Movie Review: I Want Your Sex

It's been a whopping 12 years since American indie royalty Gregg Araki has made a feature. The 66-year-old has spent this time away from the big screen in the world of television, both as a hired gun director on a wide variety of series (13 Reasons Why, Riverdale, American Gigolo, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Heathers) and as the showrunner of a Starz series called New Apocalypse that was canceled after 1 season. His return back to his artistic home is one that makes perfect sense as it's a film that's primary goal is to have some fun exploring modern society's attitude towards sex. 

When Araki rose to prominence during the 90's, horny movies were the norm. It was pretty rare to even be able to make it through a movie aimed at kids without running into some innuendo or perverted double entendres. 3 decades later, Hollywood has become borderline puritanical with its depiction of sex on screen and audiences may be even more prudish as every movie that dares to be even a little bit salacious (Poor Things, Saltburn, Anora) becomes a lightning rod for online discourse. With I Want Your Sex, Araki is saying that he's not going allow to horniness on screen to die without a fight. 

At the center of Araki's "it's alright to be horny and fuck" opus is a recent college graduate (Cooper Hoffman) working a low-level job who becomes completely smitten with his art gallery owner boss (Olivia Wilde) after she recruits him to enter a BDSM relationship with her. Hoffman's character serves as kind of a stand-in for all of gen-Z as he's a repressed, jittery young man who experiences liberation when he enters this unorthodox domineering relationship with an older woman who opens him up to a world of sexual possibilities he never knew existed. As much as this premise reads like a sex version of "old man yells at clouds", Araki is smart enough to acknowledge the slew of forces (increased societal isolation, rise of online porn, increasing scarcity of third spaces, etc.) that helped gradually build up this latest age of repression and maintains a playful tone that has zero malice behind any of its jokes. Ironically, some of the older Araki-heads out there will probably take issue with how tame the sex scenes are here, but it feels kind of counterproductive to me to go after one of the few people in the industry today that has demonstrated willingness to engage with sex in an honest, open-minded manner. 

The most captivating thing about I Want Your Sex isn't what it says about current attitudes towards sex or how artists are insufferable egotistical menaces who aren't nearly as profound as they think they are, but the actors who Araki enlisted to frolic around in his perverted playground. Wilde continues her post-Don't Worry Darling heater with an exhilarating portrayal of a miserable artist whose career decline hasn't impeded her ability to maintain a sexual muse that she takes great pleasure in toying with while Hoffman further cements his place as one of the most exciting young talents in Hollywood today by playing this complex character with the ideal mix of sweetness, self-destruction and cringey desperation. Their explosive dynamic carries this film through every turn it takes and there were a few scenes that even got to me question whether there was something real underneath all of the humiliation, toxicity and leather. While they stand absolutely zero chance of being nominated, I'd be thrilled if they both landed in the Oscar race come this winter.

The supporting cast is primarily deployed to punch up the comedy in the absurd situations that the plot throws out, and they deliver in a major way. Mason Gooding drops many of the film's best one liners as Hoffman's co-worker/confidant, Chase Sui Wonders continues to show why her stock in the industry is shooting through the roof at the moment with a delightful turn as Hoffman's best friend/roommate who is incredibly jealous of her pal's new freaky arrangement with his boss and Charli xcx (!) demonstrates a real knack for deadpan comedy as Hoffman's perpetually unenthused girlfriend. Araki really struck gold with this ensemble and there's no way this film would've soared to the levels it does without their terrific efforts.

Getting to see Araki return with a pure romp that is so full of laughs, energy and fun is one of my favorite cinematic stories this year. Independent cinema is an increasingly brutal game these days and there's just something really inspiring about watching one of the most important figures in that world make a great movie after being away from the medium for so long. Araki has plenty of creative juice left and hopefully some producers out there will be willing to back his next project so the world doesn't have to wait another 12 years to hear from him. 

