry picking matches, to actively enjoying a match where Dino lays on all fours with his entire bare ass hanging out of his trunks, and playfully being kicked by an older man. How did this happen?

I got into Japanese pro wrestling because the American and British indie scenes had been decimated by WWE and their take over of the wrestling world. It was the only place where I could find great well worked matches with well booked feuds that would span the course of a year or more. The only place where I didn’t feel like my intelligence was being insulted just for liking wrestling. This week was Wrestlemania week. A week that used to be the most looked forward to week of the entire year if you were a pro wrestling fan. Not because of the actual Wrestlemania show itself, though it does draw the most fans by far cause people love a spectacle no matter how bad it is, but because of all of the amazing matches that would happen at the indie shows in the surrounding area of where ever Mania was taking place. All of the major indie promotions would back up shop and rent out a venue a few miles from the big show and from that Wednesday to that Sunday it would be round the clock pro wrestling. The entire reason WWE has gone out of their way to sign any available indie talent is because of how much attention would get taken away from the two big WWE shows that weekend. For fans you would spend all week having your mind blown by all of the dream matches that were booked, or major angles blown off, and then sit and veg out with 60-70 thousand other fans at Mania. Mania became like the cool down show, and WWE couldn’t stand it.

So now the indies are all comedy and meme bullshit. They’re full of people WWE would never book, so they’ve become the only ones who are safe to constantly book on shows. So what we’ve gotten now is a set of themed shows like it’s fucking kareoke night at your local strip club. Sure, you may get a decent match here or there, but it’s nowhere near what it used to be.

So I ran all the way to Japan to get my pro wrestling fix, and for years it’s been great. Zero regrets, but now all the sudden I’m coming full circle and caring about a match I wouldn’t have looked twice at a year ago. I’m not even that big of a Dino fan, but he was about as good as a guy like him can be in a match like this. Does he have any business sniffing the K-OD title anymore? Not at all. Looking online he apparently had four runs with the title which are about 4 too many for me. But like I said this wasn’t about Dino winning the title, it was about giving Jun a win to make him look like a viable champion in his second defense. Things like that matter in wrestling, no matter what Vince McMahon thinks.

For Jun’s part he played along with Dino’s bullshit about as well as he should’ve. He never really looked to be in any danger during the match itself, nor should he. Dino is so far below this man he can barely see over the top of his boots. So I’m glad they treated it as such. For long time DDT fans, I can see this being exciting as Dino did a lot of stuff he hasn’t done in a long while. For me this was just fine . I’d give the match a D if I care enough to even rate it. I was just shocked that an old veteran like Akiyama let another man slip his hands into his trunks and also dry hump him. I almost forgot about the dry humping.

This was not the type of match you recommend to friends. This is actually the type of match you hope nobody walks in on you watching. It’s the type of match where people will feel justified in thinking that pro wrestling is gutter trash, and they aren’t wrong. Yet this show did have two really good matches on it. The six man match with some of the younger up and coming talent taking on the main heel faction was really good, and the tag title match that proceeded the main event was also really good.

DDT isn’t a promotion I can watch everything of, but there’s a lot I do like and the more I get into it the more I find myself becoming attached to it. It’s reminding me more and more of what Chikara was like before the shut down in 2013. Sure there’s wacky shit that makes no sense unless you’re a wrestling nerd, but the stuff that lands really fucking lands and I’m excited to see where it goes. Right now the big question is “who will beat Akiyama?”. The front runner for that is perennial ace Takeshita, who just popped into AEW for a house show and will be staying in the states for a month (hope he’s vaccinated). I assume they let him do this because they need him out of the way for a bit while Akiyama racks up some wins. By the time he gets back and is done with quarantine they could be heading directly into Peter Pan so another Akiyama/Takeshita match may be the main event there. It makes sense since Akiyama has moonwalked into DDT, Takeshita hasn’t been able to beat him. They’ve had two matches so far which were both excellent so a third is on the way. For me though I wish it was someone on the come up. Someone who could use the scalp to get to that next level. Who that is, I’m not sure yet. It’s still so early.

For those keeping score, while NOAH was my favorite promotion last year due to the Go Shiozaki title run, they’ve now dropped to third place. I am not a fan of the Mutoh title reign as he can barely walk down the ramp, and on top of that Kenoh just lost his secondary title to another old veteran who also stinks. Why NOAH is doing this I can’t say as they do not have enough young talent on the come up to challenge for these titles and become stars. Dragongate however remains a well booked and exciting promotion to watch. I have not missed any Dragongate shows this year including house shows. Making them the new number one. DDT isn’t far behind this year. Even though they have an older veteran in the top spot, there’s enough new talent for him to eventually drop the title to and potentially make a star. Even if Takeshita once again take his spot as ace, Akiyama has enough star power to put guys over for the rest of his career without losing any faith from the fans. So if I have to sit through a match where a guy does a moonsault while holding his junk from being seen every now and again so be it.

Bob’s Picks: The Spanish Prisoner (1997)

A lot of people watch older films. A lot of young people actually. Whether this is to see what life was like before the age of the INTERNET changed how we interact with one another or if movies made on actual film and not digital feel more authentic I can’t say. One of the things that has come out of this is a lot of movies are now being reexamined in light of the somewhat recent outing of several stars from bygone eras. In the olden times, pre 2000 that is, movie execs thought the movie going public couldn’t handle the idea of any sort of lead actor being gay. So the writers of these movies, some of whom were gay, would hide any pretense in the subtext of their films. Sometimes even the director himself would add in some queer subtext to certain scenes or stories. It’s become known as queer coding today, and a lot of movies have it more than people think.

Of course it’s most famously seen in horror films such as Psycho. Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins who was gay, is a trans man so wrecked by the guilt his mother instilled into him about his sexuality that he literally tries to become her. His conflicting attraction to women while also dressing like one pushes him into murder. A bit overly dramatic, but it’s a Hollywood movie. You always go big.

Want another one? How about another Hitchcock movie? Rebbecca has the character of Mrs Danvers the housekeeper who spends the entire movie not only reminding us of the dead Rebbecca but also seems to mourn the loss. Some could say she comes off very motherly, but others have made the case that it’s bit more sexual than that.

So why do I bring this up while discussing a David Mamet movie? Well after watching the film last night, I was struck by how intimately the two leads played by Campbell Scott and Steve Martin spoke to one another. It was almost as if there was an unseen intimacy between the two that was right there from the very first time they meet. I’ll explain.

Scott plays Joe Ross a corporate engineer whatever that is. He’s brought to a fancy island to make a pitch to his bosses about a process he’s created that can net them a large some of money with his friend and partner George Lang played by Ricky Jay. While on the island Joe is hit on by his really annoying secretary Susan Ricci ( Rebecca Pidgeon) who never shuts up, but he pushes her aside once he gets his eyes on a man named Jimmy Dell. Dell approaches Joe and offers to buy his camera that he was just taking photos with. Joe, flustered at the sudden attention from this man, scoffs at the money and just gives Jimmy the camera and walks off in that way where you’re mad at yourself for saying something stupid in front of a crush. Sure he SAYS he’s offended by the rude gesture Jimmy made, but we all know the score here.

Later that night, Jimmy approaches Joe and apologizes and tells him that he appreciated the kind gesture of offering the camera to him. He then invites Joe out for a drink, and the two spend the entire evening together talking on the beach till sun up. Here we learn that Jimmy has a sister and that he wants Joe to meet her. Later as Joe is leaving the island to go back to New York, Jimmy hands him a package and asks him to deliver it to his sister at her building and makes plans to go out to dinner with both he and his sister. Joe of course agrees, but doesn’t say anything about looking forward to meeting the sister. Once on the plane the lippy Susan gets it in Joe’s head that he could be delivering a package of drugs. So he opens the parcel and finds an old book on tennis with a note in it from Jimmy to his sister asking her to give Joe a chance. Joe is Boo Boo the Fool. Once back in the city he goes to a bookstore to replace the book with a newer one in better condition before dropping it off.

We see Joe looking forward to his date with Jimmy, but Friday comes and goes and Jimmy doesn’t call. The next day Joe is walking in the city, and sees Jimmy at an expensive dealership looking at cars. He walks in, clearly excited to see Jimmy, but Jimmy rebukes him. Feeling rejected Joe leaves, but decides he’s a strong independent man and goes back to confront Jimmy. Jimmy it turns out is under the impression that Joe did not deliver the package to his sister. Joe, now offended, insists that he did indeed deliver it, and asks Jimmy whether it’s possible that he is wrong here. Jimmy reluctantly agrees that it is possible and the two part ways.

Later, yappy Susan shows up at Joes house, clearly stalking him but Joes too busy thinking about other….things. She basically throws herself at him, and Joe ponders throwing her a sympathy bone just to get her off his back, but the phone rings. It’s Jimmy and he’s called to apologize and admits he was wrong. He invites Joe out to dinner again, which Joe eagerly agrees to before punting Susan out onto the street like Fred Flintstone taking Dino outside.

Joe shows up to meet Jimmy looking snazzy in his new expensive suit. The two sit and chat, and as a gag Jimmy opens a swiss bank account on a super ancient looking 1997 laptop (I laughed seeing the thing had to be plugged in and it looked like it weighed like 20lbs). The two head out to the restaurant, where Jimmy gets a note from his sister saying that she’s sick and can’t make it. At this point it’s safe to assume that Jimmy is his own sister, much like Norman Bates is his own mother. The club however won’t let Joe in since it’s members only night. Jimmy then asks for a membership application which Joe signs without reading. He’s just excited it’s only the two of them now poor guy.

At dinner Jimmy begins to suggest to Joe that he may want to get legal council for his job. Joe, confused why they aren’t talking more about Jimmy, ask why and Jimmy makes mention that if his process is as lucrative as he says, his employers are going to want to keep it for themselves and politic him out of it. This later proves true, as Joe is asked to speak with his boss and two lawyers who try and renegotiate Joe’s current deal with them. They make it clear that they want the sole copy of the process, but Joe balks at that idea and leaves. He immediately calls Jimmy to vent, and ask if he can see Jimmy’s lawyer which Jimmy offered to him.

For some reason we next see Joe buying a signed picture of a famous tennis player for Jimmy’s sister. I assume this was to further impress Jimmy and very little to do with the sister he’s never met. He goes back to her building to drop it off, and discovers that the name he was given actually belongs to an old woman, not the one Jimmy showed him a photo of.

Confused by this he goes back to his office, where of course Susan shows up with a full photo album of the pictures she took on their trip to the island. This bitch. She gloats about the photo of Jimmy as it shows him coming to the island by boat, not the plane he said he came in with the princess he’s not supposed to be with hence why he offered to buy Joe’s camera. The book also has a card that Susan was given from an FBI Agent she met at the resort bar. Joe steals the card and calls the agent (played by that criminal Felicity Huffman). She tells Joe they’ve been on Jimmy’s trail for awhile now and ask him to continue his meeting with Jimmy and the lawyer. She also tells him that Jimmy will call and change the meet spot.

Which is what Jimmy does. He now wants to meet at Central Park and he wants Joe to bring a copy of the process. The FBI was listening and tell Joe to meet them a half hour earlier. He does this and they put a wire on him, while this is going on he’s speaking with an agent (Ed O’Neil), who gives him his instruction on what they need. He hands Joe back the book with the process in it, and sends him out to meet Jimmy. Who never shows up. Joe waits for hours, but no one shows. He tries to call the agent from a payphone but gets someone totally different. He then looks at his copy of the process and finds that it’s been switched with a blank one. Joe is Boo Boo the Fool.

Joe calls the police and he walks them to every place he and Jimmy met while in the city. Each place is of course not what it first appeared to be. They then bring him into an interrogation room, and begin to accuse him of a crime. From their perspective it looks like he’s been spending undocumented money, and they even bring out the certificate Joe signed for his club membership but it turned out to be a asylum form to Venezuela. Joe scoffs at this before lawyering up. He’s later freed by his boss who asks him to get the process back as his entire fortune is at stake.

Joe calls up his George Lang whose been home sick ever since they got back from the island. Jay tells him to come over, but when Joe does he finds Lang dead with his boy scout knife in his chest (the knife came up earlier in the movie). The cops show up before Joe can get his knife back so he hightails it out of there. He rides the subway but gets funny looks due to the obvious blood on his hands. He then heads to Susan’s apartment where she told him he could lay some pipe whenever he wanted. He instead pushes right past her and goes to wash his hands and get that icky blood off. He explains to her what’s going on and of course she believes him and offers to help him (No woman will ever be into me the way she’s into him).

