JP's Reviews

→ in
Tools    





INFAMOUS



Arielle Summers (Bella Thorne) lives in Florida with her mother. She works in a diner, saving up her wages (stashing the money in a box under her bed, so that we know that sooner than later her mother’s boyfriend is going to rob her blind) to go to Hollywood, where she hopes to become famous despite lacking any discernible qualities other than looking like a an adult actress (emphasis on 'adult').

One night, Arielle goes to a party, gets in a fight, and beats up some other girl while everyone else records the event for social media. Arielle immediately gains 147 new followers, getting her first inkling that appealing to the lowest common denominator is the fastest way to fame.

The next day Arielle meets Dean Taylor (Jake Manley), who looks like Stephen Dorff and Mark McGrath’s bastard child. They spend time together at another party, where Dean reveals that he was in prison for armed robbery and assault, and that his parole requires him to live with his father.

This is where the movie begins to fall apart. This parole requirement seems to suggest that Dean is underage, and in fact Arielle later refers to the two of them as “a teenage couple.” Okay, Bella Thorne is 22 (and that's, of course, what I mean by 'adult'), while Manley is 28, and neither of them look a day younger than their respective ages, especially him.

As expected, Arielle discovers that all her money has been swiped, so she packs up and goes to Dean’s house to finds his father beating the shit out of him. Dean fights back, and his father ends up falling down the stairs to his apparent doom. Arielle and Dean immediately skip town, and realizing they have no money, decide to hold up a gas station with Dean’s gun.

Arielle tapes the stick-up and uploads it online, resulting in three thousand new followers. Dean is upset when he finds out that Arielle has been broadcasting their crimes, but Arielle says she used an “IP blocker” and didn’t show their faces.

Appeased, Dean gets behind the camera as well, and their crime spree nets Arielle’s more than three million followers. They are eventually identified by the police, their faces shown on the news. Dean is angry, but Arielle is elated to finally be (in)famous.

They are pulled over by the police, and when the officer goes to check their IDs, Arielle gets out of the car and shoots him. Arielle and Dean go into hiding, which leads to Arielle losing subscribers and followers.

Even though they have enough money, Arielle goes off alone to rob a gas station, accidentally killing a customer. The climax of the film takes place during a bank robbery involving the couple and other criminals, and which Arielle live-streams for her now five million followers.

As far as I can tell, Infamous strives to satirize the extremes to which people will go for followers and ‘likes.’ The problem, other than targeting low-hanging fruit, is that the movie tries to illustrate its point with a situation that could never happen in real life.

A real-world Arielle might literally steal and kill for internet fame, but it would be to no avail because YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., would remove her videos and block her accounts faster than she could say 'Jackie Robinson’.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Arielle lives in a world where these social networks have no policies against violent, graphic, and illegal material; her and Dean’s criminal exploits occur across at least three states, which would inevitably draw the attention of the FBI, and I'm pretty sure they could easily bypass Arielle’s “IP blocker”.

Who knows; maybe Arielle also lives in an alternate reality where President William McKinley wasn’t assassinated and the FBI never created. Unfortunately for Infamous, however, we live in a universe in which Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Dog Day Afternoon, and Natural Born Killers do exist — and while all of these films, like Infamous, are morally ambiguous at best, on the other hand they are, unlike Infamous, works of art with compelling characters — and that makes Infamous redundant and unnecessary.



Of Human Bondage



Early on in Of Human Bondage Philip Carey (Leslie Howard) is told “You will never be anything but mediocre.” Soon after, Mildred Rogers is described as “anemic … ill-natured and contemptible.” Neither will ever do anything to disprove these assessments.

Carey especially will never be able to overcome his weakness; he was literally born with a clubfoot, but his real problem is that he never develops a figurative spine. We leave the film convinced that, had Mildred not died, Carey would have kept taking her back in at the expense of far worthier women — worthier than Mildred, yes, but worthier than him as well.

Now, as mediocre and contemptible as Carey and Mildred are — and they take mediocrity and contempt to heights, or rather lows, that arguably have yet to be matched almost a century later —, there is a sort of astronomical fascination in watching them follow their preordained trajectories; they’re like heavenly bodies fixed in their orbits, she a star going supernova and he a barren planet becoming engulfed in the ensuing blast.

