Ian Thomas Malone -

Thursday

5

June 2025

2

COMMENTS

‘Ballerina’ review: excellent choreography proves there’s life left in the John Wick franchise

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

The John Wick franchise has relied on a fairly simple premise that has become quite convoluted with each passing entry. “All this over a dog,” has become short form for the ethos of the whole series. And for the most part, it’s worked, aided greatly by superb choreography and Keanu Reeves’ dedication to his craft.

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina tests the series’ formula in a major way. What is John Wick without John Wick? Set during the events of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, the film tries to gently ease its audience into its world without its major hero at the helm.

The plot is quite perfunctory. Eva Macarro (Ana de Armas, replacing Unity Phelan, who portrayed the character in Parabellum) seeks revenge on The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), who killed her father, Javier (David Castañeda). Eva is a student at the Ruska Roma organization under the tutelage of the Director (Anjelica Huston). Eva goes rogue after the Chancellor, pitting titans of the High Table against each other.

De Armas brings a lot of charm to a largely empty role. Eva’s only substantive relationship in the movie is with the Director, limiting the effectiveness of Byrne as the villain. Franchise mainstays Winston Scott (Ian McShane) and Charon (Lance Reddick, making his final on-screen appearance since his 2023) provide limited mentorship in crowd-pleaser roles.

At times, the movie feels pieced together from various strands of plot. Norman Reedus makes a limited appearance that seems more destined for another spinoff. Catalina Sandino Moreno’s role as one of The Chancellor’s bodyguards contains more complexity than was needed for such a small role. Veteran director Len Wiseman seems more than aware that his film lacks much heart at the center, but he never really commits to a vision beyond the boilerplate revenge tale.

The film does deliver on the action. Not all of the sequences are up to John Wick standards, but there are a few genuine standouts amidst the lean 125-minute runtime. The film never shakes the sense that it could have produced a better product with a few more passes at the script, but aside from a few janky special effects sequences, Ballerina manages to deliver a satisfying experience for fans of the franchise. The action is fun. There are too many flamethrowers and grenades, but many of the stunts are a joy to behold on the big screen.

Keanu Reeves is also effectively deployed. This isn’t his movie, but John Wick gets a little bit more to do than just a standard cameo. The film manages to give him a few moments without leaving its audience desperate that he doesn’t play a bigger role.

Ballerina is not a great movie, which is a shame, because the pieces are certainly there. The story just isn’t strong enough to deliver an experience on par with the mainline franchise. The film is leaps above the terrible Peacock prequel, The Continental. It’s an enjoyable time at the theater. The franchise hasn’t completely figured out the formula to thrive without Reeves, but it’s a worthy start.

Tuesday

3

June 2025

0

COMMENTS

‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ review: a satisfying, underwhelming conclusion to a franchise that deserved better

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

The Mission: Impossible franchise has defied all Hollywood conventions for the past thirty years, the rare television adaptation to vastly outshine its source material’s cultural staying power. From the franchise’s fourth entry, Ghost Protocol, onward, Tom Cruise’s passion project has grown from a bankable action series into one of the world’s biggest franchises. Cruise’s obsession with topping himself in defiance of all aging norms is practically worth the cost of admission.

There has been a mission along the way that Cruise has not exactly chosen to accept while continuing Ethan Hunt’s adventures into his sixties. Part of the charm of the original series was its ensemble nature. Each mission needed a team. The team mattered.

The Mission film series has always had its ensemble somewhat baked into its DNA, with Ving Rhames’ Luther Stickell aiding Hunt in every iteration of the franchise (though he was limited to a cameo in Ghost Protocol). The franchise has invested more heavily in its supporting bench as it’s rolled along, most notably Simon Pegg’s Benji, who first joined the team as a minor played in Mission: Impossible III. The latest release, Final Reckoning, purportedly claims to be the final entry, containing numerous callbacks to every one of its seven predecessors.

Final Reckoning has two glaring issues that it struggles to overcome. Mission has always been Cruise’s vehicle, but the supporting cast is nearly irrelevant, leaving Hunt on his own for much of the exceedingly bloated 170-minute runtime. The supporting cast is greatly expanded even as the film finds relatively little for any of them to do. Only Hayley Atwell’s Grace truly rises above the label of window dressing. The film does carve out an attempt at a special moment for one key player, falling short due to the ridiculous nature of the narrative.

