Y2K

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+

Y2K is really fun, for about twenty minutes. The opening scene is super fun, very deliberately tugging at our weird nostalgia for AOL Instant Messenger or the sound of dial-up modems. The first thing we see is computer screen activity, multiple AIM chat windows open at once, as well as a window showing a video clip of President Clinton (or, as a character later calls him, “President Blowjob”) commenting on the spectre of the Y2K bug.

Our introduction to Eli (Jaeden Martell) and his best friend Danny (Julian Dennison) is fun, especially as they chat in Eli’s bedroom while they wait for a topless photo of a woman to load in horizontal sections on his computer screen. Of course, the gag is a bit undermined by all the action going on with his computer screen in the opening shots, without any glitches whatsoever.

Still, Eli and Danny are perfectly endearing characters. We briefly see Eli’s parents, who talk a little awkwardly about Eli finding someone to kiss at the stroke of midnight. It’s New Year’s Eve 1999, you see. When Eli’s mom kisses him on the cheek, he makes a face perfect for setting the tone of a modern teen comedy.

Danny is preoccupied with one of them getting laid. Eli pines for a popular girl, Laura (Rachel Zegler). Pretty standard teen comedy stuff, most of it relatively charming, none of it particularly clever. Booksmart, this is not. Eli and Danny hang out for a few hours before deciding to go to a New Year’s Eve party. It takes just slightly too long for this movie to get to the critical moment, the stroke of midnight.

Y2K has a pretty great conceit, a revisionist history take on what millions feared when the date flipped over to the year 2000. In this movie, the computers really do go berserk. For a good ten minutes, machines start taking people out at the party, in amusingly gruesome ways. Panic ensues, lots of people die, it’s actually pretty entertaining..

And then? Just as quickly as the action starts, Y2K, a movie with tons of potential, runs out of steam. It uses up all of its ideas in a matter of minutes. A small group of kids escape the party house, and find a place with no electricity to hide out. A lot of the rest of the movie takes place in settings where no technology present, and it feels less like an active narrative choice than a way to stay within a seriously limited budget. We get one shot of a burning cityscape from the top of a hill—which is used, very economically, twice—and, in the same scene, one shot of two planes crashing into each other mid-air.

But here’s where Y2K really fails. First-time feature director and co-writer Kyle Mooney could have mined this concept for comedy gold, finding myriad ways for glitchy machinery to cause havoc, even without slapping on a tired “collective consciousness AI” idea onto it all. The computers and machines not only become sentient villains, they literally bind together to become humanoid junk-parts robots with computer monitors as heads. Seriously? Yes. A couple of times, a dude-bro avatar type figure comes onto screens and talks to the kids. Even the 1992 sci-fi horror trash fest The Lawnmower Man had more clarity of theme.

Mooney was born in 1984. He would have been 16 years old when Y2K happened. You’d think he’d have done enough research—and even memories—to come up with something better than this. The kids, such as they are, are of course high school characters played by young adults. Jaeden Martell is 21. Julian Dennison, once the breakout child star of Hunt for the Wildepeople, is 22. He also costarred in both Deadpool 2 and Godzilla vs. Kong, so at least he’s had some genuine box office success. He’s also the most interesting character in Y2K, only to be dispensed with in the first half of the film. I won’t spoil how, although there’s no good reason for you to watch this movie anyway. Unless you want to see Danny’s almost-clever resurgence during the end credits.

In any case, none of these young actors were even born when Y2K happened. They’re all taking direction from a guy who was 16 years old when it happened. Either these things are relevant to the many ways this film is lacking, or Mooney just isn’t that good a writer. He’s an adequate director; he gets endearing performances out of his young stars, anyway. In the meantime, Mooney attempts just coasting on millennial references and a late-90s soundtrack, complete with a leaden appearance by Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst as himself. Once these references move away from specifics of the era’s technology, they just stop working.

Otherwise, Y2K can’t quite settle on a tone, and it certainly can’t decide on a direction. To say it sags in the middle would be an understatement. I found it both boring and tedious by that point, although to its credit, at least it was always better than Red One, easily the worst movie I’ve seen this year. Y2K is only the eighth-worst movie I’ve seen this year, so at least it has that going for it.

You’re not ready for this. You don’t want to be ready for this. It’s too stupid.

Overall: C+

FLOW

Directing: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A+
Animation: A+

I’m not sure I can adequately explain how much I loved this movie. Flow is not just the best animated film of the year by a mile, it’s within striking distance of being the best film of the year overall. Critics love to throw around the word “triumph,” but here it legitimately applies. This is a film that transcends any cliché.

There are so many impressive things about Flow, it can be difficult to decide where to begin. How about the animation: Latvian director and co-writer Gints Zilbalodis, and his team, rendered the gorgeous animation entirely with the open-source software Blender. He also never makes clear what created the specificity of the world presented therein, with its undercurrent of haunting melancholy which is still somehow also beautiful: the characters in Flow are all feral or wild animals, inhabiting a world once inhabited by humans, recently even, but we never see any. The closest to a human character we see is a humanoid statue, and beyond that, the remnants of artistic carvings left inside a house that a cat has been using for shelter.

We never get any indication that the cat ever knew the human who once lived in that house, although we see wood carvings of cats mid-project, evidently abandoned. Finished cat carvings, most only slightly bigger than the live cat we follow in Flow, dot the yard in font of the house, right down to the bank of a passing river. The human artist was apparently quite obsessive about cats: we briefly see a cat statue so huge it has scaffolding around it.

