The Weekend Warrior April 1, 2022
MORBIUS, MOON KNIGHT, THE DEVIL YOU KNOW, THE CONTRACTOR, NITRAM, BARBARIANS, MEMORIA, BETTER NATE THAN EVER, THE BUBBLE, and More
Happy almost April Fool’s Day! I wish I had more jokes or pranks to play this year, but I don’t. Or at least that’s my story, and I’m going to stick with it, your honor.
We’re into April and sometime later today, I should be debuting my new monthly Box Office Preview column over at Gold Derby, and you can check that out right here!
We’re going to change things up again this week, because I just had so much going on this week between Oscars and other things that I just don’t know how much I’ll be able to get to, so I’ll probably write what I can and post what I’ve finished by Weds morning, and then I’ll run other reviews (like Morbius and The Bubble) as separate pieces… maybe.
(Note: This week’s column has been brought to you by the amazing drumming, singing and songwriting of the late Taylor Hawkins from the Foo Fighters, an incredibly talented musician taken far too soon. Check out some of his solo records!)
MORBIUS (Sony Pictures) - Rated PG-13
Likely to be one of the biggest movies of the month (at least its opening weekend), Morbius is the first actual superhero/comic book movie of the year – sorry, Spider-Man: No Way Home doesn’t count ‘cause it was released in December – and also Sony’s immediately follow-up to their recent hit, Uncharted. (We’ll just pretend that Umma never happened and no one will correct us, right?) Morbius was originally slated to come out in October 2020 and the first trailer hit in January of that year – yup, over two years ago. But then COVID hit and movie theaters were closed and then they were reopened and COVID just kept coming back to the point the movie was delayed until late January of this year and then delayed until this Friday after Omicron. Listen, Sony knows what it’s going, and it’s been one of the studios that really has stayed focused on theatrical throughout the pandemic… if you don’t count all the animated movies it sold to streamers, of course. :)
This one brings Oscar winner Jared Leto into the world of superheroes and comic movies, and unfortunately, it comes out in the week where he just received his first Razzie Award for his performance in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, which was actually *MY* favorite part of that movie, but clearly, I’m just weird.
On one hand, it might seem like Leto has been staying out of the spotlight of big studio blockbusters, but then you remember… “Hey, wait! He played the Joker in that not-great Suicide Squad movie! Plus he was in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 sequel!” So yeah, Leto actually has had two high-profile appearances in big movies since winning the Oscar in 2014 for his role in the drama Dallas Buyers Club from the late great Jean-Marc Vallée. Thsoe two movies made almost a billion worldwide, and even during the pandemic, Leto had the thriller The Little Things with Denzel Washington, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination, and starried in House of Gucci, which got him a SAG nomination as well as one for being part of the cast. Oh, and also won him a Razzie. Oops.
And yet, Leto is one of the actors who “woke #FilmTwitter” just loves to hate, maybe because there have been #MeToo accusations against him – nothing that’s led to prosecution – plus he also won an Oscar for being a CIS male playing a trans character, which nowadays would lead to so much woke furor that Leto would be even MORE cancelled. Yeah, these are the times we’re living in, and if you don’t believe that Leto is not being eyed rather askew for this starring role in a semi-high-profile comic book movie, then you should have seen the conversation in the Slack channel at The Beat that led me to eventually quitting that site and sacrificing a two-decade friendship! (That was only part of it but I’ve kept quiet on that for two years, so that’s a little Easter Egg for those who’ve read my work over the years and have read this far.) Then again, Leto also is the frontman for 30 Minutes to Mars, a rock band with a strong female fanbase, just to make things even more confusing.
So that’s definitely something working against Morbius, but definitely working FOR it is something that we’ll call the “Spider-Man factor,” because however you slice it, Sony has the rights to make this movie from the same deal the studio made in the ‘90s to buy Spider-Man and all sorts of his supporting characters when Marvel was filing for Chapter 11. They probably have made back the money from that deal but they also got Venom, which has led to two hit blockbusters, including last year’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which grossed $500 million worldwide despite the pandemic.
