This Film is Not Yet Watchable – May 2024

First things first. Before we get into our usual deluge of potential cinematic shit, a bit of good news. If you’ve been reading this blog with any regularity, you know that I’ve been collaborating with my friends at No Rest for the Weekend and Behind the Rabbit Productions for the last few years, sharing some content and doing some side work for them both in print and on YouTube. Well, as of this month, we’ve made things a bit more official by launching the BTRP Media Network. The project is still in its infancy, but you can check out the hub site here, with links to appropriate blogs, podcasts, and video channels for all our partners.

What does that mean for this space? Not too much. The network exists to give you as much new content as possible in the film sphere, so that you can enjoy and share with your friends. All entities within the network – including this blog and my YouTube channel – will continue to operate with complete autonomy just as we always have. You just may see a bit more promotion on my end for common projects that we work on, or a few more social media posts linking to cool stuff. That’s pretty much it. The actual content I create is still mine and mine alone, and there is no controlling entity to answer to. It’s just a bunch of friends and nerds coming together as a unit, and we hope you all enjoy it.

Now, to the real business, i.e. the garbage. Last month was a doozy, as we came just one trailer shy of our all-time record of badness. With the Summer Blockbuster Season beginning in earnest this month, you’d think things would be looking up. Unfortunately, while there will definitely be some bright spots among the studio tentpoles, we actually did one worse than April, and have TIED the record with 17 previews “earning” a spot here. There was once a time when I said that I’d almost be impressed by such futility, but after all these years, I’m firmly in the depressed column with this. We’ve seen time and time again that it’s not all that hard to make a decent picture, and to sell it in a way that’s compelling to an audience. And yet, somehow things seem to get worse each year.

Oh well, I guess it can’t be helped. I mean, it very much CAN be helped, but no one is paying me to help them, and the people who need the help will never acknowledge that they need it. As such, I remain ever vigilant in my spewing of bile across the internet, and I thank you all for being the company to my misery.

This is the May 2024 edition of “This Film is Not Yet Watchable!”

The Fall Guy – May 3

Okay, let me come right out and say that I don’t think this will be a bad film. When I see the trailer (in a slight departure, I’m using the second trailer for this section of the column, because that’s the one that’s been playing in theatres for the past two months), I admit to there being a high potential for fun, especially with leads as charismatic as Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. That said, there are two things that need to be highlighted, aside from the fact that as adaptations of old TV shows go, I can’t think of a single person who was truly clamoring for The Fall Guy to get the big screen treatment.

The first is the music. I love Journey just as much as the next guy, but this leitmotif of setting the entire trailer to a heavily-edited version of a commercial song is almost as bad as the trend of recording dour, minor key covers of pop songs for the same purpose. For this particular film, the song is so much its own character that the actual clips lose most of their impact if the track isn’t there. Seriously, try it yourself. Play the trailer normally, then play it again on mute. It doesn’t look nearly as enticing.

Second, in a bit of residual annoyance from the Oscars, the one thing that really bugs me about what I’m seeing in this movie about a stuntman is, honestly, a lack of stunts. During the Academy Awards, Gosling and Blunt had a very awkward presentation where they traded bad “Barbenheimer” jokes before tossing to a montage about how important stunt crews and actors are, but notably did not announce an award category for them, even though there’s been a campaign for it for several years. It just felt tone deaf.

In that spirit, when I saw this trailer (and the first one six months ago), I had the same reaction. In a movie about a stunt performer, why are most of the action set pieces and stunts so clearly CGI? If you want to get the audience excited – and if you want to actually pay due tribute to the craft – this should be practical effects and choreography only. There’s no impact when you see Gosling throw a bucket of ice at people and see that the ice itself is just a cartoon. There’s really no stunt there, just a couple of guys tilting their heads back to nothing.

As I said, this will probably still be a lot of fun, but I had to get that off my chest. It just rubs me the wrong way to completely miss the point like that, especially since the original show was from the 80s where special effects weren’t exactly an option.

The Idea of You – May 3

Technically this came out today on Amazon, but I’m not about to start shifting dates back so streamers can feel important. Amazingly, this has an 82% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but I’m sorry, I just don’t get it. It looks like your standard-issue softcore diddle material based off a romance novel, with Anne Hathaway totally appearing to slum it in a role with nothing new to offer.

I mean, are we really supposed to swoon over a 20-year-old kid in a boy band hooking up with a woman in her 30s? You know how these stories often end, right? Even when you get past all the negative tropes and double standards about age gaps in relationships, these films almost always wind up with the couple either splitting up because they know it can’t work, or committing to each other despite all evidence that it can’t work, and we just cut to black without dealing with the consequences.

