Delayed Reaction: Rumble in the Bronx

Premise: Jackie Chan beats up Americans.

 

And my decades-late Jackie Chan discovery continues. This is one of the big movies too. It’s credited as Chan’s big American breakout. It’s not what I expected though. The title + being his American breakout, naturally I assumed it was his first proper Hollywood studio movie*. It turns out that it’s a Honk Kong movie shot in Vancouver and dubbed because all actors just spoke their natural language. So I guess the secret to making Jackie Chan happen in the US is to pretend he’s in the US and put that in the title.

 

*Sorry, I’m not counting Battle Creek Brawl.

 

This isn’t my favorite of Chan’s movies. I suppose the stunts are his normal caliber. Perhaps a little lower with his broken foot midway through production. This feels weird to say, but this might actually be too silly and broad. I know that’s the trademark of all of his movies but it’s especially broad her. And I admit that some of this may be me as an American finally seeing the broadness on Americans instead of Chinese. These villains are severely exaggerated though. Also, there’s that annoying little kid. To an extent, it may be the “Musician thinks he’s funny at a concert” problem. You go to a concert for your favorite musician. Between songs, he tells dumb jokes that you politely laugh at until he gets to the next song. You put up with it because you really like the songs, but if it goes on too long or if you aren’t that big of a fan, that really tests your patience. Same thing with Rumble in the Bronx. If it had Police Story stunts, I wouldn’t mind how stupid the story was. The Rumble in the Bronx stunts aren’t quite good enough to put up with the dumb parts.

 

At the end of the day, this is still a Jackie Chan action stunt comedy. I enjoyed it. It’s just not in the top tier of his movies.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Escort

Premise: A reporter and an escort he’s doing a story on become friends and maybe more.

 

There’s no disguising why I watched this movie. It’s called The Escort, isn’t rated, and stars Lyndsy Fonseca. You do the math. At the same time, it’s the kind of movie I went into expecting to be wrong about. It’s got a comedy movie cast after all. Fonseca has spent most of her career in comedy spheres. Tommy Dewey, Bruce Campbell, and Dan Bakkedahl have supporting roles. This is no more a bait-and-switch than Pretty Woman.

 

Really, this is a RomCom that cleans up some risqué topics to the point of almost being family friendly. Michael Doneger plays a sex addict reporter looking for a story that will get him a job. Lyndsy Fonseca is an escort with a Stanford degree. Both claim they are fine with their lives as they are yet each ends up looking for a way to settle down. The movie is a disappointment in that it walks back all of its characters taboos, however it’s pretty clear what kind of movie this is 10 minutes in. From the opening even, it’s clear that this isn’t interested in a serious contemplation of the grey area of sex work. Same with Doneger’s sex addiction, which a more nuanced movie could explore more interestingly. I don’t say all this to drag the movie either.

Overall, I liked the movie in the way that I like a lot of harmless RomComs. The cast is affable enough. It’s well paced (aka short). It’s calorie-free viewing. It is a shame that nothing stands out as better than the rest though. I was hoping there’d be great chemistry between the leads, a supporting performance that pops, or writing that was too clever for the actors delivering the dialogue. Instead, it’s a level-set movie that’s exactly as good as it needs to be.

 

I will say, it’s weird that this movie has no reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. I know the movie is small, but no reviews at all in the age of infinite digital content seems insane to me. I wonder why it has nothing. There was no theatrical release I can find. Can’t find any festivals either. Was there no one pushing this movie when it was released? Not even an assistant of the producer’s to cold-call critics? This is a professionally made, competent film. I could name a dozen other of a similar quality. How did this one fall through the cracks so completely? 

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Bubba Ho-Tep

Premise: It turns out Elvis is alive, stuck at a nursing home, and being terrorized by a mummy.

