Malibu High and The Hearse are new to Blu-ray!

Boutique label Vinegar Syndrome continues to be one of the best around when it comes to resurrecting forgotten films from decades past and restoring them to new HD glory. Their focus is generally in the realms of horror and sexploitation, and that pattern continues this month with two new Blu-rays. First up is a sexy little riff on teenage hijinx and murder in Malibu High, and the other pairs a creepy house and a monstrous car in The Hearse.

Malibu High (1978)

Kim is a high school student bored with her classes and pissed off that her boyfriend Kevin has dumped her for that rich bitch Annette. She gives the girl a punch to the face and decides her new life starts now. Step one? Seducing her teachers and blackmailing them for A’s. Step two? Making some real cash by prostituting herself out of her drug dealer turned pimp’s van.

Oh to be a teenager again!

It’s all fun and games for a little while, but when an aggressive john forces himself on her she strikes back with an ice pick… and she likes it. Her new pimp realizes she’s as talented on her feet as she is off, and soon he’s sending her out as a teenage assassin to eliminate the competition and anyone else he wants dead.

It’s not often a T&A flick (from the ’70s or otherwise) ends somewhere completely different from where it began, but Irvin Berwick’s Malibu High does just that. It’s a romp of boobs and bullets that shifts effortlessly from a story about a teenage bad girl getting it on with every man in her life to a teenage worse girl shooting some others to death. It embraces the “sexy” quotient by opening with the high schooler waking up fully nude – as most high schoolers do – and seeing her go topless a dozen times thereafter, but the shift towards violence makes for a far more interesting film.

Kim’s not exactly a traditional protagonist either and instead walks something of a villainous line. She tells her mom that dad killed himself because he couldn’t get it up with her anymore, she hides an old man’s pills and gives him a heart attack with her bare breasts, and once she gets a taste for gunplay she does not stop.

There are some goofy elements here including a score refrain that’s essentially the sound of an arcade game ending and another that is pretty much the People’s Court theme. We also get the longest foot chase in cinema history. To be clear, it’s not a good chase as it’s basically in a straight line, but boy does it go on forever. Beats like these earn some smiles even as the film gets more and more serious, and while the end result is no lost classic it remains a fun little watch.

Vinegar Syndrome’s new Blu-ray features a 2K restoration of the film that gives new life to the highly inappropriate shenanigans on display. The special features include a trailer, still gallery, reversible cover, and the following extras:

• Commentary with producer Lawrence Foldes and actor Tammy Taylor
• Making Malibu High – Interview with Lawrence Foldes [26:40]
• Playing Annette – Interview with Tammy Taylor [12:42]
• Playing the Boss – Interview with actor Garth Pillsbury [14:51]
• Q&A from New Beverly screening [27:02]
• “Struggle for Israel” – Foldes’ short film [19:57]
• “Grandpa & Marika” – Foldes’ short film [11:07]

Buy Malibu High on Blu-ray/DVD from Amazon

The Hearse (1980)

Jane Hardy (Trish Van Devere) is a San Francisco teacher in need of a vacation, and she finds the perfect spot outside of the city in a small town where her aunt once lived. She’s inherited the long ago deceased woman’s house, but as she tries to settle in to the big house and the small town she discovers someone or something wants her gone.

Surprise, it’s both!

Townspeople treat her rudely from the local priest to the misogynistic sheriff, her dead aunt keeps appearing and disappearing, and a hearse with a growling grill keeps chasing and harassing her at night. It only gets worse when the hearse’s silent but deadly driver starts attacking her in the house, and soon Jane is forced to consider that maybe her aunt’s history as a devil worshiper might possibly have something to do with it all.

Director George Bowers only made four feature films (including the ’80s classic, My Tutor) – he made his bones in Hollywood as an editor working on films as diverse as The Stepfather and The Country Bears – and that’s a shame as The Hearse is an atmospheric horror picture offering up some solid turns and effectively creepy sequences. He uses POV well both inside and out of the house, but even better is the film’s division of threats. There are supernatural concerns, crazy locals, evil neighbors, and the possibility that Jane is in fact a nutcase. For every “normal” supporting character there are two utter weirdos whose behavior is unsettling at best.

There are some questions of intelligence though in regard to Jane’s behavior. Again, the possibility that she’s just nuts plays a role here, but she’s too quick to forgive and forget the waking nightmares she’s experiencing. Multiple broken windows and intruders would leave anyone on edge, but give the girl one good meal and suddenly she’s perfectly content again. It makes for some occasionally frustrating reversals.

The Hearse overcomes its issues  – some minor repetition, budgetary restraints, an abrupt ending – to deliver a devilish little chiller well worth a watch for genre fans. Van Devere is fine in the lead, and the supporting players offer a bevy of familiar faces including Joseph Cotten, Med Flory, Perry Lang, and the feature film debut of the great Christopher McDonald.

Vinegar Syndrome gives the film a very sharp and clear 2K restoration, but it’s very slight on extras outside of a trailer, a still gallery, a reversible cover, and:

• Satan Get Behind Thee – Interview with actor David Gautreaux [20:39] – You’ll want to watch this interview as his discussion of epic fornication, cunnilingus, and his strict Catholic beliefs is terrifically entertaining.

Buy The Hearse on Blu-ray/DVD from Amazon

Behold the visual language of cinema.

Cinema is a language of a thousand dialects. Voices from all over the world and from all walks of life contribute to its lexicon, but despite this sweeping disparity there is a common tongue that all fans and practitioners of cinema speak. This tongue, ironically enough, manifests visually in the frames between the words, in the image-based representations of themes, tropes, ideas, and emotions.

As such there are overlaps. Moonlight has imagery that conjures La La Land and vice versa, 20^th Century Women reflects moments of Sing Street, scenes in Hacksaw Ridge harken to those from Manchester by the Sea. This isn’t an act of homage nor it is wholly coincidental. All filmmakers, whatever their origins or intentions, draw from the same language of cinema, each in their unique ways, yes, but all from the same virtual well of image-based storytelling. This, rather than homogenizing film as an art form, makes it more interpretive, it shows us, in crude parlance, that there’s more than one way to skin a cat, though the end result is the same.

As evidence of this, observe the following montage from editor Tobie who has taken reflective images from a handful of 2016 films (list below the embed) to show both their common traits and the various ways in which these traits are demonstrated on screen. What they teach is that despite film’s many voices, there is always a shared current of understanding.

Films used:
Moonlight
20th Century Women
La La Land
Sing Street
Hacksaw Ridge
Manchester by the Sea
Lion

No tale at all would have been an improvement on this exhaustively bland one.

There are exactly two good and funny gags in the fifth entry of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. As is the pattern of these films the bits are dragged out a little too long, but for a few brief seconds each, they serve as reminders of the visual wit and energy that pervades Gore Verbinski’s 2003 original. It’s been a series of diminishing returns ever since with the latest film sinking even further into the depths of mind-numbing boredom.

We open on a determined boy at sea who dives deep into the ocean towards a particular shipwreck. Once aboard the rotted and crumbling deck, the water drains away and a shambling figure appears. Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), his face and body showing the ravages of death and undersea nibblings, tells his son to go home, but the boy instead promises that he won’t rest until he ends the curse that holds his father beneath the waves.

Some years later the now older Henry (Brenton Thwaites) appears no closer to completing his promise, but a chance meeting with two wildly differing personalities puts him back on track. A ship he’s working on is attacked by ghostly pirates, and the undead Capt. Salazar (Javier Bardem) spares his life so that he may tell the tale. (Someone has to, and dead men can’t… it’s right there in the title.) The crack-faced demon also tells him to find Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and warn him of the coming reckoning. Henry then crosses paths with a saucy horologist, Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario), who holds the key in the form of a map to finding an undiscovered island and the Trident of Poseidon which promises to break all the curses of the sea. Henry and Carina join forces with Jack, Salazar ropes Capt. Hector Barborossa (Geoffrey Rush) into taking his side and the race is on.

And on. And on. And on.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is a big, loud slog that fails to muster the energy necessary to carry it across its 129-minute running time. (But hey, at least it’s the shortest film in the series.)

The film’s problems are legion and insurmountable for directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg (both of the far superior sea-set epic, Kon-Tiki), but in the interest of positivity let’s begin with what works. There are two sequences that tease a vitality and creativity sorely missing elsewhere. First up is a bank robbery that goes awry in somewhat comical fashion with the highlight being a safe-dragging sequence straight out of Fast Five. It’s a funny period-piece recreation of that film’s epic scene, and while it drags on a bit too long (pun probably intended) it allows for some fun beats and large-scale destruction. The second of the film’s highlights comes shortly after Jack is strapped into the guillotine in preparation for his execution. His crew set off a rescue attempt, and amid the chaos, the guillotine’s sharp blade repeatedly threatens to lop off his head. It’s a lively blend of momentum, gravity, and physical comedy.

And that’s pretty much it for the positives.

