This Film is Not Yet Watchable – June 2024

I think it’s safe to say that this has not been a great year for movies thus far. I know the better stuff tends to be backloaded into the latter half of the calendar, particularly during the fall and early winter for Awards Season, but 2024 has noticeably been on the underwhelming side. Normally by June I have several A and A- grades. Again, the number inevitably goes up as we get closer to November and December, but usually I have some solid stuff to highlight by this point.

As of publishing, however, there are only three A and four A- movies, and those come with asterisks. Of those seven total films, I’ve only officially reviewed three on this site (Dune: Part Two, Civil War, and Furiosa). The other four will be polished off in upcoming “Back Row Thoughts” columns (teaser!), and they’re all independent and festival releases, some technically from 2023 that had to wait until this year to get a public run.

On the flip side of things, Each month it seems I have more and more shit to wade through. So far, 55 films have been featured in this space, and nine more will be added with this month’s edition. That makes for a total of 64, and puts us on pace for 128 by the end of the year. That would beat last year’s record of 122, which shattered the previous year’s mark of 98.

It just seems to get worse and worse, and I put it down to two things. One, while the pandemic offered the chance for streamers to stake their claim on a segment of the mainstream movie spectrum, most have only taken the opportunity to churn out an absolute deluge of terrible, clichéd trash as disposable as your old cable box, but somehow screened for the Motion Picture Association and rated as if they were legitimate theatrical releases rather than glorified made-for-TV nonsense you put on in the background while you scroll on your phone.

Two, as studios continue to cut corners on quality, they have yet to roll back the quantity of their output. Most of the major releases are franchise films and adaptations of profitable IPs, with only the most minimal effort put in to make them even marginally good. It’s as if they’re intentionally oversaturating the market with the worst content imaginable in hopes that it’ll just wear down our resistance until we don’t even think about handing over our money. Lame rehashes, cheap CGI, plot holes larger than the Grand fucking Canyon – it all adds up to a concentrated lack of caring in every aspect other than advertising. And yet in spite of that, you have irredeemable shitbags like David Zaslav who pull movies from the schedule for a tax break, then try to justify it as so terrible it simply can’t be seen, like he’s doing us a favor or something. I’m sorry, but are you seriously going to sit there and tell me that Coyote vs. Acme is somehow WORSE than Space Jam 2?

The last two Best Picture winners – Everything Everywhere All at Once and Oppenheimer – should have ushered in a sea change in the business model. Those films proved that creativity and passion, whether at a major studio or independent level, are embraced far more by audiences than Transformers 9 or whatever. Art is supposed to triumph over industry in this respect, and so far it hasn’t. Part of this is the fact that movies are a multi-year process, so I do hold out a degree of hope that we’ll see some improvement soon, but it’s starting to wear thin.

So as school lets out and the boys of summer have their day, let’s do our best to stay positive in the face of doom and (June) gloom. While there are nine more flicks that have “earned” their dubious place here, I can at least say that there were more passes than fails for the month, and this is the lowest total so far in 2024. Also, while the multiplex choices may be slim, we are squarely into this year’s Festival Season, with Cannes having recently wrapped up, Tribeca starting tomorrow, and the Brooklyn Film Festival currently underway (you can read my breakdown of this year’s stellar Animation Program here). There is good stuff out there. It just requires some extra initiative and a lot of patience.

For now though, just sit back and let the bile course through your veins. This is the June 2024 edition of “This Film is Not Yet Watchable!”

Boneyard – June 5

Mel Gibson and 50 Cent, together at last!

I mean, do I really need to say anything else? That combination alone may be the weirdest pairing since pineapple on pizza (which I’ve never actually tried, but it was an easy target for the joke). But just for the sake of being thorough, let’s dive deeper. We have a “story” based on “true crime events,” specifically the West Mesa Murders, which have not been solved, and we’re positing a potential “inside job” with a cop as the culprit. Is Mel still bitter over that traffic stop? Who can say? Might 50 have some issues with crime and law enforcement, seeing as how he’s taken more shots than Jenna Jameson? I refuse to speculate. Buuuuuuuuut it does feel like they’ve got the teeniest axe to grind.

Also, let’s dispel one of the dumber tropes in cinema. In this particular case, the victims are all prostitutes. I’m sorry, but have you ever actually seen a street walker? Not a damn one of them looks as good as any of the actresses in this movie, and I’m counting the shots where the working girls are out of focus. You want an attractive call girl, you go to an actual brothel… not that I have a frame of reference for this sort of thing. Just trust me on this one, alright. If you don’t believe me, drive around any seedy city district at night. You’ll quickly see that light is not their friend, and you’ll probably wind up thinking that $20 is an overcharge.

Sorry, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, fuck Mel Gibson.

Am I OK? – June 7

No. No you’re not. You’re Dakota Johnson. By the way, Madame Web is now available to stream on Netflix in case you want to be ironically entertained, which is about the only way Johnson is able to be entertaining at all (save The Peanut Butter Falcon).

Anyway, this feels patently offensive. We’re setting Johnson up as a weirdo because she doesn’t bang enough people, which somehow leads to her wondering if she’s a lesbian? I’m not saying this can’t happen, but I’ve known – and lived with – a lot of gay people, and I’m pretty sure an online personality test based on stereotypes isn’t how they tend to discover their orientation. I’ll give a mild benefit of the doubt because Tig Notaro is behind this, so hopefully the cringe comedy can pay off. At the same time, the moment I see someone bitching about not having everything figured out at age 32, I just tune out. It’s a trope that dates back to at least Ally McBeal (remember how she thought she was a failure if she didn’t marry a rich and successful hot guy by 30?), and it’s regressive as fuck.

So I’ll admit this is closer to my personal pass line than most other things I put here, as there is at least some potential for quality, but I really don’t see it in the trailer. The fact that it played at Sundance two years ago and it took this long just to end up on HBO and thinks “vag-ice cream” is a joke speak to my hesitation quite nicely.

Reverse the Curse – June 14

I love David Duchovny. You love David Duchovny. We all love David Duchovny. I have no desire to see this movie.

There are two major reasons for me to avoid this at all costs. One is that the premise – based on a novel Duchovny wrote – is just downright stupid. A lifelong vendor at Yankee Stadium (Duchovny, also writing the screenplay and directing), who happens to be a Red Sox fan just to be a dick, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. So his son (Logan Marshall-Green), in an effort to cheer him up, orchestrates a “safe space” to eliminate any bad news from Boston as the Sox rally to tie the 1978 AL East race (they would lose to the Yankees in the infamous Bucky Dent tiebreaker game). I love baseball as much as the next guy, and it can be a bonding experience for friends and family, but trying to find an inspiring story by pinning survival and longevity to the success of a perennial loser (at the time) is really depressing, not to mention a bridge too far when it comes to believability. We know how this ends, and it isn’t pretty. So why do we care about the journey? This isn’t Titanic, where you can craft an epic tale of doomed romance around one of the most poetic disasters in history. This is a jagoff hugging his naked son in a locker room and calling it dark comedy.

Second, and I admit this is far more personal than any objective statement, so take whatever requisite salt you need, but I am fucking sick to death of the YANKS and the SAWKS! I worked at ESPN for eight years, where the Bristol, CT campus is very nearly the geographic midpoint between New York and Boston. As such, every local who worked there – and they make up a significant plurality of the staff, if not an outright majority – had a strong, and very annoying, opinion on the matter, and they treated you like shit if you didn’t. For years the network was accused of having an east coast bias. I witnessed first-hand that it was just a Boston-New York bias. Every other major east coast city (Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Charlotte, etc.) didn’t count for anything unless LeBron James was playing there. I watched as homers frontloaded their teams to the top of SportsCenter and other shows’ rundowns simply because it was their team. I saw arguments about coverage and how it could be spun to be about those two cities, even when they weren’t involved. We had an entire highlight that was just Roger Clemens (seen in the above headline photo, hypnotized into thinking he’s a chicken) sitting in a press box when there was speculation he’d be going back to the Yankees in 2007.

It was incessant, and at times it bordered on bullying. For example, in the main Highlight Screening Area (featured in some SC commercials and in the background of several shows), there was a rule against people cheering and making any kind of conspicuous displays over game results, because it could show up on air. That’s completely fair… except when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2007 and 2013 and all the high-level producer fans whooped and hollered their lungs out while scolding anyone just trying to move past them to go to the bathroom, myself included (even though I didn’t report to them they loved acting like they were my direct supervisors). When the Yankees won in 2009 (over my Phillies, who were defending their 2008 title that I was NOT allowed to celebrate), people way above my pay grade openly mocked me on that Screening Area floor, then chided me for asking them to act as professionally as they’d expected me to. There was just this pervading attitude that if you didn’t care about one side or the other, you somehow didn’t know anything about sports, and therefore didn’t belong at the network.