 

This is an incredibly silly movie. It’s a bold genre mashup living in the body of a B-movie. Frankly, the movie should be terrible. That it isn’t has to do mainly with some clever writing and a pretty great Bruce Campbell performance. Campbell is a better actor than his career suggests, primarily because he never tried to “big-time” the work. He knows what he does well. He recognizes that a lot of his fame comes from being friends early with Sam Rami, but he doesn’t feel a need to prove himself. That’s why his best modern roles tend to be charming, easy-going roles like Sam Axe in Burn Notice. Bubba Ho-Tep is an example of him bringing his fast ball to a movie that isn’t ready to hit it. He plays a very good Elvis. It’s exaggerated but it’s real, if that makes sense. I don’t know if he convinced me that he’s Elvis, but he did convince me he is someone who believes he is Elvis. Applying this nifty Elvis story – he switches places with an Elvis impersonator in secret who then went onto die, but he lost the evidence to prove they switched places – to a B-monster movie is a little much. I didn’t care as much about the parts fighting the mummy as the investigation parts with Ossie Davis, who thinks he’s JFK. It’s all entertaining enough though, so what do I have to complain about?

 

Bubba Ho-Tep is a movie that demands you set a low bar for it then clears it comfortably. It’s a B-Movie in the classic sense. This can’t be the main entrée of a movie night, but it sure does pair well as a pleasant come down after something slicker and more expensive.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Emergency

Premise: Three friends who are all minorities at a nice college find a white girl ODed in their living room and look for a way to get her to the hospital without incident with police.

 

This is a tricky movie to talk about because it comes ready-made with defenses to critiques which can be discussion enders. I’m on board with the politics of the movie. In college, I probably could’ve found a passed out white girl in my house without a lot of risk of police violence (although I still would’ve been pretty freaked out and scared that I could somehow get in trouble). So, a lot of my “what they should have done” advice comes from an incompatible perspective. And also, there’s no movie if they all make the smart decisions.

 

What I actually find tricky about this movie is the balance of comedy to drama. This movie needs both. It’s an outrageous scenario. A lot of the movie is satire. And it’s extremely funny in places. However, it’s also trying to make real points about inequality, false ally-ship, and trauma. That’s a tough balance, and I think Emergency fails where most comedies do. It’s a comedy until plot gets in the way. This is also known as the “third act problem” in comedies. Everybody is having a good time until they remember that there’s a story they need to conclude.

 

Emergency is two very good movies awkwardly combined into one pretty good movie. It’s a very fun and funny movie most of the time. It shouldn’t be a surprise that I’d enjoy it, because it’s a Superbad. It’s three young men trying to get across town for a party. The three leads more or less fit the Superbad character types: the brash one (RJ Cyler), the timid one (Donal Elise Watkins), and the awkward one (Sebastian Chacon). In both movies, the characters are trying to stay out of trouble with the police. There’s even a secret about Watkins’ living situation the next year. Obviously there are key differences and most of it comes down to the Emergency guys being minorities. The best humor in Emergency comes from race. A lot of it is pretty dark or biting, ranging from fake wokeness (people with a Black Lives Matter sign assuming our leads are drug dealers just because they are parked in their neighborhood) to assumed police overreaction (Cyler’s cousins’ house scattering when everyone realizes they brought a passed out white girl to the house). The movie screeches to a halt with the police standoff at the hospital and an extended conclusion. Until then, the movie did so well balancing serious topics with great comedy. The standoff I’m totally fine with. It’s harrowing and makes its point well. But then the movie continues with scenes where the characters spell out the things that the movie previously had already shown so well. And it does it without really returning to the sense of humor.

 

Of course, there are defenses to this. Perhaps one could argue that it’s showing how quickly things can turn for a minority in the U.S. One minute you are living in a comedy until reality comes crashing down. Or it could be showing that it’s funny as long as it’s abstract. I’ll also admit that I don’t know the solution to the balance problem. After the climactic events, it would be hard to just go back to telling jokes like before. I just wish they could’ve found a way.

 

I need to be very clear though. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. It’s well worth seeing. I hope to see everyone in the cast pop up in other comedies and dramas. I even wonder if the end will play better on a second watch, knowing the beats. There are a lot of movies that disappointed me the first time because I thought they were something else, then the problems bothered me less upon rewatch. Emergency could definitely be one of those.

