The following includes references to sexual assault.
Netflix's "Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story" released on the streaming platform on April 6, 2022, and while the documentary series offers a fascinating look at a horrific wolf in sheep's clothing, the story feels oddly incomplete by the end. At just two episodes long, this is easily one of the shortest true crime miniseries to debut on Netflix, and that truncated runtime comes at the cost of honoring the victims' stories. Still, a significant amount of time is dedicated to examining Jimmy Savile as a British icon, with attention paid to the various social systems that allowed him to get away with his crimes for so long.
"Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story" tells the story of Britain's most infamous BBC personality. Savile rose to superstardom over many years, first as a DJ, and then as a television personality. During his lifetime, he was a beloved public figure — thanks, in part, to his extraordinary charity work. Underneath that quirky, bleach-blonde veneer, however, lay a monstrous predator who used his carefully-constructed celebrity as a shield. Disgustingly, Savile targeted the most vulnerable people as victims: His volunteer work at hospitals gave him access to such people, whom he sexually assaulted behind closed doors. The details of what Savile actually did, however, are surprisingly scarce and saved for the end of the miniseries. The vast majority of the documentary is archive footage of his work with the BBC and various televised interviews, as well as talking-head segments with people who knew him or were involved in exposing his crimes — but only one actual victim gets any significant screen time, and only at the very end. "Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story" is a character study of an abhorrent person, giving far too much of the spotlight to a fiend who loved attention.
Let's get one thing clear: Netflix knows how to do true-crime documentary series. From the super-hit "Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness" to the heartbreaking "The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann," the streaming platform has a reputation for addictive docuseries that cover all manner of criminal activities. This includes stories of disgraced public figures who exploited their positions in order to abuse vulnerable people — like 2020's "Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich" and "Athlete A." Following such notable series, the bar was high for "Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story." Perhaps these expectations are partially to blame for how unsatisfying the documentary feels.
Netflix's Jimmy Savile Documentary Is ... Okay
"Jimmy Savile" was directed by English filmmaker Rowan Deacon. The director has mainly worked on television documentaries, and based on that alone, should have had no issue telling the Jimmy Savile abuse story; however, this is a huge undertaking, and Deacon really struggles to both capture the scope and deliver the information in an accessible way. There are only two parts, and there's not an obvious focus or theme for each episode; the story is instead told in roughly chronological order, with some jumping back and forth. Part 1 focuses more on Savile's rise to fame, while part 2 details how he became untouchable, the rumors about his predatory behavior, his death, and how he was eventually exposed. The second half is doing far too much for one episode, and the result is that the important stuff — like the victims telling their stories and the timeline of events — gets totally lost.
"Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story" has a lot of material, and it is not communicated well, thanks largely to the format. "Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich" and "We Need To Talk About Cosby" are documentary series that tackle similar stories to "Jimmy Savile," but both of those miniseries comprise four episodes. "Surviving R. Kelly" is told over 11 (across two seasons). The multiple-episode structure is great for these kinds of information-heavy true-crime documentaries because they are intuitive — each episode gets to cover a specific part or chapter of the overall story. "We Need To Talk About Cosby" effectively weaved in victim testimony within the chronological history it presented, even though these stories weren't made public knowledge until many years later. "Jimmy Savile" instead hints at his abusive behavior, but doesn't provide the actual details of it until much later. It's a bizarre approach that simultaneously assumes too much and too little audience knowledge of the controversy.
So should you stream it?
"Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story" is definitely worth watching for true crime lovers interested in learning more about the former British entertainment icon. There are some shocking reveals throughout, and the general story serves as a cautionary tale about seeing what you want to see. Savile did a lot of good during his career, and the immense charitable acts — not to mention his close (and very public) relationship with the royal family — encouraged many people to ignore the red flags. Savile was a creep. He said creepy things. He did creepy things. He said, and did, creepy things on television — and people laughed. It's a deeply disturbing revelation that not only did Savile operate as a predator undetected for decades, but he hinted at his true self frequently, and no one caught on.
For those documentary connoisseurs with more discerning taste though, this is probably a Netflix Original that you can skip. There are other sources of information on this particular story that don't require you to watch two hours of Savile on camera, doing his schtick.
Last week's recap of "Star Trek: Picard" was a lamentation that the series habitually skews away from philosophy and theme and pushes disappointingly headlong into the more pedestrian storytelling fundamentals of plot and action. Not that a thematically lightweight-yet-fascinating plot cannot carry an episode of "Star Trek" — the parallels between this season of "Picard" and the equally plot-forward film "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" are myriad — but in so doing, the showrunners have left behind a vital element of "Trek" that has always made it fascinating: It's wrestling with ideas. "Star Trek IV," while lightweight, had the good taste to make extinction and ecology the center of its story. There are lines of dialogue about the moral horror of hunting a species to extinction. Preachy? Perhaps. Effective? Certainly.
Another antecedent to this season of "Picard" is "All Good Things...," the final episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." In that episode, the trickster god Q (John De Lanice) caused Capt. Picard (Patrick Stewart) to become unstuck in time à la "Slaughterhouse-Five" and experience his past, his present, and his future alternately. In that episode, Picard discovers a spatial phenomenon that grows larger as it travels backward through time, eventually growing so large that it interrupts the beginning of life on Earth 3.5 billion years ago. Picard also discovers that he was the one who accidentally created the phenomenon in three separate time periods simultaneously. It's clearer when you watch the episode. "All Good Things..." is about reckoning with the unforeseen damage of your actions, and confronting the paradoxes of causality loops. It's a good episode of TV.
Ecology is not at the center of "Star Trek: Picard," nor is a causality loop. Not really. In "Two for One," the sixth episode of the second season, Picard and company have traveled back in time to prevent the flashpoint that would lead to a fascist future. One would think — with "All Good Things..." in mind — that Picard's own temporal tinkering would eventually be the thing to instigate fascism. A fun ironic twist: Picard's own need to help and prevent darkness would be the thing to cause it. That is not the case. It was revealed in last week's "Fly Me to the Moon" and made more explicit in "Two for One," that Q, stripped of his powers, is deliberately sabotaging human history by: A) Posing as a psychiatrist for astronaut Renée Picard (Penelope Mitchell) and convincing her to abandon her space mission, robbing humanity of some vague sense of togetherness, and B) Hiring Adam Soong (Brent Spiner) a progenitor of Data's creator, to assassinate Renée Picard if that doesn't work. No irony. No poetry. No sense of dark inevitability. Just Q doing — essentially — spy stuff. How uninspired.
The Fancy Dress Ball
The bulk of the action in "Two for One" takes place at a fancy dress ball that our protagonists have infiltrated. Capt. Rios (Santiago Cabrera) was freed from ICE by Raffi (Michelle Hurd) and Seven (Jeri Ryan) just in time to join. Raffi points out to Rios that he is glowing, having fallen in love with Dr. Ramirez (Sol Rodriguez). The Watcher (Orla Brady) is along for the ride. Dr. Jurati (Alison Pill), having had her mind infected by the Borg Queen (Annie Wersching), has out-loud conversations with her new mental passenger, and the two vie for dominance of Dr. Jurati's body.
The rules about The Borg have changed aggravatingly frequently. In "NextGen," the Borg would kidnap a victim and put them through a long, complicated surgical process to assimilate them; there were implants to implant and memories to suppress. In "Star Trek: First Contact," it was revealed that a victim could be assimilated after a mere injection of Borg nanotech that would infiltrate their bloodstream. In "Star Trek: Voyager," we learned that one can be assimilated but retain their individuality, given the proper preparation. In "Picard," we see that the Borg Queen cannot merely infiltrate Dr. Jurati's body, but required some sort of psychic bond and the right amount of endorphins. In a truly silly twist, the Borg Queen convinces Dr. Jurati to sing for a crowd, and the endorphins caused by the room's applause are what allows the cyborg to finally assimilate Dr. Jurati. A complicated plot for an evil half-robot supervillain.
Jean-Luc Picard, meanwhile, has to track down Renée — and this is the climactic moment that separates a fascist future from a hopeful one — and have a 30-second conversation with her about how it's okay to be afraid. That fear is a mark of intelligence. So yes, gentle viewers, the notion that will prevent a fascist future was something stated in similar words from "Paw Patrol: The Movie." Picard is Ryder, Renée is Chase, Dr. Jurati is Marshall, and the Borg Queen is Mayor Humdinger.
Picard Is Still A Golem
Picard is successful. It seems that Renée will take to space, inspire this generation to keep moving forward with optimism, and be the catalyst for Roddenberry's future of hope. With four additional episodes in season two, however, an additional crisis must also be addressed. This will come in the form of the above-mentioned Adam Soong, with whom Q has been scheming. Q has not only hired Soong to assassinate Renée, but to tinker with human genes. The Eugenics Wars are a large part of "Star Trek" mythology — Khan was a cryogenically frozen relic of that war — and it seems that Adam Soong may have something to do with starting them.
Soong fails at his assassination attempt, accidentally running over Picard instead. Picard, injured and unconscious, is taken to Dr. Ramirez, who uses a defibrillator to restart his injured heart. There are cracks about how he has had "all the transplants," and the defibrillator shorts out when Dr. Ramirez uses it. This confirms, unfortunately, that Picard is still an android golem living in the same artificial body his consciousness was shunted into at the conclusion of season one. Seven was missing her Borg implants when Q teleported her into the fascist timeline, leading to the natural assumption that every member of the cast was occupying new bodies in an alternate timeline. As such, Picard was presumably now once again flesh and blood. That assumption was incorrect, and Picard is indeed an android. Why Q removed Seven's Borg implants but did not replace Picard's body is ... well, that's one for the philosophers.
