Entertainment To-Do List: Week of 8/28/20

August 28, 2020

jmunney Cinema, Entertainment To-Do List, Music, Television , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A.P BIO — “Disgraced” Episode 302 — Pictured: (l-r) Glenn Howerton as Jack Griffin, Allisyn Snyder as Heather — (CREDIT: Chris Haston/Peacock)

Every week, I list all the upcoming (or recently released) movies, TV shows, albums, podcasts, etc. that I believe are worth checking out.

Movies
–The New Mutants (Theaters) – I’m still not convinced this long-delayed movie is actually coming out! (Or that it’s safe to go to the theater yet.)
–Bill & Ted Face the Music (Theaters and On Demand)

TV
–A.P. Bio Season 3 (September 3 on Peacock) – One of the funniest sitcoms out there right now!

Music on TV
-2020 MTV Video Music Awards (August 30 on MTV)

Music
-Disclosure, Energy
-Dua Lipa, Club Future Nostalgia: The Remix Album
-Katy Perry, Smile

‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’ and They Also Face the Weight of Years’ Worth of Anticipation

August 27, 2020

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Bill & Ted Face the Music (CREDIT: Orion Pictures)

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Samara Weaving, Erinn Hayes, Jayma Mays, Kristen Schaal, Holland Taylor, Anthony Carrigan, William Sadler, Hal Landon Jr., Beck Bennett, Kid Cudi, Jillian Bell

Director: Dean Parisot

Running Time: 88 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for “Some Language,” Apparently

Release Date: August 28, 2020 (Theaters and On Demand)

Bill & Ted Face the Music is about the crushing expectations of destiny. It’s kind of like the Bhagavad Gita in that way. From a gnarlier perspective, it’s also about how time travel doesn’t make any sense, and won’t ever make sense, but that’s okay, because we can still be excellent to each other.

When we first met the Wyld Stallyns during their first excellent time-hopping adventure thirty years ago, we learned that their music would serve as the inspiration for a utopian society several centuries into the future. And now it’s finally time for them to answer that call. If they don’t, the time-space continuum will totally be ripped apart! But in 2020, the biggest live music gig that Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Alex Winter) can get is the wedding of Ted’s younger brother to Bill’s former stepmom. How then can they possibly live up to what Fate has asked of them? How could anybody, really? The premise worked well enough in Excellent Adventure, as it remained theoretical and fantastical, but now disappointment feels inevitable.

But fortunately Face the Music isn’t really about the promise of that world-saving composition. Rather, it is about the shenanigans that lead up to that point, naturally enough. Facing a profound case of writer’s block and a terrifying time limit of only 78 minutes, Bill and Ted figure they might as well visit their future selves and steal the song they will have already written by that point. But that proves to be fruitless no matter how far in the future they go, which begs the question: are they only able to travel into a possible future in which they’re not successful? But how could that be if they’re able to visit the utopian far future when they will have necessarily been successful? And why is there a time limit anyway? If they fail, can’t they just get in the phone booth and go back far enough in the past to start over? The stern visage of Holland Taylor (who plays the future’s Great Leader) assures us otherwise.

There’s a sanded-down quality to Face the Music that can happen when you try to resurrect old beloved characters. Bill and Ted are still plenty charming, but they’re far from as dopey as they were when they were teenagers, even though they still talk in the same surfer bro SoCal cadence. Meanwhile, there’s a trickier sort of alchemy attempted with their daughters (Brigette Lundy-Paine and Samara Weaving), who are basically gender-flipped carbon copies of their dads but they’re also actually geniuses, at least when it comes to music theory, history, and composition.

Face the Music struggles to get a handle on how ridiculous the Wyld Stallyns and their loved ones and collaborators are supposed to be. They do live in a ridiculous reality after all, as they must contend with a depression-prone killer robot (Anthony Carrigan) and a Grim Reaper (William Sadler returning from Bogus Journey) who mopes about not being allowed to deliver 40-minute bass solos. That’s often the trouble with returning to a kooky world. The base level of kookiness is already so high that any new bit of kookiness just feels like chaos. There’s a nice degree of heart here that sometimes shines through in the cacophony, but there’s nothing quite as sublime as “Bob Genghis Khan.”

