Delayed Reaction: Spoonful of Sugar

Premise: A young woman taking experimental medication with LSD gets a job as a caretaker for a family of a young boy with some strange ailments.

This is really more psychological thriller than horror. It's as much The Hand That Rocks the Cradle as anything. There's enough haunting imagery that I won't gripe too much about calling it horror though. I mainly saw this for Morgan Saylor anyway. After doing a batshit crazy movie like White Girl, I'm on board for whenever she decides to pick an intense role. She goes all in. I mean this next comment as a compliment: She looks like someone frazzled by drugs. She's also nearly 30 but could still pass as a high-schooler in a pinch. That age uncertainty works well for a role like this where she has to have too much and too little life experience in different ways.

I've seen enough variations of this movie that nothing truly surprised me in it. It's like how there are only so many ways a boxing match can end, but they can still be exciting to watch in a movie. The direction Spoonful of Sugar goes is nice in a "who are the real monsters in this movie" way. The fact that Saylor is on drugs and hallucinating for most of the movie means it's always interesting to look at.

All in all, I was hoping it would be a bit spookier, but it mostly worked in the ways it was supposed to.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Premise: A widow goes through her daily life and becomes bored by her routine.

I remember when I first heard about this movie a few years ago. I thought it sounded fascinating. It's a movie about watching the repetition of a woman's life and searching for the small cracks as her sanity unravels. I can really get into a good slow-play. Schindler's List works because of the detail of Liam Nesson's performance slowly changing. Paris, Texas blew me away by how its slow pacing paid off huge by the end. When Jeanne Dielman surprisingly came in first on the latest Sight and Sound poll*, that pushed the movie even higher up my watchlist.

*The 100 Greatest Films of All-Time. Assembled once every decade.

Sadly, I hated this movie.

It's a problem I run into a lot with movies. There's a difference between doing something well and making something that's good. Jeanne Dielman is a fantastically executed experiment. At well over 3 hours, it really takes its time. Nothing rushes the film. Delphine Seyrig makes so many small choices in her performance. I applaud the execution of the film.

The audacity of time spent is not a feature I care for though. To me, it feels like the art is putting the onus on me much more than on itself. For example, if I watch 100 episodes of a bad TV show, by the end, I'll end up feeling something for the characters. The familiarity is inescapable. By the hundredth episode, if something happens to a character, I'll have a reaction. That's not a sign of great performance or great writing. That’s just the familiarity anything earns from time spent. Similarly, there isn't anything particularly interesting about the filmmaking or performances in Jeanne Dielman. It's a lot of static shots. There's little dialogue. There isn't anything particularly special about the ways in which Delphine Seyrig acts slightly more frazzled as the film continues. There are a lot of movies that could make me feel something after 3+ hours with it. That Jeanne Dielman does take that long to play out doesn't make it special. So yeah, this was a big waste of time.

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Peter Pan & Wendy

Premise: The Peter Pan story...again.

I'd like to formally announce my self-nomination for the position of Movie Czar. I'll be running on a single-issue platform. My proposal is this. Before anyone is allowed to make another version of either Pinocchio or Peter Pan, they must get unanimous approval from a select committee of the grumpiest movie fans to prove that there is sufficient interest for another version of the story to be told.

For whatever reason, those two stories are the ones that all filmmakers or producers seems to have in their back pocket as a dream project. So, when these filmmakers get a blank enough check and enough wistful nostalgia, they present their take on the movie and it's pretty much the same take you've seen before

By all means, I should love Peter Pan & Wendy. I enjoy the animated movie. I think David Lowery quietly made one of the best Disney classic remakes with his Pete's Dragon in 2016. Between A Ghost Story and The Green Knight, Lowery has established himself as one of my favorite working directors. If anyone could find a good slant on the Peter Pan story, it's probably him.

Alas, I just plain didn't like this movie. It was the same Peter Pan story I've seen a dozen times before, with enough of the problematic elements sanded away to not ruffle any feathers. Alexander Molony lacks the charisma to make Peter work. To be fair, virtually no child performer can pull the role off. Ever Anderson isn't a particularly memorable Wendy either. I could see a Raffey Cassidy or a Mackenzie Foy playing her better 5 years ago. I was surprised how little fun I had watching Jude Law as Captain Hook. This should be the kind of weirdo supporting role he's relished getting in the last decade.

