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Movies Review

REVIEW – Everything Everywhere All At Once

Thank the heavens this was playing in Joplin this weekend; I was gonna have a small-scale fit if I had to wait for disc or streaming. Michelle Yeoh stars as prickly, stressed-out and very ordinary laundromat owner Evelyn Wang. Her relationships with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Qwan, who you probably remember from TEMPLE OF DOOM and THE GOONIES) and daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) are strained, her estranged father (James Hong) is flying in for Chinese New Year, and she’s being audited by the IRS. In the elevator on the way to meet the IRS inspector (an amusingly dowdy and cross Jamie Lee Curtis), Waymond’s body is briefly possessed by an alternate universe counterpart who tells Evelyn that she is the key to stopping the multiverse-threatening nihilist Jobu Tupaki; using tech to access the skills she needs from other potential lifetimes, she finds that she also gets to behold and even inhabit those what-could-have-beens. What follows is an exhilarating, inventive action spectacle filled with bizarre gags, sights you’ve surely never seen before, and a warm, thoughtful core message that I think uses the big ol’ web of branching timelines idea really well. Honestly, at this point I’m just happy to see a multiverse story that isn’t trying to sell me something else or play on my nostalgia, but I’m thrilled to report that it’s also brilliant and bonkers and full of heart, with Qwan in particular being the incredibly charming key to the film’s most emotionally moving moments. Yeoh of course is also terrific throughout; it’s a long road of growth and change she’s given to play, and no step on it is not believable. My dad did offer the fair criticism that it feels long — between widely spaced act titles, digressions that are in-the-moment puzzling, one major fake-out, and a story structure that gives the viewer no familiar landmarks to orient their sense of time through most of the middle stretch, I can definitely see where he’s coming from; I do expect it to play differently in this respect on rewatch. And therein lies the big issue I have with this being in Joplin as opposed to li’l ol’ P-burg — I do rather wish I could go straight back out to give this another go. Highly, highly recommended if it’s in your neck of the woods.

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Movies Review

REVIEW – The Lost City

The short version is, I was expecting it to be funnier, but it’s still amiably charming. Aaron & Adam Nee’s film is reminiscent of ROMANCING THE STONE in the broad strokes, but sillier. Sandra Bullock is romantic adventure novelist Loretta Sage, a recluse in a bad place in her life who’s been dragged kicking & screaming out on a book tour to promote “The Lost City of D,” which is a gag deemed too obvious for them to use as the title of the film. After the first stop goes disasterously sideways, she winds up nabbed by goons in the employ of rich scumbag Abigail Fairfax (an intense, manic-grinning Daniel Radcliffe), who can tell from the well-researched bits in Sage’s latest steamy tome that she’s the only one who can lead him to a long-lost treasure located in the REAL titular lost city. Blaming himself for her storming off and winding up in this mess, her seemingly vapid book cover model Alan (Channing Tatum) forces himself into the rescue party. As they say, hijinks ensue, the majority of which you’ll have seen in the trailers. Yes, Brad Pitt is here as the real rescuer, and he’s a hoot. Bullock is doing a very fine job doing the sort of romantic comedy lead work she’s been doing for decades, with the sort of coming-out-of-her-shell, warming-to-her-costar arc you can set your watch by. Tatum’s character starts in a broad comedy himbo mode and then, like a switch was thrown, suddenly has to function as a viable romantic lead so he gets huffy about being treaded as a broad comedy himbo. Doesn’t quite work. The gags that weren’t spoiled by the trailer, many of which are found in a subplot about the misadventures of Sage’s publicist (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) making her OWN attempt at rescue, keep the film’s head above water. Radcliffe’s wild energy doesn’t help the flick’s general feeling of mismatched tones; I like what he’s doing here, but I also feel like the way he’s playing this he DEFINITELY would have shot our heroes dead at the end. Probably wait for rental or streaming unless you’re really jonesing for a trip to the cinema, but ultimately I think still worth a watch.

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Movies Review

REVIEW – The Batman

A whole meal of a film, practically a mini-series on the silver screen, in which the Dark Knight Detective (a growling Robert Pattinson) teams up with the One Good Cop in Gotham (Jeffrey Wright as Lt. Gordon) to take down the question mark-themed obsessive (Paul Dano, clad in some kinda tactical gimp mask instead of a bowler hat) who’s murdering Gotham’s corrupt elite. The levels of conspiracy in Matt Reeves’s film bring to mind certain passages of Grant Morrison’s late ’00s Bat-books or the early stages of Scott Snyder’s run a decade ago (or the issues of the recent Batman: The Adventures Continue comic book series, continuing the classic animated series, that reference the latter run). I adored how much of the film is Batman poking around crime scenes, like classic shots out of a ’70s or early ’80s issue of Detective Comics filtered through a modern aesthetic. Pattinson is the most convincing “weird rich guy who’d dress up in that outfit” since Keaton, and his rapport with Wright — hell, his rapport with all his allies, including Andy Serkis‘s Alfred (whose every scene, just about, is memorable in some fashion) and Zoe Kravitz‘s Selina Kyle (who I’d love to follow to a spin-off where she’s just cheating dudes and stealing stuff) — is fun to watch shift and evolve as the mission that drives him changes. There are fun twists and there are twists that feel a twist too far (or that twist & twist again too rapidly), but I like where the film lands both in terms of overall story and where it leaves the characters for the inevitable follow-up. It was three hours and twenty minutes if you include the trailers, and yet I’m not against the idea of hitting that again over the weekend — somehow THIS interpretation of the Bat-mythos hit me the same way Burton & Keaton’s ’89 flick did back then, filling me with joy as I watched the Caped Crusader beat down thugs, work through clues, and pursue his foes in his crazy rocket-powered car — all the things you want to see Batman do, larger than life, in a room full of similarly awed strangers. It was everything I wanted it to be. Wow.

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Movies

My Year of Movies, 2021

If there’s one thing I can say for 2021, it’s: thank the heavens, at least the movie theaters were open again. Sure, you might still catch a life-altering contagious respiratory illness while packed in with a bunch of strangers all, together, staring up at beautiful faces larger than your house — but in a place the size of my hometown, and me being as vaxxed as one can be, I’ve considered the personal risk as slim as it could be given the state of things. So in the back half of the year, I did see a pretty fair number of films as the filmmakers intended, outside the comfort of home. What follows are cross-posts of the reviews I wrote on my Facebook page from July all the way through the week of Christmas covering almost every theatrical outing (plus, oh yeah, two somewhat notable streaming flicks) that I took in during that span of time. Enjoy!

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This Robotech Thing

This Robotech Thing: Everything Changes

In which Captain JLS discusses the biggest Robotech-related news since the announcement of The Shadow Chronicles in the early 2000s — Harmony Gold & Big West have, hopefully once & for all, settled their differences and unreleased Macross material and merchandise, new & old, can reach these shores through official channels starting … well, apparently about a month ago. Also featured: bits & bobs of Robotech & Robotech-adjacent merch ranging from the very recent all the way back to late last year.