A New Silly Plot Enters
Meanwhile, Adam Soong's daughter Kore (Isa Briones, who played multiple androids in the show's first season) has introduced a new, unrelated plot that will undoubtedly have to be addressed in the show's final four episodes. Kore suffers from an unnamed genetic ailment that prevents her from breathing unfiltered air or standing in direct sunlight. She spends most of her time in a posh basement room only occasionally talking to her father. When she goes snooping through Adam's computer, she finds several online articles on how her father was a mad scientist whose wild genetic experiments cost him his livelihood and credibility in the medical community. She also finds a series of her own childhood photos ... that she does not remember taking. It turns out Kore is merely the latest in a string of failed clones that Soong has been creating for, no doubt, nefarious purposes.
Surely, say I, the notion of a mad scientist using shady genetic experimentation would have been cause enough to suspect a fascist future. It appears the Renée plot, the Watcher, etc., were but window-dressing to a more direct plot about Data's great-great-etc.-grandfather deliberately causing a dark timeline. A more interesting confrontation, surely I say again, would have been Picard facing off against a man who looks like an old officer of his, discussing the ethics of genetic manipulation.
"Picard" is overwritten to the point of nonsense. And while I do appreciate the setting, the overall idea for the plot, and some of the characters, I find "Picard" is still merely stumbling along.
Yet to be resolved: Dr. Jurati possessed by the Borg Queen, the flashbacks with Picard's mother, and Adam Soong. I can't say I have much faith in any potentially clever denouement.
Every fan has their own specific reasons for what drew them to "Halo" in the first place. For many, the clean and simple gameplay of "Combat Evolved" held plenty of appeal all on its own, rewarding intuitive gamers who swapped guns and employed various strategies depending on the needs of specific situations and level designs. For others, the incredible amount of world-building and lore packed into the story hooked them immediately and would go on to prove foundational — not only to the original game and its many sequels and spin-offs, but to an entire expanded universe of "Halo" tie-in novels, comics, encyclopedias, toys, and more.
For the more romantic and narrative-minded among us, however, one key character dynamic has served as one of the franchise's main selling points throughout the last 2 decades. The unlikely bond between the artificial intelligence Cortana and the super-soldier Master Chief (and, by extension, the gamer/reader/viewer themselves) has slowly but steadily evolved over the course of their adventures into something that defies all labels. Though originally designed as little more than a helpful piece of hardware to guide gamers through labyrinthine locations and provide handy exposition dumps when needed, subsequent material increasingly placed Cortana in a more central role, to the point of providing some of the series' most affecting moments ("Don't make a girl a promise ... if you know you can't keep it") and even forming the emotional backbone of the somewhat divisive "Halo 4."
That brings us to this latest episode of the Paramount+ "Halo" series titled, fittingly, "Emergence." After a first few weeks of dancing around this inevitable introduction, episode 3 finally sees fit to bring the Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) and Cortana (Jen Taylor, reprising her voice role from the games) together again, although in vastly different circumstances than fans ever could've anticipated.
Overall, this latest hour still feels like yet another mixed bag, with some storylines and creative choices continuing to work better than others. It also feels like the show at its absolute weirdest ... but I'm not entirely sure that's a criticism, mind you. In any case, the shot in the arm provided by this significant plot development should at least provide some much-needed momentum going forward, as we've now put the first third of this inaugural season behind us. Let's break it all down below.
Arc Of The Covenant
For an episode seemingly all about John-117 and Cortana, it's an interesting decision on the part of showrunners/writers Kyle Killen and Steven Kane and director Roel Reiné ("Black Sails," "Inhumans") to start things off with an unrelated flashback to roughly 2 decades in the past.
It isn't immediately clear what connection the brutal conditions of planet Oban, an industrial waste salvage colony, shares with the ongoing plot ... until the Covenant rudely arrives. The episode is initially content to play things close to the vest, leaving us to focus on two small children hiding from the oppressive Robocop-esque guards who are forcing the planet's populace into grueling working conditions straight out of "Alien 3." We find a young boy named Det (Billy Marlow) reading aloud to his crush from a (fictional) novel titled "The Dawn of Angels" — the same book, viewers may recognize, that was in the possession of the human captive/ally of the Covenant, "the Blessed One" (Charlie Murphy), for the purpose of understanding humanity. Yes, we're watching the young version of this enigmatic character (played by Zazie Hayhurst) and discovering how the Covenant tracked her while seemingly searching for another relic.
The purpose of this prologue, it seems, is to set up one of the more important storylines for the season in the weeks ahead: Makee's mission to infiltrate the humans of the UNSC (a rare glimpse of action and body horror later on as Makee and wormlike Covenant aliens slice through a UNSC ship with terrifying ease), track down the "keystone" artifact (starting in Madrigal), and deliver the Demon's head for the Covenant Prophets. This has remained one of the more frustratingly vague subplots and characters in "Halo" to this point, admittedly, but things finally seem to be kicking into gear.
In fact, this sense of forward motion extends beyond the Covenant side of the story and to the UNSC as well. John continues on his mini-quest of introspection, questioning what remains of his humanity and the mysterious effect the Madrigal object continues to have on him. Elsewhere, however, even someone like Miranda Keyes (Olive Gray) is given an actual plot function, as Admiral Parangosky (Shabana Azmi) tasks the young scientist with leading her own team to analyze the relic, intentionally setting her at odds with her own estranged mother and rendering the upstart Halsey slightly less important to the Admiral in the process. Though all of these characters remain separated in their own oddly confined subplots, it's easy to see how their roles continue to round into shape. The Chief and Makee, in particular, certainly seem destined for a collision course sometime down the line, as well.
But first, let's get to the actual "emergence" of the episode.
I Think This Is The Beginning Of A Beautiful Friendship...
With the table-setting out of the way, the weirdness truly begins. Following up on last week's cliffhanger ending with Dr. Halsey's (Natascha McElhone) clone awakening, the latest episode throws us right into the deep end of the uncanny valley. Halsey's early conversation with the sentient and self-aware clone is bizarre, awkward, and off-putting enough to make me want to give this heavily modified Cortana storyline a chance. A brilliant (if wildly unethical) scientist bickering with her fully-formed (and very illegal) flash clone who knows exactly why she's been created — organ harvesting — may not be precisely what anyone expected to see from a "Halo" series, but the results are fascinating nonetheless.
Here, we receive even more evidence of Halsey's coldhearted and ruthless streak: "You are merely a product of [my] samples," she informs the living, breathing being across from her, currently performing advanced intelligence tests. More importantly, this gives us another brief window into the dark beginnings of the Spartan program itself. The Halsey clone bluntly asks about "the children," clearly referring to the Spartan candidates that Dr. Halsey and the UNSC indoctrinated into the super-soldier program at a young age. Upon being informed that only 35 survived the augmentation process, horrifically implying that more than half were killed, the clone immediately realizes that she'll be playing a significant role in the implementation of Cortana — namely, providing the brain for the artificial intelligence. If there were any doubts about the show's viewpoint on the UNSC's moral turpitude, the clone's gruesome death scene that follows not-so-subtly codes Halsey and her creepy assistant Adun (Ryan McParland) as Nazi-era scientists, doing anything in the name of "progress" (Halsey's own words) to justify their means.
In all honesty, kudos to the series creators for taking the uncomfortable subtext of the franchise — the fascistic undertones inherent in the Spartans' origins and continued service — and forcing audiences to confront it face-to-face (literally).
Cortana's "birth" neatly dovetails with the Chief's personal journey into his past as he's cleared to return to duty ... but only on the condition that he integrates with Cortana. This doesn't get off to a smooth start, but at least instances like Cortana unexpectedly crashing the Chief's meeting with the other Spartans provide some of the show's only real attempts at humor thus far. Even better, the grating dynamic between the formal, straight-laced Chief and the energetic naïveté of Cortana feels fun and full of potential conflict. It's a neat beginning to their established relationship and almost feels tempting enough to make us conveniently look past her disturbing origins stemming from the murdered Halsey clone — almost.
In another example of this episode's eccentricities, we're treated to an extended sequence where John cuts the hormone-suppressing pellet from his lower back (providing some equal-opportunity nudity after Charlie Murphy's undressing scene last week, for those who keep track of such things!) and goes out into Reach to experience normal human interactions without any artificial filters. Again, fans may not have expected a "Halo" series to feature the Spartan enjoying a classical music concert, but there's something oddly touching about this whole detour.
The ending promises plenty more action and adventure ahead as John insists on visiting his homeworld, which may or may not harbor a second artifact. But for all the show's stumbles so far, episode 3 of "Halo" shows how strangely entertaining the series can be when it embraces the weird.
(Re)claim To Fame
Halo Watch: Nope, I'm not retiring this category anytime soon. There still isn't a Halo in sight, but there are at least some developments here. The keystone is, well, the key. We now know Makee is dead-set on recovering it from the UNSC's clutches, though there's the added wrinkle of a potential second artifact that will do something or other when combined with the first. This is all rather hazy and I'm not sure if that's intentionally so, but I'm going to need this storyline to hurry up already.