They plan to use her return ticket to go back to the island to retrieve the security tapes with Jimmy’s face on it since the cops have no idea who he is. Since Joes wanted in New York they drive all the way up to Boston to use their airport. On the way to the airport they got stopped by police but Susan proves herself useful by making a scene which the cops don’t want to deal with and let them go past. Joe tosses her a pity kiss for the effort before getting out. He gets in line for security, but just as he’s about to go through he remembers that Jimmy’s prints are on the book he gave him to give to his sister. The one he replaced with a new copy. Of course Joe kept the ratty old book for himself, it was the first thing Jimmy ever gave to him. He heads back out just as we see the handbag Susan gave him had a gun in it.

Never trust yappy broads let me tell ya.

We see Susan now talking to the FBI lady, but she runs back to Joe when she sees him back outside. He pushes her onto a bus just as the cops are arriving because of the gun that was just found. They get dropped off at a Ferry, and Susan makes an excuse to get away to talk to the not FBI lady, and Joe tries to use his plane ticket to get on the boat but finds out the ticket was actually for a flight to Venezuela. Joe is Boo Boo the Fool again. Now knowing Susan is in on it, he see her speaking with the not FBI. When she comes back to him he gets her on the Ferry, and confronts her. She gives up the ghost, and it turns out this was all part of the plan as even Jimmy is on the boat as well. Jimmy tells Joe the plan was to make it look like a suicide after Joe becomes over wrought with guilt over having stolen and sold the process for himself or something. However before Jimmy can kill Joe, two asian people posing as tourist pop up and subdue Jimmy. Turns out they’re US Marshals and they’ve been on this case the whole time (if you go back you’ll see Asian tourists throughout the movie and Jimmy even makes a comment about them at one point). They float down to New York where Joe is now in the clear, Susan asks if to help her out but Joe goes back to showing little interest in her. The only time he looks upset is when they wheel Jimmy past him on a gurney still knocked out. The police detective tells Joe that this whole thing was orchestrated by his employer who planned to steal the process for himself and sell it to cash out while Joe took all the blame. Joe doesn’t seem to care though as his boyfriend is now going to prison.

The End.

Now I don’t know if writer and director David Mamet meant for his lead character to be a bit on the closeted side, but I’ve never seen a movie where two men become so clearly into each other so quickly. It was also telling that anytime anything with Jimmy would pop up, Joe wasted zero amounts of time pushing Susan to the side. Sure Joe mentions he doesn’t do inter office romances, but he does also consider sleeping with her when she stalks him at home, and eventually kisses her (I imagine he vomited once he was out of the car). So I’m not entirely joking when I say this movie has some queer coding in it. We’re never really given a reason for Joe to be so infatuated with Jimmy outside of him coming off as rich. We do not see most of their first conversation over drinks, but since the scene starts at night and ends at dawn clearly shows they were up all night talking. Kind of like you would do when you meet someone your kind of into. Jimmy asks Joe on dinner dates multiple times in the film, and Joe agrees without a second thought. Both men are overly polite with one another, and both men become offended at perceived slights from the other. When the turn happens, and it’s found out Jimmy is a con man, Joe shows absolutely zero anger towards this man. His friend is murdered, and he’s framed for it and Joe still has a look of excitement when he sees Jimmy on the Ferry with him. So while nothing is explicitly said in this movie, a lot of this came off way different in 2021 then it did in 1997. Again, I’m not saying this was the authors intent but you can make a case for it.

It could also just be the type of film maker Mamet is. This film has his typical stunted dialogue, the actors all seems like they were given sedatives throughout filming, and the way he shoots the movie is so bare bones and without an ounce of style that it borders on documentary. This is now the second of his films we’ve done for this series, and much like House of Games we get a story that’s way more tell than show. Mamet’s not a guy interested in moving the camera around, or spends hours crafting each frame. He’s a dialogue guy. So the camera is just there in the corner while his actors act. You could easily remove the camera and put in a stage and an audience and it’s much the same feel and tone. Which is fine. Some directors just do the work and are happier being invisible. Look at my recent reviews of The Family Man. A good movie but one with no set style or tone of it’s own.

Mamet to me falls in line with guys like early Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, and Woody Allen. Each of them have a unique way of telling stories and most of it is in what’s being said and not how it’s being said.

Mamet’s thing is puzzle box stories with snobby white people in suits being rude to one another. He’s done it here, Glengarry Glen Ross, Hoffa, State and Main, etc. What I wonder is is he better suited to just writing these scripts and letting other people direct rather than directing himself. He doesn’t seem to have a preference. He’s only directed about ten films, but none of them have crossed over into classic quite like the ones he didn’t direct such as Glengarry, The Untouchable, or Hannibal which has ages better than when it was released. It could also be a case of he really wanted these movies to be made but no one would sign on to direct so he said fuck it and just did it himself. I’ve never watched any interviews with the man to know.

As far as this movie is concerned it’s pretty solid overall but a little sloppy when you think too much about it. A lot of what happens to Joe and a ton of things to make this con work are all very circumstantial. It involved Joe doing exactly everything they predict him to do, but even then it kind of falls apart at the end. If the idea was to make it look like he killed himself, then why the whole trip to the airport, why put a gun in his bag and potentially get him arrested? How did Jimmy not only know he’d get on a bus to take a Ferry home, but also know which Ferry he’d take since he didn’t have a ticket? Real minor shit that you can nitpick in this one. House of Games had a better con than this one. Still this one was entertaining and it does reel you in and make you want to find out where it leads which is all that really matters.

I can’t say too much about the acting since it’s a Mamet movie and nobody is allowed to have a character that’s been awake for more than an hour. All of the actors talk like David Mamet characters where things are either overly explained or truncated with enough subtext to capsize an air craft carrier. Other than the potential secret romance, this one was pretty laid out. Which means Campbell Scott is just moving from one thing to the next with no real emotion or time to really act in a scene. He’s kind of the perfect Mamet actor since he’s essentially a robot in this. We’re not meant to like or dislike Joe, we’re here just to see him get out of this pickle he’s gotten into.

The only actor who got any type of praise for this movie and the only reason I even checked it out 20 years ago was Steve Martin. Looking over his IMDB this wasn’t his very first dramatic role (that would be Grand Cayon), but it’s clear Hollywood did not see Martin as a dramatic actor. Which is a shame since before this he’s had 20 years of stellar work. He’s done plenty of comedic dramas like Parenthood and Father of the Bride where he’s the straight man in a wacky scenario, but nothing like what he does here. His Jimmy Dell is a fast talking, easy to like mover and shaker, but he’s also clearly a killer. It’s not a huge nuance, but I think Martin was great here and showed he can be more than just a wild and crazy guy. It’s a shame that even after all the praise for his role nobody took enough notice to cast him in other serious roles. His only other dramatic role was in Shopgirl which he wrote and directed himself. I’m also just learning that he hasn’t been in a feature length film since 2011. That’s a full decade without Steve Martin in movies. That’s criminal.

The Spanish Prisoner gets a D. Totally fine movie, it’s just lacking a little extra something due to Mamet being the director. I feel if someone else was in the directors chair and allowed the actors to act like real people the movie would’ve been a lot better for it. Maybe a Barry Levinson or a John Frankenheimer, guys who were versed in neo noir and crime films and keep the movie grounded but add just a tinge of style to it to make it interesting. As it is it’s a perfectly serviceable film totally worth watching just a bit too bare bones for my taste.

I would also like to state for the record that while I joke about how Bob picks nothing but movies with white people in suits, it’s turning out to be true. Taking out last weeks film which I picked, every movie he’s suggested has had a white man in a suit. So from here on out, whenever he picks a movie and any of the characters are white and wearing a suit I will add it to a ticker at the bottom of the review.

Number of White Guys in Suits: 5

The A24 Fan Club: It Comes At Night (2017)

It’s becoming pretty clear that 2017 was a banner year for A24. They released 15 films that year, three of which went on to be nominated for awards (this is not one of them). Moonlight would win best picture that year, but was released in 2016. I’ve spoken about some of the films they’ve put out in 2017 like Ladybird, Blackcoats Daughter, and Good Time. This one though has nagged at me ever since I saw that awesome looking poster. First off the title alone is enough to get my attention. Like that’s pure catnip for horror fans. I immediately had visions of a monster movie set in the dark, and that will never not get me excited to see a movie. Did it live up to my lofty expectations? Let’s find out.

It Comes At Night tells the story of Paul and his family living in a house in the woods alone during a apocalypse. A deadly disease has forced everyone to fend for themselves, and we see the ramifications of that as Paul is set to pack up his sick father in law and bring him out into the woods. He along with his son Travis dig a hole, and Paul takes the old man out with his gun before dumping the body and then burning it. Travis looks on horrified at having just killed his grandfather. His mother, Sarah, couldn’t bring herself to be apart of this and stayed in the house.

We see the family living quietly in a boarded up house. At night Travis has bad nightmares and then walks around with his lantern while his parents are asleep. That is until one night when he’s awoken by his mother as someone got in the house. Paul manages to trap the guy as he’s fully armed and knocks the man out before tying him to a tree outside for a day. He then goes out to speak with him, and asks what he was doing. The man tells him that he was looking for water for his family who are in an abandoned house a few miles away. He offers Paul a trade of some food for water, and Paul decides to see if what the man is saying is true, but is super cautious about it.

They get attacked on the road but Paul manages to kill the man. He starts to ask if the man knew who this was thinking they may be in cohoots, but the man, whose name we find out is Will, claims ignorance. Paul eventually returns to the house with Will and his family, a wife named Kim and their son Andrew. Soon the two families begin to grow closer to each other as Will and Kim help out with the chores. Travis even has a moment with Kim as they both have trouble sleeping. However Paul remains leary of growing too close to any of them, and reminds Travis that the only people he should trust are family. This goes so far that one night as Will and Paul share a drink after working outside all day, Paul gets weird when Will tells a story that doesn’t match up with what he originally told him when they first met.

A day or so later, while outside gathering wood the family dog Stanley starts to go nuts and barks out into the woods. He even manages to escape and runs off with Travis following behind. He’s unable to keep up with the dog and is dragged back to the house by Paul (I’m not sure if Paul was his actual father or step father. Travis never calls him by any name in the film for me to know.). Later that night as Travis is unable to sleep due to his reoccurring nightmares, he walks around the house and finds Andrew in another room laying on the floor. He wakes the boy up and helps him back to his parents room. He then hears a noise coming from downstairs and goes to investigate. He finds that the front door is open and wakes his parents. Paul and Will find Stanley badly hurt and sick, and Paul makes the choice to put the dog out of it’s misery. Later as they are discussing what happened, Travis mentions that the door was open when he got there which sets off a dispute between the two families. After hearing that Andrew wasn’t in his room, Paul makes the decision that both families quarantine in their rooms for a few days just to be safe. This upsets Will and his family but they agree to it.

Once again Travis can’t sleep due to his nightmares and when he wakes up he hears Andrew crying. He goes into the attic to hear what’s being said and it sounds like Andrew is sick, and that Will and Kim plan to leave. Travis tells Paul who suits up and arms up and heads to Will’s room. He asks to come in to see Andrew but Will is reluctant saying it’s not a good time. Paul insists, and Will greets him at the door with a gun of his own. He disarms Paul, but doesn’t know Sarah is just outside the door with a rifle. Will says that he and his family are leaving and that they are only going to take what’s fair as far as food and supplies. Paul is distrustful of this but doesn’t say anything as he’s at gun point. On their way out of the room, Sarah gets the drop on Paul aiming at his head. They both agree to lower their weapons, and just as Will does so Paul attacks and over powers him. Will is again tied up and sent outside with his family.

Once outside, Will tries to attack again this time getting the drop on Paul. Sarah then shoots Will in the back, which causes Kim to run off with Andrew in her arms. Paul not missing a beat picks up the rifle his wife dropped and fires killing Andrew. Kim has an obvious meltdown, and Paul seeing no way back shoots and kills her too. All of this just as Travis runs outside to see what’s going on.

Within a few hours Travis begins to show signs of infection and quickly dies as his mother, also shown to be sick, looks on. The film ends with both an infected Paul and Sarah sitting at the dinner table looking sadly at each other, not sure what to do.

What a happy movie.

I’m not sure how this movie played when it was released in 2017, but here in good ol’ 2021 year two of a global pandemic a lot of this stuff hits pretty damn hard. Had I known that a disease was at the center of this movie before watching it, I would’ve kept waiting. Like I said I thought it was a monster movie. It was in a sense, just not the fun kind. No, this was the “god I hate people” kind.