This live cat is the closest thing Flow has to a protagonist. It encounters other animals, some more than once, but the cat is the only animal we always follow: from the opening scene of it considering itself in the reflection of the river water, to the closing scene of it doing the same. In between those bookends, we discover that there is a cyclical nature to either the world’s climate or its geology—or both—wherein the area floods to a massive degree, and then after several days, the water recedes. The cat moves to different areas of higher ground after getting swept away by a massive flood which is then followed by steady water rise, until it is trapped atop the aforementioned giant cat statue.

A drifting sailboat luckily passes by, and the cat manages to make its way onto it. Much of Flow is spent with the cat on this wooden boat, which already has another animal on it: a capybara. Over time, a sort of team of animals amasses on the boat: a ring-tailed lemur; a secretarybird; a yellow Labrador Retriever; eventually the rest of the pack of dogs that Lab has been running with—which, of course, complicates the group dynamic on the boat.

Unlike other animated films of this sort, there is no dialogue in Flow: none of the animals talk. This is an excellent choice. They do, however, make vocalizations, which are used to flesh out a personality, of sorts, for each animal. With only one exception, recordings of the species’s actual vocalizations were used for each animal we see in this film. Only the capybara stands apart, as the recordings they got from one at a zoo did not work well for the capybara’s personality in this film, so they used a baby camel’s sounds instead.

These choices make Flow particularly stand apart from films like WALL-E, which is basically a silent film in its first half but introduces cartoon humans in its second half; or Bambi, which 80 years ago innovated natural-world movements in animation but still featured talking animals. To be clear, Flow does anthropomorphize its animals, a reasonable choice as otherwise we’d just be watching a bunch of adorable animals drown or get eaten. It must be stressed, however, how subtly Zilbalodis does this: each of the animals move and vocalize only the way their species actually does in the real world. And then, the secretarybird and even the cat are using the rudder to steer the sailboat for some time before it even registers that’s what’s happening.

There is no villain in Flow, only the constant specter of danger—particularly for the cat, who falls out of the boat and into the water far more times than any small child would likely want to see (there’s a reason this film is rated PG). Given the cat is the primary character, I was sure we would get to the end with it alive and well—or would we? There is only one moment where Flow gets mystical, the cat and the secretarybird suddenly floating into the air toward a swirling celestial sky. I really wondered if we were supposed to be witnessing their deaths. I’m still not quite sure when it comes to the bird.

I see no need to dwell on it, though. Flow is a stunning achievement just in how easily it locks in its audience, from start to finish, without any dialogue beyond real animal noises. I found everything about this film utterly mesmerizing, and by turns suspenseful, sad, occasionally funny, and heartbreaking. One could call the dogs comic relief, they are such doofuses sometimes. But they only ever act like dogs, aside from occasional teamwork in an attempt to help another animal. Until a bunny hops by anyway.

There’s even a whale, who gets comparatively limited screen time and yet it has a story arc, just like any of the other animals. The whale is just as susceptible, if not more so, to the perils of rapidly rising and receding waters as any of the others. I spent a lot of time watching this movie either dazzled or with my heart in my throat. The visual achievement cannot be overstated, particularly the cinematography, where the “camera” is constantly swaying back and forth or swirling around the action, giving it very much the feel of something that was actually captured on camera. And after a tightly edited 84 minutes, the story comes full circle, with the strong suggestion that what all these animals have gone through, they will likely go through again. I don’t want that for them, but I am eager to turn right around and watch this film again, many times over.

Times of crisis make strange bedfellows. Or boatfellows.

Overall: A

QUEER

Directing: B+
Acting: A
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-
Special Effects: B-

I’m not sure I can fully explain what the hell is going on in Queer, which starts of relatively normal and progressively moves into a definitively wackadoodle space. There is very much a sense that this was what director Luca Guadagnino was going for, and in his hands, I felt totally okay just letting go and falling into his very specific atmosphere.

This is a director who has made films I adored (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers), films I have hated (Suspiria), and movies I’ve had a mixed reaction to (Bones and All). Guadagnino is a man for all seasons, a man for all tastes. There are people who adored the titles I hated and people who just didn’t get the ones I adored. He even directed a meandering but beautiful limited series for HBO called We Are Who We Are which I would highly recommend. So where does Queer fall on this spectrum, one that stretches wider than it does for most directors?

Queer is very specific, and with me at least, it elicited a very specific response. This may be the most bemusing movie I’ve seen and so very much enjoyed the experience. There’s something truly nebulous about the script, adapted from the William S. Burroughs novella of the same name, by Justin Kuritzkes. I have never read any of Burroughs’s work, but by all accounts the tripiness the story gets further into as it goes on is characteristic of his work. I’m not sure I need to read any of it. I trust the capable hands of Guadagnino in shaping an adaptation.

It’s notable that both Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, who play the two leads, are straight actors playing queer characters. One might be tempted to call it regressive, except that Guadagnino himself is gay, and evidently these were the actors he wanted. If straight actors must be cast for gay parts, it makes up for a lot if the director is openly gay. And I cannot stress enough that Daniel Craig’s performance in this film is incredible. His William Lee is an aging gay man biding his time in 1950s Mexico City, engaged in casual sex but quick to infatuation, and singularly vulnerable and insecure. Craig’s portrayal is at once unique and broad, specific and heartbreaking. William is a man who seems in search of something to fill a void in his life that his era just cannot accommodate.