And then there’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, which hit $800 million just in North America this past weekend. The “Spider-Man factor” is the fact that trailers have teased Morbius’ connections to Spidey *and* Venom even with neither of them likely to appear in the movie… although apparently there’s an end-credits scene with Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes aka The Vulture, possibly teasing Sony’s long-in-development Sinister Six movie and the possibility of them facing Tom Holland’s Spidey or another one. (He only faced FIVE of his former villains in No Way Home, but apparently, we’re now being sold on something called the “Venom-verse” which includes Leto’s Morbius.) Still, the promise of any connection to EITHER Spider-Man or Venom (the last movie which opened to $90 million) should give Morbius a nice bump to counter any ill will against the actor or any the accusations against him (which I honestly don’t even remember, at this point.) We also have to remember that Morbius is a lesser-known Spider-villain even for comic book readers – he hasn’t exactly had a history as a comic book lead on his own by comparison with Venom.
I have a feeling that like the Venom movies, Morbius just won’t have a huge female fanbase, even from the women who like Leto’s rock music, because it just seems very much a male-dominated comic book movie with no real strong female supporting characters. In case it matters, Morbius also stars Matt Smith, former “Doctor Who,” Tyrese Gibson from the “Fast and Furious” movies, and Jared Harris from Mad Men, but that really won’t matter much. It also won’t matter that it’s directed by Daniel Espinosa, a regular go-to director for Sony ala Ruben Fleischer. (Espinosa last directed the sci-fi thriller Life that I actually thought was meant to be a Venom prequel… but it wasn’t.)
Unfortunately, reviews and social media reactions are embargoed until later on Wednesday night, but I won’t be seeing it until Weds. afternoon anyway, even though early reactions out of the UK have not been great. It’s unlikely that will have that much of an effect on those who will really want to see the movie, especially with it being in premium formats like IMAX, which will drive up the base ticket price.
I expect Morbius will be good for roughly $55 million this weekend, give or take, which would be the biggest opener of the year so far and for the month of April, but if it’s as bad as some have said, expect a huge 60% drop next weekend against Sonic the Hedgehog 2, even if it will still surpass $125 million domestically with relative ease.
There are actually other movies opening this week. Maybe you’ve even heard of some of them? But probably not. One was dumped onto this weekend just a couple weeks ago (ala Umma), and the other is now going to mainly be seen on VOD. Only one of the two I’ll have seen before writing this column.
You can read my review of Morbius right here, but after seeing it, I’ve decided to lower my prediction for the weekend.
THE DEVIL YOU KNOW (Lionsgate) - Rated R
Written and directed by Charles Murray, I don’t know a lot about this movie other than it stars Omar Epps and Michael Ealy, two fine and versatile Black actors who have been in a lot of great movies. I’m just gonna swipe the plot synopsis from IMDb, since it’s probably the best I’m going to do without seeing notes or anything. “After a lifetime of trouble, a man has the chance to turn things around with the love and support of his family. As he tries to do right, he finds himself spiraling back into the dark place he overcame.”
That being all I know and not even knowing how much marketing Lionsgate is doing for this or even whether it will be in 1,000 theaters or more. Like I said, I know nothing. This might as well be a faith-based Anime movie from India, because that is about how much info I’ll have on this before seeing it. Fun, huh?
Okay, I have now seen the movie, and you can read more about it in my review below, although it’s still hard really determining how much it might make this weekend without knowing a theater count or how it’s being marketed. I guess I could see it making a million with enough theaters (say 1,000 or so) but I’m not sure Lionsgate has that much confidence in it.
Mini-Review: Sometimes – in fact most of the time – it’s nice not knowing too much about a movie before seeing it. In this case, I never even got around to watching the trailer, having not seen it in front of any of them movies I had been watching, which actually is a shame, because this is the kind of movie we just haven’t seen in a very long time. Not just a Black film, but a Black family drama, not unlike the ones the late John Singleton used to make. That’s not to say the movie is perfect or that it will appeal to everyone, but filmmaker Charles Murray and his partner and exec. Producer Omar Epps have found a way to tell an original story that may connect with some people quite a lot.