Bill & Ted Face the Music is Recommended If You Like: Midlife crises, Millennia-spanning supergroups, Just-go-with-it time travel

Grade: 3 out of 5 Princess Wives

New Documentary Says, Dear Wrestling: ‘You Cannot Kill David Arquette’, Wrestling Fires Back: Chew on This

August 25, 2020

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , Leave a comment

You Cannot Kill David Arquette (CREDIT: Super LTD)

Starring: David Arquette

Directors: David Darg and Price James

Running Time: 90 Minutes

Rating: R for Wrestling Blood and Man-Butt

Release Date: August 28, 2020 (Drive-In Theaters and On Demand)

I don’t want to kill David Arquette! But it sure seems like some hardcore wresting fans do. A bit of essential background: while Arquette was promoting his 2000 wrestling comedy Ready to Rumble, he was given the WCW World Championship belt, which apparently was a historically unpopular decision. That’s the instigating factor for the documentary You Cannot Kill David Arquette, in which we see the star of Scream and Eight Legged Freaks attempt to actually make a legitimate go of a grappling career. For most of his public life, he’s been dismissed as a total goofball lightweight, and he doesn’t refute those accusations. Instead, he absorbs them as he attempts to transform into something else.

If you only know of Arquette through his most well-known movie roles, you will certainly see a new side of him here. Not an entirely new one, though. He still very much has an eager-to-please puppy-dog vibe through and through. And the hulking physique he adopts feels more like a shiny coat of paint rather than a full-on metamorphosis. But the impression that really lingers is the obsessive motor that drives Arquette to his core. He mentions at one point how he hates growing up, but I think what he really hates is letting go. Once he has decided who he is going to be and where his journey will take him, he literally cannot see any obstacles in his way to that goal

There’s a point in YCKDA when Arquette is finally going full-bore in the ring, with his face relentlessly covered in blood, and I cannot help but wonder: why? Why put yourself through that? Is it truly worth it? I know what Arquette’s answer is, and I know that it is very different from mine. That assumes, though, that he even bothers to stop and ask himself these questions, instead of just plowing forward with blinders on. Stories like You Cannot Kill David Arquette frighten me. That might be on purpose. It’s tough to watch what Mr. Arquette is putting himself through, but I do believe that he’s calling out to all of us to take witness of him.

You Cannot Kill David Arquette is Recommended If You Like: The bloodiest parts of The Wrestler, the gnarliest circuits in pro wrestling, Famous people putting themselves through a gauntlet

Grade: 3 out of 5 Heel Turns

‘Unhinged’ Doesn’t Let Its Foot Off the Senselessness Pedal

August 20, 2020

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , Leave a comment

Unhinged (PHOTO CREDIT: Skip Bolden)

Starring: Russell Crowe, Caren Pistorius, Gabriel Bateman, Jimmi Simpson, Austin P. McKenzie

Director: Derrick Borte

Running Time: 93 Minutes

Rating: R for A Massive Overreaction

Release Date: August 21, 2020

Unhinged is basically the Book of Job but like if Satan’s preferred form of torture were the most outrageous case of road rage ever. Although I must admit that this comparison isn’t perfect, as harried single mom Rachel Hunter (Caren Pistorious) is far from as perfectly righteous as Job was. But the inciting incident that she perpetrates hardly calls for the hell that she endures. While trying to get her son Kyle (Gabriel Bateman) to school on time, she slams on her car horn at the truck stuck in front of her at a green light. The fact that she didn’t instead offer a quick courtesy honk is all the justification that Tom Cooper (Russell Crowe), the driver of that truck, needs to go on a violent spree of making bad things happen to good people.

My biblical reference may sound like a rather high-minded interpretation for such a pulpy film, but I don’t know how else to process this senselessness. Tom says that he’s “been kind of having a hard time lately,” but we never really learn what that is all about. The implication is that he’s finally snapped after being mistreated himself for too long and that he’s now going to take out his anger on whoever’s in his way. But since we learn essentially nothing about his backstory, he registers more as an anonymous agent of evil than an actual person. In that way, Unhinged is like a high-speed, wide-open version of The Strangers, as society is invaded by meaningless destruction disguised as some guy wearing the mask of road rage.

The opening credits feature a montage of traffic accidents, thereby suggesting that Tom’s revenge is the ultimate consequence of a selfish American driving culture. But Tom is too undefined to actually feel like a product of that backstory. He strikes me as more of a piece with the motiveless killers that were in vogue in 70s horror landmarks like Halloween and The Last House on the Left, which The Strangers is a clear descendant of. Nevertheless, I think the viewers who most enjoy Unhinged will be the ones whose blood pumps at one-man-pushed-to-the-brink thrillers like Death Wish or Falling Down. Unlike in those flicks, though, the focus here is on the mom who fights back against that guy and summons the strength to protect her cub. That doesn’t really make the carnage any more palatable, though it does at least make it less likely to linger with a sour aftertaste in your conscience.