Grade: B+

Movie Review: Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Up to this point, MCU Peter Parker/Spider-Man has been portrayed as a very young man. This choice has paid dividends as childlike wonder, wide-eyed optimism and lacking a fully developed prefrontal cortex are huge parts of why Tom Holland's iteration of the character has struck such a chord with the audience. When the last film No Way Home concluded with Parker having Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) cast a spell that made the whole world forget about him, this version of the character was gone for good. Making such a life-altering sacrifice to save the world is a heavy burden to deal with, especially when you don't have anyone left to turn to. Fortunately, Holland, Kevin Feige and the other creatives behind this universe decided to make a movie that focused on the fallout of Parker's choice in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Brand New Day isn't just some phony lip service title. The entire film is a reflection of the transformation Parker has gone through after the events of No Way Home and how he continues to evolve as he's handed a new set of obstacles including figuring who is responsible for a mysterious string of attacks on various facilities around NYC that are owned by a company called Damage Control where the perpetrators are unknowingly carrying out these attacks and reuniting with MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) after they moved back to New York following their graduation from MIT. Parker has clearly been hurting from all of the isolation he's experienced over the past 5 years and his only coping mechanism is throwing himself even harder into being Spider-Man. His efforts to completely bury himself in work were working well enough until he sees MJ and Ned again and then, the pain of his loneliness begins to overwhelm him to the point where it's impacting his ability to be the hero that his community has relied on for so long.

Veteran director Daniel Destin Cretton was the perfect person to lead Spider-Man into this more mature era as he has this really innate understanding of human emotions from all of the time he's spent making character-driven dramas (Just Mercy, The Glass Castle, Short Term 12). Parker's emotional arc is one that is packed with vulnerability and doesn't contain a single false note as he puts in the work to get back to a place where has the courage to try and connect with people without being consumed by the fear that he could eventually lose them. It's a real blessing that Holland and Cretton took the assignment of exploring Parker's emotional state post-No Way Home so seriously as it's not exactly difficult to envision a scenario where there was far less care put into Parker's journey of putting the pieces of his life back together and we ended up with something that didn't have much in the way of real emotional resonance. It was time for Parker to evolve, and his metamorphosis really couldn't have been more graceful than what is portrayed here.  

The bonus side effect of having Parker go on a weightier emotional journey here is that it presented the opportunity to make better use of the acting gifts of Holland and Zendaya. Holland does a tremendous job of embodying someone who's burdened by the weight of loss and being alone in this cruel world trying to find their way again. As great as he in the rest of the film, his performance peaks when he's sharing scenes with Zendaya. The emotional conflict of the movie really kicks into high gear when Parker and MJ reunite, and Parker has to face the fact that he's now a stranger to MJ. Their understanding of the characters and each other as performers is second to none and that familiarity and knowledge makes for some really powerful moments that deserve to go down as some of the most impactful in the entire history of the MCU. Casting these two was one of the best decisions Feige has ever made and Brand New Day is an occasion that is worthy of another victory lap for this monumental triumph.  

When you go beyond the emotional journey of Parker, the success rate of Brand New Day is a little more mixed. On the plus side, the action proficiency that Cretton showed on Shang-Chi carries over here as it contains easily the most exciting, clearly legible fight scenes of the MCU Spider-Man entries thus far while Jon Bernthal's cold, gruff antihero Frank Castle makes for the ideal foil for Holland's morally consistent, good-natured hero. On the downside, Sadie Sink-who is pretty good in her "secret" role-is incorporated into this storyline in a pretty clunky fashion and the emotional catharsis that's supposed to be attached to her arc makes only a small fraction of the impact that Parker's does. Still, Brand New Day presents an exciting path forward for the character and I'd be pretty surprised if this didn't end up surpassing Homecoming as my new favorite Holland-era Spider-Man movie in time.

Grade: B+

Tom Holland Ranked

Welcome to "Ranked", a weekly series where I rank a franchise or filmography from worst to best and hand out assorted related superlatives. This week, I'm profiling the work of Tom Holland-whose latest project "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" opens in theaters today. 

