EYG Hall of Famer Orson Welles’ final film, a film that had been locked away, mostly completed, for 40 years, has finally been released on Netflix.  And it is some kind of movie.

The story of how the film came to be is almost more of a tale than The Other Side of the Wind.  I would certainly recommend that if you plan on watching this movie, you take the time to watch the documentary, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead as well.  It makes for a very important companion piece to this movie.

The Other Side of the Wind is about a legendary film director who had been self-exiled to Europe for years, returning to Hollywood to get his final passion project filmed.  The narrative of this movie is told through two lenses.  One, the struggles of the director, Jake Hannaford (John Huston), trying to get through the filming with money troubles, struggles with actors and with the Hollywood machine.  Two, the film that he has made is used as a “film within a film” and helps to show the artistry and the imagination of Hannaford.

Now, many people assume that the film is basically an autobiographical tale of Orson Welles himself.  Welles had denied this, but it does seem to be pretty obvious that the character of Jake Hannaford is based strictly on the director.

Apparently there were some scenes of the nearly completed film that were damaged and had to be replaced with photos and voice over.  These scenes feel as if they would have been important for the conclusion of the movie unfortunately.  Of course there is no way around that and what they did with those scenes is the best they were going to be able to accomplish.

There are so many truly visionary shots in this film that you could break down countless numbers of them for analysis.  The scenes fly fast and furiously through the film and you are never allowed to linger on anything for long.  It is certainly an impressive feat of film-making and the creative process.  It changes perspectives, black and white to color, and points of view as easily as you can imagine.

It is slight on story and may be too inside Hollywood to truly reach a wide audience.

John Huston is tremendous here as Jake and the relationship between him and Peter Bogdanovich’s character, Brooks Otterlake, is compelling.

While Welles never put together the ultimate final cut of this movie, those who did paid tribute to his overall vision and presented the world with a film about moviemaking that is chaotic, wild, jubilant and full of the proper amount of satire.  This feels like an appropriate end to a legendary career.

4.2 stars

The Netflix original documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead tells the fascinating tale of the efforts of EYG Hall of Famer Orson Welles and his attempts to finish a film called The Other Side of the Wind, a film that has now been released on Netflix as well.

Alan Cummings narrated the documentary, which joins a group of wonderful docs from 2018.

Fast paced and engaging, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead uses archived footage of Orson Welles to show us truths about the legendary filmmaker that we have never known and to tell the story of the struggle to make this movie as a way of a comeback.

This documentary is not about Citizen Kane.  Sure, it is mentioned, but it is not what is being investigated here.  Instead, we see Welles’ conflicts with Hollywood and the movie business, especially the money providers, in his desperate attempt to get his movies made.

In fact, because of the money, an almost finished cut of the film The Other Side of the Wind wound up locked away in a vault for decades…even after the death of Welles.

Directed by Morgan Neville, this documentary really made me want to watch The Other Side of the Wind on Netflix myself, which is what a good doc about a movie should do.  The Other Side of the Wind will be my next watch soon.

3.7 stars

Claire Foy is the next actress to take up the role of Lisbeth Salander, the woman who arrived first in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  This is the next film featuring the character.  Unfortunately, there seemed to be a lack of what made Lisbeth such an original character in her past offerings.  Here, in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, she is basically just another action hero.

We join Lisbeth as she is in pursuit of a MacGuffin that gives the possessor the ability to control the nuclear weapons of the world.  The man who invented the technology (Stephen Merchant) is being chased, and his son August (Christopher Convery) knows how to access the info as well.

Lisbeth is in a race against her sister (Sylvia Hoeks) in a twist that is revealed in the trailers, but should have been held back.

There are a ton of action beats here, some decent, but others just silly.  The film is really more of a Mission Impossible or a James Bond type of flick. There is less darkness in the movie and Lisbeth is no where near as harsh as she was in the previous movie.  Where as the other movie showed Lisbeth taking to a serious extreme and being more psychological, this was more action/adventure.  I think this did not work as well for Lisbeth than the previous way.

Claire Foy continues her strong work this year.  I liked her as Lisbeth, or at least, what they let her do as Lisbeth.  I think she would have been a great actress to take this character to another level, but the film does not want to let her do it.

There were many scenes where I was bored during the movie.  It did not grip me the way I had hoped it would.  There were too many scenes where I was rolling my eyes wondering how that was even possible.  The Girl in the Spider’s Web was too predictable and too poorly executed and took a character that could be an original female protagonist and made her into just another action hero.

2.7 stars

You’re a mean one… well, maybe not that mean.

The Grinch is the newest version of the Dr. Seuss classic children’s book, How the Grinch Who Stole Christmas and this film is an animated film from Illumination, the company that brought us the Minions.

Benedict Cumberbatch voiced the Grinch and he does a nice job. The problem is that the Grinch seemed to be an alright dude early in this film.  He had some bad things happen to him, but I did not think that his heart was three times too small.  He was just lonely.  I would have liked to see the Grinch be more rotten early here.

