With "Get Back", director Peter Jackson has achieved the impossible: Making a
documentary as long as the Lord of the Rings Extended Editions.
Presented
with 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio recorded in 1969 as part of a planned documentary
of the making of the "Let It Be" album, Pete has proven himself well and truly
incapable of making any kind of editorial decision, and basically just kept everything.
There
are three episodes to this thing, each over two hours long, but the only one
worth watching is the first as that’s the only one in which anything of note
happens—to whit, Paul comes up with the riff for the song “Get Back” and George
decides to leave the band. While there are brief moments of delight here and there, such as John's monolog about masturbation in the Boy Scouts or the black humor that arises once George leaves, the rest is mostly just the four of them rehearsing, then
the rooftop concert at the end which we’ve all seen before.
Even
faced with such a logical and fitting end to the documentary Pete just keeps right
on going, showing us the boys coming downstairs after the concert and anticlimactically
going back to rehearsing again.
I leave you with one final thought about the song "Get Back": At one point Paul and John thought about turning it into a protest song opposing the white nationalist anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain at the time. Fifty years ago. Thank goodness that would never happen today. Look how far we've come. Look how much we've grown.
I
only watched the original “Cowboy Bebop” 90s anime a week before this remake
came out, and I suspect your reaction to this will depend on your relationship
with the original. The more you liked the anime, the less you’ll like this.
I
was … ambivalent about the series. It felt like a mishmash of elements the
writer thought were cool—rolled-up sleeves on pastel blue suits, jazz music,
space ships and bounty hunters, floating islands above glass-domed cities—just sort
of slapped together for funsies. The dry humor hits right (blowtorch to light a
cigarette, fantastic), but it has problems showing its female protagonist, Faye
Valentine, in any kind of normal clothing or pose, and it appears to have
borrowed its concept of male cool from Japanese high school dramas.
Sorry,
this wasn’t my anime gateway drug. I’d already seen and gotten over Ghost in
the Shell and Akira by this point, and despite living in Japan hadn’t even
heard of this until, geez, maybe five or six years ago. One of those things
that made a bigger splash overseas than at home, it seems. No fond memories,
then, no awakening to the world of animation.
So I’m
equally lukewarm on its live-action successor.
Some
days you be cowboy bebopping, some days you be cowboy bebopped
For
me, the Hollywood remake is a solid B-. Episodes run an hour instead of the
original 20 minutes, and the bulk of that extra is padded with toe-curling unfunny
“banter” but it’s got just enough spark to keep you going. Every time I thought
about giving up, there would be one good scene that actually works—the teddy
bear “Ichabod” scene, for example—just enough that you keep on watching in the
hopes of hitting that high again.
John
Cho is a little bit too shiny smooth and button bright to convincingly play
criminal hitman-gone-straight Spike Spiegel, and his wardrobe (along with almost
everybody else’s) just proves how bizarre the original space-Lupin III
character concept was. Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir) and Faye (Daniella Pineda)
come off a little better, more rounded characters than their animated
counterparts, though Daniella is stuck with some of the worst dialog (alas, repeating
the punchline of a joke three or four times in succession does not make it any
funnier) and a borderline-creepy lesbian sex scene. Ah well. At least she gets
to wear relatively normal clothes in most of the episodes.
Much
of it is shot like the 60s Batman TV series using a camera with a broken tripod
so half the scenes are at a 20-degree angle, with paper-thin backdrop sets, stiff
and stylized action sequences someone probably had to restrain themselves from
adding “POW!” effects to. That would work if it was a kind of homage to the 60s
era action shows, but half the story is this edgy, bloody rivalry between Spike
and mafia capo Vicious (Alex Hassell) that doesn’t fit the tone at all.
Neither
a cowboy bebopper nor a cowboy bebopperer be
Perhaps
the minds behind TMNT and Thor 2 were not the ideal ones to entrust with this
property. As I said, the show is oddly divided between whacky interstellar
hijinks, eco-terrorists turning people into trees, people watching things oblivious
to a massive fight taking behind their backs, that kind of thing, then goes
diving into the Spike versus Vicious with its much bloodier and heavier themes
of being stuck in one’s past. For my taste there’s too much faux-cool posturing,
not enough Mandalorian in a pastel blue suit bounty hunting.
Following in the footsteps of such august properties as Star Wars, Altered Carbon and the Witcher, the beloved haha okay no sorry that muddled racism parable and Will Smith vehicle Bright is the latest movie to get an anime follow-up sequel. Or not a sequel. Not really a prequel either. It's. Um. Something. Definitely a viewing experience of some kind.
The world of Bright--essentially our world, but with elves and orcs--is now transformed into an oddly CGified woodblock print, so it looks a bit like an extended video game cutscene that someone mistook for a feature length movie. Instead of American urban decay, we're now in post-restoration Japan of the late 19th century, though as with the original movie the presence of elves and orcs and magic is the only difference between the real world and this, making the whole exercise kind of pointless theme-wise. The whole fantasy element adds nothing to the Meiji Restoration, nor does the Edo Japan have anything to say about fantasy. It's all just kind of there, in the same movie for some reason. At least the original had its fumbling and inept racism parable, while this just has, um, pretty colors.
Very pretty colors. Really. The colors are wonderful, the lines and details ravishing, the artistry superb, the soundtrack a sort of mid-tempo upbeat electronica which literally could not be a worse match for 19th century dueling samurai if you tried.
I'm struck, as I was by Star Wars Visions, how little these anime excursions take away from the original. It's just Edo Japan with a few extras tacked on, taking essentially nothing from its putative source material other than the name.
Though in this case, that's probably for the better.
Another Reynolds masterpiece here. Surprisingly sweet for a movie that so evidently hates its own subject matter. Hollywood does the usual thing of portraying all gamers as shut-in losers, which makes it hard to sympathize with the game designer protagonists, even if they have managed to create a fully functional emergent AI from gaming code, like if the "arrow to the knee" guy used disliking archers as the catalyst for the other 4 billion leaps forward it would take to become sentient. And nobody would ever use disliking things as the entire basis for their identity. Haha, now that is funny.
Taika Waititi is unfunnily over the top in every scene, cutting away to streamers restating the action every five minutes is painfully stupid, total cringe bro, and Reynolds' funniest lines are all cribbed from his tweets about how great Aviator Gin tastes.
And yet. It's kind of giddily fun for all that. The high comes as Reynolds tries to rally the other in-game NPCs to fight for their freedom, by getting an IRL human to come and tell them how much better life could be. "How often are banks robbed in the real world?" Hardly ever! "What about corpses? How many corpses do you see per hour?" None per hour! "What about gun violence? See a lot of gun violence?" Actually, that's a big problem. A massive problem.
This is a typical Netflix original, a B movie with a couple of A list names to put on the poster and help you convince yourself it's worth more than a C- CinemaScore. The one thing it doesn't have, however, is Gal Gadot twerking on my face.
Sorry, no, scratch that. I'll start again.
Red Notice is kind of a cross between Indiana Jones and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, a 1988 movie with Steve Martin and Michael Caine which was much less memorable than Gal Gadot twerking on my face.
Oh. Fuck. Just slipped out. Carry on like nobody noticed? Probably best.
I should have been the target market for this movie. Gal Gadot flashing a bit of thigh as she twerks, if not quite on my face, then in reasonably close proximity to it as I squinted at her through my cellphone screen, and yet. And yet. No. The best bit was Ed Sheeran screaming "I was in Game of Thrones! I'm Ed Sheeran, bitch!" as he gets arrested.
A movie as charmless as Dwayne Johnson, an insincere as Ryan Reynolds drinking his own brand of Gin in close-up, as disappointing as Gal Gadot not twerking on my face.
