In a video uploaded back in November, TikTok user and musician @the_moonrocks explains how the Hunger Games prequel film focusing on Coriolanus Snow (AKA the future President Snow) follows story beats nearly identical to that of the Star Wars prequel films, which follow a young Anakin Skywalker before his rise as the evil Darth Vader.
Warning: Hunger Games and Star Wars spoilers below:
“Do you realize that the plot of this movie is literally just the fall of Anakin Skywalker? It is the same plot as Star Wars,” the user begins, referring to The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
He explains that both films follow a “young impoverished teen looking to create a better life for his family” who ventures into a “city full of politics in power, far away from the fighting of the outer world.”
Once they arrive in their respective city, their “talents and abilities” are noticed by the “absolute psychopath who is working in the shadows to fulfill a villainous plot,” who simultaneously wants to use the main character’s skills to advance their evil ambitions.
Along the way, each young man falls in love and starts a secret relationship with a beautiful, courageous young woman — Lucy Gray Baird or Padme Amidala, respectively — who is “violating a bunch of their society’s rules.”
However, his subsequent actions end up getting him “shunned by the very institution he swore his life to,” and when his lover refuses to go along with him, he flies into a “fit of rage.”
After murdering or nearly murdering his lover, he “fully succumbs to the evil and goes on to have a legacy as a child murderer.”
Reactions were mixed in the comments section of the viral TikTok, with some film aficionados pointing out that both plots simply follow the “classic hero’s journey/tragedy.”
“You mean… storytelling and genres and tropes all follow the same beats with different unique aspects? Fascinating,” one person sarcastically wrote.
“Everything has the plot of Star Wars because Star Wars was based on classic hero’s journey/tragedy, it’s literally at the heart of ALL media,” another user argued.
“THERE ARE ONLY SO MANY ARCHETYPES OF STORIES. THEY ARE RUNNING OUT OF IDEAS,” someone else commented.
The Worst Movies of 2023, According to Letterboxd
These 25 titles have the lowest average rating for 2023 titles on the social media movie website Letterboxd.
Out of the dozens of questions I got doing interviews for my Siskel & Ebert book, this was the hardest:
“What do you think of the state of film criticism today? Do you have any advice for aspiring film critics?”
You want to know the extremely intricate history of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert’s various television series on PBS and syndication? No problem! You want me to tell you how to become a critic? That’s tricky. Can you engineer impossibly good luck? Are you willing you write about your passions in your spare time while you pay your bills some other way, in or out of the online publishing world? Do you have a relentless work ethic? You’re going to need all of the above to even have a shot.
Contemplating those skills made me think about the lessons that were imparted to me when, many years ago now (ugh), I was a film student and aspiring writer myself. The best class I had at that time was a seminar on film criticism taught by J. Hoberman, then the senior film critic for The Village Voice. Hoberman’s nuts-and-bolts insights were revelatory. For years, I kept my notebook from his class in my office; if I ever needed inspiration, I would pick it up and flip through it. And when Hoberman was laid off by the Voice in January of 2012 in a very dumb and shortsighted decision, I turned ten of his most useful tips into a blog post for the company I was working for at the time.
Ironically, I got dumped by my own employer just a few weeks later. I went looking for the article I wrote about Hoberman recently, and it had been wiped from the internet as if it never existed, along with the entire archive of writing, podcasts, and videos that I and some very talented colleagues had poured our hearts and souls into for about seven years at that site. (Still want to be a film critic?)
So I went back to my original class notes, and found that Hoberman’s advice remains as useful and relevant as ever some two decades later (ugh ugh ugh). As a service to those who asked me for advice recently, I am printing the best I ever got here — ten lessons from someone who’s forgotten more about the craft and practice of film criticism than I’ll ever know. They’re more useful than anything I could come up with for aspiring (or practicing!) critics.
On the fundamentals: “Ask yourself the question, ‘What do people want to know about a movie that they’ve never seen?’”
On plot: “Plot synopses automatically ruin a review.”
On brevity: “Watch for excess words. If there’s a shorter word, use it.”
My daughters go through TV phases. They narrow in on one particular show until they have binged every episode, then rewatched every episode, then memorized every episode, at which point if some other series gets their attention, they may elect to start that process over again with this new object of fixation. In the last few years, we’ve had Paw Patrol phases, we’ve had Bluey phases, we’ve had Power Rangers phases, we’ve had Barbie phases, and as I’m writing these words I am just now realizing I’m a terrible father who lets his kids watch way too much television.
One of my kids’ most intense TV phases hit about two years ago, when they discovered a French animated series called Miraculous about a girl superhero named Ladybug and her super-powered friends. Over a period of several months, they watched well over 100 episodes of Miraculous, while filling up their playroom with Ladybug toys and dress-up sets.
Eventually they moved on to other things, as they always inevitably do, but they were very excited when I showed them the trailer for Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, The Movie. And no wonder; the trailer makes it look like a better-animated version of the TV series they loved.
A few weeks later, the film arrived on Netflix. My girls were ready. The Saturday morning after its streaming premiere they plopped down in front of the television for a new Ladybug adventure.
What they saw … confused them.
Yes, the Miraculous film was still about the exploits of Ladybug and her friends, including the roguish handsome Cat Noir. But themovie was also something the trailers never even hinted at: A full-blown musical.
My daughters weren’t necessarily upset, and they were happy to have new Miraculous content to watch for the first time in a while. But about 20 minutes in, my youngest daughter walked over to me and whispered “Dad, why are they singing so much?”
It was a fair question; the Miraculous TV series was definitely not a musical. I had a different question on my mind: If the Miraculous movie was a musical, why didn’t the characters sing in the trailer? And why are so many trailers for musicals lately doing the same thing: Hiding their true nature, and seemingly a huge selling point?
For another recent example, take a look at the trailers for Wonka. They make it look like a sweet comic fable for kids — which it is. It is also a full-on musical, which is barely alluded to except when Hugh Grant’s Oompa Loompa reprises the famous song from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. And because Grant’s song is a callback to the earlier movie, you might assume that it’s in there as an Easter egg, not as some grand indication that Wonka is a musical.
I’m also surprised how little the trailer for The Color Purple emphasizes the fact that it is based on a popular (and Tony Award-winning) Broadway musical. Yes, in one scene, the movie’s trailer shows Taraji P. Henson’s Shug Avery singing to a crowd at a juke joint. But that’s the only character who sings onscreen; if you’re not familiar with the musical, you could be convinced this new remake simply includes a scene with some singing.
Personally if I had Fantasia Barrino — an American Idol winner and platinum selling recording artist — in my movie, and in my movie she sings a lot of songs, I would let potential customers know that fact. This Color Purple ad does not. The trailer does not even call it The Color Purple: The Musical. Instead, title cards refer to it as “A Bold New Take on the Beloved Classic.” What makes it bold and new? Well, that’s a little fuzzy.
The Color Purple is not the only Broadway musical to get an upcoming movie adaptation with a trailer that obfuscates its musical elements. Early next year you’ll be able to watch a new Mean Girls in theaters. The trailer for the film makes it look like a fairly straightforward remake and update of the concept. Only the presence of a musical note in the “A” of the title indicates that this is actually an adaptation of the Mean Girls stage show. No one sings in this trailer at all.
Even trailers for sequels to hit musicals do this. Check out the trailer for Disenchanted, the long-awaited follow-up to Enchanted, one of Disney’s most popular live-action musicals ever. The sequel includes a whole bunch of songs by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz, who contributed the well-known music to Enchanted like “Happy Working Song” and “That’s How You Know.” Precisely zero of their new tunes are featured in the official Disenchanted trailer.
Disney played a similar sleight of hand game with Frozen II, the sequel to the enormously popular animated musical Frozen. The first movie grossed $1.28 billion and featured an Academy Award winning song that became the earworm to end all children’s earworms. In two different officials trailers, there isn’t a single musical number from the sequel’s soundtrack, which included all-new earworms to delight children and drive their parents crazy. (I say this from experience. My kids still sing “Into the Unkonwn” sometimes.)
Miraculous is not even the only recent Netflix musical with no music in its trailer. Did you know Adam Sandler’s new animated comedy Leo is a musical? If you’ve only seen the movie’s trailer, you might not. It features the ’80s tune “Take Me Home Tonight,” instead of one the film’s multiple original songs.
This may not seem like a lot of trailers, but Hollywood doesn’t make that many musicals these days, and this comprises a pretty hefty percentage of the recent ones. And they all share a similarly muted approach to music in their advertising.
Compare those trailers with the one from the 1950s for Singin’ in the Rain. It begins with a massive soundstage filled with dancers and a title card that reads “The Big, BIG Musical Show of the Year!” And then it goes right into a clip of the three leads singing the title song. After some spoken dialogue establishing the movie’s premise, most of the trailer is devoted to showing you a little bit of all the songs in the film, “Beautiful Girl,” “You Were Meant For Me,” “Dreaming of You,” “You Are My Lucky Star,” and on and on.
Obviously that is a very old trailer for a very old film. But take a look at the trailer for Chicago from 2002. It opens with 20 seconds of dance moves, followed by Catherine Zeta-Jones singing “All That Jazz.” This movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture and grossed more than $300 million worldwide.
Or how about La La Land from just a few years ago? Its teaser opens with Ryan Gosling crooning “City of Stars” and then proceeds through highlights of the various musical numbers.
I must assume that someone in a corporate boardroom somewhere — or perhaps multiple someones in multiple boardrooms, because this is happening at multiple distributors simultaneously — has determined that audiences don’t consider musical numbers to be a selling point for a movie these days. (La La Land grossed $472 million worldwide, by the way.) Which, of course, raises another question: If studios don’t want to tell potential customers that a movie is a musical because they think audiences might not see it as a result… why are they making musicals in the first place? It would seem there is a rather large disconnect between the people who make the movies and the people who market the movies that needs to be resolved. It should not feel so miraculous when a movie musical comes out and the selling point is … it is a movie musical.
I personally love musicals and I’m always happy to see a good one. But if the studios don’t believe mass audiences want them, why are they producing so many and then trying to trick people into seeing them with misleading trailers? If it’s true that viewers don’t want musicals — a theory I’m not sure I buy, but let’s accept it for the moment — then all you’re doing is selling people tickets to something that will probably disappoint their expectations. You’re setting your own movies up for failure. Just ask my kids. Unlike the Miraculous series, which they watched on an endless loop for months, they haven’t asked me to rewatch the Miraculous movie a single time.
2023 Movies That Got a 0 on Rotten Tomatoes
These movies pulled off an impressive feat: They did not get a single positive review on Rotten Tomatoes.
As a movie and/or TV (and/or comic book) dork myself, I say this from experience: Movie and/or TV (and/or comic book) dorks are hard to shop for. Typically, they keep tabs on the things they might want (and plenty of things they don’t want) at all times. Very often, these are the people that are rushing out to buy things on the first day they go on sale. That leaves very little for the gift givers in their lives to choose from when the holidays roll around.
