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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022)
Better than Discovery and Picard, but...
Finally, new Trek has given up this misplaced need to make itself into a modern prestige series. STD and STP were both overblown, overwrought, and underwritten dredge. Strange New Worlds at the very least embraces the genre identity at the core of the Star Trek brand: it's never going to be as lauded as Game of Thrones or as lucrative as Star Wars. It is a weekly serial couching questions of morality and ethics within a sci-fi package.
So Strange New Worlds gets at least that right. But something still doesn't feel quite right. While this series does manage to get the structure of Star Trek right, it's those little details that still feel off. Many of the moral quandaries which the characters are faced with are aggravatingly simple (should a planet take the life of an innocent child so that everyone else can live in happiness? Gosh, I don't know, let me think). What set TOS, TNG, and DS9 apart was that characters were often placed in truly impossible scenarios and were forced to make choices that compromised or even destroyed their likability, but you can feel the creators of SNW heading their bets so that none of our protagonists ever get caught in too bad of a jam. Episodes like "Memento Mori" and "Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach" present moral quandaries with the complexities of a Chinese finger trap: "Sir, instead of pulling out, what if we... PUSHED IN." "My god, ensign, it's just crazy enough to work."
But there are a few bright spots. Episodes like "Spock Amok" and "The Elysian Kingdom" recapture the playful silliness of classic Trek, though often without the narrative sophistication to elevate them. Of the first season, the only episode that I fully enjoyed was the finale, which reframes a classic TOS episode using classic Trek time travel gobbledygook to create a tense and high stakes situation, but one that is still fairly marred by an indulgence in fan service.
I'm glad fans are feeling satisfied with a new Trek show, and I hope that it continues to satisfy them. But while I can admit that there have been improvements to the crap we were trying with Discovery and Picard, Strange New Worlds still isn't quite able to scratch that Star Trek itch.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: The Gang Beats Boggs: Ladies Reboot (2018)
Great ideas/message, medium funny
A lot of hate for this episode. It's lampooning Hollywood's halfhearted and condescending attempts at creating feminist content without really metabolizing what is systemically problematic about the entertainment industry, and I think what runs a lot of people the wrong way is that it does that without being as outwardly funny as SUNNY usually is. This is where people start treating media like a vacuum cleaner or fast food, a mass produced product that is supposed to do a-b-c, and when it doesn't, it offends our customer-is-always-right sensibilities. Media is always buyer-beware. That's why they say you should check your expectations at the door.
There are a handful of other episodes in SUNNY like this, where they get a big concept that ends up overshadowing the actual comedy, THE GANG CRACKS THE LIBERTY BELL, FRANK'S BROTHER, A CRICKET'S TALE, etc.
For everyone who's plastering this review page with 1-star ratings, ok, fine, but answer me this, how many other prime time American sitcoms are as ambitious in their commentary as SUNNY is even in its weaker episodes? In a landscape absolutely littered with homogenous, predictable, uncritical tripe, SUNNY is as incisive and insightful as ever, and I think that's worth something better than "waaaaaah! worst. episode. ever!"
But hey, what do I know?
James and the Giant Peach (1996)
What a sweet nightmare.
As a diligent child of the 1990's, the VHS's for both "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "James and the Giant Peach" on regular rotation on my family's VCR. Even though "Nightmare" was populated by monsters and ghouls and skellingtons, the film that scared me more was "James and the Giant Peach," because unlike "Nightmare", that film interacted with deep fears that I carried through my childhood about being abandoned, about being alone, about being undefended from the stormy forces of the world that wanted to trample and obliterated everything that made me feel safe. "Nightmare" was spooky up until the characters started actually talking but its central conflict was basically a midlife crisis; "James and the Giant Peach" was legitimately upsetting.
Both films are full of singularly beautiful images that are so different they seem to compel your mind to pursue them. It's a type of world-building that all great animation does that eschews logic in favor of something like a self-perpetuating dream, where the mind shows itself an image so strange and possessing that it automatically does the imaginative work of generating a rationale for that image. When we see a graveyard under the arctic sea teeming with sunken ships and menacing skeletons or a massive rhino made of storm clouds and smoke come galloping out of the horizon or the kindly woman's face of a giant spider tucking our hero into sleep, we don't just take those images at face value, we follow them and they bloom into something greater than the sum of their parts.