While the film is a direct follow-up to Dead Reckoning Part One, Final Reckoning takes the franchise’s lore way too seriously. There are far too many clips of previous films that bog the first act down in exposition. There’s certainly middle ground to be had between the relative stand-alone nature of the early entries and its greater lore it has built over the first two installments.

At times, Final Reckoning’s plot borders on incoherent, rarely aided by the extremes that director Christopher McQuarrie goes to explain the stunts. Cruise’s other recent big tentpole Top Gun: Maverick spent a lot of time diligently explaining its mission. The implausibility of Ethan’s stunts here are not really helped by the extent to which the film decided to educate its audience on every rule he was naturally bound to ignore. Here, Mission: Implausible gives way to Mission: Farcical.

The Entity continues to be an empty shell of a villain. The method to combat the all-powerful AI hardly passes any kind of smell test. The Entity’s human ally, Gabriel (Esai Morales), receives little character development beyond his meager introduction in Dead Reckoning Part One. This film has a weird way of simultaneously having too much going on and dragging its feet toward an inevitable end.

There are some redeeming qualities. While the stunts represent Cruise’s insatiable need to top his own absurdity, there’s no denying that the results are top-tier blockbuster entertainment. The film’s sloppy execution undercuts its suspense, but it’s still a sight to behold on the big screen.

A certain sense of suspension of disbelief is required to enjoy a franchise like Mission: Impossible. Responsibility for maintaining that balance falls on the film more than the audience. The longer Final Reckoning meanders, the more you’re bound to question the sheer nonsense that lies at the heart of an AI program that’s powerful enough to take over the world’s nuclear arsenal, that can only be stopped by a 60-year-old man and a few of his versatile buddies. This film doesn’t play to its character’s strengths at all.

The film’s saving grace lies in its ability to wrap up a franchise with relative grace. Thirty years in, Mission: Impossible is showing its age. There is ample entertainment value to be had here, but Final Reckoning is not a particularly good movie.

Saturday

3

May 2025

0

COMMENTS

‘Thunderbolts*’ review: the MCU plays small ball, delivering its best film in years

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

The MCU has often looked lost in the six years since Avengers: Endgame. There’s a lot of different directions to point fingers, whether it’s the sheer volume of content, the haphazardly presented multiverse, or the unclear status of the Avengers team that nominally ties all the heroes together. 2021’s Black Widow displayed many of the inherent issues with this current era of Marvel, looking backwards at a time when everyone wondered what was next, a humorous façade to cover up the lack of purpose at the core of its narrative.

Too often, the MCU has felt like homework without any real payoff. In the old days, the A-list stars would rarely take more than a year off between appearances. Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, and Avengers: Infinity War all premiered within a four-year window, the same amount of time that has lapsed since Black Widow’s release. Three of its characters play major roles in Thunderbolts*, with only Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova popping up in the MCU since 2021, making an appearance in a single episode of Hawkeye.

In theory, Thunderbolts* should represent everything currently wrong with the MCU, a cast of B-tier heroes from a scattered MCU offering. Yelena is joined by her Black Widow costars, father Red Guardian (David Harbour) and villain turned hero Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). The team also includes Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), last seen in 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, John Walker (Wyatt Russell), last seen in 2021’s television show Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the Winter Solider himself (Sebastian Stan), the film’s closest thing to a front tier star. Anyone looking at the spread from which Thunderbolts* draws its cast might roll their eyes at the amount of homework required to comprehend this expansive web.

To the film’s immense credit, Thunderbolts* follows one of the key pillars of comic books in maintaining accessibility for members of the audience who are bound to struggle to keep up with where they’ve last seen everyone. February’s Captain America: Brave New World leaned heavily on 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, the MCU’s second entry, a bizarre narrative choice that functioned like an anchor strangling the entire film. Building off much newer material, Thunderbolts* rarely finds itself bogged down with canon.

The film largely centers its narrative around a botched mission planned by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who’s popped up in Black Widow, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the latter appearance having been much derided by yours truly) that aimed to get rid of her troublesome assets by sending them to kill each other. The team quickly discovers her plan in a remote base, along with Bob (Lewis Pullman), who’s unaware of his identity as the highly unstable split personality of The Sentry and The Void, essentially a version of Superman with severe mental illness.

Director Jake Schreier keeps things rolling through its relatively brisk 126-minute runtime. There’s a lot of signature MCU humor, mostly building off the strong rapport between Pugh and Harbour from Black Widow, along with plenty of jokes about the team’s underpowered nature. After mostly pulling villain duties in Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Russell brings a lot of levity to John Walker. Stan is somewhat underutilized around the peripherals of the team, letting the newer players take the reins.

The action sequences are well-choreographed. None of the fight scenes are jaw-dropping, but it’s also refreshing not to see every MCU battle devolve into everyone firing light beams at each other. The third act hits a few pacing snags, but shows a lot of restraint as far as typical blockbusters go. Thunderbolts* drama is remarkably human, the product of well-crafted storytelling that actually puts in the legwork to deliver a satisfying resolution.

The film does have a few dull moments. Louis-Dreyfus is one of the finest actors currently working, but de Fontaine is a dud of a character through her four MCU appearances, existing at the center of a silly impeachment storyline that Wendell Pierce tries admirably to salvage. As far as shady heads of government agencies go, de Fontaine falls well short of Nick Fury and Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (whose nickname is coincidentally the same as this team’s name), the latter of whom would have been a good fit for this film had it not been for the events of Brave New World.

Thunderbolts*’s crowning achievement is the way it defies a lot of criticisms currently levied at the MCU. The film doesn’t shoot for the moon, but packs a punch with its smaller-scale entertainment. The film does benefit from a level of MCU knowledge that’s bound to be over the heads of many in the audience, but it doesn’t rely on references. Nobody would be lost if they didn’t have a great memory of what happened in Black Widow or Ant-Man and the Wasp.

Perhaps most impressive is the way the film answers the question that many have had on their mind since Endgame, namely, what the MCU is building toward. There are real, substantive answers here that don’t come at the expense of the narrative. Thunderbolts* builds toward the future without losing its footing in the present. This film is proof that the MCU doesn’t need to throw out its fascination with new characters or its web of connectivity. The MCU just needs to tell good stories.

Friday

11

April 2025

0

COMMENTS

‘On Swift Horses’ review: top-notch performances and stellar cinematography buoy a compelling, uneven queer narrative

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

Gambling has plenty of natural appeal to closeted members of the LGBTQ community. If you can’t be happy, if you have to live your life within society’s artificially constructed walls, if you have nothing to lose at all, why not bet it all? It’s hard to care very much about planning a future when there’s nothing in it worth looking forward to.

The film On Swift Horses centers its narrative on a few individuals with seemingly nothing to lose. Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) resists the proposals of her boyfriend Lee (Will Poulter), seeing a kindred spirit in his brother Julius (Jacob Elordi), who’s just returned from the Korean War. The three make plans to leave their home in Kansas to build a new life in San Diego, taking advantage of the industrial boom of the 1950s.

While Muriel and Lee head west, Julius spurs their invitations, taking up residence in Las Vegas, where he works security at a casino. Julius quickly falls for Henry (Diego Calva), who shares his affection for cheating at cards, along with passionate nights in their motel room. Muriel, bored at her waitressing job and desperate for some spice in her life, takes up gambling on horse races using information she eavesdrops from her customers to develop an edge. A chance encounter at a race gives Muriel a taste of the river of Sapphos, leading her to an infatuation with their neighbor Sandra (Sasha Calle), who hosts a “book club” for fellow lesbians.

Based on the 2019 novel of the same name by Shannon Pufahl, On Swift Horses is a narrative that’s less concerned with telling a story than showcasing all the steamy parts along the way. Director Daniel Minahan crafts an intimate 1950s landscape for cinematographer Luc Montpellier to play around in. The film goes to certain extremes with its “show don’t tell” approach, throwing most character development out the window in favor of steamy romantic sequences between the pairings of Elordi and Calva, and Edgar-Jones and Calle.

The film largely splits its focus between Muriel and Julius, the former being far more compelling than the latter. Edgar-Jones brings a lot of nuance to Muriel, whose characterization is mostly defined through the audience’s understanding of the lack of agency that women had in the era. Subterfuge is her only way of exerting power, an already complicated dynamic on top of her closeted homosexuality.

There are certain frustrations that the audience might have toward Muriel’s lack of outlet to vocalize some of her angst, but that’s also kind of the point of Minahan’s work. Gay people rarely possessed access to anything that wasn’t in the shadows. Repression warps the mind toward unhealthy outcomes.

The film possesses a lot of maturity to its characters. Poulter is on an island of his own for much of the film, stuck in a loveless marriage while the other four principals have their fun with each other. The narrative resists the urge to vilify Lee, an attractive, simple man with an honest dream, possessing a charming, if not slightly unrealistic level of tolerance toward his brother’s obvious differences. There’s a lot of subtle humor that helps endear the characters that the screenplay mostly keeps at arm’s length.