So a good gift guide for a movie and TV is worth its weight in beskar — which, by the way, if you’re buying gifts for a Star Wars fan, yes you can get replica beskar ingots, which would make a great paperweight or desk tchotchke. Below, I’ve collected ten fun ideas for fans of movies, TV, Star Wars, Star Trek, and more, all of which are available now, most of which are affordably priced, a few of which are downright cheap. There should be at least one thing on here to make any pop culture nerd you know happy. (All of them would make this specific pop culture nerd happy, if that matters to you.)
The list also includes links to where you can find all the items, in case you are in a real hurry to get something now now now. (And, again, knowing this demographic, it’s probably a good idea to get gifts sooner rather than later. The longer you wait, the more likely it is they will just buy it for themselves.)
ScreenCrush 2023 Holiday Gift Guide
10 great gift ideas for the film or TV lover in your life.
The following post contains SPOILERS for The Marvels. Do not watch until after you have seen The Marvels. Maybe don’t read it even after that. You can never be too careful where spoilers are concerned.
The final trailer for The Marvels leaned heavily into the possibility of big Marvel cameos showing up out of nowhere in this movie. Title cards warned potential customers that if they didn’t see the film, they’d miss out on a “moment” that “changes everything.” It also included a line from Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury saying “they’re here” without revealing who they were supposed to be.
The line came after references to the multiverse and holes in reality, suggesting some recognizable characters from other universes may show up for the first time in the main Marvel Cinematic Universe. For Marvel nerds, the most obvious thing the studio could be teasing there is the debut of one of the two signature Marvel teams who had Fox film franchises but have yet to join the MCU proper: The Fantastic Four or the X-Men.
Well, that didn’t quite happen. And I don’t think any moment in The Marvels “changes everything” in the MCU. Buuuuut the film’s post-credits scene does feature the surprising debut of a beloved Marvel character who previously appeared (in somewhat different form) in a Fox Marvel movie.
To set the stage: The dramatic climax of the film sees the villainous Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) ripping a hole in the fabric of reality which Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani), and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) must work together to fix. Captain and Ms. Marvel blast their power into Monica, who then uses their combined abilities to sew reality back together. For whatever reason, Monica does this from the other side of the hole — i.e. the side that is in another reality separate from the main MCU. When she closes the hole, she remains trapped on the other side. Her friends mourn Monica as if she is gone, perhaps forever, but Marvel fans know this is “The Multiverse Saga” we’re watching, and that means she will back.
Sure enough, Monica returns before the closing credits even finish rolling. After the main closing titles appear, Monica reappears in a hospital bed. Sitting at her bedside is her mother, Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), who was Captain Marvel’s best friend in Captain Marvel and made a brief appearance in a flashback earlier in The Marvels. In the main MCU, Maria died of cancer; in this alternate reality, she is somehow still alive — and she has super powers and is called “Binary,” one of the codenames that Carol Danvers has used in Marvel Comics through the years.
She’s not alone, either. Joining her in this high-tech hospital is Beast — the furry blue mutant and longtime member of the X-Men. Although the character is fully CGI, he’s voiced by Kelsey Grammer, who previously played Beast (that time in prosthetic makeup) in X-Men: The Last Stand.
Beast deduces that Monica comes from “a reality parallel to our own” and says that “Charles asked for an update” about her health — obviously referring to Charles Xavier, the head of the X-Men played in the Fox X-Men franchise (and recently in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) by Patrick Stewart.
Does this “change everything”? That feels generous. But it does get the MCU one small step closer to fully introducing the X-Men, by far the most important Marvel property that the company’s own studio has yet to adapt to their big film and TV universe. This Marvels post-credits scene is still an alternate reality, meaning this version of Beast might never be seen again, or might only be seen in another brief cameo. But Marvel is building towards an Avengers: Secret Wars movie — and if the movie is anything like the comics, it will feature many different Marvel characters from many different alternate realities.
So Monica, Maria, and Beast could appear in that film in that context; as residents of this alternate universe where the X-Men are going full force and Binary is part of the team. (In the comics, there was a period where Binary spent a lot of time hanging out with the X-Men.) The next MCU movie is also Deadpool 3 — and it’s very possible that that film takes place in the same universe as this post-credits scene.
But that’s just one possible option. Marvel may not even know how this tag will pay off at this point — it could just be a way to give impatient fans a little hint of the X-Men without having to worry too much about the fine points.
Marvel Actor Yearbook Photos
See what Marvel’s stars looked like in their early years.
Sylvester Stallone is widely known as a pop culture icon, action hero, and recently, a reality TV star. But he probably deserves more credit as an auteur. About ten years ago, I watched every single movie Stallone had made until that time as the research for a piece on his filmography for The Dissolve. I took the assignment thinking I would enjoy revisiting the Rockymovies and might find a few diamonds in the rough of a long and winding career, I instead found a filmmaker who often writes, directs, produces and stars in his own projects, and whose body of work represents a decades-long consideration of heroic ideals, and a tribute to the values of hard work and tenacity.
And even with all of that background, I still learned a lot watching Sly, the new Netflix documentary about Stallone’s life. Mostly comprised of candid new interviews with the man himself, the film contains surprising revelations about Stallone’s journey from troubled kid to one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars.
The doc was directed by Thom Zimny, whose previous films include Elvis Presley: The Searcher and numerous projects about Bruce Springsteen. I was impressed with Sly, so I wanted to talk to Zimny about how he what he learned about Stallone during the process, why he chose to film his interviews in such an unusual way, and whether he sees any parallels himself between Springsteen and Stallone as artists.
You had to be a Sylvester Stallone to make this documentary. So I want to know when you became a fan. What era and what movies are we talking about?
I think I started being a Sylvester Stallone fan with the first Rocky, which I came to later. Not in the cinema, but really the early days of HBO, as a kid. All of a sudden I had this opportunity to watch it again and again, and I immediately connected.
Then years later I stumbled on Paradise Alley, and I was young enough for it to make a big impression. And then, as an adult, I was seeing other films — and I think I had just enough knowledge about [Stallone] in a general way to be very interested to learn more.
That’s what you want as a filmmaker, is to go through the process, not with a set point of view; to go through the process where you can unpack stories differently. You don’t want to go in locked with one particular vision. And the biggest thing I got with Sylvester, from the very first time I was talking to him, I realized that this was a guy whose story wasn’t told yet. And I realized too that he was tying in his own life story into these storylines, characters, their motivation. So all of a sudden I realized that I knew this guy, but I didn’t know him enough. And this is the journey of this doc.
About ten years ago, I worked for a film website that did a regular feature where a writer would watch and then write about every single thing that an artist had made. And when it was my turn to do one, I did Sylvester Stallone.
Wow.
Yeah. And I was certainly a fan of many Sylvester Stallone movies, but watching them all together I did gain a deeper appreciation of how this guy is so often speaking autobiographically through his characters. But I will admit I learned a lot watching your film; I had no idea, for example, about Stallone’s rough relationship with his father. It made me want to revisit something like Over the Top, which is overtly a movie about a father and son who have a very rough relationship. Now that you have done this film, talked to Stallone at length, watched all these movies, what other things do you think I might find buried in these subtext of his work if I go watch them again?
Working closely with Sly and then unpacking details of his childhood, the biggest gift that he left me with this film, this process as a director, is to be able to go back and look at the work through that POV now that I’ve learned so much about him. So I looked at every one of his movies differently, even Paradise Alley, which was this surreal little tale [about pro wrestling in the 1940s]; I now realize that it was a fantasy version of his New York upbringing.
Ah.
And it was tied into this boy’s Dead End Kids’ dream, and also had this redemption story of brothers and a family coming together. Paradise Alley is just one of the examples of how after working with him, I can’t help but look at the films differently.
That’s the side of the filmmaker I wanted to get at [in Sly]. I really felt like after the second interview, this is a filmmaker that a lot of people don’t grasp and understand to be someone who’s writing his own dialogue, telling his own story in many ways, many ways. The Rocky story was a reflection of his own experience. At the height of his stardom, he has the Rocky character going through the same things he was.
Right, absolutely.
So I felt like I needed to make a film that wouldn’t down every beat of his filmography or his life; I needed to make a film that examined the journey he has had as an artist and how he’s unpacked that through his art.
But yeah, suddenly all the films felt different. Nothing was just a casual hit. Cop Land was a film that I love, but going back to it now, when you realize how far he took himself as an actor. This is a guy who had demonstrated extreme strength and power in the Rambo movies, and other villains and heroes, and then took himself to this place of not being able to hear, being overweight, slouching, powerless, but then finding the sense of a hero in that character through a different way. It just showed me how how far he could go as an actor and how hard he worked towards this idea of hope and truth.
On a formal level, I thought it was interesting that you didn’t just film Stallone’s interviews in the standard, talking head sort of way. He’s never sitting down in this movie. He’s constantly on the move as he talks; walking around his house, his office, New York City. Why did you decide to shoot his interviews that way?
It’s a great question. The first time I met him was at his house in the office where I filmed — where the statues, the memorabilia is. And the first time we started chatting, we didn’t sit down. We stood up just the way the film has Sly doing the interviews. And I realized we were bouncing around the room going from subject to subject. And I thought to myself “This is the film is right here. This is the energy I want to hold onto.”
I wanted the idea of forgetting about camera to be the number one thing. So we needed to be ready to go anywhere at any time. And in this very large office, we did exactly that. We bounced around the room, and then he came to my edit room and he did the same thing where he saw the index cards that I had of his life, and he just responded. All that would happen spontaneously. There’s nothing staged. We would go four or five hours straight and then just be exhausted. And in that four to five hours, we covered all kinds of ground from, you know, childhood to Rocky, to his happiness with his family, to his sadness in his life. Everything was mixed. And I just had to keep up. I had to keep up with the energy of Sly because you might walk in with a preconceived idea and then all of a sudden the first answer he gives you takes you down a road that you never imagined.
More than once I thought he’s almost boxing with the camera; he’s kind of dancing like a boxer.
Yeah, definitely a little bit. And his voice in responding to questions, it’s music. There’s jazz to it. So you have to get in sync with him to have a conversation.
Another interesting component is you have him listen to these old tapes he had saved from decades-old interviews with other journalists. And listening to them now, sometimes he is really critical of his younger self. Which made me wonder: Has he seen your film, and did he respond in a similar, self-analyzing way?
The cassettes that are featured in the doc came from a suggestion from Sly’s producer, Braden Aftergood, who mentioned to me that he was at Sly’s office, and he opened up this desk and there was a box of cassettes, and we both just went, “I wonder what’s on there?” I think he would record sometimes himself, so he would have proof of what he was saying in the press in the early days. So it was a spontaneous moment. During the middle of an interview, I just turned to him and said, “What about those tapes?” And he literally just opens up the desk, pops one in. And as a filmmaker, that was a dream come true. because all of it was just happening there.
You have the young Sly’s voice and the older man critiquing him all within one shot. There’s a beautiful thing happening in that moment. The film itself is editing itself within one shot. There’s no crosscutting going on; there’s just this real moment of me questioning him, him putting in the tape, and then history comes back and he challenges it, or he laughs at it.