Of Human Bondage is a mixed bag to say the least for Howard, even if Philip Carey isn’t (though not by much either) the most thankless role in his career; five years later he would go on to play the equally insipid Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, opposite two other legends in the same league as Davis.

I will say a couple of things for the Carey character, though; number one, he’s fun to watch, not because of what Howard does with it (which is, wisely as it turns out, next to nothing), but because of what goes on in his febrile mind — i.e., his obsession with Mildred, whom he sees everywhere when awake and dreams about when asleep, and which the film manifests through some very neat optical effects (my favorite is a classroom skeleton that takes on Mildred’s likeness, in what may be construed as a bit of reverse foreshadowing). And number two, Howard’s pale shadow of a man makes Davis look even better than she already does, not that she really needs the help.

Beautiful though she was, Davis always had a gift for the grotesque (which reached its zenith in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), and with Mildred she has no trouble conveying, through her faux ingénue façade, the character’s inner moral corruption and physical decay; of particular note is her climactic The Reason You Suck Speech to Carey (and even then it’s hard to sympathize with him, since most, if not all the shit that she calls him out on is pretty much true).



Clara Sola



I read somewhere that "‘Clara Sola’ ... Puts a Magical-Realist Spin on ‘Carrie’." There are indeed a few similarities with De Palma’s horror classic (menstrual blood, a religiously retrograde mother, and both a party and a fire in the third act), but I think this movie is more indebted to Agnes of God (with a twist of Rain Man) — a portrait of mental illness set in a milieu where some people go to the doctor and then ask God for a second opinion.

The story unfolds in a remote place and time (at one point the title character and her sister play Snake on an old-timey cellphone, so it’s either the mid-to-late 90s, or technology has only caught up so far in the backwater where the characters live), and the rural settings — the 'voodoo of location,' to borrow Werner Herzog's term — are put to about as good use as in Sueño En Otro Idioma; unfortunately, Clara Sola is also as unfocused as that Mexican drama.

The film is certainly well titled; Clara is hopelessly alone, but perhaps a little too much so for the movie’s own good. Like her spiritual predecessors (e.g., Nell, [I Am] Sam, and the aforementioned Rain Man, Clara is as isolated from the other characters as the audience is alienated by her; she remains from beginning to end a cipher, impenetrably monolithic — as ungraspable as the rainy, muddy, slippery green hell that surrounds her. All things considered, Clara Sola goes full retard and goes home empty-handed.



Body Brokers



Body Brokers ends with a series of captions informing us that 15 people OD’d in the preceding 110 minutes (“While you were watching this film”), plus about a million more “in the last 20 years;” all told, more US casualties than pretty much every war fought in the past century and change .

I’m going to go ahead and take all of that with a grain of salt. I don’t want to say that writer/director John Swab hasn’t the slightest idea what the hell he’s talking about, but the fact that none of the above has anything at all to do with body brokering (a modern, less ghoulish, form of body snatching) doesn’t fill me with confidence that it isn’t a bunch of crap.

What the movie really is about is so convoluted that, even after several explanatory Frank Grillo voiceovers complete with visual aids, it still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; why complicate it even further with a misleading title? Surely there must be a name for whatever it is that’s going on here — though, if there is, the movie never gets around to it.

This movie, come to think of it, never truly gets around to much of anything — not even a proper conclusion; “How do you end a never ending story?,” Vin (Grillo, as reliable a performer and not-so-reliable a judge of scripts as ever) asks through the fourth wall. “That’s for you all to decide.”

Man, this film has got some nerve; it’s almost as big as its brains are small. First, Swab tells us how many people died while we were looking the other way (hey bro, we’re doing you a favor watching your contrived little movie that you gave the wrong title to; you’re the one wasting our time).

Second, he washes his hands of the whole bloody mess while hypocritically taunting us that we’ll “never do a ******* thing about it.” And third, he suggests, sarcastically — or at least one should hope so —, “if you or a loved one is struggling with addiction, give [the character who’s been well established to be a sleazoid running a multi-million dollar healthcare con] a call.”