The one thing I genuinely struggle to get on board with in Queer is Jason Schwartzman, giving an admittedly delightful performance in the deeply unfortunate use of what appears to be a fat suit. I’m having a hard time finding specific confirmation that this is indeed a fat suit, but given how thin he is in recent photos, I’m not sure what else we can conclude. And there are definitely genuinely fat actors who are just as talented as Schwartzman and could have given just as good a performance. On the upside, his character, Joe, is not only also queer, but is only ever seen making out with hot young guys. So at least we’re seeing a fat guy onscreen who can get it.

Speaking of which, there's some unusually frank depictions of gay sex in this movie–another point in its favor. Daniel Craig looks amazing at age 56—25 years Drew Starkey’s senior. But Euguene, played by Starkey, is an independent and almost aloof young man, barely acknowledging William’s obvious yearning for him.

And here is where Guadagnino’s dependably delicate touch comes in handy: at no point does Queer feel like some kind of gay version of Lolita (it helps that Eugene is well out of his teen years). A great deal of time passes with very little seeming to have happened, even though a great deal is happening onscreen, with oddly but effectively focused cinematography, great performances, and great finesse in editing. There is no question some will be bored by this movie. I was fully compelled at all times, even when it shifted into areas I could not fully grasp.

Queer takes a hard turn in that direction as it explores William’s drug use, and specifically his search for a root that he’s told will give him telepathic capabilities. The story is split into three “Chapters” and then a particularly impenetrable epilogue; the third chapter is titled “Lady in the Jungle,” the title character there being a sort of slicked-back woman with long greasy hair who looked incredibly familiar but was nearly impossible to place: it turned out to be the amazing Lesley Manville.

It’s in this third act when William, with Eugene right there beside him, goes on a bit of a wild trip, on the drug they’ve traveled out there for. Guadagnino pivots to what is essentially an interpretive dance on ayahuasca, the two shirtless men moving in and out of each other, quite literally: we see a hand passing underneath the skin, or their two torsos barely melting into each other. It is at once romantic and unsettling, unlike anything I have ever seen. I suppose it could be seen as a comment on two people truly connecting, but sometimes with Guadagnino, you just have no idea and perhaps you never will.

This is one filmmaker where, depending on the vibes anyway, I am okay with having no idea. I couldn’t tell you precisely what Queer is going for. Guadagnino is capable of such mystery in ways both deeply unsatisfying and deeply satisfying. For me, this round was pretty satisfying. If nothing else, he has a gift for molding thoroughly realized characters who elicit your compassion and interest. Queer is certainly not perfect, not least of which because of several scenes with pointlessly obvious CGI (background landscapes of South America; a near-miss attack from a viper). Still I’m glad to have gone on its journey, and would happily do so again.

Insecure vulnerability and comfortable confidence intersect in Queer-ness.

Overall: B+

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

All We Imagine as Light is the most critically acclaimed wide-release movie of the year, so I went in primed to love it. Since I liked it just okay, that rendered it kind of a letdown.

Maybe there’s something I’m just missing. Maybe I’ll watch this again one day and think: What was I thinking? This is a masterpiece! But I doubt it. I’ll be too busy watching other new movies. This is a good example, though, of how stupidly caught up I can get in the score at review aggregate sites like MetaCritic. A “Must-See” score of 94? It must be amazing! No, not really.

I should have trusted the feeling I had when I watched the trailer. I could find nothing in there that looked particularly worth getting excited about. This is not to say that I can’t find incredibly quiet movies—a huge amount of the dialogue in this film is delivered barely above a whisper—to be deeply impressive. It’s just that this movie, in particular, I am a bit at a loss when it comes to the universal praise it’s getting. Side note: the MetaCritic user score of “Generally Favorable” 7.1 out of 10 is much more in line with how I felt about it.

Which is to say, I don’t have any harsh criticisms of it either. This is just another example, of many films that critics gush over but audiences aren’t nearly as impressed by. There is a perennial divide between the intellectualist consumption of film critics and the populist tastes of audiences, and once again, I find myself falling somewhere in the space between.

And it’s not like I am incapable of gushing over films that general audiences don’t really connect with. Consider TÁR (2022), a film I loved. But there are key things that sets that film apart, including its cinematography, its editing, and most significantly, a stunning performance by Cate Blanchett. I suppose it’s not really fair to compare that to All We Imagine as Light, an international independent film with naturalistic actors totally unknown to American audiences.

I should note that this does not mean they are unknown at all. The lead actor, Kani Kusruti, has more than forty other acting credits. She plays Prabha, a nurse working in Mumbai a year after the husband she was arranged by family to marry went to Germany to work and now no longer even calls her. Her younger and more carefree roommate, Anu, is played by Divya Prabha, who has 16 other acting credits. They work at the same hospital, along with Parvaty, the hospital cook played by Chaya Kadam, who has 60 acting credits. Parvaty is a widow who is getting forced out of the home she’s lived in for 22 years because she has no papers to prove her residence, her late husband having never discussed it with her, and now developers want to build on the land.

I was pretty compelled by the framing of All We Imagine as Light at the start, writer-director Payal Kapadia opening with tracking shots of everyday life in the crowded streets of Mumbai. This is accompanied by anonymous voiceover voices, each in a different language, sharing their impressions of life in that particular city. The differing languages serves to underscore the cosmopolitan nature—if still strictly from the Indian subcontinent—specific to Mumbai. It’s an effective setup for a film primed to be a uniquely accurate portrait of a city, which is the kind of thing I tend to be really into.