Selick leaned further into the macabre, the grotesque, and the uncanny for this film, and it makes for a more emotional and ultimately affirming story. James is confronted with deep terrors from without and within, a rhino made of storm clouds and smoke as the chaos of an unreasonable world, and the aunts that neglect and starve and beat him as the hell of an abusive homelife. James's test is to create an entire life for himself, a shelter with his magic peach, a family with his human-sized insects who would be monsters to anyone else.
Rewatching the film as an adult, I loved the first two thirds of the film, but the third act felt underwhelming. James defeating the rhino by basically just telling it that he isn't afraid of it felt limp when the rest of the story was so filled with such potent metaphor and association. It may have worked better on the page, but cinematically it fell flat. The same goes for the dispatching of the aunts, although I think that would have been forgivable if we'd gotten a really strong confrontation with the rhino.
Also, Randy Newman's score felt at odds with the look and tone of the film. Selick may have thought the film would benefit from moving in a different direction than the work that Danny Elfman did on "Nightmare," but looking back now, the choice for Elfman just seems so obvious for "James and the Giant Peach." It would have give a necessary sense of dread while also providing a upbeat counterpoint. Also, I don't think I would miss the songs if they were removed. Animated musicals were the order of the day in 1996, but the songs add nothing that the dialogue isn't able to do on its own.
Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
Song to a Changing World
Norman Jewison's adaptation of the Broadway musical by Arnold Perl and Joseph Stein (itself an adaptation of stories by Sholom Aleichem) was released at a pivotal moment of painful change for the genre of the Hollywood musical. It was clear from the high-profile failures of films like "Hello, Dolly!" and "Doctor Doolittle" that both audiences and critics were no longer interested in the roadshow spectacular that had fueled so many of the industry's biggest successes from the early fifties through to the late sixties. Now films like "Easy Rider" and "Bonnie and Clyde" were bringing in box office and awards recognition, auguring an era of grittier, more character-driven films made by a new breed of younger auteurs like Scorsese, De Palma, Altman, and Coppola. If there is a guiding principle to the 1970's in American cinema, it was an investigation into the subjectivity of the form to tell internal stories about dynamic characters. Could the musical survive in such a climate, or would it limp on through the next decade as an invisible dinosaur until the auteur era ended in the early 80's?
I wasn't sure what to make of this film before watching it. I'd been aware of it for many years and had bleary half-memories of a live production I'd seen at the Smithsonian in much rowdier years. I'd always imagined it as a film that came out in the mid-sixties, not the early seventies, partly because of the jaunty catchiness of the most famous song, "Tradition." To my surprise, "Fiddler" was released the same year as "A Clockwork Orange" and "The French Connection." But once I actually watched the film, it began to fit in more and more with its era.
The stakes of the film are ultimately internal. The arc that the main character Tevye travels (played by Chaim Topol with joviality, devotion, and a wry humor that nurses deep gulfs of anger and pain) shows him going from a man who swears by and relies upon the thousands of years of social, interpersonal, familial, and religious tradition, to a man who must discover a new flexibility to his beliefs. Jewison takes advantage of the inherently meta elements of the musical to give us scenes where he debates with himself and with God questions that challenge his identity as a father and his identity as a Jew.
Jewison was wise to strip the original production of its overtly comedic tone. This is not to say that the humor is entirely removed, because to do so would be to deny so much of the characters' inherent resilience: irony and wit are their main defense against the harsh realities of being Jewish in the 1900's in Russia. Consider a scene toward the end when Tevye and the other village leaders are informed by a local goyim policeman that they must leave Anatevka, where many of them have lived their entire lives. The policeman leaves, the elders regard each other quietly until someone comes to the wry conclusion that, Well it was never that nice there to begin with.
But the film never lets us off the hook the same way that the staged musical did. The pogroms and poverty are shown with stark realism, but the humor of the Jewish characters creates a deeply human tension that makes the film all the more potent and affecting.
So many of the aforementioned Hollywood musicals of the fifties and sixties were content to simply provide lavish and spectacular experiences that audiences would not be able to get at home on the burgeoning television landscape. They were films shot in exotic locations or in extravagant sets where scores of highly trained dancers and musicians plied their trade in beautiful costumes. The comparison has already been made to that these were the antecedent to today's superhero film, but a growing cynicism due to the turmoil of the sixties left audiences with an appetite for something more real, something that they could see some of themselves in, that didn't just exist to distract them from the world outside the theater.
"Fiddler on the Roof" came out a year before Bob Fosse's "Cabaret," and together, these two musicals created a space for the classic genre to feasibly exist within this new audience expectation for complex character and subjective storytelling. They proved that the genre could be used in unique ways to plumb the depths of psychological experience with the same innovation as the other standards of American seventies cinema, because beneath the bold costumes, complex choreography, and catchy music, they were both about real human beings struggling to hold onto their sense of identity in a world chaotic with change.
A Bridge Too Far (1977)
War. War is war, and it doesn't get war-ier than this war
I've been struggling to understand the passion for and against this film. Roger Ebert hated, hated, hated it, while a number of reviewers on IMDb are calling it an underrated masterpiece. For me it landed pretty square in the middle. It seemed to accomplish what it set out to do, but I wonder how worthwhile that goal really was.
Operation Market Garden was a big, costly disaster, and A Bridge Too Far sought to depict that over the course of an epic film. It doesn't tell a story so much as recount the major events of the invasion. It doesn't have characters so much as cast recognizable actors to wear the uniform and names of real soldiers so that the viewer would have a basic understanding of where we were at any given point in the story. "Aha, we've come back to the Anthony Hopkins section! Oh look, the Germans have retaken the bridge." "Now we're back to the Sean Connery section. Whew, I wondered if he'd ever make it out of that attic." "Wait, wha-? Robert Redford is in this?"
As such, A Bridge Too Far doesn't feel like a "war film" the way that the greats of the genre do. Films like Saving Private Ryan, Dunkirk, the Thin Red Line, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, even older films like Paths of Glory, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, or All Quiet on the Western Front do not excel because they are "war" movies, but because they tell interesting stories about the human experience during the heightened and devastating experience of modern combat. For all their history and spectacle, brutality and terror, they are endlessly human films. That cannot be said of A Bridge Too Far, but I'm not sure that was even the intention.
It seems like William Goldman, the great screenwriter of classics like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men, treated this film as more of a writer-for-hire situation, because the dialogue he gives his characters is basically just enough to inform the audience of what is literally happening on screen so we have some context for the chaos of combat. I think the same can be said of director Richard Attenborough, who would later prove he was more adept with the epic genre than what he did with A Bridge Too Far, that is, filming explosions and reaction shots from actors, and then editing them together as logically as possible.
(I will say, there is one moment of great direction, which comes early in the film, and gave me a false sense of hope for what was to come: this was the airdrop sequence, where dozens of real planes fill the sky dropping parachutes out of them, where the camera enters the POV of a soldier and we leap out of a plane, whipped and thrashed by the wind, with only the sound of hurried breath on the soundtrack: twenty-five years later, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg would create a similar sequence with more advanced special effects in the miniseries Band of Brothers which, frankly, lacks the visceral quality that Attenborough was able to convey here.)
So now we've come back to the "goal" of the film that I referenced in the beginning: it seems like the producers and filmmakers wanted to create a kind of big-budget docudrama, not so much a film as an extravagantly budgeted recreation of the Market Garden operation, and to that effect they succeeded, though I have to wonder, why? Film is an emotional and visceral medium, one that has never been tethered to the facts. Think about all the movies you've seen with the tagline "Based on a true story" and how many of them tweaked, altered, or straight-up invented scenes or whole plot lines for the sake of a more dramatic film. That's because cinema is best when it is about character and story, about drama and change, and A Bridge Too Far seems to want to use the visceral effects of cinema without really earning them.
It's a well-made film in the very barest sense of the phrase. But why, you ask? For what purpose? To say what, exactly, was all that money and talent spent?
Ehh.... 🤷♀️ ?
Wish Upon (2017)
Ehh... RLM built it up too much
It seems like a lot of the other reviews here mention the Redlettermedia review of WISH UPON where Mike puts it up there with THE ROOM and TROLL 2. I didn't think it was that bad. What makes those great bad films is how specifically strange their POVs are. WISH UPON just felt like a quick, thrown-together, cheapo horror movie that no one really had a vision or even an idea for. I think one of the requirements for a great bad movie is that the filmmaker clearly thinks they're a genius.
There are some funny, awkward scenes. The whole "multiverse" subplot manages to get a good laugh, among with a few other moments, but overall, nothing to write home about. If you're a bad-movie aficionado, you might get more out of it than me. Mostly I felt bad for the actors who were really trying to sell this lazy, dumb premise. Main takeaway: those actresses need better agents.