We’ve seen this all before, and a prime example is, well, Prime, a 2005 flick where Uma Thurman shacked up with a “child,” as she called him, in the form of Bryan Greenberg, who just so happens to be the son of her therapist, played by Meryl Streep. Half the comedy came from Thurman unknowingly sharing every horny detail of their affair well after Streep had figured things out, and the other half came from lame clichés about arrested development as the 23-year-old David was too fixated on the Nintendo GameCube (yes, they really shoehorned in that product placement) to give the 37-year-old Rafi what she needed.

I can’t imagine anything new in this, especially when you add in the inanity of boy bands. This is just a flick for all the women who grew up wanting to boink the Backstreet Boys and are now “too old” to boink the guys from One Direction. When you begin your romance with, “We met at Coachella,” I instantly switch off. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, and you can hate me all you want for it. Ladies, get better books.

Turtles All the Way Down – May 3

Anxiety and mental health issues are important and crucial to discuss through the art of film. Doing so helps bring visibility and awareness to the subject matter and aids in coping when handled correctly.

You know the incorrect way to handle it? Couch the whole thing into some bullshit about a germaphobe who wants to hook up with a hot guy in high school and set the whole thing to Billie Eilish’s worst song. Yeah, no. Few things will turn me off faster than taking a legitimately intriguing theme worth exploring and filtering it through the idiotic lens of ignorant horny teen angst about how they’ll be alone forever set to the mumbling incoherence that played over the credits to fucking Brightburn. Fail. NEXT!

Unfrosted – May 3

“Is this a joke?” asks a child midway through the trailer for Unfrosted, Jerry Seinfeld’s absurdist retelling of the invention of Pop-Tarts, and that was pretty much my takeaway from the entire affair. In this non-stop cavalcade of comedic geniuses like Seinfeld, Melissa McCarthy, and Amy Schumer, there is – in ways that almost defy science and statistics – not a single joke that lands, making you wonder if this is an actual comedy. This entire preview is two minutes and 25 seconds of pure cringe, where the only good idea that pops into your head is to go watch The Big Short again, because that’s what this film is trying way too hard to be.

This is also another case where the inclusion of a catalog track actually siphons enjoyment from the experience. David Bowie was one of my heroes, but the story of a corporation developing a product has got to be the most inappropriate use of “Rebel Rebel” you could possibly think up, especially if you’re trying to do it ironically.

You know, I had really hoped that the return of the theatrical model for movies post-pandemic would mean that I had fewer streaming movies to look at. I figured that once Academy eligibility rules had been restored, that we’d move back away from this glut of studios just passing on their lesser projects to the streamers but still getting them into cinemas for the minimum eligibility run and rated by the MPA. It would make my life so much easier. But no, they insist on throwing money at any established person who has a bad idea, churning out dud after dud, and devaluing their own platforms by relegating all their shitty stuff to them pre-Awards Season. If you want to keep making these asinine pictures, that’s your prerogative, but don’t treat them like real movies that audiences are expected to shell out money for, or that journalists and bloggers have to pretend matter, because they don’t.

Tarot – May 3

If you’re dumb enough to believe in tarot cards, you deserve to lose your money watching this tripe. This is Final Destination bad, people, completely and utterly stupid from beginning to end, based on a made-up superstition that playing the “for entertainment purposes only” game with someone else’s deck means you’re going to die. This might be the flimsiest horror premise ever conceived, and because it’s PG-13, you know that absolutely none of the kills will have any level of gore, and the whole thing will just be a series of jumps scares.

I mean, for fuck’s sake the flick tries to make blind spot sensors on a car into a scare. That’s how far we’ve fallen as a society and as an industry. Good lord this is moronic! This would have been the “winner” for “The Worst Trailer in the World” this month if not for the fact that I did a horror movie for April and really didn’t want to repeat themes. I honestly wonder if the filmmakers heard the classic Steven Wright joke (“Last night I stayed up late playing poker with tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died”) and thought, “Hey, that’s a movie, somehow!”

Not Another Church Movie – May 10

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but what happens when what you’re imitating has never been sincere? Yes, ladies and gentlemen and everyone in between, we’ve somehow found the one thing in the world worse than a Madea movie… a PARODY of a Madea movie!