Once that introductory vignette is done, it cuts to Prabha, commuting on one of Mumbai’s ubiquitous trains. We only very slowly get to know her, and her living situation, her job, her absent husband, her young roommate who asks her to cover rent this month. There is an aspect of this film using just a few characters to convey a sense of living in the city, and it is indeed done very well—if quietly, and at an incredibly measured pace.

Somewhat surprisingly, only the first half of the film is set in Mumbai. When Parvati decides to stop fighting the developers and move back to her coastal home village 150 miles south of Mumbai, Prabha and Anu help her move, turning it into their own trip to Ratnagiri. This is comparatively very remote, green, serene, and near the beach, and it’s where the second half of the film is set. It’s also where All We Imagine as Light briefly turns into a kind of fantasy on Prabha’s part, and after such gritty realism it had me momentarily very confused.

There is also a subplot regarding Anu engaged in a romance with a young Muslim man named Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), and I had slightly mixed feelings about its fairly rote “forbidden love” aspect. There’s a scene in which Anu is going to sneak out to Shiaz’s neighborhood when his parents are gone to a wedding, but in order not to attract unwanted attention she buys a burka to wear as a disguise. How do Muslim audiences respond to this, I wonder?

If nothing else, I must say that All We Imagine as Light is executed with tenderness above all, a deep empathy for its characters, particularly the three women around whom the story revolves. These details are all very much in the film’s favor, which is sprinkled with several moments of quiet profundity, occasionally quite memorably framed as a picture. I found very little to criticize in this movie. I just couldn’t connect with it as something enduringly special.

This is much how I looked watching this movie. Well, I wasn’t wearing a sari.

Overall: B

MARIA

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

Maria is the third in a trilogy of films by Chilean director Pablo Larraín about famously tragic women of history, and in a way it comes full circle to connect to the first of them, Jackie—which I adored, enough to make it my #2 film of 2016. Jackie had been about Jaqueline Kennedy, later Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, having married Aristotle Onassis in 1968—right at the end of his eight-year partnership with famed opera singer Maria Callas.

The film in the middle of this trilogy, Spencer, I also adored, enough to make it my #1 film of 2021. As you can imagine, this meant I looked forward to Maria with eager anticipation, even though I was far less familiar with Maria Callas than either Princess Diana (the subject of Spencer) or Jackie Kennedy. There’s just something about Pablo Larraín’s style that speaks to me. And I am fully aware that he is an acquired taste: the three films in this trilogy have had diminishing critical returns (their scores on review aggregate site MetaCritic are, in order of release, 81, 76, and 65), and even Natalie Portman’s performance in the best-reviewed of them, Jackie, proved divisive.

In any case, I went in primed to love Maria based only on it being a Pablo Larraín film, but also having faith in Angelina Jolie’s performance as the title character. Indeed, the acting is by far the best thing about it, including Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher as Maria’s butler and housemaid in the last years of her life, tragically cut short in 1977, at the age of 53.

And yet, in spite of some lovely cinematography by Edward Lachman (Carol), neither that nor the excellent performances could make Maria speak to me in quite the same way as both Jackie and Spencer did. All of the characters speak in placid, nearly hushed tones, which all contributes to a tone of a famous woman not so much in decline, but whose life is winding down. Maria is over reliant on medication, which gives her occasional hallucinations, the only time Maria slips into the stylized, dreamlike quality I loved so much in Larraín’s previous films. I’d have loved more of that, although to be fair, no artist should be expected to deliver the same thing over and over again.

It’s just that the script, by Steven Knight—who also wrote Spencer—isn’t quite as compelling. It’s the acting, and the cinematography, and to a degree even the editing, that do a lot of work to make Maria rise above a story that isn’t all that memorable. Maria has moments of greatness, and certain scenes that are undeniably great, sometimes even exceptionally well written. It just lacks a certain consistency in its storytelling.

Much of the framing of Maria entails a reporter and a camera man, coming to Maria’s apartment to interview her at a time when she is attempting to re-strengthen a once famous voice that is now in decline. When she tells her butler a camera crew is coming, he asks her, “Are they real?” Even by the time the film ended, I could never quite figure out whether we were supposed to take them as real, or a figment of Maria’s imagination. I suspect the latter, but would have liked more clarity. The reporter, incidentally, is played by Kodi Smith-McPhee, who has previously made deep impressions with his performances in the likes of Let Me In (at age 13) and The Power of the Dog. Here his ample talents are relatively wasted, even as he manages a subtly oddball sensibility opposite Angelina Jolie.

Many will find Marie to be slow and plodding, I suspect. Larraín is clearly being very deliberate here, and it’s something I can appreciate—to be clear, I never drifted away or lost interest while watching this movie. I just came to it expecting and hoping for something exceptional, and got something that, overall, was not. There has been some chatter about Jolie competing for Best Actress, and this would be deserved, but I struggle to imagine this film gaining enough traction for that to happen. I still enjoyed Maria, but largely because I am a fan of the director and the star, and less on the merits of the film itself, which works better contextualized as part of a trilogy—and one that ends on a comparatively weak note. This is a film beautifully constructed in multiple ways, but about a person who, this time around, likely means far more to the filmmaker than to the audience.

Sometimes great composition alone can’t reach the heights of greatness.

GLADIATOR II

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: C

Protip: don’t rewatch the original film just days before seeing its “legacyquel” that’s being released decades later. I keep making this mistake. I watched Twister right before seeing Twisters; I watched Beetlejuice right before seeing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice; I watched Gladiator right before seeing Gladiator II. The only consistent purpose this seems to serve is how the new film definitively fails to live up to the first.