If there’s anything to be learned from this movie it’s shoot on site and do not ask questions. The second Paul showed a shred of decency towards Will he doomed his entire family. Now one could argue that Pauls constant distrustful nature is what lead to Will and Kim always being cagey, because how comfortable can you be in someone elses home when they’re always side eying you? Which is why I think this movie is good. It asks a lot of tough question and puts the viewer in the “well what the fuck would you do?” role. Some of which has been asked for past year and change now. Granted society hasn’t collapsed like in this movie, but having a deadly disease floating around has brought out the worst in a lot of people, and for the good people it’s left them vulnerable to being taken advantage of. Shit, the second the mere idea of things shutting down came about people flooded markets and shops buying up nothing but paper towels and toilet paper. Cause I guess wiping our asses is more important than eating food? My point is that small sample size of hysteria is nothing compared to what would really come out in people when the lights go off and we’re all sitting by candle light again. Suddenly you have a whole world of people asking why their neighbor has more food and water than they do. That’s when the real trouble starts.

It’s always a weird thing to have in the back of your head. That one day all of this can be gone and time sort of resets back to the dark ages. Some people more prepared than others (there are people who live entirely off the grid in society now), but most aren’t. We’re too busy bitching that all the episodes of Friends are on HBO Max and not Netflix anymore, or which rich white guy are we going to pretend runs the country. All nonsense.

The most profound and triggering moment of the movie for me is during the climax as Will leads Paul into their room, and demands he take off his gas mask saying “No one is sick!” while his child is clearly ill. Will’s shown to be a good guy, he’s just not in a position of power and wants to keep his family safe which is why he’s so desperate, but I can’t tell you how many youtube and tiktok videos I’ve watched over the past year of really dumb ignorant people saying the same thing while being thrown out of store for not wearing a mask. If Will had started yelling about his invisible rights, I would’ve shut the movie off.

I should mention the acting in this which was solid all around. Joel Edgerton was good as Paul, and I felt had the most range for his character. He’s clearly a nice guy he just comes off as a hard ass because he knows what it takes to keep his family safe, except for the one time he’s nice to someone. It was also fun to see Christopher Abbot and Riley Keough pop up after having just watched them in other films recently. I like that. It means I’m catching up on all these movies and getting my mojo back after so many years. Both actors were fine with what they had. Riley didn’t have much to do outside of one or two scenes and Abbot plays desperate pretty well as this is now the third film I’ve seen him do it in.

My only complaint with the film at all is it’s title. It Comes At Night makes no sense for a movie about a plague. Sure, it sounds cool as hell, like a Judas Priest song, but it denotes that something happens at night and while the inciting incident happens at night a lot of the movie also takes place during the day and early morning. When Paul left Will against that tree for an entire night I thought he was feeding Will to some big monster. You can only imagine my disappointment.

I give It Comes At Night a C. A good little small indie horror movie. Something A24 has a knack for producing. It was also writer director Trey Edward Shults first full length and it was good enough to get my attention and keep it. I’m curious to see his other movie called Waves one day. This was shot and acted well enough, there just wasn’t anything in this that makes it stand out from similar films like this (the pinnacle has been and always will be John Carpenters The Thing which is both a monster movie and a plague movie all in one). Yet if your with someone who likes these kinds of movies (a unicorn some would say) or a group of friends, I say this would make an excellent double feature with The Lodge. Both take place in one location, both have depressing and sad plots, and both of them have Riley Keough in them. The Lodge is better though. Start with that one and then follow with this movie.

The New Ranking System

So it’s been brought to my attention that my ranking system for things causes a lot of debates. Instead of people doing the correct thing in just trusting that whatever I say is true, there are some of you who insist on trying to force your own incorrect opinions into the conversation while also telling me that I’m right anyway. It’s bothersome and it needs to end. So I am taking time out of my busy schedule to rework my numbered system into a lettered system which you can see above.

Since the Bobs and Karens of the world become scared when they do not understand things like a frightened child, I will just this once hold your hand and guide you through this difficult matter.

First off I’ve given you your F rating. Since you can’t conceive of anything being just bad and have to go the extra step in an entirely made up list you can have your finite ranking. I don’t know if I’ve seen a film that would warrant an F, but it’s there.

E’s will be reserved for movies that are just for the lowest common denominator. Bobs and Karens would probably rank these as B’s or A’s cause they have shiny things in them and that’s always exciting for people whose eye sight is getting worse with age, but for me their E’s. Things like those Troll animated movies. Shit that’s just not very creative or interesting and is only there to sell you a product more than entertain you.

D’s are for movies that are just bad. Suicide Squad is a total D for example. Dune is a D. A movie that could’ve been good but for whatever reason missed the mark,

C is totally average. Nothing great about them, totally watchable and enjoyable, but not anything that’s going to stick in your head for years to come. I expect most movies will fall into either C or D rankings on average. Godzilla v Kong was a C (should’ve been an A).

B is for movies that are mostly ok but have one particular thing in that makes it stand out above a C or D movie. This could be anything from the directions, to the acting, or even the effects. Avatar is not a great movie on its own, but those 3D effects on a big screen bump it up to a B. To most people Joker would be ranked as B due to Phoenix’s performance (I still give it a D).

A is of course an excellent all around movie. When the story, the acting, and direction all come together perfectly in sync to create a piece of art that will stick with you for years to come. I would give most of David Lynch’s work A’s. Ladybird gets an A. If I give something an A it means you should absolutely go out of your way and watch it. You will not see a lot of A’s come out of me as I am a tough grader. A movie either has to work super hard to impress me or be so original and new that it catches me off guard. As I make my way through the Director’s Chair series you’ll see a lot of A’s being tossed around like roses as I’m mostly focusing on directors I already know and love.

Finally the S tier. S rankings are reserved for those unique films that transcend the typical rankings and become something greater. S tier are for movies or whatever that are so good that I can no longer be objective in my opinion. It’s something that has to reach deep deep deep down into the remnants of what’s left of my leathery soul and touch it ever so gently. These do not happen often at all. Entire years will go by without an S ranking. The most recent one that I can think of was the animated film Your Name. The one about the deaf girl and the bully. Before that it was Avengers Endgame. Which for the record is the only Marvel film to reach that high (most of those fall into the A or B ranking). Before that it was Doctor Who season 10. So maybe the average is at least once a year. Point is if you see me rate something S, you’ll know that this piece of art means more to me than my own extended family. It’s something that I’m going to cherish for the rest of my life because unlike any of my relationships it actually made me feel something and just for a brief moment filled that hole that’s ever present inside me.

And for the record this is no longer a sliding scale. There will be no A- or C+. It’s one flat letter grade and that’s it. So I don’t want to hear any shit from anyone about them thinking that so and so should be a D+ just because you thought the girl in it was pretty. She’s never going to fuck you so adding a plus isn’t going to do anything.

So there you have it. The DEFINITIVE ranking system. It is perfect and it is beautiful and will always be correct as I am the one deciding which goes where. I will no arguments on the matter. I have made this as simple as getting a license at the DMV. I have held your sweaty disgusting food smeared hand through this process. If you are still confused and lost as to how this all works I would suggest walking into traffic while looking down at your phone.

And before you even say it, this post was absolutely S tier.

The DCU Presents: Joker (2019)

Alright let’s get this over with.

For now this will be the final entry in the DCU Presents series as Shazam was taken off of HBO Max for some reason and Wonder Woman 2 is kind of like the starting point of the new rebooted DC Universe. One that does not involve anyone named Zack Snyder or Christopher Nolan or David Goyer. The trio who orchestrated the mess that these films have been for the past decade now. Once Justice League turned into the disaster that it would become, DC shifted focus away from a shared universe in favor of simply doing solo features. Hence why the Henry Cavill Superman cameo was canceled, and why Jared Leto did not appear in Harley Quinn and the Birds of Prey. There was a concerted effort to distance these films away from their others. Hell, they even announced a new Suicide Squad film to be directed by James Gunn after Marvel stupidly fired him over some old tweets he made making baby death jokes (2007 was a wild time ya’ll). Let me be clear. This new Suicide Squad movie isn’t a sequel. It’s not Suicide Squad 2 Electric Boogaloo. It’s a rebranded Suicide Squad. One full of color and jokes, and lacking any of the dirty grimeyness of the first one. It even has Starro as the villain which is the most comic book thing these films have done so far. We are also getting a new Batman movie. One without Ben Affleck. Instead Robert “I hate franchises” Pattinson got a check he couldn’t say no to. That will be directed by Matt Reeves who did a good job with the Planet of the Apes films a few years ago. It has not been confirmed that this movie is meant to be a prequel to the events of Batman V Superman, but from the teaser it’s clear it’s a stand alone Batman movie. Apparently Batman is the new James Bond and will be recast ad naseum from here on out. I might end up playing Batman at this rate.

This leads me to Joker. Even though this is a stand alone feature and does not take place withing the newly dubbed “Snyderverse” of DC films, I include it in the same vein for two reasons. One that it was in development at the same time as the other DC films were being made. Hell, you can almost say that it predates all of the Snyder films as I heard rumblings of Warner Bros wanting to do a Joker film ever since Heath Ledger won an Oscar for the role. Keep that in mind going forward as it’s important. Even as Snyder was working on Justice League, Warner Bros was hard at work trying to woo Marty Scorcece into directing with Leo DiCaprio to star. So they were deadly serious about making this a different kind of film then it’s big Bat brother. They wanted this to potentially be a Oscar winning film.

The second reason I include it, is because if it was a Snyder produced film it would fit right in as far as the tone and the overly serious subject matter. Because for a movie titled Joker starring the Clown Prince of Crime, there wasn’t anything funny in this. In fact let me get started on laying out this film.

Arthur Fleck is a mentally ill person living alone with his mother and working as a clown doing odd gigs in and around 1980’s Gotham City. We’re told he’s poor and yet he’s able to live in a massive two bedroom apartment while neither he nor his mother work. I wonder what their rent was. He sees a city funded therapist and takes medication for an affliction where he laughs uncontrollably at inappropriate times. He’s shown to be a kind and gentle soul, but the world around him is full of bullies who beat the shit out of him and take advantage of him. His mother is convinced millionaire Thomas Wayne, who she worked for, will one day save them. Save them from what exactly isn’t said. Like I said their apartment is bigger than most houses so they aren’t doing all that bad.

One night as Arthur gets fired for bringing a gun to a childrens hospital gig he’s attacked on the subway by a bunch of young men in business suits. Arthur kills them in self defense, but actually gets off on it dancing in a public bathroom at his new found power. The media explodes with coverage of the murders as it’s found out the men he killed all worked on Wall Street. So the media takes a poor killing the rich slant to the case. Arthur doesn’t seem to care one way or the other.

Instead he gets with his neighbor lady, and tries his hand at standup which in his mind he’s brilliant at but his terrible set is shown later on a talk show hosted by Robert DeNiro and made fun of. Arthur sees this as his mother is in the hospital. It’s also around this time that he finds out that his mother has been writing letters to Thomas Wayne claiming they had an affair and that Arthur was the result of that affair. Arthur goes to see Thomas but is rejected outright. He then finds out that his mother actually wasn’t his mother at all, but that he was adopted and abused by both his foster parents. There’s even mention of him hitting his head which may have caused his condition. In response to this he kills his foster mother in her hospital bed with a pillow.

He tries to seek comfort with his neighbor girlfriend but she’s absolutely terrified of him, as it turns out Arthur imagined the entire relationship in his head. Instead his new plan is to go onto DeNiro’s talk show and set up a joke where the punch line is him killing himself in front of everyone. By this point the protests over the frenzy he started have reached a tipping point and there are people wearing clown masks all over the city. Arthur dresses in his best purple suit and puts on clown makeup and heads out. He’s almost caught by two police detectives who believe he’s responsible for the train murders but he manages to get away while the cops get beaten by protesters.

At the talk show, Arthur asks DeNiro if he can be introduced as Joker. Which DeNiro does. Joker makes his entrance to a skeptical audience, and DeNiro takes jabs at him over the makeup but Joker plays along. However he quickly loses the crowd and DeNiro turns on him which causes Joker to lash out and blurt out that he’s the one who killed the men on the subway. He then goes on a rant about how terrible people are, and then kills DeNiro. He’s arrested and as he’s riding in the back of a patrol car he begins to laugh and smile at the riots that he caused. A ambulance plows into the patrol car, and some of the protesters realize it’s him in the back, and set him free. Meanwhile Tomas Wayne is coming out of movie theater with is wife and child and are stopped by a man in a clown mask. The man shoots both Thomas and Martha in front of a young Bruce. Cause apparently we have to relive that moment just as many times as Bruce has to. Joker wakes up on the hood of the patrol car, and stares out at all of the followers he’s amassed. He begins to dance on top of the car before we cut to him in a mental hospital laughing at a joke in his head. The therapist asks what’s so funny, but he tells her she wouldn’t get it. He’s then seen walking down a white hallway with blood stained foot prints coming off his feet. He danced some more before running from the hospital guards.

