Reaction Shots

Earlier this year, I had a list of movies to be released. A quick tally led to a surprising result that almost half of those releases were sequels or movies based on previously existing IP. After a second or two, I caught myself and figured I didn't really need to be surprised. There are a few reasons why. One is that it's the market attuning itself to what the consumers want based on sales trends in merchandising connected to those properties. One way to check to see what character might be in an upcoming Marvel or DC film is to check a toy store; tie-in materials sometimes make it to the shelves well in advance of a movie dropping, but the point is that those tie-ins reflect the commercial bonds that drive mass movie-going attendance and consumption. Another reason is that, of course, what proved profitable at one time is likely to be so at another, though this is a riskier proposition for investors. Any shortfall in theatrical performance is likely to be assumed to be offset...

To be clear, Jennifer Lawrence did take some time off to pursue educating herself about corruption in politics, COVID-19 (like the rest of us), and to pull back from overexposure, but was she really gone?   She left her representation at CAA because she discovered her agent was not passing along good scripts and she was tired of being pitched blockbusters and work that just wasn’t very interesting to her. However, I don’t know if she’s aware of this but for every “Passengers”, she’s done a “Hereditary”, or a “Joy”, or even a “ Don’t Look Up ”. None of these are exactly status quo, middle-of-the-world, or uninteresting.  I get it, though, now; she wants to return to more intimate human scale dramas, and “Causeway” is very much that. In a significant way, it serves as a bookend or an antiphonal response to “Winter Bone”, if less desperate and stark. In both, Lawrence plays a woman stripped of, well, just about everything.  In the work at hand, she plays Lynsey, a retur...

           A couple of weeks back - doesn’t really matter which couple of weeks since this is being read long after - I sat and enjoyed, for the most part, “Bullet Train.” Later that same day, I tossed a coin (didn’t) and wound up watching “The Gray Man” which had its moments. Both share the pedigree of recent actioners - quippy dialog, not unconvoluted motivations, plot twists that are difficult to care about, charming actors, and high body counts (at some point, I wanted to say out loud, “Yeah, I get it!” But thought better of that). One is a more self-aware trifle, the other is the first in a series of Jason Bourne wannabes. Both are calculated amusements and one succeeds better as far as tired formulae go. To wit, a fair amount of “Bullet Train” is a genuine gas. Watching Brad Pitt, Bryan Tyree Henry, Aaron-Taylor Johnson, Joey King, and others square off (sometimes repeatedly) is a lotta fun. Zak Olkewicz’s script based off Kotaro Isaka’s novel is m...

Chloé Zhao “Eternals” adaptation is a case study in what the MCU does to individualistic directors. This is not going to be a slam on either Marvel or Zhao, but it’s time to really evaluate the dynamics between the corporate vision and the individual auteur’s.   I’ll dip into this more as we go on, but I need to start off by saying that I completely disagree with Alex Dowd at the A.V. Club and his claim that Zhao’s work is just another boilerplate Marvel movie. Far from it; there is a tremendous amount of love in this film, there are actually moments when characters and the actors portraying them are actually given space to breathe, and I disagree strongly that it’s just as formulaically “quippy” as other films in the MCU. However, it’s just these strengths that point to the weaknesses in the film and while I personally don’t find them completely debilitating, those weaknesses are distracting and keep a film that could have been one of the best MCU offerings from being just reall...