Hollowest Earth

GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE

2024

Directed by Adam Wingard

Written by Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett, Jeremy Slater, and Adam Wingard

Spoilers: moderate

Disney's Challengers, part XI: Après moi, le déluge

ROCK-A-DOODLE

1992

Directed by Don Bluth

Written by David N. Weiss and numerous others (based on the play Chantecler by Edmond Rostand)

Spoilers: moderate

From shell's heart I stab at thee

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON

2022

Directed by Dean Fleischer Camp

Written by Jenny Slate, Nick Paley, and Dean Fleischer Camp

Spoilers: moderate

Census Bloodbath: A true crime

RETURN TO HORROR HIGH

And once again we welcome you, to our October Switcheroo

Where Brennan Klein deigns to review nice old sci-fi, like I would do.

But pretending to alliance, Brennan sends me 80s violence!

Cardboard Bloodbath, Census Science, demands psychic realignment.

Oh we have fun—requisite links.  Here's hoping that not too much stinks.

Poetry blows, J. Slasherfan thinks. Give me TITS and DEATH, that's my kink!

1987

Directed by Bill Froelich

Written by Bill Froelich, Dana Escalante, Mark Lisson, and Greg H. Sims

Ready player none

SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY

2021

Written and directed by Al G. Rhythm

Spoiler alert: oh, Christ, don't let me ruin the labyrinthine twists and turns of Space Jam: A New Legacy for you

Cardboard Science: Challenger of the unknown

THE LOST WORLD

1960

Directed by Irwin Allen

Written by Charles Bennett and Irwin Allen

Spoiler alert: moderate

Predator Week, part IV: The day the Earth stood up, walked out of the theater, and asked for its money back

THE PREDATOR

So now I can see why I might have dragged my feet on finishing this particular retrospective—it must have been a premonition of utter shit.  Not only the worst film in its series, The Predator is quite probably the worst film of its whole year, and damned if I didn't expect much, much better from this franchise and from these creators than that.

2018

Directed by Shane Black

Written by Fred Dekker and Shane Black

Spoiler alert: high

Please Mr. Kennedy, don't shoot me into outer space

HIGH LIFE

Man, fuck this shit.

2019

Directed by Claire Denis

Written by Jean-Pol Fargeau and Claire Denis

Spoiler alert: moderate

A mother is a woman who can take the place of anyone, but whose place no one else can take

BRAID

Like a game of Operation where someone keeps touching the sides on purpose.

2018

Written and directed by Mitzi Peirone

Spoiler alert: pretty much N/A, but let's say "moderate"

Obama's weather machine

GEOSTORM

On the plus side, once we finish cooking our green planet into a nice shade of brown, there won't be anybody left to make movies like Geostorm.

2017

Directed by Dean Devlin

Written by Paul Guyot and Dean Devlin

With Gerard Butler (Jake Lawson), Jim Sturgess (Max Lawson), Abbie Cornish (Agent Sarah Wilson), Ed Harris (Sec. State Leonard Dekkom), Andy Garcia (President Andrew Palma), Alexandra Maria Lara (Cmdr. Ute Fassbinder), Zazie Beetz (Dana), and Talitha Bateman (Hannah Lawson)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Alien Week, part VI: The war of the worlds

ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM

Oh, right: this is the one that really pissed everyone off.  As well it should have, for Requiem isn't just the nadir of this franchise; it's perilously close to being the nadir of 21st century filmmaking, period.  Truly, it is inept in ways you've never seen before, will never see again, and—not to put too fine a point on it—it's inept in ways you don't even see at all.  What a calamity this film is.

2007

Directed by Colin Strause and Greg Strause

Written by Shane Salerno

With Johnny Lewis (Ricky), Steven Pasquale (Dallas), Kristen Hager (Jesse), Reiko Aylesworth (Kelly), Ian Whyte ("Wolf"), and Tom Woodruff, Jr. (the Predalien)

Spoiler alert: moderate

He hit me, mother, he hit me hard, but it didn't hurt—it felt like a kiss

CAROUSEL

Not even being good in the first place leaves this sexist anti-classic nowhere to hide, so now that we've found it, let's punish it.

1956

Directed by Henry King

Written by Phoebe Ephron, Henry Ephron, Benjamin Glazer, Richard Rodgers, and Oscar Hammerstein II (based on play based on the book Liliom by Ferenc Molnar)

With Gordon MacRae (Billy Bigelow), Shirley Jones (Julie Jordan), Barbara Ruick (Carrie Pipperidge), Rupert Rounseville (Enoch Snow), Susan Luckey (Louise Bigelow), Audrey Christie (Mrs. Mullin), Cameron Mitchell (Jigger Craigin), and Gene Lockhart (The Starkeeper)

Spoiler alert: severe

Super Week, Addendum: Leave this place, and do no harm!

SUPERGIRL

Now, what I said was, there was no such thing as a bad Superman movie—and it's a shame that it has to be phrased that misogynistically.  But here we are, and no matter how I phrase it, our return to Kryptonian cinema leads us to one of the most legendarily awful movies of the whole 1980s.

1984

Directed by Jeannot Szwarcz

Written by David Odell

With Helen Slater (Kara Zor-El/Linda Lee), Mia Farrow (Alura Zor-El), Peter O'Toole (Zaltar), Maureen Teefy (Lucy Lane), Hart Bochner (Ethan), Marc McClure (Jimmy Olsen), Brenda Vicarro (Bianca), Peter Cook (Nigel), and Faye Dunaway (Selena)

Spoiler alert: moderate

The film that J.R. shot (until he was absolutely, positively, 100% sure it was dead)

BEWARE! THE BLOB

Whatever it is, it just isn't my scene.

1972

Directed by Larry Hagman

Written by Jack Woods, Anthony Harris, Richard Clair, and Jack Harris

With Robert Walker Jr. (Bobby Hartford), Gwynne Gilford (Lisa Clark), Godfrey Cambridge (Chester), Richard Stahl (Edward Fazio), Richard Webb (Sheriff Jones), and a few other people you may or may not remember from drunken bouts of watching Nick-at-Nite

Spoiler alert: moderate

Cardboard Science: Five brave men go to probe the mysteries of Uranus

JOURNEY TO THE SEVENTH PLANET

Cardboard Science returns for 2016 with the worst old crappy sci-fi film we've so far reviewed.

1962

Directed by Sid Pink

Written by Ib Melchior and Sid Pink

With Carl Ottosen (Eric, some brand of mission commander), John Agar (Don), Peter Monch (Karl), Ove Sprogoe (Barry), Louis Miehe-Renard (Svend), and Ann Smyrner (Ingrid)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Reviews from gulag: Dear film critics, please stop confusing "insuperable boredom" with "challenging art"

As we continue to catch up with the last gasps of last year, let us briefly discuss 45 Years, Anomalisa, The Assassin, and Memories of the Sword.

45 YEARS (2015)

Kate and Geoff Mercer (Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay) are old British people, with 45 years of marriage behind them.  But seven days before their newest anniversary—which has taken on a great deal of significance already, thanks to their 40th anniversary's preemption by Geoff's heart issues—they receive a letter from the far-off land of Switzerland, addressed specifically to Geoff, informing him that all these years later, they have found the central metaphor of this film, encased and preserved in glacial ice: the body of Geoff's old lover, Katya, who died back in 1962 when she fell into a mountain crevasse.  Geoff grows increasingly compulsive about remembering Katya—and Kate grows increasingly apprehensive that she was not loved the way she always thought she was.

The thing that 45 Years is about is very, very obvious, which I presume my plot synopsis makes clear: both its main characters are, in many respects, crybabies—Geoff, because he still gives a shit about a woman who died almost half a century ago, and Kate, because she cannot understand why Geoff might give a shit, and also because despite being a grown woman of advanced age, she operates under the bizarre impression that our spouses (if we ever wind up with spouses) actually see us as the fulfillment of every stray fantasy about their ideal partner.  Given that the only mate that most of us would ever actually perceive as truly perfect would be a telepathic shapeshifter with complementary sexual fetishes (who also shits dollar bills—or pounds sterling, if you like), I doubt any of us will ever find precisely what we're looking for in this world.  This, you know, is the way of things.  It's no reason to be unhappy.  But, on the other hand, most of us are crybabies (yours truly included!).  And unhappy we often are.

Reviews from gulag: We shall never be free of 2015, no matter how much we might prefer to be

Here's some of the things I've seen recently, ranging from the truly terrible to the marginally okay, and none of which I had the stomach to write full reviews for: Tangerine, Girlhood, White God, and Home.  2015 was really not a good year for film.

TANGERINE (2015)

When Sin-dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) gets out of jail, she finds that her lover (James Ransome) has moved on.  She'd lean on her friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor) for emotional support, but marauding across Los Angeles and dragging the other woman (Mickey O'Hagan) by the hair through the uncaring streets of the city somehow strikes her as more cathartic.  Note: this movie is allegedly progressive.

Feted as one of the better and more surprising movies of the year, the real surprise of Tangerine comes from both barrels.  First, it's about as fucking pointless as a movie can be, seeming in many ways more like a demo reel for co-writer/director Sean Baker's basic ability to put a series of shots in some sort of narrative order, and for its actors' basic ability to read lines and convey broad emotions, than it ever seems like some kind of useful motion picture.  Second, if I were a transwoman, and particularly a transwoman of color, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want this to be the movie that raised awareness of my issues, insofar as the story (such as it is) boils down to the following: "an unstable brown transwoman prostitute somewhat brutally kidnaps a tiny white XX prostitute in order to exact revenge upon her, for during the latter's monthlong stint in jail, the former had sex with their mutual pimp, whom the latter conceives as her actual boyfriend."  For the sake of argument, we'll concede that our heroine, Sin-dee, is simply tragically deluded—and that it's not just that Sean Baker thinks prostitutes are really this stupid.  (Though isn't it nice that it's the tiny white XX prostitute who gets to point out the gap in the lead's logic?  Maybe Sean Baker just thinks transwomen are this stupid.)  Anyway, what we're left with is a revenge movie where the impetus for revenge is morally repulsive and the subject of the revenge is a sexually exploited victim.  Happy holidays, losers.  (It's also a Christmas movie.)

Putting the "list" in miserablist! (or, the films of David Fincher ranked, nos. 10-9)

For going on twenty years now—my how time flies—David Fincher has been our preeminent auteur of gross, depressing tales of murder and mayhem.  Almost uniquely, Fincher has mastered a high-wire balancing act in the thriller genre, crafting films that are formally pristine, morally bracing, thematically insidious, emotionally devastating, and—most important of all—highly entertaining.  Though chiefly noted for this selfsame prediliction toward the pleasantly unpleasant, Fincher has tried his hand at other things, too—one time it was good, one time it was the worst thing ever.  On this episode: we fervently hope that he never, ever tries one of those particular things again, because we love him, and want him to succeed in life.

Spoiler alert: high

What Schrodinger's cat usually does in his box

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Monsters Mashed: 10 IF cat THEN canary 20 IF canary GOTO 10

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