Late Stage Films

 On paper, this should not have worked. "M3GAN" is probably a bad idea for a movie: a purposely campy take on the killer doll subgenre, edited down from an R rating to a PG-13 in post production to sell tickets to Tiktok teens. But the movie is good. I thought so, critics think so (the 94% rotten tomatoes score is positively absurd for a horror-comedy), and the audience at large agrees (the $168 mil worldwide box office haul is producer Jason Blum's biggest since the pandemic). The movie is actually funny, because it knows exactly when and how to ramp up the absurdity, and because Allison Williams plays a better woefully stupid tech genius than any of the other movies this decade about dumb tech geniuses. It even has something kind of like a sincere message, about actually parenting your kids instead of outsourcing that role to technology. As a slasher flick, it never feels inhibited by its PG-13 rating. (The MPAA censoring is only obvious when the movie makes weird cuts ...

 For my money, there is no more nauseating trend in cinema than the A24 school of "generational trauma". An entire subsect of movies made for hipster teens who have strained (but not particularly bad!) relationships with their parents. It feels like half of the new directors on the block, and more than half when it comes to horror, are busy making films primarily about how they're depressed because they weren't close with their moms. Of course, the concept of generational trauma has been around forever. There is something specific that these movies are doing which bores me to tears; I think the issue is how vague the trauma in question is. It feels like "trauma" is a buzzword used to mean "mildly sad sometimes". But it's certainly possible that my issue is more how these films feel hyper-targeted towards teens and young adults who are actually doing just fine for themselves (wealthy, the parents are earnestly trying, etc).   As stated, generati...

  Is that all there is to a fire  I'm only human. The concept of a "lost" Adrian Lyne film is exciting to me, doubly so when it's implied that the reason why it became lost is because of controversial, scandalous content. Anyways, Adrian Lyne's first film is 1980's "Foxes", a coming of age story that kind of, sort of, aspires to be this scandalous *thing* about teenage girls in the way that most Adrian Lyne films sit on the border of good taste. Frankly, the film stops itself quite short of that line, and several miles short of the high bar for a modern viewer's sense of scandal (the incumbent here is, I suppose, 1995's "Kids" from Larry Clark and Harmony Korine). So here's a few thoughts, which might seem contradictory but all make sense together in my head.  "Foxes" is a fine-to-good movie. It might even be Lyne's best, I say as someone who doesn't hold his work in high regard at all.   Also... almost nothing...

 Is "The Fabelmans" the very best film that Spielberg has ever made? No. ("West Side Story" is, however, a dangerous contender) But of course, leave it to Spielberg to turn a "magic of the movies" movie on its head, spin it around, and end in the land of melancholy.   What we have here is a young boy called Sammy Fabelman, one of the great names of cinema. Spielberg sees the superhero wave surrounding him and creates a superhero of his own, one whose power is storytelling. Sammy likes movies, and is preternaturally good at making them. The sequence where he gets the idea for, and then executes, creating light flashes to represent gunshots in his boy scout film he makes as a young teen is more thrilling than plenty of action movies being pumped out by Hollywood today. Because Sammy Fabelman is the most obvious director stand-in since Bob Fosse brought Joe Gideon to the big screen, his parents will not stay together, and this will make him profoundly sad.  A...

 Upfront: I was not particularly looking forward to this film. It very literally looked  bad - what is that color grading? The trailer looks terribly grey. And the marketing presents the film in a very "stage play" sort of way, threatening you with a movie shot in one location where people talk for two hours. I feel comfortable saying these negative preconceptions because I am so thankful that Sarah Polley's film is not that at all. My brain adjusted very quickly to the color tint, and the movie smartly picks its spots to introduce dashes of color and light here and there. It also sort of "works" as a "thriller", in the sense that it has propulsive energy and tension that I did not expect this kind of film to have ("Women Talking" is, of course, adapted from a novel and not a play). In short, it's a good script, which is probably a bit of a problem for the finance people as you can't convey a good script in a minute of advertising.  T...