I understand it’s a deep rivalry, but I’ve seen it bring out the worst in people who should definitely know better, so forgive me if I have no inkling to rehash this bullshit. I rooted for the Sox in 2004 when they finally did “Reverse the Curse,” including coming back from 3-0 down to the Yankees in the ALCS, because it was historic, something I’d never seen before, along with millions of others. That novelty wore off FAST once I started working for “The Worldwide Leader,” and I still have some anxiety over it to this day. Once I left the network and moved out west, I learned that basically no one outside that bubble gives a crap about either team, and that includes Yankee and Red Sox fans here in L.A. Most people just root for their chosen side, with the home market having the biggest share (Dodgers and Angels out here, obviously), and very few go crazy with this sense of entitlement that they somehow deserve championships or deference for having an 80-year chip on their shoulders that was excised two decades ago. They just don’t have a platform to broadcast their takes to the rest of the world.

At least the movie has Stephanie Beatriz in it. I’d go to Fenway for her.

Ride – June 14

“Family, faith, and strong American values.” That’s the emotional push of the trailer for Ride, starring C. Thomas Howell. In this tale of good ol’ country boys in the rodeo, it appears that Ponyboy has graduated to Bull Boy, and he’s trying to not get tossed off by the forces of… whatever the opposite of the above tautology is.

But here’s what the trailer doesn’t tell you. This is a heist movie.

Yeah, if you actually read the description that Well Go USA put on the YouTube page, the real story is that Howell’s daughter has cancer, and along with his estranged son he decides to rob a bank in order to pay for her treatment. You won’t see any of that in this ‘MURICA! bullshit teaser, because it gives lie to the entire concept they’re trying to sell. If you believed in family, you wouldn’t be on the outs with your son. If you had faith, that would be enough to trust in the Almighty to let your daughter pull through, with or without treatment. And if you believed in an actual “strong American value,” you’d be advocating for universal healthcare so scenarios like this where people’s lives hang in the balance due to lack of ability to pay wouldn’t be an issue.

But go ahead, buck that bronco for eight seconds. You’re a true patriot. Fuck off.

Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 – June 28

Wow. Just… wow.

So, nearly 35 years ago, Kevin Costner made Dances with Wolves, a nuanced (for the time) take on the dark side of the American Western Expansion, where he played white savior to a tribe of Sioux – eventually joining the tribe – as they fought against the rival Pawnee and encroaching U.S. soldiers who sought to wipe them out. It was a massive success, winning Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for Costner (an achievement he’s coasted on ever since), and even though it hasn’t aged great over the last three decades, it still stands a fantastic cinematic story of understanding, empathy, and cultural respect.

Well, all that’s out the window, because here comes Manifest Destiny: The Movie!

Yeesh this is some borderline racist shit right here, and somehow it’s stretched into two films releasing this summer (part two comes out in August). Instead of learning the ways of indigenous people, they’re all rapacious killers without mercy. Instead of warning against white encroachment, all the heroes are porcelain embodiments of the American Dream. Instead of any examinations of the underbelly of this history, it’s all about protecting settlers who simply must go as far as they can go. Good. Lord.

Seriously, did Costner take some blows to the head on the Yellowstone set that we don’t know about? This is starting to make me yearn for Waterworld as a bastion of creative credibility.

A Family Affair – June 28

Netflix only released the trailer for this a few days ago, and looking at it, I wish they had waited longer so I didn’t need to discuss it here, because… oof.

First of all, we should already assume that this is garbage because it stars Nicole Kidman, but isn’t going to play at your local AMC, because we all know that AMC objectively improves the quality of films based on their bullshit ad campaign featuring the actress. Since it’s Netflix exclusive, we can then conclude through the transitive property that it’s so bad that even a theatrical run can’t save it.

Second, this is ew, and I don’t like it. For the record, I have no problem with age disparities in relationships. Both of the major couplings I’ve been in had them (my first girlfriend was 9.5 years older than me, while my last was 11.5 years younger), so if you want to make a movie about Nicole Kidman hooking up with Zac Efron (20 year difference), go right ahead. Have all the fun you want. Hell, if you want to have Kathy Bates play Kidman’s mother despite only a 19-year difference between the two, that works just fine as well.

