GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE

 

Mckenna Grace in GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE Year: 2024 Rates: **

Jason Reitman's GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE set up a rural family to become the new Ghostbusters, a cross between the original, created by his father Ivan Reitman along with main-idea-man Dan Aykroyd and the late Harold Ramis, and STRANGER THINGS... centered on a group of small town Middle-American teens more inspired by Steven Spielberg's classic cinema than anything by the patriarch Reitman...

While AFTERMATH had moments, the same primary problem exists in this sequel, Frozen Empire... there's simply no real flow between the now New York City-set character-development and their job busting ghosts...

Emily Alyn Lind in GHOSTBUSTERS

It simply doesn't seem like THESE characters are part of anything to do with paranormal activity, which is why real-life ghost-freak Dan Aykroyd is more part of the story, as a kind of cool uncle, than the original's glib everyman Bill Murray, who phones in a few brief scenes that aren't one bit funny...

The central figure again is Ramis's Egon's granddaughter, Phoebe, a kind of science-goth tomboy who, like Wynona Ryder in BEETLEJUICE, befriends ghosts: herein a beautiful young lady, and there's a more than noticeable lesbian influenced attraction, which should have been either delved into further or not touched at all... And that's the problem... scenes between the dead and living young ladies, or with Paul Rudd (who was the Rick Moranis of AFTERLIFE) trying to become a new stepdad, amounts to very little in a bland adventure/comedy that goes in one nostalgic ear and out the other.

CRAZY PEOPLE

Dudley Moore in CRAZY PEOPLE Year: 1990 Rating: ***1/2

What's basically Dudley Moore's final leading role in a mainstream (live-action) comedy, CRAZY PEOPLE is better than its reputation, which is hardly anything at all...

A shame since this parody of not just the advertising industry but of one man who decided to be brutally forthright with his ads (basically parodying his own job), including taglines about fat people, scary movies, plane crashes, boxy cars, sexy cars and having sex at luxury resorts...

Dudley Moore in CRAZY PEOPLE with Daryl Hannah

Mostly taking place in a mental institution with an endearingly semi-humorous ensemble of troubled patients liken to THE DREAM TEAM, the biggest problem is that CRAZY PEOPLE takes too many detours away from the ads (that his loony friends help him with) and into Moore's romance with older-man's-fantasy Daryl Hannah, always a good actress but their relationship is contrived and horribly unrealistic... 

From classics 10 to ARTHUR a decade earlier, Dudley Moore passed as an anti-sex-symbol sex-symbol... however, at this point he could be her uncle or father and yet, when CRAZY works it works pretty well, overall an enjoyable time-passing flick you can watch again and again... if only the director (Moore's buddy Tony Bill) stuck closer to the actual theme linking borderline insanity with complete and total honesty.

Title for CRAZY PEOPLE

Dudley Moore in CRAZY PEOPLE

Dudley Moore in CRAZY PEOPLE with Daryl Hannah and Bill Smitrovich

Dudley Moore in CRAZY PEOPLE with Daryl Hannah and Bill Smitrovich

John Terlesky in CRAZY PEOPLE with Daryl Hannah

David Paymer in CRAZY PEOPLE with Danton Stone and Bill Smitrovich

CROSSING DELANCEY

Peter Riegert in Crossing Delancey Year: 1988 Rating: ***1/2

Peter Riegert is a brilliantly subtle actor; so much so you can't even notice anything brilliant at all... as in, there's no performance in his roles ranging from Tim Matheson's sidekick in ANIMAL HOUSE, or Burt Lancaster's Scotland-bound employee in LOCAL HERO... he simply IS the character...

Which means something two-fold since, as a perfectly normal, hard-working owner of a Manhattan pickle store, he's the last person that gorgeous Jewish single girl Amy Irving wants to date... especially because her own doting mother (and mom's doting friend) really, almost desperately wants the relationship to happen...

Amy Irving in Crossing Delancey

And, in-between this somewhat buried mainline, CROSSING DELANCEY gets a bit too artsy/progressive for its own good, particularly involving Irving's job as a book publisher's assistant having affairs (or near-affairs) with a pretentiously published author and an unhappily married man...

