Delayed Reaction: Chloe

Premise: A woman involves a prostitute into her personal life when she believes her husband has been cheating on her.

 

At some point, you must ask yourself how good you want erotic thrillers to be. The genre is meant to be titillating and maybe even boundary pushing. No one ever praises an erotic thriller for restraint and playing it safe. If I’m deciding to watch something described as an erotic thriller, I’m not looking for it to have the seriousness of a Moonlight. That’s not to say I expect bad movies. Fatal Attraction is an Oscar movie. It’s over-the-top too. There’s a balance.

 

So, when I turn on Chloe, I have to level set some. It has a great cast with Amanda Seyfried, Julianne Moore, Liam Nesson, and even a little Nina Dobrev. It’s also a movie that had a tiny release and no one remembers it. It’s a Sony Pictures Classic release, which means it’s going to be classier than a Screen Gems release.

 

Where the movie ultimately lost me is in the third act, when Seyfried’s character jumps from mysterious and calculating to screaming and demented. I never really understood her obsession with Moore’s character or why she lies about the affair with Nesson. In fact. Nesson is barely a character. Earlier in the movie, I needed a little more indication that something’s not right with Seyfried. There needs to be a little more calculated scheming or more indication of her extreme fixation with Moore. Instead, the climax of the movie feels like the filmmaker lost patience and had her skip several steps to keep the movie at nearly 90 minutes.

 

Then again, the movie is pretty watchable. I’d almost be afraid of trying to improve it too much and turning it into a boring wannabe prestige movie. I think even the optimal version of this would have problems. Maybe all this movie needs is a rabbit boiling scene. As is, it’s a little dull, even when it turns crazy.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Quick Reaction: Born into Brothels

I’ll admit that the title brought me to the movie. It’s an attention-grabbing title. I did think it would be more about the prostitution itself. Maybe even touch on human trafficking. Instead, it’s about the children of prostitutes in India. I think this movie was made with the best of intentions, but it felt exploitative to me. Like the movie is gawking at the kids in this situation. It looks tone deaf to see these kids in these bad situations and be like “I know what will help. I’ll teach them photography”. I know it’s not that simple. From everything I can see, the filmmaker, Zana Briski, has done good things for that community and doesn’t appear to have left them high and dry when she finished filming. I just couldn’t shake the “white savior” thoughts for this movie or shake the feeling that it was all being presented to make the kids’ situations look as bad as possible. 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Bad Words

Premise: A grown man uses a loophole to compete in the national spelling bee.

The pitch for this movie couldn’t be better made for me. I find it endlessly amusing to see adults bully kids in comedic ways. Kids swearing at adults. Adults swearing at kids. Adults acting childishly around kids. I love it all. I even had a good run of really loving the Scripps Spelling Bee for years. It fell off after I accidentally missed it a couple times, but I was a huge fan. I remember even joining a Facebook fan group for one of the kids*. The movie never came to local theaters or a streaming site, so I spent a lot of years not getting to it. Finally, I got my chance on HBO Max.

*Fun fact: The kid actually found the Facebook group at one point. I forget exactly what he said, but it was something like “This is weird. You all are weird. This makes me uncomfortable.” So that was a real moment of realizing the bit had gone too far.

I was underwhelmed by the movie. Technically, all the stuff I wanted was there. Jason Bateman is very lewd and foul-mouthed. I love seeing him trash talk the kids and everyone else. Rohan Chand does a nice job as the corrupted youth. And when is Kathryn Hahn ever bad? Bateman stays childish to the bitter end. Where the movie lost me is in his reason for being in the Bee. It turns out that he’s the long-lost son of the director of the Bee who is trying to ruin its reputation as a way to get back at him for not being around. That alone is not enough for me. The movie either needs to interrogate Bateman’s reasoning for doing the Bee more or ignore it entirely. You know, I’m fine with pulling a Bad Santa where Billy Bob Thornton revels in being an asshole and we don’t care what made him that way. But Bad Words wants us to ask why Bateman would be in the Spelling Bee. That’s Hahn’s expressed purpose in the film. That means Bateman needs to have a human reason. It wants to examine the kind of person who would do this in the real world. How fucked up must the rest of his life be? I mean, they barely even touch on him not completing the 8^th grade. In the film, Bateman avoids most of those questions by telling Hahn he doesn’t want to talk about it. That wasn’t good enough for me. The film set the ground rules then didn’t play by them. I was happy to watch a pure comedy. They chose to make it a dramedy, and as a dramedy, I found it lacking.