When he watched the film itself, he had moments where he would have laughter and enjoy the craziness of some of the details of his life, like his meeting Henry Winkler in LA after his car broke down. And we watched it a couple times together with his wife Jennifer. And he really was great because there were no boundaries set up. There was nothing like a list of things you cannot ask people.
After screening with him, he would give me stills that no one had ever seen before. All of it just made the film richer and richer, especially the imagery of off his iPhone with his dad at the end of his life. It was a key moment in the film that Sly himself gave to me.
You’ve made several films with Bruce Springsteen, and I can see some parallels between him and Stallone; they’re both sort of gruff chroniclers of the working class. Do you see similarities between them? How do their processes as artists compare?
In making films with people like Bruce or Sly, the one thing that I find really inspirational and that I find in both of them is this idea of work ethic. Bruce Springsteen has tons of notebooks from writing the album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, where he would pour over every line. And then I got to Sly’s place, and he had a bookshelf of Rocky notebooks. That same thing; these were school notebooks, 99 cent notebooks, right? Filled with dialogue ideas, script ideas. So that work ethic is a common thread that I see in both of those men. And they obviously came from the same generation. Rocky and Born to Run both come out of that same era.
That’s true.
And they also have ties to a certain exploration of working men in America. And both reflect to me people still creating and still hungry to figure out both the past and the present. So for me, it’s a great honor to work with them in the space of telling stories of their lives and their work, but also I’m really always influenced by that sort of passion. When you see the amount of work that these guys would do over a single song or a script idea, you can’t help but feel inspired.
Well, that connects back to Rocky. In the first movie especially. Rocky doesn’t even want to win the match with Apollo. It’s not about that. It’s about work, and proving you can “go the distance.”
At one point, [Stallone told me] he wished he could play all the Rocky films from beginning to end, because it shows that trajectory of life and the losses and the love and the changes.
We’re almost out of time, but I am curious: Because spent so much time with Stallone and his films for this, is there one of his movies you would recommend as a hidden gem?
That’s a tough one. I do still think there’s so much more to get out of Cop Land. I’ve spent a lot of time with the filmography. I’ve watched everything, but I look at Cop Land and go “There’s still more here to explore.” After I got to know [Stallone’s] life story more, it hit me so much harder. I feel like that’s the one that I can keep going back to.
Sly premieres on Netflix on November 3.
The 10 Most Ridiculous Tropes In Action Movies
Good luck finding an action movie that doesn’t have at least a few of these stereotypes.
Every week, Netflix releases a list of the most popular films and TV shows available on its service. And this week, at #3 on the most-watched movie list, just below Netflix’s two big new releases — the Bill Burr comedy Old Dads and the religious-themed documentary The Devil on Trial — is Gemini Man, the 2019 Will Smith adventure that was one of the biggest flops in recent memory. (According to Wikipedia, which is never wrong, the film cost its distributor, Paramount Pictures, more than $110 million. That’s bad!)
According to Netflix’s data site, its users watched 14.3 million hours of Gemini Man in the last week; the equivalent of 7.3 million views. That’s more than Netflix’s recent crime thriller Reptile (which had 7 million views), and even the new Jennifer Lawrence comedy No Hard Feelings, which just premiered on Netflix (6.6 million views). These numbers are all the more impressive for this reason: Gemini Man is not even available to stream in the United States on Netflix! These numbers are entirely driven by overseas Netflix subscribers.
As to why it’s suddenly a hit on Netflix? I do not know. Smith and particularly his marriage to Jada Pinkett Smith have been in the news a lot lately, and that likely doesn’t hurt. Certainly movies with big stars that wind up on Netflix have a tendency to find an audience there, even if they hadn’t in theaters. (I have documented this phenomenon before.)
I will say, I have always thought Gemini Man, directed by Ang Lee, was one of the more interesting box-office bombs of recent years. I was one of the few critics, in fact, to give it a positive review when it opened in theaters. (Its current Rotten Tomatoes score is a lowly 26 percent.) I’ve always felt it was an impressive execution of a fascinating idea: Namely that of an actor (Smith) encountering a younger version of himself (also Smith). In this case, that is in the story of a super sniper who winds up locked in a duel with a younger clone.
As i wrote in my review…
Smith is still a strikingly handsome man, but seeing him stand next to his younger self (or the best approximation visual effects can buy) reminds us how long he’s been a part of our moviegoing lives. (In almost any other movie Winstead and Smith’s characters would have a more romantic relationship, but acknowledging Smiths age onscreen seems to take that option off the table.) Early in Gemini Man, Henry says he has trouble looking in mirrors lately, and throughout the movie not only are mirrors a frequent motif, but they’re often shown getting shot at or blown up or bounced around by grenades. The notion of a dangerous mirror image is an obvious one in a film like Gemini Man, but a welcome one nonetheless. None of us know what it’s like to get kicked in the head by a motorcycle-riding clone, but we all know what it’s like to look in the mirror and be displeased with what we see looking back at us.
Anyway, it’s nice to see people finally taking a look at this movie, even if it’s only happening now. If you do want to watch it, and it’s not available on Netflix where you live, you can rent the film on a variety of on demand and online platforms.
15 Actors Who Criticized Their Own TV Shows
These actors were not shy with their criticisms of their own popular TV series — sometimes while they were still actively appearing on the shows.
Rejoice movie lovers: A new Martin Scorsese picture has arrived.
His latest film is Killers of the Flower Moon, based on the shocking true story (and non-fiction book by David Grann) about a series of murders and mysterious deaths in 1920s Oklahoma, all of which centered around the members of the Osage tribe. Pushed out of their previous home and dumped on this supposedly worthless property in Oklahoma, they instead found their new land was sitting on top of a massive oil deposit — and thus were systematically targeted by their white neighbors because of the invaluable mineral rights. Scorsese’s film is not simply a mystery; it’s nothing less than a sweeping consideration of a dark chapter of American history and the corrupting influence of money and power — and possibly even a love story between two people at center of all of this violence: Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone).
Killers of the Flower Moon is three and a half hours of pure Scorsese, full of all of his favorite themes, filtered through the perspective of a man nearing the end of his career. As part of our excitement about having a new Scorsese movie to talk about, and because Killers of the Flower Moon really does feel like the conclusion of an artistic statement spread across decades of work, today felt like the best time to look back at this great filmmaker’s career and rank all of his movies. Where does this timely, powerful epic rank among all the other timely, powerful epics he’s made through the years? (The dude’s made a bunch of timely, powerful epics. It’s kind of his thing.)
Keep in mind the list that follows is just of his fiction features; it seemed weird and hard to compare, say, The Last Waltz to something like The Wolf of Wall Street. And there are enough Scorsese documentaries, particularly when you factor in the shorts and films he’s made for television, that they really deserve their own list. We’ll get to that another time; for now, here is every Martin Scorsese fiction film, ranked from worst to best:
Every Martin Scorsese Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best
Despite the fact that this week saw the return of Loki, one of Marvel’s most popular and acclaimed shows, most of the conversation about the company’s television division lately centers instead on an article in The Hollywood Reporter about the creative dysfunction behind the scenes of the superhero studio.
If something can be both shocking and not at all surprising at the same time, this report was. Shocking, in the sense that it painted a troubling picture of the creative process at Marvel, an enormously successful company that has made a lot of very good and very profitable movies — and a few really good TV shows as well, like WandaVision and the first season of Loki. Not at all surprising, in the sense that after those early successes on TV, Marvel’s Disney+ shows have grown increasingly frustrating, with unwieldy structures, dicey special effects, and uninteresting stories. Reading that the creator of a show like Moon Knightquit during production goes a long way toward explaining why that show started off so promisingly and ended so disappointingly, squandering a great Oscar Isaac performance in the service of a bland MacGuffin chase that mostly abandoned the compelling ideas and themes introduced in its first episode.
Things have apparently grown so troubled at the studio that, per THR, they recently parted ways with the original head writers of their upcoming Daredevil: Born Againseries and are looking to bring in new producers to rework the concept and reshoot most of the show after numerous episodes had already been filmed prior to the start of the actors and writers strikes. In other words, things could be going better at so-called House of Ideas.
After two episodes, Loki Season 2 does not look like it is going to be the show that is going to right the ship for Marvel. Like all of the company’s Disney+ series, it does have a great cast, including Tom Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, and Ke Huy Quan. And it has plenty of the fun callbacks and Easter eggs and rich details that Marvel is known for. (I did get a kick out of the Kingo poster on the wall at the movie premiere early in this week’s episode.) What this Loki season lacks, especially compared to the first, is a clear narrative through line.
Loki’s first season had that; a “variant” of the title character (Hiddleston) who wound up arrested by the Time Variance Authority and swept up in their chase for another Loki variant, this one a woman named Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino). Loki and Sylvie eventually fall in love (even though they are sort of the same person) and then uncover the truth about the TVA: That it is run by a mad scientist from the future named He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors), who created the TVA to prevent a recurrence of a multiversal war between his own variants.
In the Loki Season 1 finale, He Who Remains offered Loki and Sylvie the choice to let the multiverse return or to take over the TVA and continue protecting the “Sacred Timeline” on his behalf. Sylvie stabbed He Who Remains, but chose not to assume control of the TVA, leading to the rampant multiverses seen in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Even as it had to explain all of these concepts about time travel and alternate timelines, Loki Season 1 did an impressive job of making the emotional and narrative stakes for Loki, Sylvie, and the rest of the TVA very clear. In contrast, I have no clue what is supposed to be going on in Loki Season 2. He Who Remains is still gone and multiple factions within the organization are all carrying out different agendas; some are acting like nothing has changed, while others are actively trying to upend their plans to restore the Sacred Timeline.
Loki and the TVA’s Agent Moebius (Wilson) are close friends, but don’t seem to have remotely the same goals. A TVA tech expert (Quan) who was never mentioned in the first season is doing vague but supposedly very important experiments in the organization’s basement. And Sylvie is inexplicably living in an alternate 1980s and working at a McDonald’s, apparently because Marvel couldn’t find a more plausible way to shoehorn some product placement into the series. (I mean, after you have killed an immortal time god, why not go sling some McGriddles for a while? A variant’s got to decompress somehow!)
Given the timing, it was impossible to watch this week’s Loki and not compare it to the scenes at Marvel described in that THR article — and to interpret the TVA in shambles as a metatextual version of the studio. Like the TVA, Marvel’s TV division (at least according to THR) is in a state of major upheaval, with at least one executive who oversaw the recent Secret Invasion show set to depart the company, and various creative groups fighting for control of the company’s various productions. (THR claims that Secret Invasion got bogged down in a battle between “leaders [who] vied for supremacy during Secret Invasion’s preproduction,” and ultimately resulted in “a good portion of the Invasion team being replaced, with new line producers, unit production managers, and assistant directors.”)
This would not the be first time Marvel produced something that invited comparisons to its own corporate culture. In 2017, I wrote a piece about how the best way to understand Marvel’s growth from underdog comic company to Hollywood titan was to look at Tony Stark‘s character arc in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Stark makes the first Iron Man suit while held hostage by terrorists — at the same time Marvel was beholden to other major studios, who wished to exploit their valuable IP for their own gain. In the early days, Tony’s armor is a patchwork mess. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, or even have a full sense of what he is making. Neither did Marvel in those days. Then Tony joins up with the Avengers, around the same time that Marvel was acquired by Disney. That first lineup of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes assembled around a table in the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier that looked an awful lot like a corporate boardroom. And so on.
