Jeff "Jmunney" Malone's Self-Styled "Expert" Thoughts on Movies, TV, Music, and the Rest of Pop Culture
October 25, 2022
Cinema, Movie Reviews Alessandro Nivola, Amsterdam, Andrea Riseborough, anya taylor-joy, Beth Grant, Chris Rock, Christian Bale, David O. Russell, Decision to Leave, Ed Beglery Jr., Gina Prince-Bythewood, Go Kyung-po, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, John David Washington, Johyn Boyega, Jordan Bolger, Jung Yi-seo, Lashana Lynch, Lee Jung-hyun, Margot Robbie, Matthias Schoenerts, Michael Shannon, Mike Myers, Park Chan-wook, Park Hae-il, Park Yong-woo, Rami Malek, Robert De Niro, Sheila Atim, Tang Wei, Taylor Swift, The Woman King, Thuso Mbedu, Timothy Olyphant, Viola Davis, Zoe Saldana Leave a comment
2 Women, 1 King (CREDIT: Sony Pictures Entertainment)
Starring: Thuso Mbedu, Viola Davis, Lashana Lynch, Sheila Atim, Jordan Bolger, Johyn Boyega, Hero Fiennes Tiffin
Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood
Running Time: 135 Minutes
Rating: PG-13
Release Date: September 16, 2022 (Theaters)
August 2, 2022
Cinema, Movie Reviews Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Andrew Koji, Benito A Martínez Ocasio, Brad Pitt, Brian Tyree Henry, Bullet Train, David Leitch, Hiroyuki Sanada, Joey King, Karen Fukuhara, Logan Lerman, Masi Oka, Michael Shannon, Sandra Bullock, Zazie Beetz 1 Comment
Bullet Train (CREDIT: Scott Garfield/Sony Pictures)
Starring: Brad Pitt, Joey King, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, Andrew Koji, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benito A Martínez Ocasio, Michael Shannon, Sandra Bullock, Zazie Beetz, Logan Lerman, Karen Fukuhara, Masi Oka
Director: David Leitch
Running Time: 126 Minutes
Rating: R for Blood from Guns, Swords, Knives, and Poison
Release Date: August 5, 2022 (Theaters)
What’s It About?: If a movie takes place on a speeding train, you can bet on non-stop action! Or can you? Well, you can at least rely on a captive set of characters. As the titular transport in Bullet Train charges ahead from Tokyo to Kyoto, our main fellow to follow is Ladybug (Brad Pitt), who appears to be some sort of assassin, except that he doesn’t seem very violent, at least not on this mission. Then there’s the brotherly pair of Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry), who are much more comfortable whipping out their firearms. And there’s no way to miss Prince (Joey King) in her short skirt and tight bubblegum pink sweater; it’s obvious right away that underneath her schoolgirl facade lurks the heart of a killer. Is the fellow known as The Elder (Hiroyuki Sanada) the one pulling all the strings? Maybe! Or maybe it could be that one of the other famous faces that pops up along the way will clear up the confusion. Also, there’s a very poisonous snake wriggling around.
What Made an Impression?: For most of Bullet Train‘s path of destruction, I was never really sure what anybody’s mission was. And quite frankly, none of them seemed to either. Sure, there’s a briefcase with plenty of cash that certainly is worth keeping an eye on. But if anything, that’s the reward and not the job itself. Flashbacks pop up to provide backstory, but they don’t fully answer how everyone ended up on the same departure. MINOR SPOILER ALERT: The conclusion spells it all out eventually. But before then, screenwriter Zak Olkewicz and director David Leitch ask for a lot of patience from the audience. Or they request that we just embrace the ambiguity and enjoy Bullet Train as an exercise in frenetic style and a freaky parade of accents.
I at least appreciated how the casting was in part an inversion of this year’s The Lost City, with Pitt and Sandra Bullock switching the roles of bewildered lead and glorified slightly-more-than-a-cameo. And it’s also fun to behold King subsuming herself into the kinda-sorta Big Bad villain role. But in the meantime, questions abound, such as: is that accent real? And also: is that other accent real? And furthermore: why don’t any of the non-criminal passengers seem to notice the gore and bullet holes all over the place? The ending had me going, “Oh wow, that’s what that was all about?” But beforehand, I was somehow against all odds comforted by the steady hand of a cast willing to do everything that was asked of them without any winks to the camera. Vengeance really never turns out how you expect it to go, especially when all the plot twists feel like they were determined by whacking a piñata and throwing what spilled out into a blender.