Where I draw the line is at the film’s central premise, that Kidman is dating Efron, who is an egotistical celebrity (and he’s also playing a character in this movie!), complete with vigorous PDAs, when her daughter (Joey King) works for the guy. That’s too far. No reasonable person would ever say that an older woman can’t find love with a younger man. That’s sexist as fuck. But when you have concrete evidence that this specific relationship is causing your child misery – which Efron can then weaponize – the last thing you need to be doing is flaunting it and making sanctimonious arguments about how you’re entitled to happiness. You can find that with another person. You can’t get another daughter.

You know what oddly covered this same ground with a lot more thoughtfulness? Family Guy. Five years ago they put out an episode called “Bri-Da,” in which Brian the dog dates Ida, the transgendered father of Glenn Quagmire. There had been a previous show where Brian and Ida hooked up post-op, with Brian being unaware of the situation, and it was played for laughs, especially because one of the directions the show took after its 2005 revival was to make Brian and Quagmire enemies. Both are scummy womanizers to a certain degree (Quagmire much more so, as being a sex fiend was his defining trait for years), but Quagmire based their feud on him at least owning who he was, while Brian constantly acted like he was somehow more refined and cultured, complete with a poser smug attitude.

These are all fair critiques that have led to a lot of chuckles over the years, but in “Bri-Da,” Brian and Ida decide to give it a legitimate shot as a dating couple. This angers Quagmire to no end, especially when Brian tries to act like he’s going to be his step-dad. Finally, he reaches a breaking point, where he tells Ida it’s either him or Brian. He’s gone along with all the twists and turns of his father’s life, including a surprise coming out and transition, and has supported Ida throughout it all. But shacking up with the person he despises the most is more than he can handle. In a fun bit of comic misdirection, Ida declares, “I choose Brian… (pause for Brian to fist pump in triumph) to talk to first.” Ida then explains that while she had fun with him, and will always have affection for him, her child comes first, as they should for all parents, and breaks the relationship off. And you know what happens next? Everyone’s fine and the credits roll. Brian has more romantic exploits in later seasons (his habit of self-sabotage with women is a running theme), and Ida’s life isn’t ruined by missing out on some nebulous “last chance” at love.

That’s where this movie should end, including the part where it’s over in 22 minutes. Nicole Kidman can literally have any man she wants, even at age 56. Zac Efron is NOT the last fish in the sea. There will be plenty of other chances. However, taking active steps to hurt your child leaves years of pain and trauma, and that is just not worth satisfying your lady boner. This should have been scrapped at first pitch.

A Sacrifice – June 28

“The moment someone mentions ‘sacrifice’ and ‘redemption,’ I smell ‘cult.'” This is the mic drop line after Eric Bana discovers a mass suicide in Germany (despite being Australian). I triple dog dare him to say that line in ANY church in America. He’ll be dead before he hits the ground, and be sued by the Republican Party for good measure.

When his very American daughter (Sadie Sink) comes to visit, she’s instantly hooked in to the very same cult by *checks notes* a cute boy. Sigh. Oh, and she gets further drawn in by bullshit teen angst and having a sucky dad. to the point where the cult leader literally tells her to stop relying on her parents and start relying on her for happiness, with no sense of irony whatsoever. Are you serious?

What follows seems to be your standard issue crime thriller, but there’s one thing in particular worth pointing out from a production standpoint. Um, has director Jordan Scott never heard of lights? Seriously, look at these shots. There’s so much darkness you can barely see anything, and none of it makes any sense. What college lecture hall only has one fluorescent bulb at the chalkboard? What restaurant only has three bulbs on the wall? What crime scene is only investigated at night with a single flood light? I know we get a lot of intentional darkness in effects-driven films to obscure the bad CGI, but this is a live-action movie with real people and things in it. Let us see them!

Finally, the first thing that gets Sink interested in the group is a flyer about chemtrails. If you get taken in by that bullshit, I have very few problems with you dying in a mass suicide.

A Quiet Place: Day One

Oh look, another horror prequel. And ooh, it’s not written or directed by the guy who created the franchise! This will surely be a massive success! *dies of aneurism and seizure caused by sarcasm*

I loved the original A Quiet Place. Even the sequel, which was definitely an exercise in diminishing returns, had its moments. The whole crux of the scares came from the need for silence, the idea that even the slightest sound could mean your death. The aliens who hunted with their super-sensitive hearing weren’t exactly terrifying, but seeing them in bits and pieces before the full reveal was a proper page from the Jaws book of slow-rolling the full sight of the monster.

So this movie will, of course, undo all of that with a glut of cannon fodder PG-13 bloodless slaughter. The entire trailer is nothing but aural rape, making this affair both literal and figurative noise, the most interesting character looks to be Lupita Nyong’o’s cat (in the second trailer she bitchily calls it an emotional support animal when a store clerk tells her that animals aren’t allowed in the shop, because New Yorkers are dicks who deserve to die, I guess), and literally none of this will matter to the overall mythos of John Krasinski’s series. This spinoff is so pointless that its very premise was already handled in the opening minutes of the last film!

At least Djimon Hounsou’s character (who we already know dies in the second movie) gets a name this time.

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With that, we move down to the bottom rung of this month’s ladder to Hell, “The Worst Trailer in the World.” For once, this was an easy choice. Literally A Quiet Place was the only other candidate, and I couldn’t figure out how to edit around that awful siren noise. So, with almost no hesitation, I offer what is very much a textbook example of the latter of the two problems with the film industry explained in the preamble.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die – June 7

As is often the trend, the first reviews for this movie didn’t come out until today, yet another instance of studios putting an embargo on reviews until almost the exact moment of release in hopes that you won’t see negative press and stay away. It started at 71% on Rotten Tomatoes, but is already down to 68%, which means “barely passable.” It might fluctuate up and down a bit more as we get closer to Friday, but you can pretty much expect that this will be the ultimate score, if not lower. Very rarely does a critical consensus go up as more people see it.

I will at least offer a modicum of good news. In the video, I ask for fans to meet me halfway and admit that this is dumb fun at best. Well, Jesse Hassenger’s review (a critic with whom I often disagree, but I respect his takes), posted on The A.V. Club today, does exactly that. He gives it a B- and basically says it has a few fun sequences and gags, but gets bogged down in trying to be too stylish for its own good, to the point that it feels like an R-rated Fast and Furious flick. Okay, good enough. That’s all I asked for. I still have no plans to see it, but at least one person unintentionally understood my frustration. I’ll take what I can get.

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Finally, we end on our monthly bean-ball-to-the-forehead walkoff, the “Redemption Reel.” There are a lot of films out there that deal with complex issues via very abstract means, and this may be one of the oddest, and most endearing.

Tuesday – June 7

I really wish Julia Louis-Dreyfus had begun her film career in earnest sooner. She’s obviously a TV legend thanks to Seinfeld, Old Christine, and Veep, but since she started taking on movie roles, she’s turned out some really spectacular work, including two Pixar movies (A Bug’s Life and Onward; in the latter she’s arguably the best character), Enough Said, and one of last year’s hidden gems, You Hurt My Feelings. Really only her work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been subpar, but I put that down to lazy writing and characterization more than her acting ability.

Here she appears to score another triumph with Tuesday, the trailer for which alone gets me choked up. See, unlike Ride, which hides the core relationship between a parent and their terminally ill family member, or Reverse the Curse that treats it like a joke, Tuesday takes the matter seriously, turning the worst experience any mom could face into something beautiful and cathartic. And in true A24 fashion, it’s done in the strangest of manners, with Death in the form of a talking parrot (Arinzé Kene) serving as a vessel to help her come to terms with the impending loss of her child (Lola Petticrew) and see the wonder in life’s journey, even when it’s cut short by tragedy. I’m damn near sobbing at a two-minute preview. I don’t know how I’ll make it through two hours. I’m sure they’ll play “Tuesday’s Gone” by Lynyrd Skynyrd at some point, and I’ll probably lose it.

Also, just for shiggles, the CGI parrot is 20 bazillion times more convincing than the giant Iago in the bullshit Aladdin remake, so it’s got that going for it as well.

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That’s all for this month. As always, enjoy your time at the cinema, no matter what you go see, and stay safe as the summer winds come blowing in!

Join the conversation in the comments below! Do you plan to see any of these films? Was I too hard on any of them? Seriously, if you don’t root for the Yankees or Red Sox, have you EVER given a shit about either team? 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!