The End.

Joker was written and directed by Todd Phillips. Phillips was mostly known for his actual comedies Old School and the Hangover movies. He’s directed nothing but comedies for the past 20 years. Starting with Road Trip back in 2000. While I can attest that these movies were popular, I never found any of them funny. Nothing about them were clever or well produced. Most of them relied on star power and if anything were the leading films in the ongoing trend of situational comedies in favor of joke comedies. Cause I guess watching Will Ferral running naked down the street while screaming his head off is funnier than Groucho Marx asking a rich woman if she’s single or Rick Moranis in a giant helmut demanding his space ship go into ludacris speed. But what do I know (except everything)?

So I probably shouldn’t have been shocked that this bore fest of a movies took itself too seriously. After all the Joker’s whole gimmick for 80 years has been setting up crimes to be funny, but who needs that, right? No. We need a bland story about a mentally ill man who just can’t take it anymore. Cause we haven’t had enough of those since Robert DeNiro cut a mohawk into his hair and shot his way into rescuing Jodie Foster. Or how about Malcom McDowell getting together with his friends and raping that old lady just for the fun of it? You wanna go deeper? Try watching a pre James Gunn famous Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Point is there are no shortage of films that focus on bad people who do bad things.

The mistake this movie makes is trying to get the audience tho sympathize with this fucking loser. Because we live in such a PC world you can’t talk about mental illness without ruffling a few feathers and clutching some pearls, so this movie neuters any idea that they are trying to claim that Arthur is a product of mental illness and that it’s society that’s made him into what he is. Which is both insulting to people who suffer from mental illness, and not who the Joker ever was.

The Joker has had three distinct personalities and roles in the Batman mythos. Since Batman was a rip off of the Shadow, the original version of the Joker was simply a gangster who liked to wear makeup. Just a simple criminal look a cool look. In the 60’s thanks to the TV show he altered a bit and became more funny and gimmicky to match the Cesar Romero version (minus the painted over mustache sadly). So he became a bit more of a cartoon with a Jokermobile and henchmen dressed as clowns. Stupid shit like that. it wasn’t until the 80’s that he became what he is now. A deadly psychopathic Machiavellian genius who even the Batman is afraid of.

This change came about in the story Batman: The Killing Joke written by Alan Moore. In that story the Joker shows up to Commissioner Gordon’s house, shoots Barbara Gordon paralyzing her, and kidnaps Gordon. He strips and drugs Gordon while holding him hostage in a abandoned fun house. He does this not for money, but to show Batman that he can get to and break anybody whenever he wants to. Batman of course stops, but it’s a turning point in their relationship as it now cast Joker as a boogeyman instead of a just a criminal. Interspersed into the story is an imagined origin for the Joker where he’s a failed comedian with a wife and child who gets into a life of crime to make ends meet before falling into the Ace Chemical goo that makes him The Joker. This is where the Arthur Fleck name comes from, and on it’s own would’ve made for a more interesting and engaging film to watch.

This portrayel would continue in Frank Miller’s seriously way too referenced Dark Knight Returns which this film steals a scene from as Joker is shown to be reformed only to go on a killing spree once he sees Batman is back to fighting crime. It reinforces the notion that Joker doesn’t give a shit about the murders or the destruction he causes. It’s all a means to an end to get to one man and one man only, The Batman. The one guy he can never break. For Batman, Joker is one man he fears the most, because he knows in the back of his head that one day he’ll go too far, one day he’ll cross that line where the only solution is for him to kill Batman and both of them know that. It’s what makes their relationship special. They are two people who know the game being played.

This movie obviously doesn’t understand that. This movie doesn’t even seemed to care about the Joker at all as it’s all for show and never done in practice. Arthur is not the clown prince of crime, taunting the police with his joker gas. He’s just a serial killer who thinks he’s a victim. The fact that he dresses like a clown is secondary. There’s no actual reason for it outside of Arthur thinks it looks cool. The film just wants you to fill in the blanks because everyone knows who the Joker is. Which to me is always lazy film making.

It also leads me to believe that this script wasn’t originally meant to be a Joker movie at all, but became one once Warner Bros got the idea to slap DC shit onto any existing scripts they had lying around. I can imagine, but don’t know for sure, that Todd Phillips wrote a movie that was an homage to both Taxi Driver and King of Comedy about a mentally ill man going on a killing spree and the joker just happend to fit into it perfectly. I have to believe that because if that’s not the case this movie is the most derivative film I’ve ever seen. Which having watched Hangover isn’t out of the realm of possibility either, but it just makes me mad. You can tell any story with this iconic character, and you decide to pick one that rips off elements from two far superior films instead? That’s the literally definition of taking something old and literally slapping a new coat of paint on it and telling everyone how original it is. The Bob’s of the world may buy that but I can see the paint running.

And even taking that out of the equation and taking the film at it’s own merits things fall apart. The story is set up in a way where Joker is obviously an unreliable narrator. We see the events of the movie from his point of view. He’s in every scene of this film. We know that without his meds he imagines things, because he imagined an entire relationship with a neighbor. Yet I’m supposed to believe some of the other events of the movie as well? How do I know his mother was a foster mother? How do we know Thomas Wayne wasn’t his father? How do we even know he’s not imagining the last half of the movie? Because the movie is so far up this characters ass, we the audience can’t see straight. Which is another case of Phillips wanting to play both angles, and using the “well he’s The Joker of course he lies” trope as a fall back when people question him on his bad film making. Because the Joker has no real origin. What was written in the Killing Joke was never part of canon, but one of many possible origins for the character.

Which is something the Nolan film got absolutely right in the best and most subtle way. In the Dark Knight Joker gives three totally different stories about how he got his scars. Each one giving us a glimpse into the mind of a mad man, but also into how smart he is as well. A lot can and has been said about Ledger’s performance but a lot of credit also has to be given to Nolan and David S Goyer because they understood the fact that the less we know about this guy the scarier he is. He stops being just a man and becomes a force of nature that tests Batman at every turn. The famous scene in the police interogation room between the two is a mirror image to a similar scene in the Killing Joke where Batman is telling Joker that they are destined to do this dance with each other forever until he kills him. Joker in Dark Knight’s goal is to show Batman that people will always destroy themselves so why bother saving them? Just let them destroy each other (he’s not totally wrong there. Hello 2020). It’s a perfectly written antagonist.

Joker sadly is nowhere close to being as good. The movie hinges itself to one thing and one thing only, Joaquin Phoenix. After Jared Leto sucked in Suicide Squad, Warner Bros wanted nothing to do with him so they cast Phoenix who fits that Oscar baiting template we spoke about earlier in the post. He’s a great actor whose done a lot of tremendous work for a long time, and his performance here is good. He’s trying his best with the material he’s given, but i watch him and all I see is a whiny bitch. I’m not scared of this guy like I was with Ledger. Shit, I’d be more scared of Nicholson’s Joker only because of his penchant for killing random henchmen. Here Phoenix is trying to make an unsympathetic character sympathetic and I just don’t buy it. In his penultimate scene with DeNiro when he lashes out blaming society for his troubles, I reacted much in the same way DeNiro did. With disgust. Cause that’s not who this guy is. This is the guy whose supposed to be five steps ahead of everyone else and misdirecting you in the process. Not some skinny schlub who likes to dance and can’t hold down a nine to five. He’s above that shit. So Phoenix, who won the Oscar for his role, could’ve given a performance of a lifetime but what was needed wasn’t on the page because the guy in the big chair doesn’t understand what this character is. He thinks of Joker the same way most people think of him. A crazy guy dressed as a clown who kills people. No more no less.

Yes I realize I’m in the minority here. Joker is now the highest grossing R rated movie of all time. It beat out the previous champ Deadpool which was also a better and funnier movie, where the people making it understood who that character is, but I’ll get to that soon enough. I think it’s telling though that while the film was nominated for several awards, Phoenix was the only one to walk away with a trophy. Backing up my thoughts that this movie rested solely on his shoulders. He also wins points for his Oscar speech denouncing animal cruelty and promoting veganism. That’s what the movie really should’ve been about.

Joker gets a 2 from me. It’s an average film at best that’s been overhyped because of the character and the actors performance. Nothing else in this movie resonated with me in the slightest and to be honest I put off watching this movie because of how little I enjoyed it, and even as I rewatched it last night I spent most of the time fucking around on my phone. That’s how much I don’t care about this movie. On it’s own it would’ve been an ok movie, but since they slapped the Joker all over this I have to be harder on it as he’s one of the greatest villains of all time and a pop culture icon. There’s absolutely a good movie featuring the Joker out there somewhere. One that doesn’t rip off better movies or the only two comic books Warner Bros execs have read. Why not make a movie about all of the annoying assholes who dress up like the character and harass people online for not liking the Snyder Cut? I’d watch that over this shit.

Director’s Chair: Inland Empire (2006)

We’re nearing the end of this particular series of the work of David Lynch films. With last weeks Dune rewatch we’ve come to the end of his filmography that I’ve actually seen. So todays film and next weeks film will be totally new to me. Which is interesting as my opinions on these films will be absolutely fresh.

I don’t know why it took me so long to watch Inland Empire. It’s been in the back of my head to watch since it came out in the long long time ago of 2006. By that time I was a fan of Lynch’s work, but not the devotee I am now. Mostly because I hadn’t watched Twin Peaks yet, but even after getting around to that series and loving it as much as I do I still didn’t make it a point to watch his, at the time, final feature film.

Oh by the way I should mention that I will not be watching and reviewing Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me for this series as I don’t consider that to be a stand alone film. In order to even understand what’s happening in that movie you have to be at least somewhat familiar with what happens in Twin Peaks even though it’s a prequel. One day when I’m up to it, I want to go back and watch the entirety of that film and series to get the whole scope of the work as a whole. For now it’s off the list.

So what is Inland Empire? To be totally honest I have no fucking clue. I watched all three hours of this movie, and I got more close up shots of Laura Dern and Justin Theroux then I’ll ever need in my life but very little of what the actual film was about. Here’s what I know.

Laura Dern plays an actress who is married to a very powerful polish business man. She gets a part in a film that’s based off of an unfinished film where the two leads wound up dead. It’s a story about an affair. Soon Laura and Justin’s characters end up in an affair and real life begins to blur with the events of the film they are making. Oh and there are people with rabbit heads in a room talking.

That’s as much of the plot as I could work out. Everything else in this film is pure experimental story structure. Scenes dip into other scenes. Characters talk in weird disjointed sentences. We see people who aren’t really there, and a whole bunch of polish people.

I’m reminded of the singer Scott Walker. Scott Walker in the 60’s was your typical crooner on the same wavelength as a Sinatra or Crosby. Then in the 70’s he forgos that style and begins to play around with his voice, changing his vocal range to sound more sorrowful and bizarre. Then in the 90’s he goes full avant garde where regular people scratched their heads as to what the fuck this noise actually was, yet hardcore music fans dive head first into because it’s so new and different. Bowie went the same way at the end with Blackstar.

What it really is is an artist distilling their work so finely that it becomes a pure representation of their vision. Looking over Lynch’s work he falls directly into line with that. He starts with Eraserhead which is pure art film. Gets thrust into mainstream films and tries to play the Hollywood game, only to turn his back on the whole thing and go back to making these purely experimental films that only a deep nerd like myself will spend the rest of the month trying to sus out what he was really trying to say using these characters, and those angles, and that story.

This is not a film for the Bob’s of the world. Sure Lynch does like a well dressed white guy in a suit as much as the next, but he’s more apt to have that guy vomit up legos while dancing the Somba in order to show his distaste for the oil industry somehow.

Inland Empire is a difficult film to get through. Even for me. Out of all of Lynch’s work this was by far the most obtuse and dense. The type of work where all of this is super silly and weird just to be weird or it’s on a genius level so high that I’m too stupid to understand it. Bob will argue for the first part, I think it’s the second. Lynch was clearly trying to say something with this I think he just got too far into the weeds for us regular folk to make sense of it.