The CG is fine of course, albeit less than memorable, but there’s so very little that pops here. The vast majority of the action occurs at night with everything bathed in the artificiality of blue moonlight, and while the goal was most likely to shield some of the effects from scrutiny the effect is a bland sameness to too many of the scenes. There’s little distinguish one moment from the next, one ship to the next, etc, and a Moses-like parting of the sea aside the sea-based antics blend together into a dull, ultramarine-tinted stew of sameness.

The cast fares even worse. Supporting players do competent work, but four of the five leads do more damage than anything else here. Depp is doing his late-career Depp shtick, Bardem is trying desperately to ham it up from behind prosthetics to little effect, and our supposed romantic leads exude not even an ounce of chemistry between them. Had the film revealed they were, in fact, brother and sister audiences would say “sure” and move on, but the effort expended to instead make them into a new Will Turner & Elizabeth Swann is wasted on flat performances and even flatter dialogue.

Writer Jeff Nathanson — whose filmography runs the gamut from Catch Me If You Can to Rush Hour 3, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Tower Heist — seems content hanging the film on daddy issues and an insanely simple quest. Seriously, the secret to finding the mysterious island comes down to simply sailing in a general direction. Audiences would be well-advised to point themselves in a different direction altogether when they head to the theater.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is a noisy, forgettable summer ride lacking spectacle, personality, or purpose. Well, purpose aside from making big bank at the box-office anyway.

A cerebral, successful short.

It’s not the best form to start a film review by mentioning a different film from the one being reviewed, but I mean the following as the highest possible compliment.

What I loved most about Shane Carruth’s Primer was how it took science out of the lab, or at least the lab as we think about it. There was no multi-million-dollar equipment, no corporate or university backing, no pristine white environment or dust-free enclosures, it was just two guys with a theory and know-how in their garage altering the fabric of the universe. Context like that makes the unimaginably-epic familiarly-intimate, it thoughtfully reduces magnanimous ideas to a scale most all of us can identify with even if we can’t understand the science behind it all.

The Constant from director Ben Tedesco does the same thing, it takes a large-scale idea about time-travel science and minimalises it in the best way to an intimate discussion between three colleagues in a garage, which in turn replaces the dry academia such scenarios usually involve with youthful enthusiasm and intellectual desperation, which are far more interesting. The emphasis here is on theory, which lends itself to some fascinating dialogue and conjures a world much bigger than the physical space of the film. And like all good sci-fi, there’s that “should we?” current floating through the science, and a twist in the final moments that upends your expectations.

Tedesco’s triumvirate of scientists – actors Jack Bennett, Erica Manni, and Joshua David Bishop – play well off of one another’s surety and skepticism, and the pacing of Tedesco’s narrative is itself like time ticking down to a phenomenal climax. it’s a story tailor-made to watch over and over and certain to yield new insight each time.

I’ve said enough, the rest you need to discover for yourself. Bottom line – The Constant is an original and mind-bending piece of compact sci-fi that begs many questions, the most prominent being: “where can I see more of Ben Tedesco’s work?” That, at least, I can answer: jump over to his Vimeo page, link in the video below.

When is the last time you watch Season 1 through misty eyes?

It’s not that they are gone, it’s that they were great. Over the course of this week, yours truly dove back into HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s time, after all, for the Storm of Spoilers crew (of which I am one-third) to begin our #reThrones project, in which we rewatch and reread our way back through the six seasons of Game of Thrones before the seventh season debuts in July.

What I did expect was to find so many beloved characters, many long dead, alive and well and telling each other that they’d see each other again. What I did not expect was how much I genuinely miss these actors, their performances, and the very different show of which they were apart in the beginning.

As you can hear in the discussion we had on Storm of Spoilers, there’s something striking about that first season of Thrones: it’s almost perfect. The way Dan Weiss, David Benioff, and their motley crew of producers, craftspeople, and future blockbuster directors set about making “The Sopranos in Middle Earth” is magnificent.

We take for granted how much of Thrones was built on a foundation of walk-and-talks, political drama, scheming, and well-tuned character moments. The big battles all happen off-screen, in the deep blackness of scene transitions. What matters is what comes before and what happens after. In this way, Thrones season one will undoubtedly go down as one of the great accomplishments in television history. It has wrought, if the season 7 trailer is any indication, a new high point in blockbuster television. But back in those first 10 hours, it was simply interested in perfecting its machinations.

This realization is the strongest takeaway from my revisit of season one. I don’t miss Catelyn Stark quite as much as I miss the way Michelle Fairley slowly, meticulously portrayed the destruction of her spirit. I don’t miss Daenerys and Drogo, but I do miss watching Emilia Clarke grow up as an actress right before our eyes in such a short period of time. I miss having good reason to simply despise Sansa Stark (she was awful) or the joy one could find in the blooming sociopath flower that was Joffrey.

There’s remorse in our survival beyond season one. But it’s not that we’ve survived these characters. It’s that we’ve survived a time when Game of Thrones was a beautifully crafted political drama. What we’re going to get in season 7 isn’t likely to be anything near the same show. And that’s okay, too. Things change, people change, Winter is really coming, and the show has become something different, for better or worse. But I miss it. Even more than I expected.

Today in Pop Culture History

Born this day in 1907 and 1913, respectively: John Wayne, “The Duke,” and Peter Cushing, the original Grand Moff. The latter was resurrected by CGI wizardry for Rogue One. For the former, it seems only a matter of time.

Today is also the birthday of Bobcat Goldthwait, one of the all-time great “That Guys” (see Police Academy) and one of our favorite modern filmmakers.

Thirty-five years ago today at Cannes, E.T. made its debut.

What You Need to Know Today

It’s Friday, which means two things:

1. For the next few weeks, I’ll be using this Friday column to drop Game of Thrones thoughts on you. That already happened.

2. Assuming I can get studios to give us free stuff each week, I’ll run a giveaway every Friday within this column. This week, I’ve got two Blu-ray copies of John Wick 2. All you need to do in order to enter is subscribe to this column via email newsletter. You can do so here.

ICYMI

Rob Hunter has reviewed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. It didn’t end well for the movie.

Published this morning, this essay about the cinematic persistence of Faust by Meg Shields is a must read for anyone who has sympathy for the darkness.

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the release of Star Wars. Brad Gullickson digs into our beautiful obsession with the Skywalker saga.

Shot of the Day

Back to where it all began: the first time we saw Winterfell.

GAME OF THRONES (2011) DP: Alik Sakharov | Dir: Tim Van Patten | Episode: "Winter is Coming" pic.twitter.com/5fjs4cpJSE

— One Perfect Shot (@OnePerfectShot) May 22, 2017

One night in Bangkok and Cage makes tough guys tumble, he’s never too careful with his company.

“There’s big money in misery. Where there’s money, there’s competition, and the guy paying me usually wins.”

I remember a week or so before Bangkok Dangerous was released I was at the movies seeing something else and it was clear that Lionsgate was banking on having a hit on their hands. Outside the theater, there was a “coming soon” poster for the film and inside a cardboard cutout. The real kicker was a massive banner hanging just above the lobby entrance. I’m not good at guestimating sizes but this thing was yuge. As I was waiting in line to get concessions for the particular movie I was seeing that day, I heard a couple guys in line behind me discussing the banner.

“Bangkok Dangerous,” the first dude said, extremely confused by the title. “What’s that?”

“Obviously it’s a movie, you idiot,” I angrily thought to myself, probably — I can’t remember all the details, this was 9 years ago.

His friend quickly chimed in, “Oh god, it’s another terrible Nic Cage movie.”

“Oh,” dude number one responded, still confused about everything. “You already saw it?”

“No, but I don’t have to,” the friend said, because who needs to see a movie before judging it. “If it has Nic Cage, it’s awful.”

Was I about to throw down? Were fisticuffs in my immediate future? No, because I had a movie to get to and also I didn’t want to get beat up. But I want the record to show I was angry on the inside!

This was the first time that I had ever experienced anti-Cage sentiment. Like the first dude from this story, I was very confused. I still loved Cage, didn’t everybody? I wasn’t the only person excited to see Bangkok Dangerous, was I?

When the film finally opened I was there that first weekend and as it turns out I may have been the only person excited. In my theater, there were a lot of empty seats. Despite all the extra legroom Bangkok Dangerous still managed to win the box office that opening weekend. Unfortunately, it’s one of the rare movies that managed to win it’s opening weekend box office while still being a bit of a flop. Per Box Office Mojo, the film brought in $7.7 million in its first weekend, just edging out Tropic Thunder by a few thousand. Tropic Thunder was in its 4th weekend. Ouch.

Looking back at all of this now and I shouldn’t have been surprised. Not only did I overhear that conversation between Cage haters, but outside of my bubble the public’s opinion on Cage was shifting. Bangkok Dangerous was released right in the midst of this shift. Audiences hadn’t completely soured on him by that point, but they were getting close. His three films leading up to Bangkok Dangerous were Ghost Rider, Next, and National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Some would say the writing was on the wall. Perhaps I just didn’t want to see it.