All things considered, Body Brokers is more a ‘points out the obvious problem’ than a 'comes up with a solution’ kind of movie. It’s also hopelessly cynical about rehab, implying that, since it’s a scam anyway (the handful of addicts who don’t relapse their way to an early grave end up becoming even worse SOBs when they’re clean than when they were using), a junkie might as well get a piece of the pie — a 'you get high, I get rich, everybody’s happy’ sort of deal.

PS. For a movie about a reprehensible jerk who goes to rehab for the wrong reasons, and not only does not turn into an even bigger douchebag, but actually changes for the better, and to boot lives long enough to enjoy his newfound sobriety, check 1988’s Clean and Sober.



BLOODSHOT



Bloodshot is a deceptively intelligent and patient sci-fi flick. It spends its entire first half persuading us that it's just another dumb action movie, and right when we're convinced that that's exactly what it is, it pulls the rug out from under us and reveals that it was all just a ruse before establishing its true premise, and it does this with such skill that we can't stay mad at it for having fooled us so thoroughly. It's like one of those Russian dolls, only instead of having another, smaller doll inside, it has is a much more complex and satisfying movie.

All we see up to the halfway point is utterly generic, and Bloodshot knows it (“You've already copied every movie cliché there is. I think “Psycho Killer and a lunatic dancing in a slaughterhouse is enough”). Vin Diesel's character is a Frankenstein monster made from parts of Neo, Robocop, Universal Soldier, Wolverine, and the T-1000.

After conveniently listening, just once, to a trigger song, he regains his lost memory — and not in bits and pieces; like Celine Dion, it's all coming back to him now. Without even a training montage in between, Diesel employs his many new skills so expertly that he exacts revenge on his and his wife's killers with over an hour left to go.

Director David S.F. Wilson and screenwriters Jeff Wadlow and Eric Heisserer aren't really copying action movie clichés but playing with them — subverting them for their own benefit, and the audience's as well. I was so pleasantly surprised that I'm willing to look at the silver lining on a couple of things.

1) the hero is an indestructible, unstoppable one-man army, killing machine — i.e., same old, same old except that Diesel, unlike many contemporary action heroes, has an actual personality and can be introspective (or at the very least give the illusion of introspection), 2) a sequence towards the end, where the protagonist fights a couple of baddies, deliberately looks like a video game cutscene, but it's still better than watching someone else play a video game, and 3) there are the dreaded comic sidekick and romantic subplot, but the former is tolerable, and the latter is subtle and unobtrusive.

All things considered, Bloodshot's biggest flaw is that it's supposed to be the first installment in a series of movies set in the Valiant Comics shared cinematic universe (oddly, though it's based on the character Bloodshot, that name is never uttered in the film; I imagine they're leaving it for the inevitable sequel, and ditto the merely hinted at romance between). The first movie in a franchise is almost always the best of the bunch, and this one will be hard to top.



STUDIO 666



As actors, even playing fictionalized versions of themselves, the Foo Fighters are terrific musicians. Fans of the band needn't worry though; based on the evidence of Studio 666, the Foos won’t be quitting their day jobs any time soon. This movie appears to be shooting for the same cult classic status as Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, but I think it’s more likely to inspire suicide cults than anything else – I know I would gouge my eyes out and then bleed to death rather than watch it again.

It’s a shame, because Studio 666 had the chance and the potential to be more This is Spinal Tap than Phantom of the Park. Spinal Tap is a comedy about a rock band on the road; Studio 666 could have given us the making-of-the-album version of the story – and, like the proverbial broken clock, it's spot-on a couple of times (the moment where Dave Grohl “finds” a new, previously unknown musical note which he calls “L sharp” is in a way reminiscent of Nigel Tufnel’s “D minor is really the saddest of all keys”), but these occasions are so few and far between as to make the experience even more frustrating.

It is possible to make an intelligent, funny movie about the recording process; 2014’s Frank is a great example, especially because that film, as eclectic as it is, doesn’t feel the need to experiment beyond its area of expertise.

Contrastingly, Studio 666 has a streak of cheesy horror running through it that is as out of place in a Foo Fighters movie as a song from Grohl’s heavy metal side project Probot would be in a Foo Fighters album. I mean, we like the Foos the same way we like Eminem – but then, we wouldn’t like Eminem as much if 8 Mile had been a supernatural slasher instead of a semi-autobiographical drama.

I’m not saying, though, that Studio 666 should have been a drama, only that it would have behooved it, even as a comedy, to be more veridical. Grohl’s rockstar outbursts would be a lot funnier if they stemmed from his overzealous quest to make a perfect record, as opposed to his being possessed by an evil spirit or whatever; it’s almost as if he’s so afraid of damaging his good-guy image that he has to justify playing against it with a case of ‘the devil made me do it.’



CINDERELLA (2021)



Cinderella is a jukebox musical, based on a classic fairy tale, with CGI animals, and the now obligatory ethnically diverse cast (though oddly relegated to the extras; all of the main characters are pretty much as white as the tip of Tony Montana's nose.

It's like, how much more lazy could this writing be? And the answer is none. None more lazy. To put it in perspective, Lin-Manuel Miranda's so-called songs from Hamilton or In the Heights are all over the place, but at least he sat down and committed them to paper himself (and you can tell from the result that he did without any help at all).

Conversely, what we have here is the worst of two worlds: on the one hand, covers so watered down they constitute sonic homeopathy, and on the other, original songs so bland that they make the covers sound good in comparison.

As bad as, say, Rocketman is, at least it's a jukebox musical that makes sense; after all, one expects to hear Elton John songs in an Elton John biopic. This of course doesn't change the fact that, should I want to listen to John's version of “Pinball Wizard”, I'm going to watch Tommy, not Rocketman.

By the same token, if I want to see a Cinderella musical, the gold standard is still the 1950 Disney version, which contains original, plot-relevant songs that were written expressly for the film — as opposed to a glorified playlist that fails miserably at the two most important functions a song has in a musical: moving the story forward and developing the characters (how exactly a medley of “Whatta Man” and “Seven Nation Army” is going to accomplish either of those things, I haven’t the foggiest) — especially considering that YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, etc. allow me to easily enjoy the superior, genuine article performed by the artists who wrote and/or recorded it in the first place.

As for the exception to the 'inclusive' cast that I mentioned above, it's the Fabulous Godmother; played with overflowing exuberance by Billy Porter; this is the only character endowed with a life of its own, something for which the actor, and not the script or the director, deserves exclusive credit. The rest — even (sigh) Pierce Brosnan and Minnie Driver — are so opaque and forgettable that they might as well have been as computer generated as the animals.



A Nice Girl Like You



This movie’s idea of humor is repeating the names of certain parts of the human body out loud — preferably within senior citizens’ earshot —, and in that sense this film talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk. It wants to be a sex comedy, and fails as bad as a eunuch playing with himself.

According to IMDb, “After being accused of being too inhibited by her ex-boyfriend, a violinist [played by Lucy Hale and also named Lucy, perhaps to avoid confusion among the intellectually challenged cast and crew] creates a rather wild to-do list that sends her on a whirlwind journey of self-discovery.”

How “wild” is this list? Per one if its items, Lucy must go to a strip club, which turns out to be the kind that exists only in the movies and on TV; that is, where the strippers don't really strip (later Lucy says that if one is "naked enough" it doesn't matter how badly one dances. Two things; 1) as I just pointed out, these women aren’t naked, and 2) nudity is an absolute. One is either naked or one isn’t).

It’s one thing to be sexually inexperienced, but must Lucy be dumb as well? She and her friend and fellow musician Pricilla (Mindy Cohn from The Facts of Life; ironic in a movie whose makers need to have the birds and the bees explained to them) are hired to do a gig.

At some point before this, Lucy has procured herself a set of Ben Wa balls. There's nothing inherently wrong with the latter, but why would Lucy decide to, so to speak, go balls to the wall right before she has to play in public? And the answer is so that the balls can fall out of her cavity with supposedly hilarious results (“this is not funny!” Lucy tells Pricilla, and we couldn't agree more).

I’m not saying A Nice Girl Like You should have been obscenely explicit or overly graphical, which wouldn’t do in a comedy anyway; sex can be fun, but it’s only funny to children and immature people — to put it in perspective, a film like American Pie has a lot of fun with sex because, for as much out of their depth as its characters are, they at least have a basic understanding of the mechanics of the sexual act; on the other hand, a movie like Sex Tape fails miserably because it was made by people who apparently lack the slightest notion of how intercourse works, and who think a woman doing a triple front flip onto her acquiescent husband’s member is somehow a laughing matter.

As for A Nice Girl Like You, we're meant to believe that its heroine has undergone a sexual awakening because she goes from having sex in her pajamas to doing it with her bra on — and even then we’re not really sure she went through with it, seeing as how the movie cuts to an outside shot where computer generated fireworks are going off in the night sky (CGI fireworks? Really? Guess that means he wore a rubber).



The Last Duel



The Last Duel, co-written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and directed by Ridley Scott, is a redundant hybrid of two premises that were done much earlier and much better by Akira Kurosawa and, interestingly, Scott himself.

Perhaps the filmmaker’s intention was to filter his own The Duellists through Rashomon, but the result is anything but Kurosawa-esque; while in the economic Japanese film there were three contradictory versions of the same incident, here we get we three reiterative accounts — consequently, the predictable, repetitive, interminable plot lacks any and all ambiguity and suspense. What’s the point of these overlapping stories? Consider this: the antagonist never fails to come across as anything other than a lying piece of crap from all points of view — including his own!

Scott’s legacy is as well-cemented as his oeuvre is spotty, and this self-complacent movie is closer to Robin Hood or Kingdom of Heaven than to Body of Lies or All the Money in the World (neither of which are in the same category as Alien or Blade Runner, but then which film is?).

It’s a shame, because this could have been an exciting tale if only it were told in a straightforward manner, without wasting so much precious time going in circles. Aside from the French who speak English at all times (except when they sing), and the “based on true events” which guarantees that virtually everything we’re about to see never ever happened other than in Affleck’s and Damon’s fertile imaginations (usually put to better use), The Last Duel musters a healthy level of authenticity — all of which only makes it all the more disappointing that Scott, who in The Duellists made a visual reference to "Napoleon in Saint Helena" by Franz Josef Sandmann (even more effective because the painting was recreated with spectacular real locations), resorts to shots that seem to be taken directly from Age of Empires.

Damon, as Jean de Carrouges, acquits himself best of all from this cluster****. Adam Driver demonstrates once again that he should stick to everyman characters; übermenschen like Jacques Le Gris or Kylo Ren are well beyond his limited range. And Affleck, as Count Pierre d'Alençon, approaches the character as if he were back in Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season — but I don’t entirely blame him; perhaps out of modesty he refrained from pointing it out, but Scott and Damon should have known that since Damon is Carrouges, his Le Gris nemesis should automatically be Affleck; then at least we would have had Good Will Hunting 3 (“how do you like them medieval apples?”).



A Shot Through the Wall



A Shot Through the Wall offers a third alternative on an issue traditionally seen literally in black-and-white terms. Casting a lead of Chinese descent couldn't be more natural for writer/director Aimee Long, but there's more to this decision than just ethnic identification; accordingly, police officer Mike Tan (Kenny Leu) is not limited by his cultural heritage: his partner who may or may not also be his best/only friend, Ryan Doheney (Derek Goh), is white; his fiancée Candace Walker (Ciara Renée) is biracial; and his superior and future father-in-law D.C. Walker (Clifton Davis) is African-American.

This carefully constructed microcosm comes tumbling down when, chasing a suspect through the hallways of an apartment building, Mike accidentally shoots through a wall and the stray bullet fatally lodges in one of the tenants, with part of the incident, including Mike’s and Ryan’s faces, being recorded on another tenant’s cell phone.

In theory, Mike will not face any consequences other than emotional and psychological ones; after all, “It's hard to prove [criminal] intent when you shoot someone through a wall.” This is, however, where Mike's ethnicity comes into play on different levels; story-wise, “The [police] department needed a scapegoat, they needed someone to throw to the wolves, so they found someone who they thought was expendable,” and storytelling-wise, Long needs a protagonist capable of generating pathos — something that would have been tantamount to a Herculean task had the protagonist been white.

A Caucasian hero would have been a distraction, and made the movie feel apologetic; as it turns out, taking sides is far from Long’s intention. This film is not black, white, blue or (at the risk of sounding politically incorrect) yellow; it’s not about the colors that divide us, but about two things that make us human: fallibility and accountability.

As much as Mike, apart from his possible incompetence when drawing his gun, may or may not deserve to be in this predicament, once being in it, he must make difficult decisions (e.g., use his girlfriend’s blackness in his favor) that could mean the difference between going to prison and going free; the question is, could Mike live, even in freedom, with the ramifications of his deliberate actions, or would it be easier to face the repercussions of a random act in exchange for a clear conscience? (the climax of A Shot Through the Wall is a bit of a cop-out, but it allows for a powerful final shot involving Mike's mother and that of his accidental victim).



A Tale of Two Guns


If I had to guess I would say that director Justin Lee is aiming for a meta-western, and A Tale of Two Guns (a title that must have sounded great on paper but which makes little contextual sense) certainly is very self-aware — even a little too much so for its own good; here is a movie where the score in a scene set in a saloon (though according to the sign outside it is a “club”) is Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.”

There is also a lot of talk about “the end of an era” and “a dying breed” and “figur[ing] out what men like us are gonna do in this life” now that “The organization known as the Cowboys has come to an end.”

As a matter of fact, there is a lot of talking in this movie, period, and quite a bit of it is rather incomprehensible. For instance, we have such non sequiturs as “I do not like your face, sir. Therefore, I will feel no such way about killing you on the merit that you are an annoyance in my presence.”

Now, don’t get me wrong; I love westerns almost as much as I love films about people talking, and there is no law that says a western can’t or shouldn’t be wordy (I’m reminded of Ed Harris’s Appaloosa, which had a lot of fun with the English language), but perhaps there is a reason that some of the greatest westerns seem to be as laconic as their heroes.

Two Guns is at its best when it’s about, in its own words, “the thrill of the hunt”; a cat and mouse game in which the pursuer (Ed Morrone) says of his prey (Casper Van Dien), “I've just been hunting this man for a few weeks now, and every time I think I might understand him, he does something to surprise me.”

Both Morrone and Van Dien turn in solid performances, and there’s also strong supporting work from the likes of Tom Berenger, Jeff Fahey, Judd Nelson, and DannyTrejo.

Morrone is new to me, and the others are far from what you’d call an A-list cast; on the other hand, this isn’t the first rodeo for any of them, and they all bring a world-weary journeyman quality to the proceedings that is much welcome and much appreciated.



Miranda Veil



Miranda Veil is a wonderfully schizophrenic film — a morbidly twisted love story, a peyotized road movie, and a deranged black comedy all rolled into one. There is madness here, but it has a method.

The filmmakers are unafraid of being politically incorrect, but they don’t like to shock just for the sake of shocking, either. This a refreshing combination. It takes guts to make a comedy in which a woman is beaten, flogged and stabbed, her face crushed by a rock, and her head split open with an axe, etc., etc., etc.

The film’s treatment of all this violence, however, is nothing short of masterful. When it's, so to speak, real, it's hinted at; it happens off-camera, and we only see the results. It only becomes overtly graphic around the point where the film crosses an imaginary line between realism and surrealism, and then it goes so over the top that taking it seriously would be missing the point.

Contrary to what might appear on the surface, Miranda Veil is not misogynistic — or misanthropic, or nihilistic; unlike, say, Happy Death Day, or Palm Springs, or Happy Death Day 2U, where the difference between life and death is the same as between sleep and wakefulness, and where the world resets every 12 hours of less, Miranda Veil boasts a deep concern for the mystery, meaning, and purpose of Life in general, as well as a philosophical respect (not coincidentally, the male lead is named after Kierkegaard, regarded as the first existentialist philosopher) for the inviolability of each individual life.

All things considered, the three adjectives Soren uses to label the titular Miranda (accessible, unpredictable, intriguing) may be used to describe the movie — well, maybe not so much 'accessible' (its idiosyncrasies might put some people off), but then this is a film of which you can say that it’s not for everybody, and mean it as a compliment.



Werewolf Castle



Werewolf Castle is a medieval fantasy that strives to evoke an air of authenticity. This is a film made in the same spirit as, say, Excalibur, but on a much smaller scale — and with werewolves. This is a B-movie at best, but it deserves an A for effort. The filmmakers respect the audience too much to allow even the slightest shred of cheap CGI to creep into the film.

Its Haunted Forest is all the more haunting for being an actual forest (the Brecon Beacons mountain range in south Wales), and the titular castle is, or at least was long ago, the real thing. I’ll take well-preserved ruins (and the state of the structure can even be justified within the context of the story) over a phony-looking computer-generated palace any day.