After two episodes, I’m pretty disappointed with Loki Season 2. I don’t really understand what Loki (or Sylvie, or Moebius, or O.B.) are after, and while I enjoy some of the production design and the overall aesthetic of the TVA, I don’t have a good handle on the narrative stakes and I have no sense of where the show is going or why I should care about this unclear destination. Really, the only way I find myself enjoying it so far is as a Marvel show about the state of Marvel, a place where the multiverse seems to be spiraling out of control and the people who are still working there are not entirely sure what to do about it.
New episodes of Loki premiere weekly on Disney+. Sign up here.
The Worst Marvel Comics Ever
Don’t expect to ever see these comics turned into MCU movies, that’s for sure…
The following recap has spoilers for the first episode of Loki Season 2.
If you were hoping Loki would get the Marvel Cinematic Universe back to an emphasis on characters and their emotional arcs, and away from endless plot convolutions and the broader plot of “The Multiverse Saga” … uh … The Marvels is only a month away? Maybe that movie will do that stuff?
Loki certainly did not. In fact, this was one of the least character-focused episodes of TV Marvel has produced to date yet for Disney+. The show’s Season 2 premiere, “Ouroboros,” was pretty much a mad dash through time, peppered with loads of not-very-helpful exposition. By the end of the episode a lot has happened, although I would be hard-pressed to explain to you why. Maybe that will become clearer as the season progresses.
At this point, the difference in the two seasons of Loki — which were overseen by two different head writers, Michael Waldron in Season 1 and Eric Martin in Season 2 — are striking. The opening hours of Loki were complicated at times, sure. They introduced the Time Variance Authority, and their role in policing the timestream of the MCU. And they also introduced the notion of “variants,” alternate versions of famous Marvel characters.
But the beginning Loki Season 1 was also about Loki, the man (or god) played by Tom Hiddleston. It wrestled with his motivations for committing so many heinous acts in the past, and contemplated whether he (and, by extension, anyone) had the capacity to change in the future. Then Loki started a relationship with Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), one of his variants who’d had an equally miserable life up to that point. Season 1’s science-fiction was rooted in how all those heady ideas about variants impacted the people wandering through the endless hallways of the TVA.
It’s early yet, but Season 2 seems a lot less interested in anything beyond making sense of Marvel’s scrambled multiverse, and precisely how Kang (Jonathan Majors) fits into all of it in the wake of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. The awesome cliffhanger from the end of Loki Season 1 — Loki returns to the TVA after Sylvie kills a Kang variant, only to find no one there remembers him and there is now a giant Kang statue looming over the office — is immediately retconned in the Season 2 premiere in deeply disappointing fashion. Instead of an alternate timeline or Loki being erased from history as a result of his actions last season, he’s instead “time slipping” between different points in time inside the TVA, a deeply confusing concept for a few reasons.
For one thing, it was previously established time doesn’t flow linearly at the TVA, so how could you jump around in time linearly there? For another, as Loki bounces between the past and present of the TVA, he begins to alter the future; like when he gives Ke Huy Quan’s character O.B. his nickname by traveling back from the present to a point years before anyone had ever called him that. Avengers: Endgame established a very clear set of rules for time travel in the MCU; rules that included the fact that changing the past does not alter the present. It only creates a new timeline — a concept that worked perfectly with the TVA and their mission to “prune” timelines that strayed from the “sacred” timeline that held the multiverse at bay. In Season 2 of Loki, like a Warren Beatty movie that no one remembers but me, those rules don’t apply.
Again, maybe later episodes in the season will address this seeming No-Prize-worthy continuity error. Frankly, I’m less concerned about that stuff than the fact that the entire episode had a chicken-with-its-head-cut-off vibe to it. It was manic and antsy, with lots of scenes of Loki and his allies bouncing around to no obvious end. Loki is time slipping? Which could kill him? So he has to be pruned from the timestream — formerly a very bad thing you never wanted to happen — to save himself? And Mobius has to put on a space suit and walk out to a giant “loom” of time to help? But his suit is disintegrating? And they should have an hour to do all this but actually it’s only five minutes? And O.B. needs to shut some doors to do … something? And it seems like there is a power struggle within the TVA, but who is on which side and why? I felt like I needed Cliffs Notes (or at least a ScreenCrush Easter egg video) to understand any of it.
This is not the Loki premiere I was hoping for. When the Marvel Cinematic Universe was at its peak, it had many ongoing storylines, and they could sometimes get pretty complicated. But at its core, those movies’ appeal were their iconic comic-book heroes; you bought your ticket to follow the ups and downs of Iron Man and Captain America and even Loki. This show has one of Marvel’s most interesting characters, and a wonderful actor in Hiddleston playing him. So far on Loki Season 2 he seems to play second fiddle to performing maintenance on the broader MCU multiverse.
New episodes of Loki premiere weekly on Disney+.
The Worst Marvel Comics Ever
Don’t expect to ever see these comics turned into MCU movies, that’s for sure…
As a kid growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s, a handful of movies captivated my imagination, most of them the obvious titles you would expect: Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Raiders of the LostArk.Clearly I had a type: Epic adventures with enormous effects, lots of humor, and a happy ending.
The one exception to the rule was La Bamba, the 1987 musical biography about rock and roll legend Ritchie Valens (Lou Diamond Phillips), who shot to stardom by the age of 17 and died just a few months later in the tragic plane crash that came to be known as “The Day the Music Died.” In a compact 108 minutes, La Bamba captures both the highs and the lows; energetic concert sequences (with Valens music performed by Los Lobos) are interspersed with scenes that emphasize the hardships Ritchie faced in 1950s California, including poverty, racism, and his complex relationship with his half-brother Bob (Esai Morales), who adored Ritchie but was also intensely jealous of his potential and perpetually frustrated with his own lack of opportunities, a toxic mix that inflamed Bob’s alcoholism and his abuse of his family members.
Despite its sad ending and serious themes, La Bamba became one of my most-watched movies when I was young. In an era where musical biopics are even more commonplace, it remains a deeply moving film with outstanding music and performances; few modern biographies can hold a candle to its swaggering rock energy and devastating finale. So I was delighted to see the film added to the Criterion Collection — and even more excited when I was given the opportunity to speak to its director, Luis Valdez, about making the film and the unique power it continues to hold for both young and old audiences.
Actually, I was just looking at some of the features on the Criterion disc; wasn’t “Let’s Go” the original title of the movie before it became La Bamba?
Yes. But it was taken by another movie, fortunately, because La Bamba was so much better. The concern there was that people would think it was a foreign movie or something. [laughs] But actually, it worked in our favor, because “La Bamba” was already part of the rock and roll lexicon, even if they didn’t know what it meant. It worked out for us. It was serendipitous.
I really loved this movie as a kid. And when I mentioned that I was speaking to you to a couple friends, I heard the same response every day: “Oh man, I love La Bamba.” For a very tragic story, the movie really resonates with young audiences. I’m wondering if you had a younger audience in mind when you were writing it, and why you think young people who weren’t even alive when Ritchie was releasing music — and might not have even heard of him before — have such a strong reaction to this story.
Well, I think everybody, but particularly teenagers, have dreams of making it in the world, and especially in music or art. That’s a very youthful sort of motivation. So I think every young person can really identify with hopes and dreams of becoming a rock and roll musician. At the same time, I think young people still relate to their siblings in some ways, and they’re working their way through life, and the idea of sibling conflict is pretty close to them. Now some people never outgrow sibling conflict, but most people do; they mature and they realize their siblings are human beings like they are. But when you’re a teenager, the idea of conflicting with your younger or older siblings is a way of life, you know?
I got those stories directly from Bob, who must have been in his 50s when I interviewed him. Those were his memories. And what’s good and noble about Bob is he took the blame onto himself. He said “I was the bad guy. I was the one that was giving Ritchie a lot of trouble.” He blamed it on his drinking. But the fact that he allowed me to do that … he said “Represent me in any way you want. Just tell the story.” And I think that was a tribute to him and to his maturity, but also his love for Ritchie.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the depiction of Bob, which is pretty unflinching; it doesn’t shy away from the things he did to Ritchie and especially to Rosie. You mentioned that you interviewed him and he gave you permission to tell the story how you saw fit. I am curious what he thought of the final movie when he saw it, because … I wouldn’t say he is the villain of the film, but he is certainly depicted in an unflattering light at times.
Well, let me back it up a little bit. The idea for the movie actually occurred at the premiere of my play, Zoot Suit, on Broadway. We were in my brother’s dressing room; he was playing one of the leads. We were on Broadway, and we were saying “Okay, we’ve done the ’40s, what are we going to do with the ’50s? We should come back with a rock and roll story. But what story can we tell?” And at that exact moment, we heard music coming from below the Winter Garden Theater on the Seventh Avenue side. Down below on the street, there was a group of mariachis serenading us. We didn’t know at the time, that this group had been sent by the President of Mexico to celebrate us on opening night. And they were playing “La Bamba.”
We recognized it right away and it answered our question: What should we do next? We looked at each other and we said “La Bamba!” That was the spark. Well, for the next five years, my brother Daniel took it upon himself to locate [Ritchie’s] family and do some of the research. But we couldn’t find the family. They weren’t in L.A. anymore. They weren’t in the San Fernando Valley.
It turns out that where we live, close to Monterey and Watsonville in this little mission town called San Juan Bautista, we have this local saloon called Daisy’s Saloon, which is very popular with bikers. One day, someone came over to my brother’s house and said “Hey, you know, Ritchie Valens’ brother is over at Daisy’s.” So he rushed over there and we made contact with Bob and Bob introduced us to his mother.
Knowing that I had no book and very few articles to go by, I decided to interview them on video tape, so that I could see their expressions. I interviewed both [Ritchie’s mother] Connie and Bob, and Bob Keane, Ritchie’s manager, and Donnie Ludwig of “Donna” fame. That was the basis of my screenplay, what they told me. And they were pretty honest. And Bob was the most honest of all. He said “I was a bastard. You tell whatever story you want to tell. But Ritchie was a nice guy. He was a great brother.”
I could tell there was still grief there, there was still a sense of guilt, actually. And so I told Bob, “Well, thank you. I’m gonna make a hero out of you.” And of course, it was more as an anti-hero as it turned out. But he was happy with the result. He said in interviews as we were promoting the movie that he felt that I had been a fly on the wall of the family’s house.
We needed Bob, because nobody had anything negative to say about Ritchie! Everybody universally said he was a nice guy; the best kind of son, the best kind of nephew, the best kind of friend you could ever have. I said, “Well, I can’t do much with this. He’s too good!”
[laughs]
So I kind of laid it on Bob, and made him the bad guy, make him the antagonist. But again, it’s an antagonist in terms of someone who loves his brother but can’t help himself but to compete with his brother.
In that five years of research, were there any points in the process where the film almost looked very different where the La Bamba we all know today? Did you make any drastic changes along the way?
Well, I’ll tell you. Once I’d done the research and did my outline, I was hired by Taylor Hackford and his company to write the script I think around November of ’85. And so I went into the screenplay over December. I had a draft by January and we were green-lighted in February. So that’s lightning speed as movies go. So the idea is that it came out almost like Venus out of the shell; it was fully formed already. I’ve written many screenplays since then and before that. And I must say that La Bamba was a sweetheart. It was really meant to be. It fell into place in every way. Within a year of really just sealing the deal to do the screenplay, we were in production. And that rarely happens. And the movie worked. The story worked on paper, and the movie worked on film.
What was your reaction about the film going into the Criterion Collection?
I’m very proud that the film has been accepted for the Criterion Collection. What it forebodes is the film will be remembered and preserved. I’m a fan of the Criterion Collection. It’s a tremendous resource, and it’s a treasury of great films, so to be included is a real honor.
If you’re out somewhere these days and “La Bamba” comes on the radio, what do you think about when you hear the song now?
When I hear it at different places, I’m able to connect with the tremendous impact that Ritchie Valens had on the world by taking this folk song and turning it into a rock and roll classic. It was his achievement, that young kid, way back when he was 17 years old.
We were more or less the same age; I am about six months older than Ritchie. And I remember those times. I remember the aspirations we had at that time, trying to be as American as we could be. And certainly the idea of becoming a rock star was the height. That was the top of the line, you know? And so to have “La Bamba” playing again, again, all over the world — and by the way, I’ve heard this song all over the world. That “La Bamba” is still played is one of Ritchie’s achievements. And I’m very proud of the fact that the film worked and that it remains meaningful to young people who maybe weren’t even born when the film was made, but nevertheless can relate to it because there’s the eternal spirit of his musicality and his genius captured in the story.
The image above is one of the only shots of Ahsoka Tano in the sixth episode of Star Wars: Ahsoka. After this week’s installment’s opening scene, Rosario Dawson is never seen again. The other characters mention Ahsoka a handful of times, but beyond exchanging a couple lines of dialogue with her droid Huyang, she is a total non-factor in this episode.
That follows Episode 5 of Ahsoka, “Shadow Warrior,” in which most of the series’ main characters other than Ahsoka were absent. In that installment, Ahsoka is transported to a mysterious dimension where she encounters her old (and dead) former Jedi Master, Anakin Skywalker. Although “Shadow Warrior” included a few cutaways to Hera’s search for Ahsoka, what was going on with the rest of the cast — including Sabine Wren, Baylan Skoll, Shin Hati, and Morgan Elsbeth — was left totally unknown.
In a vacuum, these were among the stronger episodes of Ahsoka so far. But that’s part of the problem; each individual episode feels like it exists in a vacuum, separate and distinct from the others in the series. Even when interesting things happen on Ahsoka — and this episode featured tons of fun, quirky Star Wars textural details like the graveyard of space whale bones and the giant dog alien called a “howler” that Sabine strikes up a friendship with — the show itself is so glacially paced that it’s impossible to get invested in its story. And a lot of the pacing issues, not only on Ahsoka but several other recent Star WarsDisney+ series, have shared this same issue: A bizarre and baffling lack of cross-cutting and parallel editing.
Cross-cutting is one of the oldest film editing techniques. It was pioneered by silent filmmakers like D.W. Griffith, who recognized that cutting between two different actions taking place in two separate locations created the impression in the audience’s mind that the two separate sequences were occurring simultaneously (i.e. they were happening “parallel” to one another).
Early film pioneers also recognized that cutting back and forth between two parallel incidents was a great way to generate tension and suspense. Instead of just showing, say, a woman being tied to a train track by a mustache-twirling villain, you cut from the woman being tied to the tracks to the train conductor asleep at the controls to the hero racing on horseback to the rescue. Will the woman break free? Will the conductor wake up in time to hit the brakes? Will the hero make it to the woman before the train? Cross-cutting keeps you invested in all of those questions, and keeps you engaged in all three sequences.
This sort of editing not only enhances plot, it can deepen a film’s themes and ideas, by creating connections between characters, places, and concepts via juxtaposition. In the hypothetical example of the stereotypical silent movie plot of a damsel tied to train tracks: Imagine if the hero racing to the rescue had been a train conductor but was fired from his job for protesting his employer’s poor work conditions. Cutting from him to the train conductor asleep at the wheel would emphasize the dichotomy between the hero’s brave deeds and the railroad company’s negligent business practices. These are basic concepts, but they have worked their near-subliminal magic on audiences for over 100 years.
But for reasons I cannot understand, the Disney+ Star Wars series seem increasingly uninterested in this fundamental storytelling technique. Think of The Book of Boba Fett, where the entire show and its ongoing plot about Boba Fett’s rise to power on Tatooine was interrupted for an entire episode where the Mandalorian, Din Djarin, suddenly became the focus as he tracked down his Mandalorian sect, fought over the Darksaber, and debated whether to retrieve his former companion Grogu from the Jedi Temple where he was learning the ways of the Force. Book of Boba Fett didn’t add Mando to its mix of ongoing stories; it temporarily replaced its ongoing mix of stories with Mando’s when he showed up. (Boba Fett actor Temuera Morrison later said it was “painful” to watch his character get sidelined on his own show.)
Mando’s subplot on The Book of Boba Fett was especially strange because it seemed purposefully designed to avoid even more cross-cutting on The MandalorianSeason 3. That show’s second season finale left ended with a major cliffhanger: Grogu leaves Mando to train with Luke Skywalker at the Jedi Temple. The Mandalorian Season 3 could have then followed Mando and Grogu in parallel for a while, cutting between their separate lives to show why they needed each other, leading to an emotional, eventual reunion. Instead, it quickly brought them back together on The Book of Boba Fett, before Season 3 even began.
These shows’ frustratingly straight-forward plot structures are particularly strange given the fact that great parallel editing has been part of Star Wars’ core DNA for decades. Think of The Empire Strikes Back, where the narrative splinters the core group of heroes and sends them off on separate quests; Luke and R2-D2 go to Dagobah to train with Yoda, while Han, Leia, Chewbacca, and C-3PO must escape Imperial forces and travel to Cloud City for refuge.
Empire repeatedly bounces back and forth between the two parallel stories; Luke and his training, Han and Leia on the run, falling in love. As Darth Vader closes in on Han and Leia, the cutting increases and so does the tension: Will Luke leave his Jedi training prematurely just to help his friends? Will he make it back in time to save them at all? Now imagine how the movie would play out without cross-cutting; if Empire had followed only Luke and Yoda for 30 minutes, and then cut over to Han and Leia for the next 30 minutes.
If you rearranged The Empire Strikes Back in that way, it would still contain all the same scenes, all the same witty dialogue, all the same memorable character beats. But the drama, the anxiety, the suspense would be dissipated. It would be a totally different and distinctly inferior experience.
The people making these Star Wars shows are talented, experienced artists; and they previously made the outstanding early seasons of The Mandalorian. So I have to assume only showing Ahsoka one week and then only showing Sabine the next is a deliberate stylistic choice — just one whose purpose I cannot discern.
When The Mandalorian Season 3 concluded, I wrote a piece about how the season wasn’t necessarily bad, but it was dominated by creative decisions that I found bizarre and confusing — and with only two episodes left of Ahsoka, I feel much the same way. There are parts of this show that are really impressive; the production and character design are gorgeous, and I’m intrigued by its coven of evil Force witches, even if I mostly do not understand where they came from or what they want.
And yet once again, my main reaction to a Star Wars show, week after week, is bewilderment. Ahsoka episodes are typically only 30-40 minutes, and yet without cross-cutting they often feel twice that length. These editing concepts are not novel; cross-cutting was invented a long time ago. Just not, apparently, in a galaxy far, far away.
A piece of horror film history is on the California real estate market just in time for Halloween.
The actual house where Jamie Lee Curtis’ character in the original Halloween movie is currently for sale for just under $1.8 million.
A listing for the South Pasadena home on Realtor.com actually leans into the fact the property was featured in the film.
“If you watch the film you’ll recognize the infamous stoop that Jamie Lee Curtis sat on, holding a pumpkin,” the listing states.
What’s Included With The ‘Halloween’ House?
The house is divided into three units with potential for a fourth unit over the garage. Each unit is somewhat modest with a total of four bedrooms and three bathrooms across the entire property.
Outside of some colorful paint choices, the home is fairly mundane. Nothing screams “this place was in an iconic horror movie.”
Much of that is likely due to the home, which was built in 1906, being owned by the same family for the past several years.
“There is a fruit-bearing avocado tree that was planted by the sellers’ grandfather in the 1940s,” the listing reads. “This exceptional property is a wonderful place to live, work and play in one of the most desirable communities in greater L.A.”
Not The Only Halloween House In South Pasadena
In the 1978 horror classic directed by John Carpenter, we see Michael Myers terrorizing the fictitious Haddonfield, Illinois after he escapes a mental hospital where he was being held for his sister’s 1963 murder.
His main target throughout the film is Laurie Strode (played by Curtis) who he sees dropping off a key to the former home where he murdered his sister when he was only six years old.
While the home on the market was the Strode family residence, the Michael Myers house is just a short drive away in South Pasadena.
According to DiscoverLosAngeles.com, the Michael Myers house at 1000 Mission Street is now a two-story office building that has been officially designated as a South Pasadena Cultural Landmark.
The building that was the hardware store where the Michael Myers grabs his mask, rope and knives is located directly across the street.
LOOK: House From Original ‘Halloween’ Movie is For Sale
A house currently on the market in South Pasadena, Cal. was featured in the 1978 horror classic, Halloween. In the movie, the home is the residence of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her family. Strode becomes the target of Michael Myers after he escapes a mental hospital in the fictitious town of Haddonfield, Ill.
The 13 Best Final Girls in Horror Movie History
Witches and slasher villains and interdimensional beings from Hell have nothing on these expert survivors.
The following post contains SPOILERS for Episode 4 of Star Wars: Ahsoka, “Fallen Jedi.” Which come to think of it was probably a pretty big clue.
A wise Jedi once said “No one’s ever really gone.” That guy knew what he was talking about; cause it is really true in Star Wars — as viewers of Ahsoka were most definitely reminded this week.
Much of the plot of Ahsoka through four episodes has been about the possible returns of Admiral Thrawn and Ezra Bridger, crucial characters from earlier Star Wars media, most notably the animated series Star Wars: Rebels. But we’re now four episodes into Ahsoka, and neither one has actually appeared onscreen (unless you count a brief appearance by Ezra in the form of an old holographic message he left to his friend Sabine). No, instead, the end of Episode 4 featured the return of a much more central figure in the Star Wars mythos… Anakin Skywalker, as played by Hayden Christensen.
Anakin’s appearance was extremely brief; it was the cliffhanger to get you to come back next week to find out just what is happening to Ahsoka. After being thrown from a cliff by Ray Stevenson’s Baylan Skoll, Ahsoka awakens in a strange, starry realm, where Anakin tells her “I didn’t expect to see you so soon.” That’s about all he says before the music begins to strike some darker notes and the episode cuts to credits.
This is Christensen’s second recent return to Star Wars after he had not appeared as Anakin for over 15 years, since 2005’s Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. (He previously reprised his role as Anakin Skywalker / Darth Vader in 2022’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series on Disney+.) As for where he and Ahsoka are at the end of the episode, we will presumably find out next week, but it all seems very similar to the “World Between Worlds” that supposedly connects all of time and space together, and was first introduced on Star Wars: Rebels — which, again, has been extremely crucial to the cast and backstory of the entire Ahsoka storyline.
New episodes of Ahsoka premiere on Tuesday nights on Disney+. Sign up for Disney+ here.
Actors Who Performed Scenes While Under the Influence
Plenty of actors filmed famous scenes while under the influence of some substance or another. Could you tell from their performances?
A hero with a crisis of faith, who discovers the secret to a sinister plot to conquer the galaxy, before setting off on a perilous quest to save a missing friend. This quest will force the hero to confront their self-doubts and evolve their powers in order to achieve a hard-fought victory.
There is a character who embodies all of those characteristics on Star Wars: Ahsoka. But it’s not Ahsoka.
Sure, Ahsoka Tano is onscreen much of the time in the latest Star Wars series. The show begins with her discovering an ancient map in an abandoned temple. (In Star Wars, when in doubt, have everyone chase an ancient map.) It quickly becomes clear, though, that despite standing at the center of the frame, Ahsoka is a static character. Through three episodes of the show, she has displayed few emotions and possesses no motivation beyond the fact that she is (sort of) a Jedi, and stopping bad guys is what Jedi do.
Ahsoka’s quest ropes in Sabine Wren, her former Padawan and a member of the ragtag crew of heroes who were central to the animated series Star Wars: Rebels. Ahsoka betrays none of her feelings about her quest to find and stop Admiral Thrawn, a former Imperial baddie who is presumed dead but apparently trapped in another galaxy far, far away.
Ahsoka is confident, an almost unbeatable fighter, and cool as hell. She’s basically perfect. Sabine, on the other hand, has lost her way following another presumed death; her friend Ezra, who was “killed” defeating Thrawn. (Who didn’t actually die, which almost certainly means Ezra didn’t either.) As portrayed by Natasha Liu Bordizzo as a feisty but troubled young woman, Sabine needs to repair her broken relationship with Ahsoka, resume her Jedi training, and trust in her potential and abilities in order to find Ezra and defeat Thrawn. If ever there was a classic Star Wars hero, it’s Sabine Wren.
This week’s episode, “Time to Fly,” even began with a scene right out of the original Star Wars, with Ahsoka as older master teaching Sabine, the young student, to trust in her feelings and to use the Force. Ahsoka gives Sabine a helmet with an eye-covering visor to wear during a lightsaber sparring session. It’s almost exact mirror of the scene in A New Hope between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker with the training droid — except here, the nominal main character, Ahsoka, is the one giving the lesson rather than receiving it.
It’s possible to make a Star Wars show about a wise, older master, who is utterly assured in their abilities but struggles to train a new student. In fact, that sounds like a fairly interesting Star Wars series! But that’s not really what Ahsoka is. If Ahsoka feels anything about Sabine’s training, their long relationship, she doesn’t share it with the audience in any way. Rosario Dawson is an unreadable presence as Ahsoka. She seems to spend the entire series standing around glaring stoically at the other characters with her arms folded, saying little and suggesting less.
Instead — or maybe because of that — Ahsoka keeps emphasizing Sabine’s struggles. The audience has a much better grasp of what she wants out of this journey, what she needs to do in order to succeed. Admittedly, I haven’t watched much of Star Wars: The Clone Wars or Rebels, so my experience with Ahsoka is extremely limited. Perhaps if you’ve followed the character through those various earlier adventures, her mindset seems clearer and her rationale for undertaking this quest is obvious. To someone like me who hasn’t seen those shows, she just seems like a generic Jedi doing generic Jedi stuff. And Ahsoka has made no attempt to help me understand her better.
In fact, Sabine is basically the only character I feel like I understand, because the villains of the show are just as opaque as Ahsoka. What, for example, does Ray Stevenson’s Baylan Skoll want? The show did reveal that he was a Jedi who survived Order 66. But why does he now want to bring back the very Empire that destroyed the Jedi and his earlier way of life? Presumably we will learn the answer to that question before the end of the series, but for now he’s just this giant question mark at the center of a series whose title character is also a giant question mark — meaning we are watching a show about two quiet, mysterious figures with unclear goals and vague motivations.
Who is the show really about? This issue of wandering focus has become a recurring theme in Star Wars’ Disney+ series. The Book of Boba Fett inserted half a season of The Mandalorian into its own show, and almost completely forgot its title character for a while in the process. Then when Mando got his own show back for a third season, it barely seemed to care about him, focusing instead on supporting players like Bo-Katan and even guest stars like X-wing pilot Carson Teva, who spent one Mandalorian episode hunting down a hidden conspiracy within the leadership of the New Republic.
Watching Star Wars television days, it feels like the creators are laser-focused on an extremely narrow segment of their audience who has seen absolutely every Star Wars movie and show and cartoon, and read every Star Wars comic book and novel, and just want obscure stories that fill in gaps in Star Wars history and lore. Which, I guess if you’re into obscure Star Wars history and lore, can be great. For the rest of us, these series are starting to feel like the footnotes to stories we don’t know. And so far, Ahsoka seems like it would have made a lot more sense if it was called Star Wars: Sabine.
New episodes of Star Wars: Ahsoka premiere on Tuesdays on Disney+. Sign up for Disney+ here.
Directors Who Followed a Classic Film With a Dud
Some of the greatest filmmakers of all time followed up beloved favorites with stinkers. It happens.
It’s 1985, and director William Friedkin has just about finished production on his latest cop thriller, To Live and Die in L.A. With principle photography winding down, there’s only one thing left to shoot: A car chase sequence that would provide a crucial boost of adrenaline to the movie’s final act.
Friedkin was no stranger to car chases. In 1971, Friedkin directed another cop thriller called The French Connection. Its key set piece was a dynamic and nail-biting chase scene featuring a police detective (played by Gene Hackman) racing to catch a crook who is making a getaway on an elevated subway train.
There had been great car chases before The French Connection, but few combined different modes of transportation, fluid editing, and amazing real-world photography (captured on actual New York City streets) the way Friedkin did in The French Connection. To try to top The French Connection was a fool’s errand at best, and madness at worst. It would be like Michelangelo looking at The Creation of Adam and going “Eh, I can paint a better ceiling than this.”
When Friedkin brought the idea of a major chase sequence to To Live and Die in L.A. stunt coordinator Buddy Joe Hooker, he did so with a warning:
Come up with something better than what was in The French Connection, or it will be cut from the film.
Fortunately and impressively, what Friedkin, Hooker, and their team came up with for To Live and Die in L.A. absolutely equaled The French Connection chase — and in some ways surpassed it. Because the chase in To Live and Die in L.A. isn’t just an exciting moment, it is essential to understanding the film’s themes and characters.
Although the chase sequence wound up consuming less than 10 minutes of screen time in the final movie, Friedkin and Hooker spent six weeks painstakingly staging and shooting it. In Counterfeit World, a documentary on the making of To Live and Die in L.A., William Petersen — who stars in the film as obsessive, reckless Secret Service agent Richard Chance — the crew for the chase was a fraction of the size one would expect on such a monumental undertaking.
“[There were] no trucks coming with us. No wardrobe, no makeup,” Petersen recalled. “It was 40 stunt guys, Friedkin, [co-star John] Pankow, and me. We were going all over L.A. blocking off streets and just spinning out.” In Counterfeit World (which you can watch below), Friedkin explains his approach to shooting chase scenes:
You don’t need a lot of people to shoot a chase. Because when you’re shooting a chase, it’s one shot at a time. Maybe with multiple cameras from different angles, but one shot at a time.
The finished chase is a blend of careful planning and improvisation. On the one hand, Hooker meticulously blocked out the positions of the cars and cameras for each key element of the chase, which starts in a seedy Los Angeles warehouse district, darts past a speeding train, transitions into one of L.A.’s canals, and then climaxes on a freeway, where the heroes attempt to speed away from the bad guys by driving the wrong way into oncoming traffic. (Counterfeit World includes reproductions of Hooker’s diagrams.)
In between the planned moments, Friedkin kept adding new elements he’d think of on set. Friedkin’s big idea for the sequence — the one he thought could eclipse his prior work in The French Connection — was the image of a car driving the wrong way down a bustling freeway. But Friedkin wasn’t sure how to get the characters moving onto the highway in the wrong direction. In Counterfeit World, you see Friedkin have the lightbulb moment in real time, as he explains to Petersen that if they add a whole batch of additional cars to the chase, his character will have no choice but to take an off-ramp onto the freeway.
Although nominally similar to the chase in The French Connection, To Live and Die in L.A.’s sequence is also different from Friedkin’s earlier masterpiece in several crucial ways. For one thing, the cops are not the pursuers this time around; they are the ones being chased all over industrial L.A. The key characters are Petersen’s Chance and Pankow’s Agent Vukovich. As To Live and Die in L.A. begins, Chance’s aging partner is murdered by a brilliant counterfeiter named Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe). Chance’s partner was days from retirement; now he’s dead. Chance tells Vukovich — his young, new, by-the-book partner — that he will take down Masters, and he doesn’t care how he does it.
True to his word, Chance quickly breaks more laws than Masters, who is violent and ruthless but only kills to protect his business. Chance blackmails a paroled woman into giving him information (and into sleeping with him), then bullies his boss into letting him take one of Masters’ associates (played by a very young John Turturro) out of custody. Then Chance loses the associate, and doesn’t even attempt to get him back because that would distract him from his investigation into Masters. Eventually, Chance’s sleazy tactics land him a meeting with the counterfeiter. Disguised as a doctor with banking interests in the Cayman Islands, Chance convinces Masters to print him a huge batch of phony money in exchange for $30,000 in authentic bills.
When the Secret Service won’t authorize that big of a payout to Chance, he proposes a ludicrously bad idea: Operating on a tip, Chance and Vukovich will hold up a man arriving in L.A. with $50,000 to buy some smuggled diamonds. This, Chance argues to Vukovich, is not a theft, because by taking this money they are actually preventing a crime. They will then use this pilfered money to catch Masters red handed.
It’s a bad plan, and it goes even worse than expected. Chance and Vukovich grab the bag man and find the $50,000, only to be shot at by heavily armed goons. The bag man is killed in the crossfire, and Chance and Vukovich make a hasty getaway — the start of this all-important chase sequence.
Friedkin and Hooker’s camera placement and cuts are clear and exact, and the stunt driving — much of it performed by Petersen himself — is visceral and kinetic. As a nine-minute YouTube clip, it’s an awesome, dynamic sequence. In context in To Live and Die in L.A., the chase is also the moment when the audience realizes just how far Chance will go to catch Masters — and how the life of a Secret Service agent has so thoroughly broken this man’s soul.
For example, Friedkin’s spontaneous decision to send Chance and Vukovich’s car up an off-ramp is a perfect moment of show-don’t-tell character revelation. Sure, going the wrong way on an L.A. freeway is a great setup for vehicular chaos. But watch how Friedkin stages that moment at 7:00 of the clip above. Chance doesn’t make an impulsive mistake; he stops his sedan, and stares at two road signs reading “WRONG WAY” and “DO NOT ENTER.”
Chance makes his choice and slams on the gas — because that is what his character does in every situation. He barrels headlong into danger, doing things in the exact opposite direction from what is safe and lawful. He is always going the wrong way, into places he shouldn’t, ignoring all warning signs.
Over and over in To Live and Die in L.A., Friedkin uses precise framing and editing to reveal ideas and themes. Look at the shot below, for example, which comes during key sequence late in the film when Chance finally tracks down Turturro’s escaped crook. By this point, Chance has proved he will break any rule or law to achieve his goals; he’s arguably just as bad as the “bad guys” he’s tasked with apprehending. Shooting the scene this way, with Petersen and Turturro on either side of a thin wall, treats Chance and his target like mirror images; two sides of the same coin.
In interviews, Friedkin was humble about his work; refusing to call it art, steadfastly denying his movies were on par with the pictures of direectors he revered like Orson Welles or Fritz Lang. But To Live and Die in L.A. shows Friedkin for the master of this story of visual storytelling that he was. It wasn’t just that he knew how to stage a chase scene. He also knew how to tell a story with one.
The 10 Most Ridiculous Tropes In Action Movies
Good luck finding an action movie that doesn’t have at least a few of these stereotypes.
Winter Kills has one of the very best casts of any 1970s thriller: Jeff Bridges, John Huston, Belinda Bauer, Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Sterling Hayden, Dorothy Malone, Ralph Meeker, Toshiro Mifune and even Elizabeth Taylor in a brief, silent cameo. It’s based on a novel by Richard Condon, whose work had already inspired three previous films, including The Manchurian Candidate. AndWinter Kills explores (and satirizes) the myriad conspiracy theories around the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a source of endless fascination amongst the American people, then and now.
So why have most people reading this never seen (and maybe never even heard of) Winter Kills until now?
It’s a mystery that’s arguably even more compelling than the one within the film itself, which is now getting a much overdue revival from Rialto Pictures, starting with a two-week run at New York’s Film Forum. A new 35mm print of the film was struck — the first in 40 years — and is being presented by Quentin Tarantino, who ranks among Winter Kills’ more high-profile fans.
Long before the film faded into semi-obscurity, the actual production of Winter Kills might be the most fascinating part of the entire story. Filming took years to complete — with a long break in the middle after the two key producers ran out of money and ran afoul of a vast array of creditors. Oh, and those two key producers? One of them wound up in federal prison and the other was found dead, “handcuffed to a bedpost and shot through the head, in his New York apartment.”
That’s according to Condon himself, in an article he wrote in 1983 titled “Who Killed Winter Kills?” that originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine and is reprinted in Rialto’s press kit for the revival. It lays out a tale with more twists and turns than Condon’s fictional saga, which tells the story of a murdered U.S. president’s half-brother (played in the film version by Jeff Bridges) as he slips down a rabbit hole of conspiracies connected to his sibling’s mysterious death.
Several years after Condon’s novel was published, it was acquired for adaptation by the two aforementioned producers: Robert Sterling and Leonard Goldberg. They offered Condon $75,000 for the rights to the book, plus a cut of the profits, then brought in novelist and screenwriter William Richert to adapt the novel and direct the screen version.
After signing the contracts, and taking a few meetings with Goldberg, Sterling, and Richert, Condon was largely uninvolved with the production. He writes in his article that he later learned that Sterling and Goldberg only raised $2.3 million of the roughly $6 million they needed to fully fund the picture — and yet they somehow convinced a slew of major movie stars and a professional Hollywood crew (including cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and production designer Robert Boyle) to start shooting — and then kept bluffing their way through for weeks, even as the money dried up, and the cast and crew stopped getting paid.
Almost every major film production has a “completion bond” which insures that in the case of financial or logistical catastrophe, the money needed to complete the shoot is guaranteed. Condon writes that Winter Kills inexplicablynever had one — “and, even more amazing, nobody insisted on seeing one.” That would eventually come to haunt the film once Sterling and Goldberg exhausted their bank accounts. (Condon writes that things got so desperate that “at one point, the key grip approached Richert on behalf of the crew to say that they could raise $100,000 in two and a half hours from their own pockets if that would permit the film to be finished.”)
It wouldn’t. With two weeks left to go in production, a whole collection of creditors marched onto the set and ordered it shut down. For two years, Winter Kills’ raw footage sat on a shelf while Richert raised the money needed to finish the film. Somehow he did it, and found a company (Avco-Embassy) willing to distribute the movie. After all of that, Winter Kills still got solid reviews and drew solid box office in its initial limited release in the summer of 1979.
But the movie never expanded to more theaters beyond that, and essentially just disappeared for years, to the great confusion of Condon and Richert. The official reason given by Avco-Embassy, per Condon, was that they “never expected Winter Kills to get the critical and audience reception it attraction” and “had what they expected to be a red-hot summer item, a movie called Goldengirl” that they were booking everywhere they could at the time.
The filmmakers found those official explanations lacking. Then Goldberg was discovered murdered and a few years later Sterling was sentenced to 40 years in prison on drug charges. (Condon speculates that the former’s untimely death “‘could have been connected’ with the continuing bad deal he gave certain investors in [Winter Kills],” although the official story from the police was that Goldberg was killed by a pickup gone wrong.
Of course, in Winter Kills, the police are part of the web of conspiracies that murdered a fictional president. Or are they? Maybe, maybe not; part of the appeal of Winter Kills is that there are so many different potential killers presented, with so many different potential motives — maybe it was the mob, maybe it was the police, maybe it was a pissed-off Hollywood producer — that even after the “real” motive is revealed, there have been so many false narratives flying around that it becomes almost impossible to tell fact from fiction.
The post-truth world of Winter Kills is one of the many elements that look eerily prescient to 2023 eyes. (Its intermingling of politics and business may not have been ahead of its time in 1979, but it’s sadly no less timely today.) Some of the film’s satire strikes me as a little flimsy; maybe it’s personal preference, but I like the rougher edge of Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, which presents anequally jaundiced view of public service. Still, it’s remarkable how the making of this movie seemed to mirror the bleak, corrupted world it presented onscreen for a very brief period in the late 1970s, and now, finally, once again.
The Worst Movies Released in August
Here are the worst cinematic disasters ever released at the end of summer.
As weird as it sounds, there are — at least according to Hollywood — “good” times to release movies to theaters. Summer has become the home of big blockbusters — mostly because kids are out of school, and families are looking for entertainment (and probably some air conditioning). The winter is the de facto launching ground for awards contenders, apparently because voters for these prestigious (and potentially lucrative) prizes have very short memories.
But there are “bad” times for movies too. Traditionally the “worst” time of year to release a movie to theaters is early January, when theaters are still crammed with those potential awards winners and big-budget holiday films, but the deadline for Oscar consideration has already passed. And though it’s not quite as famous as “Dumpuary,” late August is another deadly period for wide releases. Why? That core audience of kids and families are mostly back to school and work, or enjoying the final days of warm summer weather. Plus, it’s too early to release prestige pictures, as they are all being held for big premieres at festivals like Toronto, Telluride, or New York.
What’s left? Well … the movies on this list, the worst of the worst titles that got released to theaters in the month of August across the past 40+ years. These titles run the gamut from big-budget disasters, to misguided comedies, to bizarre erotic dramas. (And I mean very bizarre.) They all share one thing in common: They all stunk. And let’s face it: Things that stink smell extra bad in that summer heat. So let’s not dwell on this intro any longer and get right into the picks.
The Worst Movies Released in August
Here are the worst cinematic disasters ever released at the end of summer.
The Most Overrated Superhero Movies
While all of these films are varying degrees of okay to good, they’re not nearly as great as their reputations suggest.
I have no idea how many times I’ve seen Ghostbusters, but I would estimate it’s at least 50 times. Maybe it’s 70. Maybe it’s 100. It’s a lot. It’s one of the titles, along with Spaceballs and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, that’s in the running for the movie I have watched more than any other.
Over the weekend, I watched Ghostbusters for the 51st (or 71st [or 101st]) time. No matter how many times this was, I know the film by heart. I could perform it from memory as a one-man Broadway show. (And trust me, I’ve tried to mount this production. My lawyers keep telling me it’s a non-starter. They’re such killjoys.)
So I know exactly what’s coming when, for example, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man lumbers into Columbus Circle, and it looks like all hope is lost. I know Harold Ramis’ Egon will suggest crossing the streams, noting that there’s “definitely a very slim chance” they will survive what had previously been described as an incredibly dangerous scenario. And I know after a shot of Ernie Hudson looking exasperated, and several cutaways to the other Ghostbusters, Bill Murray will reply “I love this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it! Let’s do it!”
But on this viewing, Bill Murray doesn’t say it.
That’s because this was not the standard 105-minute cut of Ghostbusters I know like the back of my proton pack. The version screened over the weekend at the Alamo Drafthouse in Lower Manhattan — supposedly being shown in a theater for the first time anywheresince 1984 — ran about 114 minutes. And in this version, dubbed “Ghostbusters: The Preview Cut,” Peter Venkman doesn’t say “I love this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it!” (When he and the other Ghostbusters get up to go cross the streams, Ray does not leap out of the way of Stay Puft’s fiery hand either.)
In fact, Stay Puft is only in one shot in the entire movie. The rest of the times he should show up, the film cuts to blank screens or images of chaos on the streets of New York City with pedestrians running from absolutely nothing. That’s because most of the special effects involving Stay Puft — along with the rest of the ghosts in Ghostbusters — had not been completed by the time this “Preview Cut” was created and shown a single time to a test audience on the Warner Bros. studio lot in 1984.
The “Preview Cut” also contains no music; not Elmer Bernstein’s wonderful Ghostbusters score, and not Ray Parker Jr.’s iconic theme song. The montage of the Ghostbusters’ rise to fame, typically set to the song “Cleanin’ Up the Town” by The BusBoys, played over several minutes of uninterrupted silence.
Jason Reitman — son of Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman and director of 2021’s Ghostbusters Afterlife — told attendees at the Preview Cut screenings that such test prints were almost never preserved in the 1980s (or, for that matter, today). But Ghostbusters editor Sheldon Kahn decided to make a Betamax copy of the cut, and then held on to it for years. Decades later, someone handed Jason Reitman that Beta tape while he was working on Ghostbusters: Afterlife; he then proceeded to get it transferred to the DCP that was screened at the Drafthouse. (According to Reitman, it took months to find a transfer house in Los Angeles that could even accomplish the task, because it’s been so long since anyone used Beta tapes.)