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Jolt

The Premise: A woman needs electric shocks to control her violent impulses.

 

There isn’t much to say about this movie. Kate Beckinsale looks cool when she’s beating people up. That’s the movie. She did Underworld for so long and still has some aggression to work out. Of course, Beckinsale is not an imposing looking person. She’s average height and skinny, so they have to concoct this rage pseudo-superpower for her. It doesn’t make a ton of sense, but it doesn’t need to.

 

This isn’t a very good movie. Most people seem to be doing this in between bigger jobs. I mean, Stanley Tucci, Bobby Cannavale, and Laverne Cox seem to be having some fun, so why not? This is the kind of movie that casts Jai Courtney to play a charming accountant then we’re expected to be surprised when he turns out to be the villain. No duh. Just look at Jai Courtney. If he isn’t the lead of your movie, then he’s a villain.

 

At barely 90 minutes, it’s hard to complain much about this movie. It’s a shoot-em-up movie in the Guy Ritchie lineage. While not exactly a comedy, it is laughing at itself the whole time. As long as Kate Beckinsale wants to beat people up, I’m an intrigued audience. Perhaps this is what keeps her sharp until she shows up in a John Wick movie. I don’t care. There are worse ways to burn 90 minutes.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Quick Reaction: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

I feel silly saying this, but I didn’t realize how much the Adam Sandler Mr. Deeds was a remake of this. Obviously, I knew it was a remake. I just thought it took the kernel of an idea – simple small-town man inherits a fortune – and made something new with it. Nope. It’s basically the same movie. The only difference is that Mr. Deeds Comes to Town has an extra 20 minutes of court scenes that are much less funny. That’s the Capra of it. He’s gotta find room for the sentimentality. I don’t think it ages as well as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or It’s a Wonderful Life though. It goes on too long and underlines its point too much. Still, I mostly liked the movie. Gary Cooper is pitch perfect as Longfellow Deeds. And I was thrilled to see that one of my favorite jokes from Mr. Deeds actually came from the original movie. That would be the scene where Longfellow says if there wasn’t a woman present, he’d kick someone’s ass. Then, Jean Arthur’s Babe says she doesn’t mind, so Longfellow decks him. That’s just good comedy.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

Premise: What if King Arthur but from the director of Snatch.

 

It is very hard to meet this movie at its level. I don’t mean lowering to its level. I mean seeing the film for what it is. It’s a crazy mix of topic and director that’s certain to yield something notable. Guy Ritchie is a distinctive director known for his frenzied pace and a grimy, street-level take on topics. King Arthur is a fantastical story and among the most austere premises. The round table and the knights exist in our imagination far more pristine than they would’ve actually been. In my mind, I’d expect Ritchie to bend to the King Arthur story. Instead, it’s the other way around. As a result, Legend of the Sword is a solid Guy Ritchie movie and a poor King Arthur story.

 

Everyone in this movie could been comfortably recast in The Gentlemen or Snatch. Charlie Hunnam isn’t King Arthur as much as he’s a local crime boss who breaks the rules for noble reasons. Merlin is functionally replaced by an attractive badass mage (Astrid Berges-Frisbey). The whole movie works better the movie you readjust to what it actually is.

 

That’s not to say I loved the movie. It was still too frenetic for me. Ritchie’s use of montage was unrelenting and helped him sneak in two films of plot into one. It was so much that the action turned into white noise at some point.

 

I’d love to have been in the room whenever the studio execs convinced themselves that this would work. Did they not realize that Sherlock Holmes’ London wasn’t the same as King Arthur’s London – I mean, Londonium? Has Charlie Hunnam ever proven himself as a bankable star? Was there a theory that this would translate better to international markets? Apparently, this was phase one of a plan for an extended King Arthur universe. How do studios keep messing this up? Iron Man worked as a universe starter because of how generic Jon Favreau’s direction was (which I mean in the best possible way). Why would Warner Brothers pick someone as distinctive as Guy Ritchie to start this franchise? Had it been well-received, what other directors can successfully ape what Ritchie does? It was doomed from the start.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Quick Reaction: A Night at the Opera

The most entertaining this to me about early Hollywood movies, which I define as pre-1939, since that the first really big year I can point to, is that they are still trying to figure out what a movie is. How long should they be? What should the plot structure look like? How talky should they be? Should they be like filmed plays or spectacles that couldn’t be reproduced live? It’s exciting seeing people make the rules. Ultimately, I don’t catch up on that many early films because I don’t enjoy sifting through the failed experiments, but one day, I’d like to be one of those people. I think of this because A Night at the Opera is a kind of movie where they’re still figuring things out. It’s a normal feature length. There’s a loose plot, but it’s mainly a series of Marx Brothers vignettes. It’s a fun movie though it does feel a little thin.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: 6 Underground

Premise: A group of 6 vigilantes who are presumed dead decide to topple a dictator.

