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Mike Schulz, Dave Levora, and Darren Pitra take an extended stroll down Memory Lane with the films from 1989. Road House wasn’t the only film released that year, you know. That’s what Wikipedia tells us, anyway.
To the movies, ladies and gentlemen!
- Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, directed by Gil Kenan and starring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, William Atherton, Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, Celeste O’Connor, and Logan Kim. How did this franchise become so serious? And seriously unfunny? And why did the audience with which he saw it eat every line up as if S J Perelman supplied the dialogue? This was an occasion that Schulz felt a frission of existential horror at the scene unfolding before him — and it wasn’t the film.
- Late Night with the Devil, a real-time found-footage horror film directed by Cameron and Colin Cairnes and starring David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss, Fayssal Bazzi, Ingrid Torelli, Rhys Auteri, Georgina Haig, and Josh Quong Tar. Dastmalchian, in his first lead role, plays a Seventies-era talk-show host who decides to hold a stunt broadcast on Halloween by hosting a demon-possessed girl and a medium. This, and Immaculate, redeemed Schulz’s movie-going experience.
- Immaculate, directed by Michael Mohan and starring Sydney Sweeney, Álvaro Morte, Benedetta Porcaroli, Dora Romano, Giorgio Colangeli, and Simona Tabasco. Sweeney plays an innocent young pregnant virgin in a convent; and it only gets weirder and nuttier from there. In this instance, this is not a bad thing. It helps that Sweeney has actual acting ability from which she can draw.
- Shirley, a bio-drama about the 1972 presidential run of Shirley Chisholm, directed by John Ridley and starring Regina King, Lance Reddick, Lucas Hedges, Brian Stokes Mitchell, André Holland, Terrence Howard, Christina Jackson, Michael Cherrie, Dorian Missick, Amirah Vann, W Earl Brown, Brad James, and Reina King. Schulz felt let down by the tack Ridley took with the material, insofar as it couldn’t celebrate the character of Chisholm without pointing out that she didn’t win her run for the presidency. Oh, word? We must have missed the memo on that bit of history! Good grief, filmmakers. . .
- The Road House remake, directed by Doug Liman and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Daniela Melchior, Conor McGregor (in his feature film debut), J D Pardo, Arturo Castro, and Billy Magnussen. Schulz has never seen the first film, believe it or not. He had no basis for comparison, so he was robbed of anything that might sustain his interest. Seriously, Schulz? The Patrick Swayze original was on cable practically every day throughout the Nineties! How? HOW?!
As for previews:
- Asphalt City, released in Europe in 2023 as Black Flies, directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, and starring Sean Penn, Tye Sheridan, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Raquel Nave, Kali Reis, Michael Pitt, Katherine Waterston, and Mike Tyson. Schulz is keen to see this because it’s been a hot minute since we’ve seen Sean Penn in anything (Licorice Pizza!), and he wants to see what the former young punk renegade can pull off nowadays. Good enough reason, Schulz.
- In the Land of Saints and Sinners, released last year, directed by Robert Lorenz, and starring Kerry Condon, Liam Neeson, Jack Gleeson, Colm Meaney, Sarah Greene, Niamh Cusack, and Ciarán Hinds. Finbar Murphy (Neeson) plays a former assassin who (surprise) retires to an Irish town, but (surprise surprise) can’t leave behind his violent past. Levora does an incredibly funny imaginary dialogue between two Irish tough guys at cross-purposes with one another, with one trying to rhetorically leverage the other back into “the loife.”. Seriously, you hear Levora and you swear you’ve already seen Shamrock O’Blarney Stone — or, rather, everything you’d expect to see/hear from the latest Liam-Neeson-with-a-gun shoot-’em-up.
- Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, directed by Adam Wingard and starring Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Dan Stevens, Kaylee Hottle, Alex Ferns, and Fala Chen as the humans. More of the “explosive” showdown between the fire-breathing lizard and the chest-beating gorilla. What does the “X” stand for, again? Opinions differ. To some, it’s “against”; to others, it’s “multiplied by,” which seems problematic if you’re only getting the two monsters. The honorable Elijah Muhammad taught that members of the Nation of Islam took “X” as their surnames in order to emphasize their status of a dispossessed people, stolen from their homeland and cut off from their roots. Somehow, that last one doesn’t seem like it would apply to Wingard’s film. Levora thinks there’s no way in Hell that this film will outdo Godzilla Minus One. He’s probably right. But what would the honorable Elijah Muhammad think?