Unhinged is Recommended If You Like: Taxi Driver but because you want to fight back and teach the Travis Bickles of the world a lesson

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Cases of the Mondays

‘Chemical Hearts’ Alternates Between Low-Key and a Cascade of Emotions

August 19, 2020

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , Leave a comment

Chemical Hearts (CREDIT: Cara Howe/Amazon Studios)

Starring: Austin Abrams, Lili Reinhart

Director: Richard Tanne

Running Time: 93 Minutes

Rating: R for A Sex Scene, I Guess, But It’s Restrained Enough That It Really Should Be PG-13

Release Date: August 21, 2020 (Amazon Prime Video)

Oh, adolescence, when our lives really begin AND end. We don’t fully become who we truly are until we reach our teenage years, and adults are still basically teenagers who somehow managed to make it out of high school intact. Or so Chemical Hearts would have us believe. For all its talk of full-to-bursting emotionality, though, this movie is actually fairly low-key relative to other flicks about teens enduring love and trauma. It’s a young person’s film, with a young person’s sense of the world, but it keeps its head on straight and its feet planted securely.

The action starts out at the school newspaper and expands from there. A few minor conflicts are introduced, but they’re soon handled efficiently to everyone’s liking, and I certainly appreciate the maturity on display. But some potential mysteries linger for longer. Will they come to a head? Before we find out, we must first get to know Henry Page (Austin Abrams), who’s all set to be the editor of the paper and eager to learn about his new transfer classmate/colleague Grace Town (Lili Reinhart). She gets around with a cane and says little about her past, but she’s willing to let a friendship blossom as she and Henry walk to her house every day after school so that he can then use her car to drive himself home.

It’s no surprise that Henry and Page’s hearts gradually become bound up in each other. They initially bond over his attempts to sound like a cool literate soul (he mispronounces the last name of her favorite Chilean poet) and ultimately they just realize how much they support each other. But what is surprising, considering the genre and both lead characters’ penchants for overdramatization, is how understated their courtship plays out. There’s a sex scene at one point that is especially tender and sweet, focusing as it does on these two lovebirds doing their best to be present for each other.

If Chemical Hearts had ended right at that happy point without delving too much into Grace’s backstory, I think I would have been generally satisfied. But of course, it is impossible to completely avoid massive drama rearing its insistent head. It’s revealed along the way that Grace was in an accident and that she lost someone very close to her and has a rocky relationship with her mother. She lives with the post-traumatic stress that comes with all that in her own unique way, and as it may appear to Henry and some viewers, it feels real. This strain of practically operatic emotional pain isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but in this case, it at least doesn’t feel like the cosmos is cruelly toying with these young people. I’m not sure I buy Henry Page’s thesis that you’re never more alive than when you’re a teenager, but I can buy that his story is sufficiently worthy of my attention and my affection.

Chemical Hearts is Recommended If You Like: The Fault in Our Stars, Paper Towns, Five Feet Apart

Grade: 3 out of 5 School Papers

Entertainment To-Do List: Week of 8/14/20

August 14, 2020

jmunney Cinema, Entertainment To-Do List, Television , , , , , Leave a comment

CREDIT: HBO

Every week, I list all the upcoming (or recently released) movies, TV shows, albums, podcasts, etc. that I believe are worth checking out.

Movies
–Magic Camp (August 14 on Disney+) – Gillian Jacobs is in this.
–Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies (August 18 On Demand)

TV
–black-ish, “Please, Baby, Please” (Now Streaming on Hulu) – An episode that was pulled from the schedule a couple of years ago has finally seen the light day.
–Lovecraft Country Series Premiere (August 16 on HBO)

Podcasts
–The AP Bio Podcast – A new podcast about one of my favorite NBC/Peacock sitcoms!

‘Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies’ Provides Exactly What it Promises

August 13, 2020

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , 1 Comment

Starring: Veterans of Cinematic Nudity

Director: Danny Wolf

Running Time: 130 Minutes

Rating: Unrated (But Take a Guess What It Would Have Been Rated)

Release Date: August 18, 2020 (On Demand)

You might look at the title “Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies” and bemoan, “Isn’t that just the way to be academic and stuffy and take all the fun out of a pleasurable topic!” But you should know that pretty much all the nude scenes that are discussed are shown in their full, uncensored glory. If on the other hand you’re worried that this endeavor is a little too prurient for its own good, then it should be said that this is far from a Mr. Skin-style supercut (although it’s worth noting that Mr. Skin founder Jim McBride is an executive producer). There are PLENTY of interviews to contextualize what all these examples of cinematic bare skin have meant for the individuals involved, the industry in general, and society at large. We all have bodies, and private parts on those bodies, and those parts have been featured in movies for as long as movies have existed, so it’s worth discovering the stories behind those parts.