I'll admit right here that most of my assessment isn't that objective. Perhaps the movie plays better with younger audiences. Perhaps my Peter Pan fatigue was too much for the movie to overcome. I don't know for sure. I just know that I was too bored to ever get into this movie.

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Heaven's Gate

Premise: Some land barons fight some European immigrants in 1890s Wyoming.

Most movies I talk about on here only exist as movies. Dead Again is just this two-hour movie I liked watching and that's the full story. I don't know about its production. I don't have to think about its box office or stars. I can just talk about the movie and that's it. However, there are some that can never just be about the movie. The Crow is the movie in which Brandon Lee died while shooting. All the Money in the World is the movie that had to be reshot to replace Kevin Spacey. The Interview is the movie that caused Sony to be hacked.

Heaven's Gate is one of the latter movies. It is the epic Michael Cimino passion project that nearly broke a studio and hastened the end of the New Hollywood era. It was considered such a flop upon release that after four decades of positive reassessment, it still can't shake the stink of being a disaster.

I can't really rate Heaven's Gate. I watched all 3+ hours of it from the perspective of someone who knew it went over budget and knew it was a nightmare to make. My notes for this were things like "That scene looks like a lot a money went into that", "That's so many extras for that", and "How hard was it to get that shot?"

It's a very good-looking movie. I can see how it went over budget, and a lower budget version of this would've been pretty bad. I like the cast. It's not the first person I would've thought of for any of the roles and that works for it. It's better that it's Kris Kristofferson and not a movie star like a Burt Reynolds. I like that it's Isabelle Huppert and not Jane Fonda with a French accent.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t enthralled enough by the visuals, performances, or conflicts to stay interested for the incredible run time. There's a difference between a story needing some time to breathe and simply taking up too much time. My go to example is when I read the abridged The Count of Monte Cristo and the unabridged version years later. I adored the abridged version when I read it. Unabridged is a thousand pages longer yet I couldn't tell you a single story beat that wasn't in the abridge version. The only thing the unabridged version offered me was more pages. That's how Heaven's Gate felt to me. I truly don't understand how there isn't a 2- or 2.5-hour version of it that could be just as good. There are long movies that do need that length; one's I don't even love. Once Upon a Time in America is an OK movie, and it really does need its length. Heaven's Gate is simply bloated by ambition. Or maybe that's its reputation still informing me 35 years later.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Shoah

Premise: An incredible exhaustive documentary about the Holocaust.

Back in 8th grade, I had a group project where each group picked a time period and had multiple assignments to turn in. One part was that we had to have a video project. Or maybe it was some piece of multimedia. The specifics don't matter. My friends and I in our group initially thought about funny, impractical skits we could do on our topic - The Great Depression. Eventually, we ran out of time and opted for the easiest idea we could think of: we found the oldest people we knew and asked them about their memories of the Great Depression. It turns out, that was the best move we could've made. We got an A and a special award at an "everyone gets a trophy" awards ceremony at the end of the year for it. The lesson I learned from that is that it's hard to mess up interviewing old people about a sad time in history.

This is exactly why Shoah is such a valuable document. It's 9-hours of interviewing people with first-hand accounts of the worst parts of the Jewish Holocaust. There's almost no way to mess something like this up. It reminded me a lot of the deeply unsettling doc The Act of Killing (and its sister doc, The Look of Silence). Much of all these docs are about the banality of evil. It's not Schindler's List recreating the liquidation of the Warsaw ghettos. Shoah is about matter-of-fact stories of people with jobs like burying the bodies.

Shoah is absolutely "homework viewing". There's no way to entice a person to watch it on entertainment levels. It's 9-hours of interviews. The interview subjects are older and not the most polished speakers. There are no revelations about the Holocaust that you didn't already know. I do think it's a movie anyone should watch though. It's one of our great cultural artifacts. If this was the one piece of media left about the Holocaust, it would be plenty. Never has the Holocaust felt more like a real event to me than while I was watching this. This is certainly one of the essential documentaries, even though you'll never see it mimicked in a Documentary Now.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Judy Blum Forever

Premise: A documentary about Judy Blum.