The film followed the book pretty closely, except of course that there is way more added, because it is a short book, and the original animated version was around 20 minutes long.  This film is 86 minutes which requires a bunch more to the story.  Unfortunately, most of the additions were weaker than the parts from the actual story.  The middle of the film dragged a bit, making it feel longer than the 86 minutes.

The animation is wonderful and the colors are beautiful.  The film looks great.  The voices are really strong as well.  Cameron Seely, Rashida Jones, Kenan Thompson, Angela Lansbury all do good work with voices.  I was not a huge fan of Pharrell Williams as the narrator.  His voice was not as deep or tense as Boris Karloff from the original.

This is a fine version, although fairly unremarkable.  There are some funny bits, but it is stretched out too much.  There is great animation and strong voice work.  The film will probably be loved by a lot of the kids watching it, and it is passable for the adults.  It could be worse.

3 stars

J.J. Abrams newly produced horror/thriller is awesome.  It is tense and exciting and about as dramatic as you are going to get.

How could you go wrong by combining a war movie fighting Nazis with a monster/zombie movie?  It is like peanut butter and chocolate.

Overlord had a strong young cast (including Agents of SHIELD’s Fitz, Iain De Caestecker).  There is Jovan Adepo (from Fences and mother!), Wyatt Russell (Everybody Wants Some), and Pilou Asbæk.  There are some good performances here as these actors brought more to these roles than you might expect.

The story takes place as US Forces were preparing to invade France during D-Day in World War II.  What we did not know was that a small team of US soldiers needed to be dropped into a village in France to destroy a tower if the US Forces had any hope of landing on the beaches of Normandy. However, once they found this village, the crew found more than what they thought they would.

Overlord is a violent film with some serious gore involved.  The tension is tight and the anxiety was real.  Jovan Adepo had the feeling of a star, commanding the screen throughout the movie.  He reminded me of a younger John Boyega.  I can see this young man being a real star for years to come.

The effects are very strong and the war scenes are put together very well. There may be some real stretching of the disbelief in a few scenes.

This is a fun film with a great atmosphere.  You are engrossed with the heroes, who are surprisingly three dimensional, and are in fear of the villains.  The film is a B-level movie, but that does not make it a bad thing.  It is a lot of fun.

4 stars

Tiffany Haddish can be really over-the-top, but she can also be very funny.  It is usually graphic or lewd in nature, but that can be funny.

In Nobody’s Fool, she was funny about a third of the time.

The rest of the film is a giant mess.

Tanya (Tiffany Haddish) has just been released from jail and she is staying with her sister Danica (Tika Sumpter).  Danica has a relationship with a man online whom she had never met, but they seemed to be soulmates.  Tanya believes that her sister is being catfished and goes about trying to prove this.

Now, that is what the trailers make you think this movie is about, but it really is not.  First of all, Tiffany Haddish is not the lead character.  She is at best a supporting character.  The film is about Danica and her relationships.  After the whole catfish this ended (early on), she had a relationship with Frank (Omari Harwick) and that relationship was rocky.

Not because of Frank but because Danica was a rotten person.  The film tried to make her out the protagonist, but she was simple a horrible person whom I did not want to cheer for even a little bit.  She was rude and mean spirited.  She caused people pain everywhere she went.

Why should I want poor Frank to end up with Danica when she treated him like something she scraped off her shoes?  She was stuck up and mean.  I would have totally kicked her to the curb if I were Frank.

This is a Tyler Perry movie and none of these people feel like real people.  They feel like poorly written characters in a movie script.  They do things that reasonably intelligent people simply would not do.

The exception here is Whoopi Goldberg who plays Danica and Tanya’s mother and she steals the movie every time she makes an appearance.  She is absolutely the best part of Nobody’s Fool and I wanted more of Whoopi.

This is just a mess of a film that does not know what the narrative is meant to be.  These characters are dumb and our protagonist is as unlikable as you can be.

1.5 stars

Boring.

Boring.

I did not enjoy this movie at all.

Honestly, as soon as it started up, I thought to myself that it was totally CGI and that it looked more like a cartoon than a real place.  Even the real world part was all CGI and I am not sure that was needed.

The movie features a young girl Clara (Mackenzie Foy) whose mother has dies and Clara finds her way into a strange and magical land that her mother was the Queen of ( I guess) and has to help save it from within.

This magical land is not Narnia.  It is not Wonderland.  It is not Oz.  It is a land of four realms and there are problems.

Yawn.

The Nutcracker (Jayden Fowora-Knight) is the last Nutcracker around, but he goes by Captain.  His name is Phillip. He reminds me physically of John Boyega in Star Wars without the charisma.

Helen Mirren is here too.  I usually love her, but she seems as if she is going through the motion as the mysterious Mother Ginger.

There is so much of nothing going on here and I was so bored.  Every once in a while I noticed some recognizable music that told me this was the Nutcracker, but those moments were few and far between.

