Blurbing For The Weekend 4/5/24

I made a page about My Music & Movie Rating Scales! So you don't get confused.

For a good while, I was impressed how Brad Pitt transcended his Redford Jr. status by accepting he’s most charismatic as a confident beta. This first became apparent when he stood cockily but deferentially next to actors like Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis, George Clooney and Angelina Jolie. Burn After Reading may have been the apex of this phase, the Coens realizing Pitt would reach peak adorability by being comfortably stupider than everyone on screen with him. Though dreamy enough to be tolerated by mainstream society even at his dullest (see Redford), he truly became capable of helming vehicles when he realized he just needed a concept to accede authority to, rather than another actor. In Moneyball, he graciously accepted his inferiority to sabremetrics. In World War Z, he placed the scientific method on high, despite his skill blasting zombies with a sawed-off shotgun. Pitt became a Socratic stud, smarter than everyone else because he accepted he didn’t know everything. Then I found out he’d had an abusive drunken meltdown involving his kids, and welp - bye, asshole. The occasional late night viewing of Moneyball aside (assuming the Jonah Hill stories don’t get worse), we wouldn’t be spending time together.

While the guy remains on a thin fuckin’ line, and I’ll reaffirm I believe Angelina Jolie any time it feels necessary, there haven’t been further tales of cruelty (beyond ugly divorce lawyer shit) and he’s reportedly gotten sober. Everyone’s got a different moral calculus on this stuff, and displays of acknowledgement and evolution after a shameful circumstance do make a difference for me (for example, I still won’t be rewatching Seven or anything else featuring the unrepentant, plausibly active predator Kevin Spacey). So I found my contempt dissipated enough to watch Bullet Train, an ensemble action-comedy Pitt fronted in 2022.

I’m generally not a fan of movies where text flashes across the scene announcing someone is “The Father” or “The Hitman,” especially when they share the same info in dialogue seconds later. This is definitely a movie in that post-Tarantino/Ritchie mercenary universe where we’re supposed to be impressed when a young woman doesn’t care that she’s killed a person, and tickled that someone with a British accent and a bad dye job has a goofy code name. Bullet Train even has surprise celebrity cameos and other bits of insufferable, hoary “hip Hollywood” cutesy-poo, helped largely by being set in Japan despite a predominantly anglo-centric star cast. Does someone dressed as an anime character get punched in the face? You betcha!

Thankfully, the actors immersed in the spectacle are also staying in their lanes. Pitt plays a hapless courier who actively tries to avoid the felonies and hyperviolence that make up this fantasy world. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is dashing and brash (I now think his Kraven The Hunter movie could be dope) as a workaday hitman partnered with Brian Tyree Henry, charming despite his dubious British accent and ridiculous hair. I was even entertained by Joey King’s matter-of-fact super-sociopath. The Japanese actors are at least allowed gravitas and one-and-a-half dimensions, even if they’re having less fun. Director David Leitch keeps things popping enough that I might sit through Deadpool 2 and Hobbs & Shaw to see if he’s a modern day Hal Needham or something. FOUR BAGS OF POPCORN.

Hungry for some spooky new A24 goodness, I was this close to individually renting Talk To Me when it popped up on Paramount/Showtime. Hot damn! A three-dollar win for Dad! I had no idea the movie was Australian, which did add a wrinkle to my usual policy of watching movies sans captions the first time around. It’s about a group of teenagers who get ahold of an embalmed hand that works as a super-charged Ouija board, allowing you to commune and even be possessed by the dead without consequence as long as you don’t hold the hand over 90 seconds. As you might expect, those consequences turn out to be pretty damn harsh, and not really worth the risk. But that’s teenagers for you!

Compared to the jacked-up zeitgeist-chasers in A24’s Bodies Bodies Bodies, the kids in Talk To Me are more naturalistic in their phonesploits without being dull. I appreciated how their families were troubled but not outrageously dysfunctional, working units burdened with situations and heartbreak that might require therapy, but not CPS. It nicely fits in the same category as Drag Me To Hell, tales of karma’s supernatural cruelty, where the lead - however sympathetic - still “did the bad thing,” and therefore isn’t guaranteed a happy outcome. One can note this kind of indie thriller used to be more of a New Line thing than an arthouse affair, but the State of Cinema Today ain’t my problem. FIVE BAGS OF POPCORN.

Despite some amusing performances and cool quirks, I didn’t actually finish a rewatch of Bodies Bodies Bodies, so its status as Popcorn Classic remains unclear. Three other movies earned the accolade recently, though. 

Head Count: A sweet collegiate dink misses out on Spring Break to dutifully spend time with the older brother who raised him, now chilling in a trailer in Joshua Tree. The pair encounter a group of randy college students staying at a nearby rental, one of them single, allowing the younger brother to enjoy the camaraderie and carnality of youth. Unfortunately, he read the wrong word off the internet while looking for campfire creepypasta and this tender drama about guilt and independence is gonna get fuuuuuucked uuuup. Director Elle Callahan, who previously worked in sound, has a knack for novel set-pieces that might make you forget how little bloodshed (or expenditure) you actually saw. The cruelty feels more circumstantial than karmic - the kind of conceit that other films have already acknowledged would be world-changing if true - but it’s still a nice slice of geniality descending into chaos. POPCORN CLASSIC.

Ghost Stories: A professional skeptic is asked by his reclusive childhood role model to disprove the stories of three men, as they’re making the old guy question his life’s work. The film is based on a stage play with the same star/co-director, which I can’t even begin to fathom. Not the film has that much going on with special effects, but it’s so opened up setting-wise that there’s zero sense of a proscenium arch. Some questionable, abrupt editing choices between the stories made me assume it was shot for TV, and the coda doesn’t completely succeed in wedding the cumulative horror of the 1945 classic Dead Of Night to a revelation of personal regret. But Martin Freeman and Alex Lawther have real fun as two of the haunted interviewees, and Andy Nyman, as the cynic, does a great job careening from slightly condescending to scared shitless. POPCORN CLASSIC.

The Strangers: Prey By Night. Another tender drama about a family struggling to mix their individual needs with their shared love, interrupted by someone’s merciless, almost supernatural quest for blooooooood. Christina Hendricks and Martin Henderson play a couple still horny for each other despite a pair of teenage children, one a troublemaker they’re conflicted about sending to boarding school. Stopping at an aunt’s off-season trailer park for the night, they unfortunately find their hosts disemboweled by the three masked Manson family types from 2008’s home invasion classic The Stranglers. While written by that movie’s director Bryan Bertino, this one has a lot more running and a lot more brutally violent set-pieces set to Jim Steinman songs. Spoiler! POPCORN CLASSIC.

I also watched Ghostwatch, a 1992 TV special that aired one Halloween on the BBC and never again, due to the amount of confusion and outrage it caused. It’s on Shudder, and all I feel comfortable adding to my enthusiastic recommendation to see it as soon as possible is YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. It's that good.