You see where I’m going with this. Even more than the other examples, Gladiator II follows all the same basic story beats as its far superior, Best Picture-winning predecessor from 2000. The comparisons to The Force Awakens and Top Gun Maverick are apt—and I’d throw in Alien: Romulus as well, given how its story directly mirrors the original Alien from 1979. These movies do what they do with varying success, although it should be noted that Gladiator II does it with the least success.

Does this mean I wasn’t entertained? Absolutely not. My answer to Russell Crowe’s Maximus from the original film, when he asks the immortal line “Are you not entertained!” is an emphatic, I am. Granted, in this film Paul Mescal’s Lucius asks a question with similar delivery from the middle of an arena when he asks, “Is this how Rome treats its heroes!” It doesn’t land with quite the same import but I guess you can’t have everything.

Gladiator II is, overall . . . fine. But this is its greatest weakness, because the original Gladiator was so much better than that. It had an iconic hero in Russell Crowe’s Maximus; it had an iconic villain in Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus. It also had an undeniable movie star at its center, and the closest to that we get in Gladiator II is Denzel Washington—as the most notable scheming villain, among several. It should be noted that Washington is the best thing and most fun person to watch in this movie. Paul Mescal as Lucius the conquered and enslaved gladiator, and Pedro Pascal as the Roman General who is the target of Lucius’s vengeance, are both capable and talented actors but neither quite rise to what director Ridley Scott is clearly aiming to replicate with them. I hesitate to say it’s their fault, given that the script is one of the weakest elements of this film.

One might be tempted to celebrate the amount of queerness thrown into Gladiator II—until you realize it is exclusive to queer-coding villainous characters. Washington’s Macrinus, who is clawing his own way from a distant past in slavery with eyes on the throne, reveals himself to be bisexual, wears gold earrings, and always wears colorful, flowing robes. Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger play twin Emperors Geta and Caracalla, both of them presented as effete, one of them with a clingy male concubinus. And again, this young emperors are both villainous as well, but neither comes across so much as formidable as like a couple of fickle little dipshits.

These details are all unfortunate but relatively subtle; I was entertained enough not to be too bothered by it, at least until I had more time to reflect on it once the film ended. There’s a lot of gladiatorial combat, of course, and several large-scale battle sequences, and if there is any place where Ridley Scott shines, it is here. And if you can watch this without a vivid recollection of its better predecessor, the performances are compelling, especially among the three leads, as well as that of Connie Nielsen as Lucilla, one of three characters (and two actors) who return here from the first film.

The Colosseum gladiator scenes, however, must be called out in their ridiculousness. Ridley Scott used real tigers in one of the gladiator battle scenes in the 2000 film, and apparently felt it was important to “up the ante” this time—over and over again—but never with anything real. We get to see baboons, a rhinoceros, and even sharks, all of them transparent CGI. It’s difficult to care about the supposed danger characters face if they are effectively battling a cartoon. The sharks, for instance, dart around the water like they’re in a video game. The Colosseum apparently really did get filled with water to host mock naval battles as entertainment, but that’s the extent of the realism here. How the hell could the Romans ever have transport all these giant sharks to the Colosseum anyway, let alone captured them live in the open ocean?

Yeah, yeah: it’s just a movie, right? Suspension of disbelief still has its own boundaries, and those boundaries can be strained. Still, most of the time I watched Gladiator II, I adopted that very frame of mind: it’s just a movie, and in spite of all these details I can easily pick apart, I’m having a good time. I can’t say I was disappointed in it, mostly because I enjoy the actors, they play well off each other, and their performances do manage to elevate the lesser material, at least to a degree. The script lacks the tightness of the 2000 film, doubly unfortunate give the degree to which it simply attempts to replicate it—but, it was still compelling enough to follow. This is a 148-minute film and I never got bored. Will I ever go out of my way to watch it again, or recommend it to anyone else? Not likely.

Gladiator II was an adequate way to spend a Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t great. The key point here is that simply re-watching the original Gladiator was time much better spent.

Not a fully accurate representation of The Colosseum.

Overall: B-

WICKED: PART I

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Music: B+

Unlike the travesty that was Red One, Wicked is filled with actors who all know what movie they are in. They understood the assignment, and as a result this movie is poised to become the biggest movie musical sensation in five years—perhaps overtaking the surprising success of the 2017 live action remake of Beauty and the Beast. Although I liked even that one more than I expected to, I find myself rooting for Wicked’s success.

And this is in spite of fairly measured expectations going in. I did not expect to hate Wicked by any means, but I have never been among the rabid fans of the Broadway musical, which first opened in 2003; or certainly Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel on which it was based, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. I did find myself wondering how the filmmakers could justify giving a film based only on the first act of the play a runtime of two hours and 40 minutes, when the entire play—including intermission!—lasted all of five minutes more than that. But I’m here to tell you: Wicked Part I easily won me over, very early on, not in spite of but arguably because of how director Jon M. Chu (who also directed the wonderful and criminally underrated In the Heights) fleshed it out.

One of the biggest surprises, given how much the film is fleshing out the play, is that Part I features 11 songs, and all of them are from the Broadway play; reportedly the key difference is that, much like the rest of the story, several of the songs have been “altered and extended.” This, honestly, should comfort the diehards: it’s just more of exactly the thing you love.

As for me, my personal history with this property is practically nonexistent. I never read the novel. I did see the stage musical, once, on tour in 2009. I can’t remember anything about it. My vague recollection was that it was fine, but I didn’t quite see why people went crazy for it. This was why I went into this film, Wicked Part I, expecting it also to be fine, if maybe a little bloated. To my surprise, the film entirely justifies itself, and I was utterly charmed by it.

