Starting this Tuesday is the 78th Cannes Film Festival. As one of the “Big 5” festivals, there are some major films that will be premiering during the 12 day event. While Oscar success isn’t guaranteed if a film wins the top honor of the fesitival, the Palme d’Or, it certainly doesn’t hurt. Recently we have seen two films win the Palme d’Or and Best Picture: Parasite in 2019 and Anora last year. We have also had a lot of nominees from this festival, so this is definitely a jumping off point for award campaigns leading before festival season begins in the fall. This year we have “Highest 2 Lowest“, “Die, My Love“, “Sentimental Value“, and “History of Sound“. Two other films that will premiere that I am very interested in are The Phoenician Scheme and Eddington. I have no doubts that Anderson will bring the goods, but after Beau is Afraid, I am curious how Aster follows that one up. I’m sure I’ll see quite a few of these films in Chicago in October, but until then, on to the reviews!
Nicolas Cage movies are almost always interesting. In this one, he plays the titular surfer (not sure if we learned his actual name) who is attempting his father’s old house on the coast of the Gold Coast of Australia. When he tries to take his son to surf, he is stopped by a local gang/cult of surfers who don’t allow people who don’t live there to surf there. They are led by a man named Scally (Julian McMahon), and Cage buys one of the pizza meant for them, the gang steals his surfboard from his car. They proceed to mess with his reality as Cage is just remains in that parking lot of the beach for the majority of the runtime. Cage is his usual crazy self here, but it is really McMahon who is is the best in this. His leader character is charismatic, and he plays him as a not so outrageous person, so it appears Cage is the crazy one. The story itself kind of loses the plot in the middle a bit, and I think the third act is playing fast and loose with what was established in the early parts. Like things that we know were real and not something Cage imagines. Still, there is no such thing as a bad Nicolas Cage film, so this was a passable hour and a half.
To simplify this plot down to a what it basically is, think 2022’s Bullet Train, but his time on a plane. Our “good guy” in this Lucas Reyes (Josh Hartnett), a former secret service agent that did his job so well, he is on the run from every form of law enforcement. He is tasked by a shadowy government sect led by Katherine Brunt (Katee Sackhoff), who Lucas was previously in a relationship with, to find a hacker/eco terrorist only known as The Ghost on a flight from Bangkok to San Francisco, and hand them over when they land. What Lucas doesn’t know is that the bounty for the ghost was posted online, as were the details that they would be on the flight. So, it’s a plane full of assassins. I won’t give what happens on the plane away, but just know people die in very gruesome, inventive ways. Hartnett is very good in this, as it Charithra Chandran as one of the flight attendants on the flight. What makes this worse than Bullet Train (which I liked a lot more than most people) is that the assassin pool is basically a mob of people. There just isn’t a level of storytelling in most of the fights. It is just ‘I guess that looks cool’. I’m not sure you could make a film like this any better. Setting the film on a airplane mid flight kind of ties one hand behind your back when trying to put together a complete story. It is still fun to watch though.
This was the film that was the most interesting and it had very little to do with the story itself. Before I get into that, let’s talk about the plot. This is 2022 Swedish film (that just reached us now) that follows a teenager who believes her father 8 years previously was abducted by aliens. She joins forces with the UFO club her father founded to try and find him. I know I said this a few weeks ago when I talked about The Legend of Ochi, but this film feels like a 80’s Amblin film in its bones. The misfits who comprise the club are all distinctly unique, and the small scale adventure they all go on is just enjoyable to watch. The third act is certainly something, and tries to provide answers to the film, but it takes what was a small story, and turns it into something much different than what we are led to believe. I don’t say that is a bad thing though. It is god this isn’t that predictable. The bigger issue I had with the film has to do with what I hinted at in in the beginning. This film is from 2022 and originally was called UFO Sweden. The original is filmed in Swedish, so when this got ported over to US release, the producers decided to use a dubbing tool called TrueSync to (using AI) make it look as if the characters are speaking English by changing their mouth movements to match what is being said. The actors all recorded their lines in English as an ADR process, and the tech did the rest of the work. What this does is eliminate the need for subtitles, but what is also did for this film is make it really obvious the film has been dubbed if you know ahead of time. The voices sound unnatural at certain points, and I think I would enjoy the original Swedish version more. That doesn’t take too much away from the film. It is a nice adventure film that harkens back to a time that these kind of films were more prevalent.
The real question here is does Final Destination find what the previous entries seemingly lost. The last one in 2011 opened with $18 million, so that is the bar to pass for Bloodlines. What is against it though is the two headed monster that is Thunderbolts*/Sinners. Thunderbolts* in weekend 2 beat out Sinners by $12 million, but Sinners is continuing to hold strong. There is a chance Sinners gets it’s revenge and win the weekend.
- Sinners
- Thunderbolts* ‘
- Final Destination: Bloodlines
- A Minecraft Movie
- The Accountant 2.
This upcoming week is a pretty soft week since I am avoiding Final Destination like I have for the last two decades. The puzzle is what is Hurry Up Tomorrow going to be on Thursday night. I get nothing out of the trailers, so that could either be a good or bad sign.
Mitten Film Nerd 
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