Epps plays Marcus Cowans, a recovering alcoholic and ex-con who is trying to find redemption in his life. At least he always has his close-knit family around him, including his three brothers. When we meet him at a family gathering, he’s being set-up with a pretty nurse named Eva (Erica Tazel), and it looks like Marcus is getting things back on track.
The film opens on a very different scene, a home invasion that turns into the murder of an older white couple (one of them played by comic writer and TV producer Jeph Loeb!) that’s later being investigated by Michael Ealy’s detective. The same night Marcus meets Eva, he drives his younger brother Drew (William Catlett) home and is shown an album of rare baseball cards Drew is “holding for friends.” A few months later, the son of the murdered couple is coming out of a coma after being beaten severely, and Marcus sees that same baseball card album in a picture of the boy on the news. Marcus confronts Drew about the album and learns more about what happened as Drew points fingers to his clearly crooked pals Stacy and Al.
This is a movie that isn’t perfect, almost as flawed as the character Epps plays, in fact, but a lot of that could be due to its low budget, which makes it seem a little drab and dry and not particularly well-crafted. In some ways, it feels more like a television drama, but that’s only since it’s been a long time since we’ve seen something like this released theatrically, rather than an indie movie at a festival.
Other than a few pacing issues, the storytelling is all there, and Murray has surrounded Epps and Ealy with a solid cast, including Glynn Turman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) as the family patriarch. There are a lot of complexities to the relationship, particularly between Marcus and Drew, and that’s ultimately what keeps you invested in this family’s story. Epps really has the most interesting role, because he makes the tough decision to secretly inform the police on Drew’s friends, only to learn that Drew is more involved than he’s admitted. Epps has some great scenes with the entire cast, but there are a few particularly strong scenes between him and Ealy.
Despite its problems, The Devil You Know offers a lot of things to ponder over, including what one must do to protect their family while also morally doing the right thing. It’s a family drama unlike anything we have seen in movies in quite some time, as preeminent filmmakers like Will Packer and Deon Taylor have moved onto more lucrative comedies and genre films, but honestly, it’s just nice to see that a movie like this can actually be shown in a theater so that people can experience all its emotional ups and downs together.
Rating: 6.5/10
THE CONTRACTOR (Paramount) - Rated R
Opening in roughly 450 theaters, which may or may not be enough to get into the Top 10 for what is essentially a one-week theatrical release, as well as on Digital and On Demand is this new political action-thriller starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gillian Jacobs, Eddie Marson, Keifer Sutherland, the great Nina Hoss, and even Florian Munteanu (Razorfirst in Shang-Chi!). It’s directed by Tarik Saleh (The Nile HIlton Incident – never seen it), it stars Pine as Special Forces Sergeant James Harper, who is given an involuntary discharged leaving him in a cash crisis and unable to provide for his family. He contracts with a private underground military force and sent on a mission in Berlin, but things don’t go well sending him on the run, and really? Paramount didn’t think they could have released this nationwide and made money on it?
I mean, Chris Pine did star in their hit Star Trek franchise, and yeah, I guess he didn’t do so great as their Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, but he wasn’t bad as Wonder Woman’s love interest, Steve Trevor, so has he really fallen into actors’ jail? I mean, he’s also starring in Paramount’s Dungeons & Dragons movie, so surely, the studio hasn’t lost complete faith in him, have they? (Oddly, Pine also stars in a movie from Amazon next week called All the Old Knives, and that streamer has bought a *LOT* of movies from Paramount over the past two years – Coming 2 America and The Tomorrow War are just two.) This whole thing only gets weirder when you realize this movie was produced by STX and 30West, so they sold it to Paramount and now they’re dumping it? Curious…
Instead of getting into heavy analysis on a movie getting a moderate release and probably making less than a million i.e. not enough to get into the top 10, I’m just going to jump right into my…
Mini-Review: It was particularly hard to not be cynical about this one for some of the reasons mentioned above, but also because I had recently seen Pine in next week’s All the Old Knives… which may still be under embargo, but I’ll write about that next week regardless.
