Adam Sandler’s track record with Happy Madison Productions has drawn an equal amount of praise and ire from audiences. The former SNL funnyman has curated a dedicated fanbase that flocks towards his zany projects, even though many of them are labeled as woeful missteps by critical pundits (looking at you Jack and Jill). Continuing his streak of Netflix Originals, the Sandman returns to the screen with his latest goofy hangout comedy Hubie Halloween, a flawed, yet agreeable comedy that soundly highlights the actor’s innate charms.
Hubie Halloween follows Hubie Dubois (Sandler), a much-maligned figure who works to protect Salem, Massachusetts during the Halloween season. While many laugh off his protective ways, the town is turned upside down when some of its citizens start disappearing, leaving their fate in the hands of Hubie as he looks to crack the case.
Similar to his boisterous comedic heyday, Sandler throws himself into the distinctly bizarre role of Hubie with full force. Spotting a nearly-unintelligible accent and limitless energy, Sandler creates a memorable persona that registers an earnest impression as the town’s outcast (Hubie’s ostracized image cleverly connects to Sandler’s own track record with harsh critical pundits). His ability to push Hubie’s quirks to a comedic extreme while still grounding the character in a sense of humanity plays a crucial role in holding the film’s flimsy narrative together. It’s also just a joy to see him babbling gibberish again with child-like glee, displaying the unique presence that made him a beloved staple.
Hubbie Halloween may stick closely to the Happy Madison hang-out movie formula, but it does color its contrivances with some much-needed personality. Familiar faces like Steve Buscemi, Rob Schneider, Maya Rudolph, and Tim Meadows effectively tap into the strengths of their comedic personas, with Buscemi’s wildly dedicated turn as a Werewolf stealing several frames. Director Steven Brill does a capable job embracing the film’s seasonal sensibility, working in some devilish jump scares that double as clever comedic setpieces (Hubie’s scared scream always makes for a laugh). Brill marries the holiday’s spooky atmosphere with a playful tonality while exhibiting sturdy visual craftsmanship for a Sandler-led vehicle. There’s also a plethora of loving homages to be discovered throughout, adding a reflective warmth that enhances the film’s easy-going charms.
While the alluring leads mask some of Hubie Halloween’s issues, there are still noticeable faults throughout. Much of these occur when Sandler isn’t onscreen, with B-plots involving a love interest (played by Julie Bowen) and some of the town’s adolescent characters lacking the comedic verve to register an impression. Herlihy and Sandler’s script seems content to go through the motions, focusing on predictable plot contrivances that rarely feel earned in the narrative framework (I wish the film leaned more into its supernatural happenings). It’s frustrating to see Sandler film’s continued reliance on cheap writing crutches, showing a timidness in embracing the earnest slap-dash nature of Happy Madison’s structural approach.
Still, Hubie Halloween works as a humorous and warmly-nostalgic entry in the Happy Madison catalog, perfectly suited for the casual embrace of streaming audiences.
In May of 2016, Copley was invited to join a roundtable discussion with Hillary Clinton, who was campaigning in West Virginia before the state’s presidential primary. Copley, his voice breaking, showed Clinton a picture of his three children and challenged her assertion that she was a friend to coal miners. Copley’s raw emotion broke through the usual campaign chatter, and throughout the campaign, he was a regular on cable news.
Copley tried to take advantage of his surprise political celebrity by running for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 2018. But without money, experience, or a traditional campaign infrastructure, he quickly discovered that being a politician is harder than it looks.
Between the breakneck pace of the news cycle and the magnitude of recent events, The Campaign of Miner Bo could easily be dismissed as old news. But in pursuing this story Director Todd Drezner has struck on something that illustrates what has happened in the US political system, somewhat demystifying it for non-US audiences.
And the system is baffling: Democracy distorted. A self-proclaimed David to the incumbent Goliath, his confidence takes a pummeling when he doesn’t make a dent. Perhaps the most galling thing for Bo is realising that he is less popular than Don Blankenship. A shifty character, responsible for the deaths of 29 coal miners, fresh out of prison. Bo has to consider, is fame more important than integrity? That’s a bitter pill to swallow.
Bo Copley has unwavering faith in historical figures—Jesus and the Founding Fathers . He talks about Jesus in that casual manner that suggests they just bumped into each other at the store. Though it will always give me pause when anyone claims “God told me to do it”, he’s no megalomaniac. (But is that just a question of money?)
