Dir - Casper Kelly
Overall: GOOD
Having already made a name for himself with Too Many Cooks and a handful of other oddball shorts and TV work, filmmaker Casper Kelly crafted his absurdist full-length debut Adult Swim Yule Log. Also doubling as the network's first full-length, it is an impossible film to classify by design, Kelly utilizing a random concept such as someone walking into a yule log video and then taking it to wild terrain that no one could possibly foresee. His sheer vision is commendable as this is one of the most unpredictable genre movies of any kind, spiraling into everything from infantile-brained home invasion serial killers with psychotic mothers, to UFO landings, to surreal deals with the Devil, (or something), to curses, to animated objects wreaking bloody havoc, to spontaneous flashbacks, to themes of relationship commitment, moral relativism, and slavery of all things. It opens with two lengthy single takes, only switching to more conventional camera setups at the thirty-six minute mark, and it shifts through characters as much as it arbitrarily detours into nonsensical narrative twists and turns. Taken as a whole, it is a mess that collapses upon itself, but it never seems to be going for coherency in the first place. Working with a brisk shooting schedule and little money with local Atlanta actors, Kelly swings for the fences at every turn, crafting something that breaks as many rules as possible and keeps the viewer as confused as they are engaged.
Dir - Sam Raimi
Overall: MEH
Suffering from Phase Four MCU burnout, corporate tethering to other properties, shallow screenwriting, and an endless stream of numbing action sequences, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness squanders its potential for cult director Sam Raimi to collide the two genres that have made him a household name for the first time since 1990's far superior Darkman, that being horror and the superhero movie. The horror moments are sprinkled in more as window dressing than anything. We get Elizabeth Olsen going all red-eyed villainess who looks like a walking corpse at times, one of the alternate reality Benedict Cumberbatches literally being a walking corpse, CGI monsters galore, and a mild amount of bloodshed. Everywhere else, it is just another two hours of embarrassing platitudes and pedestrian character development shoehorned into a cacophony of unremarkable, loud, and cartoony computer generated spectacle. Every last set piece is so visually nauseating and boring that it makes the movie feel twice as long, which is a shame since this is the most gargantuan budget that Raimi has ever worked with. He could have had so much free reign to go hog-wild with the universe-hoping, but the results are generic at best and squander the celebrated filmmaker's singular and quirky mannerisms. This is Sam Raimi doing a competent, by-the-books superhero movie, nothing more. Which begs the question of why get him on board in the first place if all that he was able to do was shoehorn in his Oldsmobile Delta and a Bruce Campbell cameo, otherwise completely playing by the stale MCU rules.
Dir - Matt Vesely
Overall: MEH
The first collaborative effort between the South Australian Film Corporation and the Adelaide Film Festival initiative "Film Lab: New Voices", Monolith is refreshing and ambitious in its approach, despite its foibles. Apparently, director Matt Vesely and screenwriter Lucy Campbell's project beat out sixty-three other entries, and it is a shame that it comes up short despite what it does correctly. A gimmick movie, Lily Sullivan is the only actor on screen, playing a disgraced podcaster who speaks to various other people over the phone as she attempts to uncover a bizarre story for her conspiracy-adjacent program. The plot details are unsettling, strange, and engaging enough to keep the claustrophobic setting, (an isolated and spacious house that we barely see any of), from feeling stale, even if there is still some wheel-spinning along the way. Campbell's script seems more interested in building up the creepy mystery than either solving it or getting to the bottom of the questions that it raises about privileged people who may be due some comeuppance for past injustices. While Sullivan does fine if one-note work as a humorless woman who has gone through an emotional ringer even before we meet her, much of the voice work is melodramatic and forced, plus the ending fails to land despite its progression from the film's most WTF moment. Clean some elements up while diving more into others, (and leave Vesely's low-key style untouched), and it could have been something special, but instead, it just has the potential to be something special.
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