On the surface this seems like a story about how art imitates life in the film industry. It’s not the first time Lynch has shone a nasty spotlight on the Hollywood underbelly. He alluded to the ever famous black couch in Mullholland Drive and seeing how it took three years to finish this movie, that means he began to work on this with the prior still in his mind. Drive came out in 2001, he began to work on this in 2003. So he was clearly still in his fuck Hollywood phase.

Yet for some reason I think he was also trying to convey some other thoughts in this film as well. Something deeper and more profound. He doesn’t really devote a lot of time to the affair aspect of the story. We only see glimpses of it. He spends way more time shuffling Laura Dern from one scene to the next, and he keeps cutting back to this other girl sitting alone in a room watching the events of the film unfold on a TV. We also get a lot of scenes where these other women show up randomly and have conversations. Clearly they’re meant to represent something, but I’m not sure if it’s Justin’s prior conquest as he’s shown to be a bit of a pussy hound, or something else entirely. They all act caviler like their on a sleep over or something. Either way I feel dumb for not getting what any of this shit means.

In my defense this isn’t the best shot Lynch film. Something I think hampers any enjoyment of the movie. He shot the entire film himself using a digital camera. Which is why the shots here are so grainy, because at the time the process to smooth out digital film was still in it’s infancy and super expensive. So around this time we got a lot of films that have this very distinct look, and I can’t believe how oddly dated it’s already made those film look. It doesn’t look old like say a black and white film from the 30’s can look, or a fuzzy soft looking movie shot cheaply on VHS tape like in the late 80’s and 90’s. This is purely a mid 2000’s look to a movie which doesn’t feel all that long ago in reality. Yet it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come in that time as pretty much everything is shot on digital now but looks so clean. I’d argue too clean in some instances.

There were some benefits as well as some drawbacks in filming with a digital camera. The benefit was it was infinitely cheaper to shoot on. Which means you can just let the camera run in a scene until you get what you want. All you had to do was load up another tape and keep going. You would then hook the camera up to your computer and transfer the files into an editing program and construct the film as you go. I say all of this from experience having worked with digital cameras around the same time as this.

The other benefit was that shooting on digital mostly meant shooting hand held as the cameras were small at first (now they’re huge). Shooting hand held meant getting angles you never could before. Suddenly the camera was a floating head in the room occupying the same spaces as the actors. This meant the viewer could get a better sense of the space the scene was taking place in in a way they couldn’t with the restrictions of film. So when Laura Dern is meeting Grace Zabriskie in the sitting room of the giant mansion she lives in you really get a sense of the space the two are in and exactly how big the house is. So from a shooting perspective this is a god send as you don’t have to spend hours setting up each shot and doing any set dressing. Which also cuts down on cost as you can just find a house you like and shoot there. You don’t even need a camera man, which Lynch didn’t use on this movie and instead shoot it yourself. Making you a crew of one, instead of a small army.

The drawbacks to shooting on digital all come down to cosmetic. Like I mentioned above, if you didn’t have the money to smooth out the grainyness you were left with a typically dull and colorless movie. Something that looks closer to a home movie then a major motion picture. A lot of the cause of this was having to use natural lighting instead of set lights. Set lights are too bright for digital and would wash out the scene and actors. So you have to use room lights, or candles, and in this movie flashlights. Even then you could expect the frames to look darker than they probably were off camera. I shot a movie in a pool hall with no set up, and if it wasn’t for the light over the pool table you would’nt have been able to see any of the actors as I followed them around with the camera jabbing it into their face so the mic on the camera could pick up what they were saying. Thankfully Lynch used a sound person on the movie. I don’t have any complaints about the sound.

Mind you I’m not complaining about him using digital for this movie. It was new and exciting at the time and for a guy like him to want to experiment with a new format must’ve seemed like catnip. Add to that how much money he must’ve saved not having to hire a crew (funding has always been an issue for his films as they don’t get huge returns), and the idea that he could just shoot whenever he and Laura Dern felt like it, and I could see why he would embrace it. Yet it’s clear his idea of bracing this new medium was a lot different than others like James Cameron. According to Wikipedia, Lynch not only shot when he wanted, but he also shot without a finished script for the first time. Instead he would write the scenes the day before and give the lines to the actors the next morning and then spend all day shooting. So he essentially improvised an entire movie (been there), and it shows.

Does that mean the movie is bad? Eh. Not really. You just can’t judge it the way you would a normal film. This is an artistic director experimenting. Kind of like when Bob Dylan went from acoustic to electric. It sometimes takes some playing around to learn the ins and outs of the new thing. The only difference is these guys play around in public which is kind of how I think of this movie over all. It’s got some interesting things in it, but it’s mostly Lynch playing with his friends. It’s worth watching simply to see an artist fully on display in his work for probably the first time since Eraserhead (Lynch directed, wrote, produced, shot, set designed, and scored the entire movie himself). He also had no oversight from a studio, and was left to his own devices which explains the three hour cut of the movie. Which is the only real negative I have on this movie. It was needlessly long and plodding and could’ve used some tightening up. I don’t care how great an artist is, they need to be able to recognize when things aren’t working. Otherwise you run the risk of being awash in the smell of their own farts. Editing is god in art.

Except when you run a blog. Then you are god and your words are too precious to be edited. Imagine if the bible was edited?

Inland Empire gets a solid 3 from me. It’s not a movie for everyone, but it’s still worth seeing if you are a Lynch fan. If only so you can meet other Lynch fans in the darkest parts of the Internet and try and figure out what the fuck was being said here. It’s definitely a conversation starter. The performances are fine, though I remain impressed with how much Laura Dern loves and trusts Lynch and his visions as she co produced this, but nothing here is mind blowing. It’s all in the style of how the movie was told and the subtext that underscores the things we are shown, but will never know for sure but it’s director has no interest in spilling the tea.

Bob’s Pick: The Lady Vanishes (1938)

This was not the film that Bob picked for me to watch last night. He chose Midnight Cowboy. However according to my JustWatch app it was streaming on HBO Max. Yet when I went to go watch it it wasn’t there. So I had to call an audible and chose something I think Bob would want me to see. So I went over to the Turner Classic Movie hub, and went to the the section for films from the 30’s and 40’s cause Bob once told me that those two decades had the best films ever made. I think believes this because all of the films were set in a time when men wore suits 24/7, even on weekends, and woman weren’t making nearly as much money as men. Bob often rails against movies that don’t have electricity in them, but at the same time loves films set in an age when people were still shitting in buckets next to their beds, TV didn’t exist, and all books were still hardcovers. Truly an age of savages. So with that in mind I couldn’t think of a better film to fit his very narrow and single minded criteria than The Lady Vanishes. An Alfred Hitchcock picture from 1938.

Iris Henderson (all women in the 30’s were named Iris) is a tourist in some foreign country. She was meant to board a train back to England but an avalanche forces her to stay at a lodge. There we meet some other characters, including two Cricket fans, a man having an affair, and a singer who makes eyes at Iris. The next day on her way board the train she gets bonked on the head by a planter. She boards the train and she meets a nice older woman named Ms Froy. Froy takes Iris for some tea to settle her down, and once back in their compartment she falls asleep. After she’s awake she sees the older woman has vanished! She searches the train for her, but no one seems to remember her being around an old women. Even the waiter who made their tea says she was alone earlier. She runs into the musician whose name is Gilbert. Gilbert tries to help her but based on what all of the men are saying believes she’s making it up, but he wants to get into her under garments so he keeps helping. He even finds outs she’s engaged and still decides to help her. They meet a famous Dr who is moving a patient from one hospital to another (cause they didn’t have trucks in 38?), and the Dr is fascinated by what’s going on. Eventually the pair figure out that the man in this compartment with Iris and Froy is in on it, but he escapes in what has to be the worst fight scene I’ve ever seen committed to film and I’ve seen The Room multiple times (“Don’t touch me you motherfucker.”). Blah blah blah, turns out the Doctor is the man behind all of this and has kidnapped Froy as she is a spy for the Brits. Iris and Gilbert help her escape, but get trapped in a gun fight with some foreign military before Gilbert is able to get the train running again. They make it back to wherever their stop is, Iris does the courageous thing and totally avoids her fiancée and makes out with Gilbert, and the two then head to British Intelligence but Froy was already there.

I wanted to watch this movie because I love Hitchcock and this was one of his few movies I haven’t gotten around to seeing. It’s one of his earliest films, and by earliest I mean 20 years into his career. It’s easy to forget that the man who made such classic films in the 50’s and 60’s began working as a director in 1920. Prior to The Lady Vansishes he worked on both The 39 Steps and Sabotage which are still considered along with other peak Hitchcock films. Two years after this movie he would debut in the States with his only Oscar winning film Rebbecca. So it’s safe to say this was a guy who knew what he was doing when it came to making a film. He’s not some rookie upstart trying to make a name for himself.

Which is why it boggles my mind why this movie is so bad. The plot is totally formulaic, the acting is supbar, and the ending is unsatisfying to say the least. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bad Hitchcock movie before, so I’m at a loss here really. This doesn’t even feel like one of his movies. This could’ve been directed by anyone.

I wonder if it’s because it’s a British production. I’m not overly familiar with how the Brits did their films back in the day and what their budgets were like, but this movie was clear in how prim and proper British Gentlemen were when dealing with a conflict. If a woman brings up an issue say she’s crazy even when proven otherwise, when fighting a Italian magician who tries to stab you weakly grab him by the collar and push, never call the authorities and scoff at the idea when presented, and always no matter what made snide remarks about everything.

I wonder if it’s because it’s a British production. I’m not overly familiar with how the Brits did their films back in the day and what their budgets were like, but this movie was clear in how prim and proper British Gentlemen were when dealing with a conflict. If a woman brings up an issue say she’s crazy even when proven otherwise, when fighting a Italian magician who tries to stab you weakly grab him by the collar and push, never call the authorities and scoff at the idea when presented, and always no matter what made snide remarks about everything.

Ok everyone, now look over there and pretend you’re looking at Americans.

if there were jokes in this movie, as is the case with some Hitchcock films, they went right over my dumb American head. All I know is I barely had to look up from my phone to call how this plot was going to go. Still I wouldn’t have minded if it was presented well enough, but this film was sloppy and rushed. Especially the ending. We never see what happens to the man posing as a Dr. The train just skitters off, and even though he’s in a car chasing them they stop. It’s like they were playing tag and Iris touched a tree and yelled “Base!”. Then out of nowhere Iris is kissing Gilbert even though they’ve bickered the entire movie, showing exactly how far back that fucking trope goes. Yet we never see a scene where she finally breaks and starts to like him making their kiss feel a bit premature. It’s also kind of cold that she leaves her finance, who she states in the film she can’t wait to get back to, standing alone waiting for her to get off the train. Not something I think a heroine should do.

This film gets an easy 2. It’s a nothing movie, with a forgettable plot. The only reason it’s lingered around as long as it has is because of who directed it. Yet you would never know it watching this movie sight unseen. It doesn’t have that typical Hitchcock flair he would become known for only a fear years later. This felt like a favor in order to get the funding for the movie he really wanted to make. Bob would probably love it though. It’s got a choo choo train in it, and some white guys in suits and a pretty lead. All the makings of a classic in Bob’s little world.

Godzilla Vs Kong (2021)

I am a simple man with simple needs. I know sometimes I can be harsh on some films that don’t live up to my always spot on criteria, but it all comes from a place of love. A love for the medium and the art of making movies. It is my belief that no one sets out to make a bad movie, but when you’re dealing with giant blockbuster franchises it’s film making by committee and not just a singular voice. Which has been proven time and time again to be the direct result of a film with either a poor to mixed reception.

Yet there is one series of films that has bucked all those trends and forced me to just sit and stare in awe at the visual spectacle before me. A series of films that can take a jaded asshole like myself to such dizzying heights as to forget where I am and pump my fist triumphantly in the air and let out an audible “fuck yea!” to a packed theater of onlookers. That series is the current Monsterverse and it’s Godzilla films.

I am unabashedly a kaiju fan or monster movie fan if you’re simple. I have been watching monster destroy cities and beat the shit out of each other in poorly made rubber suits for as long as I’ve been watching anything. I don’t know if I ever saw the first King Kong so much as absorbed it into my brain at birth. Even though they stopped making as much of a dent in the American film industry back in the 70’s, the ones that would get released were always required viewing. When Peter Jackson released his epic love letter to King Kong in 2005 I was there opening night and I fucking hate seeing movies opening night. Yet it felt essential to see a giant CGI ape running around 1940’s New York while pretty dames clutched their pearls and white men in suits looked concerned while counting their money. That film only got mixed reviews but I loved it. Jacksons a premier film maker and the effects were just too good. However I’m not the biggest Kong fan. No no. My love all goes to Big G.

