To start this week, a story. On Tuesday, I saw Get Away had a showing in Ann Arbor this past weekend. That’s about 20 miles from where I live, so not that bad. Right before I went to buy a ticket for it at the Cinemark there, i happened to check the AMC app to see what was playing on Saturday. As luck would have it, Get Away had a 12:30 showtime at the Livonia location (the place I see 75% of my movies). So, that was the new plan as I wouldn’t have to spend money to see it there. Fast forward to Saturday, and I just get to the theater at 12:30, sit in my seat, and nothing is happening. At 12:40, I went to the front desk and let them know the movie hasn’t started yet. The worker there jumped on the walkie to have someone start it. I thanked her and went back to my seat. At 12:50, the manager walks in , and I’m thinking oh no. I see in his hand the pad of re-admittance tickets and know think we are getting them because of the delay. I was partly right. Turns out the theater didn’t have the film to play it. AMC’s website was wrong. So I got two re-admittance tickets to add to the one I got when I saw Dune: Part 2 in a theater with no heat. I then got in the car and headed to the Ann Arbor Cinemark that I originally planned on going to earlier. Lesson here: don’t assume the movie you are planning on seeing is actually there to be played. On to the reviews!
Why in the world Warner Bros is trying their hardest to quietly send this to Max in a few weeks is beyond me. I was sure I was destined to wait until it hit there before I saw it since none of the 34 theaters Warner placed it in was in Michigan, and the closest was Chicago, and I didn’t feel like making that drive again after doing it in October. As luck would have it, it showed up in a theater in the northern suburbs here in Detroit, so I jumped at it. I’m glad I did because this was great. Eastwood’s recent films haven’t really worked for me, but this one was so much better. To describe the plot simply, Nicholas Hoult’s character Justin has been selected as a member of the jury of a high profile murder case. The problem for him is as the trial moves on, he starts to realize he might have actually been the one who committed the crime. What follows is Justin’s conscience really trying to get him to admit to the crime. Hoult was excellent in this, but also good here was Toni Collette as the prosecutor running for D.A. Also good were J.K. Simmons and Cedric Yarbrough as fellow members of the jury. The interesting part of this is watching Justin and wondering how nobody can tell something is off with him. That telegraphing his character does is just for our benefit, but we really didn’t need so much of that. It’s pretty clear he did it early on, and you can tell that in the trailers too. The film just becomes a waiting game on when/if the truth comes out. That tension worked really well at times, and it makes you feel strange you feel tension that the correct person will get punished for a crime. Eastwood is not getting younger, so for this to be one of his final films is certainly a good one to end on. It’s too bad Zaslav doesn’t seem to care if people see it in the theater.
Something that annoys me a bit with film festivals is that I’ll read about films that premiere there, then just wait until a studio purchasing the rights to said films decide to release them to us commoners. Hit Man and Woman of the Year were from festivals last year, and AReal Pain a few weeks ago was at Sundance in January. The flip side of this is me seeing September 5 or The Brutalist in Chicago back in October. I bring this up as Y2K debuted at South by Southwest in March. I think the one shot of Zegler, Martell, and Dennison was the only still from the film until the trailer came out in September. We finally got it the weekend, and it certainly was something. The plot is simple: What if when the clocks turned to the year 2000 the machine apocalypse that was feared actually happened. We see the chaos through the actions of a bunch of high schoolers, and they are just as grating as I figured I was at that point in time. That isn’t a bad thing for the movie, it just makes things a little more believable. The cast is fun in this selling such a stupid, fun movie, but the only part that annoyed me was Kyle Mooney. As he was also the director, you could really see his weird sense of humor through this that we saw during his thine at SNL. The issue I had though was his character in the movie. I never have liked Mooney’s acting style. It just wears me down quickly. He thankfully isn’t in this for most of the movie, and what we are left with is a pretty great group of teens navigating the robot hellscape. This is exactly what you think it will be. It’s a pretty dumb, but fun film that really doesn’t take itself seriously. We don’t get a lot of films like this. Maybe that is a good thing for some. I wish we got more.
After the great trek to see this as discussed above, I was really hoping it was worth the hassle that I put up with. For the most part, I was enjoying it. The story is about an English family going on a holiday on a remote island to see the festivities of a time called Karantän there. The issue is even though they rented a B&B in the island, they are very not welcomed by the commune on the island. For the first 2 thirds of the film, this seemed like a flipped version of Ari Aster’s Midsommar, in that a group of outsiders are “invading” a yearly tradition. Having seen that film, I suspected I knew where the story was going. Oh man was I wrong, and that last third is where this kind of lost me a bit. If you are sitting in there watching this movie wondering why it’s rated-R, the last 30 minutes are there to show you why. I want to get into my thoughts of the cast, I have to be pretty vague, as my thoughts on all of them shift once the third act hits. Someday I’ll talk further on this one probably.
After a pretty weak weekend we just had, the bigger movies are coming out. This next week isn’t the big week this month, but is just be bigger than the $3 million the new movies made this last weekend….
- Kraven the Hunter
- Moana 2
- Wicked: Part One
- Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
- Gladiator II
Well, after just under 2 years of delays, Kraven the Hunter will finally be released this week, Will it be awful like almost all of the Sony Spidey films with no Wall Crawler? I’ll find out Thursday. That will be the film between a mystery movie tonight, and the Lord of the Rings anime on Saturday. It could be an interesting week for me. Finally, a programming note: the 1993 Tournament begins tomorrow night at 7 pm!
Mitten Film Nerd 
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