Skin clocks in at a dense two hours and ten minutes, which sounds like it might be a bit overloaded for a documentary that’s just a mix of talking heads and film clips. But director Danny Wolf and company have about a hundred years of history to cover. No chapter is lingered upon or indulged in any longer than it needs to be. As a piece of entertainment, this thing just cooks. Nobody is shy about sharing what they have to say, and what they have to say is interesting and illuminating. Actors who have famously appeared nude like Pam Grier and Borat‘s Ken Davitian (and many others) provide illuminating storytelling, while critics and film historians identify contextual landmarks, like the looming specter of the Hays Production Code or the first appearance of pubic hair in a mainstream film.

If this is an underlying question to this whole pursuit, it is the eternal one: when is cinematic nudity essential, or at least justifiable? The answer that multiple interview subjects offer is, “when the movie calls for it.” Which is fair enough, but also decidedly non-specific. The objections to onscreen nudity that we see raised throughout this historical survey are a mixture of perfectly reasonable and protective, hyperbolic and hypocritical. Overall, Skin posits that nudity is a foundational fact of cinema. As society has evolved, so have movies, and so therefore has nudity in the movies. Perhaps an examination like this documentary can help ensure that all future onscreen nudity will be the kind that everyone can feel comfortable with and enjoy.

Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies is Recommended If You Like: Intolerance, And God Created Woman, Psycho, Blow Up, I Am Curious (Yellow), If…, Greetings, Drive, He Said, Midnight Cowboy, Women in Cages, A Clockwork Orange, Alice in Wonderland (1976), I Spit on Your Grave, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Showgirls, American Pie, Something’s Gotta Give, Borat, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Fifty Shades of Grey

Grade: 4 out of 5 Private Parts

Well, Pickle Me American: ‘An American Pickle’ Review

August 11, 2020

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , Leave a comment

CREDIT: YouTube Screenshot

Starring: Seth Rogen, Sarah Snook

Director: Brandon Trost

Running Time: 89 Minutes

Rating: PG-13

Release Date: August 6, 2020 (HBO Max)

I recently started a review strategy in which I determine the success of a movie according to whether or not it makes me want to do the thing that it’s about. So I asked of Eurovision Song Contest: did it make me want to watch the actual Eurovision? And now I ask of An American Pickle: does it make me want to become pickled and wake up without having aged a day one hundred years later?

To which I answer! … Maybe, kind of?

I’m pretty sure that’s not how the pickling of humans works, but hey, this is a fantasy, so let’s roll with it! The movie certainly does. Seth Rogen is basically the perfect choice to capture that vibe as he plays opposite himself as his great-grandfather and goes, “Hey dude! You’ve just woken up in the future! How crazy is that?!”

Rip Van Winkle-style stories tend to play up the confusion of the man out of time, but Herschel Greenbaum, the titular pickled man, figures out a way to get along more easily than most. Which just goes to prove my suspicion that people from any time period understand that life in the past used to be different and that life in the future will also be different. With that perspective in mind, I believe I could be resilient enough to get on with an unexpected time leap, just as Herschel is. But also like Herschel, I would be quite emotional over not being able to see my kids and grandkids grow up. Pickles are great, but they’re not a panacea!

Grade: 3 Pickles out of 5 Glasses of Seltzer Water

‘The Secret Garden’ is Back for a New Generation

August 5, 2020

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Secret Garden 2020 (CREDIT: Studiocanal)

Starring: Dixie Egerickx, Colin Firth, Julie Walters, Edan Hayhurst, Amir Wilson

Director: Marc Munden

Running Time: 100 Minutes

Rating: PG for Some Kids and a Dog Running Around Like They Own the Place

Release Date: August 7, 2020 (On Demand)

I contend that The Secret Garden is best experienced at a young age and then remembered as some half-formed dream. I’m pretty sure I saw the 1993 adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel that starred Maggie Smith, but I don’t have any specific memories of it. (Furthermore, I don’t really remember seeing Smith in anything before Harry Potter.) When I heard that a new Secret Garden was arriving in 2020, I thought of A Little Princess, the other mid-90s adaptation of a Frances Hodgson Burnett book. With all that scrambling going on in my head, it’s important to identify one key difference, as the 2020 Garden shoots the setting ahead to 1947, as opposed to the early 20th century when the book was published.

