The Mitchells vs. the Machines (CREDIT: Sony Pictures Animation Inc.)
Every week, I list all the upcoming (or recently released) movies, TV shows, albums, podcasts, etc. that I believe are worth checking out.
Movies
–22 vs. Earth (April 30 on Disney+) – Prequel short to Soul.
–Limbo (Theaters)
–The Mitchells vs. the Machines (April 30 on Netflix)
TV
–Pose Season 3 Premiere (May 2 on FX) – Final season alert!
–Star Wars: The Bad Batch Series Premiere (May 4 on Disney+)
–Girls5eva Season 1 (May 6 on Peacock) – A 90s girl group tries to make a comeback…
–That Damn Michael Che Series Premiere (May 6 on HBO Max)
Music -Royal Blood, Typhoons
Sports on TV
–NBA Special Edition: Marvel’s Arena of Heroes: Golden State Warriors vs. New Orleans Pelicans (May 3 on ESPN) – An NBA game with Marvel superheroes mixed in.
Podcasts
–The Deep Dive with Jessica St. Clair and June Diane Raphael – Jessica and June and friends talk about what it’s like to be a woman.
Starring: Amir El-Masry, Vikash Bhai, Ola Orebiyi, Kwabena Ansah, Kenneth Collard, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Kais Nashef
Director: Ben Sharrock
Running Time: 103 Minutes
Rating: R for Occasionally Angry Language
Release Date: April 30, 2021 (Theaters)
Limbo is like Napoleon Dynamite, but if it were about refugees on a remote Scottish island instead of high schoolers in Idaho, and if the Pedro character were the lead and the Napoleon character his wacky roommate. Both feature oodles of quirky cinematography of patient wide shots. Both have a charmingly contemplative spirit. Both have their hearts in the fringes of society. Both include awkward classroom scenes. And both feature a climactic musical sequence: where once Napoleon boogied down to Jamiroquai’s “Canned Heat,” Limbo‘s Omar strums out a triumphant performance on his grandfather’s oud.
Writer-director Ben Sharrock is fully attuned to the light surrealism of an existence in which so much of your day-to-day life is beyond your control. Omar (Amir El-Masry) is a little hard to read, but it seems like he’s happy to have escaped the strife of his native Syria. And while he puts on a stoic face, he’s clearly yearning for something more permanent. He lives in a mostly unfurnished house with three fellow refugee roommates, and the rest of his routine is just as starkly unfurnished. He spends much of his time attending cultural assimilation classes that cover everything from English grammar to role-playing scenarios for sexual harassment awareness. Every few days, he calls his parents via a payphone on the side of an empty road. And when he goes grocery shopping, he appears to be the only customer, and all he hopes to find is his beloved sumac spice.
Omar’s refugee experience could be a whole hell of a lot worse, but his melancholy predicament makes you hope that he can improve it by taking some small measure of control wherever he can. So when he asks the shopkeeper about the sumac and it eventually shows up, we feel that victory. And when he reaches out to his estranged brother, it cuts even deeper. And when he finally picks up his oud after betraying no interest in it for most of the time we spend with him, it’s cause for doing cartwheels in the aisle. I can’t speak for everyone else who’s seen Limbo, but I know that I couldn’t help but air-oud to that performance.
Starring: Martin Serner, Jessica Louthander, Tatiana Delaunay, Anders Hellström, Jan-Eje Ferling, Bengt Bergius, Thore Flygel
Director: Roy Andersson
Running Time: 78 Minutes
Rating: Unrated, But It Should Be Rated E for “Extreme Existentialism”
Release Date: April 30, 2021 (Theaters and On Demand)
About Endlessness is so far afield from any other movie I’ve ever seen. I make an effort to watch as many new films as possible, so it’s nice to know that hard-to-define surprises can still arrive every once in a while. And sometimes when one of those new experiences makes its way through, I find myself at a total loss to respond. If I were assigned to review About Endlessness for an outlet with multiple critics, I would probably ask someone else to take over the job. But since this is my own blog, I feel compelled to do my best. So world, for the record: I’ve seen About Endlessness, and it’s fair to say it challenged me.
When I’m at a loss when writing a review, I find it wise to fall back on what can be objectively stated. So with that in mind, what we have here is a series of vignettes courtesy of septuagenarian Swedish auteur Roy Andersson. It opens with a couple sitting on a bench overlooking a city. A man walks through a town carrying a cross while a crowd chants “Crucify!” Some young women dance while some young men watch. A priest despairs, “What should I do now that I have lost my faith?” Hitler even shows up at one point. The whole thing ends with a guy having car trouble in the middle of the road.
I was raised Roman Catholic, so obviously the parts with the priest and the cross-carrying resonate with me. But beyond that, I have to chalk the point of this whole affair up to Andersson’s emotional/creative/existential whims. Is the experience of About Endlessness satisfying enough for me to recommend it? I’m not sure it’s supposed to be “satisfying,” unless you can be satisfied by the despair of mundanity. For some viewers (and you know who you are), that may actually sound appealing. But if you still have doubts, you should know that it’s only 78 minutes long. So if you’re feeling even just a little bit adventurous, why not give this oddball concoction a chance?
About Endlessness is Recommended If You Like: A Nordic outlook on life
Starring: Rachel Sennott, Molly Gordon, Danny Defararri, Polly Draper, Fred Melamed, Dianna Agron
Director: Emma Seligman
Running Time: 77 Minutes
Rating: Unrated
Release Date: April 2, 2021
After watching the very Jewish Shiva Baby, I discovered that its lead, Rachel Sennott, is not Jewish but Italian Catholic. Meanwhile, Dianna Agron, who plays the shiksa wife, is Jewish! But after the initial shock wore off, I realized that this actually wasn’t terribly unbelievable. American Jews and Italian-American Catholics do have some cultural similarities after all, especially if we’re talking about the ones in or around the New York City area. Sennott is from Simsbury, Connecticut, which is fairly close to NYC, while Agron was born in Georgia and raised in Texas and California, so perhaps the real difference is geographical. So much of American cinematic Jewish culture is New York Jewish culture!
Anyway, I enjoy stories about people with taboo jobs who are also just taking care of their lives, you know? And that certainly applies here as Sennott plays Danielle, a soon-to-be college grad who makes extra cash through a sugar daddy app. While attending a shiva with her parents, she runs into one of her clients, and it’s about as awkward as you can possibly imagine! Throw in some bagels, a bunch of nosy aunts and family friends, and a confrontational childhood friend/ex-fling, and that’s Shiva Baby!
Jeff’s cousin Kylie has admitted to never listening to an episode of That’s Auntertainment!, but she did make time to provide a setlist for the latest Karaoke Korner, and she selected some major 2000s hitmakers.
Every week, I list all the upcoming (or recently released) movies, TV shows, albums, podcasts, etc. that I believe are worth checking out.
Movies
–Mortal Kombat (2021) (Theaters and Streaming on HBO Max)
–Together Together (April 23 in Theaters, May 11 On Demand) – Ed Helms, Patti Harrison, and surrogacy, oh my!
TV
–Rutherford Falls Season 1 (Premiered April 22 on Peacock) – Mike Schur, Ed Helms, and a town bordering a Native American reservation walk into a sitcom.
–Romeo and Juliet (April 23 on PBS) – A new production from London’s National Theater starring Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor
–A Black Lady Sketch Show Season 2 Premiere (April 23 on HBO)
-93rd Academy Awards (April 25 on ABC) – Handin’ out those Oscars.
–The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 Premiere (April 28 on Hulu)
Music
-Eric Church, Heart & Soul – A three-part album released over the course of a week!
-Dinosaur Jr., Sweep It Into Space
Rating: Unrated, But Filled with Blood and Guts and All Sorts of Profanity
Release Date: April 20, 2021 (On Demand, DVD, and Blu-Ray)
Grindhouse, grindhouse, grindhouse!!! Do you want to see a bunch of racists get their guts ripped out? Well, if you’ve stumbled upon Death Ranch, then you’ve come to the right place. If you are who considers yourself a friend to all of humankind, then surely you believe that the Ku Klux Klan is one of the most distasteful organizations in modern society. Ergo, they’re an obvious choice for the villains in a tale of three Black siblings on the run through the woods of Tennessee in 1971. And in true grindhouse fashion, these Klansmen are just outrageously, disgustingly awful. If you can imagine the most depraved things possible, then chances are writer-director Charlie Steeds has thought to include it, from rape to cannibalism to an extreme close-up of body hair-ridden petroleum jelly. There’s a lot of real-life trauma baked in this den of horrors; it’s up to you the viewer to decide if this is the sort of thing you can stomach.
When I see a movie about Black people fighting back against their tormentors, I’m generally inclined to pontificate about where it fits within the tradition of African-American cinema and about how it resonates with real-world struggles. But there’s something telling me that that might not be the approach that this particular movie is asking for. Looking over the rest of Steeds’ filmography only confirms that suspicion. It’s filled with titles like Deadman Apocalypse, Vampire Virus, and The House of Violent Desire. And if Escape From Cannibal Farm is anything to go by, then people eating other people in rural settings is clearly a recurring theme for him.
I almost feel like I shouldn’t be reviewing a movie like this at all. Shouldn’t it be a secret that gets passed around in grimy basements and abandoned projection booths? It’s actually available on demand and on DVD and Blu-Ray for regular home viewing, but something tells me that the most appropriate way to watch Death Ranch is by setting up your own impromptu theater in an empty barn on a creepy country back road.
Death Ranch is Recommended If You Like: BlacKkKlansman but wish it had been a lot more like Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Godzilla vs. Kong (CREDIT: Warner Bros. Pictures/YouTube Screenshot)
Starring: Godzilla, King Kong, Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Shun Oguri, Eiza González, Julian Dennison, Lance Reddick, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir, Mechagodzilla
Director: Adam Wingard
Running Time: 113 Minutes
Rating: PG-13
Release Date: March 31, 2021
What if it were Godzilla vs. Kong vs. … jmunney? Does the latest no-holds cinematic brawl between these two iconic behemoths make me want to join the fight? Hey man, I’m a pacifist! But entering their domain in some capacity might be fun. They seem like good company. Kong is certainly a clown. And sensitive, to boot! Godzilla’s harder to peg, but I’d be willing to put in the emotional groundwork to make the connection. What’s Mechagodzilla’s deal, though? He sure comes out of nowhere. Does he even have a soul?!
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