The 117-minute runtime often struggles with the weight of both Muriel and Julius’ story, an issue compounded by Minihan’s breezy approach to pacing that puts a lot of strain on the third act when the time comes to arrange the many luscious sex scenes into a more compelling tapestry. Muriel’s arc is much more detached from her relationship with Sandra than Julius’ is with Henry. In certain ways, it’s nice to see what Edgar-Jones does with the space afforded to explore Muriel on her own, honing in on the loneliness that often defines the queer quest for love, but Calle is such a delight in every single scene that you can’t help feeling like their relationship got the short end of the stick when it comes to screen time.

Minahan does avoid one potential pitfall for his narrative. Audiences in 2025 do not need to be told that it was hard to be gay in the 1950s. On Swift Horses is a film about closeted people that dedicates little time to the exploration of the closet itself, a welcome departure from many narratives centered on the queer experience, especially from a historical sense. Edgar-Jones masterfully captures the innate struggle of trying to find happiness in a world diametrically opposed to queer joy. Without excusing its narrative shortcomings, the film does manage to synchronize its flaws to the broader reality that this era hardly possessed happiness that was not itself quite messy.

A lot of queer films fall into the trap of trying to be everything to everyone, reflecting the challenges that LGBTQ narratives have in trying to appeal to audiences both inside the community and those who know little about the broader Rainbow Empire. With that in mind, it’s quite refreshing to see a film like On Swift Horses so content to march to the beat of its own drum. The film very much understands the gamble that all queer people struggle with, to make the hardest gamble of them all, to bet on oneself.

It doesn’t always work. The narrative isn’t focused enough to give all five of its primary characters enough to do. From the actors to the talent behind the scenes, it’s clear that everyone showed up eager to play. It’s not perfect, but there’s a lot of beauty to be found in the way that this sprawling piece of work came together, a worthwhile inclusion to the queer canon.

Thursday

27

March 2025

0

COMMENTS

Classic Queer Film: Kissing Jessica Stein

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

As frustrating as it can be to watch America slowly roll back LGBTQ rights, even acceptance, films like 2001’s Kissing Jessica Stein remind us of how much progress we’ve made since people failed to comprehend a concept like bisexuality. Well, let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. Many people still don’t understand bisexuality, but at least for the past few decades, they’ve been trying to wrap their heads around the often-ambiguous nature of sexuality.

Jessica Stein (Jennifer Westfeldt) is a copywriter for a New York newspaper. The only unpartnered woman in her social group, Jessica feels the arbitrary pressure of the clock running out on her love life, complete with all the double standards that women are subjected to. A string of dates with unpleasant men (featuring early-career appearances from Jon Hamm, Michael Showalter, and Kevin Sussman) Her mother Judy (Tovah Feldshuh) certainly isn’t helping things either, desperate for her to marry a nice Jewish boy, her eyes set on Josh (Scott Cohen), her boss at the paper in a pre-#MeToo environment.

Jessica is drawn to an ad in the personals section of the newspaper (analog dating apps, for anyone reading who’s never picked up a paper), even after she learned that it came from the “Women Seeking Women” portion. Jessica goes out on a date with Helen (Heather Juergensen), awkwardly dipping her toes into the waters of sapphos. Helen is confident, determined, and patient, no stranger to the turmoil that often accompanies one’s gay awakening.

In many ways, Charles Herman-Wurm bears the familiar tropes of many LGBTQ films from its period. Jessica is like many women of her era, going through the motions of life without any consideration for her own happiness, living life according to someone else’s vague theory of how it should be lived. A good chunk of the 97-minute runtime is dedicated to Jessica’s reluctance to leave the closet, a sentiment that’s still sadly relatable to many more than two decades down the road, at great expense to the film’s more interesting plotlines.

Westfeldt and Juergensen, who co-wrote the screenplay, possess impeccable chemistry. As Helen, Juergensen brings that vital magnetic Type-A Gen X lesbian energy, the kind of force of will destined to stay with someone regardless of what happens to a relationship. Many of us have had a Helen in our lives who saw us before we could completely see ourselves, who stood up and spoke out against the false comforts of the closet.