That update doesn’t make a huge difference to me, an American who considers the vast English estates of 1947 to be pretty dang similar to the vast English estates of 1911. But it certainly makes a difference to the orphaned Mary Lennox (Dixie Egerickx), who was born in India to English parents who now finds herself adrift much as the British Empire was adrift in the buildup to the Indian Partition. She is sent to live with her uncle Archibald (Colin Firth) in a mansion that seems to have no geographic connection to the rest of the world. When she arrives, she attempts to cajole her wheelchair-bound cousin Colin (Edan Hayhurst) out of bed, but since he seems to have forgotten how to experience the joys of childhood, she must venture outside on her own to the estate’s seemingly infinite grounds. There she befriends a scruffy dog and the unsupervised Dickon (Amir Wilson) and also becomes entranced by the most sun-dappled vegetation in all of England.

For my money, The Secret Garden is about the restorative power of nature. Mary and Dickon are the only characters with any sense of joy for most of the film, while Archibald and Colin seem to be spiraling headlong into depression by spending all their time inside. When you’re a kid, the value of getting out of the house can seem like magic, especially in a setting as sublime as this movie’s. Mary certainly displays some magical thinking, both positively and negatively, as she believes herself responsible for her ill mother’s death. Whenever she views things that way, it is obvious that there is some rational explanation. Indeed, with adult eyes, the secret garden does not feel all that secret, and any magical occurrences that take place there probably only look that way from a child’s perspective. But I can see how much May, Colin, and Dickon are enraptured by their wonder of the place, and I hope there are some five-year-old kids out there who see this film and have it stick in a hidden corner of their subconscious that reminds them forever that magic is real.

The Secret Garden is Recommended If You Like: The vast English countryside

Grade: 3 out of 5 Blooms

‘She Dies Tomorrow,’ and You Just Might, Too

August 4, 2020

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , 1 Comment

She Dies Tomorrow (CREDIT: NEON)

Starring: Kate Lyn Sheil, Jane Adams, Kentucker Audley, Chris Messina, Katie Aselton, Tunde Adebimpe

Director: Amy Seimetz

Running Time: 84 Minutes

Rating: R for Sexual and Drug-Fueled Weirdness

Release Date: July 31, 2020 (Drive-In Theaters)/August 7, 2020 (On Demand)

It’s hard to get your bearings straight when watching a movie like She Dies Tomorrow. The main characters have a profound lack of charisma, the protagonist seems to keep changing before any sort of story arc has been completed, and the tone and genre are more or less impossible to pin down. There’s an early scene in which initial protagonist Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) plays a recording of Mozart’s Lacrimosa over and over to the point that it feels like the film is skipping and repeating. This is all part and parcel of the premise, in which people are overcome by a contagious feeling in which they are convinced that they will no longer be alive come the next day. Weirdly, this doesn’t result in despair so much as a strikingly unique form of negatively focused enrapturement.

I’ve read other reviews of She Dies Tomorrow that describe it as scary in an existential sort of way, though not really a horror movie. But I’m not sure how else to categorize it. It may not be populated by goblins or ghouls, but a persistent sense of ennui crossed with enveloping paranoia sounds to me like just about the most terrifying thing anyone could possibly conceive of. It didn’t exactly feel that way while watching it, though, at least not the whole way through. The illness at the heart of the film is so low-key that the people who aren’t yet infected with it react to those who are mostly as they would to annoying social behavior. At those moments, it feels like a purposely off-putting comedy of manners. But now that I’ve had some room to process everything, I am struck more fully by the loneliness and miscommunication infused throughout.

Director Amy Seimetz works prolifically on both sides of the camera, and she has a tendency to pop up in blockbuster fare like Alien: Covenant and more straightforward horror pics like You’re Next. The budget for She Dies Tomorrow came from the paycheck she earned for acting in last year’s Pet Sematary remake, and this is definitely the work of someone confidently following her own particular muse with the financial freedom to do so. What we’re talking about here is a creator making an appeal for human connection via cinema, and I’m willing to answer the call.

She Dies Tomorrow is Recommended If You Like: Upstream Color, Jean Paul Sartre

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Requiems

Older Entries Newer Entries