Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

  Has it been enough time that we can talk about this?  I will still try to avoid spoilers.

Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is feeling a little wistful after seeing the girl he might have loved, Christine (Rachel McAdams), marrying someone else.  So when America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) drops in with the power to traverse the multiverse, well, who wouldn't want to take a peek and see where they might have ended up if they had made a different choice?  Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) sure does.  Wanda has not forgiven or forgotten that she was forced to give up her sons, and with the power of the Darkhold, she can steal enough of America's power to travel to a timeline where she's still a mother and damn the consequences.

There are major cameos that are literally spoiled on the IMDb page but I will not list them here.  Instead, I'm going to talk about how Sam Raimi brought horror into the MCU.  And this is a horror movie.  It is Evil Dead Lite, complete with Bruce Campbell.  There are a few really gory moments and at least one jump scare.  If Moon Knight was too much for you, go ahead and steer clear of Multiverse of Madness.  If you are a gorehound for whom too much fake blood is never enough, this will feel like a no-calorie dessert.  But there is a sweet spot in the middle for people who have been getting a little tired of how nice the MCU is and want to see more of a darker edge.  It's probably not suitable for the youngest members of your house, but older kids (11+) will be okay.

Multiverse of Madness is currently only showing in theaters but it'll move to Disney+ in a couple of months.  

The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming (1966)

  In the 60s, this was a comedy.  Now, the hysterical-fear mongering-descent-into-violence isn't quite as funny for some reason.

A Russian sub runs aground off a small New England island.  A small crew is dispatched to shore to find some local maritime maps.  Instead, they find a writer (Carl Reiner) and his family, a gossipy telephone operator (Tessie O'Shea), a put-upon police chief (Brian Keith), and a bloodthirsty if geriatric local militia leader (Paul Ford).  The Russians just want to go home peacefully but as the rumors fly faster and thicker than sand midges, leaving without bloodshed becomes less and less certain.

This was a hard movie to sit through.  I found almost every character annoying, especially the kid played by Sheldon Collins.  I wanted to string that little brat up by the ears every time he opened his mouth.  Most of the humor was slapstick, which I have a low tolerance for, and the romance subplot was by-the-numbers boring.  Alan Arkin was good and it was nice to see Carl Reiner look so young, but those are the only nice comments I can make.  

The Russians are currently streaming on Tubi, but it's a big nyet from me.

The Boys in the Band (1970)

  This is the most uncomfortable house party since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  Content warning:  homophobic slurs, racial slurs

Michael (Kenneth Nelson) is hosting a birthday party for Harold (Leonard Frey) when he gets an out-of-the-blue call from Alan (Peter White), a college friend, that sends him into a self-destructive spiral.  Michael is gay.  All his friends are gay.  Alan is straight and homophobic.  Old resentments and bigotry surface, dragging every attendee into their riptide.  

This is one of those Important Films that everyone should watch but it is not a fun movie.  There is a lot of self-loathing and recriminations, portrayals that were groundbreaking at the time but now seem like harmful stereotypes, and a depressing pall of inevitability hanging over the whole thing.  

It is still stunningly relevant to today which is why Jim Parsons remade it in 2020.  I didn't see that version so I don't know if anything was changed to reflect modern sensibilities, but the 1970 film is incredibly hard to find so I mention it anyway.  I watched it on the Criterion Channel but before last month, it was in my queue for something like nine years.

Molly's Game (2017)

  This was very nearly a good movie.  It's so close.  There was one scene that just ruined it for me, though, and we'll talk about that in white so it doesn't spoil anything.

Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) was on the verge of an Olympic career when an injury destroyed her dreams.  At loose ends, Molly moves to Hollywood and takes a menial job with a douchebag real estate agent (Jeremy Strong) who also happens to run an underground poker game.  Within a few months, Molly is running her own game until it's undermined by another douchebag jealous of the attention Molly shows every player but him (Michael Cera).  She moves to New York, hires some Penthouse Playmates, and sets up an even more exclusive poker game.  But as the stakes get higher, her personal risk also increases, and the lines between 'legal' and 'illegal' become crossed.  

Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed this, so it is very talky.  Chastain is good in everything but this isn't my favorite performance of hers.  Kevin Costner plays against type here, which is always nice to see, even if he directly contributed to why I disliked the film ultimately.  You want to talk about that?  Okay.  **SPOILERS**  Everything boils down to this crisis of conscience moment where Molly is on a precipice looking at jail time for refusing to cooperate with prosecutors.  She suddenly sees her emotionally distant father in a crowd and he leads her on a sprint psychology session where he distills all her issues down to the fact that he was a lousy dad and she knew it, resented it, and has built her entire career around amassing power over men to compensate for it.  It's lazy, reductive, and soundly defeats the entire purpose of this movie, which revolves around Molly's agency, by having her dad spoon-feed her all the answers to her problems.  **END SPOILERS**

It's not like this is a bad film, but I found it to be unsatisfying.  Maybe you'll enjoy it more than I did.  It's currently streaming on Netflix.

A Little Night Music (1977)

  Film adaptations of musicals are tricky things.  This one mostly works on the strength of its music.