Bullet Train is Recommended If You Like: The magnetic charm of Brad Pitt, The reveals on The Masked Singer, Derailments
Grade: 3 out of 5 Boomslangs
November 25, 2019
Cinema, Movie Reviews Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Christopher Plummer, Daniel Craig, Don Johnson, Edi Patterson, Frank Oz, Jaeden Martell, Jamie Lee Curtis, K Callan, Katherine Langford, Knives Out, Lakeith Stanfield, M. Emmet Walsh, Michael Shannon, Noah Segan, Raúl Castillo, Rian Johnson, Riki Lindhome, Toni Collette 2 Comments
CREDIT: Claire Folger © 2018 MRC II Distribution
Starring: Ana de Armas, Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Lakeith Stanfield, Katherine Langford, Jaeden Martell, Christopher Plummer, Noah Segan, Edi Patterson, Riki Lindhome, K Callan, Frank Oz, Raúl Castillo, M. Emmet Walsh
Director: Rian Johnson
Running Time: 130 Minutes
Rating: PG-13 for A Few Explosions, Possible Poisonings, and (Attempted?) Stabbings
Release Date: November 27, 2019
If you’d like to dust off a musty old genre and guide it to unexpected new depths, then you might just want to call Rian Johnson. He’s already shown what new joys await in a neo-noir mystery, a time-travelling actioner, and the biggest franchise of all time, and now with Knives Out, he moves on to the whodunit, and the answer to that question is, “By golly, Rian Johnson has done it once again!”
Since every whodunit needs a murder victim and a set of suspects, Knives Out has a bounty of them. The recently dead man is super-wealthy mystery novelist (wink, wink?) Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), and the folks who might be responsible or maybe know something consist of his mother Wanetta (K Collins), his daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), Linda’s husband Richard (Don Johnson), their son Hugh Ransom (Chris Evans), Harlan’s son Walt (Michael Shannon), Walt’s wife Donna (Riki Lindhome), their son Jacob (Jaeden Martell), Harlan’s daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette), her daughter Meg (Katherine Langford), Harlan’s housekeeper Fran (Edi Patterson), and his nurse Marta (Ana de Armas). While his employees generally get along with him, his family members all have reason to resent him (and they also keep mixing up which South or Central American country Marta is from). Naturally enough, there are also a couple of police detectives on hand (Lakeith Stanfield and Noah Segan) and an idiosyncratic private investigator named Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who has been hired under mysterious circumstances.
CREDIT: Claire Folger
The trick that Knives Out pulls is that within twenty minutes, it reveals everything (or nearly everything) that happened in thorough detail. Harlan’s death is initially ruled a suicide, and we are shown pretty much unmistakably that he sliced his own throat, and everyone’s presence at that moment is accounted for. Done deal, then? Well, there’s still nearly two more hours of running time left. The script keeps itself honest thanks to one particularly telling character quirk: Marta’s “regurgitative reaction to mistruthing.” That is to say, whenever she lies, or merely even considers lying, she spews chunks. Thus, there is no other option than for the truth to similarly spill out, and there is no room for contrivances to keep the audience in the dark. But that having been said, information can be obscured and unknown unknowns can take some time to make themselves known. Ergo, Rian Johnson gives us the simultaneous joy of being let in on a little secret while also playing the guessing game.
CREDIT: Claire Folger
In addition to Knives Out‘s masterful mystery machinations, it additionally offers plenty of keen observations of human nature. There is the ever-timely message of the tension that emerges when the haves and have-nots bump against each other, as well as the chaos that can reign when fortunes swing wildly. Furthermore, there is an astute understanding of the difference between truth and honesty, and how the latter can help you survive when the former is hidden. All of this is to say, motivation matters a great deal in cinema, and in life.
Knives Out is Recommended If You Like: Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot, Logan Lucky
Grade: 4.5 out of 5 Colorful Sweaters
October 22, 2019
Cinema, Movie Reviews Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, Benedict Cumberbatch, George Westinghouse, Katherine Waterston, Matthew Macfadyen, Michael Shannon, Nicholas Hoult, Nikola Tesla, The Current War, Thomas Edison, Tom Holland, Tuppence Middleton Leave a comment
CREDIT: 101 Studios
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Shannon, Tom Holland, Nicholas Hoult, Katherine Waterston, Tuppence Middleton, Matthew Macfadyen
Director: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
Running Time: 107 Minutes
Rating: PG-13 for Big Egos Occasionally Misbehaving
Release Date: October 25, 2019
Note: This release of The Current War includes the subtitle “The Director’s Cut,” which is a rare thing for a movie in its original commercial theatrical release. But it’s arriving under unusual circumstances, as it was originally supposed to come out two years ago, but then it was one of the movies orphaned by the dissolution of The Weinstein Company. Since then, director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon assembled a cut that is ten minutes shorter than the version that premiered at the 2017 Toronto Film Festival. (He spoke about the experience with Deadline.) I have not seen that cut, so this review is based solely on “The Director’s Cut.”
I’m by no means a huge history buff, but that doesn’t mean an anti-history buff. So I’m at least open to the possibility of being entranced by stories from the past, and cinemas certainly has the power to do that entrancing. The war of the currents would seem like an ideal subject to be powerful in just that way – it is about electricity after all! In the late nineteenth century, Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse were jockeying for position to be the providers of electric energy to the burgeoning United States power grid, with Nikola Tesla popping in to alternately work for both of them. There is plenty of energy and spirit to these characters, but overall The Current War is a little more subdued than might be expected.
CREDIT: Dean Rogers/101 Studios
Much of The Current War follows this formula: the principal players head to meetings, buoyed along by the invigorating score by Dustin O’Halloran and Hauschka. Then they sit down … and the music peters out. That sense of the oomph escaping is a major issue. You get the feeling that Edison and Westinghouse don’t really want to be enemies. True, they have a major fundamental disagreement: Edison advocates for direct current, believing that alternating current is way too potentially lethal, while Westinghouse thinks that alternating is the only option powerful enough to get this project on a country-wide scale. But by the end, you get to a sense of “what was all that fuss about?”
As individuals, these men are fascinating to witness. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Edison is given to bombastic statements like making this counteroffer during a negotiation: “I give you nothing you want, and you give me everything I want,” while Michael Shannon’s Westinghouse is certainly hungry for victory, but he is also mellowed by an anti-materialist streak, noting of his company’s AC, “It’s not my electricity. It’s electricity.” That offers plenty to chew over, and there’s also a fantastic bit of filmmaking set at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago that achieves a bit of transcendence. Maybe if we could have literally spent some time in the heads of Edison, Westinghouse, or Nicholas Hoult’s Tesla instead of the snatches of subjectivity that we do get, then we could have truly been electrocuted.
The Current War is Recommended If You Like: Watching clashing egos duke it out
Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Horses
January 17, 2018
Cinema, Movie Reviews 12 Strong, Chris Hemsworth, Elsa Pataky, Geoff Stults, Michael Peña, Michael Shannon, Navid Negahban, Nicolai Fuglsig, Rob Riggle, Trevante Rhodes, William Fichtner Leave a comment
CREDIT: David James/HS Film, LLC/Warner Bros.
This post was originally published on News Cult in January 2018.
Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon, Navid Negahban, Michael Peña, Trevante Rhodes, Geoff Stults, William Fichtner, Rob Riggle, Elsa Pataky
Director: Nicolai Fuglsig
Running Time: 129 Minutes
Rating: R for Typical War Violence and Expletives, Though Far From the Genre’s Most Explicit
Release Date: January 19, 2018
12 Strong dramatizes a U.S. military operation immediately following the September 11 attacks, in which Task Force Dagger struck back against the Taliban in the mountains of Afghanistan. A mission that could have lasted years is instead completed in a matter of weeks. Thus, the film ends on a moment of triumph. But that is a note that rings hollow, as nearly two decades in, the war on terror is still going on, with no clear end in sight.
To be fair, the dispersed, insidious, leaderless nature of terrorism makes it profoundly difficult to stamp out entirely, and it is accordingly just as difficult to convey the entire meaning of this conflict in a single work of art. 12 Strong does not purport to capture that entirety, nor should we fault it for failing to do so. But it does deserve to be taken to task for bringing up some existential conundrums and declining to thoroughly investigate them. An Afghani ally tells the men of Task Force Dagger, “You will be cowards if you leave, and you will be our enemies if you stay.” And that is really the crux of this issue. But instead of grabbling with that dilemma, 12 Strong leaves it hanging.
At its heart, though, 12 Strong just wants to be a celebration of heroism. And on that score, it is more committed, but not especially capable. It was filmed in New Mexico, and you can feel just how much it is not actually on a real Afghani battlefield. A cheap, careless aesthetic is not exactly the best way to honor these guys. I am sure budgetary constraints made things difficult, but that could have been counteracted with the same ingenuity that Task Force Dagger displayed, but alas, the final product is a bunch of grey dullness with occasional flashes of personality (that personality coming from the fact that these soldiers were forced to ride horses, which most of them are not trained to do, thus resulting in a few solid laughs).
12 Strong is Recommended If You Like: Saving Private Ryan but with straight-to-video production values
Grade: 2 out of 5 Horse Soldiers
November 28, 2017
Cinema, Movie Reviews David Hewlett, Doug Jones, Guillermo del Toro, Michael Shannon, Michael Stuhlbarg, Nick Searcy, Octavia Spencer, Richard Jenkins, Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Leave a comment
CREDIT: Fox Searchlight Pictures
This review was originally posted on News Cult in November 2017.
