TOY STORY 5

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B+

Do we really need five of these Toy Story movies? I suppose you could say Disney and Pixar Animation Studios has made each one for a different generation—at least since Toy Story 2, which came out four years after the 1995 original that ushered in a new era of computer-animated movies that changed animated feature filmmaking forever. The thing is, though, that movie was also incredibly inventive on visual, stylistic and narrative levels, and it set the bar incredibly high for Pixar, which it met for nearly two decades thereafter. Toy Story 2 in 1999 was shockingly on par with its predecessor, and then, eleven years later, Toy Story 3 was the first and only film I’ve ever reviewed that was both the third in a series and the best film in the year it was released (2010). It was yet another nine years later when Toy Story 4 (2019) was released, and although it was highly acclaimed, I found it to be fun but slightly overrated, the first in this franchise not quite up to the task of justifying its own existence.

But, let’s say you were 5 years old when the first Toy Story came out. (Oh me? I was 19.) You would have been 9 when Toy Story 2 was released; 20 when Toy Story 3 was released; 29 with Toy Story 4; and now 36 with Toy Story 5. Kids have literally grown up with these movies, are are old enough now to have children of their own with the ability to understand some of the in-jokes. Toy Story, along with Pixar Animation Studios itself, has a history spanning over three decades. And while I can’t say it’s a bad thing per se that they keep returning to this particular well, I do find myself wishing they would get back to more original material, like they did far more consistently in their first couple of decades. (I can tell you this much: all of these movies are far better than the 2022 misfire Lightyear.)

Each Toy Story movie adds new toy characters to its cast, while struggling to retain the core cast from every movie since the others were introduced, always running the risk of being overstuffed. It’s been so long now since the first installment that some of the voice actors have died: Jeff Bergman has replaced Don Rickles as Mr. Potato Head; Blake Clark has replaced Jim Varney as Slinky Dog; Anna Vocino has replaced Estelle Harris as Mrs. Potato Head. Some of these iconic voices from the earlier films have been replaced by what sound like generic replacements, and unfortunately that sort of fits into the direction these last couple of films have been leaning.

Does any of that mean I didn’t still enjoy it? Of course not! I might even go so far as to say I liked 5 slightly better than 4, even if I wasn’t quite as impressed with that looks like pretty standard Pixar visual renderings these days. This one features a delightful subplot, which the narrative switches back and forth from, of about 50 Buzz Lightyears spilling from a shipping container crashed on a deserted island—this is, in fact, how the film opens. All of these Lightyears, convinced they are actually Buzz and having no idea they are toys, until they go on a quest across the sea that ultimately has them running across our regular heroes in the middle of their own story.

These movies have always been cram packed with ideas, with a lot to say and with only slightly varying levels of success. They all touch on how our perceptions of prized possessions change as we grow up, and this is a franchise that has always explored the question of how that might affect toys themselves. Toy Story 5, co-directed and co-written by McKenna Harris and Andrew Stanton, is a bit late in the game to bring up the effect of excessive screen time on kids; this is a premise that would have worked even better in 2019 with 4, and could maybe even have worked in 2010 with 3.

This time, little Bonnie (voiced by different actors in each of the three films she’s appeared in, this time by Scarlett Spears) is gifted a new toy that is a tablet for kids, here designed and named as “Lilypad,” or “Lily” (Greta Lee) for short. She serves as the primary antagonist in the story this time around, but not in quite the way you might go in expecting. Instead of being straight up villainous, there’s just a lot of misunderstanding between Lily and the other toys—once again led by Woody and Buzz Lightyear, and I suppose they’ll keep making these movies as long as Tom Hanks and Tim Allen are alive to voice them—as all of them are just taking different approaches to what they sincerely feel is best for the kid who plays with them. Even though we get wide shots of multiple houses in which kids are just sitting looking at screens, it feels as though this movie is raising its hands in surrender to the inevitability of what characters consistently just call “tech,” and ultimately it comes to the conclusion that the best approach is to let a combination of electronic and analog objects work together to ignite a child’s imagination.

The most significant new characters this time around are all older versions of electronic devices themselves: Shelby Rabara as Snappy the toy camera; Craig Robinson as Atlas the GPS hippo; and most delightful of all, Conan O'Brien as Smarty Pants, the electronic toilet training device. Smarty Pants gets all the biggest laugh lines in this movie, and I have to hand it to them, they could have run with truly cheap humor here but the literal toilet humor involved here is consistently clever and surprisingly subtle at times.

And that’s the thing with Toy Story 5, which invites you back into a comfortable world you love to return to, with all the old friends you love (Joan Cusack as Jessie—she might even have the most screen time—and Kristen Schaal as Trixie and Wallace Shawn as Rex and Annie Potts as Bo Peep and Tony Hale as Forky and many many more) and yet even more new friends you’re delighted to meet. But as much fun as I had watching this movie, and as easily as it affected me emotionally, often to the point of misty eyes, it is also by definition fundamentally unoriginal, which makes the script, arguably the most important part of a movie, its weakest link. And while it’s not extremely weak, it’s still easier to clock the contrivances with each one of these outings, taking us another step closer to boredom with each journey. There comes a point where it starts to feel a bit repetitive.

But, much like a TV show that loses its way but I keep watching because I love the characters, the winning characters and voice performances still keep me entertained. This is a franchise that achieved the unthinkable with three classic installments, and you could argue they should have stopped there. But this is clearly a well that Pixar will keep returning to as long as there is anything to pull out of it, and I suppose I’ll keep letting them take me to it as long as I’m having a good time.