My initial reaction after seeing Bangkok Dangerous that opening weekend was lukewarm. I didn’t think it was bad but didn’t think it was quite good either. It was just fine. And there’s nothing wrong with fine necessarily, but fine doesn’t warrant a re-visit. So I passed on giving Bangkok Dangerous another go…until this week.

There’s a lot of great things about doing this weekly column. For starters, I get to talk about an actor I love and all the movies he’s made that I love. It’s a great platform for me to write about something I’m passionate about. But the best part is that it allows me to re-visit movies I maybe wouldn’t re-visit otherwise. Without this column who knows when I would have re-watched Bangkok Dangerous. I’m sure I would have eventually because of Cage, but it probably wouldn’t have been anytime soon. That would have been too bad because after re-watching it earlier this week I have a whole new opinion on it.

In the film Cage stars as Joe, a contract killer that works by a strict set of rules — don’t ask questions, don’t take interest in people outside of work, erase every trace, and know when to get out. His job takes him all over the world as he goes wherever the money is. His most recent job has him in Bangkok where he has four people to assassinate.

He always hires a local to help assist him. Someone that can speak the language and work as the middleman between Joe and whoever ordered the hit. For his most recent gig, he hires Kong (Shahkrit Yamnarm), a local pickpocket that makes his living ripping off stupid American tourists.

Joe is very good at his job, but it’s starting to take a toll on him. To do this job well you have to live a life of solitude. Getting close to someone is a liability. For a number of years, Joe has been fine with this but he’s now starting to feel lonely and contemplating breaking his second rule. This begins with Kong, who he takes a shine to and decides to teach everything he knows.

After cutting his arm during a job, Joe heads to a local pharmacy to get some ointment to take care of the wound. There he meets Fon (Charlie Yeung), a deaf-mute pharmacist that helps him get what he needs. Joe is instantly smitten and decides he’s going to break rule number two a second time. He returns to the pharmacy a few days later and asks Fon out on a date to which she happily accepts.

There are some fascinating layers to Bangkok Dangerous. The story is sort of broken down into three parts — Joe’s killing, Joe’s teaching Kong, and Joe’s blossoming relationship with Fon. Bouncing back and forth between these three elements creates an interesting juxtaposition. One moment Joe is violently offing some baddies, the next he’s enjoying a lovely dinner with Fon.

The dinner scene is actually one of my favorites in the movie. Joe and Fon are unable to communicate verbally, but they’re still able to connect with one another. It’s really endearing and sweet and showcases a different side of Joe not seen in the rest of the movie. He’s very brooding and troubled throughout, but in this one moment, you can sense a true happiness. Fon helps Joe realize that there’s more to life and he’s been missing out.

Bangkok Dangerous was directed by the Pang Brothers, Danny, and Oxide, and it’s remake of their 1999 film of the same name. The basic concepts of the story are the same but in this version, Fon is the deaf-mute and Joe is the one who can talk, whereas in the original that was flip-flopped. “We’d like to keep him the same, but we understand that from a marketing purpose Nic needs to have some lines,” Oxide told The New York Times in 2006 interview.

Ultimately Oxide is right — no way this movie gets made in the US with Nic Cage as the lead playing a deaf-mute. Half the film is narrated by him, plus he’s Nic Cage! However, I can’t help but wonder what might have been. A big part of what makes Nic Cage the actor he is, is the way he delivers lines. How fascinating would it be to strip that ability away from him? What would that result in? I think it would push Cage to try and do something extraordinary without words and that thought intrigues me.

Part of why I enjoyed Bangkok Dangerous so much more on this recent viewing is because of the little things I noticed that I didn’t pick up on before. That’s primarily the stuff between Joe and Fon. Despite this somewhat change of heart, I fully admit the movie is flawed and I can understand why it didn’t really take off.

At its core the film is an action movie, at least that’s what audiences expect. And don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of action in Bangkok Dangerous and some of it is quite stylized and cool, but there’s not enough. The Pang Brothers are wildly talented directors and know how to handle action but the movie never goes big enough. This should have been John Wick before there was a John Wick.

Speaking of John Wick…

You know what would make John Wick: Chapter 3 perfect? Bringing Cage’s Bangkok Dangerous character* into that world. If you can pair Cage and Keanu together you’ve got a clean Oscar sweep on your hands. The ball’s in your court, Chad Stahelski.

Back to Bangkok Dangerous…

The failure to put the proverbial balls to the wall hinders an otherwise interesting story of a hitman having a bit of a midlife crisis. Instead of becoming a cool, hip action franchise that is beloved by everyone, Bangkok Dangerous prevented the Pang Brothers from ever taking off in the States and placed another nail into the coffin housing Cage’s bankability.

*This would actually only work if John Wick: Chapter 3 is a prequel to Bangkok Dangerous or if we ignore the dark theatrical ending of Bangkok Dangerous and instead accept the happier alternate ending as canon. That’s, of course, assuming anyone cares about the Bangkok Dangerous cannon.

A video explores the opposing but complementary perspectives of Scorsese’s masterpiece.

If pressed, gun to my head, to name Martin Scorsese’s greatest film to-date, I’d probably say Goodfellas. There’s something both familiar and unique about the film as it stands in the director’s oeuvre, it has the stark realism of some of his earlier efforts like Boxcar Bertha, Mean Streets, Gangs of New York, The Age of Innocence, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, but at the same time it plays with elements of expressive style, the subjective view of specific characters or a specific subset of people as does Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The Aviator, Cape Fear, Shutter Island, and Bringing Out The Dead.

This first grouping of films utilizes an objective perspective, it presents events as they are and removes morality from their depiction, leaving it up to us in the audience to instill such things. In the latter grouping the perspective becomes subjective, untrustworthy, almost hallucinatory or otherwise dreamlike, it becomes a portal into the depicted world, not just a reflection of it.

Goodfellas balances both these perspectives: it objectively, almost in a documentary-like style, presents the world of organized crime at a particular point in our country’s history, and at the same time it presents the story of an individual, Henry Hill, from his own, increasingly-warped and unreliable perspective. Hill’s story is the lucid dream inside the facts, it is an interpretation of events rather than just events themselves.

For a more concrete examination of this topic, enjoy the following video from Storytellers that looks at how Scorsese doesn’t just use both realism and expressive style, he combines them into a hybrid perspective that makes Goodfellas so unique and successful. This is a fascinating approach to a near-perfect film and the director in general, so fans are going to want to make time to watch.

Yo ho horology and a bit of campy fun.

These lists are about us recommending movies to see because you saw the new releases they’re tied to. It’s not supposed to be an “if you like that, then you’ll like this” sort of thing. But this week a lot of the recommendations are indeed for people to see because they like the new release in question. None of them are essential masterpieces, and none of them are certainly considered classics. But if you enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, then you should enjoy these eight picks and appreciate them for what guilty pleasure or, in a few cases, genuine storytelling craft they have to offer.

King Neptune (1932)

While not Walt Disney’s first film to involve pirates — that’d be the lost 1927 “Alice Comedy” installment Alice Foils the Pirates — this 30th entry in the Silly Symphony series (the second produced in Technicolor) seems to be the oldest surviving piece in a long tradition continuing through the POTC franchise.

With a running time of only seven minutes, the animated short is about the titular god of the sea rescuing a kidnapped mermaid from pirates with help from various oceanic creatures.

There are no mermaids in Dead Men Tell No Tales, unlike the last POTC installment, but the treasure being sought this time around is the trident of Poseidon, aka Neptune. While you watch the film, you’ll mostly notice connections to Disney’s The Little Mermaid (though here the sea nymphs are controversially topless), but you could also view it with the idea that it’s a Dead Men Tell No Tales prequel. Where did Neptune go that he should leave his iconic three-pronged spear behind? Who knows, but maybe in a sequel he can show up and attack Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and the Black Pearl for destroying it.

The Pirate Movie (1982)

It was easy for a young child of the ’80s to mix up The Pirate Movie and the 1983 film adaptation of “The Pirates of Penzance” or at least to be introduced to the latter’s Gilbert and Sullivan source material through the former, Razzie-nominated comedy.

Like many a cheesy musical of the time (if you enjoy Xanadu and Grease 2, you should like this), its songs are quite catchy and there’s enough charm to carry you through the bad dialogue and acting. Mostly for The Pirate Movie, it has the benefit of starring the very likable Kristy McNichol in the lead as a modern girl who dreams she’s back in a goofily romanticized time of pirates and model major-generals.

McNichol’s Mabel admits to being a feminist, and if there’s one thing to truly praise about The Pirate Movie is its heightening of the agency of  Gilbert and Sullivan’s already strong female lead. Kaya Scodelario’s Carina in Dead Men Tell No Tales is likewise the smartest and most confident person on screen — as Mabel says, “the body is an eight, the brain is a ten” — and is ultimately the best part of the movie.

Opposite her, though, Brenton Thwaites is an even duller pretty boy than Christopher Atkins. Meanwhile, the POTC movies are close to being so corny, minus such awful direct allusions as The Pirate Movie‘s nods to Star Wars and The Pink Panther, and they could really use some terrifically bad musical numbers like “We Are the Pirates.”

Cabin Boy (1994)

If The Pirate Movie isn’t silly enough, nothing tops the immature buffoonery of Chris Elliott. Tim Burton, who has been considered to direct a POTC installment, produced the comedy and was set to helm the thing before Ed Wood came along. Had he directed, it might have been more like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, though it’s hard to imagine it any less frivolous.

Elliott stars as an imbecilic “fancy lad” who mistakenly joins the grimy motley crew of a fishing boat called The Filthy Whore. They encounter crude and ridiculous homages to Melies and Harryhausen, and David Letterman shows up for an indulgent cameo. As nonsensical as Cabin Boy is, though, it’s got nothing on the contrived rubbish found in Dead Men Tell No Tales. At least Cabin Boy means to be stupid. Its main adversary is a gigantic man in a business suit (Mike Starr). And it’s crass for the sake of character more than cheap jokes.

Like the new POTC movie, it too has an intelligent female character who boards the ship and stands out among the idiot men. Plus there’s a ship’s figurehead that comes to life and a Bermuda’s Triangle-like place — in Cabin Boy it’s called Hell’s Bucket and in Dead Men Tell No Tales it’s Devil’s Triangle.

Time Piece (2007)

I couldn’t tell you why it was important for Scodelario’s character in Dead Men Tell No Tales to be a horologist other than to provide for a bad running joke about the word “horologist” being mistaken for “whore.” Does enough of the movie’s audience know much better what horology is than the idiot pirates to make the wordplay effective anyway? It’s not a common term nor a common area of study or expertise these days. So let’s turn stupid comedy into a reason to learn something.

My best recommendation for an interesting lesson in horology is actually the podcast S-Town, which involves an eccentric clock repairman who talks informatively of his interest in time and his skill in fixing timepieces. As for film documentaries, this 10-minute short by Kat Mansoor (not to be confused with Jim Henson’s Oscar-nominated film of the same name, though that’s recommended, too) showcases a dying profession by profiling two artisan watchmakers in Switzerland. Watch it below.

An exclusive video essay.

Though they are drastically different films, the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining share more in common than you might think, especially when it comes to their depictions of haunted writers. And though these hauntings manifest in extremely different ways, they are both brought on by the same impetus: writer’s block.

In the following video essay, I’ve taken a look at the similarities and differences in the hauntings of Barton Fink and Jack Torrance to discover what each says about the link between the creative process and mental health.

An enticing appetizer, half of a hearty meal, and then we’re kicked out of the restaurant.

Cinema is filled with films set around a table for a meal as family, friends, or even strangers share conversation and discovery. From My Dinner with Andre to The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, Her Lover, a shared meal is often what brings people together. It does just that in Oren Moverman‘s (The Messenger) latest film, The Dinner, but after a slowly intriguing setup that tantalizes our taste buds with the promisingly delicious feast to come to the dinner — and The Dinner – abruptly ends.

It’s enough to make you want to leave a negative Yelp review.

Two couples head towards an exclusive restaurant for dinner together, but not all of them are excited to go. Stan (Richard Gere) and his wife Katelyn (Rebecca Hall) are already at odds as he’s an eternally busy congressman constantly distracted by his duties and his staff. His younger brother, Paul (Steve Coogan), is in no hurry to arrive despite the nagging of his own wife, Claire (Laura Linney), who insists a fancy meal on the taxpayer’s dime will be fun.

It’s anything but though as the two sets of parents are there to discuss what to do about a shared secret. Their sons have committed a crime, one as yet undiscovered by the authorities, and the adults have varying views on how to handle it. They debate the issue over the course of the evening, but with each new course brought to the table and described in loving detail by the maître d‘ (Michael Chernus) the chasm between opinions grows wider and they move further and further off topic.

The Dinner can be divided into two halves between what works and what doesn’t. Put simply, the cast is tremendous with all four leads giving smart, angry performances, but the script is a disjointed mess of unnecessary subplots and wasted potential. Too much time is spent away from the table either in flashbacks, unrelated side conversations, or scenes with the teens who do little but frustrate and test viewer patience.

Moverman’s script feels continually scattershot as it flashes back years to Stan’s first wife (Chloe Sevigny) or to Paul’s episodes of mental illness, and neither of those threads amounts to anything on their own. Worse, they add nothing to the main themes of personal responsibility, white privilege, and the extremes to which a parent will go for their children. Every second away from the main conversation works to drain momentum, energy, and purpose from the film, and it’s a shame if only because the leads do such good work.

Gere is no stranger to playing smarmy characters, but his politician moves in unexpected directions to the point of becoming the most rational among them, and he crafts a heartfelt character torn by his loyalties and ambition.

Coogan meanwhile tackles another non-comedic role, and as with his wrenching turn in What Maisie Knew he delivers with a man who’s simply not up to life’s demands. The women shine even brighter though with both Linney and Hall playing variations on Lady Macbeth. Their love and dedication to their families are clear, but it’s also dangerous, and both women leave you wanting to disagree but fearing the outcome.

There’s an important conversation at the heart of The Dinner, but as presented here it’s one filled with stops, starts, tangents, and a lack of resolution. Not every film needs closure, and not every question need be answered, but setting a table like this implies there will be more than just scraps to chew on.

Alamo reserves 2 of its 33 June 6th Austin ‘Wonder Woman’ screenings for women. Men, predictably, lose their minds.

A few days ago, the Alamo Drafthouse did what the Alamo Drafthouse does best: announce a special event themed to one of its upcoming releases. In celebration of Wonder Woman, the first female-driven superhero movie in the current wave of Marvel and DC productions, Alamo announced that they would be holding a special women-only screening on Tuesday, June 6 at their downtown location in Austin. If you identify as a woman, you could spend a night at Alamo’s very own Themyscira and enjoy the film with an all-female audience and staff.

Almost immediately, the company was inundated with both positive and negative responses. The Drafthouse’s initial Facebook post became ground zero for both the worst and best responses to the event; some fans celebrated the fact that Drafthouse was using Wonder Woman as an opportunity to celebrate intersectional feminism, while others decried the event as just another example of liberal snowflakes and their need for safe spaces.

The resulting controversy drew the attention of newspapers and television networks around the world, and before you knew it, Drafthouse’s fun little Wonder Woman screening was the subject of reports in TIME,  Washington Post, Fox News, and even (maybe don’t read that last one). Needless to say, the show sold out in no time whatsoever, and the Drafthouse quickly announced its intentions to add screenings and roll the event out to its non-Austin locations.

On paper, it’s hard for anyone to defend why they’re upset with the two special screenings of Wonder Woman. There are an additional 31 screenings (three-one) of Wonder Woman in Austin that same Tuesday; that doesn’t even include non-Drafthouse locations, an extra level of math I have no interest in doing. Hell, there’s even one additional late screening of the film at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz for those who really want to see the film in the heart of downtown Austin.

Put another way: on one of the thirty days in June, a whopping 6% of the possible Wonder Woman screenings will be only available to people who identify as women, and that’s enough to have folks on the internet threatening to involve the United States Office of the Attorney General or invoking references to Brown vs. Board of Education.

And this isn’t a situation where the media has chosen to shape a grand narrative out of a few bad apple; plenty of people are pissed off about these screenings for absolutely no good reason. Wade into the comments sections on your social media platform of your choice and you can still see people expressing outrage at the Drafthouse for ‘promoting inequality.’ If you’re feeling particularly brave, you can visit the Men’s Rights section of Reddit, which has currently had three separate posts on its front page dedicated to the Alamo Drafthouse screenings with no shortage of ugly replies. When not taking shots at women for having to pay for their own tickets, the denizens of r/MensRights have called this event misandrist, sexist, and bigoted, despite the fact that they’ve dedicated three posts to the ‘inequality’ of women being allowed 6% of the whole.

We saw plenty of Ghostbusters-themed articles written in 2016 that highlighted some of the fatal flaws in current fandom, and this response is another data point in that argument. The myriad of assumptions that go into the Wonder Woman backlash — that women attending superhero movies are an invasion of male space, that equality means that women should never have things that belong only to them — betrays the kind of backward thinking that frustrate the hell out of women on the internet every. single. goddamn. day. If this Alamo Drafthouse story is the first time you’ve brushed up against the mass of fans who believe that all comic book things should be primarily for men, then bless your heart for staying out of the fray this long. It’s not a very welcoming space.

There’s also the chance that this takes an ugly turn in the next week when some tech-bro with too much money and not enough sense decides to sue the Alamo Drafthouse for unfair discrimination. Or when a handful of guys show up to the screening and angrily demand that they ‘identify as a woman’ and should be allowed admittance, thereby adding a level of transphobia to their toxic masculinity. Even under the best of circumstances, I am both a worrier and a hypochondriac, so I cannot help but see the various ways in which this could become a headache for the company, albeit one that they gladly take on in exchange for equality.

But I personally hope that those who click for the controversy will stay for the affirmation. For every person who has expressed outrage at the screenings, another has expressed excitement at the opportunity for a bunch of women to gather together and watch a kick-ass movie that celebrates women. I’ve seen people discussing sponsoring tickets for non-profit organizations focused on women and women’s health, making plans to drive down to Austin with a close sibling or parent, or simply cheering on those who will attend the screening even if it’s not targeted to them. And on the macro-level, the screenings have become a welcome (albeit brief) respite from the horrible headlines we see every day around the world. We still live in a violent and stupid country? Well, at least there’s going to be this one fun thing happening the first week of June. Anything else is outrage for the sake of outrage.

A look at a host of other films influenced by Kurosawa’s classic.

If you don’t think Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is the greatest action film ever made, then I humbly suggest you leave here now and go watch it again, because it is. It combines cinematic artistry with narrative proficiency, rich characters with graceful technique, and drama with adrenaline. It is a template not only for quality action films but quality films in general, and in the 63 years since its release its esteem has only amplified.

This is partially because so many directors make reference to Seven Samurai. John Sturges (and last year, by proxy, Dominic Sena) outright remade the film as The Magnificent Seven, but dozens of other films have given nods to Kurosawa’s, both obviously and subtly. Films like Three Amigos, A Bug’s Life, Django Unchained, The Matrix Revolutions, Mad Max: Fury Road and – duh – Star Wars have all borrowed elements from Seven Samurai, be it plot, dialogue, visuals, character or what have you.

In the following comparative montage from Bill Rwehera for Fandor, the cinematic offspring of Seven Samurai have been collected and arranged via the elements they borrow to show just how lasting the influence of Kurosawa is, and also just how well-deserved is its designation as the greatest action film ever.

Relate much?

We’re all guilty of it, even though we all swear we won’t do it. I’m talking about bringing your work home with you. It’s a particularly contemporary flaw, and a product of our 24-hour world; no matter how much we try to delineate between our work selves and our home selves, the former always bleeds into the latter. Think about it: what’s the first thing you talk about when you get home from work? Work. What do you discuss when you meet up with friends for a drink after work? Work. What’s one of the first questions you ask or get asked when you meet someone? “What do you do for work?”

For better or worse, usually worse, we are in a major way defined by what we do for a living, and as much as we like to think we can shut things off when we clock out, we can’t, not entirely. This unfortunate phenomena is given a hilarious bent in the short film Bad News from sketch comedy duo Mid-Brow, made up of writers-directors-actors Alex Cooper and Tom Blackwood.

Two friends are attempting to meet for a drink after work. One is delayed. In communicating this delay, both can’t seem to shake the cadence and jargon of their day jobs, which – no spoilers here – makes for a pretty amusing conversation-style.

Clocking in at just under three minutes, Bad News is pitch-perfect sketch comedy: succinct, sharp, and all punchline. Once you’ve given it a watch, be sure to check out the other couple sketches at Mid-Brow’s Vimeo page.

It’s often the case that biopic films are judged by their adherence to the facts of the actual stories on which they are based. It would then stand to reason that the more accurate the filmic depiction, the better the movie. Right? Not necessarily. While creative license is often met with resistance, sometimes biopics benefit tremendously from veering heavily away from historical veracity.

Case in point, Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables.

One would presume that the story of a legendarily irreproachable squad of law enforcement officers taking on one of the most notorious villains in American history would warrant no creative tinkering to sell to audiences. However, the 1987 movie takes a Tommy gun to the facts of Elliott Ness’ crusading squadron and the adversarial nature of his relationship with Capone. And thank goodness it does.

The actual story of The Untouchables is, cinematically speaking, as interesting as reading the language of the Volstead Act itself. There were no violent acts of retribution perpetrated by Capone against Ness’ men. Capone never went after Ness’ family, and in fact, Ness had no children during the years he pursued Capone. This would completely negate the scenes of Nitti outside Ness’ home as well as the moment wherein the mother of the little girl killed in the prologue instills confidence in Ness with her teary-eyed affirmation, “it’s because I know that you have children too.” In fact, the scene wherein Ness expels from his office a Capone agent attempting to bribe him represents the entirety of Capone’s nefarious tactics for dealing with the troublesome lawman.

Drama requires conflict; the more heated and personal that conflict, the more compelling the drama. Robert Deniro and Kevin Costner screaming at each other in a courtroom while Capone’s goons hold the mobster back from starting a full-on brawl, that’s dramatically viable. Less so is the fact that historically Capone and Ness were never actually in the same room with one another at any point in their lives. Frank Nitti being thrown off a roof by a vengeful Elliott Ness, incredibly dramatic! The real Frank Nitti killing himself on a railroad track–missing with the first shot to his own head–is more sad than dramatic.

Most importantly, The Untouchables crafts a bonafide boy scout out of Elliott Ness, aforementioned roof-tossing of Nitti aside. In reality, Ness was a troubled individual whose crusades beyond bootlegging included prosecuting anyone who had contracted a venereal disease. He had several failed marriages and ended up drinking himself penniless with several visits to brothels along the way. This suggests a man far more morally conflicted than the spit-polished hero of the film. Although we watch him wrestle with crossing the line in multiple scenes, there is always the sense of a greater good being pursued. Almost as a nod to his real-life, morally gray personal life, the last line of The Untouchables is Ness answering a question as to what he would do if Prohibition were repealed with, “I think I’ll have a drink.”

There are valid reasons to deride factual revision for the sake of entertainment, but when a filmmaker is concerned with the legend of a historical figure more than the textbook facts, it creates multiple perspectives by which to evaluate that figure’s worth. It also has the potential, as in the case of The Untouchables, to make for a far more thrilling cinematic experience.

Feel like investigating further? Why not muck with the Gs of Junkfood Cinema as they dissect Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables. Rest assured, they do it the Chicago way.

As a special treat, anyone who backs JFC on Patreon will have access to weekly bonus episodes covering an additional cult movie, a new movie in theaters, or a mailbag episode devoted to your submitted questions! During Summer of 87, there will be an entirely separate Summer of 77 miniseries just for Patrons! Have a couple bucks to throw in the hat, we’ll reward you!

On This Week’s Show:

• Appetizers [0:00–2:12]
• The Main Course [2:13–48:09]
• The Junkfood Pairing [48:10–51:38]

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The director of ‘The Secret Life of Bees’ will begin directing the ‘Spider-Man’ spinoff from Sony’s Marvel Universe this fall.

With the release of Wonder Woman looming, director Patty Jenkins’ female superhero blockbuster will hopefully provide studio executives and/or (mostly male) DC/Marvel viewers with the confidence that women, too, can direct big-budgeted superhero movies.

Whilst it’s often arbitrary to compare women directors’ work on films of the same genre (after all, viewers usually wouldn’t compare the talent of sci-fi directors J. J. Abrams with Ridley Scott — there’s enough room for each to exist), Jenkins’ Wonder Woman presents a turning point in the action, superhero, and blockbuster film genres, and it’s important to see what other studios do next.

The latest advancement comes from Sony, with The Secret Life of Bees director Gina Prince-Bythewood set to direct Silver & Black. The film focuses on Sony’s Marvel Universe characters Silver Sable and Black Cat/Felicia Hardy, both characters with ties to Spider-Man.

Silver Sable is both an ally and antagonist to Spider-Man, with Sable hunting war criminals and acting as a mercenary. Meanwhile, Black Cat (real name Felicia Hardy) is an “acrobatic cat burglar” with a complicated relationship to Spidey in the comics. The cast has not been announced yet; however, viewers, saw a glimpse of Felicia Hardy in Marc Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man 2 with Felicity Jones playing the character (although no references were given to her alter ego).

As THR notes, Sony hopes to release a slate of Spider-Man-related movies, with this summer’s Marvel cinematic universe based Spider-Man: Homecoming reintroducing the world. Tom Hardy will star in the first of the spin-offs with Venom, while Silver & Black is sure to play an important part in Sony’s Spider-Man plans.

Prince-Bythewood’s previous work proves that she’ll provide some much-needed originality to this new slate of Spider-Man spinoffs. Having directed dramas such as Beyond the Lights and her much-acclaimed Love & Basketball, the director’s bold style of filmmaking will ensure she’ll leave her own mark on Silver & Black. Prince-Bythewood also directed the first episode of Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger TV Series.

Filming for Silver & Black is to begin this fall. A release date has not yet been set.

San Andreas vs. Baywatch. Let’s settle this.

Memorial Day Weekend is a time to celebrate sacrifice, freedom, and the best humanity has to offer. It’s also quickly becoming a time to celebrate films which capture depictions of sacrifice, freedom, and the best humanity has to offer embodied in Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Alexandra “I don’t know if she has a nickname” Daddario.

Let’s compare 2015’s disaster porn San Andreas and 2017’s beach porn Baywatch and try to determine the Ultimate Johnson / Daddario Memorial Day Movie.

The Plot

San Andreas is the story of a major earthquake that essentially destroys California. Johnson stars as Raymond Gaines, some sort of SEAL Team Six Coast Guard James Bond. Daddario plays Blake Gaines, Raymond’s daughter who has learned how to be MacGyver from her father.

While Daddario spends the movie using her survival skills and trying to find higher ground in San Fransisco, Johnson flies planes and helicopters and drives boats through buildings trying to get to her. Thousands of people die and entire cities are destroyed, yet The Rock is completely uninjured and, at one point, saves an entire group of people by determining where a building is going to fall.

Baywatch is a reboot of the ’90’s TV franchise about lifeguards who are also the ultimate crime fighting team. Johnson plays iconic Mitch Buchannon who, in the first five minutes of the film, is compared to Batman but browner. Daddario stars as lifeguard recruit Summer Quinn who, well, she’s Zac Efron’s love interest and not much else. She does bounce up and down because it’s part of a completely relevant to the plot discussion about her boobs.

While investigating drugs that have washed ashore, the lifeguards uncover a criminal enterprise that involves murder and, gasp, closing the beach! They infiltrate the morgue, parties, and chase bad guys all over the bay, even after the police tell them not to.

Winner: Tie (Seriously, do either of these plots make any sense?)

Why So Serious?

San Andreas begins as your typical disaster film. Scientists are being ignored while oblivious tourists go about their business. The film takes itself serious, to a point, and that comes across in the tone of the movie. While thousands of people are literally dying all over the place, the viewer only cares about the Gaines family. The stakes for them are extremely serious. Everyone else? Screw ‘em.

On the other hand, Baywatch does not take itself seriously and that’s evident from the moment the lights go down in the theater. Dwayne Johnson as Mitch Buchannon is opening the lifeguard tower when disaster strikes. A sudden gust of wind strikes and a lone kite-boarder flies out of control and crashes into the rocks. Johnson springs into action and sprints down the jetty, diving into the water to rescue the unconscious kite-rider. As Johnson pulls him out of the water like a baby in his giant arms, the title card rises behind him. “BAYWATCH” reads across the horizon and CGI dolphins leap and dance in celebration. It’s as if the movie points at the audience, winks and says, “let’s do this!”

Winner: Baywatch

Rotten Tomatoes Ratings

Ratings can be highly subjective. Snatched earned a 37% from critics. Was it a perfect movie? No. But did I enjoy it? Yes. In trying to determine the Ultimate Johnson / Daddario Memorial Day Movie, it’s worth looking at what the critics had to say.

Baywatch earned a 19%, the critical consensus saying, “Baywatch takes its source material’s jiggle factor to R-rated levels, but lacks the original’s campy charm — and leaves its charming stars flailing in the shallows.” Ouch.

Oh the other hand, San Andreas earned a moderate 48%. The critical consensus said, “San Andreas has a great cast and outstanding special effects, but amidst all the senses-shattering destruction, the movie’s characters and plot prove less than structurally sound.” Not so great.

Winner: San Andreas

Box Office (Opening Weekend)

While critical response can’t always be relied upon to determine how great a movie is, what it takes in at the box office is a good indication. If people enjoy it, they’re going to go see it.

San Andreas opened at number one with $54,588,173, or 49.6% of its budget. That’s a successful opening weekend! Baywatch opened at number three with an estimated $18,100,000, or 26.2% of its budget. Not so great. San Andreas went on to earn nearly $500 million globally and, while Baywatch will probably do a lot better overseas than it does here, it probably won’t come close to $500 million.

Winner: San Andreas

The Rock’s One-Liners

Seemingly every popcorn action movie Dwayne Johnson is in, there’s a great one-liner. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island has, “It takes a big man to play a tiny guitar” as The Rock pulls out a ukulele to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Furious 7 has, “Daddy’s gotta’ go to work,” as The Rock shatters his cast by flexing his giant bicep and looking at his daughter. These are great one-liners! How do San Andreas and Baywatch compare?

In San Andreas Johnson’s character is on a plane flying to San Fransisco. He’s picked up his ex-wife along the way to rescue their daughter. Due to the massive earthquake, there’s nowhere to land so The Rock produces a single parachute. They strap in together and jump. Landing on the second base of San Francisco’s AT&T Park, he says, “It’s been awhile since I got you to second base.”

In Baywatch, Mitch has just chased a henchman into a little girl’s room. The fight ensues. The crib is destroyed, a mobile is used to choke out the henchmen. The baby picture is declared off-limits. The Rock uses a giant train to hit the henchmen and says, ”You’re going night-night bitch!”

Winner: San Andreas

Would I buy it on iTunes?

This is probably the ultimate test. Would I spend more money to purchase the film on iTunes, providing the ability to watch it for eternity?

Currently, San Andreas is on sale for $14.99. At this price point, I can’t see a compelling reason to not purchase the movie. If it were at the full, $19.99 price I’d probably say no. But at $14.99 it seems like a good option.

Having just been released, Baywatch is available for pre-order at the full $19.99 rate. I can’t say it’s worth that. Sometimes pre-orders fall into the $14.99 rate, but even then I probably wouldn’t bite. If Baywatch hit the weekly sale of $9.99, it’d be compelling. If it somehow made the Friday $4.99 sale, no brainer. But it’s not a good buy at $19.99.

Winner: San Andreas

San Andreas is the Ultimate Dwayne Johnson and Alexandra Daddario Memorial Day Movie

Nothing against Baywatch, which is fun and enjoyable and exactly what you think it is, but San Andreas is an all around better movie. Not only is the action much bigger, Daddario’s character has a lot more agency and a role that involves more than looking great in a bathing suit. Dwayne Johnson is great in both films. Honestly, is there anything he isn’t great in? But all things considered, San Andreas wins the Ultimate Crown.

What will the Johnson / Daddario Memorial Day Movie be for 2019? Will we get the rumored San Andreas 2? Perhaps Baywatch 2? Maybe something, where The Rock is the President and Daddario, is the First Daughter and they go on the road to sow seeds of peace through any means necessary in The First Family: Flags of Freedom? Yeah, probably not.

‘Pirates’ is sunk, ‘Baywatch’ drowned, and the traditional start of the summer has fizzled out.

Once upon a time, Memorial Day Weekend kickstarted the summer box office season. Two things you could depend on over the holiday honoring our fallen soldiers were cookouts and a new Beverly Hills Cop, Shrek, X-Men, Mission: Impossible, or other major franchise sequel that everyone was dying to see. But this year, the latest Pirates of the Caribbean installment proved relatively unappealing not just to Americans but to the whole world, and not even The Rock could save the total domestic box office from being the lowest of the century.

That distinction is actually quit sad. If you look at the bottom of Box Office Mojo’s weekend chart for this past Friday through Sunday, you can see that all reporting theatrical releases (44 titles) add up to a box office total of just $140M ($172M through Monday). The last time the first three days of Memorial Day Weekend cumulated a lower figure was in 2000, when it was only (with 15 releases reported) $108M (but still $184M through Monday). Yet with an adjustment made for inflation, that Mission: Impossible II-led year’s total would be $177M ($302M through Monday).

We need to go back a couple more years to 1998 for (with eight movies reported) a true lower figure, when adjusted for inflation, of $127M (but still $234M through Monday). That was actually a fluke bad year, too, thanks to the disappointment of Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla. Prior to that, the last time the Memorial Day Weekend box office dipped so low was in 1991 when Backdraft led a four-day total of just $144M (adjusted). That was a time when there were far fewer screens than there are now.

Ring the alarms that moviegoing is dead, because if people aren’t going to the multiplexes on the first big holiday weekend of the blockbuster season, then they’re just not interested in the cinema anymore. Right? Well, maybe, but also as more and more big tentpole movies open earlier in May (and sometimes April), the Memorial Day release has been watered down. Plus this year’s offerings didn’t cut it. The Pirates of the Caribbean series was already on its way downward, and an R-rated take on a cheesy ’90s TV drama isn’t anyone’s idea of fun.

Looking first at Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, the fifth installment performed much worse than anticipated with $63M through Sunday (most predictions put the movie at $80M for the four-day weekend, but it only reached an estimated $77M). Compare that to the adjusted-for-inflation openings of the other four, in order of release: $68M for The Curse of the Black Pearl, $183M for Dead Man’s Chest, $147M for At World’s End, and $99M for On Stranger Tides.

When On Stranger Tides showed such a big drop for the franchise domestically, Disney at least celebrated a successful global launch as the sequel grossed $260M overseas on its opening weekend. Dead Men Tell No Tales still off-sets its US debut pretty substantially but only with $208M. It’s much more normal these days for the international box office numbers to go up for a franchise like Pirates of the Caribbean even when the domestic numbers are going down. The Fate of the Furious, for instance, opened about $50M less in the US than Furious 7 did, but it opened almost $200M more overseas than did its predecessor.

Memorial Day weekend does seem to be a bad time for Disney to open movies. Last year they had Alice Through the Looking Glass, which bombed domestically and internationally, especially compared to the grosses for Alice in Wonderland. The Memorial Day before that, Disney had a huge disappointment with Tomorrowland. And back in 2010, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time failed to take in enough to turn the property into a franchise. Ten years ago, though, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End was a hit.

Fortunately, the studio has the Marvel movies, which tend to bow earlier in May and continue to do well through the holiday. This year, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is still going strong in its fourth frame. Its $21M (and estimated $25M through Monday0 is surprisingly enough to keep the sequel in the number two spot, in part thanks to Baywatch flopping hard. Tracking for the comedy put its four-day total predictions giving it $40M, but it only grossed 19M through Sunday and an estimated 23M for the full holiday weekend.

That’s less than last year’s Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, which opened a week prior to Memorial Day and co-stars Zac Efron and was seen as a disappointment compared to the first Neighbors movie. Fortunately for Efron, it’s not his worst debut ever. However, unfortunately for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, it’s one of his worst openings of all time — this is his least-grossing vehicle since 2013’s low-profile drama Snitch, and his only other major release movies with worse openings (as adjusted for inflation) are The Tooth Fairy and Faster (and the animated Planet 51, if we count voice-only roles). Yes, even Doom was a bigger hit at the start.

Contributing to the historically low box office, of course, is last week’s number one, Alien: Covenant, which fell an embarrassing 71% in its second frame, marking it a certain disaster for Fox. And that’s with a slight increase in the prequel’s screen count, too. You can tell it’s a generally dismal weekend when the movie with the best per-screen average ($17K) belongs to a four-hour Grateful Dead documentary that will be available to stream free online (for Amazon Prime members anyway) a mere week after its theatrical release: Long Strange Trip.

Of course, it’s not a terrible loss for Disney, who will make just enough on Dead Men Tell No Tales globally to break even and which has Guardians and Beauty and the Beast profits to swim in. The Rock shouldn’t sweat his movie’s failure, either, as he’ll have tons of hits in the future, such as Fast and the Furious 9 and the Fast and the Furious spinoff with Jason Statham, and the San Andreas sequel with his Baywatch co-star Alexandra Daddario. But it’s clearer that Central Intelligence did so well thanks to Kevin Hart, and thankfully he’s reuniting with Hart for his next release, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.

As for whether this Memorial Day weekend’s box office should be an indication that moviegoing is really doomed, it’s more like just the usual warning signs of such a long-known fate. However, next year the holiday should be back to meaning something for summer blockbusters and box office, because the tentpole opening on May 25, 2018, is none other than Disney’s Han Solo origin Star Wars spinoff. That thing will surely prove me wrong about the studio and this holiday, as it should wind up breaking records in the other direction.

*This column has been updated and slightly reworded with Monday’s updated figures.

Can we still be friends, Rock?

There is no doubt that Dwayne Johnson has a staggering amount of charisma. Most of his career has been shaped by how he captures the attention of audiences and brings them along for the ride. Even when he recently talked about running for president, there were plenty of people who would follow The Rock with whatever career path he chooses. Here at FSR are big fans of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, but Baywatch is another issue entirely. Not even Johnson can elevate the cavalcade of dick jokes and uneven pacing. Although he would like to think critics just didn’t get his movie.

A group of elite lifeguards is in the process of hiring some new recruits. Baywatch isn’t just another ragtag group of lifeguards that save people from drowning; these individuals protect the bay at whatever cost. Led by Lieutenant Mitch Buchannon (Dwayne Johnson), rigorous trials are about to be held to determine who is has enough heart and determination to join the team. Matt Brody (Zac Efron) has other ideas of how this is all going to work out. As a disgraced two-time Olympic gold medal winner looking to serve his community service sentence, Brody thinks the rules don’t apply to him.

While Buchannon and Brody are chastising each other, often with ‘cute’ insults, there is trouble afoot. Businesswoman Victoria Leeds (Priyanka Chopra) has been buying up much of the property along the bay to lock down her drug distribution ring. Slowly, but surely she has been buying out owners either by offering them large sums of cash or by threatening their lives. She has bought out politicians as well along the way so that even the police turn a blind eye to her scheme. This is a job for Baywatch.

Baywatch is only concerned about the overarching plot when runs out of dick jokes. During the early parts of the movie, the character of Ronnie (Jon Bass) is heavily featured along with his romance with lifeguard CJ (Kelly Rohrbach) in multiple uncomfortable situations. The most egregious of which is when Ronnie gets his large member stuck in a beach chair. Plenty of time is spent just analyzing the situation and how exactly to get Ronnie out of trouble. In fact, most of the romance between CJ and Ronnie can be summarized by how many times CJ looks at his massive package and then decides that this is a good enough reason to be romantically entwined with Ronnie. 

Zac Efron also gets a romance of his own with fellow Baywatch trainee Summer Quinn (Alexandra Daddario). Perhaps much more interesting than the lack of sparks between Efron and Daddario is the absence of a love interest for Dwayne Johnson’s character. It was frequently reported leading up to Baywatch that Ilfenesh Hadera who is Mitch’s second-in-command at Baywatch, would be his love interest. The problem there is that it is the least developed and unfulfilled relationships of the entire feature. The budding bromance between Mitch and Brody certainly feels more real. There are plenty of instances where it seems as though Hadera’s Stephanie Holden should be accompanying Mitch on a specific subplot, but since Efron has been sold as the co-lead of the picture, he fills that role instead. 

There is no shortage of movies based on popular TV shows of yesteryears. Baywatch was one of those shows that were never a critical darling and as such expectations should be in line with what we’ve always gotten from the franchise. Baywatch brings many of the signature elements of the show to the big screen with mixed results. The good-looking men and women of the team are all on display with their slow motion jiggles intact. Apparently plentiful customers and disguises were one of the series trademarks as well because there is no shortage of goofy outfits. It’s just that in recent years we expect more from TV show adaptations especially after films like 21 Jump Street and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. have set the bar for these adaptations.

As mentioned at the top, Dwayne Johnson is an extremely likable guy. So it is a little disheartening to see him joining the ranks of the filmmakers and actors who have publicly called out critics for disliking a movie. In this move, he joins other cinema ‘greats‘ who have said they don’t make movies for critics; they make them for the fans. ‘Great’ filmmakers like Michael Bay, Rob Schneider, and Kevin Smith have all chastised critics for going against them. This goes against what the persona Dwayne Johnson has worked so hard to develop. Most actors would usually take the bad reviews and try to make it up on their next film outing, not slash back against critics. Critics aren’t what made Baywatch a bad movie, the sum of the weak parts of the film did that.

In general, critics go to a feature hoping to enjoy the film. I’d imagine most people want to spend their time watching something that gives them joy and pleasure, than something that wastes their time. Critics, including myself, were not out to ‘get’ Baywatch or any other feature. Listen, Rock (Can I call you Rock?), we like you, and we wanted to enjoy your movie. Nothing screams summer movie season more than a movie about beautiful people by the water engaging in action stunts. Baywatch just misses the mark in so many ways that it is hard to recommend it.

Surprises were abound at the Cannes closing night celebration, but so was discomfort and confusion.

The 70^th Cannes Film Festival came to an interesting conclusion yesterday with a closing ceremony that featured several surprises, including a special anniversary prize, history-making wins, and a joint victory. As someone who attended the festival this year, the newly announced winners are intriguing for a variety of obvious and perhaps not-so-obvious reasons. That said, here’s an annotated breakdown of the big surprises of the night:

Palme d’Or: The Square

Considering there wasn’t really an agreed upon frontrunner beforehand, Ruben Östlund’s multifaceted satire taking home the top prize was not really an “upset.” That said, it was still a surprise. Though generally well-received, The Square wasn’t one of the handfuls of titles prominently featured in the awards forecasts circling the web.

However, what makes The Square a particularly intriguing choice is the nature of the film itself. I was present at the red carpet premiere of The Square—high up in the nosebleeds with a ticket I begged off a stranger (note: this is actually a common practice at Cannes), but there nonetheless—and it was by far the most bizarre and, quite frankly, uncomfortable screening I attended at the festival, and only about 40% of it had to do with the film.

Cannes jury president Pedro Almodóvar lauded The Square as being about “the dictatorship of being politically correct”—and he’s not wrong about that. However, as someone who saw the film, and then went back and looked up some of Ruben Östlund’s comments to make sure I didn’t entirely misread it somehow, that’s really not the main point. Long story short, The Square is a commentary on class, privilege, and the flimsily constructed but deeply problematic nature of the gilded alternate universes in which microcosms of the most affluent reside. The specific focus on the world of contemporary art is chosen to highlight the issue because it presents an added irony of which the film makes good use: art has the potential to either expose these problems or exemplify them.

“There are many rituals and conventions in (the art) world that make it very separate from what’s going on outside the walls of the museum,” Östlund has said of the film. “We’re trying to attack that world a little bit and make them ask questions about what we are doing.” Now, the Cannes Film Festival might not be a contemporary art museum, but it is very much a gilded alternate universe.

A personal anecdote to help illustrate the festival’s vibe: several major trade publications publish daily editions which are handed out for free during the festival featuring mostly Cannes-centric articles, sponsored content, and screening schedules. I would read them every morning to help plan my day, and quickly grew desensitized to the juxtaposition of articles either wondering if or explaining how the festival is relevant and/or what the kids would call “woke,” and interviews detailing how to properly tip a yacht staff.

Which brings me back to my bizarre and uncomfortable screening experience. You see, The Square left me uncomfortably aware of the privileges I mindlessly take for granted, the prejudices and biases I generally like to pretend I don’t have. But it really didn’t get to me until the day after I saw the film because until then I could take temporary solace in being merely within arm’s reach of being targeted by the film while sitting a stone’s throw away from people who were metaphorical bullseyes.

Östlund said he wanted to make people question themselves. The fact that The Square took home top prize, especially at this festival, in a very strange way put the film’s success in question as opposed to highlighting it.

Best Screenplay: Joint winners Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou for The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Lynne Ramsay for You Were Never Really Here

The first and very obvious surprise is the fact that there were two winners instead of one. While The Killing of a Sacred Deer was considered one of the more likely possible winners, the second film is a little bit more of an unexpected choice. The day after You Were Never Really Here premiered, Deadline ran an interview with writer/director Lynne Ramsay which detailed how when the film went into production “there wasn’t a concrete third act.” As someone who has seen the film, for all of its definite strengths, I would have been much more surprised to hear that the ending was not thrown together on the fly. Considering how the film seemed about 90% as opposed to 100% done with post-production (it didn’t even have proper end credits, just “A film by Lynne Ramsay with Joaquin Phoenix” and then a black screen with some music playing for a little bit), I had been thinking the storyline might still be in for some heavy polishing. However, considering the narrative just got a very shiny seal of approval, I’m not really thinking that’s going to happen anymore.

Best Director: Sofia Coppola, The Beguiled

Once again, Coppola was not the favorite to win in this category. However, the real story here is in how Coppola’s win makes her the second woman to take home Best Director at Cannes, with the first being the Russian director Yuliya Solntseva for the film Chronicle of Flaming Years all the way back in 1961. Unfortunately, the fact that jury member Maren Ade—director of Toni Erdmann, the breakout hit of last year’s festival that was ultimately snubbed at the Closing Ceremony—was the one who accepted the award on Coppola’s behalf particularly draws into question whether Coppola’s unexpected win might have been in part motivated by a desire to combat those accusing the festival of having an issue with representation. Only time will tell if the acknowledgment of The Beguiled and You Were Never Really Here is a bellwether of an actual shift or whether it will be used to distract from the absence of any actual progress.

Best Actor: Joaquin Phoenix, You Were Never Really Here

Saying a win is “totally unexpected” could pretty much function as the free space on an awards show buzzword bingo card, but Phoenix’s tux-and-Converse combo when he went to the stage to accept his award suggest that he really meant it. It’s also worth noting how this double win for You Were Never Really Here implies that the jury really, really liked the film, because screenplay and performance are the only multiple award combo that the festival allows.

70th Anniversary Award: Nicole Kidman

Considering Kidman starred in no less than four projects included in the festival’s official selection, including two competition films, The Beguiled and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and two projects that screened out of competition, How To Talk To Girls At Parties and Top of the Lake: China Girl, the fact that the jury came up with a special, one-time-only award for her is perhaps not quite as surprising as a special surprise prize would generally be.

Other Winners:

Grand Prix: Robin Campillo, BPM (Beats per Minute)

Jury Prize: Andrey Zvyagintsev, Loveless

Best Actress: Diane Kruger, In the Fade

Camera d’Or (Best Debut Film): Leonor Serraille, Jeune Femme

Short Film Prize: A Gentle Night, Qiu Yang

Sorry Remo Williams.

Welcome to Missed Connections, a weekly column where I get to highlight films that are little known and/or unfairly maligned. I’ll be shining a light in two directions — I hope to introduce you to movies you’ve never seen and possibly never heard of, and I’ll attempt to defend films that history, critical consensus, and maybe even your own memories haven’t been very kind to.

This week’s movie is a mid ’70s genre-bender from Japan that delivers action, bloodletting, sexy shenanigans, and a healthy dose of WTF bliss. Say hello to Sonny Chiba‘s Wolf Guy.

Akira Inugami (Chiba) is a crime-solving bad-ass who’s friends with neither the police nor the gangland thugs running the nastier parts of the city. He crosses their paths though when he witnesses a man ranting in the street about a tiger just moments before his flesh and clothing are torn open as if by invisible claws. Digging deep into the mystery Inugami discovers a young woman named Miki (Etsuko Nami) at the heart of other similar attacks. Once a wide-eyed innocent, abuse at the hands of a popular rock group ruined her life and left her hungry for both smack and revenge.

That’s already more than enough for a feature film to focus on, but Wolf Guy‘s just getting started. Did I mention Inugami is the last survivor of a clan of lycanthropes? He watched as a toddler as his village was destroyed and his people slaughtered — and we watch the memory unfold during the opening credits — and now as an adult his heightened abilities lend themselves to his work and often help him out of tight situations.

What manner of abilities you ask? He’s strong, he can do flips, he can make his exposed intestines retreat back into his body purely through willpower, and he throws quarters like nobody’s business. The one thing this wolf guy doesn’t do? Turn into a wolf man.

The decision by director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi (Sister Street Fighter) and writer Fumio Kônami (Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion) to avoid having their lycanthrope ever actually transform is only one of the film’s many terrifically odd choices. The plot grows well beyond a simple tale of revenge to include a government conspiracy involving the J-CIA, dumbwaiter ninjas, targeted assassinations, and more. It’s an absolute blast from beginning to end.

Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope (the full onscreen title) isn’t the first film based on the popular manga/novels that first introduced the character if Inugami as a tamer, more direct adaptation called Crest of the Wolf hit screens two years earlier. While that film kept the teenage protagonist and themes Wolf Guy succeeds by going the far more entertaining exploitation route. Flesh is torn asunder, blood flows freely, and action sequences embrace violence and absurdity with equal affection. A quarry fight sees Inugami shot repeatedly before flipping and somersaulting his way through multiple explosions to take out the bad guys with fists, feet, and lupine attitude. Sex is equally omnipresent as he out Bond’s Bond and beds several women subsequently doomed to die. A sexy motorcyclist, a fur-clad village girl, and Miki herself all pull at his loins with the villager triggering certain memories of his own mother as he fondles and kisses the young woman’s breasts.

Typical Wolf Guy.

The film is a constant onslaught of memorable visuals and energetic camera moves, and the score (by Hiroshi Baba) keeps apace an array of wicked and moody guitar/bass riffs. We get some jazzy piano too, but the it’s the guitar work that feels at times like a Goblin score as interpreted by a progressive ’70s rock band.

There are some interesting and surprising narrative themes at play here too, and the common thread is a nihilism towards humanity that would have made for a fantastic franchise character. Imagine a private eye who takes on cases despite not giving a single solitary shit about the fate of mankind. It would be glorious. Inugami is that character. He’s already removed from humanity by his biology, but through the course of the film we see his view of people diminish further as they do horrific things to Miki and attempt to steal his wolf-like essence (which they then transfuse into the guy pictured at the top of the page). The film’s final shot is no accident as a triumphant, but now alone, Inugami throws a gun at the camera. It’s man’s weapon, not his, and he no longer needs it.

There’s a tragedy to Miki’s story too as it blends the familiar rape/revenge tale with a supernatural edge and fallout that would feel at home in an X-Men comic. She lost her life and love to the band’s assault, and after her phantom tiger ability is discovered she’s forced into further atrocities by government agents. They keep her hooked on drugs and constantly remind her of the abuse she’s suffered, and then they target her rage on those they want eliminated. She’s the “monster,” but she’s also the victim whose suffering breaks our heart.

Not that the film pauses the ridiculous fun to play tiny violins for her.

Wolf Guy has lived in the shadows for over forty years, but happily for those of us who love awesome things the fine folks at Arrow Video have just released the film to Blu-ray with a remastered picture and a trio of new interviews with director Yamaguchi, producer Toru Yoshida, and star Chiba. The actor star’s interview is marked as part one meaning more Chiba goodness is most likely on the way from Arrow.

Follow along every Monday with Missed Connections .

Buy Wolf Guy on Blu-ray/DVD from Amazon.