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Octavia Spencer, Michael Stuhlbarg, David Hewlett, Nick Searcy
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Running Time: 123 Minutes
Rating: R for Penetration From a Monster, Both of the Variety That Causes Massive Bleeding and Frustrated Profanity and the Kind That Results in Ecstasy
Release Date: December 1, 2017 (Limited)
If you are a fan of ’50s and ’60s creature features but wish that they concluded with the heroine and the monster consummating their love, then it should be not surprising to discover that you have a kindred spirit in Guillermo del Toro. With The Shape of Water, there is now proof of that truism in feature-length form.
Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) is a mute woman working as a custodian at a government research facility in 1962 Baltimore when an amphibious humanoid referred to as “The Asset” (Doug Jones and a bunch of movie magic) is brought in from South America. With a condition that renders her an eternal outsider, it only makes thematic sense that Elisa would be drawn to The Asset. Now, my natural inclination would be to push against such a longstanding trope, but when one half of a coupling is a fantastical being, symbolic meanings are hard to avoid. And in this particular case, Elisa and The Asset’s attraction does appear to go deeper than their shared general abuse at the hands of society. Words cannot capture it, but it is undeniable that they see the world in compatible ways.
There are plenty of other sci-fi B-movie hallmarks blown out to full intensity to provide color around the monster shagging. As a colonel in charge of The Asset, Michael Shannon runs around barking orders at everybody, and I’m not sure if that’s more of a B-movie trademark or a Michael Shannon trademark, or just the perfect marriage of the two. As the lead scientist with a secret identity who wants to preserve The Asset, Michael Stuhlbarg gets a two-for-one deal of nuclear era tropes. Octavia Spencer, as another custodian and Elisa’s closest friend at work, does not necessarily fit into the mold of a classic creature feature character, but her presence is invaluable. And being that this is mid-century America, Richard Jenkins plays the tragically closeted artist; his story is saddest when he is no longer able to have any of his beloved diner-fresh slices of pie.
But this is Elisa and The Asset’s story through and through. Everything else is important, but in the grand scheme of things, they are all just in service of the lovingly shot, artfully composed, and almost too indulgent (but not quite) sex scenes. Let’s just say that Sally Hawkins is not shy. But hey, when you find love that is this real and unbridled, you owe it to yourself, like Elisa, to be rid of all timidity.
The Shape of Water is Recommended If You Like: Creature From the Black Lagoon but wish it had been more explicitly romantic
Grade: 4 out of 5 Slices of Key Lime Pie
December 4, 2016
Cinema, Movie Reviews Amy Adams, Jake Gylenhaal, Michael Shannon, Nocturnal Animals, Tom Ford 1 Comment
The story-within-the-story in Nocturnal Animals – Jake Gyllenhaal teams up with Det. Michael Shannon to track down the rapist-killers of his wife and daughter in the Texas desert – is a satisfying pulp yarn on its own merits. But it exists as it does within a frame device so that we have the added pleasure of Amy Adams (Jake Gyllenhaal the author’s ex-wife) looking distraught as she reads the story that she believes she inspired, and so that director Tom Ford can play around with the editing and sound design as he cuts back and forth between reality and fiction in a way that gets under our skin and sticks in our craws. Also, there is a scene in the middle with Jena Malone that suddenly switches genres that will have you indelibly jumping out of your seat. That is certainly how my entire theater reacted.
I give Nocturnal Animals 9 Lovingly Framed Butts out of 10 Wails of Anguish.
March 20, 2016
Cinema, Movie Reviews Adam Driver, Jeff Nichols, Michael Shannon, Midnight Special Leave a comment
What if a cult’s prediction about a looming apocalyptic happening is correct? Midnight Special humors this premise, while also keeping the vibe mysterious and uncertain. Something will happen on March 6 involving supernaturally powered eight-year-old Alton, but nobody knows just what that something is. (Spoiler: The fact that it remains unknown means both nothing and everything.)
With Alton, his parents, and his dad’s friend on the run from the cult and federal agents, Midnight Special asserts itself as an indelible mix of eye-in-the-sky sci-fi and laconic chase movie. Director Jeff Nichols has earned auteur status; his influences (ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) are unmistakable, but his style is uniquely his own. There are not very many movies in which supernatural powers can be interpreted as meta trope awareness – Alton’s sense that the NSA agent played by Adam Driver (adorably all-business) is the guy he needs to talk to is basically a way of saying, “Okay, let’s move the story along.” There are elements that could make Midnight Special annoying or derivative, but it is so calm and its performances are so lived-in that it instead manages to be welcoming and challenging in a matter-of-fact way.
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