Tom Holland's Filmography Ranked:

15.Chaos Walking (D)

14.Onward (C)

13.Uncharted (B-)

12.In the Heart of the Sea (B)

11.Spider-Man: Far from Home (B)

10.Spies in Disguise (B)

9.Captain America: Civil War (B)

8.Locke (B)

7.The Devil All the Time (B)

6.Spider-Man: No Way Home (B)

5.Spider-Man: Homecoming (B+)

4.The Impossible (B+)

3.The Odyssey (B+)

2.Avengers: Endgame (A-)

1.Avengers: Infinity War (A)

Top Dog: Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

The most obvious challenge surrounding Avengers: Doomsday is trying to figure out how to fit dozens of characters from Marvel's cinematic past, present and future into a coherent storyline. For my money, the most daunting one is trying to make something that handles a powerful threat to the typically indestructible heroes of the MCU as well as Infinity War did. From the moment that Thanos appears on screen, there's a sense that this collection of heroes is overmatched and that lingering feeling of dread made this film an exhilarating ride that is unlike anything else Marvel has done to this point. The Russo Brothers, Kevin Feige and co. are going to have dig really deep to replicate this feeling and if they don't, this latest two-part Avengers epic could be destined to permanently live in the shadow of the previous one.

Bottom Feeder: Chaos Walking (2021)

About the only positive impact that COVID had on the movie industry is that there was a window of time between August 2020 and April 2021 where they could dump titles they weren't happy with into theaters without having to warry about the blowback they would have otherwise gotten from bad word of mouth and losing boatloads of money. Lionsgate's dystopian sci-fi thriller Chaos Walking was one of the lucky titles released during this window. Originally set to release in the spring of 2019, Chaos Walking got delayed as Lionsgate commissioned heavy reshoots led by a different director (Fede Álvarez took over for Doug Liman, who received sole directorial credit on the final cut) with the hopes of salvaging the project. As you could probably guess by the first couple of sentences and the strong likelihood that this is a movie most people reading this haven't even heard of, let alone seen, they didn't succeed. Personally, I was kind taken of back by how aimless and meandering this project was given the amount of talent that was involved (beyond the pair of solid directors who worked on it, the ensemble cast included Holland, Daisy Ridley, Mads Mikkelsen, Cynthia Erivo and Demián Bichir). I had it ranked as the worst movie I watched in 2021 and there's probably only about 5-8 movies from the entire decade that I would rate lower than it at this point.

Most Underrated: The Devil All the Time (2020)

Speaking of COVID-era projects, The Devil All the Time was part of Netflix's big fall awards hopeful slate in 2020. As Mank, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and The Trial of the Chicago 7 emerged as the focal points of their campaigning efforts, The Devil All the Time quickly became just another piece of content rotting away in the vast emptiness of the Netflix library. It's a shame that it met this fate as Antonio Campos cooked up a pretty bleak, intoxicating Southern Gothic thriller here that features a handful of really great performances from its loaded cast (Holland, Riley Keough, Sebastian Stan, Robert Pattinson, Eliza Scanlen) and some beautiful hazy cinematography from future Oscar winner Lol Crawley. 

Most Overrated: Captain America: Civil War (2016)

Captain America: Civil War is a film with plenty of highs (the introductions to Black Panther and Spider-Man, the action sequences, weightier material that allowed all of the gifted actors on the MCU payroll more chances to show off their talent). Those highs just happen to be somewhat undercut by its boring villain (Daniel Brühl's Zemo), uneven pacing and refusal to really dig into the moral disputes that cause the titular divide between the typically united MCU heroes.  

Movie Review: Her Private Hell

Picture Tokyo in an unspecified cyperpunk-y future. A strange mist has completely engulfed the city and within that candy-colored haze, lies an unholy masked entity with diamond-encrusted gloves known as "Leatherman" who goes around the city kidnapping and/or killing women. Unbeknownst to them, three American actors (Sophie Thatcher, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Forseth) who are in town to shoot a sci-fi movie are about to be the become next targets of Leatherman. Meanwhile in the criminal underworld, an American solider (Charles Melton) is slicing his way through Yakuza shot callers with the intention of getting information that will help him track down Leatherman-who took his daughter years earlier. Will Leatherman claim some more souls before the mist fades or can he finally be thwarted? The answer for those who are curious to crack this supernatural crime spree, lies within the 110 minutes of this summer most uh, unique movie entitled Her Private Hell.

Her Private Hell marks the return of Nicolas Winding Refn to the world of movies after stepping away from the medium for a decade to make a pair of streaming miniseries (2019's Too Old to Die Young, 2023's Copenhagen Cowboy). If anybody that didn't watch his television shows was concerned that the Danish auteur who is loathed by most and revered by a vocal few had changed since The Neon Demon crashed into theaters in the summer of 2016, rest assured that this is the same NFR. Words like "plot", "writing", or "character development" are of little use here as Refn frantically cycles through a pretty sizable hodgepodge of genre aesthetics (noir, giallo, vigilante, surrealism, cyberpunk, psychosexual thriller, supernatural horror, family drama) with the hope that he'll be able to cast a hypnotic spell that can make up for how little is actually transpiring on screen. For the first 2/3's of the movie, it doesn't succeed in the slightest as the pacing is too meandering to build an atmosphere that's worth getting lost in. Then, out of nowhere at the top of the third act, all of the sex, violence and sleaziness the movie had been teasing with no tangible results finally coalesces into something that's completely fucking mesmerizing. It was like Refn suddenly realized that he should use the beautiful neon lighting and elaborate spaceman sets that he had at his disposal to engage in some psychedelic hedonism spiked with graphic violence for the final 30 minutes. While this incredible groove Refn settles into comes far too late into the movie to fully redeem Her Private Hell, it provided enough of a sugar rush to elevate it out of the gutter and into semi-respectable territory. Considering how little of I thought of it for the opening 70-75 minutes, this is a remarkable late game rally that assures that I will watch whatever silly surrealist bullshit Refn cooks up next. 

Grade: C
 

Movie Review: The Odyssey

It's not a coincidence that Christopher Nolan used the blank check from Universal he earned after Oppenheimer made $983 million at the global box office and won a zillion Oscars 3 years ago to make The Odyssey. Not only has Nolan been working his whole career towards making a sprawling epic, but Homer's text makes for the perfect thematic complement to Oppenheimer as both films focus on a man who was the driving force behind winning a war coming to terms with the price of "victory". In the case of Odysseus (Matt Damon), he has to consider if slaughtering the people of Troy, getting so many of his own men killed and being away from his family (Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland) for decades was a worthwhile trade-off for being lauded as a hero by the people who cheered for the victory without ever bearing witness to all of the death and destruction that followed him. He comes to realize as his memory slowly returns after spending a decade stuck on an island with the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron)-who has fallen in love with him as she nursed him back to health after his unconscious body washed up on her shores-that being victorious in war doesn't help spare you from the burden of inflicting so much suffering onto others. 

Electing to really focus on the true cost of Odysseus' actions during and following the Trojan War is an inspired framing for the latest adaptation of one of the oldest stories in the world. For the first time in a long time, Nolan finds a real narrative reason to trot out his signature cutesy non-linear storytelling device to show Odysseus' fragmented memories returning to him that details the life he left behind, how the war was won and the series of horrific events that led to him washing up on Calypso's island alone. Having all of the choices he made that led him to that beach gradually play out on screen challenges the real mythmaking in The Odyssey-Odysseus as a hero. Being so far removed from all the despair, suffering and death his actions when his memories return forced him to really sit with the weight of his actions and subsequently reframe his own legacy.

Once Odysseus finally gets on the path that brings him home to Ithaca and in turn, something that at least resembles redemption for all of the hurt that he's brought into the world by reuniting with his wife and the son he's never known, the film largely pivots to a more traditional narrative style that highlights the difficulties Odysseus faces as he sets to reuniting with his family and plots one final violent siege to rid his home of the suitors (Robert Pattinson, Corey Hawkins, several others that have little-to-no dialogue) and traitors (Logan Marshall-Green, Mia Goth) that aim to bring harm to the people he loves. In this final chapter, Nolan manages to do something really remarkable by delivering a really powerful emotional crescendo to Odysseus' story (Damon and Hathaway are on fire during their big "reunion" scene) and in the final moments, issuing a chilling statement that the world will forever be doomed to repeat Odysseus' mistakes by forgetting how war brings nothing but needless suffering for all parties involved. As somebody who has always felt that Nolan has struggled in the areas of filmmaking that don't involve spectacle and technical wizardry, I was in a borderline state of disbelief watching him make something that achieved so much success with its dramatic, emotionally charged storytelling.

