Road House (03.29.24)

 

Like a lot of millennials, I was first introduced to a lot of 80's movies via Family Guy. From that context I gathered that the film Road House involved Patrick Swayze in mom jeans and violence, but other than that I couldn’t tell you anything about it. I can tell you a bit about the 2024 reimagining with Jake Gyllenhaal, though. It's fine. It has the violence, it has that charmingly simplistic 80s DNA, and it wasn’t painful. Sometimes that’s all you can ask of a remake.

The 80s simplicity that Road House can’t help but wear on its sleave is in itself very reminiscent of classic westerns, but if you somehow miss that relationship don’t worry—the characters will explicitly tell you as much and continue to beat you over the head with it, no pun intended. Elwood Dalton, former UFC champion and current wanderer, is hired to be a bouncer at a bar and cleans up the town in the process, using arm guns rather than actual guns. The moral lines are very clear despite Dalton’s angst over whether or not he is one of the good guys, the objective even more so once the obligatory mystery is cleared up. Heads get busted, testosterone gets brandished, the bad guys get theirs. Road House is not high art, but it does deliver on a lot of the cheap thrills that are expected of it.

Jake Gyllenhaal and his shredded bod do just fine as Dalton, a protagonist who never seems to be in too much danger as he punches his way through countless mooks. The supporting characters are two-dimensional and bland, but the actors who portray them do the best they can. Real-life UFC champion Conor McGregor plays the most imposing of the villains with a scene-chewing ferocity that is sometimes amusing but more often than not comes off as obnoxious. The dialogue that all of these characters bandy about is poorly written but, to its credit, is also rarely outright cringy.

All of the negatives of Road House seem more indicative of its 80s roots than any particular failing on behalf of the film’s cast and crew. It was a time when action stars were unstoppable, spectacle was paramount, the dialogue was secondary, and cheese was abundant. This is Road House in a nutshell, but it is not entirely clear if the filmmakers did this on purpose, as it is not overtly corny but subtly so. It would have left much more of an impression if they went all in, but instead of glorious cheese we got something middling and fairly forgettable.

But the action is fun and there is some charm to the stripped-down, barebones plot. Road House is a relic of a simpler era of entertainment, and like its main character it shows up on a Greyhound bus, sticks around for a bit, and leaves with few people being the wiser. But unlike Dalton and his abs it won’t change your life, that’s for sure.

Road House is now available on Amazon Prime. 

 

This review was first published in the Keizertimes on March 29th, 2024. Visit at www.keizertimes.com.

 

Spaceman (03.22.24)

 

Adam Sandler has admitted that often he picks roles depending on whether or not they let him travel to exotic locations so he can essentially have a studio-paid vacation while only occasionally doing work in front of the camera. Sure, the result of this practice is often junk like Grown Ups 2 and You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, but Sandler gets paid and he has fun, and I can’t help but envy him for that. Like a lot of comedic actors who are getting up there in age, however, legitimacy and validation from his more serious-minded peers eventually beckoned, leading to Uncut Gems, a film which saw the perpetually goofy Sandler take on a decidedly more dramatic type of role. Netflix’s Spaceman continues this trend, and although the film itself falls short of its ambitions when it has them and can be boring when it doesn’t, there is no denying that it is also amongst Sandler’s finest work, unconvincing Czech accent aside.

Plodding and purposeful, Spaceman is a very cerebral film that essentially boils down to a lone cosmonaut (Why is he up there by himself? Couldn’t tell you.) getting marriage counseling from a giant alien spider stowaway that may or may not be imaginary. There are additional science fiction elements, of course, but they are fairly silly and basic, often go unexplained, and are ultimately beside the point. This is a film about relationships, and when it focuses on these relationships it mostly succeeds in no small part thanks to the strong performances put forth by the actors. Sandler is particularly engaging, his subdued turn as the cosmonaut Jakub carrying the bulk of the dramatic weight with his subtle sadness and fraying sanity, and Carey Mulligan is equally as believable as his put-upon wife Lenka who just wishes to be seen. The dreamlike, surreal quality of Spaceman is interesting to watch as the film mixes reality, dream, memory, and maybe even a hallucination or two, but that doesn’t mean that it is without its boring moments either.

Spaceman tries to make several profound observations on love and the human condition, and sometimes these observations land and sometimes they feel unearned and superfluous. There is a certain self-important quality to the film which can feel a bit off-putting, and it is when the film doesn’t shoot for the stars that it is the most likeable. It is in these moments, however, that the boredom occasionally creeps in as well. Why? Because the counseling that Hanuš the spider (soothingly voiced by Paul Dano) gives isn’t anything unique to Jakub and Lenka’s relationship... it’s all stuff that a person who has ever been in healthy relationships (or who has watched a lot of T.V. and movies) would know already. It may be a pretty good movie about marriage counseling, but it is still a movie about marriage counseling.

Spaceman isn’t bad. Far from it, in fact. I might not have learned anything new from it like it clearly wanted me to, but the journey was still worth having.

Spaceman is now available on Netflix.

 

This review was first published in the Keizertimes on March 22^nd, 2024. Visit at www.keizertimes.com.

