patron’s pick – Page 3 – PopCult Reviews

Patron Pick – Wonka

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Wonka (2023)
Written by Simon Farnaby and Paul King
Directed by Paul King

Why? Why was this movie? Yes, I know it was made because a series of corporations made legal acquisitions of the film rights to Roald Dahl’s writings, and so they made the movie to recoup the costs spent on purchasing the rights with the idea of also turning a profit. What I am asking is why, from a creative perspective, does this film exist? What does this add to one’s appreciation of Dahl’s original novel or the character of Willy Wonka? Nothing about this film feels like it has anything to do with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory besides Wonka and Oompa-Loompas. I would go so far as to argue that not one of the three live-action appearances of Wonka on film does the book character justice, as much as I love Gene Wilder.

Patron Pick – All Good Things

All Good Things (2010)
Written by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling
Directed by Andrew Jarecki

Just because a recipe looks good on paper does not mean the final dish will be a masterpiece. Let us peruse the ingredients list for All Good Things. The cast is stacked: Ryan Gosling, Kirstin Dunst, Frank Langella, Philip Baker Hall, Nick Offerman, Kristen Wiig, Lily Rabe. Not a bad line-up at all. The cinematographer worked on Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, among many other films. The director, Andrew Jarecki, had wowed audiences with his documentary Capturing the Friedmans seven years earlier. But it is in this last ingredient we have identified the problem. Jarecki made a fantastic documentary, but that is different from a narrative feature, and this film stands as a great example of how success in one does not translate into the other.

Patron Pick – Dream Scenario

Dream Scenario (2023)
Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli

I first encountered filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli in 2022 when I saw his film Sick Of Myself. While it was a stylish satire with such a specific tone that showed Borgli’s control of his picture, the underlying themes were troublesome. In that film, the director appeared to be mocking visibly disabled people on the internet. He frames it as two horrible humans feigning disability for online attention, but the big wrinkle for me is that people with disabilities are never shown in any other light. I would conclude that he’s rolling his eyes at online influencers who are rabid attention seekers? I would hope he wasn’t suggesting that people who are openly disabled online are vapid? This film also has some ideas I’ve been wrestling to pin down.

Patron Pick – Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted (1999)
Written by James Mangold, Lisa Loomer, and Anna Hamilton Phelan
Directed by James Mangold

I was surprised when I saw this film was directed and co-written by the filmmaker behind such pictures as Logan and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. A memoir adapted to film about an emotionally troubled teenage girl living through the tumult of the late 1960s didn’t seem like what I expected from Mangold, but I learned Winona Ryder brought him onto the project. She got the ball rolling on this film after reading the book of the same name by Susanna Kaysen, who Ryder would play in the picture. I wish I loved this movie, but I would be lying. The subject matter should make me invested, but ultimately, the directorial choices and the acting, in particular, held me back from becoming emotionally invested. Ariana said while we were watching that the acting reminded her of a slightly more mature Disney Channel original movie.

Patron Pick – Maid

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Bekah Lindstrom.

Maid (Netflix)
Written by Molly Smith Metzler, Marcus Gardley, Rebecca Brunstetter, Colin McKenna, and Michelle Denise Jackson
Directed by John Wells, Nzingha Stewart, Lila Neugebauer, Helen Shaver, and Quyen Tran

Maid is an American drama mini-series created for Netflix and inspired by Stephanie Land’s memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive. It focuses on Alex (Margaret Qualley) leaving her emotionally abusive boyfriend and struggling to provide for her daughter by getting a job cleaning houses.

I am going to start with the harsh bits. Although it has a lot of good qualities, there is a layer of cringe to Maid that resembles the storyline structures from the US version of Shameless. Their link to this is Molly Smith Metzler, a writer for both, and John Wells, executive producer and director for Maid, who developed, wrote, and directed for Shameless.

Patron Pick – The Pledge

The Pledge (2001)
Written by Jerzy Kromolowski & Mary Olson-Kromolowski
Directed by Sean Penn

I remember liking this movie more when I saw it in college. It’s not a bad film, but The Pledge is incredibly messy. There’s a clear sense of director Sean Penn getting a day with an actor he likes and shoehorning a scene in with them. The film drips with the essence of being a picture directed by an actor. It’s more interested in being a character study that plays in the tropes of the crime thriller; that’s one of its strongest aspects. However, the script demands a plot, so throughout the entire runtime, we experience tension between Penn’s desire to play with his performers and the genre tropes indicating specific plot beats to the audience. It doesn’t surprise me that The Pledge is a movie that split critics & audiences on its release. And despite all its many flaws, it is one of Jack Nicholson’s great late-career performances.

Patron Pick – Like Crazy

Like Crazy (2011)
Written by Drake Doremus & Ben York Jones
Directed by Drake Doremus

Improvisation is a complicated skill. When you see performers who are incredible improvisers, they can make it look effortless. The Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual is a comprehensive textbook I’ve read through a couple times over the years, and it taught me a lot about what is happening during an improvised performance that the audience never sees and is likely not aware of. The performers operate at “the top of their intelligence,” meaning they act as a character while intellectually & emotionally analyzing the story and the relationships in a scene. This is immensely hard to do and makes it look so casual. I’ve come to look at improv through this lens, often impressed at how brilliant some performers are. Like Crazy is a film improvised off a 50-page outline. The problem here is the actors needed far more direction and structure for this to work.

Patron Pick – Gran Turismo

Gran Turismo (2023)
Written by Jason Hall, Alex Tse, and Zach Baylin
Directed by Neill Blomkamp

2023 feels like an apocalyptic year for Hollywood. The labor strikes, which the studio execs refuse to approach in good faith, stretch into the future. Rumblings of AI-generated films & television abound. The content coming out often feels like it was already written by AI anyway. The mainstream has never been such a void of humanity, and that’s saying a lot. The brand movie and video game adaptations have been hot commodities as trends shift in a disturbing direction. These two horrible new late-stage capitalism genres come together in the mire that is Gran Turismo. “Based on a true story” but clearly embellished and overly dramatized, which doesn’t help the picture to become more compelling. Not since Black Adam have I felt such a sinking sense of doom watching a movie that this medium I love so much is being strangled in the States, everything that made it worth engaging with melting away (thank god for world cinema!).

Patron Pick – Nine Days

Nine Days (2020)
Written & Directed by Edison Oda

I did not like this movie. From what I see online, it has proven to be a very polarizing film, with few people settling in the middle. I know exactly why I didn’t like it, which concerns some creative choices by the writer/director Edison Oda. I think the film is way too long for what it is trying to say and how it is trying to say it, and I argue the message could have been more poignant if a good half hour was shaved off the runtime. By the time we get to the third act, Oda is just saying a lot of the same things over and over but not building upon them in a manner that excites or interests me. It is thematically similar to another divisive film that came out recently, Alfonso Cuaron’s Bardo. I enjoyed Bardo because I felt the director kept things visually inventive, so I never got bored with the images on the screen. Nine Days is never able to move past the sedate, bland tone it sets at the start.

Patron Pick – The Social Dilemma

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

The Social Dilemma (2020)
Written by Davis Coombe, Vickie Curtis, and Jeff Orlowski
Directed by Jeff Orlowski

In every person’s mind lives three Vincent Kartheisers, at least according to this “documentary.” This might be the worst documentary I have ever seen. I was baffled from the first ten minutes and kept sitting there, unable to get over how amateurish and poorly edited the whole thing was. It’s also one of the most redundant films I have ever seen. The picture’s central thesis is explained in the first five or so minutes, and the rest of the runtime is just people saying the thesis in different ways over and over again. Oh yes, and using poorly thought-out metaphors. Two people used magicians as metaphors to explain social media, which was kept in the final cut rather than the director noting that this was unnecessarily repetitive. It’s also a film about a problem in which the people who caused it try to convince you that only they can solve it.