We recommend 12 movies you should watch to better appreciate Disney's latest theme park ride adaptation.
Saturday 31 July 2021
Friday 30 July 2021
‘Star Wars’ Video Game Fans are Rewarded with a Significant Cameo in ‘The Bad Batch’
Episode 14 reintroduces two critical players, and their arrival equals the Empire's inevitable destruction.
Thursday 29 July 2021
Wednesday 28 July 2021
Contrast and a Needle Drop: Dissecting the Iconic Ending of ‘The Graduate’
If there's one thing that'll give your life purpose, it's disrupting a wedding, right? Right?!
12 Movies To Watch If You Like ‘The Green Knight’
From Arthurian Legends to modern myth-making, these are the best streaming picks for those enchanted by 'The Green Knight'
Navigating the Digital Landscape of Michael Mann’s ‘Miami Vice’
The masterful big-screen adaptation has a polarizing and distinct mid-2000s look to it, but that's all part of what makes it great.
Tuesday 27 July 2021
Producer Hiram Garcia Explains Why You Don’t Say No to ‘Jungle Cruise’
We chat with the blockbuster producer about the lifetime of movie watching that finally put him and Dwayne Johnson in a room with Disney executives.
What to Expect from the Sopranos Prequel ‘The Many Saints of Newark’
Finally, it's time to see how Tony Soprano became one of the most iconic mobsters of all time.
Monday 26 July 2021
‘Old’ is a New Low for M. Night Shyamalan at the Box Office
At least it opened bigger than the lastest 'G.I. Joe' would-be blockbuster and franchise starter.
Sunday 25 July 2021
James Wan’s ‘Malignant’ is a Mix of Dario Argento, Brian De Palma, and ‘Frozen’
The filmmaker makes a strange comparison between his giallo-inspired latest and the Disney animated feature.
Saturday 24 July 2021
10 Unanswered Questions Left by M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Old’
Welcome to Unanswered Questions, a series where we react to confusing movies and plot holes with a “huh?” and a “hmmph!” and maybe a “hah!” This time we have questions about the M. Night Shyamalan movie Old. Spoilers can be expected.
For a filmmaker who likes to explain everything in a neatly wrapped expository twist, M. Night Shyamalan also leaves us with a lot of unclear elements in his movies. Why’d aliens come to an ocean-covered planet if they’re harmed by water? How do a couple of teenagers have no idea what their grandparents look like? Was Mark Wahlberg trying to act so bad in The Happening? Shyamalan’s latest, Old, is just as baffling, if not more so than the rest. That’s why I’ve brought back our Unanswered Questions series to work out more than just our opinion of Old and why its ending doesn’t work.
Burning questions about the plot of M. Night Shyamalan’s Old
Some of these questions do have answers, just not satisfying ones. Others just absolutely don’t make any sense. Most of them involve SPOILERS for the movie, in case that wasn’t obvious. But Old is a movie that means to make us think about a number of ideas, and so this is our place to explore some of those ideas while also nitpicking about how those ideas are delivered.
1. How can so many guests leave no trace of where they are going?
All of the special guests to the resort in Old are lured there by the management based on their medical ailments. The resort manages to provide transportation so there’s no commercial trail to the destination. But that seems impossible to handle in our day and age. Sure, the idea of having no cellphone service in an inescapable location is as believable as it is convenient to the plot of any horror movie. But on the way to the resort and during the stay, is there no chance any of these people told someone where they were going, documented any part of the trip on Instagram, or communicated with the outside world at any moment before going missing? Mid-Sized Sedan is a famous rapper who must need to share his whereabouts with someone. The vain Chrystal is seen taking a selfie and is certainly a social media sharer. How would the resort so easily make people disappear? There is some mention of how the resort can make it look like the people never left home, but that doesn’t hold up at all.
2. Why doesn’t the kid at the resort just warn people not to go to the beach?
From what I can tell, there seems to be a lot of confusion about the little friendless resort boy who forms a brief bond with Trent. The kid, named Idlib, is the shady resort manager’s nephew, so it would seem that he might know something about what’s going on. Or that he has some interesting back story. But no, he’s just a little boy who lives on a resort with his uncle, and he constantly sees people go to a beach and then go about their lives or something. So why does he give Trent a coded message that helps Trent and Maddox escape the island? Does he know about the beach, and if so, why not just warn Trent immediately? That’s all actually a lot more innocent than it looks and is sort of annoying in its execution. Idlib writes in code for fun, not to go undetected, and his message stating that his uncle doesn’t like the coral, that’s him thinking he’s helping Trent and family avoid something the kid thought was dangerous based on his misunderstanding of what he overheard. Fortunately, the wording of the note is unnaturally so oddly phrased so Trent is able to interpret it as the opposite.
3. Why doesn’t the resort manager destroy the coral?
It’s unclear how the people who run the resort and evil pharmaceutical conspiracy found the cursed beach, and it’s also unclear how the resort manager knows about the coral being a shield against its powers. There’s mention of another time that a person attempted to escape through the coral but then they drowned. Did they know about the significance of the coral before then? Was it too recent that they didn’t make an effort to destroy the coral in order to eliminate that one potential escape option? Maybe there wasn’t an easy solution to get rid of it that wouldn’t also lead to the demolition person being stuck on the beach or otherwise killed as well. But they don’t care about people’s lives so why not just send in a sacrificial helicopter pilot with a bomb and not worry about if they make it back alive. Or use a drone. There are many options.
4. Why doesn’t anyone disarm the crazy doctor who just killed a guy?
Even before Dr. Charles manages to kill Mid-Sized Sedan, which seemed very plausible given his racist and manic responses to the rapper, someone should have thought to confiscate his knife. And after he manages to kill a man, someone definitely should have thought to confiscate his knife. Because, unsurprisingly, he strikes again later. Fortunately, this time Prisca saves her husband from a similar fate as Mid-Sized Sedan by stabbing the mad doctor with a rusty knife (whether this death makes a lick of sense even considering the lethality of maybe him getting tetanus is another question of its own). He was strong and stabby, but the doctor could have been overpowered by the others collectively. But they may just not be thinking clearly enough in the state of such high-level shock as they’re experiencing.
5. Why does Trent grow hair on his face and armpits?
Do I need to explain puberty? No, this is not about the boy becoming a man and what that means for his body. This is a question regarding consistency in the logic of the world that Shyamalan has set up for Old. Before anyone in the audience has a chance to wonder why nobody’s hair and fingernails are growing along with the aging, a character provides an answer. This is the sort of expositional dialogue we get from the filmmaker on a regular basis. He’s trying to anticipate questions by having them answered in a way that might as well be a fourth-wall break. The problem with this kind of narrative defense is that it opens up the conversation with the viewer in a way that invites more questions. So then the audience wonders, well, what about Trent’s armpit and facial hair growth? I’d say that’s just easily dismissed as still consistent because it’s a one-time effect of the body’s aging into adulthood and then that’s it. But also we could have just done without the mention of the hair and fingernails thing and allowed it to be a simple movie logic thing where we suspend our disbelief.
6. How does Kara get pregnant?
Well, you see, it starts with the birds and the bees… No, this question is simply answered: Trent and Kara have sex during their bonding moment, and she becomes pregnant with their child. It’s implied well enough that we don’t need to literally see that it happened in order for us to be aware of what occurred and not have any thoughts of immaculate conception or anything. Still, the whole sequence plays out poorly in the way Trent and Kara’s time together is intercut with other events going on at the same time. It’d have been more effective if Shyamalan gave us a lengthier time between when we see them growing closer, perhaps with that moment ending with a kiss, and then the reveal that she’s pregnant. I can only assume that the filmmaker and the rest of the production wanted to keep the thought of these two essentially still-six-year-old children having sex out of the audience’s minds. Because yikes.
7. Why doesn’t Kara say goodbye to her mother before trying to leave?
There are a lot of missed opportunities for emotional moments in Old due to the way the movie is written and paced. The death of the baby goes by so quickly that it’s almost like they should have just left out the cringe-worthy pregnancy entirely. And some characters aren’t given natural relationship moments. Never mind that Kara probably feels some detachment from her self-obsessed mother and her violently ill father, even at age six, but it still feels odd she wouldn’t let Chrystal know she’d be attempting to escape by climbing the cliff. Especially since most of the other players are present at the time. When Chrystal does show up wondering what happened to her daughter, there’s not much of a payoff there. I get it, she quickly turns back to being concerned about her own appearance and physical health, but it’s another moment that’s unsatisfactorily executed.
