Author: Snugglecub

2024 – Emilia Perez

Ok, what the heck did I just watch?  This movie was strange, bordering on bizarre.  It was certainly unique in a very artistic way.  And knowing next to nothing about it when I sat down to watch, it surprised me in a good way.  It was a musical… kind of.  It was a drama… mostly.  It was a suspense thriller… but not really.  Wikipedia calls it a Spanish-Language French musical crime film, though I would call it a drama, as well.

It had a relatively small main cast which included Zoe Saldana, Karla Sofia Gascon, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Edgar Ramirez, and Mark Ivanir.  They all did a very good job, though the movie was really about Saldana’s character, Rita Mora Castro.  The story begins with her and ends with her, and follows her journey from start to finish, though she won the Oscar for the Best Supporting Actress category.  She is a lawyer in Mexico who is disillusioned with her job defending criminals.  She is recruited by drug cartel crime boss Manitas Del Monte, but for a job that was as surprising to me as it was to her.  He wants to undergo gender reassignment surgery, leaving his wife, his sons, and his life of crime behind him.

Rita accepts the job for a massive amount of money and finds Manitas a surgeon, relocates his family to Switzerland, tells them Manitas has been killed, and then disappears with her payment.  The drama comes when a woman, now called Emilia Perez, finds her and recruits her once again to bring his/her family to Mexico City because she misses her children.

It was a strange concept for a plot, but what made the movie exponentially stranger was that it was a musical.  I have a friend who doesn’t care for musicals because he can’t get past the idea that people in a perfectly normal story would, for no apparent reason, start to sing and dance, and then, when a song is over, just go back to regular acting, and all the while, pretending that nothing out of the ordinary just happened.  This movie would have driven him crazy because the music was sly in the way it infiltrated the narrative.  Someone would be talking, just ordinary dialogue, when suddenly I would realize that they were talking in rhythm.  A percussion beat would creep in beneath them, and without realizing it, I would be listening to a song.  Then, the extras in the background would start to dance in highly choreographed sequences that were wonderfully executed. 

There was a scene near the end of the movie where Rita is bringing in a team of rough banditos with some major firearms to rescue Emilia, who has been abducted and is being tortured.  There is a dramatic underscore as the men are preparing their weapons for the mission.  But then, unexpectedly, I noticed that the men were moving in unison, the clicking of their guns as they are being loaded and readied for combat, became part of the music.  It was almost subtle in how it slipped in under the radar.

The cast did a great job, but I really have to mention Karla Sofia Gascon.  The first time she is on the screen, I totally believed she was a man.  The makeup department outdid themselves.  As the cartel kingpin, she/he looked scary and intimidating, even as he was telling Rita that he wanted to be a woman, and not because he wanted to go into hiding, but because he’d wanted to be a woman since childhood.  But as I think about it, those few scenes were darkly lit, helping to hide the illusion.  Also, even while watching the movie, I was wondering why Manitas spoke and sang without moving his lips.  I thought it was a character choice, but I think maybe it was also to help hide the fact that the female actress was made up as a different gender.  Honestly, I bought the illusion, hook, line, and sinker.

Selena Gomez, playing Manitas’s wife, Jessi, also did a great job.  Once she was dropped off in Switzerland, I thought I’d seen the last of her, but when she was brought back in later, she created a realistic character with some depth and a relatable arch.  She feels manipulated and bound to the will of her dead husband as a sister-in-law she has never met suddenly begins to steal her children from her.  The climactic scene, where Emilia is near death, she comes clean and tells her who she actually used to be.  Jessi, who is part of the team who has tortured Emilia, is still in love with the husband she had thought dead, and she has one of those classic “What have I done?” moments.  Gomez did a great job!

But of course, I think the stand-out of the cast was Saldana.  She did it all.  She handled the singing, the dancing, and the drama perfectly.  I loved the scene where Emilia reveals herself to Rita in London.  That look of shock and fear in Rita’s face was perfect as she connected the dots and realized who she was talking to.  And who knew Saldana could sing and dance like that?  She really did a fantastic job.  But again, I think she was really the main character, not Emilia.