Lawyer Frederick Engerman (Len Cariou) has married a beautiful girl half his age, Anne (Lesley-Ann Down), but her reluctance to have sex with him leads him to seek out an actress, Desiree Armfeldt (Elizabeth Taylor), that he had a fond affair with years ago.  Desiree loved Frederick and comes up with a plan to get him to leave his wife by inviting them both out to the country for a weekend at her mother's (Hermione Gingold) estate.  What she doesn't know is that Anne is friends with Charlotte (Diana Rigg), who is married to Carl-Magnus Mittleheim (Laurence Guittard), Desiree's current lover.  Anne invites the Mittleheim's to the estate as well.  Hijinks ensue.

This could have easily been named Men Who Aren't Shit and the Women Who Inexplicably Love Them.  Neither Frederick, Carl-Magnus, nor Frederick's grown ass son, Erich (Christopher Guard) are worth the time and effort these women spend on them.

Taylor is decent in this but the real star is Riggs.  She was magnetic in every scene she was in.  The men are kind of interchangeable, if I'm honest.  Down is a good actress but her character was extremely irritating and Anne's motivations made no sense to me.  Like, you aren't fucking your husband, you don't want to fuck your husband, but you're mad some other lady fucked your husband fifteen years ago?  ???  When you were 3???  Bizarre.

This is not streaming anywhere to my knowledge.  I got it on disc from Netflix.  It might be worth it for Sondheim fans, but you'd probably be better off finding the original with Glynis Johns in the Desiree role.

The Batman (2022)

  I did not hate this movie!

Like many of you, I'm a little Batman-ed out.  Zach Snyder Batman has not been my favorite interpretation and I was concerned about yet another unnecessary origin story, but Matt Reeves Batman was refreshingly to-the-point.

Gotham City is wracked with corruption.  The mayor, Don Mitchell, Jr. (Rupert Penry-Jones) is up for re-election against a feisty and motivated opponent, Bella Reál (Jayme Lawson), but is spared from losing at the polls by being brutally murdered by the Riddler (Paul Dano).  Riddler has a grand scheme to expose the many ills of his hometown, leaving a complicated trail of clues for Gotham's caped crusader (Robert Pattinson), in whom he feels a kindred spirit.  Batman follows the leads to an underground club run by the Penguin (an unrecognizable Colin Farrell), and a missing girl named Annika (Hana Hrzic), who might have witnessed some shady dealings of the late Mayor.  

Somebody finally let Batman actually do some detective shit!  Yes, he's still dark and gritty and emo AF but this time it works.  He looks like a 20-year-old billionaire stuck in permanent adolescence trying to figure out exactly what running around the city in costume is getting him.  Reeves has said in interviews that he wanted Batman to be more DIY, less high-tech, and that grungy effect works to astonishing degree.  And there are moments of humor that work even more because the rest of the film is so stark.  No spoilers, but about 3/4 of the way through, there is a reveal and Pattinson's "wait, wut" look is pitch-perfect.  Like, you can see his brain just blank and then frantically try and cover for it.  It's subtle but great character work.

But honestly the thing that impressed me the most was Colin Farrell.  It is unreal how completely he disappeared into that character.  Not even his voice sounds the same.  It might be his best performance ever and it's in a goddamn comic book movie.  That is wild.  The Batman is currently streaming on HBO Max but I don't know for how much longer.

13 Hours (2016)

  It's Micheal Bay.  That's pretty much all you need to know.

In 2016, after the death of Muammar Gaddafi, the U.S. ambassador, Chris Stevens (Matt Letscher), was attacked by Libyan insurgents.  His security team called for aid from the nearby black site run by the CIA, and government contractors were dispatched to their rescue.  The violence spilled over to the black site, and the contractors defended the CIA analysts for the eponymous 13 hours until they could be rescued.

This movie is jingoistic, hyper-masculine, patriarchal nonsense.  It waxes lyrical about the heroism of these highly-paid private contractors, consistently referring to them as soldiers when the correct term is mercenary, and glosses over the blatant illegality of the CIA operating in Libya under the pretense of foiling terror, when all of their meetings are about oil and how best to strip natural resources from a nascent government.  Nobody deserved to die over it, but it's hard to feel sympathy for a nest of spies being rooted out, even if they're our spies.  

Michael Bay has never made a bad action movie.  This is perfectly serviceable and maybe even enjoyable on its face.  At least it's not giant robots fighting each other again.  13 Hours is currently streaming on Paramount+.

Anomalisa (2015)

  This is a deeply weird movie and it will not be for everyone.  

A man (David Thewlis) stuck in a deep depression over his life finds it temporarily alleviated when he meets a young woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) at a conference.  

This was written by Charlie Kaufman and is reputed to be the work the author finds most personal.  Viewed in that light, it's hard to criticize.  But I found the character sympathetic, if not relatable.  

The style is interesting, being stop-motion animation, and highlights the surreality of the film.  Nothing is real but we must react as if it is.  It's off-balance, sometimes clumsy, deliberately to invoke the anxiety the character feels.  

Did I like it?  No.  Will you like it?  Probably not.  Some people like awkwardness but there's no humor to this, only sadness.  Is it Art?  I think it is.  As long as you're prepared for that going in, there's definitely a lot to unpack with it.  It's currently streaming on Kanopy, if you're interested.