In his introduction to the Drafthouse screening, Jason Reitman said the test screening of the Preview Cut went extremely well. But even if everyone in attendance agreed they had a massive hit on their hands, they didn’t just add in the missing special effects and music and call it a day. In between this cut and final version that we all know by heart, there were a ton of changes made to Ghostbusters. Not massive structural upheavals, necessarily, but rather a million tiny changes, at least one or two in almost every single scene. Many sequences were shortened, trimmed by lines here or there. Takes were swapped in or out, so even famous Ghostbusters quotes have a totally different vibe. Several brief scenes were removed entirely.
Some of those deleted scenes that are included in the Preview Cut have been available publicly before, as extras on earlier Ghostbusters home video releases. That includes this moment from around the time of Stay Puft’s emergence, when genital-less EPA bureaucrat Walter Peck (William Atherton) shows up at Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver)’s apartment building on Central Park West and demands the Ghostbusters be arrested. (In the finished film, Peck is seen getting drowned in liquid marshmallow goop after the ’Busters cross the streams, but he doesn’t have any dialogue, and is shown so briefly and in such a dark shot that it’s easy to miss it’s even him.)
There’s also a very short scene added prior to the moment where Venkman, Stanz, and Spengler are kicked out of Columbia University that’s as close as Ghostbusters ever came to giving an origin story to this very oddball trio’s relationship. Still staggered by their first encounter with a legitimate ghost at the New York Public Library, the men discuss their chances of receiving a Nobel Prize for their research, to which Venkman says “I introduced you [meaning Ray and Egon]! If it weren’t for me, you never would have met! And that’s got to be worth something!”
Far more interesting than any of these larger additions were the minor changes to so many familiar scenes which feel totally different in this Preview Cut. For example, in the scene where Egon examines Rick Moranis’ Louis Tully after he’s been possessed by Vinz Clortho (AKA “The Keymaster”), when Annie Potts’ Janine tells Egon she’s scared and embraces him, Egon responds “You have nice clavicles.” Similarly, the Ghostbusters’ post-Stay Puft celebration with fans on Central Park West includes a big final line from Bill Murray that I’m guessing have gotten a huge laugh if they’d kept it for the theatrical cut:
“We’re the Ghostbusters! We’re in the Yellow Pages!”
Right before that trim, there’s another extension to the Ghostbusters’ rescue of Dana and Louis after they are turned back into humans after a brief stint as terror dogs. In the Preview Cut, the two share an intensely awkward dialogue exchange.
“Did, did you and I? Did we…?” Louis asks, alluding to their hookup when they were possessed by the spirits of the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper.
“No, Louis. No,” Dana replies. She walks off with Venkman, but then Louis says “I don’t know. I’m sure that…” before he trails off again, to which Ray says “Hey, don’t worry about it. A million fishes in the sea.”
The lusty nature of this moment actually pervades the entire Preview Cut of Ghostbusters; a lot of the stuff that wound up getting cut were line readings, jokes, and even moments of body language that, if they had been left in, would made the movie a whole lot more pervy. The character that is most affected by the changes is Peter Venkman, whose flirting with Dana Barrett in the final film reads as impish and playful but, thanks to the alternate takes and additional dialogue in the Preview Cut comes off a lot more horny — and even slightly unpleasant.
This exchange between Peter and Dana in her apartment, which was completely removed from the final cut, is a good example of the sort of material that Ivan Reitman changed.
Removing these snippets had a huge impact on the way the film plays. Left in, Peter Venkman is not likable. He’s not just a jerk, he’s a bit of a creep! Removed, his pursuit of Dana seems a lot more endearing and charming.
The cuts had an additional, practical effect: They helped Ghostbusters secure a PG rating. While the Preview Cut might not necessarily earn an R, it would have been a lot closer to one thanks to all of the additional profanity and sexual innuendos. And that could have meant a lot of parents (including mine, I’d bet) would have kept their kids away from this movie. And if kids couldn’t see Ghostbusters, who knows if it still becomes an era-defining hit without them.
The cumulative impression of the Preview Cut is fascinating; it’s like watching Ghostbusters from some other dimension where the movie was not a blockbuster. It would be extremely useful as an instructional tool in film schools; viewed back-to-back with Ghostbusters, it shows the sort of impact a couple of minutes of cuts plus an orchestral music and a great soundtrack can have on a movie. It’s about a clear a window into the editing process of a Hollywood blockbuster as you are likely going to get.
Unfortunately, at this point that window is not easy to look through — or at least not for an affordable price. The screenings I attended were the first ever and as far as I know, there are no plans for more right now. The Preview Cut was included as a special feature on the recent Ghostbusters: Ultimate Collection 4K box set, but those currently go for hundreds of dollars online. (Even Amazon is charging $350.)
Maybe the positive reception for these screenings — the Drafthouse sold out two screenings within hours, added two more, and sold those out as well — will encourage a wider distribution of the Ghostbusters Preview Cut. And it would be great to see more early cuts of other classics. You can learn a lot from watching a great movie at its worst.
The Best Movies Based On Toys
Although they’re sometimes associated with craven financial motives, there have been some really good movies based on children’s toys.
Hollywood and the theme park industry have been inextricably linked ever since Walt Disney opened Disneyland in 1955. The park’s early offerings included attractions synergistically inspired by Disney films, including a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea exhibit and rides based on Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. In the decades the followed, entire theme parks dedicated to movies opened, like Universal Studios in Hollywood and Orlando, and Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
When Hollywood Studios first opened in 1989 it was known as Disney-MGM Studios, named after the iconic film and TV production company founded in 1924. These days, MGM is owned by Amazon but back in the 1980s it was still owned by billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, who first bought MGM in the late 1960s, and went on to affix “MGM” branding to a series of upscale Las Vegas hotels. When Kerkorian launched the MGM Grand in 1993, it included an amusement park of its own, MGM Grand Adventures.
The park had a brief and relatively undistinguished history; it opened in 1993 and closed less than a decade later, after the hotel repeatedly shrunk the park’s already limited footprint to make room for more lucrative projects like a pool complex and set of condo towers. Despite its name, MGM Grand Adventures bore no resemblance to Disney-MGM Studios, and contained no rides inspired by films from the MGM library.
But it almost did.
As chronicled on a recent episode of Podcast: The Ride, the early development of the park included at least one ride based on a movie. Now, given MGM’s storied history, there are many family-friendly titles they could have tried to turn into rides, including The Wizard of Oz, Clash of the Titans, or Forbidden Planet. But the ride that was attempted was based on, of all things, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War Epic, Apocalypse Now.
The hosts of Podcast: The Ride got their hands on a document titled “Apocalypse Now: MGM Grand Theme Park Ride Concept Storyline” dated from October 22, 1991, about two years before MGM Grand Adventures. They don’t reveal all of its contents, but they do describe some truly bizarre ideas. Including this one, for the theming in the ride’s queue:
Entering the queue line dock building, the guests are surrounded by various video screens. An edited version of Hearts of Darkness is playing, which also includes Mr. Coppola welcoming riders to the MGM Studio Theme Park and the Apocalypse Now ride.
The notion of showing behind-the-scenes footage while riders waited for an attraction based on a movie was not outlandish in and of itself. Many attractions at Universal Studios employed the same formula for decades — like their Twister … Ride It Out! show, which was introduced with a magnificent IDGAF performance by Bill Paxton explaining some of the special effects used in the Twister movie.
But Apocalypse Now was no ordinary film production. Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about its creation that MGM’s designers proposed be shown in the Apocalypse Now ride queue, begins with Francis Ford Coppola comparing the film’s shoot to the trauma and chaos of an actual war. (“My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.”) Hearts of Darkness does not so much reveal how to make movies as it offers a very clear blueprint of how not to make movies, at least if you intend to do so on schedule and under budget.
That was just the queue area; the Apocalypse Now ride itself wasn’t any more sensible in design. Titled “Apocalypse NowRiver Tour,” it would have put guests on a small boat that would have taken them on a ride through a man-made stream, in much the same way that Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard journeys upriver to locate Marlon Brando’s missing Colonel Kurtz in the film. In fact, the plans called for Sheen to star in the attraction — as himself and in character as Captain Willard. (Sheen was scripted to welcome guests with pre-recorded promises he would “show you how effects from that film and others are used to create movie magic,” then transition to Willard, barking orders to the tourists like “You better get back here in one piece!” through their boat’s radio.)
I love movies, and I completely understand the desire to want step inside one by means of a theme park attraction. When that illusion works — on things like Universal’s Back to the Future: The Ride or Disney’s Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance — it’s a thrilling, immersive experience. But Harry Potter and Star Wars are escapist fantasies. Apocalypse Now is a disturbing cautionary tale about how soldiers are driven insane by the brutality of war. Who wants to step inside that movie? That is an experience people spend thousands of dollars trying to process through therapy, not thousands of dollars flying to Las Vegas to sample it for themselves.
So it’s not entirely shocking, then, that MGM eventually pivoted away from making an Apocalypse Now ride the centerpiece of their new theme park. But according to an interview with Rick Bastrup, a partner in the ride design company that worked on MGM Grand Adventures, the attraction wasn’t abandoned because it was a nightmarish idea. Instead, Bastrup explained in 2011, his company “worked with Francis Ford Coppola for awhile on this but he did not come to an arrangement with the Hotel.”
In fact, when Coppola and MGM couldn’t come to a deal, Grand Adventures didn’t ditch the concept entirely. Instead, they removed all the Apocalypse Now branding and instead made a more a generic boat ride about moviemaking that still included a sequence where visitors get to experience the horrors of the Vietnam War.
The final attraction was dubbed the “Backlot River Tour,” even though the MGM Grand hotel did not have a working backlot, and real working backlots tend not to be navigated by river boat. In concept, Backlot River Tour was like Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise — if the Jungle Cruise tried (and completely failed) to convince you that they were actually filming Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt’s Jungle Cruise movie in the middle of your Anaheim vacation.
Signs that lined the queue for the attraction promised it would reveal “The Magic Behind the Camera!” even though, again, no actual cameras were involved because no actual movies were made at MGM Grand Adventures. Guests boarded boats that then floated through through the phony backlot, where a variety of upcoming movies with titles like “River Trader,” “Swamp Creature,” and the inventively named “Temple of Gloom”were supposedly in production.
The Backlot River Tour’s show-stopping climax was a repurposed sequence from the proposed Apocalypse Now ride. Guests are brought via boat to the “hot set” of a film called “Jungle Storm.” A reasonably impressive-looking helicopter rose from behind a rocky facade, and then an animatronic gunner would start blasting a prop machine gun mounted to the chopper’s skids in the direction of the ride vehicle. The idea of a military helicopter attempting to murder guests is … probably not a concept that would be approved at a corporate level in 2023..
But this was in 1993. You can see this unhinged moment for yourself in the YouTube video below, which documents the entire Backlot River Tour. When you know what to look for, the Apocalypse Now elements are blatantly obvious. (That part of the video begins around the 8:00 minute mark.)
The Backlot River Tour closed years before MGM Grand Adventures finally shut down for good in 2002. Until it was featured on Podcast: The Ride, I never knew about the theme park, much less its faux backlot tour and pseudo-Apocalypse Now attraction. I can only thing of one phrase to sum up my feelings about missing my chance to ride it: “The horror. The horror.”
Amazing Theme Park Rides Based on Movies That Were Never Built
