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Mike Schulz discusses with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra the recent incident where the whole of Oppenheimer was posted on Twitter. One presumes it has since been taken down. Director Christopher Nolan has urged fans to hold out for the DVD/Blu Ray version of his film, and, given the uniqueness of the audiovisual spectacle, one is inclined to take his word for it. Getting right into it, Schulz confirms his disengagement from The Marvels, directed Nia DaCosta and starring Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Zawe Ashton, Gary Lewis, Park Seo-joon, Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur, Saagar Shaikh, and Samuel L Jackson — that is, his disengagement from being able to engage fully with the story.
Given that the Marvel shows on Disney presuppose that you’ve been following them all since Jump Street and you’re alert to every character development in the film, so the filmmakers feel no need to provide a mini-data-drop for those poor, beknighted fools who’ve walked into The Marvels cold, how else could it be? You’re either jacked into that world or you aren’t. Despite what the film’s poor box office would lead you to believe, The Marvels isn’t a bad film: The FX are okay, but the story takes for granted that its stakes are yay-high — the end-of-the-world-nigh threat if the heroes cannot rescue the thing from the thing and restore it to that other thing in time — and Schulz is just done with that poor excuse for storytelling. Also, he found Larson incredibly boring as Captain Marvel, but Vellani as Ms Marvel a delight. Levora, who likewise doesn’t care about the franchise, points out that there have been 33 Marvel films since the release of Iron Man in 2006 and 25 Marvel TV shows. A case can be made that we’ve reached Peak Marvel. How long ago that occurred is a subject that will undoubtedly be debated by future historians, but present-day pundits can agree that the cinemas are saturated with superheroes. Within the franchise’s formula for hooking viewers into watching the next installment upon the next installment, ad infinitum, lie the seeds of its eventual destruction, as Marvel has eleven more films in the pipeline, and it’s going to be painful for the producers when more and more viewers decide that they are done with these world-ending shenanigans, and the films make $20 million, maybe $50 million, on $200 million budgets. Happily, there are other films one can see, like The Holdovers, directed by Alexander Payne and starring Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and Dominic Sessa. Set in 1970 at a New Hampshire boarding school, where Paul Hunham (Giamatti), an uptight classics teacher disliked by his students and barely tolerated by his colleagues, has to stay behind and look after a handful of students, including Angus Tully (Sessa), a student whose mother is honeymooning with her new husband and wants her boy to stay behind. Schulz thought the material clichéd, but “really well-written cliché.” He also thinks Giamatti isn’t in any danger of losing fans or winning an Oscar, given the character is well within his wheelhouse of tight-assed blowhards. As Levora says, Paul Giamatti can never not be Paul Giamatti, citing a recent viral Twitter pic of him as he was in his car waiting in line at an In-N-Out joint. The look on his face, caught in the driver’s side mirror looking back at his photographer, says to the world, Wherever Paul Giamatti goes, there Paul Giamatti is. Luckily for David Fincher, he doesn’t have that particular worry: He can set up camp at his look In-N-Out in a loincloth and no one would be the wiser as to his identity. His latest film, The Killer (or, rather, The K….r), starring Michael Fassbender, Arliss Howard, Charles Parnell, Kerry O’Malley, Sala Baker, Sophie Charlotte, and Tilda Swinton, is streaming currently on Netflix. This, apparently, is Fincher’s lot for the rest of his career, judging by the interviews he’s given where he’s stated his preference for Netflix over the studios. “I just wish the movie was better,” Schulz says, causing Levora to groan in pain. Based on the French graphic-novel series of the same name by Alexis “Matz” Nolent and Luc Jacamon, Fassbender plays the titular killer, who botches a hit and lams it to a hideout in the Dominican Republic. There, he finds his employers have beaten his girlfriend, Magdala (Charlotte), in retaliation for his sloppiness. The Killer then spends the remainder of the film following the trail of assassins who are bent on putting his retirement into retirement. Despite such a rich premise, Schulz found the proceedings dull, Fassbender’s nameless character without any character (which was probably the whole point of the guy, but still. . .), and The Killer’s relentless, neuropathy-inducing voiceover narration tiresome. Then Schulz saw “the most well-funded church pageant you’ve ever seen, written by a couple of