8. What’s the benefit of keeping the unwitting guinea pigs in the dark?
You’ve lured sick people to your resort for your pharmaceutical trials conspiracy, and you’ve dumped them on a beach they can’t escape from. Why not just let them know what’s going on? They’re not going to be able to leave anyway, so they’d have to ultimately understand the service they’re going to provide by, well, staying alive for as long as possible. Consider how many of the people on the beach die from unavoidable circumstances. Some attempt to swim away and then drown. Others try to climb out of their prison and fall to their death. At least one person is stabbed to death by a racist lunatic. Think of how much better these test subjects would be to the drug trials if they weren’t trying to kill each other or putting themselves in danger due to having no clue what’s going on? Narratively, that’d surely take away the intrigue for the audience, but realistically the operation is kind of dumb. By communicating with the lab rats on the beach, they could even administer more or different meds.
9. Is one anti-seizure drug really worth all the trouble?
Maybe we just need to take the movie’s evil Big Pharma revelation to be representative of what that industry goes through for a profit and not realistic in a literal sense. Still, we want to accept the logic of the world within the story at hand, and this just doesn’t make a lot of sense. In Old, the plot twist is briskly dealt with, but it’s one that we’re left to think too much about after the credits roll. Consider everything this company has gone through to secure this secret magic beach on an island and establish this resort and then transport and kill close to a hundred people, most of them innocent familial bystanders of afflicted targets, to find new drugs that work for various diseases and disorders. They’ve wound up with a treatment for epilepsy that curbs seizures for nearly twenty years, yet the patient still dies of epileptic seizures in the end (again, transparency could have been a benefit and resulted in delivering another dose or further experimentation). And what sort of data does this company present as proof of the medication’s effect in order to get it on the market?
10. Why not just clone the test subjects?
Hey, if Shyamalan can tack on an extra sci-fi explanation ending to his adaptation of a graphic novel, then I can add my own to his movie, right? Maybe I’ve seen Jurassic Park too much, but if you’re going to have a secret resort island with secret scientific experiments, why not go more John Hammond than George Harris, to go full-on Michael Crichton-based analogy? Get DNA samples from the afflicted persons and clone them in a lab and drop them on the beach to watch them age. Of course, this would only work for genetic maladies. Also, I understand that this idea goes beyond the point of Shyamalan’s movie, though doesn’t his own evil pharmaceutical twist do that anyway? It’s unclear what the filmmaker is trying to say with Old given the way it ends in such a convoluted revelation.
Captain Janeway Returns to the Final Frontier in ‘Star Trek: Prodigy’
This article is part of our ongoing Star Trek Explained series, featuring the insights of our resident Starfleet officer Brad Gullickson. In this edition, we’re exploring Comic-Con At Home and going shot by shot through the new Star Trek: Prodigy trailer.
For the second year in a row, San Diego Comic-Con International could not open its doors to their usually massive crowd. As they did in 2020, however, they’ve brought their epic programming to their attendees virtually. Starting this past Wednesday night, their YouTube page flooded with content, and wading through it offers a daunting task. For us Star Trek obsessives, the Paramount+ Peak Animation panel sparks immediate interest.
Attempting his best Wil Wheaton, Jerry O’Connell wrangled the cast and crew of two Starfleet-significant animated shows: Star Trek: Prodigy and Star Trek: Lower Decks. The latter show is scheduled to repeat what it accomplished last season, whereas Prodigy sets sail into the bold new arena of children’s entertainment. Although, the producers made double-sure to announce that all ages could and will enjoy this new adventure series. They didn’t say the words “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” but that particular Lucasfilm vibe radiates from the first teaser trailer.
Watch the Star Trek: Prodigy trailer:
The return of Kate Mulgrew as Captain Janeway
Star Trek: Prodigy promises a classic Star Trek exploration told “through the eyes of characters who are outside of Starfleet.” In the trailer, we see a scrappy, young crew of aliens who discover a discarded experimental Federation ship in the Delta quadrant and use it to bust off the boring rock beneath their feet. Aiding them in this impossible mission is the hologram of Kathryn Janeway. Yes, you did hear Kate Mulgrew, iconic captain of Star Trek: Voyager, during those last few moments.
The series is canon, but it navigates Gene Roddenberry’s human adventure away from the usual Federation trappings. This is somewhat in keeping with Jean-Luc Picard’s recent streaming escapades. The current franchise keepers remind their audience that Star Trek is more than a uniform. They’re examining the ideals we latched upon during the original series and showing their value beyond the iconography.
Let’s drill into this idea a little deeper by pulling out four shots from the trailer for Star Trek: Prodigy. At first glance, neither Prodigy nor Lower Decks are mirrors of your past Trek loves, but neither is so foreign that they’re unrecognizable. Bridging the old with the new is what Star Trek is about. Discovery builds strength.
The Star Trek: Prodigy trailer shot by shot
The trailer opens with Dal (Brett Gray) shackled to a chain gang. He’s from an unknown species, and despite his mining camp imprisonment, he’s a kid that exudes hope and optimism. He refuses to let the misery he experiences every day poison his dream of something more. He’s our gateway character, and through him, we’ll meet the rest of the cast.
From offscreen, some wretched brute bellows, “No one shall escape.”
By its very presence in a Star Trek series, the declaration is instantly rendered moot. It’s a challenge to stir Dal into action. When his opportunity calls, he’ll answer.
Zero the Medusan
Zero, here, is maybe the most exciting new character on the show. They’re a Medusan. Voice actor Angus Imrie describes them as “a genderless, non-corporal entity.” Zero is basically a light source trapped inside a mechanical containment suit. Think of Zero as a friendly Lovecraftian creature. Because if anyone saw their true appearance, they’d be instantly driven mad.
Medusans have appeared in Star Trek before. In the original series episode “Is There in Truth No Beauty,” the Medusan Ambassador Kollos mind-melded with Spock when the USS Enterprise was thrown off course in the Milky Way Galaxy. Imrie is excited to add more depth to a similar entity. He explained how much joy it is to play a character who learns to understand emotions through awkward interplay. As a mind-reader, Zero constantly fumbles societal conventions, frequently blurting out what others are thinking.
Meet Dal
Here’s the clearest look we get of Dal in the Prodigy trailer. His enthusiasm for the unknown is plain on his face. But we can also see that he’s been through multiple altercations. He’s got a chunk missing from his ear and a gash over his right eye. But, to hear Gray explain Dal, the character finds themself through interactions with others. He thrives through a “zipper effect,” connecting to those around him and becoming stronger as a result.
During the panel, Kate Mulgrew dropped a few more hints regarding Dal’s abilities as well. She said that Gray is a “vocal magician” exchanging all manner of “vocal tricks” when acting across Janeway’s hologram. Gray appeared visibly chuffed by the compliments but wouldn’t elaborate further as those vocal maneuvers could spoil Prodigy‘s early surprises.
The Star Trek: Prodigy ship
Here’s the shot that titillates the longtime fans. What is this starship? And why does it contain a hologram of Kathryn Janeway? Pinch and zoom, and you can see that its designation contains the NX marker, clocking the starship as an experimental class.
This is the USS Protostar and its arrival in the show signifies escape for the characters who need it most. Mulgrew wants it known that her hologram is very much alive. “She’s Janeway at her best,” she says. “She’s here to help this motley crew and get this defunct ship functioning.”
Her mission is to help those who need it, and these kids need her help desperately.
From Star Wars to Star Trek
Dee Bradley Baker is the Star Wars invader amongst the cast. He’s the voice actor who embodies nearly every Clone you meet in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: The Bad Batch. For Paramount+, he’s ditching blasters and inhabiting the sentient blob called Murf.
Baker acknowledges that Star Trek: Prodigy may appear to have a cartoon kiddie sheen on it, but it represents everything the original series sought to do back in the day. This Star Trek, like all Star Trek, succeeds in the optimism it presents. Prodigy delivers an “appealing ensemble of disparate characters and creatures that can work together.” They can see a bright future ahead, and by working as one, they’ll reach that destination.
Star Trek: Prodigy was originally scheduled to premiere on Nickelodeon but will now land on Paramount+ with the rest of the franchise. The release date is unknown.
‘Snake Eyes’ Carves Out a Dull Origin That’s an Insult to Ninja Cinema
From action figures to cartoons, the world of G.I. Joe has been one powered by simple characters, elaborate hardware, and imagination. A pair of big-budget, live-action blockbusters followed their lead with both G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) and G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013) delivering over the top action and exaggerated personalities. Unlike Hasbro’s other toy to movie transition, though, the films weren’t the monster hits that would have guaranteed an ongoing franchise. Never one to give up on an IP, Paramount is back eight years later with Snake Eyes — an origin story about two of the G.I. Joe world’s more mysterious characters. Unfortunately, it’s the one not named in the title who’s by far the most interesting, engaging, and exciting.
A young boy witnesses his father’s murder at the hand of a man whose loaded dice determined his fate, and twenty years later he’s grown up to fight in illegal brawls under the name Snake Eyes (Henry Golding). A minor boss with the Yakuza named Kenta (Takehiro Hira) recognizes his talent and hires him on, and while Snake is hesitant at first the promise that Kenta will find the man who killed his father seals the deal. He befriends a mouthy enforcer, and when Tommy (Andrew Koji) is outed as a traitor and marked for death it’s Snake who fights by his side and helps him escape. Turns out Tommy is next in line to rule the centuries-old Arashikage clan and had gone undercover to investigate the Yakuza’s gun-running scheme, and now he’s welcomed Snake into his well-guarded home. They’d be best friends forever if only Snake wasn’t there under duplicitous purposes.
We can never have enough ninja movies, so the idea of giving G.I. Joe’s infamous enemies, Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, their own film seemed promising, but the end result is a disappointing one. Snake Eyes is surprisingly dull — for an action movie, for a ninja movie, and for a G.I. Joe movie. The script takes an overly familiar path with its narrative and without any fresh angles, and while it’s punctuated by action beats they’re constantly underwhelming for a variety of reasons.
To be clear, the previous G.I. Joe films wouldn’t win any writing awards themselves, but they also embrace the inherent silliness of sci-fi hardware, gung-ho 80s heroes, and exaggerated villains like Cobra Commander. Snake Eyes dips its toes into the absurd with a magical jewel, train-sized anacondas, and Cobra favorite The Baroness (Úrsula Corberó, doing her best Cory Chase impression), but far too much of the script (by Evan Spiliotopoulos, Joe Shrapnel, and Anna Waterhouse) focuses on the overly sedate and basic. While billed as the origin of Snake Eyes, the film serves better as a look into what turns Tommy into Storm Shadow. Snake’s journey sees him as something of a jerk with an unsatisfying heroic arc, but Tommy’s flip towards darkness actually earns viewer understanding and sympathy. It’s an oddly crafted dynamic.
The cast is equally deceptive in its promise starting with Golding’s turn in the title role. He’s a charismatic actor, both personable and engaging, but while he has physical presence — and yes, would make one hell of a James Bond, circa Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan — he’s an unavoidable second fiddle in an action beside Koji. The Warrior (2019-) lead is a legitimate action star capable of mesmerizing moves and impressive acrobatics, and Golding just can’t compete.
Of course, that brings us to the biggest issue with Snake Eyes — the action is immediately forgettable. Despite Koji’s capabilities, the behind-the-scenes presence of the great Kenji Tanigaki (fight choreographer on numerous Donnie Yen films and the Rurouni Kenshin franchise), and action giant Iko Uwais in a supporting role, anything teasing impressive or cool fights is neutered in post-production. Director Robert Schwentke and editor Stuart Levy butcher the sequences with an abundance of misguided cuts, edits, and coverage choices leaving fight scenes a mess of uninteresting blurs. Larger action sequences fair no better as CG and green screen work fails to compel or convince.
While the film doesn’t really work there are elements of note worth mentioning. Chief among them is Koji who proves his Warrior success is no fluke. He’s more than just his action chops, and he gives Tommy both sincerity and weight. Haruka Abe does good work despite her poorly written character as the Arashikage clan’s head of security — we’re told she’s a force to be reckoned with yet she’s sucker punched twice (by Snake) and falls immediately in love (with Snake). Samara Weaving stars as Scarlett and is as welcome as Uwais, but she’s let down by her character just as he is by the editing.
To paraphrase a line from Snake Eyes itself, all studios make mistakes, it’s what they do next that matters. In this case that hopefully means one of two things (or both if Paramount is feeling especially ambitious) — return G.I. Joe to the realm of big, silly, action-heavy entertainment, or hire people who know what the hell they’re doing when it comes to making, editing, and showcasing killer action sequences.
Friday 23 July 2021
The Ending of M. Night Shymalan’s ‘Old’ Explained
Ending Explained is a recurring series in which we explore the finales, secrets, and themes of interesting movies and shows, both new and old. This time, we look at the ending of M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie, Old. Yes, prepare for spoilers.
Before one steps into an M. Night Shyamalan movie, they’re already anticipating the twist ending. The writer/director’s reputation for and reliance on the swerve taints every experience as your attention is already dagger-sharp. A person cannot simply sit back and let the movie wash over them. No, their eyes are peeled. They’re clocking every detail from the jump. We never know what’s going to come back and bite these characters in the butt during the last five minutes.
Old does not have the traditional Shyamalan zag, but the movie does plop an ending designed to elicit, “Ohhhhhhhhh.”
The Plot of Old
Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) are approaching their end as a couple. She’s got a tumor growing inside of her, but she’s also not going to let her medical condition prolong a marriage that was already lost years ago. It’s time for their split, but they don’t want to divorce until they’ve given their two kids, Trent and Maddox, one last happy vacation. They hope that the memories they build on this trip will buoy them through the dark times ahead.
Prisca, by apparent happenstance, stumbled on an island resort too good to be true. When they arrive, the hotel presents the family with tailor-made beverages and smiles that never stop from their staff. Because Guy and Prisca are such swell people, the resort manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) lets them in on a secret. A hidden beach is not too far from the hotel, where the water is miraculously clear and sparking with special minerals. If they promise not to tell the other guests, he’ll get a special driver (M. Night Shyamalan) to escort them to the location.
Of course, they agree. But when they arrive, the beach is not as isolated as they thought. The resort manager lied to them and gave directions to several other guests, too. Their disappointment quickly escalates to terror when they discover that none of them can leave. Every time they attempt to do so, a sudden pressure takes over their heads and knocks them backward. Even more horrendous, the longer they stay on the beach, the faster their bodies age. Children are soon adults, parents are soon grandparents, and grandparents are soon corpses.
What the hell is going on?
The Ending of the Movie Old Explained
Old is based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Frederik Peeters and Pierre Oscar Lévy. But the French comic book is much less interested in exploring the phenomenon perpetrating the aging process than Shyamalan is. Peeters and Lévy’s story only hints at some nefarious outsider interference when a person notified as “the hotelier’s son” is spotted running toward the protagonists before unseen attackers gun him down. The guests are so far along in the aging process that they can’t investigate it further before they’re dead on the sand.
Shyamalan can’t help but concoct a much more complicated ending for the movie version, with Old. After Guy, Prisca, and the rest have perished, their two surviving children, now older than their parents were when they first arrived, remember an encrypted note given to them by the resort manager’s nephew, Idlib (Kailen Jude). Earlier in the movie, before the family heads to the beach, still-six-year-old Trent and Idlib strike up a fast friendship at the hotel.
The two boys bond over cryptography and most of their notes are secret celebrations surrounding ice cream parties. However, this final communication reveals that Idlib somewhat understands the magic that hovers over the beach — or he misunderstands something to be a potential danger there. Once decoded, the secret message directs old man Trent (Emun Elliott) and even older sister Maddox (Embeth Davidtz) to the coral reef located offshore.
The siblings swim toward it and find an underwater passage that blocks the power from the mysterious minerals surrounding the beach. Above them, the hotel driver witnesses their escape attempt but believes that they drown under the coral. He reports back to his masters, and the movie jumps away from the siblings’ point of view for the first part of the ending of Old.
Spoiler Alert: Old is a Movie About an Evil Pharmaceutical Conspiracy?
The hotel is revealed to be a lure for the sick. The management seeks the chronically ill and spams their email until they bite. When they do, they serve the specially sanctioned guests various pharmaceutical cocktails. They then alert those guests of the secluded beach and drop them off so that scientists at the resort can observe how the drugs operate on the unwitting guinea pigs as they age rapidly. This allows the company to tweak their cocktails faster than the competition, igniting scientific breakthroughs that would normally take generations to develop.
Unfortunately for the evil pharmaceutical firm, Trent and Maddox did not drown in the coral tube (as is eventually depicted in the third part of the ending of Old). They return to the hotel, where Trent finds the vacationing cop he met when he first arrived. (He remembers everyone’s occupation!) He hands the man a journal written by a science-fiction writer who died years (or is it days?) before on the beach. In that book are the names of numerous missing individuals. Disturbed by Trent’s tale, the cop reports the names to his squad back home (wherever that is), and bing, bang, pow, the resort is swarming with the authorities.
At the very end of Old, Trent and Maddox are placed on a helicopter where they’re presumably being flown back to the States. Mom and Dad might be dead, but they’ve contacted their aunt, who will gladly house these new adult children. What future can they possibly enjoy in these bodies? Hopefully, they won’t focus on how many decades have been robbed from their lifespan. They should revel in R-rated movies and use their sudden voting power to instigate whatever youthful chaos they can muster.
The Old Movie Ending: Comic Book vs. Adaptation
Peeters and Lévy’s graphic novel uses the magical beach to explore the bubbling tensions between various parties. What is causing the phenomenon and who is overseeing it is not that important in the comic. It’s what the phenomenon is doing to the people and how it rapidly exposes the tensions and anxieties that are already there.
Shyamalan’s daughters gave him the comic book. The filmmaker told Entertainment Weekly that its premise deeply moved him, but he couldn’t trust his emotions because any gift from them always cut deep. As time passed, Sandcastle kept bubbling in his brain. Maybe it was more than just a sweet present.
Sandcastle‘s plot reminded Shyamalan of what worked so well with The Twilight Zone, but he felt like it was incomplete. For the movie version, he needed to add another ending to Old. His ending.
But the evil pharmaceutical climax is not the only addition Shyamalan made to the story. The comic book’s central family is not the movie’s central family. Guy and Prisca belong solely to the director. Their problems are problems that he is personally working out, not Peeters and Lévy.
Why the Ending of Old Doesn’t Work
Shyamalan sees the magical beach as a blessing for these characters, not a horror. That sounds strange, considering it means their demise, but they were dying anyway. Prisca literally, Guy and their marriage more figuratively. On the beach, as they age into oblivion they also remember the love that initially united them. This final reconciliation gives them peace and frees them of their anger and regret. It also unburdens their children.
Shyamalan loses himself in the explanations, though. If all he worked into Old were Prisca and Guy, the movie would probably feel like a more satisfying adaptation in the end. His overreaching explanation regarding the who and the why confuses the viewer from what he’s ultimately exploring. Then again, no one fondly remembers the psychologist intensely ruminating on Norman Bates’ psychosis during the ending of Psycho. The why does not matter, and it’s easily forgettable.
Old is a movie about a husband and a wife — a father and a mother — realizing that their squabbles are not as important as their love’s product: their kids. Only when they face their end and witness their children grow rapidly into adults do they recognize the wonder they’ve made as a couple. Before they go, they shed their anger. Old should have ended at that moment. The shenanigans that come next are a needless afterthought.
Old is now playing in theaters.
The Most Notorious Mobsters in ‘Star Wars’ Arrive in ‘The Bad Batch’
Welcome to The Bad Batch Explained, our weekly column dedicated to those rough and tumble Clone Wars leftovers and their march through a bold, new galaxy far, far away. In this entry, we’re charging into Star Wars: The Bad Batch Episode 13 (“Infested”) and confronting the franchise’s most notorious crime syndicate as they deal with Roland Durand. So yes, there are spoilers here.
When we talk Star Wars we talk in absolutes: the Light Side versus the Dark Side. Star Wars: The Bad Batch is trying to break us from such thinking. Clone Force 99 doesn’t know what to make of their new place in the universe. They fought for the Republic, but the Republic is now an Empire. Hiding from their sight in the shadows forces the soldiers to operate as mercenaries. It’s a job that doesn’t sit well with their leader, Hunter, but his loyalty to his mates compromises whatever small values bubbled to the surface during the Clone Wars.
In each episode of The Bad Batch, we watch Clone Force 99 inch ever closer to the burgeoning Rebellion. But just when you believe they’ve turned a corner in their thinking, and someone like Captain Howzer shows it’s possible to lash out against your former masters, Hunter’s crew falls back into bounty hunter ritual alongside their underworld contact Cid. Changing spots is a damn difficult process.
At the start of The Bad Batch Episode 13, titled “Infested,” the troopers return to Ord Mantell fresh from completing another profitable mission. Sure, this one involved a scrap with some nasty Gundarks, but there’s always a hiccup buried somewhere in the plan. When they walk into Cid’s bar, they discover it swarming with goons. Their criminal liaison is out, and Roland Durand, son of crime boss Isa Durand, is in.
Hunter is not about to start taking orders from the jerk who ousted Cid. He rejects the authority of Roland Durand and heads for their ship. Their life as mercs is over. Ha!
Cid darkens their ship’s doorway. Clone Force 99 is not getting rid of her that easily. She explains that Roland pushed her out and hooked up with the Pykes. Cid’s bar on Ord Mantell is a perfect home base for their massive smuggling operation, and if she doesn’t unseat Roland quick, this particular corner of the galaxy will become an even more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Hunter accepts Cid’s offer. What options does he have? With no Cid to bark orders, he’ll have to start thinking for himself. But going up against Roland Durand means navigating treacherous pathways that could lead them into conflict with the Pykes. Getting on their bad side, which is definitely Dark adjacent, is a death sentence.
The Pykes are Star Wars‘ answer to Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel. They’re the nastiest of the nasty, solely concerned with running Spice and turning profit. Wedge yourself between them and their goal, and you’ll wind up in some Rancor’s stool.
We last encountered the Pykes in the Clone Wars Season 7 four-parter that introduced Trace and Raffa. Before that, they allied themselves with Darth Maul’s Black Sun organization and aided in reclaiming Mandalore for the terrorist group Death Watch, a.k.a. The Mandalorian‘s righteous clan. They’re also the ones who took control of the Spice mines on Kessel, the critical location we saw during Solo: A Star Wars Story that would eventually lead to Han Solo’s introductory bragging rights in A New Hope.
The Pykes are a vicious lot who hold no sanctity for life. Whenever they appear in Star Wars, they send shivers through the characters in the know. During The Bad Batch Episode 13, when they discover that Clone Force 99 has stolen their Spice from underneath Roland’s nose, they bring the galaxy’s terrible knowledge of their deeds to his office. Roland draws a blaster on the three present Pykes, but they know that he knows that they are legion. He can pull the trigger and kill these three, but the next morning will see Roland’s entire family chopped into cubes. The wannabe hoodlum has no choice. Either Cid returns the Spice, or he and his people are Rancor meat.
Cid and Clone Force 99 might have left Roland to dangle, but they also know the Pykes will come for them if the Spice doesn’t reappear. Hunter and company lost the cargo in the bottomless caverns below Ord Mantell. They have no choice but to battle the predatory bugs that live deep down in the dark. These little nasties are a hassle, but handling hassles is part of every job. As already mentioned, there are always Gundarks to swat.
What’s more intriguing in The Bad Batch Episode 13 is what occurs once the action escapades are over. They deliver the Spice to the Pykes. The mobsters accept, and they turn their attention to Roland. They can’t allow for his failure to go unpunished. His head should do nicely.
Omega, however, sees the possibility within Roland. She cannot watch as Pyke daggers extinguish it. She speaks up, and the shock of her brashness connects with the Pykes. They don’t take Roland’s head, just the tip of one horn on his head. To his amazement and everyone else, he gets to walk away from this scrape.
The chopped horn is curious. It recalls the appearance of Star Wars: Rebels supporting player, Cikatro Vizago. Could these two characters be the same person? It’s possible. Vizago is no hero. He’s a smuggler and the ringleader behind the Broken Horn Syndicate. No friend to the Empire, Vizago frequently partnered with the Rebels‘ Ghost crew and offered them Imperial intelligence in exchange for various mercenary missions.
But whether Roland and Vizago are actually one character is not as important as Hunter’s reaction to Omega’s pardon. The soldier is confused. “Why did you stick up for him after what he did?” he asks. Omega responds by noting how his pet lizard, Ruby, sees some good in him. If the animal can snuggle with such a scoundrel, there has to be a hint of Light inside him. And where one ounce of Light exists, more can shine in.
The look on Hunter’s face says everything. They’re not specifically talking about Crosshair, but the connection is obvious. Their former colleague is a killer. He betrayed the group, threw himself into the Imperial business of subjugation, and only sank further into treachery from there. But, once upon a time, he was a member of Clone Force 99. Hunter yearns for his pal’s redemption, and as we already know, Star Wars is all about redemption.
There is no pit a person can’t escape. Is all forgiven regarding Anakin Skywalker? No. But, he did not let his history dictate his future. He turned on the Emperor and tossed his bony butt down that Death Star reactor shaft. If Darth Vader can reject the Dark Side after years of loyal service, so too can Crosshair.
Omega allowing for the possibility of Light inside Roland Durand offers hope to Hunter. He hates what his brother has become, but he can’t condemn Crosshair in his heart. He must believe, the way Luke Skywalker believed, that the Imperial sharpshooter can one day recoil from the Dark Side that surrounds him. Forgiveness for others means there’s a possibility of forgiveness for us.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch Episode 13 is now streaming on Disney+.
M. Night Shyamalan Doesn’t Make Horror Movies
M. Night Shyamalan’s Old grapples with a common aspect of life (and death) through a horrific lens. The movie follows a vacationing family that winds up on a secluded beach where everyone starts aging rapidly. Shyamalan doesn’t want to just tell a story about getting old, though. He wants to illustrate the absolute terror of that experience.
It’s a familiar idea found in his previous features The Sixth Sense, Signs, and The Village. And there’s no denying they’re all scary. But are they horror films? In a featurette promoting Old, Shyamalan says they aren’t. As he explains:
I don’t ever think I make horror. Ever…Horror has an almost sense that that’s the destination. This is meant for us to come out on the other side with a belief system stronger for it.”
While this feels akin to the recent “elevated horror” discussion, Shyamalan has always held this perspective throughout his career. Rather than a genre label, horror — whether ghosts or aliens or angry plants — is a tool used to create an experience in a character’s journey. It pushes his characters through the story, but they always end up, as he says, “on the other side.”
Shyamalan is more focused on their emotional journey. He explains while discussing his writing process in the video:
“What I keep trying to do as I write is to imagine the very worst things, and would I survive that as a human being, emotionally.”
He focuses on the lasting emotional impacts of traumatic experiences. These stories aren’t just about physical survival, but mental fortitude, as well.
While dealing with such difficult and upsetting subject matter, Shyamalan also adopts a rather positive outlook to create these uniquely caring movies. Whether they work or not, they always reveal just how deeply he cares about his characters. That empathy comes from his own personal experiences. In the featurette, he explains:
“These movies, the original movies that are mine, they represent where I am at each moment. ‘Unbreakable’ represents where I was. ‘Split’ represents where I was. ‘The Visit,’ you name it. And then my father and mother who are getting, you know, very old and what do I feel about that? When I go there, the roles have switched.”
Each movie is a piece of Shymalan’s own memory, capturing a specific moment in time that is both deeply personal to him and also universally understood by an audience. He taps into collective anxieties about death and grief that make the movies’ horrific images even scarier
While Old does share quite a few thematic similarities with Shyamalan’s previous works, this movie has a much larger scope. In an interview with FlickeringMyth, he explains that the beach offered him a new opportunity to play with scope. Many of his movies are set in or around Philadelphia with cramped settings, which allow him to get a microscopic view of a family. He says about the difference:
“Normally it’s very contained, in a house. And dark. And I love that. I could endlessly tell stories at the dinner table, in my mind. But this idea of doing a thriller out on the beach, that has that scope…to have this opportunity of telling something outside, still contained, it was a rare, exciting opportunity.”
For Shyamalan, the change of environment marks a renewal. In the featurette, he says:
“I want to start over, I want to come up with a new style.”
Old is now in theaters. Check out our review here.
Mediation, Artifice, and the Anxious Digital Format of ‘Bo Burnham: Inside’
Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay on the format and structure of Bo Burnham’s comedy special Inside.
However you feel about Bo Burnham: Inside, you must admit: the acclaimed Netflix comedy special definitely feels like the most significant piece of mainstream pandemic art.
Sure, there have been other creative efforts over the course of COVID-19 to grapple both practically and narratively with the effects of lockdown. But Inside feels different. Filmed, edited, written, and performed by comedian/actor/director Bo Burnham from the confines of his guesthouse, the subject matter of Inside is sure to strike a nerve. This isn’t an especially “funny” comedy special. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Inside’s anxieties are blunt and unambiguous. And while critiques of commodified activism, glorifying the ultra-rich, and (sigh) the inability of boomers to navigate FaceTime aren’t exactly cutting edge ideas, their pervasive presence in our lives makes them relatable nonetheless. The more nuanced and personal wrinkles in the special are more compelling and trickier to parse. Namely: Burnham’s admission that the layered artifice of digital life is having an adverse effect on his mental wellbeing. Again, this isn’t a novel thesis. But, as the following video essay explains, it’s one that Burnham expresses in a distinctly novel way.
In a wildly impressive move, the video essay mirrors Inside‘s vignettes and aesthetics to unpack what exactly Burnham is doing from a formal perspective. The essay hits on a variety of topics from Inside‘s groundbreaking articulation of “internet video” cinematography to the special’s overarching concern with authenticity and artful staging. Whether it blew your socks off or struck you as “just fine” (for what it’s worth, I’m in the latter camp), this essay on the format of Bo Burnham: Inside is well-worth watching.
Watch “Breaking Open The Format of Bo Burnham’s Inside”:
Who made this?
This video essay on the format of Bo Burnham: Inside is by Virginia-based filmmaker and video editor Thomas Flight. He runs a YouTube channel under the same name. You can follow Thomas Flight and check out his back catalog of video essays on YouTube here. You can follow him on Twitter here.
More videos like this
- Want to see more of Thomas Flight’s work? Here’s what Christopher Nolan‘s Tenet can teach us about the limits of exposition.
- And here’s Flight on the brilliant (and essential) sound design of Sound of Metal.
- More from Flight: how the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit makes chess feel interesting.
- Here’s Flight’s breakdown of why director Terrence Malick‘s visual style feels so distinct.
- And here’s another sample of Flight’s work, on the gentle editing of Kelly Reichardt‘s First Cow.
- Here’s Flight again, with a look at the real-fake lighting in Pixar’s Soul.
Thursday 22 July 2021
The Real Stories Behind Wes Anderson’s ‘The French Dispatch’
Real Stories is an ongoing column about the true stories behind movies and TV shows. It’s that simple. This installment focuses on the true New Yorker stories, editors, and reporters that inspired Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that Wes Anderson is an admirer of The New Yorker. A fascination with the kind of high-brow culture and style chronicled in the magazine runs through Anderson’s movies.
His love for the magazine forms the basis of The French Dispatch, a fresh and spectacular mid-career work from the master of quirk. The new movie centers on a team of American journalists at the titular France-based periodical. And it presents a collection of stories, some of which are inspired by the editors, reporters, and writing of The New Yorker.
From our review out of Cannes, written by Luke Hicks:
“In pique Wes Anderson fashion, a narrator (voiced by Anjelica Huston) reads us through the articles at a silly rate. She rattles off mini-biographies, local histories, and statistics seemingly pulled out of a hat in a sheer fit of delight. It’s nearly impossible to follow everything on the first watch. Perhaps still so on the second and third.”
Watch the trailer for The French Dispatch:
As we prepare for the release of The French Dispatch later this year, here is a look at the true stories and people that influenced the film:
Bill Murray as the Obsessive Editor
The cast of the movie is overflowing with Hollywood stars, including many of Anderson’s regulars. One of them, Bill Murray, plays The French Dispatch founder and editor-in-chief Arthur Howitzer Jr., who is based on the true New Yorker co-founder and editor-in-chief Harold Ross. He started the magazine with his wife, Jane Grant, in 1925 and served as its boss until his death in 1951.
Ross was a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers who regularly met at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan. The collective included the likes of Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley, and even Harpo Marx. The group has taken on a mythic status in American letters and has been regularly cited and depicted in popular culture. Most notably in the 1994 movie Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, in which Sam Robards plays Ross.
Despite The New Yorker‘s reputation as a periodical for the American and global elite, Ross came from humble beginnings. He was born in Colorado, in a prospector’s cabin, never graduated from high school, and served in the military. A newspaperman at heart, Ross famously told people he walked one hundred and fifty miles to Paris after he heard the US Army had launched a newspaper there. That paper, Stars & Stripes, still exists today.
His devotion to The New Yorker is the stuff of legends. Ross edited an astonishing one-thousand, three-hundred, and ninety-nine issues of the magazine. According to current New Yorker editor David Remnick, even as Ross died in the hospital from lung cancer, “his eccentric, unstoppable obsessiveness, his unembarrassed habit of questioning every matter of grammar, usage, and fact, no matter how niggling, seemed undiminished.”
A comma obsessive, Ross’ friend and New Yorker contributor E.B. White once said, “Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.” It’s a style that still lingers in the pages of the magazine today.
Owen Wilson as the Prolific (and Sometimes Not) Reporter
Another longtime Anderson collaborator, Owen Wilson plays Herbsaint Sazerac, a French Dispatch journalist based on the true New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell. He joined the staff of the magazine in 1938 and technically stayed on until his death in 1996. In his heyday, Mitchell earned a reputation as a profile writer who, as his New York Times obituary notes, “tended to avoid the standard fare of journalists: interviews with moguls, tycoons, movie stars and captains of industry. Instead, he pursued the generals of nuisance: flops, drunks, con artists, panhandlers, gin-mill owners and their bellicose bartenders, at least one flea circus operator, a man who sold racing cockroaches, a bearded lady and a fast talker.”
Once one of the most prolific and dogged reporters at the magazine, Mitchell published his final piece for The New Yorker in 1964 and then entered into what Thomas Kunkel, in Publisher’s Weekly, called “one of the most celebrated ‘writer’s blocks’ in American letters.” Each day, Mitchell would commute to the magazine’s office, work on projects, and interact with colleagues, but produce nothing. Once a year, he would meet with editor-in-chief William Shawn (Ross’ successor) to update him on his progress. As Kunkel notes, Mitchell was busy, he just had nothing to show for it.
“An infinitely courteous and patient man, Shawn never would have pressed Mitchell about his work, much less imposed any kind of deadline on him,” Kunkel writes. “Besides, Shawn knew full well that back in the late ’30s and ’40s, when Mitchell was relatively prolific and his quirky pieces helped establish the magazine’s popularity — and profitability — the writer earned a relative pittance.” Seems fair enough.
Sazerac, the character inspired by Mitchell, is an active journalist in The French Dispatch. But I’ll be curious to see if Anderson hints at any looming writer’s block in his future. According to an article about the movie in The New Yorker, actor Wally Wolodarsky plays a member of the staff who “has never completed a single article.” Perhaps he is inspired by Mitchell’s later years.
Jeffrey Wright as an Amalgamation
According to The New Yorker, actor Jeffery Wright plays French Dispatch journalist Roebuck Wright, a food writer from the American South, whose true inspiration is “a mashup of James Baldwin and A. J. Liebling.”
Baldwin, one of the most celebrated American writers, contributed a number of articles to The New Yorker during his career, including the famous “Letter from a Region In My Mind.” The essay is one of two works that formed his seminal work on race and racism, The Fire Next Time.
He first arrived in Paris at the age of twenty-four with only forty dollars. It was the distance from America that life in Europe allowed that gave Baldwin the ability to reflect so eloquently on the oppressive nature of life in the US for a gay, Black man. Or, as the National Museum of African American History & Culture puts it, “Baldwin found a place within a diverse community of creative types. The social scene of that neighborhood gave him a respite from the constant tension that living in the United States meant for someone like him.”
Liebling was more closely associated with The New Yorker than Baldwin. He joined the magazine in 1935. A frequent visitor to Paris, Liebling was equally famous as an eater as he was a writer. In 1959, he published a memoir entitled Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris. According to his friend Mitchell, Liebling sometimes used a piece of bacon as a bookmark. I can’t imagine treating my own books that way, but it certainly sounds like something a character in a Wes Anderson film might do.
Adrien Brody as the Art Dealer
In a 1951 New Yorker profile, S. N. Behrman describes the true inspiration for the character played by Adrien Brody in The French Dispatch as “the most spectacular art dealer of all time.” Quite a statement. Brody, another Anderson regular, plays Julien Cadazio, an art dealer based on Sir Joseph Duveen.
In fact, Behrman’s “The Days of Duveen” serves as the inspiration for one of the core three stories that comprise The French Dispatch. Duveen made his millions by selling European art to wealthy Americans. His genius, as Behrman put it, was that he “noticed that Europe had plenty of art and America had plenty of money, and his entire astonishing career was the product of that simple observation.” I need only mention the last names of some of his clients for you to get the picture: Rockefeller, Morgan, Mellon, Huntington.
Rich people buying up tons of artworks undoubtedly sucks, but Duveen’s deals did lead to many of those collections finding a public home in museums. “In his five decades of selling in this country, Duveen, by amazing energy and audacity, transformed the American taste in art,” Behrman writes. “The masterpieces he brought here have fetched up in a number of museums that, simply because they contain these masterpieces, rank among the greatest in the world.”
May 68
Another one of the main narratives in The French Dispatch is based on the true story presented in a two-part article by New Yorker writer Mavis Gallant titled “The Events in May: A Paris Notebook.” Those titular events discussed have now become known as May 68, a period of unrest in France first ignited by student protests as part of the political, cultural, and sexual revolutions that helped define the 1960s.
“Their spontaneous occupation of some of the administration buildings was partly a demonstration against the Vietnam War,” NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley wrote in 2018, “and partly to demand something closer to home: to be able to spend the night in each other’s dorm rooms.”
The demonstrations led to broader protests against the government and global capital. Eventually, ten million workers joined in. “Each person that engaged, engaged himself all the way,” Bruno Queysanne, a teacher, told the New York Times in reflecting on the events. “That was how France could stop running, without there being a feeling of injustice or sabotage. The whole world was in agreement that they should pause and reflect on the conditions of existence.”
In The French Dispatch, Frances McDormand plays Lucinda Krementz, a journalist covering the protest, while Lyna Khoudri and Timothée Chalamet play two student protesters. You may have already seen the clip from the movie in which Krementz confronts Chalamet’s character, Zeffirelli, while he bathes.
Much of the rage of the protesters was directed towards the French government led by President Charles de Gaulle. At one point, the protests got so heated that de Gaulle left the country. The government eventually negotiated with unions for better pay and conditions for workers. And while de Gaulle won re-election the following month, the impact of the protests remained.
“But the established hierarchy and formality that permeated relationships between teachers and students, parents and children, bosses and workers, and ultimately even politicians and citizens, had been upended,” writes Alissa Rubin in the aforementioned New York Times article. “When students returned to classes, they could now ask questions in class and dispute ideas — a revolution in the French educational system. Bosses had to treat their workers better.”
The French Dispatch releases in theaters on October 22, 2021.
What to Expect from Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’
Welcome to Great Expectations, a recurring series in which we break down the most essential information about an upcoming movie or show. In this edition, we look at what you can expect from — and where you can watch — the new movie adaptation of Dune.
To say that adapting Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune into a movie has been a difficult journey would be an understatement of epic proportions. We’ve seen one version fall through, another version that failed to draw a crowd, and a TV miniseries version that’s fine but not very memorable. But now, Dune is (hopefully) finally getting the cinematic treatment it deserves. Directed by Denis Villeneuve (Blade Runner 2049), with a screenplay by Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts (Prometheus), and Eric Roth (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), the new adaptation is gearing up to make a big splash in fall 2021.
Here’s everything you need to know about Denis Villeneuve’s Dune:
Dune Release Date (and Where to Watch)
Production on Dune saw significant delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the movie finally has a date locked in. Warner Bros. will release the adaptation in theaters and for streaming on HBO Max on October 22, 2021. If you’re one of those people who likes to read the book first, you might want to get started ASAP.
Dune Cast
The adaptation’s cast includes Timothée Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name), Rebecca Ferguson (Mission: Impossible – Fallout), Oscar Isaac (Ex Machina), Zendaya (Spider-Man: Far From Home), Jason Momoa (Aquaman), Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men), Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men), Stellan Skarsgård (Mamma Mia!), Charlotte Rampling (The Night Porter), Dave Bautista (Army of the Dead), Stephen McKinley Henderson (Lady Bird), David Dastmalchian (Prisoners), Chang Chen (A Brighter Summer Day), and Sharon Duncan-Brewster (Blooded).
The Plot of Dune
It’s hard to think of a work of science fiction that has more complicated lore than Dune. The original novel takes place in an alternate galaxy where people are constantly going to war over land and resources. The story starts with Duke Leto (Isaac), a wealthy heir asked by his Emperor to mine a valuable mind-altering drug called “spice” on the desert planet Arrakis. Later, his son Paul Atreides (Chalamet) is tasked to finish his father’s mission. But he isn’t the only person who wants to take over Arrakis, and an epic battle commences.
While Villeneuve will be following the plot of Herbert’s novel, he told Vanity Fair that he will be making some tweaks. For example, he will be adding to the character of Atreides’ mother, Lady Jessica (Ferguson), and changing Dr. Liet-Kynes to a woman, played by Duncan-Brewster.
The movie is expected to only cover about half of the first Dune novel, leaving a lot of room for at least one sequel, currently known as Dune: Part Two. As Villeneuve explained to Vanity Fair:
“I would not agree to make this adaptation of the book with one single movie. The world is too complex. It’s a world that takes its power in details.”
Watch the Trailers
When Warner Bros. announced Denis Villeneuve would adapt Dune into a movie, the general prediction was that it would be pretty magnificent. The trailers confirm that theory. Let’s see, there’s some killer acting from Chalamet. Sleek and mysterious aesthetics. And, of course, a bold new imagining of the infamous Sandworm. This adaptation looks like it’s going to have just about everything you loved about the book — and more. Watch the two trailers here:
A Prequel Show is Already in the Works
Already worried that Villeneuve’s Dune won’t be enough for you? No need to worry. A spin-off show, called Dune: The Sisterhood, is already in the works for HBO Max. The series will take place before the events of the new movie. And the focus will be on the Bene Gesserit, a mysterious order of women with special abilities. Villeneuve explained this decision:
“The Bene Gesserit have always been fascinating to me. Focusing a series around that powerful order of women seemed not only relevant and inspiring but a dynamic setting for the television series.”
Villeneuve will direct at least the pilot episode, while Jon Spaihts is writing the script. So get ready to get your sci-fi on, because the Dune universe is here to stay.
‘Old’ Sees M. Night Shyamalan Fall and Struggle to Get Back Up
M. Night Shyamalan isn’t the only filmmaker to have scaled great heights, fallen out of critical favor, and then climbed his way back up again, but he’s one of the very few to continue delivering hits all along the way. His genre debut with The Sixth Sense (1999) resulted in his highest-grossing and most acclaimed film to date (although we all agree his best remains the following year’s Unbreakable), and he’s kept the high-concept thrills coming ever since to the tune of over two billion dollars. Audiences have remained loyal no matter how silly the films get or how low the critical scores fall, but his latest movie, Old, might just test those waters even harder than did 2006’s Lady in the Water — which bombed with critics and audiences alike.
Vacations are meant to slow down someone’s life for a week or so with relaxation and fun replacing the drudgery of their daily grind, but that’s not in the cards for Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps). The couple is on the verge of separating but decided to take one last trip with their kids. The tropical resort has catered to their every need, and the family is even tipped off to a secret beach that’s revealed only to special guests. Soon a handful of such special guests find themselves trapped there, though. And as time ticks by, they realize something horrifying: every thirty minutes that passes sees them age one whole year.
The movie sees the filmmaker in familiar territory as Old puts its protagonists face to face with an unnerving phenomenon and forces them to deal with a cruel new reality. This is an interesting enough mystery on its face. But while each passing minute ages the film’s characters it also threatens to push viewers farther away from giving a damn. None of the characters are likable or as engaging as the setup. Once the premise runs out of steam, viewers are left with very little to cling to. Visuals are a mix of shoddy VFX and detached camera choices. The performances will have you convinced that nearly the entire cast has forgotten how to act. And the ending — the element that Shyamalan has been rightly or wrongly aligned with the most over the years — simply underwhelms.
The script, adapted by Shyamalan from the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederick Peeters, leaves viewers with little room in which to workshop ideas and interpretations because the characters are constantly unloading exposition and clear observation as to what we’re seeing on the screen. The dialogue rarely feels natural. Statements and conversations land with a written stiltedness. And that’s even before adult actors start conversing as if they’re six to twelve years old. None of this is how actual people talk.
One result of that dialogue is the sea of surprisingly bad performances in Old by the movie’s ensemble cast. To the point that it wouldn’t surprise anyone if they joined together to file a class-action lawsuit against Shyamalan for making them look so utterly incompetent. These are strong actors who’ve proven their talent elsewhere including Bernal, Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Eliza Scanlen, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Ken Leung, and two of our favorite breakouts of a few years ago, Alex Wolff and Thomasin McKenzie. For all their prior skill, though, they’re helpless here against Shyamalan’s writing. And unlike master thespian Mark Wahlberg, they’re unable to at least (unintentionally) milk it for laughs.
No story, especially one that leans into genre, needs to tie up every last detail and loose end, but while Old goes too far in trying to do just that with its ending — or endings, as the movie goes on for several minutes after what feels like the natural stop — it falls short with the smaller questions. Would a six-year-old really care about missing prom and graduation? Why don’t they take the knife away from the character slipping into dementia before they stab another person? How is it that neither the doctor nor the nurse knows what to do when someone is having a seizure? And what is with Shyamalan’s disgust and fear over the elderly?
Old does look good at times as Shyamalan and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis offer sumptuous visuals and a couple of disturbing images involving broken bones, but the movie’s visual effects stumble more than once. Carnage is minimal, but when present it bears the distinct sheen of CG that doesn’t quite blend into the surroundings. And green screen usage adds to the occasional ugliness. The camerawork also plays a role here as it tries to capture the horror and uncertainty of it all without showing all that much. Closeups of characters’ faces reacting to things unseen, a frame moving around an object rather than into it, and a general avoidance of some things altogether make for odd choices that rarely feel successful and instead leave viewers detached from the terror.
There is a disturbing premise at play here, one that offers up numerous opportunities for horrors both visceral and mental. But far too few of them are exploited. One character’s vanity gets the best of them as their carefully curated physique fails and falls apart. Yet that body horror never takes grip with anyone else. The children seem oblivious to finding themselves in adult bodies — Tom Hanks milked the shift for more unnerving discoveries in Big (1988) than the characters do here. And the adults become nothing more than a collection of maladies. There’s no effort given to painful realizations of lives wasted or sad acknowledgments that time is precious and over far too soon.
It’s a cliche of sorts to say so, but Old feels like a feature-length movie that would have been far better suited as a half-hour episode of The Twilight Zone. The initially intriguing premise is stretched thin in the least interesting of ways. And by the time the ending hits it lacks a punch. The same goes for the ending that follows a couple of minutes later. And again for the one after that. When the end credits finally begin, you too will be wondering if your past (hour and forty-eight minutes) could have been better spent.
Wednesday 21 July 2021
‘Ted Lasso’ is Not Trying to Be Your Comfort Show
Welcome to Previously On, a column that gives you the rundown on the latest TV. This week, Valerie Ettenhofer reviews Ted Lasso Season 2.
For the better part of the past year, audiences have been talking about Ted Lasso with the kind of reverence reserved only for the best that humanity has to offer. Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) is the hero we need right now. Ted Lasso is the kind-hearted cure to our times. From my own review of Season 1: “It’s impossible not to smile when watching Ted Lasso.”
The sophomore season of the Apple TV+ series brings some of that lofty talk back to earth by reminding us that it ain’t easy being Ted. The eight episodes of Ted Lasson Season 2 available for review (out of twelve in total) favor moral complexity over tidy narrative arcs and present several new challenges to the affable football coach’s almost mythical good nature.
With a slew of awards and the most important praise already under its belt, the show makes a brave choice by going introspective when it could have stayed broader. Ted Lasson Season 2 puts its characters in situations that can’t simply be solved by kindness and cookies. And for the most part, it’s a gamble that pays off.
Ted’s most notable roadblock comes in the form of sports psychologist Sharon (Sarah Niles), who is initially hired to get a key player out of a mental rut but stays on and quickly becomes a sore point for Coach Lasso. At a certain point, the season’s overarching plot seems to be less about whether or not the new AFC Richmond will be successful, and more about whether this beloved figure will be willing to dig beyond his impulse towards the silly and the sweet to what lies beneath.
Ted Lasson Season 2 also gives its large ensemble room to grow in satisfying and surprising ways. In one of the best sub-plots, Nigerian player Sam (Toheeb Jimoh, who shines now with his expanded screen time) grapples with an ethical decision that could impact the entire team. And newly promoted Coach Nate (Nick Mohammed) begins gauging his self-worth against his social media image, with sure-to-be-polarizing results.
Meanwhile, Roy (Brett Goldstein) and Keeley (Juno Temple) grow into their serious relationship, facing personal and professional trials along the way. Every character, from team owner Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) to Diamond Dog Higgins (Jeremy Swift), is given ample screen time, albeit in disparate plots that rarely see them all in the same place.
A season-long attempt to humanize saint-like Ted and question his methods may sound like a drag, but rest assured, Season 2 of Ted Lasso isn’t just here to bum you out. The show’s comedy is still firing on all cylinders. When Rebecca tells Ted she’s dating a man named John, he exclaims, “STAMOS?!” with a near-jump-scare level of fervor. Later on, we’re introduced to his coaching alter ego, “Led Tasso,” whose attempts to be a hardass are more hilarious than intimidating.
Pop culture bits between Ted and quippy Coach Bearde (Brendan Hunt) are cleverer than ever, with the two riffing on everything from Tom Cruise’s tiny ponytails to the climax of The Shining. In the tradition of Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Cougar Town) sitcoms, several of the most laugh-out-loud moments are too intricate in their silliness to easily describe here.
Sudeikis’ performance is the glue that holds the series together. When he’s serious, imbuing folksy monologues with restrained emotion, he’ll make you cry. Ted often looks as if he could cry himself, his open-heartedness physically manifested in the form of eyes that are always half-brimming with tears.
Yet when he’s funny, as when he spends an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to sit on a couch while nervous, Sudeikis can deliver physical comedy and babbling witticisms with just as much enthusiasm. This season, he unearths a fine line between the two, and we see — through psychologist Sharon’s eyes — when Ted’s jokes become defense mechanisms.
Ted Lasso Season 2 (so far, through the first eight episodes) doesn’t quite reach the perfection of its first. But its imperfection is admirable because it clearly comes from an urge to push past its initial conceit. Having sold us completely on the concept of a Mr. Rogers-like football coach who can single-handedly dismantle toxic masculinity, the folks behind Ted Lasso seem compelled to acknowledge — perhaps in the wake of 2020 — that real life is often more complicated than that.
The result is a funny, sweet, and, yes, challenging batch of episodes that builds on a larger-than-life first season in compelling, surprising ways.
Ted Lasson Season 2 begins dropping weekly on Apple TV+ on July 23rd.
What to Expect from ‘The Suicide Squad’
Welcome to Great Expectations, a recurring series in which we break down the most essential information about an upcoming movie or show. In this edition, we look at what you can expect from — and where you can watch — The Suicide Squad.
DC Comics fans rejoice: your favorite oddball cast of superheroes is back with a vengeance. While the 2016 movie Suicide Squad was generally panned by critics, there is hope that The Suicide Squad, written and directed by James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) will be better-received. While it does exist in the same universe as the first movie, sort of, the two are only loosely connected. So, the second take on the material has a chance to introduce some much-needed changes.
Here’s everything you need to know about The Suicide Squad:
The Suicide Squad Release Date (and Where to Watch)
Because of Warner Bros.’s new streaming deal with HBO Max, The Suicide Squad will debut in theaters and on the streaming service simultaneously on August 6, 2021. Although its theatrical run ultimately depends on how well it does, the movie leaves HBO Max after one month — so plan accordingly!
The Suicide Squad Cast
The Suicide Squad welcomes back some familiar faces while also introducing some new ones. Margot Robbie returns as Harley Quinn in her third stint in the DC Extended Universe after Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey (2020). Other original Suicide Squad members coming back include Joel Kinnaman as leader Rick Flag and Jai Courteney as Captain Boomerang. Also, Viola Davis is also back as the Suicide Squad missions director Amanda Waller. Those characters who survived the original who aren’t in the new movie include Will Smith and Jared Leto, who played the Joker.
Newcomers in The Suicide Squad include Pete Davidson (The King of Staten Island) as armored villain Blackguard, Idris Elba (Luther) as special weapons-expert and super dad Bloodsport, John Cena (Blockers) as a peacemaker called, well, Peacemaker, David Dastmalchian (Ant-Man) as Polka-Dot Man, Flula Borg (Pitch Perfect 2) as Javelin, Daniela Melchior as a rat specialist appropriately named Ratcatcher 2, Mayling Ng as Mongal, Michael Rooker (Guardians of the Galaxy) as Savant, Alice Braga (City of God) as Sol Soria, Nathan Fillion (Firefly) as T.D.K., Peter Capaldi (Doctor Who) as the highly intelligent super-villain The Thinker, Sean Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) as Weasel, and last, but certainly not least, man/myth/legend Sylvester Stallone as the voice of the half-man/half-shark known as King Shark.
The Plot of The Suicide Squad
The Suicide Squad follows a cast of infamous super-villains who are assembled from the Belle Reve prison and are turned into Task Force X. Their mission? Go to a remote South American island called Corto Maltese and eradicate a sketchy prison that is home to a shady cast of characters. While on Corto Maltese, the group encounters a giant bloodthirsty starfish called Starro… because that’s totally not the creepiest thing we can possibly imagine.
Watch the Trailers
If you were wondering whether or not The Suicide Squad would be totally epic or not, allow these two trailers to confirm that it definitely will be. Among the things we see are: Harley Quinn being her regular badass self and taking out a group of adversaries with the swoop of her gun, members of the crew leaping out of a crumbling building, and of course, the giant killer starfish in the flesh. Head to the PG trailers below to watch these see-it-to-believe-it moments yourself. And if you’re ready for more, the age-restricted Red-Band trailer can be found here.
The James Gunn controversy that led him to DC
Career-wise, The Suicide Squad is likely more significant to James Gunn than to anyone else. In 2018, old, offensive jokes Gunn had made on Twitter resurfaced, and he was temporarily fired by Disney from the next Guardians of the Galaxy sequel. In an interview with the New York Times, Gunn admits he was convinced that his career was over at that moment.
“It was unbelievable. And for a day, it seemed like everything was gone. Everything was gone. I was going to have to sell my house. I was never going to work again. That’s what it felt like.”
Gunn also gave his thoughts on “cancel culture” and whether he deserved to be punished for his dumb Twitter comments of yesteryear:
“Cancel culture also is people like Harvey Weinstein, who should be canceled. People who have gotten canceled and then remain canceled — most of those people deserved that. The paparazzi are not just the people on the streets; they’re the people combing Twitter for any past sins. All of that sucks. It’s painful. But some of it is accountability. And that part of it is good. It’s just about finding that balance.”
Months after Gunn’s firing, everything changed (again). He was hired by Warner Bros. to make The Suicide Squad (though he could have done Superman if he wanted) and felt he was getting a second chance. Now, he is one of the only directors to have worked in the DC Extended Universe and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And he’s also now back at Disney and Marvel Studios doing the movie he had been fired from, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
As the release date gets closer, it’s looking like perhaps The Suicide Squad will be a chance at redemption for the Suicide Squad property, as well as for James Gunn.
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