Dir - Ari Aster
Overall: GOOD
Say what you want about Ari Aster's latest, longest, and boldest venture into absurdity, but he certainly "goes for it" as it were. Beau Is Afraid runs for three exhausting hours and is a self-described "Nightmare comedy; a Jewish Lord of the Rings" about an eccentric loner who is just trying to visit his doting mother. While this sounds simple enough, the resulting film is anything but. Aster piles on the questions without answering them, unless the audience member is both saintly patient and has as off-the-wall of an imagination as the movie's auteur writer/director does. While this is no doubt frustrating in many respects, it is also exactly what makes the film such an interesting experience. Joaquin Phoenix is typically immersive as either the word's worst or most relentlessly unlucky son; overweight, gray, balding, shlubby, and as the title would suggest, is host to a plethora of fears that primarily stem around his birth-giver who likewise may or may not be the world's worst or unluckiest mother. Assuming that most if not the entirely of the film is "merely' a psychological fever dream that is taking place in Beau's troubled head, it is impossible to land on any solid conclusions. That said, Aster is not making something that is spoon-fed ready for any viewer and watching him therapeutically let lose with a hefty budget as well as A-list talent in front of the screen is the stuff that might garnish some aggressive head shakes while simultaneously delighting those who want their genre excursions to take much more wild chances.
Dir - Elizabeth Banks
Overall: MEH
Expecting anything than what was delivered in Elizabeth Banks' latest directorial effort Cocaine Bear is probably a fool's errand as it banks, (pun intended), on a catchy title, as well as a goofy premise that results in a barely engaging series of checkpoints to get to the credits. In other words, it kind of sucks. On the one hand, this might be surprising being distributed by Universal
Pictures and having an A-lister behind the lens, as the minimal effort deserves fair comparisons to deliberate anti-classics like Snake's on a Plane or pick your favorite production from The Asylum. Clearly made on as small of a budget as possible, the simple movie trailer would suffice in saving people ninety-five minutes of sitting through lame jokes, lazy characterizations, monotonous pacing, a cartoon CGI title "monster", and some insulting nonsense about family at the end. The script is downright embarrassing, missing countless opportunities to go for a wilder tone with such undoubtedly asinine material that could have played up the obviously misleading "based on a true story" tag to more ridiculous heights. Instead, everything is underwritten and all of the gags stutter and stumble without any sense of what type of movie this is even supposed to be. It is more bland than bad, which in effect actually makes it that much more bad.
Dir - Magnus Martens
Overall: WOOF
Norwegian director Margnus Martens' mostly English-speaking, R-rated holiday romp There's Something in the Barn comes after a long line of both better and worse movies of a similar ilk. Fish out of water high-jinks get immediately underway with an American family that inherits a remote estate in Norway, only to get tormented by child-sized garden gnomes. Said family is made up exclusively of four cliches; the clueless dipshit dad, the cheery stepmom who finally snaps, the smart-ass teenage daughter who constantly mopes about having to move to a new house away from her friends, and the kid brother that no one believes who is the only one to both see and deal with the mischievous thing of the title that is in the barn. Stereotypes abound with the depiction of the locals as well, with "jokes" about lutefisk, every TV channel having nothing but skiing on, Norwegians, (and elves), loving them some alcohol and giving their children wine, etc. Such lazy tropes would be all fine and good if any of them were remotely amusing, but this is hardly possible with such annoying characters and a point-by-point, derivative plot construction that seems as if it was AI-generated. Christmas horror movies have long been less than a dime a dozen and the offensively lame Gremlins in Norway Except Elves easily fails to stand-out amongst the horde.
No comments:
Post a Comment