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The Nonsensically Grave Overtures of Eenie Meanie

There are several problems with the movie Eenie Meanie , starting with the fact it is called “ Eenie Meanie ”. Another big one though is that in spite of that puerile title it endeavours to take itself, for the most part, seriously; like a genuine, dramatic crime movie with a pair of heroes who might be a latter day Bonnie and Clyde. More power to debut writer-director Shawn Simmons, who does seem honestly compelled by these characters and their personal stakes, but his tonally counter-intuitive title and character -which seem positively winking in nature- set the movie on a bad disjointed path right from the get. And I think even he knows it, consciously dropping “Eenie Meanie” from the most critical sequences. Not that it particularly helps them. For its silly juvenile sound, the “Eenie Meanie” moniker comes from a rather tragic situation -bestowed on a girl Edie as a young teenager by a gangster as well as her drug addict parents, exploiting her as a getaway driver for criminal jobs...
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Vanessa Kirby Outshines a Dismal Poverty Picture

The Netflix drama starring Vanessa Kirby in a performance far out-pacing the quality of the movie itself is becoming a streaming subgenre. She got an Oscar nomination for it in Pieces of a Woman , easily the strongest of them and still a pretty good movie overall; less successful though was Italian Studies  -curiously atmospheric but fairly dull beyond the efforts Kirby put in. And Night Always Comes is firmly in the same territory. Though it too has some good moody filmmaking courtesy of Andor director Benjamin Caron, it is a movie that seems principally developed to give Kirby a juicy performance and not a lot else. In this facet, along with the subject matter it deals in, Night Always Comes  is quite reminiscent of To Leslie , the 2022 film carried on the back of Andrea Riseborough to a surprise Oscar nomination, in which the lead actress “de-glamourizes” themselves to play a troubled woman struggling through poverty. To Leslie  was much more of a full-blooded charact...
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Nobody's Home

In retrospect, the smartest thing about Nobody  was that it tapped into a natural though vacant space of the modern action genre. Really, all that writer Derek Kolstad stumbled upon was the fact that in that action lane, already pretty diminished in the modern Hollywood landscape, there were no movies centred on the average joe. John Wick, Ethan Hunt, Dominic Toretto -these are not ordinary people that the audience has any real chance of relating to. And it’s not like such characters are an anomaly for the action genre historically, it’s of course famously the thing that made Die Hard ’s John McClane so compelling.  And so Nobody simply  taps into that old well by allowing for a working-class suburban dad to be an action hero. But that novelty really can only go so far, as most of the  Die Hard sequels proved and to a degree Nobody 2 does as well. To compensate for this it throws its protagonist Hutch Mansell, once again played by Bob Odenkirk, into an even more dom...
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Sorry, Baby Navigates the Awkward Complexity of Trauma

The older I get and especially the more stories I am confronted with, both in art and in life, the more clear it becomes that the notion of ‘overcoming trauma’ is a fiction. Certainly severe traumas, those associated with a singular event, cannot simply be moved on from -it is not how our minds work. They can be repressed, and often have been in the lives of our older generations, but that is not a healthy way to process them. At a point it is just something that has to be lived with, and that may be the hardest truth to realize. I have not seen a movie that has articulated the particular awkwardness of trying to live a normal life with one’s trauma like Sorry, Baby , perhaps this year’s great indie darling and the directorial debut of Eva Victor, also the film’s writer and star. And I do mean awkwardness, a sense of unease that does encompass sorrow, depression, and frustration, but also humour, horniness, other feelings that distract or provide some relief from the pain. At one point...
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Unconventional Weapons

Typically, a story like Zach Cregger’s Weapons , in this day and age, would be conceived of as a miniseries. And indeed it is a fitting format for a story about the effects of a traumatic event on a community with some supernatural mystery behind it all -good miniseries have been made out of the formula. But I do appreciate that Cregger told it as a movie, with both the strengths and limitations the medium offers. There is little room for fat and yet still plenty for atmosphere, its episodic structure works so much better when the puzzle pieces it presents are more immediately tangible. There is a lost art in the puzzle movie, certainly where the horror genre is concerned, and it is satisfying to see it realized again. Cregger, coming off of his 2022 feature Barbarian , was apparently inspired by Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia  in composing a structure of interlocking narratives following several characters united around a singular theme, each sequence revealing just a little more...
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Together: A Movie That Really Sticks with to You

There’s a way of viewing this movie as some demented form of couples’ therapy for Alison Brie and Dave Franco. And it’s probably not entirely without merit. The metaphor of two becoming one in the context of love or marriage is an age-old theme that, while having some social or religious connotation to it, has frequently been evoked with high romance. A profound ideal of compatibility and belonging, faith and companionship. That notion that the right other person will perfectly fit the gap in oneself and they will each be made whole as a result. I get the impression that director Michael Shanks, an Australian YouTuber here making his movie debut, had heard variations of this theme a lot -perhaps he’d been to several weddings- and made the natural leap that someone inclined towards genre filmmaking would, and asked ‘yeah, but what if that were real?’ Together  isn’t an original idea. And I don’t mean necessarily to suggest it is a plagiarized script outright as it has been accu...
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You Can't Keep a Bad Guy Down

Two Bad Guys  movies and only one Nice Guys  movie? Something is wrong with the system. Much as I didn’t care for it, I get why The Bad Guys  was a success with kids and families. It pops with a manic energy that is very visually appealing, and unlike a lot of other hyperactive contemporary animated films, it is all pretty coherent and tangible. You can follow the action and the comedy beats, and on top of that it is colourful and features a cast of diverse and perfectly broadly designed animal characters. And there is a kind of attractive coolness to their personalities and the slick heist-movie attitude of the film itself. That it’s substance is very mundane doesn’t penetrate these, and I’m sure many a parent is grateful for a film like it to occupy their child’s attention for an hour and a half, even if entirely passively. And hey, at least it’s a mildly original film in a sea of franchises and brands. Now it is its own brand within DreamWorks though, and some of those...
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