Kissing Jessica Stein rises above many of its rom-com trappings to display a remarkable level of maturity. The nature of Jessica’s sexuality sits at the heart of the narrative, but the film never falls into the trap of making bisexual people pick sides. Feldshuh helps anchor the emotional core of the film with a powerful supporting performance.

In many ways, the film conjures natural comparisons to Sex and the City and other pieces from the early aughts centered around the existential crises facing young adults among New York’s upper class. Kissing Jessica Stein doesn’t exactly bring anything new to the table, but there’s a certain charm to be found in this endearing queer romcom. LGBTQ people are often expected to have all the answers. Perhaps Kissing Jessica Stein’s greatest triumph is that it doesn’t pretend to.

Friday

14

February 2025

0

COMMENTS

‘Captain America: Brave New World’ review: a disappointing paint by numbers slog

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

The announcement of Robert Downey Jr.’s return to the MCU for Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars last July was a not-so-subtle admission of the mess that stands before the most powerful franchise in cinema. It doesn’t take a genius on the level of Tony Stark to figure out what went wrong. It’s easy to point the finger at the multiverse, or the departures of the MCU’s original core, but Marvel possesses one of the deepest benches in popular culture, as well as the bank account to hire anyone they want.

The simple reality is that the stories have been bad. Plenty of the films have spent too much time looking at the past to bring anything new to the table. Others try to compensate for a lack of innovation by introducing new characters, without having the space to give them anything interesting to do. Captain America: Brave New World delivers on the promise first established at the end of Endgame. After a rather unnecessary six-episode build-up in Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) finally gets his turn with the shield. Unfortunately, his film doesn’t have anything to say.

Brave New World barely acknowledges the events of Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Aside from the inclusion of Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) and Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), viewers would miss absolutely nothing if they skipped the Disney+ series. The 35th feature film in the MCU instead possesses a bizarre infatuation with the second film in the franchise, 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. When William Hurt originally reprised the role of Thaddeus Ross for Captain America: Civil War eight years after his debut in The Incredible Hulk, he remarked that he felt it was a completely new iteration of the character. Now, eight years after Civil War, and with Harrison Ford taking over for the late Hurt, Brave New World wants to hone in on intense specifics from his first appearance sixteen years ago.

The plot of Brave New World is fairly boilerplate. Captain America and his team are dispatched to stop the illegal sale of adamantium (the metal in Wolverine’s body, not to be confused with vibranium, found in Wakanda) procured from the Celestial that popped up in the middle of the Indian Ocean back in 2021’s little-loved Eternals. After a brief skirmish with associates of the Serpent Society leader Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito), Sam and Joaquin are invited to the White House by Thaddeus Ross, now the President. At Sam’s insistence, Isaiah is also brought along as a way to make amends for the U.S. government’s detention of him for thirty years, experimenting on him in a fashion that evokes the Tuskegee Airman.

Isaiah and several others are brainwashed into an assassination attempt on Ross, who is trying to put together a coalition to stop the arms race over the adamantium. Sam spends most of the film trying to prove Isaiah’s innocence, even though American intelligence is presumably aware of the existence of super-powered villains capable of mind control. The lack of motive for why an old man and several other random assailants would want to kill the president is only superficially addressed.

Mackie is a very confident leading man. Sam’s rapport with Joaquin and Isaiah is a little forced, evoking nodes of Wilson’s brotherly banter with Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan, relegated to a cameo after major supporting roles in every other Captain America), but Mackie does a remarkable job filling the void left behind by Steve Rogers. Unfortunately, despite having five credited screenwriters, no one seems interested in giving this Captain America a story that lives up to the first three, too often cribbing off the themes from The Winter Soldier, often regarded as among the best of the MCU.

Brave New World is never as incoherent as other post-Endgame releases such as Thor: Love and Thunder, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Quantumania, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, or The Marvels. It’s also just not a fundamentally compelling film. Director Julius Onah crafts a few solid action sequences, but Sam shows off his best choreography in the first fifteen minutes. The rest of the narrative is a lot of build-up with no real payoff.

Despite a budget of close to 200 million, the MCU has rarely felt smaller than Brave New World, which often feels like an episode of The West Wing without any of the quippy writing or coherent plot progression. The special effects look ugly. A confrontation between the American and Japanese navies lacks any stakes, coming across as decidedly cheap. The MCU once found a way to weave dozens of character’s storylines into a single film. Now we have to watch Thaddeus Ross whine about his daughter Betty (Liv Tyler), who won’t see him because of the events of a film from 2008 that many in the audience are bound to have forgotten about.