Globetrotting: For those wondering: yes, "Oban" and all the other planets mentioned throughout this episode (especially in the scene where Cortana assists John's search in finding his home planet, Eridanus II) are names taken straight out of franchise lore. We'd be here all day if I listed them all out individually, but Oban in particular has "Halo 5: Guardians" connections as the location of Forerunner-caused destruction. It's a fun bone to throw at fans if nothing else.
Mommy Issues: I only touched on this point above, but I for one am looking forward to how Miranda Keyes' new directives should put her and Dr. Halsey in direct conflict ... or, at least, I was until the episode ends with Halsey jetting off with the Chief. Despite one of the images (also seen above) released for this episode, I don't actually think Miranda and Halsey have ever shared a single conversation just yet. Let's hope this development gives their "relationship" some overdue juice — it's certainly a better use of Miranda than having her play diplomat with Kwan a few weeks ago in a transparent attempt to give the character something to do.
Checkmate: Did you catch Cortana's first words after being activated? "When the game is over, the king and the pawn go back into the same box." Far from a non sequitur, that phrase is actually a callback to the video game canon, where Halsey's mother repeated this phrase to Halsey herself after a game of chess (as revealed in Halsey's journal during "Halo: Reach"). Fun fact: a progressively rampant Cortana actually mentions this anecdote in "Halo 4," when her memories and those of Halsey's seem to be confused.
Divergent Differences: Here's a neat little difference from previously established "Halo" lore. In Eric Nylund's "The Fall of Reach," Halsey describes the Chief to Cortana as, "...neither the smartest nor the fastest nor the strongest of the Spartans. But he is the bravest -- and quite possibly the luckiest. And in my opinion, he is the best." Here, Cortana instantly sizes up an unconscious John: "Above the rest in strength, stamina, and good instincts." This isn't a major issue either way, but I do think I prefer the book's description of the Master Chief more than the show's less nuanced summation.
Lucky Coin? Speaking of luck, we briefly see young John holding a coin during one of his relic-influenced memories. This also hearkens back to "The Fall of Reach," where a younger Halsey in full recruitment mode actually visits John on Eridanus II and creepily scopes him out to test his fitness for the Spartan program. They play an innocent enough game of heads or tails, which John wins. Unbeknownst to the poor kid, this was actually a final test for luck. Halsey needed to cull the candidate pool somehow, so only those who "win" that coin toss are subsequently kidnapped and forced into the training.
Hunter Killers: By the way, those wormlike aliens who tear up that UNSC ship at Makee's behest? Gamers likely already put the pieces together and realized that this may be our first look at the Covenant race of Hunters. Also known as "Lekgolo," the fearsome creatures are made up of colonies of extraterrestrial worms and serve as the obligatory boss battles throughout the "Halo" games. Of course, they're usually encased in nigh-impenetrable armor, so here's hoping we get to see them in all their cannon-hefting glory on the battlefield at some point.
Kwan and Soren: No, I didn't forget about two of our more major characters! It's just that their storyline is given so little emphasis in this episode. Kwan desperately wants to return to Madrigal to join up with the resistance there and fight the villainous Vinsher Grath (Burn Gorman). Soren, citing his promise to John last week to keep her safe, is understandably reticent. It only takes the temptation of either Kwan's "deuterium money" or the reward from the bounty on her head to convince him to change course entirely, which sort of rings false to me. I realize he and John aren't BFFs anymore, but this strikes me as more of a decision made out of plot convenience (the pair needs something to do rather than stay on the Rubble, after all) than anything else.
https://ift.tt/ikC4SAJ Review: The Unofficial Celine Dion Biopic Is Officially One Of The Most Uncanny Cinematic Experiences | SlashFilm Reviews
https://ift.tt/ikC4SAJ Review: The Unofficial Celine Dion Biopic Is Officially One Of The Most Uncanny Cinematic Experiences | SlashFilm Reviews
https://ift.tt/ikC4SAJ Review: The Unofficial Celine Dion Biopic Is Officially One Of The Most Uncanny Cinematic Experiences | SlashFilm Reviews
"Aline" might truly be one of the most bizarre movies to come out of the arthouse circuit. A biopic that's not a biopic, a movie that manages to gain the rights to the artist's music but refuses to lavish any attention on the beloved songs or how they were made. A movie where the 57-year-old director stars as a Céline Dion surrogate from 5 years old to 40 years old, her face eerily pasted onto a tiny child's body like some kind of malformed hobbit. A movie where things keep happening at a relentless pace, without any semblance of dramatic tension or narrative. Is this camp? Or at least, some strange fever dream from the mind of a Céline Dion superfan?
No, "Aline" is the "unofficial" biopic of Céline Dion, wherein director and star Valerie Lemercier plays Aline Dieu, a Canadian girl with the voice of an angel who gets discovered at the age of 12 and soon rockets to international superstardom. But her success is complicated by her romance with her longtime manager who first discovers her — and is 20 years older than her, too. The film's central romance reflects the real relationship between Dion and her longtime husband René Angélil, also 20 years older than the singer.
"Aline" is a Céline Dion biopic in all but name, and even cheekily nods to the real artist who inspired the film, with Aline's future manager and husband Guy-Claude Kamar (Sylvain Marcel) mistakenly calling her "Céline" before he gets corrected. The film even strictly follows the events of Dion's life, from her humble beginnings in a crowded Quebec family (one of 14 siblings!), to her global superstardom, to her many Vegas residencies. But, perhaps refreshingly though a bit perplexingly, "Aline" isn't much interested in the career and music of Céline Dion. It's only interested in her love story.
The Power Of Love — And Digital De-Aging
The music biopic has never recovered since "Walk Hard" so efficiently and brutally dismantled it. And "Aline," starcrossed ambitions that it has, can't help falling upon those biopic tropes that "Walk Hard" already skewered: the artist towards the end of their career reflecting back on their life, the flashback to their pastoral childhood, the many, many montages. But one thing immediately sets "Aline" apart from the rest, and it may not be for the better: digital de-aging.
For some reason, Lemercier insists on playing Aline throughout her life, first appearing as a 5-year-old (thankfully they spared us a terrifying baby from "Twilight" moment here) singing at her brother's wedding — or rather, her partially hidden face pasted onto the body of a 5-year-old. The obfuscation doesn't help: our first glimpse of Aline is terrifying, like seeing Gollum halfway through his transformation from Andy Serkis to mo-cap creature. Lemercier's performance as Aline is perpetually doe-eyed throughout her life, making her feel like a fan's vague impression of a musical diva and not a person.
The broad, cartoonish performances of the rest of the cast around her don't help; everyone in the ensemble — apart from Marcel, who appears to be the only actor to have made the choice to play a human — acts like the wandered in off a "Muppets" movie, except they're the Muppets. All of Aline's family members appear to be costumed and made up to be older than their respective ages throughout the film, in what one can only assume is an accidental display of Brechtian theatricality. Increased exposure to the bizarre de-aging effect doesn't make it any less uncanny: try as they might, Aline always looks like she has a 57-year-old woman's face pasted on her body, up through her 30s, and by then, the film's bizarre narrative choices will have taken your attention.
Aline Will Go On...
Another one of the great obstacles of a biopic is crafting some kind of narrative out of someone's life. In a music biopic, it's typically drugs or debauchery or divorce; in show business dramas, it's the rise of stardom and the painful pull of romance (and all the melodrama therein). "Aline" elects to follow the show business route, but for some reason, skips the stardom part and goes straight for the romance — an even stranger choice when you realize that the film, unlike other "unauthorized" music biopics, managed to gain the rights to Dion's most famous songs. There are plenty of montages, but they're used as a way to fast-forward through Aline's biggest career landmarks — the only reference we have to "My Heart Will Go On," one of Dion's biggest international hits and a song the film did get the rights to, is that Aline doesn't like it when she first hears it. Time has no meaning, dramatic tension doesn't exist, and before you know it, Aline is on her second Vegas residency.
But perhaps that's all worth it for the grand and epic romance between Aline and Guy-Claude, right? Not so much. The film never overcomes the discomfort over their age difference (that Marcel looks all of his 57 years when he first meets 12-year-old Aline does not help), nor does it ever give us a reason to care about their relationship apart from Lemercier's insipid stares at Marcel in every scene. The romance around which this film supposedly revolves falls victim to that same lack of dramatic tension that the narrative suffers — things just happen. Aline and Guy-Claude have their first kiss, cut to the next scene, it's 15 years later and they're married. A "Star is Born"-inspired final song attempts to give weight to their decades-long love story, as a 40-something Aline mourns her husband's death, but the song is terrible and we have ceased caring.
Perhaps these wild swings and baffling narrative choices were all intentional? Perhaps this was Lemercier calling attention to the overused unreality of digital de-aging in the movie business. Maybe it is camp. Whatever it is, "Aline" is one bizarre cinematic experience.
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https://ift.tt/ikC4SAJ Review: The Unofficial Celine Dion Biopic Is Officially One Of The Most Uncanny Cinematic Experiences | SlashFilm Reviews
https://ift.tt/ikC4SAJ Review: The Unofficial Celine Dion Biopic Is Officially One Of The Most Uncanny Cinematic Experiences | SlashFilm Reviews
"Aline" might truly be one of the most bizarre movies to come out of the arthouse circuit. A biopic that's not a biopic, a movie that manages to gain the rights to the artist's music but refuses to lavish any attention on the beloved songs or how they were made. A movie where the 57-year-old director stars as a Céline Dion surrogate from 5 years old to 40 years old, her face eerily pasted onto a tiny child's body like some kind of malformed hobbit. A movie where things keep happening at a relentless pace, without any semblance of dramatic tension or narrative. Is this camp? Or at least, some strange fever dream from the mind of a Céline Dion superfan?
