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Reviews
The Oath (2018)
one of the most underrated and relevant films of the last few years.
Ike Barinholtz caricatures himself as a news obsessed uber-liberal whose center and right-leaning family is staying with him and his wife and daughter for Thanksgiving. As someone who is very liberal and has sat at many of those holiday family dinners with my own right-leaning siblings during the Trump presidency, his frustrations and inability to bite his tongue in the spirit of togetherness are all too real to me.
All of this is set to the background of a nation divided, in particular over a president low-key demanding that American citizens sign an oath to the office of president. Tensions flare up periodically in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, with Ike's character Chris finally erupting in the middle of Thanksgiving day dinner when a news alert on his phone says several protesters have been shot dead by the police, and Chris's brother's girlfriend, who gets her news from Facebook and conservative Twitter mouthpiece, @fat@$$patriot, tries to justify the bloodshed.
If any of this sounds familiar, it's because Ike (who writes and directs) used events like the Charlottesville riots to seemingly predict (in 2018) the state of our country, sans covid, here in 2020, with BLM riots being met with widespread extreme prejudice and excessive force from police. In further evidence of his almost supernatural powers of foreshadowing, he talks about protesters being taken away by members of CPU, the Citizens Protection Unit and new division of Homeland Security, under mysterious circumstances, just like the protesters abducted this summer by badgeless police in unmarked vehicles. (Are those people okay, btw? You lose track of the messed up crap that happened this year due to the alarming rate at which messed up crap has been happening.)
Eventually, Friday morning, two members of the CPU invite themselves into Chris's home seemingly to question him about his stance on the titular oath. When Chris demands they leave, one of the members refuses and begins an immediate spectacle of intimidation and excessive force. This character of course represents the angry and entitled white male who inexplicably feels disenfranchised in a country where white men are allowed to coast through life and as such becomes law enforcement in his thirst for unchecked power.
From there, things immediately spiral for Chris and his family making for one of the tensest 2nd acts in recent memory and culminating in a climax that would make the Safdie brothers envious.
I cannot implore you enough to watch this movie. In a country where meaningless symbols like the flag and the national anthem, much like the film's oath, are more important to half its citizens than the lives of the other half, watch this movie. Well done, Ike, well done.
Hunter Hunter (2020)
Wow
I finished this movie 20 minutes ago, and I'm still rattled. I feel like I need a shower, and it's barely 8 am.
Let me just start by saying, this movie is intense. A taut thriller with Hitchcockian levels of tension and steeped in enough dread to keep Ari Aster awake at night. A plot not all that dissimilar to Leave No Trace, with splashes of It Comes At Night, and about as bleak as the darkest parts of the first season of True Detective.
A lot of reviews focus on the ending of this movie, but this had one of the best first acts I've seen in recent memory, and it never let up after that. I honestly have not been this glued to my seat since I saw Hereditary in theaters (and worth nothing, writer/director Shawn Linden seemingly released another feature 13 years ago, otherwise I would say this it the best debut in horror since Aster's 2018 masterpiece). Devon Sawa is as good, and as grizzled, as he's ever been, and Camille Sullivan and Summer Howell carry this film through to the end as startling revelation after startling revelation are revealed.
With only a few days to spare, this is my favorite movie of 2020. Cannot recommend enough.
Just wow.
Tenet (2020)
An absolute and stunning misfire
A relatively simple and generic thriller plotline is bloated and convoluted into an unrecognizable yet utterly hollow mess. The first 70ish minutes are literally just characters talking, explaining their motives, back stories, and the mechanics of the plot to each other. And yet I still struggled to follow how or why each scene stemmed from the previous. The proceedings do pick up considerably in the second half, but the film still suffers from never ending hurry up and wait.
The "reverse entropy" science is explained enough to let you think you understand it, but also enough to know it makes little or no sense. The handful of fight scenes are largely boring. Besides a lone car chase, stunt sequences are just as boring. The plot requires a jet liner be crashed into a building for...reasons, I guess...and it's one of the dullest stunt sequences in years. And then for...again, reasons...the final act is set in a military warzone, even though we're never once shown an enemy combatant. And scenes throughout the film are edited so poorly they contain seemingly almost intentional (??) continuity errors.
The protagonist is so devoid of personality, he's never even given a name- literally being called Protagonist in the movie. John David Washington sleepwalks through the entire movie, I assume at Nolan's direction. Kenneth Branagh repeatedly overacts and Elizabeth Debicki is wasted. Robert Pattinson is the only actor displaying any charm at all.
This movie is basically Inception, but with all of the interesting and exciting elements removed, played backwards and forwards at the same time. If that makes any sense, which this movie does not.
The score SLAPS though.
Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)
Sequel-itis in a bad way
Bloated, bland, convoluted, confusing, never once raising my pulse. Not a single scene approaches a fraction of the great heights of the no man's land sequence of the first WW. Again uses narration/monologues/a prologue to overemphasize pointless, shoehorned themes. Steve's return is a mess, the main villain is a extra hot mess, and the action is practically nonexistant.
Everything about the first WW that worked is missing, and all of its flaws are carried over and amplified.
Kamera o tomeru na! (2017)
"I emailed."
It's hard to quantify this film as a whole because it starts so much as one thing and finishes as something else entirely. Shaun of the Dead comparisons are accurate in how whip smart the script is- everything you see on screen is a pay off to something you've seen before (and sometimes after)- but those comparisons pretty much stop there, as this is not your typical zom-com. I think it's best for first-time watchers to approach this movie with as little background as possible because it's certainly a unique and worthwhile viewing experience. In the end, this is a great movie, peppered with humor and a surprising amount of heart stemming from strong themes of family and determination.
Mulberry St (2006)
where a great director got his start
This movie puts a unique spin on zombies (or even vampirism, given the Nosferatu-esque look of some of the creatures)- using a lot of the same basic tropes, but completely upending the origin. The majority of the film takes place in or near an apartment complex on Mulberry St in Manhattan, as seen through the eyes of its tenants.
From a writing perspective, it does a good job feeding the audience a slow trickle of information regarding the outbreak via cutaways from the main characters and radio and TV news reports. Unfortunately, at the same time, we're mostly just living with these characters- taking part in their day to day- without much action, despite the rising body count in the city. There's also a b-story that eventually intersects with the main one, but up to that point, it just slows down an already tepidly paced narrative.
Thankfully, the characters we spend the bulk of our time with are for the most part fleshed out and very likeable- with the standouts for me being Frank and Charlie. Also to the benefit of the audience, the film barely clears an hour and fifteen minutes before the credits roll, and the action does ramp up substantially in the last 20 minutes or so, once the characters realize they are caught up in a full on outbreak. Co-writers Jim Mickle and Nick Damici
***minor spoilers***
don't hold back on character deaths either in this final sprint to the finish line.
***end spoilers***
Probably my biggest complaint with the movie is how DARK it is. The second half of the movie takes place at night and it's often quite hard to distinguish exactly what's unfolding on the screen. I assume this was intentional to mask the low budget effects of the creatures, which is a valid excuse, but I still would've preferred a bit more clarity to the action. The ending also fell a little flat for me.
All in all, this is a solid debut from director Mickle (filmed on a shoe string budget, which obviously led to many of the films drawbacks), and is suggestive of his work to come- which include three of the better genre films of the last decade.
I encourage anyone interested in low budget, contained filmmaking or in checking out Jim Mickle's back catalog to give this movie a watch on a rainy evening.