A huge piece of that success is the casting. Ariana Grande is stupendous as Galinda, later to be known as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. She perfectly threads the needle between revoltingly self-centered and lovably clueless, delivering an over-the-top performance that is also packed with indelibly subtle touches. She is arguably the best thing about Wicked, except that this will inevitably, criminally, overshadow the deeply affecting and nuanced performance by Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, later known to be the Wicked Witch of the West. This is the story of how two completely opposite personalities are first enemies and then become friends at Shiz University, in spite of Galinda’s blinding privilege and Elphaba’s lifetime of oppression for being different, having been inexplicably born with green skin.

There is obviously great potential for allegory here, which Chu doesn’t dig into quite as deeply as some might have liked—although, in contrast to Idina Menzel having originated the part on Broadway, one might read further meaning into the casting of Erivo, a Black woman, as Elphaba. Given the time elapsed since the play was first mounted, and the cultural landscape today, this is a change that makes more sense. (It would have made more sense in 2003 too.)

Wicked also features a far more directly allegorical subplot about animal characters who are the victims of a conspiracy to stop all animals from speaking. There is a goat professor character who is a key feature in this subplot—I struggled to identify the wildly familar voice being used for this CGI character rendered as a full-on goat who can talk (how the hell he does things like, say, get dressed in the morning, we just won’t talk about), and it turned out to be the great Peter Dinklage. In the Broadway play, the animals are portrayed by humans wearing fairly elaborate prosthetics, but they still presented as definitively humanoid; it follows that in the film, they would be entirely CGI creations. In any case, I found this subplot to be rather undercooked, more of a plot device for a wedge in Elphaba and Galinda’s friendship than the legitimate, front-facing concern it should be.

Speaking of the visual effects, it should be noted that this is Wicked’s weakest element. The universe of this film is invented with vivid imagination, I will give it that—it’s just rendered in plainly obvious visual artifice, with sometimes distracting glitchiness, such as how Elphaba’s movements hitch a bit when she’s seen flying on her broom. Even compared to the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, one can’t help but be impressed by that film’s elaborately designed and colorful, practical sets, even by today’s standards. Much of the visuals in Wicked feel like shortcuts that did not demand the same kind of effort, even though a movie like this more than justifies such efforts.

What recommends Wicked is how much movie magic it still contains, in spite of that. The music is unbelievably catchy and easily elevates a script that could stand some greater depth. Far more importantly, the casting is spot-on across the board, starting with Ariana Grande and Erivo, who alone make the movie worth seeing, both for their shining, distinct personalities and their undeniable charisma as a pair. But the rest of the cast is wonderful too, from Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible, to Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey’s singularly charming turn as the prince Fiyero. There’s even a touch of unforced queerness among the supporting cast, most exemplified by Bown Yang as one of Galinda’s two biggest acolytes, which I very much appreciated.

Jeff Goldlbum, for his part, is serviceable as the Wizard of Oz; it’s a casting choice that works and makes sense, even though he’s just as Goldlbum-y as ever. I won’t say his singing is bad, but it certainly pales in comparison to the staggering singing talent surrounding him. And yes, original Broadway players Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth do get concurrent cameos, in a scene that is quite funny. Finally, Marissa Bode is good as Ephaba’s sister, Nessarose, who is a wheelchair user, but I rather wish that character had been given more to do and meatier content to chew on. At least in this case they cast an actual wheelchair user to fill the role.

Wicked: Part II is set for release at this same time next year, and I am now looking forward to it far more than I expected to prior to seeing Part I. I still have mixed feelings about splitting film adaptations this way; on the one hand it feels like a choice motivated by profits alone, and on the other hand it can really allow a story with a lot going on to breathe. I find myself surprised to feel that nothing in Part I comes across as filler, and still some of it could have been better fleshed out. Given that this is an adaptation of a Broadway musical, it already has a clearly defined first and second half baked in. This film ends with an extended version of “Defying Gravity” and it is sensational, a great way to end the movie—in spite of one woman in the elevator after the screening I attended being quite miffed to have discovered only that night that this was only part I. Again: it just allows you to look forward to more of exactly the thing you love. In the meantime, just think of this as a year-long intermission.

Some of the best connections come from the most surprising places.

Overall: B+

RED ONE

Directing: C-
Acting: C+
Writing: D-
Cinematography: C-
Editing: D
Special Effects: C

Let’s talk, for just a moment, about Mariah Carey. I am not a fan. Okay, in the hands of the right director she can be a pretty good actor—but I’m talking about her music. And yes, I know, she has legions of fans; even I can acknowledge that she holds the record number of #1 singles of any solo artist in history. That doesn’t make the music good. I’m sorry, I just can’t with her music—especially that crazy-making perennial single “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” And I love Christmas!

You may be starting to see where I am going with this. Director Jake Kasdan (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle), perhaps, thought he was being a bit cheeky when, instead of throwing “All I Want for Christmas Is You” onto the soundtrack to his new, absolutely soulless Christmas movie, Red One, he chose “Santa Claus Is Coming’ to Town”—from the same 1994 album.

The song’s arrangement is as generic and forgettable as it could possibly be. It’s what plays over the end credits, standard white text on a black background, nothing fancy or cute. And this is easily the best part of the movie.