It’s more of the same, but it’s so fun to return to

Overall: B+

STOP! THAT! TRAIN!

Directing: C
Acting: B-
Writing: C
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C
Special Effects: C+

Let me tell you a story, you ones. There once was a movie spoof comedy so hilarious, people went back to see it over and over again, just to catch the wall-to-wall gags they missed while they were too busy laughing the first time. It was a smash at the box office, it could reasonably be called the funniest movie ever made, and it was called Airplane! The thing is, if you are indeed young, you’ve probably never even heard of this movie, let alone the fact that it was sending up the countless, self-serious disaster movies being made at the time. And you certainly won’t understand that Stop! That! Train! clearly thinks its paying homage to it, but instead is straight up ripping it off.

It has the characters regularly returned to as a running gag—in this case, a horny woman (Missi Pyle) coming on to the train conductor (Chris Parnell) she doesn’t realize is dead; or the bitchy businessman (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) yammering to a pregnant woman (Mayan Lopez) about how he only likes babies when they are still inside the womb, or the distracted woman (Natasha Leggero) who can’t stop yakking on her phone. In retrospect, I suppose it actually is kind of hilarious that the woman playing a famous actress constantly thinking people are recognizing her, when really they just wanted to complain about her being in her seat or whatever, was an actually-famous actress I did not recognize, and it turns out she was Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Airplane! didn’t have these exact same scenarios, but it certainly had a number of similar concepts—enough, in fact, that here they play like overused ideas in Airplane IV. What Stop! That! Train! does do is have crew dragging the conductor’s lifeless body down the aisle while passengers fail to notice, and this exactly happens in Airplane!

What I’m saying is, I watched Stop! That! Train! constantly thinking of the far better movie that clearly inspired it but did everything a hundred times better and with actual laughs per minute. I won’t deny that I got a few good chuckles out of this movie, but the frequency was more like a couple laughs per act. I was excited by the thought of a major motion picture presented basically as a spoof but through a pointedly queer lens, but this is an exercise that would have worked far better as a five-minute sketch, or hell, even a thirty-minute short film. Stretching it out even as far as what otherwise should be a tight, ninety minutes, if you’ll pardon the pun, drags it down. Way too much of what’s onscreen just lands with an airless thud.

The opening credits sequence is amusing, as director Adam Shankman (who saw better days directing the 2007 film adaptation of the Hairspray musical—the ensuing two decades have not been kind) cuts back and forth between real footage of impressive high-speed trains zooming through verdant landscapes and shots of obvious model trains and toys. Unfortunately, this is the high point of the film. We then meet Tess and DeeDee (played by drag queens Ginger Minj and Jujubee), on their way to work at Stank Rail, only to find themselves laid off. When two crew members don’t show up for work at competing rail company Glamazonian Express, they quickly whip up disguises to go in their place. Very quickly this luxury train finds itself headed straight into a “Stormaganza,” and hijinks ensues. Shankman, and co-writers Christina Friel and Connor Wright, clearly want you to think that hilarity ensues. It might be more likely for your mind to wander.

If you’re a huge fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race, you might consider this movie star studded. I never got into that show, so while I’m sure plenty of people recognize the plethora of other drag queens in the cast (Brooke Lynn Hytes; Marty Lauter; Symone; Monét X Change; I think I may actually recognize Latrice Royale from somewhere), the only one readily recognizable to me was RuPaul, who plays President Judy Gagwell—part of the “gag” here being, obviously, she’s hardly any more ridiculous than the actual President we have right now, though her winning campaign slogan of “She fun” isn’t that far off from how he got here. Maybe my favorite was Matt Rogers as President Gagwell’s Press Secretary; his reaction after Gagwell says “Give it to me straight” and then “Now give it to me gay” is pretty great. This entire film could have used more of his vibe.

The thing is, I really want a movie like Stop! That! Train! to work, and to succeed. It was made for a paltry $20 million, and the $2.5 million it’s earned in the past five days might as well be regarded as nothing—but, if you watch this movie, you won’t be surprised. The people making this movie seemed to be having a good time, but apparently no one was around to tell them how much of it wasn’t working. The outtakes during the end credits have more energy to them than the entire film that precedes them.

Stop! That! Train! is the kind of project that would have worked far better as a janky live theater production, particularly one that could be workshopped in front of audiences so they could decipher which gags actually work. There’s a smattering of gags in the film that do work, but they are few and far enough between that you might start to get antsy, or downright impatient. The film does have a sort of knowingly low-budget quality, with what appears to be the aim of that being part of the charm. I really like a ton of the people seen in it (there are countless I haven’t even mentioned; I will say that Guy Branum is utterly wasted in it as one of countless idiot guys who won’t listen to the one woman—played by Rachel Bloom—at the United States Train Command Center who is trying to save the runaway train), but none of them get used in a way that comes close to meeting their potential.

This is a movie that actually could have been great, had they just used better writers. This makes it all the more disappointing, and given the hopes I had for it, maybe the most disappointing movie I’ve seen this year. I want to give the cast their due, say they’re doing their best, but that hardly matters in a comedy where most of the comedy doesn’t work.

Stop! That! Movie! and watch Airplane! instead.

Overall: C

DISCLOSURE DAY

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A
Special Effects: B

Look, I reserve the right to change my opinion of Disclosure Day over time. I’m seeing it again next week; perhaps my opinion will evolve. After first watch, I found it riveting from start to finish, but I thought the aliens looked kind of dumb. Thankfully their cumulative screen time is mercifully brief.

As is always the case with Steven Spielberg, this movie is much more about the people—as in, the human people. Tonally, Disclosure Day is like a cross between Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Spielberg’s 2005 take on War of the Worlds—a flawed movie that I still return to every few years. (It is perhaps worth noting that the War of the Worlds aliens from 21 years ago looked better than these ones do.) Disclosure Day isn’t perfect either, but it spoke to me in a way Spielberg has not managed in a very long time, perhaps not since the 2001 science fiction extravaganza Minority Report.

Still, it’s easy to find things to be ambivalent about in this movie, and while I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it polarizing, one can anticipate a degree of mixed reviews. The special effects, frankly, are not up to Spielberg’s usual standards. Some of the effects shots in the trailers, out of context, look worse than they come off while watching the film—but you can still see the CGI of it all. It would be one thing if the animals that appear out of nowhere to sort of mesmerize a couple of the lead characters were always part of a hallucination or a flashback of memory, but there are instances of this where we are meant to take it as occurring in their present reality.

And I really have to criticize the aliens themselves. Spielberg is clearly using the prototypical alien form from as far back as the forties as a reference. But, there are shots in which these guys just look like beanpole children in rubber costumes. There’s a shot in the final sequence that for me, pushes against the line of ridiculous; others might reasonably feel it crosses that line.

It’s a testament to the writing, by both David Koepp (who has written a great many great movies, including four previous Spielberg films) and Spielberg himself, that I am easily able to overlook these things. Ditto the direction, and also the phenomenal editing by Sarah Broshar (another frequent Spielberg collaborator). Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography is very good but not at quite the same level; there are a bit too many lens flares, and one major nitpick is the shot of a crowd of people recording through a window with their smart phone lights on—they would just be recording the light reflecting in the glass. It makes for a cool, haunting image, though.

Janusz Kaminski is yet another frequent Spielberg collaborator, and that seems to be a major theme here. Much of Disclosure Day is a revisit, of sorts, to ground he’s covered before. To its credit, it also looks forward, and although it hardly gets into the weeds, it has some pretty provocative philosophical questions to pose, and this is a big part of what elevates it. Should we be keeping proof of extraterrestrial life secret because we fear aliens, or because we fear how people will handle it? (There was one scene in which I thought: if this were the real world, some idiot would just whip out a gun and shoot that thing.) What kind of impact would proof of aliens have on global religious consciousness? These are things that characters in the film actually talk about, and we get very reasonable arguments from multiple sides.

Now, it’s on the record that Spielberg himself is convinced that aliens walk among us, and this is a perspective that clearly informs his approach to this film. My reaction to that is: that’s cute. The adorable old man thinks aliens on Earth are real! The idea is of course preposterous on its face. If any evidence actually did exist, it would have been leaked eons ago. There’s a throwaway line in this movie about how U.S. presidents are kept in the dark since they are civilians again eight years after being in office, and that explains how they are kept in the dark, and gives an out for speculation regarding the unnamed current president. The thing is, presidents still stack agencies with people who are just as moronic as they are, and it’s silly to think anything this huge could ever be kept secret by hundreds or maybe even thousands of people with knowledge of it. It’s mathematically impossible.

It sure makes a great movie, though. Conspiracies are typically ludicrous in the real world, but they make for great thrillers, and Disclosure Day is indeed a great one. Even better, it’s fantastically cast: Colin Firth is a government agent on the tail of Josh O’Connor on the run with the government secrets he’s spent a decade being paid to protect, and they both slip into their roles organically—as does Eve Hewson as O’Connor’s girlfriend, who is having a crisis of faith in the face of the information being shared. The standout, though, is Emily Blunt, as the Kansas City TV news meteorologist who suddenly finds herself uttering a click-like laguage nearly no one can understand, and occasionally slipping into Russian or Korean. She gradually discovers other abilities that I won’t reveal here, except to say that they provide a delightful mix of mysterious and comic moments alike. Blunt’s performance, as a relatable middle-aged woman confused by suddenly extraordinary circumstances, arguably makes Disclosure Day worth seeing on its own. Colman Domingo, on the other hand, is a a great actor underused as a guy who spends most of his screen time on the phone with one or another of the other characters.

For all I know, maybe one day I will find the writing in Disclosure Day less impressive and the visual effects somehow more sensible. All I know is, I look forward to seeing it again, and I look forward to being able to discuss it with people. This is a movie that grabs you from its opening shot, from the point of view of a professional wrestler stomped in the face. Within moments, we see O’Connor’s whistleblower character nervously sitting in the crowd, already on the run. Disclosure Day does not waste a moment, and is so well edited that its 145 minutes pass swiftly. This is action-thriller filmmaking at its finest, not a narrative sag in sight. It occasionally invites nitpicking, but that’s relatively inconsequential considering how high it’s flying when the story soars, and I felt like I was windsurfing on its intrigue the entire time.

To be perfectly Blunt

Overall: A-

TUNER

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: A

What a delight this movie is, an original idea executed well. What a concept!

It probably helps that the director and co-writer, Daniel Roher, is an accomplished documentary filmmaker, shifting into narrative film for the first time with Tuner. This means we get fresh and new ideas from someone who already knows a thing or two about making movies. Most crucially, he knows something about editing, which can make or break any film but is especially important in documentaries, and is easily the strongest element of Tuner,

Leo Woodall plays the title character, Niki White, a guy with a hearing condition best described as “allergic to loud noise.” When things are quiet, though, he can take advantage of his greatest talent, perfect pitch, while working for an aging Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman) for a piano tuning company. Roher, along with co-writer Robert Ramsey, takes his time getting to these details, but eventually we learn that Niki’s father, who died some years ago, was close with Harry. This is one of the many great things about Tuner, which doesn’t bother with spelling a lot of things out. You simply get the sense that, in the wake of Niki’s father’s death, Harry and his wife, Marla (Tovah Feldshuh), took him under their wing.

When Harry, who we see immediately is perhaps in very early stages of dementia, is hospitalized, Niki learns that Harry and Marla are already in deep medical debt. He falls in with a group of Israeli criminals who are delighted to learn of Niki’s other gift: in total silence, he can use his pitch-perfect hearing to crack the code to unlock safes.

I spent a lot of time watching Tuner wondering how the hell it was going to resolve. Is he somehow going to outsmart these thieves who increase their threats when he tries to pull away from them? Is he going to endanger his concert pianist girlfriend, Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu)? It’s the not knowing the answers to these questions that makes Tuner exciting, because in someone else’s hands, we’d see what’s coming a mile away. But, not in Daniel Roher’s hands. I never had the slightest clue where the hell it was going, and in the best way. This is a crime thriller that’s thrilling in its originality.

Leo Woodall is the perfect fit to play Niki, a guy whose potential as a child prodigy was ripped away from him by his hearing condition. He now moves through life frustrated and shy, but in the end he lets a relationship organically blossom after a bit of pushing by Harry. Hoffman, who is now 88 years old, is an equally good fit as a lovably cantankerous old man. (If anything, he plays younger here; we never hear how old Harry is, but who continues running a shoestring business at 88? It’s easy to believe Harry and Marla are around the same age, even though Tovah Feldshuh is 11 years younger than Hoffman.)

I suppose you could call the plot to Tuner a bit convoluted, but it’s always legible, which is a credit to the director and writers. I do have a couple of nitpicks, chief of which is the presence of a brightly colored piano incongruously hanging out in Harry’s hospital hallway, convenient for Ruthie to bring in and play for him. Niki also seems a little too smart to believe the obviously bullshit lies that the thieves tell him about the rich people they’re stealing from, but whatever; I’ll forgive it because what’s great about the movie more than makes up for these things.

More than anything, Tuner has great editing—and specifically, sound editing. I was reminded of another excellent film, Sound of Metal, which also featured great sound that vividly illustrated the experience of a man losing his hearing. In Niki’s case, he wears hearing aids that he can use to turn down ambient noise, and often wears noise-canceling headphones on top of that. There are villainous characters who occasionally use this condition against him, and instead of going the more predictable route of Niki somehow outsmarting the Israeli thieves who are progressively more dangerous to him, the story comes to a completely unexpected yet fully satisfying conclusion.

Niki isn’t so much a hero as he is a flawed protagonist you can’t help but root for, largely thanks to Leo Woodall’s nuanced performance. This is a story that is both complex and comprehensible, gripping and utterly unpredictable. It would be particularly fun to watch having known nothing about it going in, but then how would you convince people to watch it? I had such a great time, this is the kind of movie that can restore a person’s faith in cinema.

I hear you need a tuneup: Dustin Hoffman and Leo Woodall on the scene.

Overall: B+

PRESSURE

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

It’s been said that Brendan Fraser is miscast as General Dwight D. Eisenhower in Pressure, a movie about how much the weather forecast went into play with the timing of D-Day, the 1994 invasion of Nomandy, France, which laid the foundation for victory over the Nazis. Look up photos of Eisnehower, and he looks a bit old and just this side of frail, almost too thin for his uniform. Ironically, Eisenhower was 53 years old on June 6, 1944 (spoiler alert! D-Day didn’t happen on June 5 as originally scheduled), and yet Fraser cuts a far more imposing figure at age 57, and a heigh of 6’3” as opposed to Eisenhower’s 5’10”. And to all this, I say: so what? If you’re bitching about how little Brendan Fraser actually resembles Eisenhower then you don’t understand how movies work. Just shave the man’s head and you’re good to go.

It’s the story that matters anyway, and how many people going to see Pressure are going to be hung up on what the real people the actors are playing actually looked like? Andrew Scott plays James Stagg, the Scottish meteorologist who made the critical weather forecast, and he’s far better looking than the real Stagg was. You don’t see me complaining!

Indeed, I have no complaints at all about Pressure, really, which is as down-the-middle an entertainment as you can get. There’s nothing in it particularly worth raving about, either; it just works. Your dad will like it. Your grandpa will like it. I liked it! If the two women in the aisle behind me are any indication, old ladies will like it. Possibly they loved it: they actually applauded when the movie ended, and this was in a theater with maybe fifteen people in the audience.

I suppose you could say they’re running out of the seemingly endless stories that have been told about World War II over the past eighty years—now they’re talking about the weather? Well, as we were informed in ending title cards, when Eisenhower was asked what gave us the edge on D-Day, he replied that was had better meteorologists than the Germans. Why not tell that story?

To be fair, the script, by David Haig and Anthony Maras and based on a stage play of the same name by David Haig, is pretty standard and by-the-numbers. I do find myself wondering how the play could possibly have been as fun to look at as the film with all its shots of stormy weather. Anyway, Stagg is the “genius” meteorologist recommended by Winston Churchill; Chris Messina steps in as Irving Krick, the antagonist American meteorologist who ignorantly insists that historical “analog” weather patterns are enough to be convincing forecasts. He’s very obstinate about this, because he has such a long track record of being right; he’s told more than once that the regions in which this worked so well for him have no relevance to the unpredictable weather patterns of Northern Europe. But does he listen? Of course not! We have a dramatic story to unfold here!

And that’s fine, I was into it. You go into this kind of movie knowing what to expect, and it delivers exactly that. It’s got a cast exclusively of men except for the one woman played solidly by Kerry Condon as Eisenhower’s secretary, and Tamsin Topolski as Stagg’s pregnant wife, who serves no purpose except to flesh out Stagg himself as a character. Otherwise this is entirely a men’s story, and that’s also fine given what the story and setting are. If “dad-core” were a genre, Pressure would be a prime example. There’s no need for you to see it in theaters, really, but you could do worse than to look for it eventually on one of your streamers. Watch it with your parents, you’ll all have a fine time.

Brendan Fraser is so dedicated, that’s his real scalp!

Overall: B

I LOVE BOOSTERS

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B

I Love Boosters is only the second feature film by writer-director-producer Boots Riley; the first came eight years ago, Sorry to Bother You, a movie I struggled to connect to or make sense of. I Love Boosters is largely more of the same, but at least I can make slightly more sense of it. “Slightly” is the operative word here.

Riley is clearly a guy with a thing for gonzo excess. In this film, Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, and Taylour Paige play Corvette, Sade, and Mariah, respectively, also known as the Velvet Gang, the “Boosters” of the title—people who shoplift from high-end fashion outlet stores and resell them at a discount price. They quickly get the attention of the billionair fashion maven and Metro Designer outlet stores owner Christie Smith, played by a perfectly cast Demi Moore, who, along with her 2024 film The Substance, is really going for it with out-there roles in her sixties.

Moore is hardly the only fun casting choice in I Love Boosters, though. Don Cheadle shows up totally unrecognizable as Dr. Jack, a guy selling a pyramid scheme. Will Poulter is pitch-perfect as Grayson, the snooty manager at the Metro Designer store where Corvette, Sade, and Mariah manage to get jobs in an elaborate plan to boost its clothing. Eric André gets barely more than cameo time as a character credited as “Futuristic Police Tank Cop.” And while we’re on the subject of credited character names, LaKeith Stanfield plays “Pinky Ring Guy,” and I can’t even remember anything about a pinky ring; only that at one point one of the women says “He looks like sex”—and she’s right: LaKeith Stanfield need only stand still and stare at the camera to put a stir in the loins of viewers of any gender. (I guess I’ll take this moment also to name-check Jason Ritter as “Upstanding Community Member”; Kara Young as “Crying Black Mother”; and Jermaine Fowler as “Based Young Dude.” These characters all show up on news feeds offering backward talking points in defense of billionaires and corporations.)

I Love Boosters is surreal to the nth degree, to the point where the Velvet Gang are soon joined by Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a Chinese factory worker who steals two prototypes of a device with three different functions, depending on the setting: “Teleporter,” “Situational Accelorator,” or “deconstruction,” which renders anything it’s aimed at into the elements that made it. The plot is so wildly convoluted it would take an age to describe it all, but suffice it to say that the corporation is using this prototype to send product from China to the U.S. to save on shipping costs, but Jianhu teleports herself to the U.S. to start sucking all the Metro Designer outlet merchandise through the teleporter and right back to China.

This is where I Love Boosters has a lot in common with Sorry to Bother You, in which low-level workers are revealed to be literal “work horses.” The metaphor there was very on the nose, and much going on in I Love Boosters is moving in that same direction. Boots Riley throws in a lot of stuff about seemingly disparate groups of people actually fighting the same cause, and sets quite a lot of scenes in the Chinese factory where they are assembling the fashion. I’d say that there’s something ironic about the money spent to make a movie like this, using studios that arguably represent the very thing the movie is purportedly speaking out against, but this movie was made with a budget of $20 million and has grossed less than $5. Maybe Boots Riley knows what he’s doing, wasting production studio money!

I Love Boosters even features a bizarre, surrealist turn rather similar to the “work horses” of his previous film, just this time with a group of characters running after the Velvet Gang as stop-motion bodies of nothing but muscle and bone—complete with dangling, skinless penises—after being forced to shed their “suits,” which turns out to be their actual skin. This isn’t even the most memorable image in the movie; that would involve “Pinky Ring Guy,” who turns out to be way more than a guy wearing a pinkie ring, and is featured in the single most unfortgettably wild and hilariously disgusting scene in the movie. (It might also affect how much you agree that he “looks like sex.”)

This is a movie packed with gags, a ton of them visual, from Christie Smith’s office being in a leaning high-rise to the outfits worn by the Velvet Gang designed to contain all the clothes they’re boosting. A lot of the time, the gags work. A fair amount of the time, they kind of don’t. If there’s any signature trait to Boots Riley feature films—all two of them—it’s that they go in countless different wild directions and struggle to come together as a coherent narrative. I suppose a movie like this can work if you know what the very specific vibe is, and what it’s going for. I’m still not quite sure what I Love Boosters is going for exactly, but I picked up on the vibe. It worked better for me than Sorry to Bother You, but kind of barely. These movies are a lot, and you need to be ready for that. If you are then you’ll have a good time.

I Like Boosters Enough

STAR WARS: THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU

Directing: B
Acting: B-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B

Gather around, younglings. Let me tell you of a time very different from the one we currently live in. A time when a new Star Wars feature film release elicited palpable excitement. I’m not even talking about the prehistoric times of 1999, 2002, and 2005, when the Prequel Trilogy caused a global sensation in anticipation alone—only to disappoint millions (and yet delight viewers who were as young then as we were when the Original Trilogy was released). I’m talking just last decade—as recently as 2019, the appearance of the Lucasfilm Ltd logo elictited whoops from audiences. It’s worth noting that that was a full seven years after Disney bought Lucasfilm. But, it was at the end of their wildly misguided choice to flood the market with five feature films in as many years.

When I sat down to watch The Mandalorian and Grogu in a local theater, it was the first time I experienced that opening Lucasfilm Ltd logo and found it met with . . . silence. Everyone’s tired now. Star Wars is your parents’ franchise. The heyday has long since passed.

And yet: in a way, this helps The Mandalorian and Grogu, which is about as much fun as you can hope for with a feature film based on a television series, which was itself part of a broad franchise universe. It leans too heavily on action and is light on character development, but I have to say, most of the time the action is a blast.

There are many who act as though a lot is riding on this movie, and I’m not really convinced of that. I went in hoping for a good time that had no promise and no need to reinvent the wheel (or hyperdrive), and that’s precisely what I got. Perhaps more importantly, it gives a ton of screen time to that achingly cute character once known as “Baby Yoda” but whose name is actually Grogu, and it turns out that cuteness goes a long way. Even with a ton of screen time, Grogu never overstays his welcome. (For his part, Pedro Pascal gets one sequence without his all-important helmet on; they can’t have a star in one of the title roles without ever showing his money maker.) Having four new Anzellans, the small humanoid creatures who specialize in fixing things, doesn’t hurt either. The Anzellan Babu Frik was the best thing in The Rise of Skywalker, otherwise the one Star Wars movie to get worse with each viewing, and we didn’t get enough of him. We get plenty more of his kind in The Mandalorian and Grogu and it is always welcome.

All that said, there are elements of The Mandalorian and Grogu that are a bit of a mixed bag—namely, some of the casting. It’s bad enough that the opening sequence features several throwaway characters giving genuinely bad line readings, but this may be the worst I have ever seen Sigourney Weaver perform onscreen. It’s as though they just used the first take for every line she delivered, apparently having learned them just beforehand. How many science fiction franchises does Sigourney Weaver need to be in, anyway? Are Alien and Avatar not enough? Now she’s not only getting greedy, but apparently getting lazy. She genuinely feels out of place here.

The character around whom the plot turns is Rotta the Hut, a CGI character voiced by Jeremy Allen White, in a deepened voice that renders it unrecognizable. In which case, what was the point of casting him? At least Martin Scorsese’s voice is recognizable as Hugo Durant, a monkey-like character with four arms, odd a casting choice as that may be.

It’s somewhat of a miracle that Pedro Pascal is one of the few characters whose actual face we almost never see but who doesn’t seem like he’s phoning it in. Just as had been the case in the television series (but it should be stressed: you need not have seen the TV show to understand or enjoy this movie), there remains a delightful chemistry between him and the tiny puppet character—thank all the gods in the galaxy they never pivoted to rendering him fully in CGI—and that is truly the engine of this story, the reason to watch.

The Mandalorian and Grogu offers nothing particularly new, it doesn’t move the franchise forward in any real way, but it does prove it’s still viable. People may not be excited about this movie the way they were with previous ones, but this movie makes it easy to imagine one coming along that captures the public’s imagination again. Given the indelible nature of both the Mandalorian and Grogu as characters, it could easily be argued that this is better than Solo: A Star Wars Story, which made the mistake of making a Han Solo movie without Harrison Ford in it. The Mandalorian and Grogu has more potential for lasting impact, and is a fairly effective palate cleanser even seven years after The Rise of Skywalker squandered all the thrilling potential that came with The Last Jedi.

I do find myself curious about the way they title these movies. It feels a little like Lucasfilm backed themselves into a corner by retroactively making all official titles of any film in a trilogy start with the words “Star Wars,” and then making the subtitle to all standalone films “A Star Wars Story.” Except this new one is a standalone story and its official title is apparently Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu. Are they just sticking with “Star Wars” as the beginning of all feature films now and scrapping “A Star Wars Story”? Make up your minds!

The Mandalorian and Grogu heralds a clearly transitional time in Star Wars franchise history, which has had high highs and low lows, and a few movies, like this one, which are just fine. I kind of wish some of the special effects were better; occasionally movement onscreen is weirdly jerky. Other times, the picture rendered onscreen is stunning. Rotta the Hut is pretty standard-looking as CGI characters go, which qualifies as a disappointment: Star Wars is supposed to stand apart in these areas. If it’s not exceptional with its visual effects, how can it be exceptional at all?

Thankfully, none of these things drag the movie down to any fatal measure. The truth is, in spite of its clear flaws, I genuinely had a blast watching this movie. I got a good many laughs out of it, and I can easily imagine enjoying subsequent viewings. It doesn’t feature a story with enough depth to make it a new classic, but it holds its own among the other decent offerings in the franchise.

This far into a franchise’s history, this movie gives us just enough of exactly what we want.

Overall: B

OBSESSION

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

Everything’s a riff on a riff on a riff anymore, but I suppose the thing that still makes the difference is whether it’s done well. I have to admit that Obsession kind of exceeded my expectations. Granted, I went in with the bar pretty low—I knew this film got positive reviews, but as a rule the horror genre just isn’t my jam. I don’t tend to be impressed unless the movie is great enough to transcend the horror genre. I’d be hard pressed to say Obsession manages that, but it’s got a specific enough vibe to make it stand apart in a surprisingly compelling way.

We’re now 124 years from the original W.W. Jacobs horror short story The Monkey’s Paw, but we’re still not done seeing variations on its premise. You could spend a week listing off all the stories people have written about a wish gone horribly wrong because it wasn’t worded quite right or the person making the wish didn’t think it through. Plenty of people have already compared Obsession to Big, the 1988 comedy in which a kid wishes to be “big” and gets more than he bargained for by turning into Tom Hanks. Obsession is a little bit like if Big and The Exorcist had a baby.

The other thing Obsession has in common with countless other films is a character changed or possessed by powers beyond their control. Writer-director Curry Barker offers a bit of a fresh twist on this by having the possessed character turn out to be the victim as much as the villain, someone conscious of what’s happening to her but still unable to do anything about it.

In fact, you could have a fun debate about this movie: is the protagonist, a young man named Bear (a truly fantastic Michael Johnston) really the villain? We learn in very economic storytelling in the first few scenes that he’s got a huge crush on a woman in his friend group, Nikki (an increasingly unsettling Inde Navarrette), but is too scared to share his true feelings. He goes to a store to find her a replacement for a lost crystal necklace, and finds a product called a “One Wish Willow.” The instructions are to snap it in half and make one wish, and in a moment of panicked desperation Bear does this and says, “I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the world.”

You can imagine where this heads, and it heads there surprisingly quickly, underscoring the immediacy of the wish’s effect. I went into this movie expecting a sprinkling of comedy, and I have to say, there was only a couple of times I chuckled, and that was only out of nervousness. Barker is good at unraveling tension, especially as Nikki becomes more and more unhinged. And yet, when she literally says to Bear, “It’s all your fault,” she’s actually right. And because he’s spent so much time being in love with her, Bear even spends a fair amount of time selfishly convincing himself he can somehow make it work.

I won’t spoil what happens thereafter, but it feels worth warning the animal lovers that Bear’s cat, who is dead the moment we see it onscreen, factors significantly into the plot, and in no good ways. The best I can say is that it turns out to have been Bear’s own mistake that Sandy, the cat, has died; it somehow got into his mess of pills, presumably for his plethora of anxieties. How a cat would have gotten into pills with a secure lid while also eating its own food remains a mystery, but whatever. Maybe Bear just didn’t replace the lid well enough and then it fell from the counter? These are oddly laid out details, and we merely find the cat lying on the floor next to its own vomit and cat food spread around the floor mixed with pills. And this all happens before Bear even makes his wish, so I suppose we’re meant to see his judgment has been impaired by the trauma. This doesn’t stop him from jumping at the chance to attend Trivia Night when he learns Nikki will be there. You’ll have to watch the movie to find out how Sandy figures into the story thereafter.

There are two other people in Bear’s friend group, all of whom work at a music store run by a middle-aged man played by Andy Richter, the most random appearance of a single semi-famous face in the movie. Megan Lawless plays Sarah, the store owner’s daughter who has her own unrequited feelings for Bear. And then there’s Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), the most annoying of them all, a guy who is never truly listening when people need him to. This friend group winds up with a lot more going on between more of them than it seems at first, and I’m not sure all of that was necessary, but I guess it’s a way to thicken the plot.

When it all comes down to it, Obsession is a relatively predictable riff on The Monkey’s Paw, but it has enough fresh twists to it to make it worth a look if you’re into these kinds of movies. The performances elevate the otherwise fairly average material, and certainly some of the dialogue, especially in the beginning when things come across as a bit more contrived. When things turn creepy, though, they turn genuinely unsettling, and eventually we learn that is the case for both Bear and Nikki, who find themselves in a metaphysical bind with no solutions—or at least, no pleasant ones. Obsession gets pretty gruesome in its second half, and should delight the audiences who are coming for exactly that—not to mention the jump-scares that I never particularly enjoy.

But hey, if nothing else, Obsession is everything it promises to be, and Curry Barker and his cast deserve credit for that. This is the kind of movie I usually actively avoid, and I feel like I’m paying it a compliment by saying I don’t regret having seen it.

Hey dipshit, be careful what you wish for!

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: BODY BLOW

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

Body Blow is currently merely on the festival circuit, and thus far responses have been pretty mixed. I would argue that it practically invents the “camp noir” genre, though presumably there have already been other films released that fit the genre. Either way, detractors of Body Blow clearly just don’t get what it’s going for. This film is far from perfect, but it does strike the perfect balance in tone, right down to how it might as well have been titled Twink Fatale, except that even for this movie that title would have been a little over the top. Then again, the one onscreen murder scene in this film is the precise moment when Body Blow ascends to the point of high camp. And it’s kind of what made the movie work.

Mind you, this is a movie that falls apart with any close examination. The plot, as written by director Dean Francis, is so convoluted I often found it hard to ascertain why what I saw onscreen was happening. Some of it clicks together by the end, but not everything Francis attempts to wrap up in a bloody bow is quite fully contained in the package.

Speaking of packages—hooray for segues!—lead actor Tim Pocock’s figures prominently, albeit without a great deal of sense. (Side note: I don’t know if that guy’s last name was just a coincidence, but it sure got a smattering of giggles from the audience I was in.) His character, a Sydney cop named Aiden, is obsessed with the idea that not masturbating makes him both stronger and a better cop. In the opening scene, we hear the voiceover of a podcast he’s listening to, a guy with an American accept (also: coincidence?), is extolling the virtues of what we later learn is part of the “no fap” movement. Aiden eventually takes this to the extreme of buying a chastity cage for his penis—something we get several shots of him in, otherwise nude. I found myself wondering how the Motion Picture Association sets parameters for this, because it’s clearly not “full frontal” if we never see his penis, it’s rather unusual to see an actor’s testicles, however smooshed a cock cage might make them. Is this similar to it being okay to see nearly all of a woman’s breasts so long as only the nipple's are covered?

This cock-cage subplot is amusing—as is the fact that Aiden keeps chickens in his backyard, including roosters, even though you don’t need roosters in order for hens to keep laying eggs—but never feels vital to the plot. This involves Aiden’s introduction to Cody (Tom Rodgers), a guy who takes his identity as a twink so seriously that his car’s vanity plate just reads TWINK (the final shot of which is satisfyingly gruesome, incidentally). Cody is sort of a “kept boy” at the drag club run by a villainous drag queen played by Australian cabaret performer Paul Capsis. I don’t know how famous Capsis is in Australia, but this is the kind of part any drag queen worth their salt would love the play, yet Capsis doesn’t quite bite into the role the way you might hope, and his multiple club-host performances in the film fall a little flat.

It’s Tim Pocock and Tom Rodgers who make Body Blow worth watching (though Sacha Horler as Steel, the dirty lesbian cop and Aiden’s superior, has a bit of onscreen charisma of her own). I can’t pretend Body Blow was everything I wanted it to be, but it gave me plenty to work with, in that it features effectively knowing film noir tropes; it has a hot gay 40-year-old cop; it has a hot gay twink; I am also gay; and I have a pulse. That said, it also has a cinematographer (Franc Biffone) who clearly understood what the director was going for, and it has an 80s-synth-style score by a composer (Andreas Dominguez) who gave the vibe something you might find on a sonic highway connecting Priscilla, Queen of the Desert with the original Blade Runner.

Tone can really make or break a film, and this is where Body Blow nails it, staying impressively consistent with its very specific sensibility. The pacing is measured but never completely drags (so to speak), and this is in keeping with neo-noir storytelling. There’s a dangerous attraction between a copy and a young beauty, there are multiple levels of betrayal, and there are backyard cocks. Flaws aside, Body Blow is a film that truly stands apart, which makes it imperfectly exceptional. It’s not for everyone and it’s not meant to be, but I for one sit square in the crosshairs of its target audience, and I do love it for that.

This movie has a lot of entendres.

Overall: B

IS GOD IS

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

I feel a bit like I’m in an impossible position with Is God Is, which is a movie that I have to admit really did not speak to me, but then, I am perhaps not the person it’s speaking to.

I didn’t even realize until after seeing the film that Is God Is is based on a stage play of the same name, and a rather critically acclaimed one at that. I wonder if I would have felt differently about the play? Well, the play was written by Aleshea Harris, who also wrote and directed this film adaptation. I had never even heard of the play, much less seen it, so I have no idea how well it translates to film as compared to its original medium.

I left this movie a little stuck on how dedicated it was to its story of revenge. We have two twin sisters, Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), now young adults but long psychically connected, contacted by their birth mother, Ruby (Vivica A. Fox) after having long ago relinquished custody. All three of them have severe burn scars, Ruby worst of all—she is bedridden and now actively dying—as a result of her husband and the girls’ father (Sterling K. Brown) having set Ruby on fire. Anaia tried the hardest to save her and so is also significantly disfigured in the face; Racine’s face is unblemished but her arm and hand are severely disfigured. And, after all this time, Ruby has summoned her daughters to tell them, “Make your daddy dead. Real dead.”

The thing is, Racine and Anaia–who just address each other as “Twin”—take up this request, and go on a journey through which a pretty notable body count takes place, and with people who don’t necessarily deserve it. This is a film with an all-Black cast (as was the case with the play) and thus is sort of a Black woman’s answer to Quentin Tarantino, and I’m all for that. I guess I just expected something a little more stylistic, which is how the film was marketed. There’s something more nuanced going here, but if the theme is cyclical violence, it didn’t feel particularly clear while watching the movie. It felt more like a movie that just went along for the ride with these women destroying anything that gets in the way of their ultimate target, their monster of a father.

This much is clear: Racine is much more comfortable with the violence than Anaia is, and this grows into a rift between these telepathically connected sisters (we even get several silent exchanges of facial expressions, translated into dialogue with subtitles). I know this is arguably a silly nitpick, but there’s a moment when Racine and Anaia refer to themselves as having been “from the same cell,” but that would only be possible if they were identical twins, which they quite clearly are not. I could suspend disbelief here if they were two actors who looked similar and at the very least were the same height, but Mallori Johnson is literally four inches taller than Kara Young. Either Aleshea Harris is just deliberately ignoring how this works, or she doesn’t understand that fraternal twins happen when two separate eggs are fertilized by different sperm and develop in the same womb. Furthermore, it’s typically identical twins that report having some kind of psychic connection, and there they are basically telepathic with each other.

All that aside, Anaia is increasingly uncomfortable with Racine’s proclivity toward violence, and that did seem to be a clear thread in the narrative. It just didn’t strike me as consistent, or with thematic clarity, when it came to which characters actually seemed to be dangerous or capable of violence in the end. I could never quite grasp what Is God Is was trying to say, if indeed it was trying to say anything at all. At times it seemed only to revel in its own odyssey of vengeance.

Perhaps that’s the point. Maybe I just don’t get it. It wouldn’t be the firs time. There’s also a religious thread in this story, between Ruby, the mother, being referred to as “God” (hence the title) because she gave these twin sisters life; and Racine and Anaia’s encounter in a church with another woman their father abandoned, and who is now a cult-like preacher. I couldn’t quite grasp what Harris was going for here either.

There’s a lot going on in Is God Is, and yet each scene kind of takes its time, giving it a somewhat belabored pace. I’m fully aware of the acclaimed critical consensus enjoyed by this movie, which does make me doubt myself a little; maybe this just went over my head for some reason. What am I missing? Maybe I’m just missing something that wasn’t made for me, and that’s okay.

Ironically, this movie could have stood to have a bit more fire lit under it.

Overall: B-