Getting Caught Up in ‘Madame Web’

February 20, 2024

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

The Four Madames (CREDIT: Sony Pictures)

Starring: Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabel Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Tahar Rahim, Adam Scott, Kerry Bishé, Emma Roberts, Zosia Mamet, Mike Epps, José María Yazpik

Director: S.J. Clarkson

Running Time: 116 Minutes

Rating: PG-13

Release Date: February 14, 2024 (Theaters)

It’s finally here!

Madame Web… what an experience. I can barely believe what I just watched, but I’m so grateful I did.

I can see the future now, but only a thin slice of it, specifically the part in which Madame Web becomes a midnight movie classic.

Half of it is run-of-the-mill meh mediocre. But that other half… It’s like the people who made this movie were half-asleep during all of 2003 and tried to recreate that year through telepathy.

The Amazon is a trip, man. They don’t make realities like this anymore!

Grade: Mike Epps and Emma Roberts Are Weirdly Also in This

Napoleon’ Review: Raucous Romance, Straightforward Warfare

November 20, 2023

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

Napoleon just does whatever he wants, gosh! (CREDIT: Aidan Monaghan/Apple)

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Tahar Rahim, Ben Miles, Ludivine Sagnier, Matthew Needham, Youssef Kerkour, Phil Cornwell, Édouard Philipponnat, Ian McNeice, Rupert Everett, Paul Rhys, Catherine Walker, Gavin Spokes, John Hollingworth, Mark Bonnar, Anna Mawn, Davide Tucci, Sam Crane, Scott Handy

Director: Ridley Scott

Running Time: 157 Minutes

Rating: R for Horny Napoleon and Grisly Injured Horses

Release Date: November 22, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: If you paid attention at all during history class, then surely you remember Napoleon Bonaparte, the opportunistic general who rose all the way up to emperor and nearly conquered all of Europe. But ambition and ego got the better of him, as he lived out the end of his life in exile and inspired one of ABBA’s most popular songs. His story has similarly stymied filmmakers over the years, but now director Ridley Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa have finally managed to bring it to the big screen, with Joaquin Phoenix diving shamelessly into the title role. The movie mostly alternates back and forth between his military campaigns and his courtship with his first wife Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), and there’s certainly plenty to cover on those fronts. (Although I gotta be honest, whenever I read this movie’s title, I can’t help but reflexively hear Aaron Ruell’s immortally nasally delivery of a certain other “Napoleon.”)

What Made an Impression?: Making a Mockery Out of History: I’m no Napoleon scholar, so I can’t say with 100% certainty how accurate any of this movie is. But I can say that his interactions with Josephine sure feel accurate. Mr. Bonaparte strikes me as one of the most impetuous world leaders of the past few hundred years, and that is abundantly clear when he decides that he must find himself a wife. Their relationship is childish, raunchy, and profoundly id-driven. This is all to say: I wish that the entire movie had been a Napoleon/Josephine romantic comedy! They throw insults and food at each other, and then kiss and boink like rabbits in between all the cacophony. You gotta love it when costume dramas dress down.
A Bunch of Explosions, Too: In its efforts to be thorough, the movie also features seemingly every single one of Napoleon’s major battles. They’re all competently staged by Scott and his crew, but during those sequences, I was mostly waiting to return to the intimate humanity of it all. There’s just not much personality to all the mayhem. Although, at least at Waterloo, we get a clear sense of his enemies cattily boxing him in.

In conclusion, I don’t really have much to say about the battle scenes, as they didn’t get much of a reaction out of me. But the Josephine business is enough to make Napoleon worth recommending.

Napoleon is Recommended If You Like: Reading Wikipedia, The naughtiest bits of Amadeus

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Coronations

‘The Mauritanian’ Gives Guantánamo Bay Detainee Mohamedou Ould Salahi the Legal Thriller Treatment

February 10, 2021

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

The Mauritanian (CREDIT: STX Films)

Starring: Tahar Rahim, Jodie Foster, Shailene Woodley, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zachary Levi, Saamer Usmani

Director: Kevin Macdonald

Running Time: 129 Minutes

Rating: R, Mainly for a Scene of Intense Torture

Release Date: February 12, 2021

In the 2000s and early 2010s, films that grappled with 9/11 and its aftermath tended to be combat thrillers, reaching an apotheosis in terms of cultural impact with 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty. Now the focus has turned toward the War on Terror’s legal repercussions. 2019’s The Report took a deep dive into the massive amount of paperwork detailing the CIA’s use of post-9/11 torture, and now The Mauritanian comes along to narrow its attention on the particular case of Mohamedou Ould Salahi, who was detained at Guantánamo Bay withou charge for more than a decade. His story has been told before via the likes of 60 Minutes and Salahi’s own memoir, but even if you come in to this movie completely cold (as I more or less did), it’s immediately obvious that we are witnessing a miscarriage of justice.

There’s essentially zero doubt at any point in The Mauritanian about Salahi’s innocence. We’re not exactly told this outright, but we might as well be. With the guarded way that Tahar Rahim plays Salahi, there is a sense that he might be susceptible to being tricked into thinking that he has abetted terrorist activity. But these are merely survival tactics, as he mostly keeps his head down and says what is demanded of him when he absolutely has to so as to stay alive and sane enough to get by. The main source of the movie’s tension then is how much our patience is tested: just how long – in real time and movie time – will Salahi be detained? Because if you know anything about Guantánamo Bay, you know it’s probably going to take a while. Luckily, he has a couple of competent lawyers on his case in the form of Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster) and Teri Duncan (Shailene Woodley), and with Foster giving off Hall of Fame-level tenacity vibes, we can feel confident that there will be a happy ending eventually.

Salahi’s story is undoubtedly compelling, but in terms of how it works as cinema, it’s not an automatic slam dunk. It mostly avoids indulging in the shoutiest excesses of miscarriage-of-justice legal procedurals, but it perhaps swings too far in the opposite direction, opting for a low-key approach that’s content to mostly just hum along. Then there are the torture scenes, which is something I would happily never see re-created on screen ever again. That’s not to say that it’s always absolutely wrong to portray torture; the ethics of doing so are certainly debatable. But aesthetically, it tends to be jarring and unnecessary, very much so in this case. Still, despite my misgivings, I’m glad that movies like The Mauritanian exist. The value they offer by getting these stories out to a wide audience generally outweigh my trepidations.

The Mauritanian is Recommended If You Like: The due process of law, Un-redacting the redactions

Grade: 3 out of 5 Forced Confessions