And now the damn veggies. The werewolves are clearly People in Suits, and that’s the good news; the bad news is that they all wear identical masks, eternally frozen in the same expression, as if they are always mid-growl. This must perforce confine the werewolves to the background, which has the upside of shifting the focus to the human characters — among whom I include the leader of the lycanthropes, who wisely retains his hominid appearance at all times.

Werewolf Castle tells a straightforward, deceptively simple story (in 90 lean minutes). Werewolves in general symbolize the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy, but the filmmakers establish this duality before and beyond a literal transformation.

The young hero, Thorfinn (Peter Lofsgard), leaves his younger brother at the mercy of the wolves so that he can cavort with a plump wench, whom he also abandons to her fate once the monsters attack their village. Thus, joining the “great warrior knights” Hamelin Wiltshire (Tim Cartwright), Thomas Fairhurst (Greg Draven), Osmund Blakewood (Derek Nelson) and the awesomely named Hal Skullsplitter (Jay O'Connell), is for Thorfinn the only way to redeem himself and fulfill Hal’s words: “Where once you were a coward you can now be brave, and where once people took you for a fool, new people might recognize you as a hero.”

This movie is by no means perfect, but it has a lot more heart and brains than, say, the never-ending, boring, and pointless The Green Knight. If one is forgiving of its rudimentary werewolves, and willing to let them take the place of dragons in an Arthurian pastiche, then there is much to enjoy at Werewolf Castle.



BLONDE



There is a film called My Week with Marilyn. Blonde feels more like A Fortnight with Norma Jean. You could make a drinking game around how many times they utter Monroe's Christian name in this movie — but only if you want to end up like Keith Moon.

Here's a picture that likes to drop names just to hear itself name-dropping. Do you think that Charles Chaplin Jr. really went around saying things like "In our household, my father, Chaplin..." or "People think it's a blessing being Charlie Chaplin's son"? Why would he possibly feel the need to advertise a fact that his very name literally made explicit?

But that's how this film operates; the protagonists are reduced to their screen personas and/or their public images — both of which have been either blown out of proportion or distorted beyond recognition through the years, and which the movie further muddles up rather than straighten out.

Blonde isn't almost three hours long because it has a lot to say about its subject; on the contrary, it has so little to say that it has to make shit up as it goes along — and I know all biopics do that to a lesser or greater extent (usually greater), but that doesn't mean they should.

Oddly enough, the film somehow manages to ramble endlessly on, and at the same time take shortcuts. For example, little Norma Jean gets dropped off at an orphanage and... nothing. The plot just flash forwards to adult Norma Jean/Marilyn Monroe. I guess writer/director Andrew Dominik just assumed we've read our Dickens, so that he could spare us the obligatory Dickensian childhood (now, if only he'd assume we're familiar with Monroe lore, he might have spared us the entire movie).

I'm aware that this is not supposed to be a historical document, but if the filmmaker had stuck to what he knows and what he thinks (that is to say, an honest opinion), as opposed to what he thinks he knows (mostly hearsay, speculation, and downright fabrication), he would have come up with a much more truthful movie, not to say a lot shorter as well — two qualities that Blonde is in dire need of.

Unfortunately, Dominik actually isn't the least bit interested in Marilyn — at least not as a performer or as a human being; in an irony totally lost on the director, he is as guilty of objectifying Monroe as the studio executives he purports to skewer; what's more, he's doubly guilty, because in vicariously fulfilling his star****ing fantasies, he has fetishized leading woman Ana de Armas and her co-stars.

That's what all the frontal nudity, threesomes, and JFK blowjobs amount to, and no amount of visual trickery (of which the biggest offender is the random, back-and-forth switching from color to black-and-white) is going to convince anyone other than the most gullible of viewers that it's all very artistic and tasteful; a savvy audience will easily see through this flimsy charade and recognize it for what it really is: nothing more than cheap titillation.

Since the movie stops its lingering gaze at the surface, when it's finally over we're left without a sense of who the people in it truly are, or even who they're meant to be, except for whatever previous knowledge we may already have. Blonde provides little or no insight; if you know something about Marilyn, you're not going to learn anything new, and if you know nothing, you're not going to learn anything at all.