Hey friends! Last week’s roundup was stymied by the hustle and bustle of life/some ongoing personal and professional bugaboos (running a business on top of film/TV criticism is hard!). But I wrote a lot last week, so here we go with some bits and bobs!
It always seems to be the way that, whenever I try to cover a film festival with any kind of ambition, along comes life (and a bunch of non-festival assignments) to take up my mental real estate. That said, while I plan a couple more dispatches out of SXSW 2023, here’s my first dispatch at The Spool on some docs spotlighted at the fest — from Penny Lane’s incredible Confessions of a Good Samaritan to Ian Cheney’s The Arc of Oblivion, as well as Lagueria Davis’ well-meaning but politically muddled Black Barbie: A Documentary.
“You must spend your life making memories,” Cheney remembers his father telling him when he was young. The Arc of Oblivion explores that impulse to its fullest, a work marked by clear-eyed approaches to existential questions about the finite nature of human life and our desperate attempts to extend it beyond our lifespans.”
For RogerEbert.com, I got an early glimpse at season 3 of Ted Lasso, a show whose nicecore sheen has worn off thanks to the vestiges of the Twitter discourse cycle and the sheer vagaries of time. It’s still got some intermittent charms, but when your main character starts the season wondering what he’s still doing there, it’s not hard to start thinking the same way.
“Season Three is a slight return to form, offering more time to hang out with its disarming, charming cast of characters. But even the show’s warmth is starting to wear thin, especially now that the sunshine has to spread across more characters, settings, and conflicts.”
One returning show that hasn’t missed a step, though, is Showtime’s Yellowjackets, whose blend of riot-grrl anger and Lostian mystery boxes continues to delight, even as the central cast splits off into their own separate adventures in its second season. Here’s me reviewing for Consequence:
“Like the best mystery boxes, each new answer raises more intriguing questions, which is enticing enough. But throw in buckets of blood and more Tori Amos needle drops than you know what to do with, and baby, you’ve got a stew going. (Just don’t ask where we got the meat.)”
New outlet time: I’m doing the odd review and feature for Wealth of Geeks, kicking things off with my review of the lively, but disappointing Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, a film that discovers firsthand why the idea of a D&D story that you can’t play might get a little boring:
“Honor Among Thieves feels more like tagging along on game night when there’s no space for you in the adventure; you’ve just got to sit there on the sidelines while the cool kids make things up as they go along.”
D&D’s Marvelesque laughs are downright refreshing, though, when compared to the sloppy CG slapdashery of Shazam! Fury of the Gods, which I broke down for Consequence. You can tell Gunn’s just burning off these turds till he can do what he wants with DC, and it’s probably for good reason:
“Fury of the Gods tries to recapture what made the first Shazam! a disarming breath of fresh air, but it just can’t quite do it. Even as the film’s climax gestures towards some actual life-changing consequences for our heroes, audiences need not fret: Everything will go back to normal by the end, we’ll get a couple of unwanted cameos, and we’ll even set up some fresh new adventures in a mid-credits scene.”
But fret not; the movies are far from dead, though the ones keeping it going are leaving quite the trail of bodies. John Wick: Chapter 4 is a three-hour monstrosity of stylized violence and the most inventive, unrelenting stuntwork you’ve ever seen, and it’s the bee’s fucking knees. Cinematic literacy meets a star and stunt team at the very tippy-top of their game; watch this one in a packed theater and hoot and holler with the rest of us. For The Spool:
“It’s tempting to just chalk Chapter 4 up as an “action showcase” whose fights make up for perceived deficiencies in the script, the plot, in Reeves’ stoic performance. But it’s all part of the stew that makes these movies so fascinating. Where others might see thin plotting, I see mythic storytelling, Wick sitting somewhere between the grand tragedy of a Russian novel and the fateful samurai trying to do right before his time ends. Cynical minds might call Reeves flat; no, he’s perfect here, an engine of violence struggling to make do with what he’s become and what kind of legacy he’ll leave.”