The mind truly boggles. Trust me, Tyler Perry’s cinematic mainstay has been a thorn in the side of good taste for far too long and definitely deserves to be roundly lambasted, but not in feature length form. We just need to leave it at, “This is ungodly stupid,” and never give him money to make another one. That’s it. This derivatively loving send-up (which steals the title from an entirely different parody movie from 20+ years ago) is definitely not the way to go. The point of satire and parody is to playfully mock the powerful, but when that powerful entity got its power from mocking an entire artform, all you’re doing is playing into their hands.

Back to Black – May 17

Amy Winehouse is one of the more tragic figures in modern music history, a wayward soul who refused to be pigeonholed, made music on her own terms, and sadly died from substance abuse thanks to the insane amounts of societal pressure put on her. Because her rise and fall happened at the forefront of the 24-hour news cycle, we even got an Oscar-winning documentary on her plight made entirely out of media footage. She was truly a unique individual who didn’t deserve the end she got.

But fuck that, because there’s money to be made at her expense with a cheap biopic, yay! She’s been dead a whole 13 years now, goddammit! That’s plenty of time to wait before we profit some more off of the art and labor that eventually killed her!

This is just shortsighted, and honestly kind of disgusting. I’m not all that familiar with star Marisa Abela, as this is meant to be her breakout role (she had a tiny part in Barbie, but not one that any of us would remember), but in watching the trailer, the filmmakers gave her nothing to work with, as all of her lines are either working class clichés, Lifetime movie clichés, or both, and her accent seems to change from scene to scene. Nothing about this performance (that we see in the preview) or the story beats reads as anything above entry level.

But the real reason you shouldn’t watch this (apart from the fact that it’s already been released in the UK and Australia and has a 38% rating so far), is that the marketing itself betrays Winehouse’s legacy. Just look at the onscreen text. “Witness the love story that inspired one of the greatest albums of all time.” That tells you all you need to know. The art doesn’t matter, her life doesn’t matter, only the product matters. Setting aside whatever platitudes they have Abela say, you can’t escape the fact that this is a formulaic biopic just oozing corporate filth, something Amy would have denounced and spat at. To make a dramatized VH1 Storytellers episode out of her suffering in an attempt to render her as a commodity is to insult everything she stood for.

The Strangers: Chapter 1 – May 17

Oh goodie, another horror prequel. What’s it for this time? The 99-Cent Store version of The Purge? Great.

Yeah, I’m out. The only mildly interesting thing is the final scene of the trailer, which feels like the movie itself is trolling the audience forced to watch it in the theatre instead of the film they paid to see. “Why are you doing this to us?” asks a terrified ingenue, to which the masked assailant replies, “Because you’re here.” That about sums it all up, doesn’t it? Why are we subjected to this nonsense? Because AMC can’t let us just have 10 minutes of trailers instead of 25.

Also, if you were ever on the fence about Cage the Elephant, the heavily-affected usage of “Trouble” here might tip you into pure hatred. Just a fair warning.

Thelma the Unicorn – May 17

You know what was missing from those terrible Sing movies that Illumination did a few years back? A “liar revealed” story, lazier animation, and an even worse soundtrack! Also, you know you’re in for a rough time when gawker characters come in to see the “unicorn,” ask if it can do anything special, and it breaks into song, as if the sight of any talking animal wouldn’t be cause enough to go batshit.

I try to find the good in things, so maybe we can take Thelma the Unicorn as a thought experiment in just how fucked we are as a society. See, as the trailer shows us, the impetus for this entire plot is a convenient pothole that a truck runs over, splattering our title character (a miniature pony) with pink paint and glitter, leading her to become a viral music superstar. Let’s find out just how popular this movie becomes, and learn once and for all if people are that easily distracted that literally pouring paint and glitter on something automatically makes it interesting.

Except wait, no, Netflix doesn’t release comprehensive viewership data that can be independently verified, so we just have to take their word when they say it’ll be great, right? NO!

Children deserve better than this.

You Can’t Run Forever – May 17

“Why are you doing this?” asks a man about to be shot by J.K. Simmons in You Can’t Run Forever. “Does it matter?” he replies before pulling the trigger. Well, YES! Yes it does matter why you’re doing this. This film is trying to set up a thrilling chase between predator and prey where Simmons is a lethal man with no mercy, so you need to establish his motives. It’s called character development, and it’s among the most basic of needs for good storytelling.