Sometimes I wonder what I did throughout my childhood. I know I had interests. I wasn't some niche interest kid. Yet every year or two, it seems like there's some documentary that comes out about beloved children's entertainment that I wasn't part of. I didn't watch Mr. Roger's Neighborhood or Sesame Street. I also don't recall reading much if any Judy Blum. The book titles certainly sound familiar, but they were definitely not my go-tos. I guess I was more of a Beverley Cleary kid?

Much like the recent Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and Sesame Street docs, Judy Blum Forever meets its assignment. It covers the breadth of her life and career. It finds enough significant moments and highlights all the key accomplishments. It also does a great job showing the impact her books had on others. Even though I have little personal attachment to her work, I came away from the movie understanding why it was worth making a doc about her.

While the doc does understand the assignment, I wouldn't say it went for any extra credit. It's the exact doc I expected. There wasn't much to it that was inventive or unexpected. The depth of its impact will be directly proportional to how much you care about Judy Blum going in. That's hardly a bad thing though. Sometimes all you want is a documentary that is nice and straightforward.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Insomnia

Premise: LA Police Detectives are called to a remote Alaskan town to solve a murder.

While I've seen all of Christopher Nolan's movies, Insomnia has been the one I remember the least. It's not as stylish as his other movies, nestled between Memento and Batman Begins. The most important thing about it is that it's the movie that proved he could work above an indie budget.

The movie itself is standard fare for a crime movie. Al Pacino is excellently exhausted throughout the movie. He's dazed the whole time. This was Robin Williams in the peak of his villain era. For years, I would confuse this and One Hour Photo. This movie is great evidence of how unready Hollywood was to make Hilary Swank a star. She wins the Oscar in 2000. Her immediate follow-up movies are ones like The Gift and this where she plays supporting characters. It is strange to see her as the hungry young officer when she's already a couple years removed from a Lead Actress Oscar.

This is easily my least favorite Nolan movie, because it's the one that it feels the most like anyone else could make. Still, they don't make crime dramas like this very often anymore, so the movies ages quite well.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Ghosted

Premise: After a great first date, a man finds out the woman who ghosted him is actually a secret agent. And now he's mixed up in her latest job.

Can we just keep Chris Evans and Ana de Armas away from streaming productions for a little while? I haven't even seen de Armas on a movie screen since No Time To Die. Short of cameos or voice-work, the last time I saw Evans in a theater was Knives Out. I don't know how many times I can say it, but there's something different about a movie made for theaters. Notice how the first movie Evans and de Armas did together, Knives Out, was a beloved hit. The next one, the incredibly expensive The Gray Man, was widely panned, mostly for feeling generic. I can't prove it, but if that movie would've been made with theatrical in mind rather than Netflix streaming, it would've been made differently and played differently.

Ghosted is arguably even more generic. And I don't like saying that. I tend to be a fan of movies like this (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, True Lies). I like both leads a lot. They are great for an action movie and their combative relationship in Knives Out makes me think that could be tweaked for romantic chemistry. It just doesn't work in Ghosted though, and most of it has to do with Evans. De Armas since Knives Out has become one of Hollywood's go-to badass women, so she fits perfectly into this superspy role. Evans has proven he has two successful modes. The majority of his career has been as one of the great assholes (of both the lovable and detestable variety). Single-handedly because of Captain America, he's also great at entirely earnest roles. In both cases though, he's in at least what he perceives to be high status. Ghosted has the weird task of convincing the audience that Evans is a somewhat pathetic everyman. It's reductive to say he's too handsome to be an everyman. Many, many actors have done it. Rather, Evans hasn't figured it out yet, and it really shows in this.

The best way I can describe it is this. I remember during his press tour for Lightyear, Evans took a couple promo shots at Disney Land. Shortly after those we released, he got on his Instagram to point out that some people thought he was photoshopped into the pictures because his pose was exactly the same in both. Evans assured everyone that the photos were real, and he has to thank his impeccable posture for the confusion. That is not the story of someone ready to play an average dude.

That is the core issue of the movie that derails so much of the rest of it. The weird cameos don't help though. I know the idea of having Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Ryan Reynolds, and Jon Cho pop up briefly was to be a fun wink to the audience. They ended up having the opposite effect. It felt like the movie begging the audience to associate this with how much they enjoyed Evans in the Marvel movies. And the Reynolds cameo was particularly bizarre. It was so pointless to everything else happening at that point in the movie. The fact that it wasn't cut out played into a perception of desperate star-chasing in the movie: the idea that the best thing this movie could do was fit another big name into the credits and not worry screenplay, editing, or general flow of the movie.

I've gone on about this movie long enough. It's a major case of "I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed." While it's a harmless movie, it so easy to find similar movies that are just plain better.

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Rec2

Premise: Rec technically ended on a cliffhanger, so here's a bunch of answers you maybe didn't need.

Despite how prevalent they are, horror sequels are really hard. The audience already knows the game, so the options are ‘escalate’ or ‘pivot’. A pivot tends to piss off the audience, so almost all sequels opt to escalate: do the same thing, only more. That's pretty much the tactic of Rec2. Since we already know about the virus, it's about increasing the number of characters, getting more cameras, and heightening the stakes. I remember there was a religious angle to the original movie, and Rec2 really leans into it. It's damn near apocalyptic. That did less for me.

I do like that there are basically two groups not in communication with each other until late. Since we don't get the surprise of finding out about the quarantine, the surprise is figuring out what this other group was up to. I've always been a fan of stories that change based on one's perspective, so that was a nice addition to this.

Otherwise, this didn't work as well for me. The religious angle felt like too much of a puzzle: “There's an evil force so we just have to find the right good force to counteract it”. Whereas the first movie had more of a defeatist view: “Well, there's this virus. What can we really do?” I still might see more of these because I have a near infinite capacity for more found-footage movies, but I do now recognize this as a franchise of diminishing returns, not deepened impact.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Catherine Called Birdy

Premise: A young woman in the Middle Ages doesn't want to be married off to an old man.

Lena Dunham laid out her mission statement early on in Girls. In the first episode, Hannah walks back the statement "I want to be the voice of my generation" to "I want to be a voice in a generation". This is what made most of the discourse that followed around the show so funny to me. It was often judged as a show saying something about life as a whole in the early 2010s, when it's actually a show about very specific people with a very specific experience. Applied more broadly, I'd say Dunham is at her best when writing about characters who don't fit in and don't appreciate the comforts they enjoy. The titular Girls all had safety nets which allowed them a lot of opportunity to be idiots.

She's applied that same skill to Catherine Called Birdy. This is one of those movies that was initially lost in the streaming content deluge. Then it kept coming up in "Do you know what else I liked, actually?" comments. Given some of the complaints about Hannah in Girls and the absolute success of Catherine in this, I now wonder why Lena Dunham hasn't been writing teenagers since the beginning. The same things that work for teenage Birdy are so much less palatable in the adult Hannah.

Catherine Called Birdy is a success because it is happily anachronistic. Catherine is a modern girl. She has a privileged life but hasn't yet had to face the unfortunate compromises that come with that life in that time. Bella Ramsey is a lot of fun as a tomboy who wants to hold back womanhood as long as she can. Ramsey is a great Lena Dunham proxy in that - I can't put this any nicer - it's easier to naturally root for her. When Dunham writes for herself, she likes to lean into the least flattering parts of her character. Ramsey is better at finding ways to make the same actions rootworthy. And that's what this movie needed.

I can't say anything specific about the plot did much for me. It's really the overall sense of humor and Ramsey's performance that did it for me.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Pleasure

Premise: An aspiring porn star moves her way up the industry, for better and worse.

Look, we're all adults here. We know why I saw this movie. And I'm not alone in that. I was first aware of this movie from the digital Sundance Film Festival in 2021. It was the only movie I couldn't get a pass to. In the year of CODA, the first movie to run out of passes was Pleasure. We're all sickos, I guess. And since then, this has been a movie I've wanted to check out. Was it worth the fuss?

What's most interesting about Pleasure is how much access it got to the big brands of the porn world. They were able to use some of the biggest brands and cast a lot of authentic performers to play the roles. The movie does a good job of showing the business side of the industry and how it blurs a lot of lines. Sofia Kappel's Bella does dream of stardom. She does put herself in questionable circumstances. Yet, there are times where it isn't clear who is using whom more.

The arc of the movie is everything you've seen before. Humble beginnings. Maneuvering to get on top. Defining moments where she can either do what's right or do what's best for her. And when she gets to the top, she realizes it isn't everything she hoped it would be. The only thing separating this movie is the specific industry that it is set in.

It's a tough movie to pull off because people will come at it from all sides. Some will think it sanitizes the porn industry and ignores the ugliest parts of it. Others will say it demonizes what is typically a business just like any other. It most succeeds in striking a balance. Beyond the paint-by-numbers plot, my main issue was that it's never really clear why Bella wants this. Almost from day one she seems hesitant about it; unsure. I couldn't tell you much about the character or what drives her.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Eiffel

Premise: Gustave Eiffel isn’t just an architect. He also had a lost love.

The best version of this movie is looking to be Titanic. A fictionalized account of a great man-made structure with a love story at the core. When you pitch this movie to me like that, my first concern is with the epic scope parts, not the love story. After all, a love story just needs two able leads and some OK writing. Given that I saw this specifically for Emma Mackey*, I wasn't too worried about the love story aspect. Now, recreating the construction of the Eiffel tower on a pretty limited budget (~23€ million) was a real concern.

*While I know her for the British show Sex Education, she's actually French with a British parent. I thought it would be fun to see her in one of her French roles.

To my surprise, the part of the movie that really worked for me was the construction of the Eiffel Tower. The movie does a great job conveying the complexity of the project and the size of it. I came away from this movie impressed with the accomplishment more than I ever was before. Where the movie lost me was the love story. From what I can tell, everything about Mackey's Adrienne Bourges is made up. That in and of itself isn't a problem, except that it feels pretty made up. There isn't much emotional grounding to the romance. It's a collection of all the tropes. Lost love. Forbidden affair. Work over love. Mackey is stuck playing a character with little depth. Romain Duris is fine as Eiffel, I suppose. I won't be rushing to see anything else with him in it. They have the base compatibility of any two attractive Frenchmen and little more.

With a reasonable runtime and impressive production values for the budget, not to mention enjoying any chance to see something with Emma Mackey, it's hard to come out strongly against Eiffel. It's best to see it as a movie that doesn't need to be sought out.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Nymphomaniac Volume I and Volume II

Premise: A nymphomaniac woman recounts her life story to a man giving her shelter after an assault.

Congrats Lars von Treir. You're a provocateur who provoked me. That's almost my full opinion of Nymphomaniac. This is an explicit and shocking movie. Watching it, at times I couldn't believe that this was available on Hulu at all. The only thing that doesn't make it porn at times is that no one really appears to be having any fun. The two parts really are distinct movies, but I don't want to make two separate posts on it.

There's a lot of impressive stuff in this movie. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stacy Martin give very committed/brave/bold/fearless performances. I'm not sure what the right word is. They go through the wringer and are game for every step of it. The absolute standout of the two parts is a single-scene performance by Uma Thurman as a woman whose husband has left her for the main character (Martin in this scene and Gainsbourg later on). It's a pretty stunning exercise is discomfort. It wasn't discomfort for discomfort's sake. It really served a purpose.

Mostly though, the film felt like Lars von Trier stirring outrage. I mean, there's an onscreen home abortion. I guess it's a success in that I was deeply unsettled watching that. I mostly came away from this movie wondering what the point was. It reminds me a bit of when I watched A Dog's Purpose. The movie definitely brought me to tears when the dog dies the first time. I don't credit that to the film though. I'm going to weep at a dog dying in any movie of any quality. Nymphomaniac is similar. It certainly made me feel things, but it felt more like a reaction test than a movie with anything in particular to say.

Also, full transparency: I mainly watched this after hearing that Mia Goth was good in it. I didn't realize that she didn't show until 3 hours into the movie; with 45 minutes left. I was surly about that and felt cheated. That didn't help my opinion of the movie.

