Features_Creatures

"It stinks!" -Jay Sherman, "the critic" I miss Jeff Baena. This movie needed 5 more rewrites to make it less childish, or lean further into its childishness. Instead it left itself in a grey area of mediocrity in which Baena would have made it thrive. Truly the most mediocre effort I've seen in awhile. The large format photography was nice, performances good. Screenplay really bad. It's a fun incredibly dumb romp if you want to role play that Jeff Baena finally made a bad movie. I quote, from the movie, a real piece of dialogue that made it through all editing, into the final on screen movie: " I think something happened in the cave, something that made me feel insane." That's the entire screenplay top to bottom. And yes I get that it's supposed to be camp. But it can't decide if it's camp or this elevated horror nonsense. Make a choice. It's bad. Sorry whoever wrote this trash. Get an editor who actually cares about you. Or shoot music videos for lorde. One of the two.

I went into this movie with VERY low expectations: It's a beloved movie from like 40 years ago that is a product of its time. Tim Burton hasn't made a good movie in a LONG time. This type of remake where they make the child of the original cast member the protagonist never works. It's a sequel to a movie that absolutely does not need a sequel. The trailer looked cheap...Etc etc etc.

Nothing about this should work. But somehow, by the grace of god, it actually does. It's genuinely funny, it balances matching the tone of the original with doing something new and fresh and it doesn't try to hard to please fans and sacrifice doing something original for just telling the exact same story again. It doesn't hurt that I saw it at an old drive in movie on a very foggy almost-autumn night, wrapped up in a bunch of blankets in the trunk of a car with a dog and my girl. Honestly one of the best movie-going experiences I've had in a long time. Go in without any pretentiousness or cynicism and you'll have a great time. 7/10. Super fun, willem dafoe is absolutely hilarious.

I really loved this movie but it simply was way too long. I like long movies, I like slow cinema but there is still the concept of economy or story telling. I wish he would allow himself to "kill his darlings" and cut like almost an hour out of this. One of his justifications is that people "sit and binge tv shows for 4-5 hours" but it's not at all the same. The form and structure of television and film are completely different, he knows that. It really just feels like self indulgence because he's at the end of his career and nobody is going to tell him no. Self indulgence is the death of a lot of great artist once they find success. Particularly Scorsese, all of his most respected films (maybe with the exception of casino) even if they had a slightly longer run-time were completely trimmed of fat. Every shot, every line has a point in advancing the plot and was very economical. This adaptation felt like it made all the mistakes of adapting from a novel to film. I would absolutely love an edit of this film that is maybe 2 hours long and could easily been done. It would have been more emotionally impactful, interesting and still honored the story and the people it was about. The Osage, which was definitely the most interesting part of the film. But gets swept up in a stale courtroom drama that we've seen a million times and could have been a couple of short scenes.