No, "Aline" is the "unofficial" biopic of Céline Dion, wherein director and star Valerie Lemercier plays Aline Dieu, a Canadian girl with the voice of an angel who gets discovered at the age of 12 and soon rockets to international superstardom. But her success is complicated by her romance with her longtime manager who first discovers her — and is 20 years older than her, too. The film's central romance reflects the real relationship between Dion and her longtime husband René Angélil, also 20 years older than the singer.
"Aline" is a Céline Dion biopic in all but name, and even cheekily nods to the real artist who inspired the film, with Aline's future manager and husband Guy-Claude Kamar (Sylvain Marcel) mistakenly calling her "Céline" before he gets corrected. The film even strictly follows the events of Dion's life, from her humble beginnings in a crowded Quebec family (one of 14 siblings!), to her global superstardom, to her many Vegas residencies. But, perhaps refreshingly though a bit perplexingly, "Aline" isn't much interested in the career and music of Céline Dion. It's only interested in her love story.
The Power Of Love — And Digital De-Aging
The music biopic has never recovered since "Walk Hard" so efficiently and brutally dismantled it. And "Aline," starcrossed ambitions that it has, can't help falling upon those biopic tropes that "Walk Hard" already skewered: the artist towards the end of their career reflecting back on their life, the flashback to their pastoral childhood, the many, many montages. But one thing immediately sets "Aline" apart from the rest, and it may not be for the better: digital de-aging.
For some reason, Lemercier insists on playing Aline throughout her life, first appearing as a 5-year-old (thankfully they spared us a terrifying baby from "Twilight" moment here) singing at her brother's wedding — or rather, her partially hidden face pasted onto the body of a 5-year-old. The obfuscation doesn't help: our first glimpse of Aline is terrifying, like seeing Gollum halfway through his transformation from Andy Serkis to mo-cap creature. Lemercier's performance as Aline is perpetually doe-eyed throughout her life, making her feel like a fan's vague impression of a musical diva and not a person.
The broad, cartoonish performances of the rest of the cast around her don't help; everyone in the ensemble — apart from Marcel, who appears to be the only actor to have made the choice to play a human — acts like the wandered in off a "Muppets" movie, except they're the Muppets. All of Aline's family members appear to be costumed and made up to be older than their respective ages throughout the film, in what one can only assume is an accidental display of Brechtian theatricality. Increased exposure to the bizarre de-aging effect doesn't make it any less uncanny: try as they might, Aline always looks like she has a 57-year-old woman's face pasted on her body, up through her 30s, and by then, the film's bizarre narrative choices will have taken your attention.
Aline Will Go On...
Another one of the great obstacles of a biopic is crafting some kind of narrative out of someone's life. In a music biopic, it's typically drugs or debauchery or divorce; in show business dramas, it's the rise of stardom and the painful pull of romance (and all the melodrama therein). "Aline" elects to follow the show business route, but for some reason, skips the stardom part and goes straight for the romance — an even stranger choice when you realize that the film, unlike other "unauthorized" music biopics, managed to gain the rights to Dion's most famous songs. There are plenty of montages, but they're used as a way to fast-forward through Aline's biggest career landmarks — the only reference we have to "My Heart Will Go On," one of Dion's biggest international hits and a song the film did get the rights to, is that Aline doesn't like it when she first hears it. Time has no meaning, dramatic tension doesn't exist, and before you know it, Aline is on her second Vegas residency.
But perhaps that's all worth it for the grand and epic romance between Aline and Guy-Claude, right? Not so much. The film never overcomes the discomfort over their age difference (that Marcel looks all of his 57 years when he first meets 12-year-old Aline does not help), nor does it ever give us a reason to care about their relationship apart from Lemercier's insipid stares at Marcel in every scene. The romance around which this film supposedly revolves falls victim to that same lack of dramatic tension that the narrative suffers — things just happen. Aline and Guy-Claude have their first kiss, cut to the next scene, it's 15 years later and they're married. A "Star is Born"-inspired final song attempts to give weight to their decades-long love story, as a 40-something Aline mourns her husband's death, but the song is terrible and we have ceased caring.
Perhaps these wild swings and baffling narrative choices were all intentional? Perhaps this was Lemercier calling attention to the overused unreality of digital de-aging in the movie business. Maybe it is camp. Whatever it is, "Aline" is one bizarre cinematic experience.
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https://ift.tt/ikC4SAJ Review: The Unofficial Celine Dion Biopic Is Officially One Of The Most Uncanny Cinematic Experiences | SlashFilm Reviews
"Aline" might truly be one of the most bizarre movies to come out of the arthouse circuit. A biopic that's not a biopic, a movie that manages to gain the rights to the artist's music but refuses to lavish any attention on the beloved songs or how they were made. A movie where the 57-year-old director stars as a Céline Dion surrogate from 5 years old to 40 years old, her face eerily pasted onto a tiny child's body like some kind of malformed hobbit. A movie where things keep happening at a relentless pace, without any semblance of dramatic tension or narrative. Is this camp? Or at least, some strange fever dream from the mind of a Céline Dion superfan?
No, "Aline" is the "unofficial" biopic of Céline Dion, wherein director and star Valerie Lemercier plays Aline Dieu, a Canadian girl with the voice of an angel who gets discovered at the age of 12 and soon rockets to international superstardom. But her success is complicated by her romance with her longtime manager who first discovers her — and is 20 years older than her, too. The film's central romance reflects the real relationship between Dion and her longtime husband René Angélil, also 20 years older than the singer.
"Aline" is a Céline Dion biopic in all but name, and even cheekily nods to the real artist who inspired the film, with Aline's future manager and husband Guy-Claude Kamar (Sylvain Marcel) mistakenly calling her "Céline" before he gets corrected. The film even strictly follows the events of Dion's life, from her humble beginnings in a crowded Quebec family (one of 14 siblings!), to her global superstardom, to her many Vegas residencies. But, perhaps refreshingly though a bit perplexingly, "Aline" isn't much interested in the career and music of Céline Dion. It's only interested in her love story.
The Power Of Love — And Digital De-Aging
The music biopic has never recovered since "Walk Hard" so efficiently and brutally dismantled it. And "Aline," starcrossed ambitions that it has, can't help falling upon those biopic tropes that "Walk Hard" already skewered: the artist towards the end of their career reflecting back on their life, the flashback to their pastoral childhood, the many, many montages. But one thing immediately sets "Aline" apart from the rest, and it may not be for the better: digital de-aging.
For some reason, Lemercier insists on playing Aline throughout her life, first appearing as a 5-year-old (thankfully they spared us a terrifying baby from "Twilight" moment here) singing at her brother's wedding — or rather, her partially hidden face pasted onto the body of a 5-year-old. The obfuscation doesn't help: our first glimpse of Aline is terrifying, like seeing Gollum halfway through his transformation from Andy Serkis to mo-cap creature. Lemercier's performance as Aline is perpetually doe-eyed throughout her life, making her feel like a fan's vague impression of a musical diva and not a person.
The broad, cartoonish performances of the rest of the cast around her don't help; everyone in the ensemble — apart from Marcel, who appears to be the only actor to have made the choice to play a human — acts like the wandered in off a "Muppets" movie, except they're the Muppets. All of Aline's family members appear to be costumed and made up to be older than their respective ages throughout the film, in what one can only assume is an accidental display of Brechtian theatricality. Increased exposure to the bizarre de-aging effect doesn't make it any less uncanny: try as they might, Aline always looks like she has a 57-year-old woman's face pasted on her body, up through her 30s, and by then, the film's bizarre narrative choices will have taken your attention.
Aline Will Go On...
Another one of the great obstacles of a biopic is crafting some kind of narrative out of someone's life. In a music biopic, it's typically drugs or debauchery or divorce; in show business dramas, it's the rise of stardom and the painful pull of romance (and all the melodrama therein). "Aline" elects to follow the show business route, but for some reason, skips the stardom part and goes straight for the romance — an even stranger choice when you realize that the film, unlike other "unauthorized" music biopics, managed to gain the rights to Dion's most famous songs. There are plenty of montages, but they're used as a way to fast-forward through Aline's biggest career landmarks — the only reference we have to "My Heart Will Go On," one of Dion's biggest international hits and a song the film did get the rights to, is that Aline doesn't like it when she first hears it. Time has no meaning, dramatic tension doesn't exist, and before you know it, Aline is on her second Vegas residency.
But perhaps that's all worth it for the grand and epic romance between Aline and Guy-Claude, right? Not so much. The film never overcomes the discomfort over their age difference (that Marcel looks all of his 57 years when he first meets 12-year-old Aline does not help), nor does it ever give us a reason to care about their relationship apart from Lemercier's insipid stares at Marcel in every scene. The romance around which this film supposedly revolves falls victim to that same lack of dramatic tension that the narrative suffers — things just happen. Aline and Guy-Claude have their first kiss, cut to the next scene, it's 15 years later and they're married. A "Star is Born"-inspired final song attempts to give weight to their decades-long love story, as a 40-something Aline mourns her husband's death, but the song is terrible and we have ceased caring.
