Hey all!
First off, many many apologies for setting up this Substack a few months ago and promptly sitting on it. Between my regular work, the stresses of home/pet ownership, and the the usual lingering malaise about the world, this Substack has fallen by the wayside a bit. I promise I’m shaking off the cobwebs, though, and getting back to work!
This’ll be the first of my weekly Sunday roundups of my most recent writings elsewhere, and I’ll do paid-sub specific takes on Tuesdays when and where I can.
For Consequence, I reviewed the Lord-and-Miller produced, Elizabeth Banks-directed Cocaine Bear, which teases some goofy, B-grade creature feature fun and is amiable primarily when it does just that. You can turn it off after the big ambulance setpiece halfway through, though; after that, it’s sub-Stranger Things ‘80s drivel.
“The film’s first act is easily its most assured, dialing up that Lord and Miller humor just enough while keeping a firm grasp on the likable characters they’ve set up. It all gets a bit too loosey-goosey by its repetitive, redundant climax — there just aren’t enough good jokes left to cover for the fact that, yes, we get it, the bear did cocaine.
But as these things go, it’s a decent enough time, an energetic throwback to devil-may-care creature comedies of yore like Tremors or Lake Placid. And in the doldrums of late February, as the late stretch of Oscar season exhausts us all, that might just do nicely.”
Working both film and TV can be exhausting; often, you get paid the same whether you have to dedicate 100 minutes or six whole hours. I certainly felt that with my review of the Apple TV+ spy series Liaison for RogerEbert.com — a show that wastes Vincent Cassel and Eva Green as former lovers forced to reunite to stave off a devastating cyberattack. They’re electric, as expected, especially when the show lets their innate heat radiate off each other (When Green has to slowly pull tracker barbs out of Cassel’s bare back in one episode? Hachi machi!). But like so many of these things, the conflict is too sparse and contrived, packed with too many genre cliches, to overcome any inkling of style. By the time you hear that Massive Attack song from House M.D. for the fifth time in six episodes, you’ll beg for this liaison to end.
“Frankly, “Liaison”’s title sequence writes checks the show itself can’t cash: A smooth, swaying techno-jazzy track from Plumm plays over infrared footage of a couple making love, tight close-ups on footage of revolution, cityscapes encaged in swirling light trails. It all promises a sleek, modern, sexy thriller that the show itself can only approximate. Its deeper concerns about post-Brexit England’s vulnerabilities, its occasional dips into the politics of revolution and how they can be co-opted and infiltrated—none of this gets much exploration save for the intermittent outburst.”
It’s hard to have any kind of expectations for a Children of the Corn movie — hell, even the first one isn’t very good, and the series has tried at least eight times since to mine scares out of the prospect of a bunch of country kids who get maize-pilled and off any remaining adults left in their economically-depressed backwater. But Kurt Wimmer’s prequel/reboot/remake/something is something even direr, as I highlighted over at Consequence:
“There’s something particularly galling about the laziness of this one — its flimsy gestures toward topicality, the piecemeal nature of the whole thing — that makes its failures acutely horrifying. Wimmer’s track record is as spotty as it is infrequent — he hasn’t directed a film since 2006’s execrable Ultraviolet. If his work here is any indicator, I’ll be happy to wait another 17 years before I have to see another.”
As my months of absence on Substack is any indicator, I’m really, really bad at promoting my stuff. Half the time, I’m so exhausted when I hit publish or turn in a draft that I hope someone will come across it.
But I’m proud of, and definitely should push more, my podcast Right on Cue, where I interview film, TV, and video game composers about their latest works. My most recent episode is last week’s interview with now-Grammy winner(!) Stephanie Economou, who won the first-ever Grammy for Best Video Game Score for her driving, black-metal opus for the Assassins’ Creed Valhalla DLC Dawn of Ragnarok. She even offers up exclusive commentaries for me!
We had a blast chatting about the pressures of scoring for such a long-running franchise, the amount of mythological and historical research she had to do to nail its Nordic sound, and what it’s like to be a female composer in the world of video games.
Either I’m extra grumpy lately, or Guy Ritchie’s Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre is that much of a step down from his previous stuff. Sure, I hated Wrath of Man when I reviewed it, but I have a greater appreciation for it upon rewatch, especially in the context of this limp, lightweight Bond riff that can’t quite commit to its vague air of spy satire, which I alluded to in my review for Consequence.
Ritchie pulls back on his signature style in favor of tepid coverage, Statham shows the limits of his charm, and it’s the worst Aubrey Plaza has been in a while (a feat I thought impossible). It even wastes Cary Elwes as the foppish Charlie to Statham, Plaza, and Bugzy Malone’s Angels. What’s more, it backgrounds its most interesting premise — Josh Hartnett as the villain’s favorite movie star, suddenly blackmailed into joining the team so he can play honeypot — as just another aspect of the chase.
“Operation Fortune is a spy “comedy” insofar as it generally shrugs in the direction of parody: its characters presume the air of cheeky sendup without actually committing to it, whether it’s Statham’s grumpy skull-cracker or Plaza’s confused deadpan. Apart from some fun sartorial experimentation and a fun shot here or there, there’s little of Ritchie’s signature brio to uplift the dull-as-dishwater spy tropes on display.
Instead, it’s like watching a cheap Kingsman knockoff; only it comes from the filmmaker arguably most influential to the things that made those movies fun. Ritchie wants to send up the spy movie, and he doesn’t let the fact that he has nothing to say about the spy movie stop him.”