 

Side Rant: Am I alone thinking the movie does Sabrina Carpenter’s character dirty at the end? She’s a bit much and makes some bad faith assumptions. But it’s not like she’s the only one doing a bad job making sense of the situation. All she knows is that her sister went missing. She tracks her down to being passed out in a van with three strangers taking a circuitous path in the woods. When she finally does confront them, her sister was being chased in the woods and is unhealthily intoxicated. No matter who the three young men are, is it wrong of her to assume the worst? Everyone is panicking. Most are high or drunk. No one does a great job explaining the situation. While we have spent the entire movie with Cyler, Watkins, and Chacon, they mean nothing to her. Her focus is on her sister. It’s not that surprising that her focus wouldn’t be on diffusing the police standoff. It’s very weird to me that she gets a kind of villain treatment at the end with them shutting the door on her. And maybe I’m reading the end wrong. Maybe it’s not Watkins shutting the door on her to say the damage has been done and I don’t forgive what you did. Maybe it’s that they are annoyed that instead of a simple “Thank you” she’s using this as an opportunity to prove her wokeness. The solution isn’t to have them accept her apology. Frankly, I think they needed to make her do more earlier to apologize for. This is something I’d like to see some other takes on. I feel like I have some blinders somewhere or forgot about some things she did. Or maybe it’s as simple as “I like Sabrina Carpenter and don’t like to think of her as a villain”.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Romper Stomper

Premise: Australian Neo-Nazis run into trouble with the law.

 

Here’s the thing about Neo-Nazis: I don’t need more of them. I’ve seen enough depictions of them. I’m not going to go out of my way to see more stories about them. Add in Australia though, and you have my curiosity. It shouldn’t. Australia is an English-speaking nation with a lot of the same pop culture as the U.S. We share celebrities. They do feel more foreign than England though. Whenever I hear about something in Australia, my instinctive thought is “Oh, they have that there too?” even though I know they do. That’s some of the fun of Australian Westerns or Australian horror. They obviously would have those, but I think of them from such an American perspective that I get myopic. The same goes with Neo-Nazis, I guess. Obviously they’d have them in Australia. They just target their rage at slightly different people. Instead of black people, it’s Vietnamese and the Aboriginals. It’s always interesting to me to see regionalized hate. There’s a history to it; often dark. But it’s also interesting to track the weird melting pot of the world. Like, why does Long Beach, California have the largest Cambodian population outside of Cambodia? There’s a story there.

 

Anyway, the reason to watch this is the star making turn for Russell Crowe. This is the movie that got him the attention of filmmakers and studios stateside. He’s very good in this in a way where I’m surprised he didn’t spend the next few years shaking villain roles.

 

I also made a discovery that I always kind of assumed. I kind of liked the music. This isn’t a huge surprised. I’m very into Celtic rock. I’ve noticed that Celtic Rock can bleed into Punk Rock which can bleed into Oi! if you aren’t careful. For those who don’t know, Oi! is pretty much skinhead punk. Or, at least, it’s a type of punk that has become associated with skinheads. That’s what a lot of the music in Romper Stomper is. It’s a troubling music genre to get into because one day, you’re enjoying some Dropkick Murphys which maybe leads you to The Business, and eventually you have to start being vigilant for lyrics rhyming “master race” with “in your face”. All this isn’t to say I’m going to pick up the Romper Stomper soundtrack, but it does mean I’m going to read through the lyrics of my favorite Real McKenzies album just to be sure I didn’t miss some messaging that I don’t cosign.

 

Anyway, Romper Stomper: good for the Russell Crowe. Good for the brutality. Not great if you are looking to avoid racism.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Driven

Premise: A Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead account of the John DeLorean scandal from the perspective of the FBI Informant who set him up.

 

The John DeLorean story looks great on paper. It’s a story of hubris and the limitations of capitalism. DeLorean was a massively successful engineer and executive who came to realize how impossible it is to succeed at the highest level, no matter how skilled or smart you think you are. His product, while deeply flawed, was iconic, in no small part thanks to Back to the Future. I even remember having a hot wheels DeLorean as a kid and thinking this thing looked so cool. Then of course there’s his decadent lifestyle and the salacious cocaine scandal that took him down. This is a man made for a good biography to be written or at least good for killing an hour on a Wikipedia dive.

 

I just think his story isn’t that cinematic. Because of the elements above, it feels like it should be, but it’s not. Essentially, he’s a great engineer and a mediocre businessman. He tried to build a product and made concessions until the product was no longer any good. He went deeply in debt and did something illegal to try and get out of it. No one died. There were no chases. The sting by the FBI went off without a hitch. It’s an interesting story to hear but not to watch.

 

Driven attempts to find a more interesting angle. It takes a comedic perspective with someone tangentially related to DeLorean and fabricates some of the story around him. Jason Sudeikis excels as this kind of lovable huckster: a guy who carries himself like a better conman and liar than he actually is. Casting Lee Pace as John DeLorean works is some ways. He certainly captures the mysteriousness of him and that feeling like he always has the upper hand, even when he clearly doesn’t. Pace just isn’t great at playing someone believably popular. He always seems like he’s full of shit. His take on DeLorean is more “guy you invite to all the parties because you never know what he’ll bring” than “guy who throws the party everyone wants to go to” if that makes any sense. I do enjoy Judy Greer and Corey Stoll rebelling against the movie with their performances. Greer has a wet blank wife role but occasionally says “I know what my character is supposed to say here, but instead, I’m going to have some fun*”. Stoll on the other hand is the only guy who realizes he’s in a serious crime movie. That’s different than him being the only person who doesn’t realize he’s in a comedy. That implies that Stoll is playing the role incorrectly. Instead, he’s very intentionally playing this as someone annoyed by everyone else, namely Sudeikis, treating this all like a joke.

 

*To be clear, I assume that’s how the character was written, Greer just infuses it with more conviction than I expected.

 

Overall, the movie has trouble figuring out how much of a comedy or drama it is and ends up falling short on both. The 80s of it all felt pretty superficial. Not lived-in. Much more “how we remember the 80s” than “how it actually was”. Not all of the performances worked for me and the ones that did worked because they were trying to be in a different movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Valet

Premise: A famous actress begins dating a valet to cover up an affair she is having with a married businessman.

 

Eugenio Derbez has a really interesting career. He’s been working steadily since the early 80s and has been working in English films some for about the last 20 years. I didn’t become aware of him until his 2013 film Instructions Not Included became a specialty hit as a mostly Spanish comedy with a successful targeted ad campaign (i.e., it played well to almost exclusively Latino audiences). Since then, he’s been one of those guys who pops up in things because Hollywood isn’t sure how much of a star he is. He’s gotten additional starring vehicles like How to Be a Latin Lover and the 2018 Overboard remake. He also pops up in supporting roles like the villain in Dora and the Lost City of Gold and the teacher in CODA. Even in those supporting roles, when he shows up, I kind of get the feeling that to a corner of the audience, he’s the star. The best comparison I can make is when the Leftovers fans would see Carrie Coon in something before 2020-ish*.

 

*You better believe Carrie Coon as one of the henchmen in Infinity War was something I was watching very closely in that movie.

 

I can’t say I entirely get his shtick. Part of it is that he’s in his late 50s now. He’s got the man-child problem. His specialty appears to be men in arrested development and the older he gets, no matter how honed he gets it, the smaller the returns. It’s a lot like Adam Sandler. Now imagine if Adam Sandler didn’t show up on the scene until You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. Or maybe Jackie Chan is the better comparison. He had a long and impressive career in China. By the time he really broke out in the US, he was 40 and his peak stunt years were behind him. Derbez would’ve fit into a 90s Adam Sandler movie really well actually, but finally getting his chance to shine with American audiences in the 2010s and beyond, it’s too late for it to work optimally.