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Silent House

Premise: A young woman unpacks trauma in her family's old summer house.

The main reason I watched this movie was because it was a horror movie that received the incredibly rare F CinemaScore. For those of you who are unfamiliar, CinemaScore is a service that on opening weekends, gets grade ratings for movies from people who just watched them, then reports those to whoever will listen. F CinemaScore movies are fascinating to me, because it only sometimes means the movies are bad. Remember, these are grades from people who chose to see a movie. That's self-selecting. Most people only go see movies they think they'll enjoy. People who hate Michael Bay movies aren't typically the ones seeing them in theaters. To get an F CinemaScore, a movie tends to have to deliver something vastly different than what the audience expects.

I had a decent idea of what Silent House was going in. It's shot like a continuous take for the entire 87 minutes. It follows Elizabeth Olsen as cleaning out her family's old summer house with her father and uncle turns into a possible home invasion and eventually revelations of old trauma she experienced there.

I totally get the CinemaScore it got. The movie is pitch like a home invasion movie. Think, The Strangers or maybe The Amityville Horror. It even starts like that. But, eventually it turns into a story about childhood sexual abuse. That's a sharp turn that an audience really needs to be ready for.

Personally, I dug what this movie was doing. The continuous take was a cool move. I appreciate horror going for a level of difficulty that it didn't have to. The introduction of the childhood abuse is jolting and a little clunky but me knowing that it was coming made it less upsetting when it happened. It's a bummer that this seems to have killed the directors' careers, because between this and Open Water, they displayed a real talent for intimate and uncomfortable thrillers based on real life horrors rather than supernatural ones.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Triangle of Sadness

Premise: A cruise for the societal upper-crust goes very long wrong.

I think I just don’t like director Ruben Ostlund’s brand of satire. I saw Force Majeure and wasn’t that impressed. It’s well-made. I think there’s a canny angle it finds to attack marital troubles. However, to me, it felt like he just kept hitting the same sore spot over and over. Triangle of Sadness is similar in a lot of ways. I think the movie is well done. There are a variety of good and odd performances. He very clearly makes his points. It never reached the point where it broke through as comedy to me though.

This led me to reflect on the nature of comedy. A major brand of comedy I’ve never warmed to is discomfort comedy. I tend to find that it requires more commitment than skill or cleverness. Words like “fearless” are thrown around a lot. In a Borat, it’s the willingness to do crazy things to unwitting participants. In the classic Office episode “The Dinner Party” it’s about how uncomfortable they can make the situation. Ostlund, as I said before, is about repetition of the same punchline. In Force Majeure, it’s very specifically how the wife won’t let go of the fact that the husband fled without the family when he thought an avalanche was coming. Every other scene is relitigating the same argument. The idea being that eventually, the audience will break and enjoy it. Triangle of Sadness keeps hitting on how coddled the rich are. He made the point for me within 10 minutes. The next 140 were about making the same point in new ways.

I really found this movie off-putting. Due to his satirical repetition, the movie felt interminable. Sure, the best part was when they were stranded on the beach in the last act. By then though, I was already fully checked out. It had already spent all my goodwill. And the beach was just an escalation of the same points he made on the boat.

Yes, the sequence with all the puking and shitting was excellently amped up. The constant swaying added tension. It escalated then kept escalating. But I got my laugh out of the way the first time I saw some puke on the window. It failed to find new punchlines beyond that.

I feel like a sourpuss talking about this movie. In theory, I really want to like a movie that’s trying to be clever and sophomoric at the same time. I mean, American Vandal remains one of my favorite shows of the last decade. To me though, Triangle of Sadness felt a lot more like an Adam McKay movie of recent vintage. A social satire that thinks it is smarter than its audience and tries to appeal to people with something crass in order for its clever point to sink in.

Verdict: Strongly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Chronicles of Riddick

Premise: Riddick is Batman now?

I have to give Vin Diesel credit. It's hard to think of someone who manifested a career better than him. He literally calls himself Vin Diesel. That is the joke name a movie gives an action movie star. Movies he's in struggle to find a name that's more self-awarely cool than that. It's like one day, Mark Sinclair decided he'd be the biggest movie star in the world, made his stage name Vin Deisel, and decided he'd only be in movies where he was the baddest mother fucker in the world (or in some cases, universe). I used to think that came from getting cast in The Fast and the Furious, but Pitch Black came before that. Even in something like Boiler Room, he came at his role from a "punching nerds" perspective.

So, it's no surprise that when he's in a SciFi movie, he's playing an unstoppable killing machine. And when that SciFi movie gets a sequel, his unstoppable killing machine also becomes the Chosen One. What's crazy about this is that Vin Deisel is a bulletproof persona. What's more ridiculous than calling yourself Vin Deisel and picking the roles he does? Yet, he's made it work in spectacular fashion.

The Chronicles of Riddick is a good reminder that I tend to like Vin Deisel movies despite him, not because of him. In the Fast and Furious movies, I like the stunts and action. I find the story and talk of "family" tedious. He's good in The Iron Giant and Guardians of the Galaxy, because it's just his voice, which is his super power. The few other things I've seen him in rely much more on Deisel himself carrying them and I'm not a fan. I used to hate The Fast and the Furious mostly because I couldn't stand him. It took an incredible series pivot for me to work up to those even.

This is all to say that I didn't like The Chronicles of Riddick. I was curious about it, just because of the circumstances around it. Pitch Black came before Vin Deisel was as close to a B-movie as movies got in 2000. Since then, he was in two hits in F&F and XXX that had established him as a star if not a draw. Chronicles of Riddick was a huge step up in budget, casting, and expectations. This was his moment to prove if he was Harrison Ford or Mark Hammill: a true star or someone who hitched onto the right wagon.

It's a shame the movie wasn't as interesting as the narrative around it. It certainly looks more expensive than Pitch Black, but the action wasn't markedly better executed. The upgraded supporting cast all act like performers who made sure to cash their check before learning a line. The movie serves as a reminder of how hard it is to construct a cinematic world that people care about, because I had no investment in learning what was actually going on.

I may still watch Riddick, just to finish the arc of Deisel's career. Pitch Black was before his breakout. Chronicles of Riddick was his big bet. Riddick seems to line up with when he accepted the limitations of his star appeal. Then again, if Netflix removed the movie tomorrow, I wouldn't be heartbroken.

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Tetris

Premise: A businessman tries to secure the international rights to Tetris.

"The creator of Tetris never collected royalties on the game because it was made in the Soviet Union" is one of those facts that's been so repeated that it's moved into legend. It's like the fact that Michael Jordan was cut from his high school varsity team. And like that Michael Jordan "fact", it's not quite that simple*. Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov did eventually collect royalties about a decade later when he formed a company in the US. Amidst Pajitnov's exclusion from the profits was a whole complicated rights deal that exposed Tetris to the rest of the world despite being behind the iron curtain. The movie Tetris is an attempt to tell that story in the most exciting way possible.

*From what I gathered, as a Freshman, Jordan was a bit undersized and played with the Junior Varsity team while he developed. Not quite the historical injustice it's made into these days.

I must admit, I was expecting less from Tetris. I don't mean it's better than I expected. I mean I expected the movie to be less sensational. I just came from watching Air, and I was expecting - even hoping for - that. When it's at its best, Tetris is a movie about businessmen in separate rooms all trying to get a deal done in a land that doesn't approach business in the way they are accustomed to. To me, Tetris has always been something elemental. It's like a calculator function on a computer. It's just always been there. I love how this movie looks at it like a commodity. It marvels at the elegant simplicity of it. The movie is great at showing how desired the game was and showing how gaming law was in its infancy. Computer vs. arcade vs. console vs. mobile rights is something few people had to think about before this. The mechanics of the parties in this movie figuring that out held my interest throughout.

Where the movie lost me was in its attempts to turn this into an action movie or spy thriller. I don't doubt that there was a shady KGB element to this deal. When it gets to threatening Henk Rogers' family and requiring a getaway chase, I lost interest. I just fundamentally can't see Tetris as a thing with those kind of stakes around it. Maybe if it was caked in an Armando Iannucci layer of absurdity, I could buy it. Like if there was an audience stand-in character calling out how bizarre it is that the Soviet have attached so much trouble to getting gaming rights. As is, this movie feels like a textbook case of someone padding out a draft with higher stakes until it compromises the original story it's trying to tell.