It’s also why this trailer fails to resonate. We get an early scene of Simmons giving some kind of survivalist lecture before implying that he murdered his wife after catching her cheating on him when he came home. Okay, that explains one death, but it has absolutely no connection – at least as far as we’re told – to why he then targets Random Meek Woman Who Will Somehow Prove Stronger When The Script Calls For It And Kill Him #4,712 (played by Isabelle Anaya) and shoots everyone in his path along the way. We don’t know how he knows her, why he wants her dead, or why he doesn’t kill her in what appears to be multiple silver platter opportunities in the preview alone. The idea of a relentless pursuer has its merits, but when you give us no reason to care why she’s trying to stay alive and show us several points where she’s dead to rights, we as an audience have nothing to latch onto.

Also, you can tell just from the clips shown that Simmons puts more effort into voicing the Peanut M&M. As the film notes, the man has an Oscar. You’re better than this, my dude!

Darkness of Man – May 21

Don’t get me wrong, I’m more than happy to see that Jean-Claude Van Damme is still getting work. The man kicks copious amounts of ass. But acting has never been his strong suit, and with the years he’s put on his odometer, that accent only gets harder and harder to discern, to the point that half the things he says are completely unintelligible. Also, as awesome as JCVD is and always has been, I have no desire to see him play a white savior dialed up to 11.

We’d all be better off just watching Bloodsport and The Quest again.

Atlas – May 24

How do you make The Creator look like high art? Make a carbon copy of it a year later with cheaper effects and Jennifer Lopez in the lead. Yes, not only do we have another ill-advised entry in the “Let’s Root for the A.I. in the War Between Machines and Man” Cinematic Universe, but this one serves as the official D.U.F.F. of this shameful motif, once again shoving one of the worst actresses in American history down our throats. Well done, Netflix! You truly have your finger on the pulse of your audience! You won’t let anyone share passwords, but you’ll outright steal someone else’s IP to try to force feed more propaganda about how really, automation is great for everyone, especially media executives!

And by the way, just, bravo on the character names. The A.I. is named Smith. I wonder if he’s got agency of some kind, almost like he’s an AGENT. And gee whiz do I wonder if Atlas feels like she has the weight of the world on her shoulders.

Kill me.

Hit Man – May 24

What we have here is a case of a really intriguing concept getting screwed over by stupidity. Glen Powell is a fun and versatile actor, and Richard Linklater is one of the greatest writers and directors ever (especially when he does something other than fetishize Texas). The idea of showing us the escapades of a fake hitman as he entraps would-be killer contractors has a ton of potential, and as we see in the early shots, Powell gets to show off his comedic chops with aplomb.

But then he gets a boner. And everything goes to shit.

At that point, any interest I have is gone. It’s not just that he gets distracted by the hotness of Adria Arjona. Any of us would. It’s the fact that all momentum comes to a screeching halt because he builds up this reputation and persona of being really good at his job, only to undercut that by screwing up his entire operation (and potentially getting someone murdered) because his cock took precedence. From that point on, I have no desire to see the character succeed, all his credibility is shattered, and this just becomes another generic action comedy that feels like it doesn’t know what it’s doing.

That’s just not how the world works. Despite what the entertainment industry might have you believe, most men won’t put blinders on and throw away their entire career (and other people’s lives) just to get laid, even if it is someone as gorgeous as Adria Arjona. The film posits that this is based on an actual person, but the sense of fun and reality are instantly dashed when you succumb to so simple of a trope.

The Legend of Catclaws Mountain – May 28

If you want to know why you should instantly stay away from this, look no further than one of the first lines of this trailer. “My grandma got me a pony.” Oh goodie, so our protagonist is super relatable! Fuck off.

Anyway, this flick has all the earmarks of a Disney Channel movie that Disney itself deemed unwatchable. It’s full of kiddie adventure and fantasy clichés (including an unconvincing talking horse and convenient greedy prospectors), a gang of precocious tweens that feel like they were pulled straight out of the ’80s, and even has a narrator that sounds like an imitation of Jon Bailey’s imitation of the late Dan LaFontaine. Seriously, you could have told me this was a Goonies ripoff from 1993 and I’d instantly believe you.

The funniest part of all is that the narrator reads off the lead actors like they’re household names. Oh sure, you’ve definitely seen something with most of these people (James Duval played the teenage Miguel, son of Randy Quaid’s Russell in Independence Day, but he’s in his 50s now; Robert Davi was actually one of the Fratellis in The Goonies, to extend that reference; and Dee Wallace was the mom in E.T.), but I guarantee you that no one watching this trailer is going, “Oh yeah, Robert Davi, this is totally going to be an A-List project!”