 

The Valet is a very simple and stupid movie. The premise is dumb and sweaty as hell. The execution is sloppy. Most of the best jokes are a little too slapstick for my taste. But I still kind of liked it. I’m a big fan of the stealth non-RomCom RomCom. It’s a RomCom in which there’s decidedly no romance. I was so relieved when almost immediately Derbez tells Samara Weaving, playing the actress who is dating him as cover, that he’s old enough to be her father. From then on, it’s pretty clear the movie wasn’t moving toward Derbez and Weaving ending up together romantically. It becomes a friend movie. I really love that the movie ends with them at a restaurant catching up as pals. It turns out that while The Valet has little to offer me in terms of laughs, it has heart in all the right places. And that’s enough for me. Derbez hits the emotional beats well and is a convincing sad-sack. Weaving is fine. I never quite believe her as the biggest movie star in the world, but I also appreciate a gorgeous actress who is willing to look stupid or silly. Her face is also great for looking annoyed without seeming unlikable. This isn’t the best movie you’ll ever see, but if nothing else, it works well as a movie you start and never bother to turn off.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Premise: Four friends scatter across the globe over the summer for assorted romance and coming-of-age stories.

 

In The Social Network, there’s a fun recurring bit where they remind you that it started as “The Facebook”. Mark Zuckerberg continually insists on keeping the “The” in there. That was the name of the site he created, after all. It’s a losing battle though. The “The” isn’t needed. It eventually is dropped because they realize it isn’t needed. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants reminded me of this. Perhaps this is sacrilege to say but that movie really didn’t need the pants. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I thought the pants would be way more central to this movie. Instead, I sort of lost track of who even had the pants at any point and got annoyed when they would insist that they were key to anything.

 

I get it though. This is based on a book series with the same name. The title is attention-grabbing even if it is nonsense. It wouldn’t make sense to drop the pants. It just felt really unnecessary though. The jump from “Weird. These jeans fit and look good on all of us” to “These are magic jeans that will bring us all good luck. Let’s draw up a manifesto” is very forced. It had the feeling of something that was only there because it happened in the book, except the book was able to spend way more time foregrounding it.

 

Beyond that hyper-specific issue, I enjoyed this. That’s entirely due to the cast, which is a sort of 2005 All-Stars lineup. At that point we were several years into seeing if Alexis Bledel was a star. Amber Tamblyn already had an Emmy nomination for Joan of Arcadia. America Ferrera was riding the success of her film debut, Real Women Have Curves, a few years before. The only actual gamble in the cast was Blake Lively. All of the cast have stayed active over the years. Normally, you expect to have at least one person in a young cast like this who retired (by choice or by lack of options), but not this cast. Lively quickly followed this with a hot CW show followed by a level of fame that arguably exceeds any of her film roles. Ferrera has become one of the more reliable TV stars of the last 17 years. Bledel and Tamblyn have worked very steadily too. Bledel even has an Emmy and has seen Gilmore Girls evolve into the TV cannon. In short, this movie benefits greatly from its stars remaining collectively more relevant than, say, Aquamarine or Sleepover (although there are some individual casting gems in those).

 

The four stories strike a good balance. There’s a death story, a divorce story, and two love stories. All of them have secondary focuses too to prevent them from getting repetitive. It’s a PG movie aimed at tweens, so I’ll forgive them for not going super deep into anything. For what it is, The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants is pretty good. That said, it isn’t something targeted to me, and I felt that.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Flashdance

Premise: A welder by day, dancer by night tries to overcome her fears and get into a prestigious dance academy.

 

I miss soundtrack movies. Movies that aren’t musicals that reach another level of success due to a good soundtrack. It seems like the 80s were lousy with them but they all but dried up by the 90s. The last one I can remember was The Bodyguard. It was a major box office hit that no one talks about anymore outside of the soundtrack which is one of the best-selling albums of all time and won the Grammy for Album of the Year. Flashdance didn’t reach those heights, but it’s a similar story. It was a sleeper hit that became a pop culture behemoth thanks to an amazing soundtrack.

 

While the soundtrack is a big reason Flashdance became a hit, it does have some other things to offer. It’s a star-making Jennifer Beals performance. It’s crazy how few opportunities this film led to for her at the time. These days, she’d either be in 5 Sundance movies the next two years or be scooped up by a major franchise. In the early 80s, there wasn’t that indie film infrastructure and the studios didn’t know how to capitalize on the emerging youth market. Flashdance was looked at as an MTV hit, which ghettoized Beals. Prestige filmmakers weren’t looking there for new talents. I’m sure there are some other nefarious mechanisms that got in the way of a half-black actress like Beals succeeding too. She’s so damn good in this though. And the music video approach to many of the dance sequences in the movie really works for me.

 

It’s otherwise a rough movie. I wasn’t that into Beals’ romance with her boss, especially when I realize he really was almost twice her age (20 years old/38 years old). The other employees at the club bored me too. I don’t know what to do with the fact that the aspiring stand-up comedian tells a couple lazy Pollack jokes then decides he’s good enough to go to L.A.

 

Flashdance is a thin but enjoyable movie with some very high highs.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Roger & Me

Premise: Michael Moore blasts the auto industry.

 

It’s no secret that I don’t like Michael Moore. It’s not even that I disagree with him. I think if you break down his stance on things, I agree with more than I don’t. For me, it’s his tactics and presentation that I hate. He makes personality-first documentaries. In most documentaries, the star is the topic of the doc. In Moore’s docs, he’s the star. He’s in front of the camera, inserting himself into the story. There is some value in that. In Roger & Me, it’s probably more important than in any of his films, given his personal connection to the subject of the film. I think what really bothers me though is how much his docs feel like camera prank shows. I’m not a fan of things like Candid Camera. I’ve never enjoyed watching shows/movies where the humor comes from people who didn’t sign up for this being the butt of the joke. There’s no skill in making regular people uncomfortable. Even if it’s being done to make a point. Even if it’s being done to people who deserve to be laughed at. It always feels like the filmmaker is punching down at the person. By it being Michael Moore’s film, he has all the control. He can edit this however he wants, so any situation he inserts himself into he’s the bully.

 

The fundamental problem of Roger & Me is that Moore can’t get access to the people who deserve Moore’s bully treatment. The more innocuous or undercover his camera is, the better. The moments that hit hardest are when he gets a camera into rich person events and let people sink themselves. Take something like the overnight jail party. That’s astoundingly tone deaf. Every single person taking part in that looks awful. The scenes speak for themselves. There are several scenes like that where every “eat the rich” impulse in my body gets triggered and I want to burn it all to the ground. Then, counter that with the scenes of Moore trying to get to Roger Smith’s office at GM or attempting to find Smith at the country club. Those are scenes of Moore being a dick to working-class people just trying to do their job. It’s a mixed message. He’s making a film about how the entitled executives stomp all over people, so he makes his film by…acting entitled and stomping over people. That really doesn’t sit well with me.

 

The implication of this film is that Moore is here to give a voice to the little guy. He loves pointing out that he’s from Flint and has friends who were fired by GM. However, so much of this film is him gawking at the unfortunate people. Why do we spend so much time with the rabbit lady? Do we really need to see her kill and skin a rabbit? No. All he needed to make his point is show that the plant closings have led to her resorting to selling rabbits to try and make ends meet. He stays with her for shock value. Or there’s all the time he spent with the man evicting people. Moore’s camera felt more like a news cameraman trying to catch something salacious for the evening news than a documentarian trying to build a thesis.

 

It’s a shame, because there’s some very good stuff in this. Moore is well-researched on all of this. He makes a lot of great points throughout the movie. The movie has aged disturbingly well. The games the large corporations play are still the same. Flint has never come out its downturn. Instead of closing plants, we now associate Flint with not having clean water. Moore’s personal connection to this topic and very real frustration is an asset that a filmmaker who desired the spotlight less could’ve used better.

 

Even without Michael Moore, this movie would’ve been a hard sell. Typically, I prefer documentaries that are presented as explorations not theses. I like a film that goes in saying “What’s this about? Let’s find out and see where it takes us” rather than “I’m making this claim now let me give you all the reasons why”. I like the impression that the filmmaker’s mind wasn’t made up before they made the film. There’s no curiosity in Roger & Me. When there’s no curiosity in a documentary, I either need it to be as dry and measured as a Ken Burns series or have such a tight argument that I feel like I’m being sold the truth and not an opinion. I’m never going to get that with a Michael Moore doc.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend