Mickey 17 is kind of like stew (I’m talking classic “it’s what we have thrown in a pot” kind of stew). Sometimes stew turns out amazing, sometimes it’s horrible, but no matter what it’s always kind of messy. Mickey 17 is more charming than good and a big part of that charm is in the mess of it. It’s all over the place, doing a ton of things, jumping from here to there and back again. I had a great time at it, but it’s also not really accurate to describe stew like you’d describe soup from a measured recipe, is it? I think Mickey 17 is a good stew.
The trailer for On Becoming a Guinea Fowl paints the film as a thriller. That is inaccurate, but I don’t blame the marketing team for that choice. It’s hard to describe Guinea Fowl. It’s extremely funny, very sad, existentially terrifying, hopeful and depressing in equal measure. How do you express that to an audience succinctly? Really, you can’t, so it’s easier just to shrug and say, in genre shorthand, “you’ll be riveted”. They’re not wrong.
Captain America: Brave New World is a bad movie that happens to star characters I love. I don’t think that used to be true in the past, as I believe the previous Captain America movies are genuinely good. I can’t really recommend that you see Brave New World, but despite that I’m glad I got to watch my friends do the old song and dance again, even if they’re not moving as fast as they used to or hitting the steps quite right anymore.
I have no idea who Novocaine is for, really, because it feels like they made it just for me. I know they didn’t but it sure feels like they did. I like Jack Quaid, I like Amber Midthunder, I like fun gore, I like cool action choreography, I like 80s rom-coms, I like movie bank robbers who dress as Santa Clause (shout out to my fellow The Silent Partner fans, all eight of you). I have no idea if you’ll like Novocaine, but I sure as hell did. Maybe my taste isn’t as rare as I like to think it is. I guess I hope it’s not, because I want you to like Novocaine too.
Watching Black Bag is like catching a fleeting glimpse of an endangered animal out of a jeep window. “Woah, a Black Bag! There’s only like three of those left in the wild!” There should be a thousand of these every year, tight little thrillers full of movie stars, but alas they’re few and far between nowadays. I don’t mean to wax nostalgic, Black Bag is just some of the most enjoyable moviegoing I’ve had all year and I wish it wasn’t guessing game for when I would be able to experience something like it again.
Thousands and thousands of young, enthusiastic filmmakers have made slasher comedies in the past 40 years and that cinematic bedrock is the bread and butter of services like Tubi. The young, enthusiasctic filmmakers behind Hell of a Summer just happen to be famous, so instead of stumbling upon the film on a free streaming service it’s in a theater near you, courtesy of Neon. All told, I’m happy Hell of a Summer got made and I think it’s a lot of fun, but everybody should know that it’s more a promise of things to come by new artists than a refined experience.
Eephus is a vibe. It’s the familiar verbal patter of your grand-dad’s friends, it’s the taste of ballpark hotdogs before you knew what they were made of, it’s the feeling of the world being small. It’s all of that, but with the adult perspective to know that time consumes all of that, just as one day it will consume everything you love now. And that’s okay. In a way, it’s kind of beautiful, just like Eephus is.
If you asked me what movies can do that other mediums can’t, I’d point you to something like They Call Her Death. Comic books come close in their overwhelming style and deliberate pacing, but only movies can push you and pull you like They Call Her Death does. Slow motion-whips, zooms, freeze frames, splotches of color, it puts your brain in a place of fantasy, something outside of the experience of sitting in a movie theater looking at a screen. And then it uses all of that power to show you a frontier lady absolutely annihilating cartoon villains for 90 minutes as gloriously as possible.