Part of the issue is that Brave New World seems to settle on a villain-by-committee strategy. Esposito, a highly skilled practitioner of the art of the bad guy, is given practically nothing to do. The film instead looks to The Incredible Hulk’s Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson) to be the puppet master pulling the strings. Like Esposito, Nelson shows up ready to play. He’s just not given much to work with. Ross’ long-awaited transformation into Red Hulk is quite pathetic. Ford looks lethargic throughout the entire film, understandably bored out of his mind.

Captain America: Brave New World is far from the worst MCU release of the post-Endgame era. It’s also not a very good movie. The film doesn’t have much of a natural flow, possibly the result of extensive reshoots, or possibly just its over-reliance on a film that came out sixteen years ago, before Disney even owned Marvel. The Incredible Hulk has aged well in a way, perhaps owing to the fact that it didn’t have many obligations to the broader continuity in the then-nascent MCU. For a film that was ostensibly given the runway to do its own thing, Brave New World has no idea what it wants to be.

Friday

31

January 2025

0

COMMENTS

‘Emilia Perez’ review: trans people may consider detransition after sitting through this abomination

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

There is a certain obligation that many pieces of transgender media feel to explain the trans identity to a wider audience. We’re more than a decade removed from having trans characters in film and television that are more than just dead bodies for the likes of Law & Order: SVU or CSI, yet plenty of cisgender people know very little about our community. For trans artists and those seeking to include trans people in their own stories, the inherent need to hold the audience’s hand playing ‘trans 101’ can be extremely frustrating.

The film Emilia Perez spends very little of its time diving into the identity of its eponymous trans character (Karla Sofía Gascón), a Mexican cartel kingpin who enlists Rita (Zoe Saldana), an attorney, to help her undergo a steal gender transition. Emilia, previously known as Manitas, transitions in stealth under the dead of night in Thailand, a highly unrealistic proposition fundamentally rooted in decades-old preconceptions of trans people. After having every procedure under the sun in one fell swoop, Emilia misses her family, having shipped off her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and kids to Switzerland to avoid retribution from rival gangs.

Inexplicably, she sends for them to join her at her Mexican estate, posing as her former identity’s aunt to a family who has precisely zero idea that their new benefactor is actually their father/husband. Director Jacques Audiard seems to operate under the utterly clownish impression that trans people shed our entire prior identities, fully integrating into the cis way of life after a weekend in Bangkok. Emilia Perez contains what is very likely the worst song ever written about gender dysphoria, guaranteed to make any trans person regret the life decisions that might cause people to associate themselves with this trainwreck.

It’s unclear why Emilia Perez is a musical. The songs are all terrible and add nothing to the experience beyond padding an excruciating 132-minute runtime. Audiard doesn’t know how to film musical numbers either. Somehow, against all odds, Gomez, a professional singer, sounds just as terrible as Saldana and Gascón, not that anyone could put lipstick on the lyrics that somehow made it into a professional film.

Saldana and Gascón’s chemistry provides some intrigue to the film’s anemic second half, which takes a four-year jump after Emilia’s gender confirmation procedures. Rita is more of the lead than Emilia, but Saldana doesn’t have much to work with for her character. Rita is unfulfilled at her job and upset at being a bachelorette in her forties. The fact that she supposedly became immensely rich after arranging Emilia’s surgeries is cast aside, for whatever reason.

Audiard’s gross incompetence squanders a brilliant premise. Trans people rarely get to play fun roles like drug kingpins. Emilia’s transformation from cartel overlord to nonprofit benefactor is poorly explained and inconsistent. Most trans people will tell you that gender-affirming care does not lead to a complete 180 in character and personality. If Audiard knows a single trans person other than Gascón, it doesn’t come across in his superficial narrative that cares little about its subject beyond her medical procedures. Judging solely by his film full of racist stereotypes, it’s unclear whether Audiard, a French native, knows any actual Mexican people either.

Cis people might be fooled by some of Audiard’s attempts at compelling drama. One of Emilia’s children notes that she smells like their father once did, aside from her off-putting perfume, another trans stereotype. A change in body odor is one of the most immediate effects of hormone replacement therapy. Somehow, this child, who never indicates that he sees a physical resemblance between Emilia and his father, picks up on what would be an unlikely medical anomaly, unless we’re to believe that Emilia keeps using the same deodorant.

Audiard’s pathetic depiction of trans issues belies Emilia Perez’s more glaring issues. This is a profoundly bad movie. The music is awful. The screenplay never dives deeper than its superficial surface. Trans people might be embarrassed that this film was made, but cis people won’t have a very good time either.

Wednesday

29

January 2025

0

COMMENTS

‘The Brutalist’ review: Adrien Brody carries an uneven odyssey

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Movie Reviews

One of the great beauties of the artistic process is the way that the act of creation can help you drown out everything else going wrong with your life. The reconnection with one’s craft can bring the soul back from oblivion, or it can doom an obsessive heart inside a prison of its own making. The film The Brutalist takes its audience on an odyssey through one man’s grief and his efforts to hold on to what’s left of his humanity.

László Tóth (Adrien Brody) is a Hungarian-Jewish architect who arrives to America in 1947 after surviving the Buchenwald concentration camp. Separated from his wife Ezrsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), László finds work at his cousin’s furniture shop. An expensive commission by a wealthy businessman Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) for his father Harrison (Guy Pearce) gives László a chance to put his Bauhaus education to work in a suitable setting. Harrison’s angry reaction to his son’s surprise renovations causes strife between László and his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who has already angered László with his assimilation into American culture and conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Harrison seeks out László a few years later, now working menial labor, to make amends and to hire him to design a community center that he intends to construct as a tribute to his late mother. Harrison also pulls strings to have Ezrsébet and Zsófia approved for immigration. László quickly butts heads with Harrison’s team, bristling at any suggested changes and repeatedly clashing with Harry, who resents the Tóth’s presence in his life.

Director Brady Corbet’s most impressive feat is how he makes 215 minutes fly by. The Brutalist is exhausting, but never boring, wasting little of its mammoth runtime. Lol Crawley always keeps things interesting with his fantastic, dreamy cinematography. Even in well-trodden territory, Corbet manages to carve out a fresh perspective on the horrors of that era.

Brody completely loses himself in his lead role. László is a proud man with great depth. Brody captures the essence of a soul that spent too far much time in survival mode, totally immersed by his rare second chance to redefine his own legacy, even at the expense of everything he thought he held dear. Few people who lose everything get a chance to taste the peak of the mountain once again.

The film does fall short in a few crucial aspects. Corbet doesn’t really know what to do with Jones, who doesn’t make an appearance until part two, after a lengthy built-in intermission. Ezrsébet is very charming, befriending everyone in her husband’s extended orbit. There’s tension between the two as a result of Ezrsébet’s decision to hide her health problems from her husband, now confined to a wheelchair from osteoporosis brought on by malnutrition from years of living in famine. The introverted László can wax poetic about the beauty of architecture, lacking that same chemistry with his own wife.

Corbet has such tunnel vision for László that he undersells the rest of the cast. Despite his best efforts, Pearce fails to elevate Harrison into much more than a cartoon villain. We see snippets of his jealousy toward László, who possesses the artistic talent he desperately craves, but his scenes are one-note and repetitive. The depiction of the architectural process leaves a bit to be desired. We see László’s vivid descriptions of his passion for his work, but we rarely see the application of his craft. There’s too much telling and not enough showing.

The shortcomings of Corbet’s storytelling abilities are best apparent through an epilogue tasked with significant heavy lifting for a narrative that had three and a half hours to set up its third act. The Brutalist is a deeply frustrating piece of art. Like its protagonist, you can see the meticulous effort that went into every frame. You can also see the tunnel vision of a mind that may have benefited from additional voices in the room.

Corbet’s vision grapples with Emerson’s timeless saying, it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. A person like László, whose life was filled with unthinkable horrors, might understandably be fixed on the destination as a way to triumph after years of hardship. As for the audience enduring the odyssey that is this film, there’s no question that the journey matters more than the rather underwhelming destination.

Monday

27

January 2025

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‘Sing Sing’ review: Colman Domingo is a tour de force in this quietly gem

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

As America sinks deeper into a fascist theocracy, it’s worth frequently pointing out how little our government seems to care about anything that can be found in the Bible. From Hebrews 13:3 to Matthew 25:39-40, the Good Book is pretty clear regarding how we should treat our incarcerated. Prisons are supposed to be about rehabilitation, not the contemporary idea of using the criminal justice system to exploit the labor class.

The film Sing Sing is based on the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program at the eponymous correctional facility in upstate New York. The RTA is a non-profit that stages theatrical productions for inmates across ten facilities. Many former RTA alumni make up the cast of the film, playing fictionalized versions of themselves.

The narrative follows the production of a light-hearted time-traveling comedy. Divine G (Colman Domingo) recruits new member Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin, playing himself), who initially dismisses the therapeutic value of the troupe. Divine G, incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit, struggles under the weight of his upcoming clemency hearing, as well as his desire to use the stage to work through his own demons.

Director Greg Kwedar uses a soft touch for much of the film’s 105-minute runtime. The plot is warm and uplifting, allowing the cast to shine through their fantastic chemistry with each other. Few films manage to make their audiences feel like they’re in the room with the performers, an inviting sense of flow to the narrative.

Domingo puts forth what might be the strongest performance of his career. The pain never quite leaves Divine G’s face, even as he spends the bulk of the film trying his best to help others. At one point early on, Divine G notes to Divine Eye that the RTA is all these people have, a reality of the bleak nature of incarcerated life, but there’s such a richness to their sense of community. Amidst all the darkness of life behind bars, the innate human need for connection shines through.

Prison films are not exactly known for their uplifting nature, which is perhaps Sing Sing’s crowning achievement. Our society fails the incarcerated at every level. While our government turns its back on its imprisoned except in times of exploitation, these men never gave up on each other. There is always light, even in the darkest hour. Anyone questioning the sheer power of the arts should look no further than this quietly powerful gem of a film.

Wednesday

15

January 2025

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‘Sonic the Hedgehog 3’ review: a little overstuffed but easily the best installment in the franchise

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

The Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has become quite the anomaly in the entertainment realm. Amidst a landscape where television shows take years in between seasons and many major films take half a decade to get off the ground, Sonic has consistently put out a new installment every two years. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that, against all odds, the films somehow manage to get better each time.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 continues the modern trend of major franchises prioritizing the introduction of new characters over established stalwarts. Shadow the Hedgehog (Keanu Reeves) is a beloved figure in Sonic lore, making his debut in Sonic Adventure 2, the swan song for the Dreamcast, Sega’s final piece of hardware. The Dreamcast’s entire original demographic is old enough to have kids of their own, a reality never lost on the filmmakers.

The plot is fairly cookie-cutter, if not a little overly complicated. Shadow wakes up from fifty years in suspended hibernation to seek revenge on the Guardian Units of Nations (G.U.N.) that put him there. Team Sonic, now composed of the titular hedgehog (Ben Schwartz), Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessey), and Knuckles (Idris Elba) are summoned by G.U.N. Director Rockwell (Krysten Ritter) to stop Shadow from wreaking havoc on one of their facilities. Shadow quickly overpowers all three, while a surprise attack casts suspicion on G.U.N. as an organization, causing Team Sonic to form an uneasy alliance with arch-nemesis Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey).

While the narrative often throws a little too much chaos energy into the mix, director Jeff Fowler does an excellent job juggling the film’s many moving pieces. 3 corrects many of the mistakes of the second film, particularly its over-emphasis on the human characters. James Marsden and Tika Sumpter largely take a backseat role, while Jim Carrey performs double duty as the Eggman and his grandfather Dr. Gerald Robotnik, the head of Project Shadow who spent the last fifty years imprisoned. Carrey’s character work is particularly powerful, elevating the script above its mostly juvenile ambitions.

Reeves brings ample emotional depth to Shadow, without much of the forced humor that was dumped on Knuckles in the last film. Fowler takes his time building up the newcomer over the course of the 110-minute runtime. That does come at the expense of the titular hero, who largely plays second-fiddle to Shadow and the Robotniks. There’s an interesting subplot concerning teamwork within Team Sonic that doesn’t receive as much attention as it deserved. Tails and Knuckles aren’t given enough to do, perhaps to be expected with the amount of principal characters.

The script shows some legitimate improvements over the last two. There are a few pop culture references too many, but plenty of the jokes land. The filmmakers are clearly aware of how many adults are in the audience. There’s a lot of humor that no child would possibly understand, and a few fun references to Sonic lore.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is not exactly great art, but Fowler deserves a lot of credit for competent blockbuster filmmaking. 3 is a major improvement over the first two. The franchise juggles the space between mainstream appeal and children’s fare quite well, even if it’s a little too preoccupied with low-hanging fruit. Beyond that, consistency is something sorely lacking across the modern entertainment sphere. Sonic may not fully capture the Sega zeitgeist, but it’s certainly an enjoyable time at the theater.