Perhaps these wild swings and baffling narrative choices were all intentional? Perhaps this was Lemercier calling attention to the overused unreality of digital de-aging in the movie business. Maybe it is camp. Whatever it is, "Aline" is one bizarre cinematic experience.
"Aline" might truly be one of the most bizarre movies to come out of the arthouse circuit. A biopic that's not a biopic, a movie that manages to gain the rights to the artist's music but refuses to lavish any attention on the beloved songs or how they were made. A movie where the 57-year-old director stars as a Céline Dion surrogate from 5 years old to 40 years old, her face eerily pasted onto a tiny child's body like some kind of malformed hobbit. A movie where things keep happening at a relentless pace, without any semblance of dramatic tension or narrative. Is this camp? Or at least, some strange fever dream from the mind of a Céline Dion superfan?
No, "Aline" is the "unofficial" biopic of Céline Dion, wherein director and star Valerie Lemercier plays Aline Dieu, a Canadian girl with the voice of an angel who gets discovered at the age of 12 and soon rockets to international superstardom. But her success is complicated by her romance with her longtime manager who first discovers her — and is 20 years older than her, too. The film's central romance reflects the real relationship between Dion and her longtime husband René Angélil, also 20 years older than the singer.
"Aline" is a Céline Dion biopic in all but name, and even cheekily nods to the real artist who inspired the film, with Aline's future manager and husband Guy-Claude Kamar (Sylvain Marcel) mistakenly calling her "Céline" before he gets corrected. The film even strictly follows the events of Dion's life, from her humble beginnings in a crowded Quebec family (one of 14 siblings!), to her global superstardom, to her many Vegas residencies. But, perhaps refreshingly though a bit perplexingly, "Aline" isn't much interested in the career and music of Céline Dion. It's only interested in her love story.
The Power Of Love — And Digital De-Aging
The music biopic has never recovered since "Walk Hard" so efficiently and brutally dismantled it. And "Aline," starcrossed ambitions that it has, can't help falling upon those biopic tropes that "Walk Hard" already skewered: the artist towards the end of their career reflecting back on their life, the flashback to their pastoral childhood, the many, many montages. But one thing immediately sets "Aline" apart from the rest, and it may not be for the better: digital de-aging.
For some reason, Lemercier insists on playing Aline throughout her life, first appearing as a 5-year-old (thankfully they spared us a terrifying baby from "Twilight" moment here) singing at her brother's wedding — or rather, her partially hidden face pasted onto the body of a 5-year-old. The obfuscation doesn't help: our first glimpse of Aline is terrifying, like seeing Gollum halfway through his transformation from Andy Serkis to mo-cap creature. Lemercier's performance as Aline is perpetually doe-eyed throughout her life, making her feel like a fan's vague impression of a musical diva and not a person.
The broad, cartoonish performances of the rest of the cast around her don't help; everyone in the ensemble — apart from Marcel, who appears to be the only actor to have made the choice to play a human — acts like the wandered in off a "Muppets" movie, except they're the Muppets. All of Aline's family members appear to be costumed and made up to be older than their respective ages throughout the film, in what one can only assume is an accidental display of Brechtian theatricality. Increased exposure to the bizarre de-aging effect doesn't make it any less uncanny: try as they might, Aline always looks like she has a 57-year-old woman's face pasted on her body, up through her 30s, and by then, the film's bizarre narrative choices will have taken your attention.
Aline Will Go On...
Another one of the great obstacles of a biopic is crafting some kind of narrative out of someone's life. In a music biopic, it's typically drugs or debauchery or divorce; in show business dramas, it's the rise of stardom and the painful pull of romance (and all the melodrama therein). "Aline" elects to follow the show business route, but for some reason, skips the stardom part and goes straight for the romance — an even stranger choice when you realize that the film, unlike other "unauthorized" music biopics, managed to gain the rights to Dion's most famous songs. There are plenty of montages, but they're used as a way to fast-forward through Aline's biggest career landmarks — the only reference we have to "My Heart Will Go On," one of Dion's biggest international hits and a song the film did get the rights to, is that Aline doesn't like it when she first hears it. Time has no meaning, dramatic tension doesn't exist, and before you know it, Aline is on her second Vegas residency.
But perhaps that's all worth it for the grand and epic romance between Aline and Guy-Claude, right? Not so much. The film never overcomes the discomfort over their age difference (that Marcel looks all of his 57 years when he first meets 12-year-old Aline does not help), nor does it ever give us a reason to care about their relationship apart from Lemercier's insipid stares at Marcel in every scene. The romance around which this film supposedly revolves falls victim to that same lack of dramatic tension that the narrative suffers — things just happen. Aline and Guy-Claude have their first kiss, cut to the next scene, it's 15 years later and they're married. A "Star is Born"-inspired final song attempts to give weight to their decades-long love story, as a 40-something Aline mourns her husband's death, but the song is terrible and we have ceased caring.
Perhaps these wild swings and baffling narrative choices were all intentional? Perhaps this was Lemercier calling attention to the overused unreality of digital de-aging in the movie business. Maybe it is camp. Whatever it is, "Aline" is one bizarre cinematic experience.
Janus Metz's "All the Old Knives" exists comfortably at the intersection between airport novels and the works of Claire Denis. It is downbeat, emotionally intense, and only slowly reveals its plot — told wildly out of chronological order, often inserting flashbacks inside of flashbacks — over the course of its first 45 minutes. But more than merely obfuscating for its own sake — a pit that lesser thrillers can often fall into — "Old Knives" wisely remains more closely focused on the relationship between Henry (Chris Pine) and Celia (Thandiwe Newton), two ex-CIA agents and former lovers, who decide to reconnect eight years after an attempt to stop a terrorist hijacking when horribly awry. The details of the botched operation are central to the plot (it involves a hostage situation on a plane, a mysterious unseen inside man, and a CIA mole who may or may not be in league with the terrorists) and Metz almost playfully gives the audience facts in a steady drip of information as to just how badly everything went down eight years ago ... but he will always cut back to Pine and Newton, sitting in a posh NorCal wine-country restaurant, trying to size each other up and surmise just how trustworthy this meeting actually is.
The restaurant scenes are where "Old Knives" displays its most wit. Newton and Pine are experts in creating a relationship between their characters wherein they still have affection, are clearly trying to be friendly, but just as clearly don't trust each other. Once a CIA spook, always a CIA spook. Newton figures out pretty quickly that their reunion has less to do with celebrating old times than investigating, even at this late date, an eight-year-old debacle they were both partially responsible for. Newton and Pine bring the necessary emotional heat to make these scenes function. It helps that we also see their affair in flashbacks, learning the depth of their affection and, importantly, how good the sex was.
The CIA plot is, however, a mere collection of familiar spy tropes wherein stern-faced government agents gather regularly around a dimly lit table, look up at a TV screen displaying a terrorist crisis, and gravely say lines of dialogue like "Okay, what are our options?" If you've ever read an airport novel, the terrorist storyline will feel familiar; even trite. That it's based on an airport novel — by Olen Steinhauer, who also wrote the screenplay — comes as no surprise. The CIA plot is not so much twisty, as it is tangled up all-too-clear, painful memories.
Obfuscation Is Not A Crime
The opening of "Old Knives" begins in 2020 (although there is no mention of COVID-19) and Henry is tasked by his boss (Laurence Fishburne) to finally close the case on the Flight 127 debacle from 2012. New evidence has pointed to the potential identity of a mole who sold out the CIA, and led to ... well the actual details of Flight 127 are kept hidden. Henry must investigate two old co-workers: The nervous, pub-dwelling Bill (Jonathan Pryce) and his secret ex-girlfriend Celia. This is less about meting out justice as it is the CIA requiring a scapegoat for a bad operation.
"All the Old Knives" will cut between the events of Flight 127 (and the exploration of potential mole agents, also including Ahd Kamel and David Bedella), the dinner Henry has with Celia, the things Celia and Henry were doing separately on the day of Flight 127 (as mentioned: flashbacks within flashbacks), and an "interflash" to the moments right before Celia and Henry gather to dine, wherein they reveal they might have been setting up more than we initially realize.
It's a straightforward story told in a convoluted way, although that is not necessarily a weakness. Because the central relationship is so strong — Pine and Newton are genuinely terrific as lovers who love, hate, respect, lust after, and fear one another equally — the screenwriters' metagrobolism serves an emotional function: The true depths of what they survive and what they know about each other deepens every tiny interaction they have as the film progresses. By the end, every word has portent, and Pine and Newton approach every interaction with adult maturity, not action-movie revenge spite.
Sundown
"All the Old Knives" most notable misstep, however, is its somewhat turgid tone. The pervasive sadness that lingers over the dinner scenes is wholly appropriate, and it penetrates as intensely as the setting sun right outside the window (the dinner lasts into the night). What's missing is a sense of "zip" to the spy sequences. This should be intense, clear, open-handed, and maybe even a little playful. The energy levels are kept aggravatingly low during the CIA scenes, leaving too little to differentiate them from the bookend material.
The capable photography (by Charlotte Bruus Christensen) only gives us a few visual hints as to the different timelines we are visiting, and the incapable score (by Rebekka Karijord and Jon Ekstrand) fills the audience's brains with flavorless strings and melodramatic chords. "All the Old Knives" might have benefitted from flat, un-dynamic shots, and a few moments of strategic silence.
Had "Old Knives" managed to function as a corker of a spy thriller in addition to being an intense conversational drama, it could have emerged as something special. At the end of the day, however, one will walk away satisfied with the characters and moved by a bleak and tragic ending, but left with little to carry in their memory. Ironically, a film about the painful suspicions of the past and the aching nature of memory is largely unmemorable.
"Ambulance" is a Michael Bay movie. For some folks, that's the only sentence of this review that matters. By now, Bay's ultra-shiny, ultra-chaotic style is so firmly established that you know what you're going to get — and you're likely either on board with that by now, or you think Bay is everything wrong with modern cinema. Me? I'm somewhere in the middle. I think Bay has made some true stinkers. I also think he's a genuine auteur, and when he gets it right (see: "The Rock," "Pain & Gain"), he can deliver a film that's wholly unique, warts and all. Bay, for his part, has no qualms about who he is or what he does (and why should he? Critics aside, his films usually make major bank). He is a filmmaker who knows what he likes, just as fetishistic about his cinematic obsessions as someone like Quentin Tarantino. "This is what I like," Bay shouts through a megaphone at his audience. "You can like it too, or you can buzz off."
With "Ambulance," Bay continues to celebrate all-things-Bay, going full-Bayhem with a feature-length chase where certain characters will pause to quote lines from the Michael Bay movie "The Rock" or reference the Michael Bay movie "Bad Boys." That's right: Michael Bay exists within the world of this Michael Bay movie. And he's making more Michael Bay movies in that world. It's ridiculously meta. It's a snake swallowing its own tail. It's kind of great.
Bay ups the ante here by bringing in drone cameras — and the director doesn't use drones like modern-day documentary filmmakers to simply get aerial establishing shots, oh no. He has his drones swoop, and swirl, and twirl, and flip. They buzz through open windows or abandoned buildings like flying insects; they dive-bomb the scenery like birds of prey. It's like Bay got a neat new toy and he just can't stop playing with it. Again, the unbridled Bayness of it all will either click with you or send you heading for the exit. Perhaps it speaks to the sorry state of modern movies, or maybe I'm just starved for some sort of entertaining distraction, but as I sat watching "Ambulance" in a Dolby theater, and felt my comfy seat vibrate with every explosion and burst of gunfire, I couldn't help but get swept up in it all. "Ambulance" does exactly what it sets out to do. Take it or leave it.
Before the big, feature-length chase begins, "Ambulance" introduces us to its cast of characters. There's ex-soldier Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a stand-up guy trying to get insurance money to come through to pay for experimental surgery for his sick wife (Moses Ingram). Then there's Will's brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), who seems to have his fingers in various illegal pies all over Los Angeles. We learn that Danny's family took the orphaned Will in as a boy, and while a close bond formed between the adoptive brothers, they didn't exactly have an idyllic childhood. It's revealed that Danny and Will's father was a psychopathic bank robber, and he tried to pass his criminal trade on to his sons. Danny took to the idea — he's robbed 38 banks in the last year, we're told! — but Will did not. Desperate for money now, Will turns to Danny for help, expecting a loan. Danny makes a counter-offer: Will should come help rob a bank of $32 million. Ideally, Will would walk away from this. But then we wouldn't have a movie. So he goes along, swept up by his brother's manic enthusiasm. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Los Angeles, we meet Cam Thompson (Eiza González), an EMT who is described — and I'm not making this up — as "the best paramedic in town." Soon, these characters will collide.
Gyllenhaal Steals The Show
González is appropriately fiery and tough as Cam, and Abdul-Mateen II is stoic and sympathetic as Will. We like these characters, especially Will — it would be easy to judge him, since he's ultimately a criminal who puts lives in danger. But Abdul-Mateen II carries himself with such dignity and poise that we accept his actions without question. But make no mistake: "Ambulance" belongs to Gyllenhaal. The actor has entered an interesting phase in his career. After trying on the traditional leading man costume and finding it didn't fit well, Gyllenhaal has embraced weirder and wilder roles.
Here, it seems like Bay gave him free rein to go nuts, and that's exactly what Gyllenhaal does, spitting his lines out in a motor-mouth fashion that seems to suggest he's improvising the dialogue as he goes rather than reading from a script. He's frantic and sweaty, eyes wide, cracking jokes that don't really make sense. When his sweater gets sprayed by a fire extinguisher he angrily yells, "It's cashmere!" He behaves at all times as if he's just snorted the entire mountain of cocaine that sat on Al Pacino's desk at the end of "Scarface." If Bay's Tilt-A-Whirl filming style didn't thrill us, Gyllenhaal's performance would pick up the slack. In fact, the performance might be too successful, because it slowly becomes clear that we're supposed to think of Danny as a bad guy — and make no mistake, he does bad things — but gosh, it's just so much fun to watch Gyllenhaal have fun.
As you might have guessed, the bank robbery goes horribly wrong. The rest of the crew is killed, and Danny and Will end up hijacking an ambulance to get away. And wouldn't you know it, Cam is in this ambulance! And so is a rookie cop (Jackson White) who has been shot by Will during the robbery. Now, in true "Speed" fashion, the ambulance rockets along through Los Angeles, refusing to stop, and the cops are in hot pursuit. Leading the charge is an aw-shucks lawman, played by a memorable Garret Dillahunt. He's the type of character willing to halt a chase in order to protect his beloved dog, who happens to be in the back seat of one of the pursuing cop cars.
More and more characters keep showing up to complicate things, and almost none of them is fleshed out very well. The script, by Chris Fedak, is often quite clunky, and there are countless instances where automated dialog replacement, or looping, has been added so characters (always off-screen) can helpfully summarize what the hell is happening. Is someone's motivation not making sense? No matter! An ADR line will fix that up in a jiffy! And for all Bay's action prowess, he does have a tendency to get too close, rendering several moments visually indecipherable.
And yet ... "Ambulance" still works, because for all its flaws, it never lets up. It never really gives us a moment to stop and think about those flaws as we watch. That will come later, after we've left the confines of the theater. But as we watch, we're lost in the moment. Whenever a movie shows me something that seems new, I perk up. And "Ambulance" has that, in more than one regard. Not just with the way Bay uses drones, but also with the staging of several scenes themselves. The most notable is a bloody, darkly funny moment where Cam and Will have to perform life-saving surgery on the cop, literally cutting open and reaching into his stomach to pull out his spleen — which bursts in a fountain of blood! Since Cam isn't a surgeon, she calls her ex-boyfriend, a doctor. He, in turn, calls two surgeons out golfing. And soon, three doctors are video calling into the ambulance to watch the high-speed surgery unfold and offer comical guidance. I'm not saying "Ambulance" is original — hell, it's a remake of a Danish film from 2005. But I have never seen a sequence like this before, and to watch it here felt fresh and new. And that's a feeling I'm always chasing. So thank you, Michael Bay. I mean that. "Ambulance" is unlikely to convert those who loathe Michael Bay and all he creates. But if you're on board, you're in for one hell of a ride.
You can't help but feel bad for Steven — he's lost his job and his sense of his place in the world. To make matters worse, the personality he shares brain space with is, in his opinion, kind of a jerk who kills wantonly for the Egyptian god of the moon. That's a lot to get used to, but it turns out Steven has more inner strength and resolve than Marc or anyone else expected. (Can you tell I'm Team Steven?)
Read on to get the breakdown of how Steven (Oscar Isaac) and Marc (Oscar Isaac) get into more than one argument about what they're both doing with their lives while Khonshu heckles from afar.
Warning, spoilers for the second episode of "Moon Knight" lie ahead.
It's Area 51 And MI6 Bonkers, Man
After the dramatic ending of the show's first episode (Moon Knight fighting a jackal! Bathroom sinks flying in the air!) we start this one with Steven once again waking up in bed. This time, however, Steven can't pretend that what happened last night in the museum was just a dream. After trying to find the other man in the mirror and failing, Steven heads to work, eager to see the security footage of supernaturally strong jackals chasing him through the exhibits.
What shows up on those vids, however, is just Steven — the jackals don't show up on camera, and it looks like he is the one causing all the destruction himself. This gets him promptly sacked, which gives Steven plenty of time to dig into what the hell is going on when he's "asleep." He uses the storage key as a start and eventually finds Marc's mercenary man cave. It's there Steven finds the MacGuffin scarab that Harrow needs to find Ammit's tomb, and it's there where Steven and Marc have their first real conversation.
There are a lot of ways to portray someone with multiple personalities talking to themselves, and most of them are bad. "Moon Knight," however, threads the needle well of having Marc and Steven talk with each other via reflections without it becoming hokey. This conversation also lets Steven (and the audience) in on what is really going on — Marc is the avatar of Khonshu, the bird-skulled, scythe-wielding monster Steven has been seeing. This conversation also makes clear that Marc sees himself as a steward of sorts for Steven — he was trying to take care of him, in his own way, by keeping him out of all this.
Steven doesn't take the news well, and who can blame him? He vows to take the scarab and says he's going to get himself locked up, so his body doesn't hurt anyone. Khonshu isn't happy about that and starts chasing Steven in the storage building hallway — Steven appropriately freaks out, runs outside, and tumbles to the ground right in front of his wife.
Every Marriage Has Its Difficulties
Well, Marc's wife, actually. It's Layla from the phone, and she's confused, hurt, and angry at Marc. Steven doesn't know any of this, of course, but they both go back to his flat, where Marc-in-reflection is none to happy to see Layla there. We find out that before Marc disappeared from Layla's life all those months ago, he wanted a divorce. We also find out that Marc wants to keep the scarab hidden from her, and Steven ultimately tries to hide it from her when reflection-Marc tells him that if she becomes involved, she'll be killed.
Layla is too smart for that. She finds the scarab and realizes that Steven isn't just Marc putting up an act. Two "police officers" knock on the door interrupting their conversation, however, and Layla escapes unseen with the scarab while Marc gets hauled off.
Those so-called police officers actually serve Ammit and, by extension, Harrow. They take Steven to Harrow's headquarters, a place full of hardcore followers who tend goats, grow tomatoes, and watch weird television shows with dolphins and flamingos doing stuff in slow-motion. Harrow is all cool as a cucumber with Steven — he offers him lentil soup and tells him that he used to be Khonshu's avatar.
Who broke up with who is unclear, but Harrow is now all about Ammit, who judges people before they've sinned. Steven, in a very Steven-like way, points out the logic of that isn't so great, as it basically allows for child murder and all that. But Harrow doesn't care about Steven's qualms — he just wants the scarab.
Steven doesn't have it of course, and he's not going to give up Layla. But then Layla shows up with the scarab, confronting Harrow head-on.
Meet Mr. Knight
Steven is, to put it mildly, a bit startled by all of this. Layla keeps telling him to "summon the suit" and he is a bit clueless about how to do so. The two run away from Harrow's minions, with Layla beating up more than a few of them on her own. Harrow has jackals up his sleeve, however, and uses the cane to summon them.
Steven and Layla end up in a room full of Egyptian artifacts that Steven cleverly calls, "an evil magician's man cave." Layla keeps begging Marc to come out, and in a touching scene, she finally reaches out to Steven directly. Layla realizes now how separate the two are. It's an emotional moment for Steven, but he still doesn't know how to summon the suit.
A jackal breaks in, and we find out that only Steven can see it, most likely because he is the avatar of Khonshu. The jackal pushes him out of the building and as he falls, he summons the suit and lands in a superhero pose before toppling over. His suit, however, is an actual three-piece suit rather than the traditional garb of Marc's suit. Marc-in-reflection is unimpressed, but we then get a delightful scene of "Steven with a V" trying to fight the jackal himself. It doesn't go great, and Steven ultimately gives up the body to Marc, who then takes the jackal on a chase and impales it on a steeple.
The jackal is gone, but Harrow now has the scarab, as it fell out of Steven/Marc's pocket at some point. It's here where Steven-in-reflection and Marc have another serious conversation, and this one really doesn't go too well. Steven is understandably pissed off — his whole life has been wrecked by Marc and Khonshu, and he doesn't want his body hurting anyone else. Marc says that he must follow Khonshu because of a deal he made with the Egyptian god, and breaks the mirror when Steven doesn't buy it.
We then end the episode with Khonshu and Marc having a little conversation of their own. Khonshu is a complete jerk! He's moody and belittling and so, so bitter. Marc tells him they'll get to Ammit's tomb another way, and Khonshu wearily says they have to go. When Marc asks where, Khonshu replies, "Where the hell do you think?" F. Murray Abraham's delivery here conveys so much — Khonshu is a tired, irascible, desperate god. And where he and Marc (and Steven) go is to Egypt, with the last scene of the episode revealing a drunk Marc in a hotel in his underwear, looking out the window at the pyramids.
Other Thoughts
Marc, Steven, and Khonshu are giving off some Odd Throuple vibes here, though their relationships are anything but endearing.
The Egyptian hotel room where Marc is staying has a smashed mirror. Looks like he and Steven still aren't getting along.
One of the "police officers" who serves Ammit calls her partner "Billy," a nice reference to the orderlies in the Lemire comics.
New episodes of "Moon Knight" drop Wednesdays on Disney+.
The last two years being what they are, I had memory-holed the experience of watching "Sonic the Hedgehog" in the early, pre-COVID days of 2020. But, intrepid critic that I am, I re-read my review of the film, written for this very website, immediately after sitting through the sequel, arriving in theaters this Friday. Among the many adjectives I used in that review of the first adaptation of the beloved video-game character are "desperate" and "exhausting," and I will not leave you hanging in suspense when I tell you those words will come up again in this review too. Perhaps the best thing to say about "Sonic the Hedgehog 2" is that it is not demonstrably worse than its predecessor. Yet as it clocks in at an unwieldy two hours and expands its universe to include two more well-known characters from the video-game series, this sequel is as wearying and unfunny.
Sonic (voiced once again by the ever-energetic Ben Schwartz) is enjoying his time in Green Hills, though he spends more time than is appropriate doing a weak job of fighting crime in Seattle at night, talking about himself like he's the Christopher Nolan version of the Caped Crusader. (Just as its predecessor, this movie has an overabundance of pop-culture references that primarily serve as reminders of all the much more enjoyable films you could be watching instead.) His surrogate dad Tom (James Marsden) wishes Sonic would get himself some like-minded friends, which ends up happening when the dreaded Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey) returns from his off-planet exile to cause more mayhem, now with the assistance of Knuckles the echidna (voiced by the overqualified Idris Elba). Sonic, meanwhile, gets a partner of his own in the form of Miles "Tails" Prower (Colleen O'Shaughnessy), an eager fox with two tails that function as Tails' own personal helicopter propellers. Sonic and Tails begin their history as a dynamic duo, fending off Robotnik and (initially) Knuckles from Siberia to the middle of the Hawaiian islands.
With much of the same creative team, including co-writers Pat Casey and Josh Miller, as well as director Jeff Fowler, returning for this sequel, "Sonic the Hedgehog 2" is as traditional a sequel as you can find: it's the same, but more of it. There's more CGI action, courtesy of Sonic and Tails and the much stronger and angrier Knuckles. There's more quipping, as Sonic continues to act like a family-friendly Deadpool, save for looking straight at the camera and breaking the fourth wall. And there's more cartoonish villainy, thanks to Carrey once again dropping reference after reference to things that primarily just adults will understand. Whether or not those references are funny is another matter. When Robotnik, at one point, references the odious comments from our former President after the tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia (you know, the "very fine people on both sides" remark), it's hard not to ask a question that — well, what a coincidence — I asked in my review of the original: who is this movie for?
A Movie That Doesn't Know When To Quit
Based on the ad campaign, and the fact that Sonic is referred to (lovingly) as a kid, this is a family film. The various references, including more affable ones like Sonic nodding to the public beef between Vin Diesel and The Rock, are all for the parents in the crowd, and the video-game-style battles and MacGuffin-style chase for an all-powerful emerald are for kids. Yet some of the film's extended setpieces, like a dance fight in a Siberian saloon, are more inexplicable. The longest and least involving section occurs midway through, at a wedding between Tom's sister-in-law (Natasha Rothwell) and her buff, obnoxious new beau (Shemar Moore). Sonic and Tails only show up near the end — to explain the details would both take too long and be too goofy. If the target audience for this film is indeed children, I can only share that my son was at his most restless during this centerpiece sequence, one that strangely strands its most interesting, non-human characters.
The humans in the film fare pretty poorly, as was the case with the first one. Carrey — odd references aside — tries his damnedest again to liven up the proceedings with his constant shtick. At the very least, it remains more than a little depressing that Carrey has in the last five years appeared in two movies ... specifically, these two movies. He's as game as possible as the mustachioed Robotnik, but you can only create so much chemistry working opposite CGI. The same is true of James Marsden, about whom I said in my original review, "How the hell is it that, after his hilarious supporting role in 'Enchanted,' Marsden has been given roles like 'Straight man to a talking blue hedgehog?'" I suppose the good news is that we're getting an "Enchanted" sequel at the end of this year. Even as Tom feigns awkwardness as the sole white guest at his sister-in-law's wedding, Marsden is far more talented than this whole bloated IP nonsense. Schwartz, Elba, and O'Shaughnessy benefit from Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails being more interesting, or at least not being quite as dull as their human counterparts.
"'Sonic the Hedgehog 2' is two hours long" is both a statement of fact and about as clear a sign of danger as possible. There is no good reason for this movie, or any movie about a fast-talking and fast-moving hedgehog, to be two hours long, especially when it feels closer to three hours long. If you enjoyed the original "Sonic the Hedgehog," take heart in the knowledge that the sequel tries to replicate its success and does so without feeling more maddening. My only hope with this repetitively exhausting and desperate sequel is that it'll be just as easy to forget.
https://ift.tt/TsUfziY Carmichael Makes A Splash On Saturday Night Live, And Oscars Jokes Basically Guest Starred | SlashFilm Reviews
If you tuned in to "Saturday Night Live" this weekend, you might have found yourself asking, "Who is Jerrod Carmichael, and why is he hosting the show?" The comedian may have created and starred in his own NBC sitcom, appropriately titled "The Carmichael Show," but it only lasted three seasons, and it wasn't exactly a "Seinfeld"-level hit. There's also a chance that you might recognize him as one of the frat boys from the "Neighbors" film franchise. But Carmichael's greatest success comes from his stand-up comedy career, and he proved that very well with a monologue that managed to address the pop culture frenzy surrounding the 2022 Oscars controversy heard 'round the world without actually bringing up any of the names involved or even the specifics of the incident itself.