This movie surprised me in several ways, and I think director Jaques Audiard really did some things that were bold, unique, and ultimately fascinating to watch.  The unconventional story, and the way in which it was told, was captivating on the screen.  It was visually interesting, and the soundtrack was unexpected.  I also have to give a big thumbs up to the choreographer, Damien Jalet.  But all that being said, I don’t really understand why there are so many critics of the film.  Mexico criticized it on a cultural level, the LGBTQ community did so in defense of trans-people, and both critics and audiences called the film insensitive to drug traffickers.  People just seem too eager to be offended.  Just relax and enjoy the movie.  I see it as a unique piece of art, and one that I wouldn’t mind watching again.

2024 – Nickel Boys

This was an interestingly filmed movie, but it was difficult to watch, not because of its story content, which I really liked, but because of the way in which it was filmed.  Though it is certainly not the first movie to ever do it, the movie was shot using a first-person perspective.  It was supposed to be as if we, the viewers, were seeing things through the actual eyes of the main protagonist.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I applaud the director for choosing to make the movie this way.  It doesn’t just show the view the story like most movies do.  Instead, it forces the viewers to watch the story as if they, themselves are part of the narrative.

The problem with this is that it is physically uncomfortable to watch.  Much of the camerawork had the constant shaky motion of a handheld camera, which, after a while, tends to give me a stomach ache.  If the character was lying on his side in a bed, the camera was angled sideways in a disorienting way.  And the camera wasn’t always focused on a person’s face or the action taking place in a scene.  Instead, if the character is looking at his feet, that was all we got to see.  We could hear what was going on, but that was all.  If he is talking to someone, but not looking at them, we don’t get to see who is talking.  And I think a certain portion of the film’s emotional content was lost because we couldn’t see the face of the person through whose eyes we are supposed to be looking.

But like I said, the story was good and engaging.  It was about the strong friendship that developed between two black boys at Nickel Reform School in the 1960s.  The school was in Florida, and was of course, segregated, and the horrible abuse and frequent murders of the students by the corrupt staff.  After watching the film, I was not surprised to learn that the fictional Nickel was based on a real school known as Dozier School for Boys, a place where such unforgivable abuses actually took place.  Most of the victims were black.

The two boys, Ellwood and Turner, played by Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, quickly become friends.  Elwood is there because of a crime he didn’t commit.  One of my favorite characters in the movie was the woman who raised Elwood, his grandmother, Hattie, wonderfully played by Anjanue Ellis-Taylor.  She is certainly a supporting character, but she seemed to steal the scene every time she was on the screen.  She was so beautifully real and earnest in her love for her grandson.

Turner was more cynical than the cerebral Ellwood, believing in the worst in others and in the school, and he was rarely disappointed.  The two boys looked after each other and supported each other to get through the dangerous experience of being at the school.  And after seeing the first half of the movie through Elwood’s eyes, the second half changes the perspective, allowing us to often see and experience the story through Turner’s eyes.  There were only a few scenes in which the two are having a conversation, where the perspective keeps changing from one boy’s eyes to the other, making the narrative unfold like a regular film.

Both the lead actors did a really good job, but it was pretty much impossible to tell if they had a good on-screen chemistry, since they were only on the screen at the same time once.  In the scene, the two were looking into a mirror together.  That was it.  They were clearly good friends, but I had difficulty gauging the emotional connection between the two actors.

Another aspect of the narrative was the non-linear story-telling.  There were scenes where we jump into the future and follow the life of Ellwood after he has grown into adulthood.  He is a man who has his own business and a wife.  We see him using the internet to research the School and the murderous crimes that were regularly committed there.  There is an official investigation in the media that is asking for witnesses.  Ellwood eventually decides to testify.  These future scenes were shot just slightly different than the rest of the movie.  Instead of looking through Ellwood’s eyes, the camera is fixed on the back of his head, showing things from his perspective, except that now we are separated from him.  There is a disconnect.

And I think the twist ending of the story explains this inconsistency.  While at the reform school, Turner learns that Ellwood is to be quietly executed by the school officials for unsuccessfully trying to inform the public about what has been happening at Nickel.  To save his friend, Turner plans an emergency jailbreak.  The two are quickly tracked down, and as they run, Ellwood is shot and killed.  Turner escapes, and when he grows to manhood, he takes Ellwood’s name.  He also takes his convictions and his courage, which allows him to testify against the atrocities that he survived at Nickel. It was a good movie, and again, I applaud director RaMell Ross for choosing to make the movie from the first person perspective, first that of Ellwood, and then that of Turner.  It was a bold choice, and it worked for the story that was being told.  However, it was, at times, a physically difficult movie to watch.  But the story was good.  The cast and the acting were good.  And the attention to the 1960s period aesthetic were fantastic.  This is definitely a must-see movie, as long as you can handle the shaky hand-held camera action.

2024 – Wicked – Part 1

I’ll start this off by saying that this was a gorgeous movie.  Visually, it was stunning.  The sets and costumes were absolutely perfect.  The music was amazing.  The two leads were wonderful.  I have to say this is one of the best stage to screen musical adaptations I have seen in a very long time.  They stuck close to the source material, which is great.  By doing so, they didn’t upset fans of the beloved stage show, and they kept the good things that made the stage show popular.

So let me just get two things out of the way quickly.  What didn’t I like?  First, there were two roles that were terribly miscast.  Madame Morrible, played by Michelle Yeoh, and the Wizard, played by Jeff Goldblum.  They made the point of casting actors who could sing in every other role, but these two, while they are very good actors, couldn’t sing.  It made no sense.  I mean, they already got Ariana Grande, a popular artist who has made a career singing, and Cynthia Erivo, a trained Broadway singer.  Both of them did a great job, but the school teacher and the Wizard… not so much.

Second, there was a new scene and new music written for the film that takes place when Elphaba and Glinda arrive in the Emerald City.  But it was only done so that they could shoehorn in Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth.  Their cameo scene felt forced and unnecessary, and it took me out of the story because it was nothing more than blatant fan-service.

But now, on to the good stuff, because there was a lot of it, and a good place to start is Erivo and Grande.  They were simply fantastic.  True, their voices were completely different than the Broadway cast recording that we all know and love, but they took the music and made it their own.  Erivo was especially good.  Her voice really fit the music and she elevated the character in unexpected and remarkable ways.  She has a wonderful tone full of emotion and depth.  And Grande, while using a much more breathy pop sound in her singing, still had the ability to hit those high soprano notes with clarity and precision.  And it was clear that they both understood their characters.  And the actors playing Fiyero and Boq, Jonathan Bailey and Ethan Slater, were perfect, too.

The costumes were particularly memorable.  They were fanciful, whimsical, and again, remained very true to what was originally intended in the stage show.  Glinda’s wardrobe was especially beautiful.  And also, I loved the gorgeous gowns given to Madame Morrible.  Elphaba’s wardrobe is a little one-note, but always appropriate, and she looked good in black.  The sets were elaborate and incredibly detailed.  They looked fantastic on the screen… all except for one.  The library set with its revolving wheel bookshelves was silly, impractical, and were an injury lawsuit waiting to happen.  Whimsical is good, until it just becomes dumb.

One of the things I loved about Wicked is that the filmmakers knew that they were working with a different medium than a stage production.  They could do things with visual effects and CGi that can’t be done in a live environment.  There was the flying, of course, but it was so much more than that.  A blatant and obvious example is Glinda’s flying bubble.  For the Broadway show, the actress is harnessed into a big circular metal frame that is suspended from wires.  Here we get a computer generated bubble that looks fantastic.  But they used more subtlety than that in other effects, like when Elphaba sings I’m Not That Girl.  The woods through which she walks is alive with shadows and glowing spots of living color that turned the song into a magical number that was mesmerizing.

And the way that the movie ended was phenomenal.  It closed at the end of Act 1 with the song Defying Gravity.  First Erivo’s voice was amazing.  And again, they did things with the medium of film that couldn’t be done on a stage, like when Elphaba leaps from the tower.  As she is falling, we see her remembering pivotal moments in her life that inspire and drive her to fly for the first time.  It was beautifully done and was exciting to watch.  And the joy and freedom that come to her with her newfound power are intensified because now we can see close-ups of her face.  We can read her emotions as she victoriously defies gravity.

Ok, sure they added a bunch of things that weren’t in the Broadway show.  How else could they have expanded the first act of the live production into a run-time that exceeded the entire show?  But I think that most of what they added worked.  And they did it all without losing the aesthetics and charm of the source material.  I especially liked the intimate scene in the Ozdust Ballroom where Elphaba and Glinda finally become true friends.  It actually brought a tear to my eye.

And finally, I need to briefly mention how much I liked the fact that we were finally able to get realistic talking animals, courtesy of some pretty remarkable CGI, and not just an actor with animal prosthetics and makeup.  I liked professor Dillamond voided by Peter Dinklage.  This was a wonderful fantasy musical that really lived up to the hype and the expectations.  The movie version has been a long time coming, but it has been worth the wait.  I loved it, and I can’t wait for part two!

2024 – The Substance

This was a strange, strange movie.  I would have to categorize it as a body horror movie, first, a fantasy, second, and a social commentary, third.  It stars Demi Moore as Elizabeth Sparkle, a celebrity actress and fitness icon, who is past her prime and therefore no longer desirable by the industry, which is represented by her TV show’s producer, Harvey, played by Dennis Quaid.

Now, I don’t mind watching a good horror movie every now and then, but I am easily disturbed by body horror.  So the very genre of this movie didn’t really appeal to me, but I can appreciate many aspects of the film.  It easily kept my interest, and even had me thinking about it days after watching it.  The acting was good, especially Moore.  The visual effects were pretty amazing, as were the makeup effects.  The music, by composer Raffertie, was weird, but it fit the strange story quite well.  And despite all the grotesque imagery on the screen, the film had an almost amused or campy quality that really came out in the last few minutes.

In a nutshell, here is the plot.  Elizabeth is contacted by a mysterious company offering a black market drug that promises to make her younger and more beautiful.  Here’s where the body horror comes in.  The injected drug causes Elizabeth to fall unconscious.  Her back splits open, and a beautiful young woman crawls out of the opening.  In order to stabilize herself, the new girl, who names herself Sue and is still the same woman, now played by Margaret Qualley, must extract a fluid from the original body.  She must also switch places with her every seven days so the fluid can replenish.  Otherwise her own body will begin to break down.  A balance must always be maintained.  But Sue, in her lust for fame and success as Harvey’s new star, abuses that balance and extracts more fluid than she should, causing Elizabeth’s body to rapidly age into a deformed elderly crone. 

That’s the premise, and I have to applaud the filmmakers for the originality of the plot.  It was creative and yet very cohesive at the same time.  I hate it when movies establish their fantasy own rules, but then fail to abide by those rules.  But The Substance does a good job of setting up these elements of the narrative, and then sticking with them, and even going beyond them to logical and extreme ends.  It all made sense, in a horrific and bizarre way.

Just as a quick note, I have to mention one thing that I didn’t buy, but I get it.  The persona of Sue was supposed to be more beautiful than Elizabeth, but it didn’t really work for me.  I thought Demi Moore was prettier.  I think maybe they should have either found an actress who resembled Moore, or used de-aging technology on her to allow her to play the other part herself.  But I get why they couldn’t do that.  Nobody could recognize her as the same woman, or the plot wouldn’t work.