This is actually a movie that could very well appear to the Tom Clancy fans, and it’s not only a better role for Pine than the movie mentioned in the previous paragraph, but also a better movie than the Jack Ryan movie that was directed by recent Oscar winner Kenneth Branagh. Pine’s James Harper is a chuchgoing family man (married to Gillian Jacobs!) who has been sidelined from injuries but finds a big paycheck from doing contract work, even if his first mission in Berlin is quite questionable. But he was brought on board by his former commanding officer, Mike, played by Ben Harper – seriously one of the best actors who just hasn’t gotten the attention from his peers as he deserves – so he gives it a go, because his first paycheck is quite helpful. The contracting company is run by Kiefer Sutherland’s former Green Beret, Rusty, but it doesn’t take long before Harper starts questioning some of the motives and morals of those paying him, since they clearly don’t have his back when things go wrong.
I actually really liked this movie, particularly the pairing of Pine and Foster, and it’s a pretty decent suspense thriller in the vein of Bourne or Clancy that is quite well directed by Tarik Saleh, using his cast to its fullest. There were other reasons I was bound to enjoy this, one thing being that much of it takes place in Berlin (which I love) but then about halfway into the movie, Eddie Marsan shows up, and he’s been one of my favorite actors for ages.
This is just so much better than last year's Without Remorse, which Paramount sold to Amazon, the home for all things Tom Clancy. Maye the ending gets a little over-the-top in terms of the acting, but it’s kind of fun to see Sutherland still up for some action as we get kind of a Jack Ryan vs. Jack Bauer climax of sorts. Still, it really earns its last act and finale by being a surprisingly taut thriller up until that point.
It’s nice when a movie like The Contractor comes along where I don’t necessarily have a ton of expectations, and it actually surpasses those by proving itself to be a worthy entry into a specific genre.
Rating: 7.5/10
(^^^^^^ Hey, Mike Palmer, I was talking about this movie! ^^^^^^^) :)
THE CHART:
While I highly doubt The Contractor or even The Devil You Know will break into the top 10 this weekend – for the latter, it’s all about its theater count – though I’m not sure I would even know about either movie if I wasn’t writing this column. On the other hand, A24 is supposed to expand Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once into more theaters this weekend, but it may only be another 50 or 60 theaters, which might be enough to get into the top 10 but possibly on the lower side.
UPDATE 3/30: I don’t do this very often but after seeing Morbius, I’ve decided to just knock $10 million off my prediction, because I don’t think the reviews will do it any favors for those on the fence about it.
1. Morbius (Sony) - $45.4 million N/A (Down 10 million!)
2. The Lost City (Paramount) - $16.5 million -46%
3. The Batman (Warner Bros.) - $10.8 million -47%
4. RRR (Sarigama) - $4.1 million -57%
5. Uncharted (Sony) - $2.8 million -45%
6. Jujutsu Kaizen 0 (Cruchyroll) - $2.2 million -52%
7. Dog (MGM) - $1.3 million -39%
8. Sing 2 (Universal) - $1.2 million -13%
9. Everything Everywhere All at Once (A24) $1.2 million +135%
10. Spider-Man: No Way Home (Sony) - $1.1 million -45%
- The Devil You Know (Lionsgate) - $1 million N/A
- The Contractor (Paramount) - $600k N/A
NITRAM (IFC Films)
Opening in select theaters on Wednesday, as well as On Demand and streaming on AMC+ is the new dramatic thriller from Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel (Macbeth, True History of the Kelly Gang), starring Caleb Landry Jones as the title character, Nitram, who lives with his parents (Judy Davis, Anthony Lapaglia) in suburban Australia, living in isolation until he meets a reclusive heiress named Helen (Essie Davis from The Babadook). When that relationship ends, it leads to disaster. Listen, you know IFC is serious about one of their movies when they send press a long list of disclaimers and trigger warnings, as they did a few years ago with Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale. In this case, they’ve tried to sideline press from making comparisons between Kurzel’s movie and a famed 1996 mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania… which I DID NOT EVEN KNOW ABOUT! So yeah, in trying to do some kind of due diligence, the filmmakers have instead put me immediately on the defensive about whether this movie can do justice to true-life events.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve generally been a fan of Kurzel’s films, but definitely more his last movie, True History of the Kelly Gang, and like that movie, this one is also based on real events, as opposed to Assassin’s Creed and his fairly recent take on Macbeth. I’ve also been quite impressed with how Caleb Landry Jones has grown as an actor to the point where I started watching this movie thinking he was Australian… even though I must have known at some point that he actually was American. Plus he’s surrounded by such a great group of Australian actors helping to bolster the illusion.