Unfortunately, this wasn't the only appearance that the tired subject made throughout this episode of "SNL." Thankfully, there were a variety of fantastic sketches that didn't need the crutch of a headline-making celebrity misstep to spark laughter.
So, let's dig into the Jerrod Carmichael-hosted episode of "Saturday Night Live."
The Best
Short-Ass Movies - Look, it's not just because this is /Film that this came out on top as the best sketch of the night. It's simply a fantastic premise, a well-written rap, a slickly produced track, and it let's Pete Davidson do one of two things that he consistently knocks out of the park (the other being stand-up bits at the Weekend Update desk). Who of us hasn't scrolled through the endless streaming services at our disposal to find the shortest feature film we can squeeze in before bed. Aside from the great rap itself, the roster of titles included, whether they qualify as a short-ass movie or get dismissed as being far too long, makes it even better. Just a great sketch all around.
Shop TV - We've seen the home shopping television framework on "SNL" many times before, and it typically involves something going horrifically wrong or being incredible inappropriately. This qualifies as both, with Jerrod Carmichael showing off a Rainbow Brite-inspired doll known as Rhylee Rainbowlocks. Aside from the technicolor design, the doll is named for the hair that kids can cut and style before magically regrowing the hair to do it all over again. But then the source of the doll's growing hair is revealed, and it's all downhill from there. Cecily Strong and Mikey Day as these enthusiastic Southern hosts reacting in horror to this inadvertently inappropriate doll is already good enough, but Carmichael trying to explain it away with technical "Dollmaking 101" certainly adds to the hilarity. The cherry on top is ending with a callback to the beginning of the sketch, and it's nice to see that "SNL" can perfectly end a sketch when they put their mind to it.
Story - Awkward Kyle Mooney can be hit or miss, but when he hits, it hits pretty damn hard. In this case, Mooney is Heidi Gardner's cousin who is visiting her in New York City. He's so desperate to enjoy himself and seem cool that it's just a little too much when he reacts to an average story from Jerrod Carmichael. It's cringeworthy comedy at its best, and it just keeps getting worse. But the pièce de résistance is the end when Mooney just can't handle that he's embarrassed himself. It's capped off by physical comedy that's executed so well that Gardner clearly breaks when everything on the table is knocked down. That's the good stuff.
The Average
Scattering Remains - Man, this sketch could have been one of the best of the night. This funeral service takes a dark turn when the typical scattering of a deceased family member's remains ends up being the entire body thrown over the end of a cliff. It's not just the physical comedy, but the audio used to depict the sound of the body falling down the cliffside. It's so loud and cartoonish, like a bunch of junk was thrown over instead of a body. While Andrew Dismukes and Jerrod Carmichael's dry approach to their misstep is hilarious, the pacing of the dialogue makes it feel rather stilted, and it really takes the wind of the sketch's sails. Plus, the conclusion of this sketch is rather clunky. But even so, it was still one of the better sketches of the night.
Baby Clothes - On the surface, this sketch might seem based on the inappropriate nature of the phrases on these new Oshkosh shirts. However, what's great about this sketch is how it speaks to the inherent silliness that we allow from heteronormative perspectives with gender-based shirts. That's not to say that some of these shirts can't be cute on unsuspecting babies, but if any kind of relationship or gender dynamic was represented in the same way on children, it would create an uproar on Fox News that would last for at least a week. There's still some hilarity that comes from the framing of the advertisement itself, especially reactions from Bowen Yang, but it's the commentary that works best.
Post-COVID Game Show - Even though the premise of this sketch is almost too simple and silly, the way it's played by Kate McKinnon, Bowen Yang, Sarah Sherman, and Jerrod Carmichael makes it feel a little less elementary. In particular, I loved the part where the contestants answer McKinnon as she rhetorically asks herself, "What's wrong with me?" But this sketch also had pacing issues where it felt like there were silences that lasted just a little too long, on top of being maybe a tad too broad.
The Worst
Seat Fillers - Welp, we knew that "SNL" was going to touch upon the Oscars controversy that erupted after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on live television after a joke the comedian made about Jada Pinkett-Smith's shaved head. However, this was the second attempt at mining the incident for comedy (we'll get to that later), and it certainly wasn't the last. Aside from the parade of Weekend Update jokes about what happened, this was the most direct riff on the moment itself, and it just felt unnecessary. Furthermore, the set-up for the sketch is just far too basic to be worth entering the conversation nearly a week later. Though Carmichael and Mooney reacting at the Oscars ceremony itself wasn't without amusement, it wasn't good enough to justify its existence. They should have just stuck with Jerrod Carmichael's opening monologue and half of the Weekend Update jokes.
Fox & Friends: Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings (Cold Open) - It should come as no surprise that the political cold open was again the worst of the night. Having said that, there were two commendable parts of this sketch. Kenan Thompson's work as Clarence Thomas allowed him to bat clean-up and bring laughs to an otherwise disappointing sketch. And you can always rely on Cecily Strong as Judge Jeanine Pirro. It's just a shame the rest of the sketch doesn't work very well, especially when you have Alex Moffat, Heidi Gardner, and Mikey Day doing great impersonations of the "Fox & Friends" buffoons.
Weekend Update
Almost the entire first half of Weekend Update was focused on the Oscars controversy involving Chris Rock and Will Smith. They tried to lead-in cleverly with a misdirect about Vladimir Putin, and then they really leaned in. Granted, the punchlines are much more varied than simply mocking the incident itself, unlike the aforementioned, unimpressive sketch, they're not really adding much to the conversation that was had throughout the entire week. However, even though Che's defense of Rock (and presumably many others) not knowing that Jada Pinkett Smith had alopecia feels a little misguided, the punchline about comedians being held responsible for the insecurities of others (especially when it comes to not being aware of details in certain people's lives) is much better than the manner in which it's set up.
Thankfully, the rest of Weekend Update made up for the overflow of Oscars jokes. Jost's riff on Senator Lindsey Graham looking like he wants to be part of an orgy in the aforementioned headline was aces, and Che even made a joke tied into a radio show appearance where he made it sound like he would be leaving the Weekend Update desk. Watch the second part of Weekend Update right here.
Senator Marsha Blackburn on Judge Jackson's Confirmation Hearings - Cecily Strong doesn't quite have the same streak of political personalities that someone like Kate McKinnon has on the show, but when she impersonates a prominent government figure, she knocks it out of the park. This Weekend Update appearance by Senator Marsha Blackburn, who had some ludicrous moments during the confirmation hearings for SCOTUS nominee Judge Jackson, is thoroughly enjoyable. But sadly, that's because it's unfortunately painfully accurate.
O.J. Simpson on Will Smith's Oscar Slap - After Jerrod Carmichael's opening monologue (we'll get to that next), the obvious sketch attempt, and the barrage of Weekend Update jokes, you might have thought we were done with Will Smith. But the Weekend Update desk had one more riff. Thankfully, this one isn't actually about the incident itself. Instead, it's merely a launching point for Kenan Thompson to give a great performance as O.J. Simpson, who is hilarious concerned about having awards and accolades taken away from him. It may not be the most timely or relevant take on the incident, but it's certainly much better than almost all the other comedic takes that have arrived this week.
The Host
Jerrod Carmichael is an outstanding stand-up comedian, so it should come as no surprise that he walked out onto the "SNL" stage comfortable as hell. He knows how to work a crowd, and much like the many stand-up comics who have monologue'd before him, this one is a stand-up bit through and through. However, what's supremely impressive is that this entire bit is predicated on the Oscars controversy with Chris Rock and Will Smith. But much like John Mulaney's bit about a horse running rampant through a hospital as a comedic metaphor for the Donald Trump presidency, Carmichael does this entire bit without mentioning any specifics about the event and instead focuses on the pop culture cycle that has followed in the week since then. Carmichael even makes a joke at the expense of Lorne Michaels and addresses him directly during the monologue. If you were impressed by this, then you simply must seek out Carmichael's stand-up specials.
With that out of the way, I must say that Carmichael wasn't the best sketch comedy performer. It's not that he doesn't have good comedic timing or delivery, but he wasn't really given an opportunity to do anything except be himself with various wigs and costumes. Carmichael also stumbled over some lines and flubbed punchlines. That happens to some of the best, seasoned cast members, but in this case, Carmichael didn't have much that made him stand out. Even though he gave a decent comedic performance overall, it wasn't exactly remarkable. But I certainly wouldn't mind seeing him get the chance to do it again.
The MVP
Cecily Strong - Even though her appearances throughout the night weren't always in the best sketches, Strong was easily a high point whenever she was on screen. In fact, Strong also gets point for her off-screen work as the voiceover in the Oshkosh commercial for baby clothes. It's something that she frequently does whenever there's a commercial parody for Target, Old Navy, Kohl's and plenty of other companies, and it often goes overlooked, but it deserves just as much recognition as any other comedic turn. Sometimes the best comedic performance doesn't stand out, but in this case, Strong was the clear MVP.
The Final Word
With an untested, more obscure host taking the stage, "SNL" still came back with a solid episode, even if it relied too much on a specific pop culture moment that has already worn out its welcome in the news cycle. Thankfully, even though Carmichael isn't the best sketch comic, he's still funny enough to deliver an amusing episode of "SNL." For those looking for what will likely be a little more sensational episode, Jake Gyllenhaal will be hosting next week (just after "Ambulance" arrives in theaters), and considering the last "SNL" appearance by Taylor Swift, audiences are curious to see what happens. Stay tuned.
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