At first appalled at Clinton’s coal mining stance, he becomes receptive to her once he discovers the full story. He begins to understand the extent to which media framing creates a new narrative by removing context. Political division is apparent in every conversation he has. But he is uncomfortable responding to the vitriol people have when Hillary Clinton is mentioned: Nervously laughing along with their threats of violence, like the new boy at school.
Bo is conservative to the bone, so Clinton would never go so far as to convert him. But the Republican Party he belongs in is not Trump’s either. He’s likeable. An affectionate family man. A bad singer. He is reluctant to emulate career politicians—all that schmoozing and marketing. He wants to succeed as a person, not a brand. This documentary does not explain Trump’s success, but it goes some way to revealing the failures of the Democrats: Ordinary people, especially those in rural areas, feel abandoned.
West Virginia is one example of an all-or-nothing economy that exists in America. Coal production is everything there, but like Motor City Detroit before it, ordinary people suffer when businesses go bust. They are victims of capitalism, convinced that capitalism will save them.
The Campaign of Miner Bo is a critique of contemporary news media, which invents the news more often than reporting it. He mistakes a short burst of celebrity for something more, yet his passion makes him easy to root for. But ultimately he’s a poor man playing a rich man’s game.
A cursory glance at Relic’s reception shows a split between critics and audiences, with the former praising its ‘expertly crafted atmosphere of dread’ and the latter bemoaning how ‘slow’ and ‘dull’ it is. The audience has got it right this time, for Relic is indeed a trite, laboured debut.
Co-written and directed by Natalie Erika James, the film tells a story of family crisis in which three generations of women – Edna (Robyn Nevin), the grandmother; Kay (Emily Mortimer), her daughter; and Sam (Bella Heathcote), her granddaughter – struggle with the elder’s psychological decline. Like many films before it, Relic uses horror as a metaphor for illness, yet this ghoulishly indirect treatment of dementia is far less scary than the realism of Still Alice, for example.
The film begins as a missing person’s case, with Edna nowhere to be found in or out of her rural, white cladded house. It is an evocative location that’s attractively shot by Charlie Sarroff, whose camerawork is graded with a cool, dark tone that gives the film an overcast aura. Indeed, you can almost smell the petrichor as Kay, Sam and townspeople scour the forest for Edna. These opening moments, perhaps 20 minutes long, are Relic’s best.
When Edna reappears, the film’s modicum of interest plateaus and then slowly declines toward the credits, at which point you’re willing for it to end. The so-called ‘atmosphere of dread’ consists of a lot of wide-eyed, trepidatious slinking, mostly in hallways but also in broom cupboards, and it’s usually caused by mysterious banging noises. It’s all part of a derivative haunted house formula: weird noises, tortured violin strings, moss on the wall – repeat. The only prop Relic gets here is that it doesn’t indulge in cattle prod jump scares.
As Edna’s behaviour becomes stranger, we question whether it is because of her ostensible dementia or some kind of supernatural element. The aforementioned moss, which manifests on people as well as walls, suggests it may be the latter. However, when the family has this little chemistry, who cares? Kay is too po-faced to have a relationship with anyone; all we get from her is a vague suggestion that she’s shared a difficult relationship with her mother There’s some friendship between Edna and Sam, often at the expense of Kay, but nothing approaching a developed, interesting relationship. This is a reflection not of the performances – which are fine – but the script, which is more interested in plodding attempts at ambience than dialogue between its few characters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUBx3hukKJ0
In the climax, this frosty character work gives way to flat metaphor, with labyrinthine corridors representing the confusion of dementia and a fetal, mummified corpse symbolising the infantilisation of old age. It’s presented in a final-form monster climax like that of The Fly, only without all of the drama, heart and horror. Ultimately, Relic has taken the A24-style horror to a point of lifeless inertia, when perhaps it should have considered the transgression of The Exorcist, the detail of Rosemary’s Baby and even the punch of Paranormal Activity.
Timothée Chalamet & Dune: Body Diversity In Action Cinema. By John Battiston.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Skinny guys seldom get the short end of the stick in Hollywood. Really, male actors are generally held to much looser standards than females in the film industry, both in terms of physique and overall youthfulness; the windows of age and body-fat percentage within which women can conventionally hope to find the greatest odds of big-screen success are undeniably, and inexcusably, narrower than those of men attempting to do the same. Nobody’s denying that, and one would be foolish to do so.
That said, one genre in which the preferred body type for top-billed performers tends to be especially particular — for any gender — is action. While we’ve seen the occasional exception or slight paradigm shift to the prerequisite physical presentation of an action star, the genre has steadily continued to prefer actors whose athleticism can be described as anything from chiseled to Olympian to so-big-it’s-a-little-frightening. But even today, one is hard-pressed to find a mainstream shoot-em-up, sci-fi epic or swordplay-infused fantasy tale with a twiggy or plus-sized performer featured as anything more than a joke-a-minute sidekick.