 

Simply put, this is what people imagine when they say they dislike Michael Bay movies. It’s an explosion-filled action fest with characters so broadly shaped that they are known by numbers. I don’t hate Bay as a director. I stand by the first Transformers movie. I think when his films have a more nihilistic edge like Pain & Gain, they can be pretty good. At some point, he did get a little too focused on how he could deliver thrills at the expense of everything else though. That’s certainly the problem with 6 Underground. It practically starts in the middle of a long action set piece. I even wondered if I accidentally skipped past a part of exposition somewhere to let me know what was going on. I hadn’t. This movie just isn’t that concerned with plot.

 

I really don’t have much to say about the movie. It was a more earnest Ryan Reynolds mode than I prefer. The full cast felt a bit like Netflix did a study of all the markets they thought this movie could work in. They fact that Ben Hardy’s role didn’t go to an East Asian person is almost shocking. The end result of all that’s going on was too much to hold my interest. It’s the equivalent of if everyone is yelling at the same time, you actually don’t hear what any of them are saying. Except, this has the added wrinkle of “What if what each person was saying also wasn’t that interesting?”

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Wedding Guest

Premise: A man is hired to “kidnap” a woman arranged to marry someone else, then things fall apart.

 

2018 sure gave me the wrong impression about where Dev Patel’s career was going. That year, he came out with Hotel Mumbai and The Wedding Guest. I saw those trailers and really thought Patel was turning into an action movie star. I mean, Hotel Mumbai is a hostage movie in which Patel tries to lead a group of people out of a hotel taken over by terrorists. The Wedding Guest is a hired gun movie. These sound like action movies. It turns out, neither are. Not really. Hotel Mumbai is based on true events. Patel doesn’t rescue the group. He’s mostly just a POV character. The movie is a pretty grim drama, actually. The Wedding Guest is also a lot more subdued. There’s the quick shootout early on, but it’s not a movie about Patel running from the law and dodging pursuers. It’s more of a romantic drama of sorts. When you throw in The Green Knight this year, Patel is really specializing in being in the smart versions of movies that should be dumb movies.

 

Anyway, I enjoyed The Wedding Guest. My misunderstanding about it even helped my enjoyment. The entire movie, I was tense waiting for the moment when Radhika Apte’s family catches them. All those patient shots in the movie or wide shots to take in the location felt like setting up the geography of a location for when Patel had to shoot his way out of it. The movie is a thriller, so I think some of that was an intentional misdirect. The movie had a much softer edge than most movies of its ilk. It always decides for the less intense option. Patel’s “shootout”: just two shots and only because he missed on the first shot. When he has to hide Apte’s boyfriend’s body, no close calls where he’s almost caught. When Apte leaves him: she does it while he’s sleeping, leaving him half the money, and no overwrought drama. This is a movie that I’m talking my way into liking even more.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Quick Reaction: Les Misérables (1935)

This is what happens when I don’t update my Netflix queue. I get the “eat your vegetables” movies that I tell myself I want to watch but don’t really want to. I forget the exact way this ended up on my list. Probably an Oscar hit or National Board of Review selection. I like occasionally watching the movies that people thought were important at the time. It helps me contextualize something like a Philomena in more modern times. Good movie but no legs.

 

This is a Les Misérables adaptation, plain and simple. What’s interesting with something as adapted and extensive as Les Misérables is how it’s adapted. What’s cut out? Which characters get focus? Etc. This one focuses heavily on Fredric March’s Jean Valjean. It does develop any of the other characters all that much. It certainly cuts down Fantine’s role, no doubt because of Hays Code-type concerns. The simple approach does cut down on the expansiveness that has made the story so enduring, but I kind of liked the streamlined approach to it. I didn’t even think it was possible to do a Les Mis adaptation that’s under 2 hours.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend