The “semi” in front of the “semi-autobiographical” label for Pete Davidson’s quarter-life crisis movie memoir The King of Staten Island is both ambiguous and chancy. Formally, the prefix is meant to signify “half” while it often means “partially,” “incompletely,” and “somewhat.” The adjunct is fitting. At its fullest and best, Judd Apatow’s newest comedy coming to VOD on June 12th is a collection of half-hearted beats and half-witted mischief. That’s it. Just half.
Read MoreThe tale-of-the-tape of Becky is as preposterous as the promised twisted violence that follows. In one corner, you have the middle-aged comedian Kevin James taking a dare for his first “dramatic role” as the escaped Neo-Nazi criminal Dominick. He’s hulking, tatted-up, bearded, and armed with stern rhetoric and an itchy trigger finger. In the other corner, you have the titular Millennial 13-year-old played by Lulu Wilson of The Haunting of Hill House. She’s angry, mournful over the passing of her mother, and, due to the home invasion circumstances than transpire, motivated for every hell-raising level of vindication possible. Before Bruce Buffer screams into a microphone, who do you got in this cutthroat clash that hits VOD June 5th?
Read MoreEach time Maggie’s employers, the fictional world-renowned recording artist Grace Davis played by Blackish’s Tracee Ellis Ross and her manager Jack Robertson played by Ice Cube, summarily dismiss her to stay in her lane or fetch some inconsequential thing, The High Note gets better because the real talent is allowed to emerge. To love underdog moxie, or any moxie for that matter, you have to have it. The flimsy Dakota Johnson doesn’t. She, and the movie, would be better served by her getting out of the way just like her shunned Maggie.
Read MoreHere’s the rub though. For “hi-jinks ensue” to work and live up to its promise, you need strong and effective events to come before and after when that phrase is planted. Have a weak setup and the absurdity of hi-jinks after can feel like a jolting improvement or tail-spinning crash. Have a great setup and the hi-jinks that follow can either evolve or devolve the auspicious start. This “one wild night” romp of The Lovebirds has about half of each measure in that balance.
Read MoreIn true western, or in this case, bushranger movie fashion, the edgiest and most intense moments in Justin Kurzel’s True History of the Kelly Gang come in the moments when someone is being held at gunpoint. Drama properly peaks with the potential power released by one little curved metal lever hinging a mechanism of murder and mayhem. The action itself to squeeze that trigger is easy. The decision and ramifications, as we well know, are not.
Read MoreGranted, messy people and their messy lives make for messy stories, especially here in the medium of narrative film. Not everyone can hold their noses to other peoples’ messes on display. Their pity or empathy levels have limits. Tolerance comes from the talent and the trueness coming together for the given story. Filmmaker Drake Doremus presents another striking, bare, and brave movie in the form of Endings, Beginnings. If you have the capacity to wallow along, you will be impressed. Plenty won’t and that’s too bad.
Read MoreI am starting to become convinced that there will never be a movie wedding that goes off without a hitch, as they say. It’s cinematically impossible not to have something, anything, or everything go wrong. But, that’s the fun of all those movies, including the new Netflix film Love Wedding Repeat. There is always comedy to be had when a springboard event of enduring love can survive in every cringe, surprise, fumble, flub, and fail executed by the doting newlyweds on down to the drunk ne'er-do-wells.
Read MoreThose posters clearly catch the eye, but once Coffee & Kareem attempts to evoke the promotional notion that it is worthy of standing next to classic giants like those three films as a homage or even as an lesser riff, it’s asking to bomb. When you fail, even intentionally, you become one more shitty cop movie from a generation ago. Does someone get an award somewhere from some lofty agency of aficionados when you make a shitty cop movie precisely as shitty as the old shitty cop movies this shitty cop movie emulates and remembers? Is that a Razzie or something else?
Read MoreFor a moment, think on the last bad day you experienced when the things you juggle in your life continued to collapse. What sort of “wit’s end” did you find yourself arriving at? Jog the memory of how you reacted to that ugly day. Did you lash out harmfully or did a figurative life preserver pull you out of the doldrums or stresses? Chicago filmmaker Matthew Weinstein’s newest short film A Missed Connection thrusts a character to such a breaking point and exquisitely presents a chance scenario likely dreamt of by many, yet afforded by few. This film plays on February 21st and 22nd as a selection of the Beloit International Film Festival.
Read MoreThere is a certain steadiness to Destin Daniel Cretton’s new film that pushes back those gaudy tendencies. Its central real-life figure Bryan Stevenson is not the firebrand type most legal movies typically adore and request. Played by Michael B. Jordan, in a fitting and matured leading role for the muscled actor, Stevenson is not made to be something he is not. His real-life story and iron will principles are not smudged just to show a little pizzazz for the sake of pizzazz.
Read MoreDiving deeper beyond the basic “something that is final” meaning, the dictionary of this galaxy describes “finality” as “conclusiveness,” “decisiveness,” or “an ultimate act, utterance, or belief.” J.J. Abrams’ massive space opera follows his own The Force Awakens and Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi to aim so very badly for those traits. In many peaks of scope and emotion, his movie achieves such finality. In others, overindulgence and disarray put question marks on the value or vindication of all this promised fulfillment.
Read MoreKinetically engineered to simulate real-time, 1917 moves with a propulsive momentum like no other film of 2019 and no other combat flick of recent memory. Its velocity matches the unyielding pull of war itself. That compelling force defines a soldier’s moral sense of duty and keeps a man watching, trekking, running, fighting, and downright surviving. 1917 is all about that pull and concentrates its adrenaline into a relentless experience that will strafe your senses, from the hairs on the back of your neck to the fidgeting nerves that bounce your toes.
Read More