Since the story of Odysseus is also paved with massive battles and constant peril, Nolan has the luxury of getting to have his cake and eat it too. Every penny of the reported $250 million budget can be felt on the screen as Nolan gives the viewer a front row seat to Odysseus' harrowing journey. There isn't another director working today that would be able to secure the money or have the audacity to do things like shoot extensively on the open ocean, enlist hundreds of extras to reenact the Battle of Troy or depict Odysseus' troops famous encounter with Circe (Samantha Morton) through prosthetics, makeup, etc. instead of CGI. Deep down, Nolan is probably aware of this, and he didn't take this golden opportunity to make something that's uniquely immersive for granted at all. It's a miracle that this movie was made in such a tactile manner and my hat goes off to the remarkably hard work that the thousands of artists who worked on this project put in to make it possible.

The Odyssey marks the first time since The Dark Knight Rises that I walked away from a Nolan movie very impressed. That's not to say that I don't have issues with it (the big action sequences are let down by consistently choppy editing, the dedication to elaborate location shooting really backfired in the cyclops sequence as it's incredibly difficult to make out what is happening in the cave due to how little light can physically get in there and most of the scenes where Odysseus is sidelined ahead of the third act are considerably less compelling than the rest of the movie) or that I was truly floored was by it like so many people out there have been, but I had plenty of doubts about his ability to pull off a great adaptation of this story and it felt good to be proven wrong. Where Nolan goes from here will be fascinating as the possibilities are pretty much endless now it's guaranteed that the film is going to clear $1 billion worldwide with ease. My guess right now is that he's going to go in the complete opposite direction of The Odyssey and make something considerably smaller in scope to give himself a bit of a reprieve after working on a project that he's repeatedly referred to as the biggest challenge of his career during this press tour. Until the day somewhere in the near (?) future when the mystery of what Nolan's next move gets solved, we'll just have to settle for continuing to discuss how the most prolific director on the planet today somehow managed to further elevate his already comically rich legacy with his 13th feature.

Grade: B+

Movie Review: They Fight

It's been a minute since I've seen a movie that feels as incomplete as They Fight. This fact-based sports drama about a recently paroled boxing coach (André Holland) in Washington DC who slowly rediscovers his passion for the sport that defined his life before drugs took him down a dark path after he crosses paths with a community center manager (Wendell Pierce) who introduces him to a couple of kids from the neighborhood (Anthony B. Jenkins, Toissant Francois Battiste) who show real potential as fighters progresses in such an awkward manner that it feels like you're watching a scratched DVD that is skipping multiple chapters between scenes. Characters who appear to be pivotal players in the story during the early going just disappear without explanation. Arcs for both the adult and child characters are assembled with so little detail that it's pretty much impossible to have any emotional reaction besides confusion or indifference. Even the boxing elements kind of feel like an afterthought as only about a third of the far too short 95-minute runtime is actually dedicated to the sweet science. While They Fight isn't aspiring to be some epic boxing movie a la the Rocky sequels, it also shouldn't feel like the filmmakers ran out of money after they shot 60-65% of the script and had to frantically assemble a final cut from the footage they were able to get.

The clumsy, rushed nature of They Fight became more shocking when the end credits sequence arrived and I discovered that the co-writer of the film Andrew Renzi directed a documentary about the people depicted in it! How the hell could somebody that got to know the real people who these characters are based on do such a terrible job of translating a story he's already told on screen into a dramatized narrative? The raw skeleton of this story is a compelling one that could easily become an effective sports biopic and yet, Renzi and co-writer/director Sheldon Candis managed to turn that solid seed of an idea into something that's sloppy to the point where it borders on being amateurish. There's absolutely no excuse for turning in a poor effort that leaves your solid cast who all turn in earnest performances out to dry because you couldn't be bothered to tell this story in a manner that wasn't fragmented, soulless and dull. As rude as this is to say, I believe that They Fight deserves its fate of being buried in the depths of a streaming library and I fully expect it to go down as one of the weakest movies I watch this year.

Grade: D+
 

Ben Foster Ranked

Welcome to "Ranked", a weekly series where I rank a franchise or filmography from worst to best and hand out assorted related superlatives. This week, I'm profiling the work of Ben Foster-whose latest project "Motor City" releases in theaters on Thursday. 

Ben Foster's Filmography Ranked:

20.The Finest Hours (D)

19.The Contractor (D)

18.King Ivory (C-)

17.Big Trouble (C)

16.Phone Booth (C)

15.Leave No Trace (C)

14.X-Men: The Last Stand (B-)

13.Sharp Corner (B-)

12.30 Days of Night (B)

11.Christy (B)

10.The Punisher (B)

9.Hostage (B)

8.Contraband (B)

7.The Mechanic (B)

6.Hostiles (B)

5.Lone Survivor (B)

4.Hustle (B)

3.Alpha Dog (B+)

2.3:10 to Yuma (B+)

1.Hell or High Water (B+)

Top Dog: Hell or High Water (2016)

Prior to Yellowstone becoming a phenomenon that completely transformed his career, Taylor Sheridan was a struggling journeyman television actor (he was best known for his role as Deputy David Hale on the first 21 episodes of Sons of Anarchy) who had hit a home run with his screenwriting debut Sicario. His writing stock continued to skyrocket with his terrific second screenplay Hell or High Water. Like Sicario, Sheridan lets his vivid characters and the tense direction from a veteran filmmaker in David Mackenize lead the charge on what is at its heart a very simple story about two brothers (Chris Pine, Foster) being pursued by some wily Texas Rangers (Jeff Bridges, Gil Birmingham) as they commit a string of small scale bank robberies (i.e. only taking the cash that's in the drawers in the front of the bank) in rural towns with the intention of paying off of the reverse mortgage on their family ranch. Sheridan is just starting to dip his toes back into the waters of cinema after exclusively focusing on his television empire since the release of his second feature directorial effort Those Who Wish Me Dead in May 2021-penning the script for the upcoming Brandon Sklenar-led action thriller F.A.S.T that's currently slated for release in April 2027. Fingers crossed that he can somehow return to the excellent form he showed here.  

Bottom Feeder: The Finest Hours (2016)

Somebody's father or grandfather was definitely floored by the sentimental, old school survival drama schtick of The Finest Hours. I, on the other hand, considered bashing my head off the floor to wake myself up after sitting through this remarkably dry, corny soap opera dressed up as a dramatic retelling of the daring rescue of a Coast Guard vessel off the coast of Cape Cod in February 1952. As much as I can't stand The Finest Hour, I do get kind of bummed out whenever I remember that this marked the last time that Disney ever put out a piece of boomer cry porn like this in theaters. 

Most Underrated: Alpha Dog (2007)

Nick Cassavetes following up The Notebook with such an alternately scuzzy and tragic crime drama is the kind of hard pivot that I can't help but respect. While I can't discard there's a nostalgia element at play here as I saw it when I was 15, I can confidently declare that Alpha Dog features a number of excellent performances (Foster, Emile Hirsch, Justin Timberlake, the late great Anton Yelchin) and handles its several huge tonal shifts pretty well. 

Most Overrated: Leave No Trace (2018)

Fun fact: Leave No Trace has the highest number of reviews (248) of any film that boasts a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. If I were a professional critic, I'd have ruined its perfect score. There's nothing egregiously wrong with Debra Granik's understated family drama about a teenage girl (Thomasin McKenzie) who lives in the woods outside of Portland, Oregon with her veteran father (Foster) whose battling severe PTSD, I just found it to be a pretty meandering movie with emotional beats that didn't really land.