Moore’s performance was brilliant.  She was amazing both before and after her body started to disfigure.  In the first half of the film, her desperation to regain her youth was strong, making it believable that she would inject herself with a mysterious and dangerous substance.  And as she began to age, a process that started with her finger, and eventually spread to cover her entire body, her shock and disgust with her own reflection was perfectly portrayed.  Moore really pulled it off and I think her Best Actress nomination was well-deserved.

One scene in particular stood out to me as particularly powerful.  She is trying to remind herself that she is still alive, and schedules a date with a man in whom she really has no interest.  Her face is still normal, but she sees already herself as disgusting when she looks in the mirror.  Her extreme frustration causes her to make several attempts to making herself up.  Each time she becomes more and more violent as she wipes the makeup from her face to begin again, until she is simply smearing lipstick all over her cheeks and messing up her hair, making herself look more and more disfigured. 

As I watched the movie, I remember asking myself, more than once, how much further the outrageousness of the plot would go.  How much more over-the-top would the narrative get?  But the story just kept going, kept progressing, and getting weirder and more grotesque.  In the end, Sue murders Elizabeth and tries to use the leftover activation drug to give herself one final night of beauty.  Instead, she transforms into a monster who, in her final disintegration, ends up spraying an audience with an impossible amount of blood.  In fact, during filming, they used an actual fire hose to cover the actors, the extras, and the set with enough blood to drown n army. 

But it was the movie’s social commentary on ideas of youth and beauty in our modern society that stood out to me as somewhat dramatic, or at the very least poignant.  Do we, as a culture, constantly cast aside people once they are no longer young and attractive?  Do we fear aging so much that we would do almost anything to regain the health and vitality that we once possessed?  Or is it simply that our focus on youth and beauty is so strong and unhealthy that it ultimately turns us into monsters.  I think maybe the answer is yes to all of the above.

Cast Photos

Character Posters

31 – Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

I know.  I know a lot of people consider this to be a low point in the MCU franchise.  But I have to say, I really enjoyed this movie.  I liked the visuals.  I liked the cast.  I liked the action sequences.  I liked the plot.  I liked the humor.  I liked the villain.  And I even liked the CGI-heavy visuals.  Paul Rudd proved that not only can he handle the comedy, but he also kicked butt in the final fight between him and Kang.  And speaking on Kang the Conqueror, I’ll quickly address the elephant in the room.  It totally sucks that the actor playing the super-villain, Jonathan Majors, was dropped from the MCU after being convicted of the terrible crime he committed, but I get it.  It sucks because he was so good in the role, but I totally understand why Disney distanced themselves from him. 

But as bad guys go, I still maintain that Majors did a really great job.  He had a calm and menacing attitude most of the time, but when he became angry, man, he really let loose.  He used laser beams out of his hands that destroyed everything they touched, and his fury was intense.  There was a scene in which he was threatening Cassie to get Scott to do his bidding, and he just seemed so dangerous, even in his calmness.

The rest of the cast, did a fantastic job.  I loved Michelle Pfeiffer as Janet Van Dyne, but then again, when has Pfeiffer ever turned in a bad performance?  Cassie, played by Kathryn Newton, was also really good.  She had a fresh face and I liked how she wasn’t a sudden great fighter like her father.  They made the point of showing that she was still learning.  On the flip side, though, she did seem to have sudden genius level intelligence in order to create the device that started the events of the plot in motion.  And I have to give an honorable mention to Bill Murray and his performance that was actually a little more nuanced that what he gives in the characters he creates.  Yes, most of Lord Krylar was Bill performing his shtick, but there was a serious and dangerous undertone when it is revealed that he is actually betraying our heroes, which I liked. 

And as far as I can tell, one of the biggest complaints about this movie was the character of Darren Cross / M.O.D.O.K.  Most people say that the CGI used to create the giant head on the tiny cybernetic body was awful.  Fans didn’t like how he looked, and they didn’t like how the character was written.  He was turned into a joke, when, in the comic books, he was actually a very dangerous villain.  But I liked what they did here.  First, they changed his origin, making him the broken body and mind of the first Ant’Man bad guy, Yellowjacket.  I thought the CGI actually looked pretty good, and as for the character, Cross had clearly lost his sanity while in the Quantum realm, especially considering what had been done to his body by Kang. Oh, and as far as the CGI goes, I loved all the gorgeous fantasy environments of the Quantum Realm!

Now… all that being said, the movie was not perfect, and I think the biggest problem it had was that it couldn’t seem to figure out what kind of movie it was.  The action, while exciting, was punctuated with silly, sometimes juvenile humor, which was amusing, but the two didn’t always seem to jive.  Was the film trying to be a drama about families and their secrets, or an epic about a revolutionary war against a tyrant?  It was both, and the two genres didn’t always mesh well.  But despite those little inconsistencies, I still enjoyed watching the movie.  Sure, it may not have been a ten, but in my book, it was still an eight. 

And the mid-credit scene with all the Kang variants was awesome, though we now know that it will eventually come to nothing.  The threat might get a quick resolve somewhere down the line, but it will not be the next major threat to the MCU that it was supposed to be.  Kang is out.  Doctor Doom is in.  And I’m on board with that.

Top 10 Favorite Parts

1. Scott and Hope, still a couple, bring Cassie home from jail.  The sweet family dynamic between the three was nice.
2. The whole family gets sucked into the Quantum Realm.  There was very little foreplay before the conflict of the movie started.
3. The entire Lord Krylar scene.  Bill Murray was perfect.
4. M.O.D.O.K. attacks the rebels.  Cool battle sequence.  Also, anything with the character of Quaz.  I really liked William Jackson Harper.
5. Janet’s back-flash story on Kang and learning how he was really a dangerous monster.
6. Scotts attempt to recover the multiversal power core.  The duplicate Scotts and Hopes were very cool.
7. Kang begins his launch sequence.  Great CGI, great action, great music, great scene!
8. Giant Ant-Man attacks Kang’s citadel with the rebels.  “I have HOLES!!”
9. The enraged Kang lets loose and devastates the rebels until he is overrun by intelligent ants.
10. Ant-Man stays in the Quantum Realm and defeats Kang, killing him.

1944 – Cary Grant

None but the Lonely Heart

So I have to start off by saying that I am a Cary Grant fan.  He was handsome, charming, and always very likeable, even when he is playing a character that is less than likeable.  I always love watching him on the big screen.  But I’m sorry to say that I didn’t fully buy his performance in this movie.  Oh, his acting was fine, but he played his part the same as he plays his part in every movie.  He basically played himself, and while that usually works for him, I don’t think it did here.

The biggest and most obvious problem was that he played the part of a Cockney man, and he tried his best with the difficult accent, but he just didn’t have it.  It was distractingly bad.  Sometimes he wasn’t even trying.  He just spoke in his American accent and that was that.  But even that was inconsistent.  He kept waffling back and forth between that and a slightly British accent.  Aside from that, I don’t really think he looked the part.  He was too handsome.  I think the role would have benefited from a man with a more rugged, worn down look.  Even in the beginning of the movie, when Ernie Mott was a homeless tramp, he looked little more than a shave away from being dashing and debonair. 

But what I liked about his performance was the emotional drama that he nailed.  He was able to do the love scenes and the angry scenes, the gut-punch scenes, and the light-hearted scenes, all with equal skill.  His final scene was where he learns that the woman he has fallen in love with has decided to return to the mobster who tore them apart.  The utter devastation on Grant’s face was heartbreaking to watch because of his focused intensity.

The other thing I liked with his natural chemistry with Ethel Barrymore, the woman who played his mother.  Their difficult relationship was probably one of the more interesting aspects of the film.  Ernie apparently had a history of being a shiftless wanderer who thought little of responsibility, a clear disappointment to his long-suffering mother.  But the dynamics of their relationship changed when he made the effort to turn his life around and work, helping her in her store.  And it was nice to see that change in the way he and Ethel played their parts.