Red One is what happens when feeling dead inside becomes a feature film. I have never seen a movie with so much magic onscreen be so lacking in actual movie magic. I went into this thinking I was fully prepared, but ready to have a good time in spite of the poor reviews and lackluster response. Sometimes bad movies are fun! If only. Instead, Red One is so busy just being busy, it dulls the senses, and becomes a snooze fest. Believe me when I say that literally. I nodded off multiple times. During the periods I managed to stay awake, one of the five other people in the theater let out a loud snore. We’re all in this together, I guess.

Except: you aren’t. Or you won’t be, if you value your time. Some of you might expect amusement from a movie where someone actually utters the line, “It’s Christmas, dickhead!” Some of you might even be genuinely amused by it. In that case, you’ve lost my respect. I’m just over here wondering why the hell anyone would cast J.K. Simmons as a Santa Claus who is not fat, but jacked. Santa literally lifts weights in this movie. In what universe does this make sense? Santa is supposed to be cuddly and soft. Stop fat shaming Santa Claus!

Okay, okay. I was reminded, as I left the theater expressing my active contempt for this movie, that I did laugh a few times. We all have our moments of weakness. There are some things in Red One that are almost fun. There’s a testy polar bear, voiced by Reinaldo Faberlle, who might have improved the film slightly had he just gotten more screen time. Kristofer Hivju chews up the scenery pretty well as Krampus. This is about as close as I can get to finding redeeming qualities.

Chris Evans plays Jack O’Malley, the unscrupulous tracker tasked with finding Santa Claus after he is abducted. He’s a douchebag on the surface who we know from the first second will eventually be revealed to have a heart of gold, and Evans might as well be sleepwalking his performance. Dwayne Johnson plays Callum Drift, head of North Pole security, and the earnest seriousness of his performance would feel out of place if not for the fact that not one of these actors seems to think they are in the same movie as any of the others. Lucy Liu is utterly wasted as “Director Zoe Harlow,” just walking around looking mildly annoyed all the time. I would be too if I had to appear in this movie. Bonnie Hunt appears as Mrs. Claus and similarly gets nothing interesting to do. Kieran Shipka, once young Sally Draper from Mad Men now grown up, plays Gryla the Christmas Witch, attempting to ham it up as a villain but sadly failing to make any real mark.

Christmas movies are a dime a dozen anymore. Less than that, even. A penny per hundred. It used to be a fairly regular thing to get a theatrical Christmas movie release that actually penetrates and becomes something special. I felt something close to that with Happiest Season, but that was largely contextual: an effectively sweet holiday film released on a streamer (Hulu) during the pandemic. These are the kinds of things Red One isn’t even aiming for. It’ll entertain a few teenagers who get a kick out of a “Christmas movie” with enough profanity to land it a PG-13 rating.

There’s something about Red One that feels deeply cynical to me. It hits obligatory story beats and the same old moral lessons, purporting to be about “the meaning of Christmas” without actually using the phrase. Characters spew platitudes and learn to be “nicer,” driving home the consumerism of the holiday by using toy store stock rooms as portals to travel around the globe, packaged as entertainment for an audience that increasingly celebrates cruelty. It’s clear that no one involved in the making of this movie thought they were making something any more special than a paycheck, and as long as those checks cash, what reason do they have to care that this was easily the worst movie I’ve seen all year?

Why so serious? Jesus Christ, eat a doughnut!

Overall: D+

THE PIANO LESSON

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

The Piano Lesson is the third August Wilson play to be adapted to film in the past eight years, the others being Fences (2016) and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020). As with the others, this one is both compelling and feels very much like a filmed stage play. If you didn’t already know it was such an adaptation, you might sit through its almost exclusive scenes of characters in rooms talking and think: Was this a play?

This is always what makes film adaptations of stage plays tricky. On the one hand, watching a story like this is certainly more effective when scene unfold live on stage. On the other hand, film certainly reaches far more audiences. How much more is perhaps the most pertinent question: film adaptations of plays don’t tend to be huge hits, although sometimes (as with Fences) they do go on to gain Academy Awards recognition.

The Piano Lesson is currently in limited release, showing here in the Seattle area only at the Landmark Crest Cinema, up in Shoreline. This is a Netflix production, and as is typical, they have released it in a small number of theaters for Oscar qualification; it will be streaming on Netflix November 22. I can tell you there’s no need to go out of your way to see it in a theater; there is much to admire about this film, but none of it made exceptional by the theatrical viewing experience rather than simply watching it at home.

Although the titular piano plays prominently in the plot, there is surprisingly little piano actually played in this movie. It’s much more about what the object itself represents, as a sort of family heirloom, with lore attached to it that dates back to slavery times: the ancestors of the present-day family whose story this is are carved into the piano’s wood. In the opening sequence, we see the piano being stolen, on Independence Day in 1911, from the former slave owners who have had the piano for decades. It’s the family etched into the piano who are stealing it, but the story being told focuses much more on the descendants of that family, 25 years later.

I will freely admit getting a bit of a kick out of any movie with an otherwise all-Black cast, where the very few White characters onscreen are either outright evil or merely forgettable and insignificant. Plenty of White dipshits will see this as “wokeness” gone too far. I see it as poetic justice. The fact that August Wilson’s dialogue is reliably poetic is icing on the cake.