What You Wish For – May 31

So let me get this straight. A desperate, down on his luck chef gets recruited to cook a high-end meal for a group of rich people who will kill him if the dinner is unsatisfactory? And there’s only a half-dozen of them, none of whom look particularly threatening? If only he had some kind of means of escape. A weapon he might be able to use to quickly dispatch those who would do him harm. But where would a chef find such a simple way to solve his problems?

Yeah, this is what we call false tension to stretch out a plot. Of course he’s got a set of knives and could end the entire affair in two minutes, but we’ll pretend there’s something preventing him from doing just that (even though we’re inserting sword sharpening sound effects as he chops fucking mushrooms) in order to artificially push this to feature length.

Sorry, not buying it.

Young Woman and the Sea – May 31

Did you like Nyad? Well then you’ll love Young Woman and the Sea, because it’s basically the same picture. No, seriously. The former was about Diana Nyad swimming from Cuba to Florida. The latter is about Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel. This version will have more polish and cheesy CGI effects because Disney’s making it with Jerry Bruckheimer, and having it star Daisy Ridley because she’s probably still partially owned by the House of Mouse due to her Star Wars contract, but basically that’s it.

If you didn’t like Nyad, then you’ll be even less enthused for this, and not just because this movie clumsily lifted the title of a Hemingway novel for it. Even more than last year’s entry, this trailer piles on the tired, repeated feminist lines and heavy-handed sexism (there was more subtlety in Jennifer Lawrence snidely suggesting that James McAvoy rename his time the X-Women), and doesn’t even bother to counterbalance that with any of the intense physical training that Annette Bening had to go through for her role.

Joy.

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Phew. That was a lot. Man, I gotta catch my breath. I feel like I just swam a marathon. Maybe someone will make a mediocre film out of it one day.

Anyway, it’s time to hit our monthly rock bottom at last. Despite what I said about Tarot earlier, the May honoree for “The Worst Trailer in the World” was never truly in doubt. Sure, I looked at the cheap horror laziness as a potential candidate, but really, there could only be one victor here, and it’s the film that almost makes laziness into a meta artform by taking one of the most well-known lazy characters out of his tried and true environment and thrusting him into a lame animated adventure filled to the brim with uninspired plot beats and themes that are in direct conflict with nearly 50 years of established content.

The Garfield Movie – May 24

But no, seriously, I want some Olive Garden breadsticks like, right now. I had Italian for dinner tonight, and while the meal was tasty, they gave me these garlic knots that were almost gag-inducing. I need my carbo-loaded crack!

***

Finally, we end this trek as we always do, with a right ray of sunshine. It’s time for this month’s “Redemption Reel.” Now, just because this gives me a positive vibe, that doesn’t mean it’s all smiles and rainbows. In fact, this month’s winner looks bleak as hell, and that’s exactly as it should be.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – May 24

I have been looking forward to this from the moment it was announced. One of the coolest things about Mad Max: Fury Road (apart from the motherfucking FIRE GUITAR!) is how thorough George Miller was in constructing this newest chapter in his greatest work. I’ve always been a fan of the franchise (Beyond Thunderdome was my favorite for a long time), but he went above and beyond with Fury Road, fleshing out every character, including creating a backstory and screenplay for Furiosa, which Charlize Theron used to help prepare her for the role. That is an insane degree of commitment to your craft.

Now, nearly a decade after that glorious achievement, we have the prequel film for this breakout character, and from what we can see in the trailer, it’s going to deliver on all the promise that the previous entry built up. Anya Taylor-Joy feels like the perfect fit for the role, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what Chris Hemsworth will do with what appears to be an awesomely cartoonish villain in Warlord Dementus.

More importantly, while there looks to be a bit more of an imbalance between practical and digital effects in this, you can still tell that the effort was put in to make the CGI as realistic as possible, expertly blending the camera angles, editing, and color schemes that Miller used so wonderfully last time out. Even in just two minutes, we’re shown enough to know that when the text says, “This is her odyssey,” we can believe that the scale of the action and story will live up to the actual definition of the word. “Can you make it epic?” asks Hemsworth at the end. We know Miller absolutely can, and I am so stoked to see how this turns out.

***
That’s all for this month, folks! As always, I hope you enjoy yourselves at the movies, no matter what you end up seeing, and that the days and weeks ahead treat you well.

Join the conversation in the comments below! Do you plan on seeing any of these films? Was I too hard on any of them? Seriously, how exactly is anyone supposed to find tarot cards scary? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) and YouTube for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!