Clean up in aisle, uh, everywhere?

Apr 07, 2021

"Well, I'll be 21 on my next birthday,
so I guess that makes me 20.
And how old are you, young lady?"

PINNED: this newsletter is supposed to be a friendly recapping of the movies in, and coming to, theaters. But things be real weird right now. So until that changes in earnest, I'll either be suggesting old favorites to revisit, pointing out recent flicks you may have missed or calling out notable new VOD / streaming options.

Man, Godzilla vs Kong did a thing. From Wednesday to Sunday, it made $48.5 million at the box office. For context, with theaters at full capacity (they vary, but around 50% in largest markets) and over 1,000 more theaters playing it, Godzilla: King of Monsters (the last movie in the series) made $47.7 million on its opening weekend. That's not even including the fact people could watch G vs K at home on HBO Max.

Sooooo, we're back? Maybe?!

I mean, it is kind of the perfect movie to lure people back to theaters. How else do you want to watch two massive creatures fight, except on the biggest damn screen possible? Mortal Kombat, another Warner Bros. movie will be a good second test in a couple weeks. If that does well? Which, based on trailer views (note: Suicide Squad broke the record a few weeks later), it very well may. Then yeah, we (might be) back.

Oh, I didn't put into the trailers cuz it isn't one, but Sony put out a (MILD SPOILER WARNING) juicy lil clip from Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which is coming out this fall. It's pretty damn adorable.

(from top, left to right)

Moffie: "As a black South African filmmaker, Oliver Hermanus [Moffie's director] understandably hadn’t given much thought to the suffering of the ruling white community under apartheid."

And why would he? But then Hermanus read an autobiography by André Carl van der Merwe’s, upon which the is movie based and "That made me look and re-evaluate every white man I know who’s over the age of 45. You see them in a different way. They were trained to be the foot soldiers of apartheid, to embody its ideology and protect it."

I'm starting with these quotes because if you see the trailer, Moffie may look like a lot of things: a war movie, a queer story, a treatise on toxic masculinity. Which, it kind of is, but the point is it's also broader than that. Take the word the movie uses as its title, moffie, which is an Afrikaans word that means something akin to the six letter gay slur here in the states, but again "It’s a word that’s more complex than that. It’s mainly used against boys to tell boys how to be boys. It’s a masculine weapon used to define the borders of behavior. ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that, or you’re a moffie."

The view into all of this is through the lens of a young man, Nicholas, sent off to his two-year mandatory military service in 1981 South Africa. You can see in the trailer, but the experience looks harrowing and brutal, even without the fact Nicholas is questioning his sexuality. As Hermanus alludes to above, the impact of all this is not just felt on the young men experiencing it, but of those they go on to encounter in the world. In essence, the movie looks to show the origins of hate, and how even those trained in it, were once victims of it and the larger effects that trauma has on society.

It doesn't look like an "easy" movie, but it sure does look like a good one.

Releases: Friday!
Watch: VOD & Limited Theaters
Trailer | NR | 1 hr 44 mins
Rotten Tomatoes: 97%  (Certified Fresshh)

Thunder Force: Semi-non-rhetorical question. Is Melissa McCarthy pulling an Adam Sandler and just saying "fuck it," and making whatever movie she damn well pleases? Yeah, prolly a lil bit. Is that a bad thing? Not if you like her movies. And for those who don't? Ya know, you really don't have to watch 'em.

Now, this is not to imply McCarthy is going full Jack and Jill, (although I dare you to watch that movie's trailer and not even chortle a smidge), just that her and her writer / director husband, Ben Falcon, have been poppin' out high-concept movies that are essentially McCarthy joke delivery systems for a while now - reviews be damned. Again, not inherently a bad thing!

The *ahem* high-concept here is that McCarthy and estranged buddy ol' pal Octavia Spencer become an accidental superhero duo. Obviously they're playing off the popularity of the genre, but also aping it, in part by having McCarthy and Spencer as the clad in tights do-gooders. Which, good on 'em. Cuz as fun as superheroes movies can be, they're still holding up and purveying plenty of cultural stereotypes.

And while there is a super baddy in Thunder Force (Bobby Cannavale), I'm guessing the real villains, as far as McCarthy is concerned, will be the critics as there hasn't been a single movie that McCarthy and Falcon have worked on together which has received a majority of positive reviews. But, as Mr. Sandler once said...

And that dude is rich, like rich rich. So.

Releases: Friday!
Watch: Netflix
Trailer | PG-13 | 1 hr 45 mins
Rotten Tomatoes: TBD

Pixie: the vibe of this movie might feel familiar; a sort of nonchalant approach towards gun "play," combined with a plucky, likable lead (--> Olivia Cooke from Thoroughbreds, Sound of Metal) that casts witticisms like you wish you could, but never will. Makes one think of a Martin McDonaugh movie like In Bruges dunnit?

We've discussed this before, a movie that may not be wholly original, but still worth a watch. Hell, creativity is often just the process of taking pieces from other things and making it into a new thing (see: Paul Simon explaining how he wrote Bridge Over Troubled Water).

Problem is when it feels like a straight rip off. Now, that doesn't seem like the case here, but I am giving you forewarning that this tale of a young woman trying to escape her beautiful, if violent Irish home, may fall into that somewhat samey category. But reviews say Cooke lights it up enough to turn the movie into its own thing.

Plus, it has gangster priests who run drugs and murder people, which sounds kind f'd up, until you remember what they (ok, some of them) have been doing in real life. 😬

Plus, Alec Baldwin plays the prayer in chief, almost begging for you to not take everything too seriously, and you probably won't! Which'll probably make it all the more fun when you see nuns hockin sawed offs. 🤷‍♂️

Releases: It's out!
Watch: VOD
Trailer | R | 1 hr 33 mins
Rotten Tomatoes: 78% (Certified Fresshh)

NOTABLES
(from top, left to right)

Black Widow - basically a drop to announce the new release date / that it'll be on Disney + (for an extra $30), but nice if you've been hankering. Disney did a similar thing for Cruella (see below).

Space Jam: A New Legacy - a redo w/ LeBron James. Not quite sure they recaptured the magic... But I also did watch the OG when I was a wee one, so maybe a matter of perspective??

Limbo - a well reviewed quirky looking comedy-drama that takes on the refugee experience via a small Scottish island town.

Those Who Wish Me Dead - Angelina Jolie gettin back into action, literally, as a firefighter caught up in some nastiness. Directed by Taylor Sheridan, who co-created theTV show Yellowstone and has written a bunch of great movies: Sicario, Hell or High Water, Wind River.

Note(s): also second trailers for Cruella and Suicide Squad in the full list. / I have no idea what everyone is looking at either 👀(see image above).

What's In Theaters +

Discussion about this post