Even so, it’s really tough to love or even recommend this movie, because it’s a well-made movie about a generally horrible person. Nitram is clearly unbalanced and just not someone you might sympathize with, so it might make you wonder why someone might enjoy watching this movie at all? Of course, it’s impossible not to cite movies like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant or Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, which are far better movies… but also ones I don’t necessarily need to see more than once.
There’s something about Jones’ character that reminded me of the Australian indie drama Hesher, because starts getting high and hanging out with a guy who may be a worse influence than his friend played by Kent. But it is still shocking to watch Nitram walking into a gun shop and walking away with a cache of guns procured so easily wth “no drama.”
Thankfully, the movie doesn’t actually try to recreate or show any of the actual shootings, but I’m not quite sure what Kurzel was hoping to get across with this film other than to point out that gun laws were passed after the events in Australia with hundreds of thousands of guns destroyed, and yet, decades later, things are back to as bad as they were back then. Americans can fully understand this, even if things may have changed in other countries dealing with mental health and gun sales… even if America hasn’t gone far enough, if you ask me.
Wherever you fall along these lines, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it makes for an entertaining or particularly insightful film to anyone going into it completely cold. In fact, Nitram is a pretty dark and dour movie which may be shocking if you don’t know the story on which it’s based, which of course I looked up before watching the movie. Therefore, I can’t fully recommend Nitram, since it tends to be such a hard movie to watch despite another amazing performance from Jones in what is just not a great movie.
Rating: 6/10
BARBARIANS (IFC Films)
Producer Charles Dorfman’s directorial debut, this dramatic thriller is another movie involving two couples getting together for a birthday dinner for Adam (played by Iwan Rheon from Game of Thrones) when his best friend Lucas (Tom Cullen) and model girlfriend (Inès Spiridonov) come over and the night sort of deteriorates from there. Catalina Sandina Moreno plays Adam’s artist girlfriend.
I don’t know what’s going on between me and IFC Midnight but I’ve barely liked any of their recent movies. A lot of their releases just seem very dry and just aren’t horror as much as they’re just heightened drama, and that certainly seems the case with Barbarians, which on hand tries to deal with things like toxic masculinity between male friends but never really justifies where it goes from just being a tense night between friends into something more akin to The Purge or The Strangers, a home invasion movie which is also not a genre I love. And that’s more than a little ironic since a lot of that aspect of Barbarians seems inspired by A Clockwork Orange, one of my all-time favorite movies.
Maybe it’s just that I didn’t understand the set-up for this movie that involves something called Gateway, some sort of exclusive community involving some Stonehenge-like stones that I never quite understood what they had to do with anything else, including why these masked terrorists show up at Adam’s house. But the whole movie is just kind of ugly and not particularly enjoyable to watch because this toxic masculinity just keeps building and building, and there’s just nothing to like about any of the characters or the story being told.
This is just a movie that never justifies having such a decent cast, because it never really elevates itself above what would have been fine if it maintained its simpler premise. By being made needlessly complex, it just gets unpleasant once violence comes into play.