really industrious seventh-graders,” Journey to Bethlehem. Adam Anders and Peter Barsocchini, the seventh graders in question, do their version of the Passion Play, which stars Fiona Palomo, Milo Manheim, Lecrae, Joel Smallbone, Antonio Banderas, Antonio Cantos, Stephanie Gil, Rizwan Manji, Geno Segers, and Omid Djalili, and includes slapstick numbers (the Three Kings as The Three Stooges), musical numbers (Banderas, as King Herod, sings “It’s Good to Be the King” — “Mel Brooks could not have done any better,” Schulz says), anachronistic dialogue, and overall camp tone — “camp” understood here to mean “unintentional irony and bad taste that strives for rapturous passion and inspires only derisive laughter,” and not “a bunch of queens swanning about in drag pretending to be Barbara Streisand or Cher.” Schulz says he laughed heartily throughout the whole production, but witnessed audience members who received this tragically-ludicrous rendition of Christ’s birth with the reverence they might otherwise bring to a meeting with their cardinal. Anders, who also directed the film, has made a Christmas classic — just not the one he might have intended. And a month in advance, too! As for previews, Eli Roth provides a more holiday-appropriate slasher film in Thanksgiving, starring Patrick Dempsey, Addison Rae, Milo Manheim, Jalen Thomas Brooks, Nell Verlaque, Rick Hoffman, and Gina Gershon. The film, which involves a murderous pilgrim at loose in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is Roth’s homage to the 2007 Grindhouse films of Quentin Tarantino (Death Proof) and Robert Rodriguez (Planet Terror) — both of which were homages to the low-budget, zero-empathy grindhouse films of the Seventies. Those precious few who saw Grindhouse in theaters also saw mock-trailers for films like Hobo with a Shotgun and Thanksgiving. Director Jason Eisener made good on the former four years later, with Rutger Hauer as the titular Hobo; and now, sixteen years later, Roth has come through with his contribution. (Tagline: “Thanksgiving: There Will Be No Leftovers.”) For all the reasons cited above, how could one dare avoid such a film? Though Roth might want to remind audiences what the whole “grindhouse” concept was all about, because it was a general lack of awareness that killed Grindhouse’s financial prospects back in ’07; and only through the passage of time (and DVD releases) did they recoup their investment. No reason why history should repeat itself at the box office here. We also have Next Goal Wins to look forward to. Directed by Taika Waititi and starring Michael Fassbender, Oscar Kightley, Kaimana, David Fane, Rachel House, Beulah Koale, Will Arnett, and Elisabeth Moss, Next Goal Wins is a biographical sports comedy-drama concerning the efforts by Coach Thomas Rongen (Fassbender, naturally) to lead the American Samoa national fútbol team, considered one of the weakest teams in the world, to qualifiy for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. (How bad were they? The year prior to Rongen’s hiring, they were 0-31. Ouch.) If sports flicks aren’t your bag of popcorn, perhaps you might get into Trolls Band Together, director Walt Dohrn’s third installment in the Trolls franchise; then again, you might not. Voiced by Anna Kendrick, Justin Timberlake, Zooey Deschanel, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Icona Pop, Anderson .Paak, Ron Funches, Kenan Thompson, Kunal Nayya, Eric André, Kid Cudi, Daveed Diggs, Troye Sivan, Camila Cabello, Amy Schumer (*groan*), Andrew Rannells, RuPaul, and Zosia Mamet, this animated jukebox musical comedy promises to be — something. Also promising something is Disney’s Wish, another animated film, this one a fantasy musical, directed by Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn and voiced by Ariana DeBose, Chris Pine, Alan Tudyk, Angelique Cabral, Victor Garber, Natasha Rothwell, Jennifer Kumiyama, Harvey Guillén, Evan Peters, Ramy Youssef, and Jon Rudnitsky. Finally, since the world has been clamoring ceaselessly for a Hunger Games prequel, director Francis Lawrence delivers the fifth film in the franchise with The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, starring Rachel Zegler, Tom Blyth, Peter Dinklage, Hunter Schafer, Josh Andrés Rivera, and Viola Davis. Set 64 years before the events of the first Hunger Games film, Schulz identifies the plot as “how Donald Sutherland became Donald Sutherland” — or, rather, President Coriolanus Snow, the main antagonist of the series. How did Donald Sutherland become Donald Sutherland, you might ask? The answer is in the haircuts: Sutherland began his career in the Sixties with normal hair and generally good grooming; by the Seventies, he had a mustache and a kinky ‘fro; and, from the Eighties onward, he went back to clean-cut when he started getting grey hairs. And that’s what becomes a screen legend most. Happy Thanksgiving!
“The Holdovers,” “The Killer,” “Journey to Bethlehem,” and “The Marvels”