Last week, Anora took the big prize at the Academy Awards winning Best Picture. It also made a little history too. In the Festival circuit, there is the Big Three. That would be the Berlin International Film Festival, the Cannes Film Festival, and the Venice Film Festival. The top prize at those festivals are among the most prestigious awards in the film industry. Those awards are the Golden Bear (Berlin), Golden Lion (Venice), and the Palme d’Or (Cannes). That last award is what Anora won at Cannes last year. In winning the Oscar last Sunday, it became only the 4th film to win both the Palme d’Or and Oscar for Best Picture. The other 3 to win both were The Lost Weekend (1946), Marty (1955), and Parasite (2019). I guess we will see in May when Cannes wraps up for this year who will be half way to joining the now 4 to win both awards. On to the reviews!
On paper, this should have worked. With a cast of Bill Murray, Ed Harris, Gabrielle Union, Lewis Pullman, and Pete Davidson in a crime comedy, you would think this be a good one. It really wasn’t for me though. We are following an extended family where Harris is married to Union and they have a son (more on him in a minute). Harris’s other son, his girlfriend, and his ex wife (Jennifer Coolidge) then show up. It turns out they are on the run from Murray and Davidson who are after them for some reason that is revealed at the end of the second act. What we have through most of this film is flashbacks and backstory that really is just filling time. We only have 15-20 minutes worth of plot here. Murray and Davidson are the best here, but the worst is by far Miles J Harvey’s DJ, the son of Harris and Union. That character was a cartoon character. He serves as our narrator, but he inserts himself in scenes that he doesn’t belong in because the film thinks it would be funny. It is just annoying. This film was just over 100 minutes, but I could make the argument you could effectively tell the story in 30 minutes. You could even keep it non-linear like this film does. The third act was the only part that I got interested in, so reflecting on wasting so much time to get there just bummed me out. This could have been so much better.
I will preface this with something I have brought up many times before: I am a wimp with gore and uber violence. Usually, I just have to avoid horror movies to not have to go through watching that. Again, I’m a wimp. Going into this, I kind of had a feeling it was going to be that kind of movie. In this, Jack Quaid plays Nathan Caine, a man with a rare disorder that leaves him with the inability to feel pain. That means you can do so many gruesome things to him, and they do. What gives us a plot here is Nathan begins to date a coworker named Sherry, and when a robbery takes place at the bank they work at, Sherry is taken hostage. What Nathan decides to do is chase after them and rescue Sherry. The fight scenes they have for the three big showpieces are very good, and they get more and more violent. That final fight sequence was brutal, and there was something in there that I just couldn’t watch. The sound of both the action and the people around me was enough for me on that. I do have a couple of comments on this that will give the ending away, so I will keep them back for now. Just know I have quibbles with the final 5 minutes. Still, even with my personal problems that I am trying to improve, this was very entertaining movie. You just need to know what you are getting into here. This isn’t a soft R rated film.
This movie is what the title of this week’s post is referring to. Mickey 17 has had an interesting path to finally being released in theaters. Back in 2022, Bong Joon-ho announced this would be his follow up to his 2019 Best Picture winner Parasite. Warner Bros scheduled it for a March 29th, 2024 release. Then the strike happened and the studio pushed it back 10 months to January 31 of this year. They then pushed it back further to April 18th, but changed the release one last time to March 7th, switching dates with Sinners. So, was all that delay worth it now that it is out. Yes. This was really good. Set in the future, Robert Pattinson plays Mickey Barnes. Mickey decides to be and “expendable” on a space ship sent to colonize a new planet. As an “expendable”, when he is killed, a new copy of him with all his memories is printed out. So, in the ship, he is the guinea pig, and is used to test for viruses or sent out to any dangerous situations that could harm a normal person. The only real good thing he has is Naomi Ackie’s Nasha, who becomes his girlfriend pretty quickly into the journey to Nilfheim. Leading this quest is Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette). Kenneth is a failed politian with a very loyal supporter base, and he is also an egomaniac.
As you could guess by the title of the film, our Mickey we are following is the 17th version of him, after we watch how the 16 other Mickeys met their end in all sorts of ways. Our plot really gets going when after circumstances (keeping things vague here), 17 discovers that they printed out 18 thinking his predecessor was dead. Since multiples are illegal, this causes issues for the Mickeys. There is so much more in this I want to bring up, but this doesn’t need to be really long, and spoilers. There is a species that lives on Nilfheim that becomes a major plot point that is fun. Steven Yeun’s Timo (Mickey’s fiend from Earth) is interesting when he pops up. In the end, this is just a fun sci-fi film that isn’t going to win over those that need a true thought provoking storyline. This is just very enjoyable for the lunacy that Joon-ho decided to throw at us.
This was just an unpleasant film to sit through. In this Geoffrey Rush’s Stefan is a judge who suffered a stroke while on the bench. He is sent to a nursing home that is being terrorized by John Lithgow’s Dave. Dave also has a puppet with him almost at all times he speaks through/to named Jenny Pen. When you watch the trailer, you get the sense there is something spooky with the puppet, but I will just spoil it here: it’s just a puppet and Dave is a psychopath. That would be interesting, but there is nothing else in the film that works. Stefan is insufferable the entire duration of the film, and you really have nobody to root for. More glaring is that in the nursing home, there is no security and the staff just wander around whenever. I get it’s a movie, but after three times of Stefan telling the staff Dave is doing bad things, and the staff acts like he is just insane and needs to go to bed, you lose the will to care about the plot. I have never walked out from a film, but I came very close for this one. There was only another couple in the theater when I saw this, and when we were leaving I mentioned I should have left an hour ago. They just chuckled and said they thought the same thing. What a dud.
Next week is a full weekend, but only one really has push behind it to take the top spot for the weekend.
- Novocaine
- Opus
- Mickey 17
- Black Bag
- Captain America: Brave New World
As of now, only 4 films this week, and one of those will be a streamer, so a normal week. At one point this week had 6 films part as part of it, but shuffling up the schedule made things easier. What will make things easier for my next couple weeks is if tomorrow’s Screen Unseen is Magazine Dreams or Death of a Unicorn. From a Classic side of things, the last region of the first round’s voting begins tonight, and the second round will begin on Wednesday.
Mitten Film Nerd 
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