Rating: 5/10
YOU WON’T BE ALONE (Focus Features)
Goran Stolevski’s fantasy-horror-thriller is set in a remote mountain villain in 19th Century Macedonia where a young girl is kidnapped by a witch who converts her into a similar shape-shifter, one trying to find her way in this isolated and primitive community. I reviewed this film when it premiered out of Sundance earlier this year, and I actually watched it a second time to see if I could get any more out of it. (Spoiler: I couldn’t.) This will be opening in roughly 100 theaters this weekend, but I’m not sure that will help it make more than a minor dent with its limited release, since this is a very specialized foreign language release, and not quite as accessible as some of Focus’ other upcoming releases.
MEMORIA (Neon)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest movie, which premiered at Cannes last July, is finally getting its planned roadshow release into, I believe, one theater at a time for a single week, as it moves across the country starting Friday. The new movie stars Tilda Swinton, and while I have had a good EIGHT MONTHS to watch this three-hour movie either in screenings or on the NEON FYC screener I’ve had sitting next to my bed for the last four months, I just never got to it. I’ve never really been a fan of this beloved author, maybe because I just have such trouble remembering how to spell his name (but I’ve seen some of his movies and they just weren’t for me.) Unfortunately, I don’t even have a list of theaters where or when it will be playing — I know it will play at New York’s IFC Center this Friday, though — so you’ll just have to some of your own research on this one. Sorry!
A couple I just wasn’t able to get to with everything I had going on this week, but if I do get to them later, I’ll add those reviews…
THE ROSE MAKER (Music Box Films)
Pierre Pinaud’s French comedy stars Marguerite’s Catherine Frot as horticulturist Eve Vernet, who has been trying to keep her family business breading prize-winning roses, although her stubbornness to stick with the old ways forces her to struggle against mass market production. Her assistant Vera (Oliva Côte) then gets the idea of hiring three employees from the prison rehabilitation program who have zero gardening skills to try to turn things around. The Rose Maker will open in New York at the Angelika Film Center, in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal and in Pasadena at the Laemmle Playhouse 7 this Friday, following by other markets over April.
BOON (Cinedigm)
Neal McDonough (Captain America: The First Avenger) stars in (and co-wrote!) Derek Presley’s action-thriller playing mercenary Nick Boon, who moves to the Pacific Northwest in order to try to escape his past as a ruthless enforcer, where he settles down with a widow (Christiane Seidel) and her son, who are being terrorized by a criminal kingpin (played by Tommy Flanagan).
Streaming…
MOON KNIGHT (Disney+)
The latest Marvel Studios series to debut on Disney+ (today) is also I guess the streamer’s fifth foray into the MCU? I’ve been looking forward to this one for a long time since I’ve been a Moon Knight fan since he first got his own series in the ‘80s – it was one of the first direct market books in fact, just as I was transitioning between getting my comics at the drugstore and actually driving to the comic shop nearby. That first series was written by Doug Moench and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz, still one of my favorite artsists of all time. I miss all of my Moon Knight comics as he becomes the first new character to get a Disney+ series which launches today and will be a six episode mini-series. I had a lot of concerns about how the character would be handled, since there are a lot of sides to the character, quite literally, since much of what makes the character unique is that he’s a superhero that suffers from a split personality, and on top of that, it deals with Egyptian mythology and Gods, which some might remember, Marvel shied away from with Thor and those movies, instead trying to explain magic as science.
I won’t go into heavy spoilers in this “review” but I do want to say that not only did the first four episodes I saw deliver on many of the things I loved about the character while doing its own thing, but it has the added bonus of second and fourth episodes being directed by Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson of Synchronic fame. Boy, do they deliver on the premise of their earlier indie films by being given the keys to Moon Knight.
But first and foremost, it’s the casting of Oscar Isaac in this dual role, because he is one terrific actor, and you really need to have that for such a complex and intricate character and storytelling. We first meet him as Steven Grant, a nerdy gift shop employee at a British natural history museum who knows a lot about archeology and Egypt in particular. Weird things start happening to him, and next thing he knows, he’s caught up in a race to find the burial place of a certain Egyptian deity against Ethan Hawke’s Dr. Arthur Harrow. Oh, and every once in a while, Steven blacks out, because he instead transforms into the mercenary Marc Spector, hears the voice of a Moon God call Khonshu (voiced by F. Murray Abraham), and his estranged wife Layla (May Calamawy) also gets involved with the search.
That’s all you really have to know in advance, but it’s another great action-adventure in the Marvel Studios tradition, with the series really picking up with Episode 3 when things move to Egypt and becomes even more of an action-adventure that will remind many of Tomb Raider and The Mummy (the Brendan Fraser ones). That’s where I was really sold, cause it was dealing with stuff I loved (including the Egypt-based Assassin’s Creed game, which was one of the last things I became obsessed with playing on my XBox). I’m not sure anyone is going to miss the irony that Isaac follows his previous Marvel character with Egyptian ties (Apocalypse) with another one. But it also throws a pretty gigantic monkey-wrench in the works in the 4th episode. In fact, that’s one of the only big drags about getting early episodes as press is that while it’s nice to see 2/3rds of the series in advance, I now have to wait even longer to find out what happens in Episode 5… and boy, it’s gonna be fun when others get to see these.
Moon Knight is another fine feather in the Marvel cap, showing that the studio can create interesting new takes on its beloved comic book characters but also keep even the most stalwart fans guessing on what’s possible and what happens next. Great stuff!
BETTER NATE THAN EVER (Disney+)
Hitting the streamer this Friday is this musical comedy starring Nueby Wood as Nate Foster, a 13-year-old kid from the Midwest who dreams of becoming a big Broadway musical star in the movie directed by Tim Federle of High School Musical: The Musical - The Series (on which he’s a writer/producer).Unable to get a decent role in his middle school productions, Nate travels to New York City with his friend Litty so they can audition for “Lilo and Stitch: The Musical.”
Mini-Review: (Coming Soon!)
THE BUBBLE (Netflix)
Judd Apatow is also now on streaming with his latest comedy, which is a behind-the-scenes satire about the making of the sixth chapter of the “Cliff Beasts” blockbuster franchise, and how it’s affected by the COVID pandemic with the cast including Karen Gillan, Keegan-Michael Key, Pedro Pascal, Leslie Mann, David Duchovny, Fred Armisen, Kate McKinnon, Maria Bakalova, and more. Reviews are embargoed until Thursday night at 9pm, so make of that what you will.
Mini-Review: On paper, it seems like Judd Apatow – arguably one of the finest comedic filmmakers of his generation – could do something fun with an ensemble comedy set in the very real world we live in where making movies has become especially challenging due to COVID, and yet movies do get made. The Bubble could have been his State and Main or something similar.
The premise revolves around a major tentpole franchise that needs to get made to keep the studio afloat, despite the difficult relationships between the principal players. I’m not going through the entire roster, but Karen Gillan probably plays the key role as the “serious actor” who bowed out of the previous installment which created quite a bit of ill will with her cast once reunited.
Don’t worry. Apatow isn’t getting all serious like his former collaborator, Adam McKay, but he’s certainly getting a hell of a lot less funny, because The Bubble just isn’t something that does enough with the comedic cast Apatow has assembled. For instance, his wife Leslie Mann is always terrific, as is Keegan-Michael Key, but it doesn’t feel like their characters or material really gives them much room to do what they do so well. At least his daughter Iris Apatow enters the family business with one of the better roles as TikTok influencer Krystal Kris, which doesn’t require a ton of heavy lifting but still works. I just didn’t think Armisen or McKinnon were good at all, although Bakalova does so much more with her role than another actor might.
In many ways, The Bubble feels like Judd Apatow is trying to emulate what Armando Iannucci has done so well both on television and movies, but there’s something so “inside baseball” about the results that Apatow constantly resorts to humor that’s far more low-brow and physical. When the cast starts doing drugs and decides to do a TikTok dance together on Kristal’s channel, you know that it’s gone far past any chance of salvation.
It’s crazy how ridiculously horrible and unfunny The Bubble is. It might come from an idea that would have worked if it was something Apatow spent many years developing rather than trying to rush it out in order for it to feel timely. It’s clearly the worst movie of his career.
Rating: 4/10
APOLLO 10 ½: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD (Netflix)
I reviewed Richard Linklater’s new animated memoir in last week’s column before its limited theatrical release, but if you didn’t get a chance to see it in theaters, it will be streaming on Netflix starting Friday.
A few odds and ends…
Up at Lincoln Center, its annual doc series, “Art of the Real” kicks off on Thursday, March 31, and runs through April 7. The Opening Night film is Lina Rodriguez’s My Two Voices, a portrait of three women travelling between Colombia, Mexico, and Canada, Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Come Here, Mlenia Czernovsky and Lilith Kraxner’s Beatrix and much more. This year’s series will also include selected works by Alice Diop with Diop in attendance to discuss her documentary work. (I haven’t seen any of these so I have little to no insight about what might be worth seeing.)
Downtown, the IFC Center is starting its spring season of the Pure Nonfiction Documentary series starting next Tuesday, which will include Sundance hit, Navalny, as well as Judd Apatow’s doc George Carlin’s American Dream, and more.
Repertory stuff….
I actually wish I could get to my local arthouse this weekend since they have a great series called “Pop Plays Itself,” which is made up of movies about pop and rock stars that runs through April 14. It’s a pretty eclectic mix of films that include Stormy Weather (1943) and 1980’s Rude Boy, a doc about a sex shop worker who became roadie for The Clash, as well as The Bodyguard (1992), Decoder (1984), and more. Charles Grodin X3 will include screenings of Midnight Run (1988) and Clifford (1994)this weekend. This weekend’s “Play Time” is Muppet Treasure Island (1996) on Saturday and Sunday, while “Late Nighst” will continue its adult animation series by screening Fantastic Planet (1973),Perfect Blue (1998), and Son of the White Mare (1981). “Metrograph Presents A to Z” will show Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going (1945) on Friday and Saturday, as well as Satajit Ray’s Charulata (1964) on Friday and Sunday. “Left Bank Cinema” continues this weekend with films from Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, and Alain Resnais pretty much all weekend.
On Friday, Film Forum begins a 4-week 47 film series inspired by the late, great Sidney Poitier, called “Sidney Poitier and his Trailblazing Contemporaries.” It begins on Friday with No Way Out (1950), Blackboard Jungle (1955), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and Home of the Brave, and Sunday’s Film Forum Jr. offering is Sidney Poitier’s A Raisin in the Sun (1961).
On Friday, you can see Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr (1924) along with two shorts, The Electric House (1920) and The High Sign (1921), all with live piano accompaniment ,and then on Sunday, you can see Keaton’s The Navigator (1924) and the short The Boat (1921). I believe (but I’m not sure) that Bronco Bulldog and Mr. Klein with both continue running through the weekend.
A pretty exciting retrospective series begins Wendesday (tonight) called “Oh, the Humanity! The Films of Larry Fessenden and Glass Eye Pix,” which will indeed focus on the work of the great and wonderful Mr. Fessenden, as well as some of the movie he has produced through his Glass Eye Pix. Larry will be on hand to introduce some of the films, which will include some of the films he produced like Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass (1994) and Wendy and Lucy (2008), and the full run of films he has directed, as well as Joe Maggio’s Bitter Feast (2010) and son Jack Fessenden’s Stray Bullets (2016), both of which screen on Saturday. I honestly wish I had more free time to get up there for some of these, but this is already just too busy a week for me.
“Linda Darnell, Dark Lady of Fox” concludes this week with Rene Clair’s It Happened Tomorrow (1944) and Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel (1945).
David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) and his adaptation of Dune (1984) continue to show through the weekend, mostly after 9:40pm.
ETC…
WATERMAN (Purdie Distribution)
THE YELLOW WALLPAPER (Mutiny Pictures)
BULL (Saban Films)
Next week…Sonic the Hedgehog 2 faces off against Michael Bay’s Ambulance!
All box office data provided by The-Numbers.com, now newly-designed for the ‘20s!