Dune: Part Two (03.08.24)

 

I have never seen David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Dune, despite the fact that it is, by some accounts, a fun watch because of how spectacularly weird and bad it is. It has been sitting in one of my streaming service queues for quite a while now, gathering imaginary digital dust, and whenever I get some free time I just can’t find myself ready to commit to 137 minutes of silliness. Dune: Part Two was a slightly different beast—sure, it may be a whole 18 minutes longer, but I found 2021’s Part One to be exceptional. And even though Denis Villeneuve’s latest adaptation may have taken up a good chunk of my evening I gotta say—I loved every minute of it.

Dune: Part Two Is, in a word, big. The scope, the actors, the soundtrack… everything that Part One did this one does bigger, battering each of my senses into submission until there was nothing left in my life except the desert planet of Arrakis, giant Diet Coke and tub of popcorn at my side not withstanding. Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Greig Fraser (who won an Academy Award for his work in the first installment) instill every frame with sheer awe, their knack for finding the perfect angle never failing to bring forth the beauty and horror of Frank Herbert’s universe (the Harkonnen world of Geidi Prime is particularly striking with its black-and-white eeriness).

It's a dense and daunting universe, to be sure. David Lynch's previous attempt at adapting the novel in 1984 famously included a glossary of terms along with each ticket, the better to help audiences understand what the heck was happening and what those silly made-up words meant. Dune: Part Two feels significantly easier to follow, even in comparison to Part One, although I do recommend rewatching this previous installment first if you have another two and a half hours to burn (I caught a showing of Part Two with closed captioning, which also helped immensely).

The stacked cast is a who’s-who of Hollywood royalty and gen-z wunderkinds, and most of them have interesting material to work with (poor Dave Bautista is not one of them, as he once again only gets to be angry to varying degrees and Florence Pugh doesn’t have much to do) in this cautionary tale of revenge, love, and the dangers of religious extremism. The costumes are magnificent, the CGI is breathtaking, and the unusual but excellent score by Hans Zimmer (who also won an Oscar for his work on Part One) turns the entire experience up to eleven. Honestly I’m having a hard time finding anything interesting to talk about with Dune: Part Two that’s not just a boring checklist of things done well done. Watching it on the big screen is a transcendent experience that must be seen to be believed: This is why we go to the movies. Go see Dune: Part Two on the big screen before it’s gone.

Dune: Part Two is now playing exclusively in theaters. 

 

This review was first published in the Keizertimes on March 8^th, 2024. Visit at www.keizertimes.com.

Drive-Away Dolls (03.01.24)

 

I don’t love road trips; they generally bore me and make me sick to my stomach, but do you know who does love driving cross-country in cars, or at least filming people doing so? The Coen Brothers. You know what else they like? Making movies about crimes gone wrong. But have they ever made a cross-country crime caper with lesbian protagonists? Ethan Coen has, though Joel was apparently busy doing other things. The result is Drive-Away Dolls, a raunchy throwback to exploitative B-movies of yore that somehow feels neither like a complete crime film nor a complete romantic comedy, sputtering out of gas somewhere in between.

The advertisements made Drive-Away Dolls out to be a Lebowski-esque normal-people-get caught-up-in-a-criminal-undertaking film with a sapphic twist, and I was therefore a bit surprised at just how much screentime is devoted to the central romance between Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan). Their love story feels much more central to the film than the actual crime plot, which is good, because the crime plot is fairly bland and straightforward, and both the comedic and romantic chemistry between Qualley and Viswanathan are some of the stronger aspects of the film. If you could call it a love story, of course... Jamie and Marian’s relationship doesn’t feel as much based on a deeper emotional connection than it is based on a shared sexual attraction to each other, which Dolls isn’t afraid to show you both frequently and rather graphically. Ultimately, the sex-positive message tends to overshadow the love part of the love story.

The absurdist comedy that the Coens are famous for is present in Dolls but feels a lot more spaced out than normal, leading to periods that don’t feel particularly funny or clever. A lot of the comedy in the second act relies on the inherent funniness of the word “penis” as well, so your mileage may vary. Is there even a second act? I’m not entirely sure because of how quickly things wrap up. Again, the not-quite-central crime plot is lame, its only redeeming factor being the ridiculousness and novelty of the central MacGuffin, which does not get revealed until late in the film. The villains never feel menacing or competent, and the stakes never rise above the lowest of the low. When the film ended at the 83-minute mark I was shocked, thinking that surely there must have been more to it than that. Nope. Things really were that simple and straightforward.

Overall, the film feels incomplete, missing something important. It has all the trappings of a schlocky B-movie, but the spirit just isn’t there. Dolls never feels painful thanks to its strong leads, occasional laughs, queer-positive message, and breezy runtime, but it also could have gone further while simultaneously reigning some things in. As a love story it’s not romantic enough, as a comedy it’s not funny enough, and as a crime caper it’s not exciting or interesting enough. Drive away.

Drive-Away Dolls is now playing exclusively in theaters.

 

This review was first published in the Keizertimes on March 1^st, 2024. Visit at www.keizertimes.com.