2021 might look a bit different, though. With the release of Denis Villeneuve’s next foray into franchise filmmaking, Dune, having recently been pushed back a year, crowds (or, at least, cinephiles starved for new prestige content after a paltry 2020) will have to wait a good deal longer to see America’s spindliest sweetheart, Timothée Chalamet, wrapped in an inky cloak and armor as beloved protagonist Paul Atreides. But should Dune, in its eventual theatrical run, make the waves Villeneuve and Co. are surely hoping for, it may just provoke a sea change in what moviegoers — and the industry writ large — see as an action star.
One need only revisit the major-studio blockbusters of the last few decades to observe the elevated expectations for a top-billed actor’s physique within the genre. While some may trace the genesis of action cinema to the films of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa or John Sturges, standalone, unadulterated action films — unencumbered by any external trappings of the western, war or samurai genres — really began to come into their own during the New Hollywood movement, earning particular mainstream legitimacy when The French Connection won the Best Picture Oscar in 1972. Gene Hackman, true to self, embodied an average-Joe physicality in that film, but popular action cinema of the following years — particularly from the ’80s onward — saw a sharp turn into extraordinarily muscle-bound machismo that, in several ways, remains.
Buff bodybuilder types like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris were among the most reliable names to (to quote the late William Goldman) “open” a standalone action movie in the ’80s, kicking, chopping and blasting their way through jungles, forests and throngs of barbarians in monolithic fashion. Only in a decade so dominated by sheer brawn would it be considered unusual to cast Bruce Willis — an athletic-looking fellow by most standards — in Die Hard, though his lack of experience in the genre and prominence as a TV comedy star in Moonlighting arguably had just as much to do with that, if not more. Still, it’s telling that Schwarzenegger and Stallone were among the top choices for the lead, though I doubt either of them could pull off Willis’s indelible brand of acidic New-Yawk snark (much less fit into an air duct).
Willis wasn’t the only exception to the you-must-be-this-stacked-to-ride mentality of Reagan-era action, though these anomalies still tended to be physically demanding and rarely fell into the action-and-action-only category — think Sigourney Weaver in the sci-fi classic Aliens (one of few female-fronted blockbusters that decade) or Eddie Murphy (who, judging by his onstage preference for half-zipped leather suits, was no stranger to the gym) in Beverly Hills Cop. But while sturdy stars like Schwarzenneger, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal would continue their hot streaks well into the ’90s, that decade would also introduce a wave of cucumber-cool, lean-muscled men like Keanu Reeves, Will Smith and Nicolas Cage to the forefront of the genre with multimillion-dollar hits such as Point Break, Bad Boys and The Rock.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-c3-XZXqto
What we’ve seen since the turn of the millenium has been more or less an amalgam of the archetypes that preceded it. Outright bulk has been reintroduced into the zeitgeist with the imposing proportions of Vin Diesel, Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson, while likes of Chris Pine, Brad Pitt and Guy Pearce have opted to stay svelte. The latter body type, of course, tends to be the standard for female stars in the genre, and while action films with women at the forefront have seen a significant uptick in the last 20 years, the expectations for a balance between strength and slenderness are still quite rigid; the entertainment world at large is still shamefully loath to embrace a bulky female lead, as evidenced by the discourse surrounding the “Abby” character from The Last of Us: Part II. (Apparently, her strapping build led some to posit that she was transgender. Like…really?)
All that to say, action cinema has rarely afforded headlining opportunities to performers one would be surprised to spot prowling the weight room at the local Gold’s Gym, a trend that’s begun to carry into the next generation of big-screen idols. Even teen and young-adult stars best known for their dorky demeanors, like Ansel Elgort and Tom Holland, often have abs and pecs with enough contour to keep them from being labeled “scrawny,” and to elicit an impressed “Ooh” when my girlfriend and I watched Spider-Man: Homecoming. (Whether it came from her or me is none of your business.)
But Chalamet, objectively lanky as he may be, has an irrefutable pull with the 24-and-under crowd, and will likely be the main incentive for young audiences to see a movie that not only falls beneath the action umbrella, but also aims to reinvigorate a 55-year-old piece of intellectual property. Adapting such an aged — and, in recent decades, unappreciated — tale as Dune is a gamble with anyone at the forefront, but should it pay off, Chalamet’s casting could potentially trigger an influx of similar opportunities for performers deemed even less conventionally built or appealing as he.
None of this is to suggest Chalamet is ill-suited for the lead in Dune, or was cast exclusively to draw viewers outside the film’s likely main demographic of men approaching, or reluctantly surpassing, middle age. As the third-youngest nominee for the Best Actor Oscar, Chalamet has more than proven his weight (no pun intended) in salt with emotionally hefty roles, including those in Call Me by Your Name and Beautiful Boy. With a director so interested in the twistedness of human emotion and identity as Villeneuve helming the adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, Chalamet, whose physical and vocal expressiveness eclipses that of many of his contemporaries, is an apt casting choice. Not to mention, his appearance matches the character’s physical description as “a stringy whipcord of a youth … with ribs there to count,” per the Dune Wiki on Fandom.com. (No, I haven’t read the book; if you were expecting intelligible commentary on the story itself, you’re reading the wrong article.)
This is also not meant to imply that the outward beauty of its top-billed stars is what reliably puts butts in the seats for a tentpole action film. Those who would argue that an attractive cast is paramount for a movie’s success need only look to Villeneuve’s last action-packed venture into an esteemed sci-fi franchise, Blade Runner 2049, which by all accounts underperformed. With a beefy marketing campaign touting the dazzling, robust visages of Ryan Gosling, Jared Leto, Ana de Armas, Robin Wright, Mackenzie Davis and Harrison Ford (about as stately a septuagenarian as you’re bound to find), that film was anything but lacking in eye candy. Rather, 2049‘s problem, one could reasonably assume, was the unfortunate lack of relevance the words Blade Runner bore for contemporary moviegoers — the unfortunate disadvantage a film bears when it isn’t within the consumer-friendly jurisdiction of Disney, Star Wars, Marvel or D.C.
All I’m getting at is that performers falling outside a narrow set of physical criteria aren’t nearly as represented in combat-heavy, explosion-riddled cinema as those within it. But if such a film with someone as alluring, talented yet unconventional-looking as Chalamet were to bring in the revenue 2049 failed to accrue, Hollywood executives (out-of-touch as they can be) might — just might — see it as an indicator that ticket-buyers are more open to seeing action films not necessarily starring someone you’d expect to see on the cover of Men’s Health or Maxim. Imagine a movie landscape wherein actors’ sheer talent, not their relative heft or lack thereof, was the primary factor in whether they could be the next Snake Plissken, John Rambo or Mystique.
One would be grossly hyperbolic to deem Timothée Chalamet’s casting in Dune revolutionary, or even progressive for that matter. But one can only hope it is the first microscopic step toward a much-needed increase in body diversity in action cinema. We’ll just have to wait until next October (if not later) to find out.
Norwegian filmmaker Benjamin Ree’s new documentary is a small story with a big heart, which follows artist Barbora Kysilkova as she forms a fascinating friendship with Karl-Bertil Nordland, one of the thieves who stole her paintings.
Barbora first acts in her own self-interest, keen to understand why Karl-Bertil did what he did and understandably desperate to recover her artwork. It soon becomes apparent that Karl-Bertil has serious drug issues and genuinely doesn’t remember what he did with the paintings, but the pair discover a surprise connection and continue to meet. A strong and loyal friendship is soon formed, as Barbora tries to help Karl-Bertil rediscover himself and get over his addiction.
Ree is a man who knows how to tell a story; the continuity in The Painter and the Thief is expertly crafted, following a riveting structure with genuine surprises and conflicts, as we get to know Barbora and Karl-Bertil both together and independently of one another.
They are both very likeable people; Barbora, in her selfless approach to a man who so wronged her, and Karl-Bertil, a survivor of a difficult upbringing who seems to have lost sight of himself. His reaction to Barbora’s first painting of him is devastating to watch, and one of the most memorable cinematic moments of this year. He’s not used to being treated this way, and it’s in that moment that he realises it’s exactly what he needs.
While Barbora’s influence over him is at the forefront of the picture, the effect he has on her is far more subtle and doesn’t necessarily become clear until the final act. They are both kind but flawed individuals who meet each other at a crucial stage in their lives and offer the support that they need. It’s almost poetic, and by the final scene of the film (a happy accident that brings the story full circle in a special way), both are vastly different people, having grown in ways that they couldn’t have without their friend.
The Painter and the Thief is a classic ‘life is stranger than fiction’ tale about the unlikeliest of bonds formed between two polar opposites; one that leads to genuine healing and personal growth. It’s a meaningful tale of the power of human kindness, and a study of what we might discover if we open ourselves up to others in the same way. It’s exactly the kind of warm, hopeful film that 2020 needs.