Then again, all these distractions (also including a handful of girl-friends that often seem like three characters in one) make the relatively few sequences with Riegert that much more important and effective, and even romantic... in a perfectly suited anti-romantic-comedy fashion, neatly towing the line of mainstream and art-house.

Amy Irving and Peter Riegert in Crossing Delancey

Peter Riegert in Crossing Delancey with Peter Riegert

CLASS OF 1999

Bradley Gregg in CLASS OF 1999 Year: 1990 Rates: ***

Bradley Gregg was a pretty good young character-actor, and really stood out as a bad kid in STAND BY ME while in NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS he played the sleeplessly troubled hospital patient into puppets with enough melodramatic rebellion for his inevitable doom to really matter...

But in Mark L. Lester's sequel to CLASS OF 1984 titled CLASS OF 1999... where instead of teachers fighting against lethal gang-member students the gangs are fighting against three human/android teachers... Gregg is trying so hard to be stiffly cool (in a kind of Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western style) he has almost no personality at all...

Patrick Kilpatrick, John P. Ryan and Pam Grier in CLASS OF 1999

Instead of being a cutup who learns about how strong those bionic teachers (led by mad scientist Stacy Keach and played by John P. Ryan, Pam Grier and Patrick KilPatrick) really are, he's already done with drugs and fighting by the opening credits, making his transition not matter since it never actually happens at all..

Instead he just frowns and grimaces, even while dating principal Malcolm McDowell's sexy yet scholastic daughter Traci Lind and, more liken to the ironical police-state-future of ROBOCOP than Lester's gritty teen-angst original, CLASS OF 1999 plays like a straight-to-video title that's surprisingly decent for a day off work, school, or whatever you happen to be breaking from.

Bradley Gregg and Traci Lind in CLASS OF 1999

The teacher's house in CLASS OF 1999

Malcolm McDowell with Bradley Gregg and Traci Lind in CLASS OF 1999

Malcolm McDowell with Stacy Keach in CLASS OF 1999

 

GODZILLA MINUS ONE

Ryunosuke Kamiki in GODZILLA MINUS ONE (doing a JAWS imitation) Year: 2023 Grade: C

Japanese cinema (Toho Studios in particular) have made a popular Godzilla vehicle in GODZILLA MINUS ONE, which makes sense since the creature was literally born there: only it pays more homage to American auteur Steven Spielberg's JURASSIC PARK... as the roaring T-Rex-style monster first appears where a failed (hence living) kamikaze pilot takes a military-island breather... and JAWS, after the same central character gets a job on a tattered yet dependable fishing boat, where they drop and shoot floating land-mines instead of barrels (and the approaching dorsal fin's replaced by the creatures' spiked-back resembling immense reindeer horns)...

And while attempting a searing human story in-between the monstrous ocean-to-city attacks... including our much too vulnerable hero meeting a pretty girl raising an orphaned baby in the ruins of their hometown... the action and downtime feels awkwardly imbalanced as the titular GODZILLA, looking fitfully menacing and formidably ferocious, seems like a special guest star crashing an otherwise slow-burn postwar-melodrama.

Godzilla in GODZILLA MINUS ONE aka Gojira -1.0

Godzilla in GODZILLA MINUS ONE aka Gojira -1.0

Godzilla in GODZILLA MINUS ONE doing a JURASSIC PARK imitation

THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER

Linda Blair in THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER Year: 2023 Rating: *

Ellen Burstyn's Chris MacNeil complaining that she wasn't allowed to actually witness the exorcism of her daughter Regan, played by Linda Blair, would be like the mother of a kidnapped child being bitter and angry that she wasn't present when her child was saved in a house full of armed, dangerous felons (who wind up killing the men saving her)... And, get this... she BLAMES the Catholic church for basically being chauvinistic...  

Underlining the fact that the original EXORCIST, although originally deemed demonic itself to Christians and Catholics, can now be considered Faith-based being that without God, there is no Satan at all...  

Ellen Burstyn in THE EXORCIST BELIEVER

That said, BELIEVER sluggishly plays-out like a cheap, too-darkly-shot, CGI-filled straight-to-streaming throwaway that is simply no fun at all... and yes, the original classic has many moments of the audience not only reacting to terrifying possession scenes with Linda Blair, but getting to know the other two main characters with both intensity and sarcasm, in particular Burstyn and younger priest Jason Miller as Karras... who, in the William Friedkin classic, wound up the 11th-hour sacrificing hero while the absence of the latter (i.e. a solid central protagonist) takes away from this movie's expository structure even beyond having two girls possessed instead of one... because you never get to know either girl enough to base an entire 2-hour movie on... 

Starting out with the girls lost in the woods, involving a cult of homeless freaks, there's a rudimentary glimpse of intrigue, and perhaps they could have centered more perspective on the pair and their own spooky pre-possessed plight: but all that's quickly abandoned, replaced with what's basically a replica of the original yet without any real suspense or, with a stressed-out single father in charge, no logical reason or any purpose and, news just came out that they're abandoning a sequel to this sequel and starting over with a NEW reboot instead... which is important information lacking in any review written before May 30th, 2024...  So whatever did POSSESS this film's creation has thankfully been exorcised, forever. 

Linda Blair in THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR (2013)

Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color Rates: ***1/2

Celebrated French teenage-lesbian romantic-drama stars now famous Léa Seydoux and still unknown Adèle Exarchopoulos... the latter being the true lead (the original title translates to THE LIFE OF ADELE) as we go through her daily high school routine ranging from teachers teaching to a pseudo-boyfriend flirting to her finicky gal pals gossiping... soon enough about how she's been seen hanging around with Seydoux (who she kind of accidentally met at a girl-gay bar) as the lovely and confident blue-haired artist Emma...

When both first see each other crossing the street, it's intense intrigue at first sight, which is how the director grabs the audience, albeit sometimes dragging out their relationship through mundane family dinners to backyard parties while the lesbian bedroom scenes become far too graphic, paling to the rudimentary budding-relationship aspects featuring Adèle with full lips kissing Seydoux, comparably more sexy than anything taken further: ultimately making BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR far too long, often overreaching the more simple mainline of two young opposites in love, which, when centered only on them, is right on target.

Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color

Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color

Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color

Adèle Exarchopoulos first kiss with Alma Jodorowsky in Blue is the Warmest Color

Adèle Exarchopoulos first kiss with Alma Jodorowsky in Blue is the Warmest Color

Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color

Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color

Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color

Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color

Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color

Adèle Exarchopoulos in Blue is the Warmest Color

Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color

Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color

Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color

Adèle Exarchopoulos in Blue is the Warmest Color

Alma Jodorowsky in Blue is the Warmest Color

Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color

Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color

GIA (1998)

Angelina Jolie playing Gia Carangi would be like, musically, if Jeff Beck played a concert celebrating Eric Clapton... while both Jolie and Carangi are knockouts, they're completely different kind of knockouts: Gia was subtle, more cute-gorgeous while Angelia's... well... Angelina Jolie and, acting-wise, is quite good here, wielding the kind of energy that steals her own movie... yet it often feels more like a biopic set during the 1990's than the 1970's/1980's...

The director's partially to blame, making GIA seem a bit too much of exactly what it is: a risque cable movie (or one of those Don't Do Drugs Specials without any specific reasons behind her using) that sporadically almost-reaches big-screen potential (the documentary-style interview/interludes mirroring another doomed beauty flick, STAR 80)... meanwhile the lesbian scenes with Kim Dickens needed to evolve past cliche lipstick chic... although they did both have terrific chemistry in their build-up, and, overall, Jolie's almost too good here, not seeming like she's portraying an actual former niche celebrity but embracing the fact she's on the verge of becoming a revered beauty-icon herself: Or like she's rebooting Gia's life rather than factually reliving it... which isn't too shabby, either way. GRADE: B—

Kim Dickens and Angelina Jolie

James Haven and Angelina Jolie in GIA

White Shadow star Joan Pringle in GIA