I just did not like this film and the tons of children in the theater I was in did not help the movie going experience.

1.3 stars

There were times in this movie where I had goosebumps.

Some may say that the biopic about the rock band Queen, led by one of the greatest front men in the history of rock music, Freddie Mercury, was too simple and basic of a story.  And the performance required of an actor to bring back to life Freddie Mercury was a task extremely challenging.  Fortunately, that job fell into the talented hands of Mr. Robot’s Rami Malek, who proceeded to unfurl a performance for the ages that combined perfectly with the magnificent music of Queen into a cinematic experience unlike most others.

I am uncertain if Malek performed the songs or if they were lip synced, but they were perfectly constructed into the narrative and brought what could have been a typical and unremarkable biopic into a marvelous musical engagement.

The film begins and ends at the Queen performance at Live Aid, the worldwide concert to raise money for starving people in Africa.  The concert scenes in Bohemian Rhapsody were wonderful and stirring.  Malek became Freddie Mercury before our eyes and embraced the character like few others could.

Although his performance transcended the film, Malek was not the only strong performance in Bohemian Rhapsody.  Gwilym Lee brought Queen’s guitarist Brian May to the screen and Ben Hardy embodied the drummer Roger Taylor.  Both band members were able to illuminate the complicated relationship with their eccentric lead singer.  The band displayed a wonderful feeling of family, where even when they fought, it was clear that they had each other’s backs.

No scenes exemplified this more than the scene where the band arrived at the offices of EMI record executive Ray Foster (Mike Myers, in a funny and surprisingly ironic performance).  Queen seemed to be completely together, a single mind shown to the world, intent on releasing the six minute Bohemian Rhapsody as their single, despite the objections of Foster.

Other scenes that were the best ones in the film were the scenes of the band and how they came up with the great music that they did. The creation of Bohemian Rhapsody the song is an epic section of the film and highlights the creativity of the musicians involved in Queen.

The relationships within the band were stretched to the limit, as many families are, with the introduction of Paul Prenter (Allen Leech) and the distancing of Freddie from his family by way of drugs, alcohol and sexual experimentation.  Leech must have done a marvelous job, because I hated that man, who threatened to tear the band apart by placing himself square in the middle between the band and Freddie.  The resolution of that situation in the movie was tremendously satisfying.

Another relationship that was beautifully rendered was the one between Freddie and the love of his life, Mary, his ex-wife who is truly his soulmate.  Mary knew Freddie was gay before Freddie knew it, and yet she did not blame him for his confusion.  The relationship was so powerful that it survived through the trials that Freddie heaped upon it.

While Bohemian Rhapsody, the movie, is not as experimental as the band Queen was with their music, I did not find that to be a problem.  As a big fan of Queen’s music, it was expertly interwoven in the movie and, along with what should be an eventual Academy Award nominated performance by Rami Malek, elevated what could have been typical biopic fare into something that was killer.  Killer Queen for sure.

I really don’t know why the reviews on this film are so mixed.  I think it is one of the best films of the year.

4.7 stars

This is a movie that, when I think back upon, I notice issues that I did not think about when first watching it.

I will say on the first viewing of Mid90s, the directorial debut of Jonah Hill, I enjoyed the narrative of the film and I did not have much problems with it with a notable exception of an uncomfortable sex scene that I wondered how they could get away with filming.

However, in retrospect, there are issues of misogyny, homophobic behavior and the aforementioned sex scene that should be questioned in a film being released in 2018.  I will say that the film is taking place in the mid 1990s and much of the language and thoughts are accurate to the times being shown.  Does that “artistic vision” make the use of these acceptable?  Were they necessary to display the time frame of the mid 1990s accurately or does it just highlight a deeper problem in the script?

It is hard to say.  If you remove the questionable material, you still have a story of a young boy Stevie (Sunny Suljic) who has an abusive older brother (Lucas Hedges) and a mother (Katherine Waterston- dreadfully under used here) who has her own problems to deal with.  Stevie finds a connection with a group of skateboarders made up of older kids, led by the cool older boy and best skateboarder among them Ray (Na-kel Smith).  Stevie bonds with this group and faces the problems of alcohol and drug abuse, jealousy from within and teenage rebellion.

This group of skateboarders was shown considerably more developed than a typical movie of this fashion.  Each member of the group had their own motivations and personalities and it makes this seem like a much more realistic film.  Yes, the female characters of this movie, including the terribly undervalued Katherine Waterston, are poorly developed and based on cliches and stereotypes, but the film’s main focus is on the group of boys.

There are some really powerful scenes, but there are also some scenes that feel disjointed and out of place.  Some of it is uncomfortable and other aspects of it are very strong.  Much of the language is irritating to listen to, but it certainly is the way teens talked during that time period.

My first response after walking out of the theater was positive for Mid90s and I will be giving the movie a recommendation, but I would warn those who may be easily offended that this may not be the film for you.

3.5 stars