Godzilla is one of those characters I just grew up knowing. I used to watch his films, the ones released here in America that is, on cable channels late at night. While the 1960’s Japanese effects were totally dated by the 90’s the humor in the films and the light hearted tone made them an easy watch. Were they dumb movies? Absolutely and they got worse as they went along, introducing aliens from other planets, spies, and one useless human plot after another. All anyone came to see was Godzilla fighting whatever the other monster was for this movie, sometimes two, beating ass and leaving. Sometimes Godzilla was a good guy and sometimes he was a bad guy. He’s ever the tweener if I may use a wrestling term. He’s the Stone Cold Steve Austin of big giant monster. You never know which way he’s going to go until the bell rings and even then he may just toss you a stunner just to remind you whose boss. So of course I was always going to like him.

Cut to 2014.

Universal Pictures announces that they are not just doing a new Godzilla, the first American attempt since the god awful we should never talk about it Godzilla 99 by Roland Emmerich. This was a big deal because for years Japan was the home for the big fella. This time director Gareth Edwards would be in the directors chair. Edwards had made a name for himself with his little indie feature called…..Monsters. A film where giant alien monsters are roaming the world in modern times. It’s fine. It’s a neat take on the formula but it wasn’t about the monsters themselves so I give it a 2.

Not only were Universal going in on Godzilla, they also announced a new Kong movie, and hinted that the plan was for these two to eventually meet at some point. This would make it only the second time since the 60’s the two of faced off. In fact the original Kong vs Godzilla was the direct reason Godzilla became a franchise star. The first film proved so successful that Toho, the Japanese company who produces all of the Godzilla films, went all in on making sequels for the character producing one Godzilla film a year for the next decade. That is until the returns got so bad that they shelved him for fifteen years. Only bringing him back in 1985 with a reboot/sequel of the first Godzilla film. This is also where you get the trend of Godzilla sometimes being a babyface and sometimes he’s a heel. He’s always a heel at first, but eventually he saves humanity from a bigger threat and he’s made a babyface. It’s pro wrestling 101.

So the table was set for a new slew of kaiju films. All of which would lead to the most recent release of Kong Vs Godzilla (2021). Yet to see where we got to go we have to first look back at where we’ve been so let’s quickly go over the events of the previous three films before diving tail first into this new one.

Godzilla (2014)- Bryan Cranston is a nuclear scientist living in Japan in the 90’s. One day the plant he’s overseeing has a melt down due to some unknown seismic activity. He loses his wife in the event, and is forced to raise their son alone. Years later that son is now an adult in the military, I think he was bomb guy, whose married to Elizabeth Olson and also has a son. He’s then forced to go to Japan because his father was caught trespassing around the old town they lived in. Turns out Cranstons gone full conspiracy theory and thinks the village has been quarantined but not cause of radiation from the plant. He’s right of course as we see a shadowy group known as Monarch researching a giant cocoon. The cocoon hatches, Cranston dies, and a giant bug like creature comes out of it. It’s dubbed Muto, and oh no there’s actually two of them. These things eat radiation for breakfast and begin to pop up in various places looking for snacks. This also prompts our main character to show up and fight the giant bugs. According to Ken Watanabe who leads Monarch, Godzilla is the top of the food chain on this planet. A titan amongst titans. So while he’s super destructive he does keep the peace by keeping the other titans in line. Unfortunately Godzilla does not give one lick about property damage as he goes San Fransisco and takes on both Mutos who are trying to mate. The humans take out the Muto eggs, while Big G does clean up with the other two in a tremendous fight. Afterward Godzilla collapses from exhaustion, but gets back up and heads into the sea, a job well done.

Quick Review: Fantastic monster movie. The human plot is simply a set up to get us from one place to another but thankfully stays out of the way leaving our main star doing all the literal heavy lifting. People complained we didn’t get enough Godzilla in this movie, but I saw how Edwards was trying to go with the slow reveal emulating other monster films like Jaws and Jurassic Park (both God tier btw). If you want head to youtube and go watch the ten minute video of just the Godzilla scenes. It’s what I do when I need a serentonin boost. Beyond that I thought Edwards did a hell of a job establishing an actual reason for Godzilla to be around, and even hinting at more extended lore which would be followed up on with other films like the next one with Monarch being a group.

Grade: 5

Kong Skull Island (2017)- Now we head back into the past. All the way back to the 1960’s in the days of the Vietnam War ending. John Goodman is a scientist who had a brief run in with Godzilla and has become convinced that monsters are real. He wants to take a research team into these uncharted waters to a mysterious island. He gets some government funding as well as a team of soldiers led by Sam Jackson, as well as a photographer played by Brie Larson and a handsome tracker played by Tom Hiddelston. So if you’re keeping track this movie has Nick Fury, Captain Marvel, and Loki in it. Sadly only Sam Jackson would do anything interesting in this movie. Once they reach the island by helicopter they are attacked by a giant ape named Kong. Kong it’s found out is the protector of this island and it’s natives. Goodman, Larson, and Hiddleston all respect that, but Sam Jackson whose been at war for the past few years wants to kill it. He goes all Colonel Kurtz on his men and drags them deeper into the island, where Goodman and his people figure out that there are holes that could potentially lead to the core of the earth and be how titans like Godzilla travel around without being seen. Too bad for them they all get killed by giant monsters that pop out of those holes. Leaving Larson, Loki, and a few others to run into the natives. There they run into John C Reilly playing a WW2 pilot who crashed onto the island after being in a dog fight with a Japanese pilot. The two became friends and lived there, but only Reilly has survived. He’s able to sort of communicate with the natives, who don’t speak, and knows about Kong. together they work on getting off the island and back onto the ship waiting for them. Jackson meanwhile tries to blow Kong up but that doesn’t go well for him, and he dies. With Kong’s help beating up the other monsters (called Skull Crawlers) the rest of the humans manage to escape, and with all of their findings Monarch is officially formed.

Quick Review: Pretty good take on the Kong formula. I’m happy they didn’t just try and recreate the story from the original. It was also an interesting way to establish Monarch and what their role in this story actually is. Sam Jackson going up against Kong was the more interesting parts of the movie. John C Reilly, Larson, and Loki was utterly pointless to the plot and had no effect on the story at all.

Grade: 3 and a half.

Godzilla King of Monster (2019) – it’s been a few years since Godzilla first showed up letting the modern world know that monsters do exist. Monarch, now a fully fledged government agency have outposts all over the world researching various locations where other Titans are resting. One of them is in China being lead by Dr Emma Russel. Russel was in San Fran when Godzilla showed up and lost her young son in the attack. This caused her and her husband to split up and she took custody of their daughter Madison. Coincidentally, both Emma and Mark were already working for Monarch and researching the Titans. Now years later Emma has finished their work of creating a machine that can communicate with the great beast using sound waves. She gets a chance to use it on the one that just hatched from her cocoon, known as Mothra. However a terrorist cell lead by Charles fucking Dance shows up and kidnaps Emma and Madison. This leads Ken Watanabe to bring Mark back into the fold even though Mark is on Team Blow Up All Monsters Especially Godzilla Cause He Killed My Son. Mark and Monarch work to figure out where Emma is, which turns out to be Antarctica where Monster Zero is encased in ice. Charles Fucking Dance and Emma let out the three headed beast who immediately starts killing people. Godzilla shows up to show this asshole who runs shit around here, but gets trounced. Monster Zero aka King Gidorah is able to fly away. Oh and during the melee it turns out that Emma is working with Charles Fucking Dance to unleash all of the Titans in the world thus setting earth back to it’s natural order (I am for this plan.). Gidorah then flies to Brazil and let’s out a call waking up all of the other Titans. Monarch figures out that the Titans go back centuries and that Gidorah is actually not originally from this planet. He’s the lone Apex predator to challenge Godzilla’s rule before they all went to sleep. So all of the other Titans including Rodan answer to him. We get a big air battle with Rodan and the military and Gidorah and Godzilla show up, and the military tries to take them out using their new Oxygen destroyer bomb. It takes out Godzilla but Gidorah is fine and flies off. Meanwhile Emma and Madison are hiding out in Boston, when Madison steals the machine her mother created to lure Gidorah there. Ken Watanabe volunteers to go into Godzillas lair and set off a nuke to help power him back up, and we get a tender moment between the two. Gidorah shows up to Boston and starts chasing Madison but is stopped by Godzilla and Mothra. Rodan and Mothra fight, while Gisdorah and Godzilla duke it out. Mothra takes out Rodan but is easily beaten by Gidorah. She then gives some of her life essence to Godzilla, powering him up to go nuclear and he fucking melts Gidorah, reclaiming his title of King of the Monsters as the other titans bow down to him, including Rodan.

Quick Review: This. Movie. Rules. It was the best thing I watched that year and it came out months before Avenger Endgame. This time it was directed by Michael Doughtry who absolutely understood how to shoot this story. The human plot was actually interesting this time around and served a better purpose, but this movie is all about the kaijus throwing down. All of the fights scenes are expertly done and shot in fun and interesting ways. Godzilla comes off like a complete bad ass even though Gidorah did give him a run for his money. Sadly Charles fucking Dance wasn’t used more even though he was set up as a major villain for this whole series. We even got a post credit scene of him buying one of Gidorah’s left over head on the black market. Hinting of more to come. Sadly it would be ignore.

Grade: God Tier.

This brings us to Kong Vs Godzilla. So many questions would be asked over the years. How would they make these two fight? Isn’t Kong smaller than Godzilla? How will Kong get off Skull Island? Can apes swim?

We get our answers in the form of some new characters this time out. Godzilla opens the movie rampaging a facility in Florida owned by a billionaire named Walter Simmons. Simmons runs a company called Apex and is building something shady. A podcasting conspiracy theorist named Bernie Hayes works at the place Godzilla attacked and is convinced Apex is up to something and it has to do with the Titans. Maninly Godzilla. Madison returns and is an avid listener of said podcast and believes something is setting off the giant lizard as he doesn’t just attack people. Her father, now maybe kinda sort of running Monarch? Maybe?, doesn’t want to hear it as he’s too busy doing damage control. Simmons, enlists a scientist named Nathan Lind to help him find a way into the core of the earth. Nathan has studies show a hollow earth theory where the inside of the earth isn’t just full of magma but an undiscovered land as well with all sorts of creatures in it. Simmons wants some type of unknown energy that’s produced there for some reason. Nathan then meets up with another scientist named Ilene Andrews who has been studying Kong at Skull Island. Kong now has a protective barrier around him as Ilene is afraid that Godzilla will attack the island and “Kong doesn’t bow”. Kong however is not happy with his new arrangement and is able to voice that to a little deaf girl named Jia. Jia is able to use sign language to talk to Kong as well as a spiritual bond the two share. Nathan convinces Ilene, for some fucking reason, to let him move Kong to Antarctica to lead them into the center of the earth. For some reason the only way to get him there is by boat. So they somehow sedate an ape the size of a large building and put him onto an air craft carrier. Godzilla of course attacks, and the two fight for the first time with Kong barely able to make it out alive. They then do what they should’ve done in the first place and air lift him to the frozen tundra. Once there he leads them into the center of the earth which looks like something out of the Land of the Lost. Kong journeys to the center of the place where he finds a weird looking ax and a throne with a shrine of himself there.

Meanwhile Simmons is shown to have built a robot Godzilla….a MechaGodzilla if you will. However he’s unable to find a power source viable enough for it. Hence the trip to the center of the earth. Godzilla attacks Hong Kong where the robot is being held and Madison, Bernie, and some kid I couldn’t be bothered to learn the name of figure out that the robot is what is setting off Godzilla, as the interface for it uses the skull from one of Gidorah’s head we last saw Charles fucking Dance buying. Godzilla also, somehow, is able to sense Kong is at the center of the earth and shoots an atomic fire blast into the center of the earth.

These are all real sentences that I am typing.

Kong and company make their way back up to the surface, where Kong and Godzilla have their big fight. Kong, a dirty cheater, uses the ax he found to help him get the upperhand, but Godzilla is the fucking best and is able to eventually take out the giant ape. Sensing Kong is no longer a threat, Godzilla power walks off while Kong slowly dies. Madison and her friends get caught by Simmons who tells his man to power up the robot now that his daughter was able to send him the power source he needed even though it cost her life (not upset by it one bit), but the robot goes rogue (gee I wonder why) and takes out Simmons but somehow misses Madison and her friends. The robot then goes and attacks Godzilla, who mind you just got done beating up someone else. So he’s a little dodgy and this robot has it’s own lasers and missles. Everyone but Godzilla is a dirty cheater in this movie. Nathan and Ilene are able to help save Kong, and Jia asks him to go help Godzilla which he understandably is reluctant to do, but does it cause he’s a good monkey. Together the two battle the robot, and thank to Godzillas atomic breath powering up Kong’s ax he’s able to chop up the robot with little problem. The city is absolutely destroyed but all of our main characters are magically ok despite being mere feet away from all of this crazy action. Godzilla and Kong give each other the monster equivalent of a bro fist before Godzilla heads back into the sea for a well deserved nappy. Kong meanwhile goes back into the center of the earth which he’s claimed as his new home.

The end.

Ok. Lot’s to unpack here.

I do not expect these movies to be smart. The main draw is and has always been giant monster destroying everything in their path. That should be at the forefront of every one of these. However, the past three films in this series have all been grounded in somewhat of a reality. A loose reality but a reality none the less. They’ve treated these massive creatures with reverence, giving them a weight in this world. Kong V Godzilla takes all of that and tosses it in the bin and basically makes a live action cartoon.

You mean to tell me that with all of the resources that Monarch has at their disposable that they can’t think of any other way to move Kong from his island than by boat? Who even knows if the giant ape can swim? For someone whose major concern with the well being of keeping Kong safe, Ilene sure does put him into danger a whole bunch in this movie. Half the time she defers to this little girl who can only speak in sign language. Which seems awfully dangerous to me.

Not to mention the whole plot of Kong and the center of the earth plot line feels like it belongs in a separate movie. One of the problems with setting Skull Island in the 60’s was having to now spend time in this movie explaining what he’s been up to all these years. Time that this movie doesn’t seem all that concerned with as we are constantly zipping from one storyline to another. So the whole him leading them into the the land of the lost felt tacked on. A thing to keep Kong busy when he’s not getting his ass kicked by Godzilla. Other than getting his dumb ax which becomes a macguffin at the end, the whole plot line was dumb. The whole movie Kong says he wants to go home, which presumably is Skull Island, but he seems to forget that at the end when he says this new land he’s taken over is now his home. Makes sense. Monkeys are dumb.

What’s even more dumb and pointless is the Madison plot in this movie. I get that Millie Bobby Brown is popular amongst the kids for her role in Stranger Things, but where as she was vital in King of the Monsters, she’s the exact opposite here. She’s tailed by two try hards used as comic relief (except they forgot to be funny), but all they do is go from one place to another and explain to the audience watching this what’s going on. The plot was so bad that they had to figure out a way to get her from Florida to Hong Kong where all the action will be, so they just put her and her friends in a super fast ship and shot them there. Which we see them traveling at about 600mph, and I’m no scientist but I do think anyone traveling at that speed with no insulation would be liquid seconds into the trip. Nope they just pop out and go about their day like they took a bus. Speaking of, if Simmons has mastered the travel from one end of the world to the other in a matter of hours why wouldn’t he bring that to the world? Seems like if you can provide safe and efficient travel from say New York to Tokyo in a matter of 5 hours compared to the 16 hour plane ride some people would pay a lot of money to use that system, right? Also how did he get all those permits to tunnel underground and how long exactly did it take to make that tunnel? How many feet below sea level would you have to go to avoid the ocean? What about the sea pressure? Wouldn’t that have killed anyone not wearing diving gear? Like say a young girl and two fat guys in a ship? This is how you know this plot line is bad, it’s making me ask all of these questions I shouldn’t be making. Like how exactly does a man interface with the skull of a dead dragon in order to control a giant robot?

It wouldn’t have been so bad if Madison and her crew actually did something of worth at the end. They try and hack into the robot to shut it down, but get locked out. The one fat kid tries the ol’ water method and that does slow it down, but doesn’t stop it at all. Effectively making this entire section of the movie utterly fucking pointless. A needless transition that could’ve just been focused on Simmons our new bad guy.

You don’t want to bring back Charles fucking Dance (or he turned down being in another one of these dumb movies.) so you need to come up with a last minute replacement. Ok fine, but at least give that character time for us to hate him. Right away Simmons is shown to be shady, but we don’t know exactly how shady he is until the climax when MechaGodzilla is revealed, and even then he’s not given any real justification for going so completely out of his way like this other than “I’m scared of Godzilla”. He doesn’t say that it’s just the gist. Meanwhile the real motivation was right there all along. He owns a company named Apex. Why doesn’t he just think that man, mainly himself, is the real apex predator on the planet? Why not just make him a glorified trophy hunter? Something everyone on this planet hates anyway. These movies have always had a bit of a ecological bent to them, saying that Godzilla and the other titans are part of the natural order so why not make the main villain totally against that with the resources to actually do something about it? Charles fucking Dance’s character was an eco terrorist but he believed that restoring the Titans would fix all of the problems humanity has caused the planet (again. Don’t disagree). Simmons could’ve been the opposite of that. Instead he’s just some wacko who wants more power or something. We never actually get a good reason for why he’s doing what he’s doing. I don’t want to say he’s a Donald Trump analogue cause fuck me if I’m not so tired of that in my genre fiction but that’s all he kind of is. Just nowhere near as obnoxious. He’s just slimey. Like a used car salesman.

But hey this all the human plots of the movie! They’re always bad, except for the dozen or so of these movies when they’re not. It’s all about the big fights, right? That’s what I said earlier, right? Well even there this movie goes off the rails. Directing this time went to Adam Wingard, and like I said his idea of what these characters can do versus what they should do are totally different than what Gareth Edwards and Chris Doughtery did. Edwards did a fantastic job of creating a dark realistic atmosphere for Godzilla to step out on and you literally felt the weight of him as he dropped his giant foot down on the ground. Doughtery did something similar but widen the scope to make room for all of the other titans and made the movie a but brighter, so when Godzilla is fighting Gidorah there’s a believability to it. It’s a bit cartoonish but it doesn’t feel out of place in this world. This movie just went all in on the cartoon logic. So we got Godzilla and Kong fighting on a tiny (to them) boat that should actually crumble under their weight. We get a weird slow motion action shot of Kong jumping action movie style out of the way of Godzilla’s atomic blast. Boats and buildings fall like paper mache at the slightest touch from either of them, but can also support Kong’s weight as he jumps from one to another. Godzilla is strong enough to grab Kong by one hand and drag his entire body across the floor. MechaGodzilla just grabs Godzilla and slams his head into buildings like a wrestler hitting a turnbuckle. It’s all too ridiculous even for me. It breaks the immersion I look for in these movies.

Added to that is the bizarre angles and constant close up shots Wingard used of the monsters that are just so fucking cringe worthy. Godzilla straight up smiles at one point. Godzilla should never fucking smile. You can’t give me two movies where this dude is straight up bad ass, only to have him smirking like he just got caught fucking Kongs wife. Then you have the weird over head shots where we’re right in Godzilla’s face. I get you want to make your mark on these movies and do different shit, but this is not the type of movie for that. There’s a 60 year history of what works and doesn’t work with this character. If you don’t abide by that you’re sunk. Close up shots of Kong are fine. Kong’s whole gimmick is his expressive face to make you feel sorry for the monkey. We relate to Kong, but we’re in awe of Godzilla. That’s the dynamic they should’ve went for. Also why was this movie so brightly colored? Godzilla (2014) was dark to show what real world devastation would look like. The end fight was dark not for the sake of being dark but because all of the buildings and destruction around the fight created this foggy smoke that made it look like nighttime. Kind of like what happened at 911. King of the Monsters turned that brightness up a bit with a lot of blues but that was to coincide with Godzillas atomic breath. It’s right there on the poster. Here the movie is basically neon colors all over the place but I couldn’t find any reason other than just a style choice, and boy does it not work. Kong does not look good around neon pink and blue Hong Kong. He looks good in a jungle setting, and in a gray city. That’s about it. Godzilla lights up like a Christmas tree so he can kind of get away with it but it still looks odd. I’m not saying just repeat the same shit over and over again, but the locations chosen for this movie were all wrong.

So what did they get right? Well Godzilla definitively won the fight. He whooped monkey ass and if it wasn’t for MechaGodzilla would’ve just went home and had a beer. They kept with the tone of him being a tweener, neither all good or bad which I liked, but I also feel like we spent way too much time with Kong and lost out on some good Godzilla action. Kong was fine. Other than him being confused about where he lives he was about what I expected here. Pure white meat babyface. The only thing they got wrong with him (and in Skull Island) is that apes like him are actually vegetarians by nature. They can eat meat, and some species do but it’s super rare and it’s only if their other food sources are low. In this movie they feed Kong fish and it bugged me.

Godzilla V Kong gets a 2 from me. Utter disappointment. This movie was meant to come out last year around May but the thing pushed it back. It was my most anticipated film of last year and this year, and I’m gutted by how bad it was. The only excuse I can think of is that they only had a year to make it which seems insane for a movie this size. Why Universal felt the need to rush this out so quickly after King of the Monsters makes little sense. The plot was awful, the fights weren’t good, and the movies look is just bad. It’s a shame after they did such a good job of building up this world and the people in it. This should’ve been a slam dunk. Instead it’s a forgettable mess featuring two of the best characters in film history. There’s a good movie with these two in it, this just wasn’t it. This was also supposed to be an ending of sorts to this phase of the monsterverse, but it also fails in that regard.

The A24 Fan Club: Good Time (2017)

Constance “Conny” Nikas (Robert Pattitson) is not a good person. It may appear like that as he goes and picks up his mentally disabled brother Nick (Benny Safdie) from a annoying therapist, but he then brings Nick to help him rob a bank. The two show up wearing masks and clothes over clothes to prevent them from being recognized. The bank clerk gives them all she has in her drawer, but Conny presses her for more. She goes into the back and returns with a full back of cash. Which Conny grabs and they walk off.

Once in their getaway car Nick goes to look in the bag, where the dye cartridge goes off flooding the car with pink dye and causing the driver to crash. Conny and Nick run off, and try to avoid the police. They manage to get into a Dominoes bathroom to clean up and Conny stashes the bag with the money in the ceiling. They try to play it casual as they walk down the sidewalk, but the cops try and stop them which makes Nick take off. They get chased through a supermarket, where Conny escapes but Nick gets stopped by going through a glass sliding door face first.

Nick gets put into jail, but his disability gets him into fights with the other inmates and he ends up getting his ass beat. Conny meanwhile works to try and get his brother out by hiring a bail bondsman. He goes back to the bathroom to pick up the stashed money, but what’s usable is still ten grand short of what’s needed. So Conny goes to visit his girlfriend Corey (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an older woman living with her rich mother. Conny was all set to go on a vacation with her using the money he stole, but instead he convinces her to let him use her mothers credit card for the rest of the money to get Nick out. At the bond place again, Conny finds out that Nick is currently in the hospital, and the credit card declines. Conny is not having a good night.

He instead decides to sneak into the hospital to get his brother. He manages to get him out, and escapes on a handicapped bus. There he meets a nice woman taking care of her husband. Conny uses that kindness to worm his way into their home claiming he’s locked out of his place and his mother won’t be home until the morning. The woman offers him a room to stay in, and Conny soon makes himself at home even stealing and using hair dye to try and disguise himself. The woman’s 16 year old grand daughter takes an interest in Conny and spends time with them, feeding him. Conny, who is an adult, makes out with the girl when his “brother” wakes up. Turns out Conny snuck out the wrong guy. Even though the man’s head was bandaged up with similar hair to Nick’s, and he was handcuffed to the hospital bed he is in fact not Nick. He’s man named Ray ( Buddy Duress), and Conny convinces him to play it cool until he can figure out what to do.

That thing turns out to be stealing the old woman’s car and phone, and going back to the hospital to get Nick. The girl also cons her way into coming along. They drive past the hospital which is now crawling with cops, and Conny stops at a White Castle to buy some time. He tells the girl whose name is Crystal (Taliah Webster) to go in and get them food. While he’s inside Ray tells him of how he ended up getting arrested and put in the hospital. It’s a story that involves money being stashed at a local amusement park and a Sprite bottle full of acid (the fun kind). Conny decides they are going to try and find the money that was stashed from when Ray and his friend ran from the cops. So they all head to the amusement park.

They climb over the barbed wire fence using the car mats (I actually thought that was really clever), but as they are searching for the money they are stopped by a security guard who saw them on the camera. He manages to catch Ray, but Conny is able to hide. The guard takes and zip ties Ray in his booth, and waits for Conny to try and escape. Which he does. However when he tries and stop Conny, he gets attacked and Conny beats the shit out of the guy. He frees Ray, and the two drag the guard into the fun house they were looking through. This is when the cops show up, and Conny quickly switches clothes with the guard and Ray, who found the Sprite bottle with acid in it, downs some of it into the guards mouth before hiding. The cops do a sweep of the park, and pick up Crystal and ask Conny is he knows her. Conny denies knowing who it is, and Crystal stunned doesn’t a say a word as they take her in. Once the coast is clear, Conny calls Ray out of hiding, and together they drive off.

They crash and hide out in the guards apartment, thanks to the wallet Conny stole off of him. They manage to get his dog into another room and try and figure out what to do. Conny thinks of selling the acid to Ray’s friend which Ray is reluctant to do but goes along with it. Once the friend shows up he and Conny barter over price, but once they set a price the friend tells Ray they’re going to rob Conny. Conny, not a dummy, smells a rat and as soon as the friend leaves he tries to bail. Ray tries to stop him and a fight breaks out. The dog attacks Ray, and Conny is able to escape. Ray runs back into the apartment and calls his friend to tell him to come back. He looks out the window and see the cops finally nab Conny, but Conny drops the Sprite bottle. Ray tells his friend where it is, before trying to escape out of the window. Unfortunately he’s an idiot and ends up falling to his death, as Conny is loaded into the cop car. We last see him being driven off with a sullen look on his face.

The film ends with Nick, now out of prison, getting the help he needs from the therapist from earlier in the movie and joining a group with people similar to his disability. We see him being reluctant to join in, but as the credits roll he becomes more and more an active participant.

The End.

I love movies like this. Small setting, character focused, and a story where things just keep getting worse and worse for the main character. It’s like watching a Ed Brubaker comic come to life.

Good Time was directed by The Safdie brothers who would become way more popular with their next film Uncut Gems starring Adam Sandler. However this was the film that got them on some film critics radar, their third film over all. You can clearly see that these two have talent, and a clear vision for their films. They used a lot of hand held camera work for this and the digital video gave the film an over all gritty and lived in vibe. This was coupled perfectly with the New York setting. You can also tell that these two are from New York as they chose some unique locations to shoot, like the supermarket with a two sided entrance which are unique to Manhattan, or the Dominoes with all of the plexiglass in front of the counter. I don’t know what other cities look like in this regard but I knew exactly where I was in every frame of this picture without having to be told where I was. The only location I wasn’t aware of was the amusement park. I’d love to know how they got all of these permits to film in and around these highly congested parts of the city.

As for the story, it’s fine. I have to admit the casting of Robert Pattinson was a little distracting for me, as he was surrounded by all of these local or non actors. So while everyone else in the film felt authentic, he stood out a bit more than he should’ve. It would’ve been fine if he had more to his character then just being a scumbag but he really didn’t have any real personality. Which again, is a fine choice when you’re trying to create an organic and authentic look and feel to your movie, but when you cast a famous Brit as a guy with the last name Nikas you’re going to need more than a American accent to convince me he belongs here. Maybe it’s the New Yorker in me, but I can think of ten other guys who could’ve pulled off this role and been more believable.

That’s not me shitting on Pattinson either. Dudes a fine actor. He’s sort of becoming the new Jude Law. A good actor who gets his foot in the door by being handsome and charming, but spends a big chunk of his career trying to prove that he’s a legit actor and not just a pretty face like there’s something wrong with that. The only difference is Jude Law was never in a film that became a pop culture phenom like Twilight was. I will always remember the moment, sitting in a packed theater about 95% full of women (the 5% were either gay males or schlubs like me along for the ride) and hearing the glass shattering shrieks and hollers when he made his entrance as Edward Cullen. Yet to his, and Kristen Stewarts, credit they both got very uncomfortable in their new roles very quickly and did everything a person can to make sure they didn’t get type casted. Robby here could’ve made some quick cash just showing up in various rom coms or some action films, but he’s been pretty choosy of his parts. Only going for roles where he doesn’t act anything like himself. The Gary Oldman method if you will. So while I can’t say he’s mistcast in this movie, he does stick out in it more than he should. It’s a fine performance that helps carry the film. You never once like this guy. Even when he’s “helping” his brother you get the sense that he’s only doing it for himself since he can control Nick. Not out of some brotherly love. If that was the actual intention then this movie failed in that regard. Conny to me was a guy who only cared about himself and it didn’t matter who or what was caught in his wake. He was going to do whatever he could to get what he wanted. Pattinson put in the work on this movie with what he was given. It will also not be the last time he pops up in a A24 film.

All of the other actors in this movie felt like they came straight out of New York City. From Benny Safdie to Buddy Durress, and to local New York hip hop artist Necro showing up out of nowhere. Even the old woman who kindly gives Conny a place to stay felt like someone I could go outside and meet right now if I wanted to. So on that end the movie was bit more fun for me, than I imagine it would be for someone in say Kansas. Unless Kansas runs hardcore with crime.

Good Time (which is a bad title for this movie) gets a 3 from me. Solid film from some up and coming talents. I’m actually looking forward to seeing what Uncut Gems is like now more than I was already. I could’ve started with that movie and worked backwards but I wanted to see the progression of these two brothers whose names are now being attached to multiple projects as happens when you are the new IT kids. It’ll be interesting to see if they stay in the crime genre or branch out into something completely different going forward. I’m also curious to check out their other two films as they don’t seem to be in the same genre either. In any case this film was fun to watch. Nothing special or groundbreaking in it. Performances were all fine. No stand outs. If you want to watch a movie where a piece of shit has a very bad day then you can do worse than this film.

The Director’s Chair: Dune (1984)

We come now to the second work for hire films David Lynch fell into. After directing The Elephant Man which was nominated for numerous awards, Lycnch found himself the bell of the ball. The new IT kid on the block and numerous projects were pitched to him. Including a shot at directing the third Star Wars film Return of the Jedi for George Lucas. Let’s stop for a second and just dream of how nightmarish the Ewoks would’ve looked on Endor…….amazing.

Lynch sadly passed on telling a story from a Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far Far Away, but he wasn’t against working in the science fiction realm. Instead he was courted by then super producer Dino De Laurentiis and his daughter Rafaella, to work on a adaptation to a famous novel they had just acquired the rights to. Dune.

Dune was a sci fi fantasy novel written by the late Frank Herbert in the mid 60’s. It became a best seller for it’s massive world building, and it’s psychedelic, mind altering, drug referencing, conscientiousness expanding ideas. While also being super detailed in it’s science fictions aspects and also tossing in some inter galactic political intrigue. Even though the story on the surface is pretty tame compared to say A Song of Ice and Fires or The Expanses of today.

The story of book one of Dune, tells the tale of a young Paul Atreides. Paul is the son of the Duke Atredes and his concubine, a Benne Gesuit Witch named Jessica. The Benne Gesuits are a religious sect who have been manipulating events behind the scenes for generations, and are used as protectors and caregivers to various important people. They also possess powers to influence minds and some telepathy. The Emperor tasks the Atreides to leave their home and take control over a planet called Arrakis (also called Dune). On Arrakis there is a mining colony that digs up a substance called The Spice Melange or just spice. The spice is the most valuable substance in the galaxy and is used to prolong life as well as expand the mind. The planet is entirely made of dessert with no source of water to be found. Instead special suits are worn to draw moisture from the body and recycle it for consumption. Yes this includes bodily functions as well.

While on Arrakis, there is an attempted assination of Paul which fails, but then the Harkonens who were previously in charge or the planet attack, and the Duke is killed while Paul and his mother escape. Now out in the dessert alone, the two begin to be affected by the spice which expands Paul’s consciousness in a way where he can see both past and future events at the same time. They come across a group of locals known as The Fremin who take them in, and Paul soon becomes their leader. They believe that he is the messiah who was foretold to them based on his abilities. He trains them to fight using sonic weapons and they take back Arrakis from the Harkonens while Paul rides a sandworm. The Emperor even sends a fleet of ships to stop him, but ultimately fails. Paul then makes it rain (literally. Not like money or something) on Arrakis for the first time ever. Fulfilling the prophecy about him.

I left a bunch of stuff out, but that’s the basic gist of the story. In the book version Paul actually takes the throne from The Emperor himself which plays into the sequels later. Most of the rest remains the same, just cut down a great deal in favor of tons of exposition explaining just what the hell is going on in this movie. Which is totally bizarre for a David Lynch movie to try and hold your hand. It directly hurts the picture as characters feel stunted and wooden. They tried to touch this up by interjecting their thoughts to the audience, which is actually taken directly from the book, but it becomes off putting having so many characters whispering their thoughts at you instead of just saying them. It especially makes no sense as this was an amazing cast of actors that Lynch assembled. It marks the first time he would work with a then unknown Kyle MacLaclan as Paul, Patrick Stewart is in this, Max Von Sydow, a young Sean Young and Virgina Madsen, as well as Brad Douriff and Dean Stockwell. So he had the cast that would’ve been able to convey all of this stuff, he just didn’t use them properly.

It’s not the only problem with this film. This was clearly Dino’s attempt to get some of that Star Wars money. He pitched this as being Star Wars but for adults, but there isn’t anything in this movie that’s completely off limits to kids. It’s not as cute and cuddly as Star Wars for sure, but it’s not full of sex and violence either. However with that said and with them constantly cutting the budget, which kept growing, the effects in this movie look awful. The sets look amazing. In fact everything that was shot in camera looks great. It’s all the post production work that’s hard on the eyes.

There’s a bit in the book about how the people of this galaxy fight using force fields that you carry on your belt. It covers your entire body and is used like armor. In this movie it’s a bunch of boxes that rotoscoped over the actors making them nearly impossible to see. Then you have the Fremin eyes which glow a particular blue. This was before the use of colored contacts so again rotoscoping was used and it looks off. Then you have the big center piece of the film, the space battles. In the book they’re written as they giant grandiose ships battling it out, and in the movie they look like absolute junk. In an age where Star Wars was still so fresh in everyones minds they looked ancient in comparison.

So with all the post production effects a wash, all that was left was the story itself, and at a brisk tow hours there just wasn’t any time to cover all of the nuances the book was able to in it’s 500 pages. I’ve read the book since seeing this movie as a kid, and while I’m still not the biggest Dune fan around, I totally get why this book had the effects it’s had on fans, and a lot of that is because of the world building which you can’t cover in just one movie. If anything this should have been a TV miniseries, but even then they would’ve worked with an even lower budget because TV in 1984 was not the TV it is now. Game of Thrones episodes costs 10 million each by the end of the show, and they STILL had to cut shit out. If was done in the 80’s the dragons would’ve all been poor looking claymation like something out of Land of the Lost.

That said there are some cool things in this movie. The costume designs are all awesome looking. The sets are fantastic. The look of the sandworms as they breach the surface look amazing as well. The orange sky and all that god damn sand creates a unique atmosphere for a sci movie. It feel like one part Star Wars and one part Mad Max. I would never want to live on Arrakis, but there is a beauty to the place.

However I can’t say this movie works. You can blame Dino De Laurentiis for a lot of the financial problems the movie had. You can blame Universal for demanding the four hour run time Lynch put together be cut into two (though I wish they had the ability to show the directors cut now). You can also blame Lynch himself for not reading the room that when it comes to big time Hollywood movies you are not always going to have the final say. Too much money is on the line. Maybe things were different back then because big budget epics like this were still new in the post Jaws and Star Wars world they were now in.

Lynch himself calls this his worst movie. He barely even talks about it to this day. Only saying what a miserable experience it was, and telling new directors to always no matter what have final cut on their picture. A lesson he seems to have learned from this film. The only good thing you can say came out of this experience was Blue Velvet. Which Lynch worked on after Dune bombed, and was produced by and distributed by Dino himself as a make good for fucking with the final cut of Dune. Without that I think he would’ve had to go back to just being a painter cause no one would’ve hired him. He would also never take a work for hire job again, and only produced his own ideas which is exactly the lane David should be operating in with his unique style and voice.

Dune gets a 2 from me. Not a great movie. As far as Star Wars rip offs I’ve seen this one at least has it’s own voice, but the production issues are right there on the screen for all to see. Coupled that with a not very engaging story for mainstream audiences and it’s a recipe for disaster. For me the effects and the cut to shit run time are what hurt it the most. By the time the movie was ending I was barely awake. Thankfully we’re getting another bite at the Dune apple later this year. Director Denis Villeneuve who did Arrival (which is great) and Blade Runner 2049 (which I haven’t seen) is taking his shot at this behemoth of a series. So far from the first trailer it looks like the effects have finally caught up with Herberts vision. So I’ll be checking that out later for sure when it drops on HBO Max and comparing it to this one here.