Despite that, Taron Egerton is good as the businessman who is both determined and in over his head. I was never exactly bored by the movie. And there were enough parts of the story I did like still in there to hold my interest during the more excessive parts.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Boston Strangler

Premise: So, it's She Said, but about an infamous serial killer.

I guess the idea here was "Let's try the David Fincher thing without David Fincher. It can't be that hard." As it turns out, it is. Don't get me wrong, this story about the two female journalists who drove much of the Boston Strangler story is a decent watch. I love both Keira Knightley and Carrie Coon. I'd watch any movie with them as leads. The basic story of the Boston Strangler investigation is inherently interesting.

The main problem with Boston Strangler is that it's not Zodiac and I was aware of that the whole time. That's not fair. I know. I should judge each movie independently. Too bad. Here's the truth about Boston Strangler. Zodiac is better. If you haven't seen either movie, you should watch Zodiac first. If you like Zodiac and don't mind watching something that's still ok but definitely not as good, Boston Strangler scratches that itch.

One of the nice things about the streaming age is that there's a place for movies that are real movies but really don't need that theatrical window. Two decades ago, I'd call this a TNT watch: something I'd happily watch on cable but would be underwhelmed with if I made a trip to a theater for it. They made the right move by releasing this directly to Hulu.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Pitch Black

Premise: Some people on a space ship land on a planet with three suns and creatures that attack when all the suns set.

SciFi is really useful to me to understand when people don't like horror. You see, I like SciFi, but I won't go out of my way for it. When someone tells me about some great new series on Syfy, I nod along with no intention of actually watching. The holes in anything but the best SciFi I have a hard time ignoring. When the effects aren’t quite good enough or the acting is lacking, the ideas behind the movie or show aren't enough to carry me through. I find this helpful, because it explains how other people feel about horror. I'll watch the hundredth variant of a found footage horror movie with actors who wisely never worked again and eat it up. Then I won't get how other people aren't as head-over-heels for the movie. That's because I have those SciFi blinders but for horror. I'll ignore bad acting and plot holes if I think the styles or scares are cool enough.

I think Pitch Black is laughably bad in a lot of ways. It looks like crap. Some of that is intentional; lighting effects of the multiple suns. But it makes the movie look washed out and cheap. The effects show their age badly. Vin Diesel with the goggles looks more silly than cool. The cast is otherwise filled with more faces than names. I think there are some interesting ideas in the movie, specifically with the protective power of light, but this just isn't a genre where I have the right blinders to ignore the weaknesses.

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Premise: A documentary about a famous artist who uses her clout to fight the Sackler family, who are behind much of the opioid crisis.

The best thing about All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is how well it mixes two stories. The first is the life story of photographer Nan Goldin. The second is the story of the opioid crisis largely caused by the Sackler family's release of Oxycontin, and their work to wash their name by donating money to the arts. The movie never goes too long without addressing one story or the other. I could've watched a documentary about either on their own and remained plenty interested.

I do struggle sometimes with movies about famous artists though. I don't know much about the modern art and photography world. It's hard for me to distinguish between a movie that is covering a significant artist from a movie made to inflate the importance of an artist. I really just rely on the fact that Nan Goldin has an interesting life and if she's good enough to be in some of the museum galleries she's protesting then she's probably a big deal.

Similarly, I don't know how impressive her group's protests really are. By the time this movie picks up, it's not like the Sacklers are beloved. The main point of their protests is just to remind people who the Sacklers are. One of the big moments in the movie is when they are throwing the pamphlets from all levels of that one museum (MoMA, I think). They talk about it like some transcendent experience; where they are shocked when additional people join in their cheering. It didn't seem that triumphant to me though. It doesn't take a lot of convincing to join in calling the Sacklers awful. Of course everyone in the museum will take their side. I'm a cynic about protests though. I'm always late to catching onto the moment when they go from hysterics to real calls to action.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend