Weekend Watch Report
New Title Who Dis?
Just calling it for what it is… a breakdown of the weekend and what’s out there to tickle our fancy and give us a small reprieve from two idiots typing mean things at each other because power and money corrode the soul.
At the box office…
Well here we go… we get to see if the best part of the last James Bond installment, No Time To Die, can carry an entire movie. Ballerina, starring De Arnas, is set in the John Wick universe, and if you didn’t realize that you probably didn’t realize the full title of this movie is literally From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, which is both amazing and depressing.
Will this movie be good? I assume if you’re a John Wick kinda person it will sate that part of your brain. Beautiful people wearing beautiful things killing people beautifully. I doubt it’s gonna offer up much more than that.
In this week of hot take confessions, I will end with one more posed in the form of a question: Are we sure Wes Anderson is good? Or is he stuck in his particular, framed artificial world of wink wink nudge nudge sensibility? I haven’t seen The Phoenician Scheme, and I don’t begrudge the man for finding a comfort zone and producing very fine stories within it, but I’d like to see him stretch a bit. And the most interesting thing for me is his career is almost backwards… he came out of the gate with such bangers and then snuggled into a filmography of comfort and sameness. Oh well. I assume I’m in the minority on this one. The Phoenician Scheme, if nothing else boasts quite the cast:
It’s hard to guess what the inspiration was for Al Pacino to star in The Ritual, a movie about an exorcism gone wrong, without immediately thinking about money or possibly a weird, underground acting competition he has going on with Russell Crowe, to see who can chew more scenery in a movie. I broke this movie down a few weeks ago, so I don’t think there’s much more to say about it other than… woof. It’s currently running a 0% percent on Rotten Tomatoes so if you choose to go see it, the blood is on your hands and your hands alone.
Ok, this next one however… last week I introduced the idea of choosing which release I thought was most likely AI generated and I gotta tell you Dangerous Animals feels as though it was created with the prompt: “Craft me a story about a serial killer who kills people with sharks.” Now, I am happy to have the debate about whether that is something that can hold the weight of an entire movie, or if Jai Courtney is the actor who can carry the weight of this preposterousness. No disrespect to him either - it looks as though he is loving life in this. It’s just that… I guess we’re fed the chum we will eat, and right now the chum is Jaws meets… [insert bad serial killer movie].
Great, now I have to apologize to Dangerous Animals, because I just stumbled across The Gardener and yeah, no way AI wasn’t used to write this piece of shit. I wish Jean Claude Van Damme nothing but success, as he walked in the 90s so people like Jason Statham could kick butt today but this looks to be absolute dreck. It’s never a good sign when the trailer looks to be cut using TikTok editing tools…
I’m so mad I googled “where can I watch The Gardener” giving the algorithm that piece of bit info that it will surely use against me in some weird, machine-inducing torture campaign. I look forward to our dance.
Just watch the Belmont this weekend. Or go outside.