The original play was produced in 1987. but there was a revival Broadway production in 2022 and 2023 starring Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Ray Fisher and Michael Potts—all of whom reprise their roles here. Most of the story takes place in the house of Bernice (Danielle Deadwyler), her daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith), and her uncle, Doaker (Jackson), which is slowly revealed to be haunted by James Sutter (Jay Peterson), the patriarch of the aforementioned slave-owning family. Bernice gets paid a visit by her brother, Boy Willie (Washington), and his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher). A couple of other visitors wind up showing up: Wining Boy Charles (Michael Potts), Bernice’s other uncle and Doaker’s brother; and Avery (Corey Hawkins), an old family friend, now turned preacher, who has aims to marry a very resistant Bernice.

A huge amount of the dialogue consists of Bernice and her brother Boy Willie arguing over the piano. Boy Willie has come to Pittsburgh with a truck load of watermelons he intends to sell, and then buy land with funds combined with the sale of the piano. This is actually a rich and compelling argument to witness, because both characters have valid points of view on the matter. Boy Willie believes their forefathers would want the piano to be used to make their lives better and more secure, being worth enough to help make that happen. Bernice believes far too much love and sacrifice went into the carvings to cast it aside as a family heirloom. I think I’m with Bernice on this one, but it’s not difficult to understand Boy Willie’s opinion on the matter.

The Piano Lesson is directed by first-time feature film director Malcolm Washington—John David’s brother and also son of Denzel—and he holds his own fairly impressively, creating an adaptation about as successful as the other two from recent years. It’s the supernatural element where your mileage may vary: this one has a legit ghost, and a preacher who comes to throw holy water around and attempt to cast out the spirit. It’s like August Wilson suddenly gained a strain of The Exorcist—albeit one far more subtle than that comparison might suggest.

This also allows for a lot of myth and allegory, of course, particularly when it comes to generational trauma. For me, The Piano Lesson mostly works, and the challenge lay less with the content itself than with adaptation across mediums. Once you can cross that hurdle as a viewer, this is a film that succeeds just by sticking with you.

A lesson is conveyed by ancestors.

Overall: B+

A REAL PAIN

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A

In A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play adult cousins who attend a guided holocaust tour of Poland, and the tour guide is a Brit who is the only person in the group not in any way Jewish. How often does it actually happen that way, I wonder? I could be wrong, but I would expect that more often than not these tour guides are Jewish or have some connection to Judaism, or at the very least to the country they have chosen to operate in. I’m sure there are exceptions to that, as in this story, in which it’s a fascinating narrative choice.

Eisenberg wrote and directed this film, his sophomore feature film effort on both counts. It’s easy to be skeptical of yet another young(ish) actor fancying himself a director, but it really should be noted how assured and accomplished A Real Pain is. It’s a film filled with scenes set up to go a predictable direction, but which consistently go a different way. There’s a scene in which Eisenberg’s David is ranting to the rest of the tour group over dinner about Culkin’s Benji while he’s gone to the bathroom. He goes on so long that I was sure Benji would be revealed to be standing behind him and overhearing all this. Instead Benji does something totally different, serves as an effective disctraction, but is wholly in character.

Eisenberg and Culkin are two very different people, and so are David and Benji. After a while, it becomes increasingly clear that this casting is inspired. These cousins were only born three weeks apart, so they grew up very close, and you really feel it in their characters. David consistently allows Benji to walk all over him, and it’s never clear whether this has always been their dynamic, or if it’s only happening now because of a recent, sad incident in Benji’s life. Either way, I found Benji often deeply annoying, and can’t imagine tolerating him the way David does. He even asks David to lend him his phone so he can play music in the shower, making the dubious claim that he can’t on his own phone. I’d tell him to use his own fucking phone.

The magic trick of A Real Pain is how much we empathize with both of these guys in spite of their character flaws. In typical Eisenberg style, David is neurotic and nervous and awkward, taking anti-anxiety pills. At least he’s not a pretentious prick, a type of character Eisenberg excels at playing. David feels wholly his own person, someone with deep affection for the people in his life, from his wife to his son to, vividly illustrated here, his cousin.

I do love a story about grown men with an enduring love for each other, that isn’t sexual. We do get more of them these days than we used to, but there can never be too many stories of platonic but deep bonds between straight guys. Audiences need that modeled for them, and this movie does it stupendously. Granted, David and Benji are cousins, so it’s about more than friendship, as they are family. But, they are also so wildly different from each other, they function as best friends who complement each other.

The tour group they are on is fairly small, The others in the group are an older married couple (Liza Sedovy and Daniel Oreskes); a Rwandan man who escaped the genocide and converted to Judaism (Kurt Egyiawan); and a recently divorced woman played by Dirty Dancing’s Jennifer Grey. I heard her interviewed on a podcast recently on which the hosts insisted she’s “a scene stealer” in this movie, and I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. She’s fine, but the part could just as easily have been cast with any other competent actor.

Will Sharpe, though, conveys some surprising subtlety as James, the tour guide—particularly when Benji randomly breaks and criticizes James’s over-reliance on historic facts and statistics at the expense of experiencing the moment. James takes the criticism with a graceful willingness to learn, an unexpected thing to see.

This tour also goes to locations notable to the holocaust not often seen in film, in particular the unusually well preserved concentration camp Majdanek, in Lublin, Poland. David and Benji take this particular tour in part because this is the city where their grandmother was from, and they leave the tour a day early to visit the house where she grew up. There, they have an interaction with a neighbor that is characteristically awkward, but which these characters manage to turn into their own brand of sentimentality.

That is perhaps why A Real Pain really spoke to me. The characters in it struggle to make it work, but with persistence they make it work. The story is very well constructed, and I can only imagine this film succeeds in much the same way, with loving layers of polish over time.

A relationship that’s more functional than it seems.

Overall: A-