Weapons

 

Hair Of The Stick 
That Bit Me

Weapons
Directed by Zach Cregger
USA 2025
New Line Cinema
UK cinema release print.

After containing my disappointment that the movie in question does not include a return to cinema for Chesty Morgan, I went to my local cinema to take a look at Weapons, because both the trailer and the one short clip I’d seen of it were, if nothing else, certainly intriguing. And, I would add that the film, while not great as some people have been hailing it, is certainly not a bad movie either and, though I was disappointed by some obvious aspects of it, it certainly kept me entertained throughout... so that’s pretty good. 

The film concerns the events of a day when Justine (played by Julia Garner) shows up to teach the kids in her third grade class and 17 of the 18 children in that specific class did not show up to school that day. This is because, at 2.17* that morning, all the kids ran out of their homes and ran off, disappearing into the night. So, naturally, the townsfolk aren’t very happy with Justine, who they all think is somehow responsible. Especially Archer, played by Josh Brolin, who lost his son to the incident too. 

The film then unfolds events to a total resolution of that story, split into chapters and each telling a portion of the events through the point of view of different characters. Such as Benedict Wong as the principal of the school, or Alden Ehrenreich as an ex-alcoholic cop. 

Now, the critics have been saying two things about this film that have me annoyed. One is that some of them are citing Rashomon as the way in which the narrative works. Now I’m assuming not many of them have read the original story on which Rashomon is based but, even if they are, as I suspect, referring to Akira Kurosawa’s excellent movie version... well, I have to wonder if any of them are actually familiar with that movie at all. That film (and story) tells of the same incident taking place over the same time from different points of view and, like Mario Bava’s sex comedy version Four Times That Night, each viewpoint recalls the same events in a much different way, relying on memory and interpretation of what has been seen. This film doesn’t do that. 

So, no, it’s not Rashomon. 

What it is more like is a series of Matryoshka dolls with each one presented reflecting what you’ve already seen but then taking you a little further into the same narrative from when you left it last. And that works fine as a somewhat gadgety narrative structure... even if it’s not completely necessary much of the time. It at least allows the story to build some kind of suspenseful impetus by not revealing everything at once... a tactic also employed by the cinematography which tends to focus on people and then move slowly over to what they are seeing, to imbue the shot with tension, as the environment a character is standing in is slowly revealed (thus harbouring the potential of a jump scare... even though that doesn’t happen that often). 

The other thing which annoys me is critics saying the movie makes no sense. It totally does, everything is fully explained and even the big visual metaphor we get at one point... which somehow left some critics pretty baffled.... seems a little too obvious, it seemed to me. However, I would have much preferred the film if it had left a lot of things hanging because, frankly, the film makes the same mistake as the popular (with everyone except me) Longlegs (reviewed here), in that it not only explains things too much but, delving firmly into a specific kind of folk horror, it gives the movie an actual main antagonist and, to be honest, the film suffers from it. Giving the film an actual villain to focus on not only denies the mystery of the film but, in this case, also leaves little flaws in the logic that governs the way in which the main antagonist weaponises people in the film. Which kind of sucks and ensures that I probably won’t be picking this one up on Blu Ray because, once it’s all been explained, I don’t feel the need to watch this one again. 

So... yeah. Weapons is a fine film in the horror tradition for sure. If anything, it feels like the kind of thick spined best selling novels that both Stephen King and Dean R. Koontz were putting out in the 1980s. And I do feel that this movie would have made a better, 600 page plus novel than the format it’s ended up in. But, you know, very nice to look at, some good performances, some intense moments but, for me at least, not really essential viewing. 

*Room 217 is the infamous room in the Overlook Hotel in the original Stephen King novel The Shining (though not in the movie versions of both that and the follow up, Doctor Sleep).  

Cocaine Bear

What’s It About, Del Boy?

Cocaine Bear
USA 2023 Universal
Directed by Elizabeth Banks
UK cinema release print

To probably quote many other critics, I’m sure, Cocaine Bear is a movie which very much does what it says on the tin. It was a film I mainly got interested in from the buzz surrounding the title (I had a similar attraction to the movie Snakes On A Plane for the same reason) and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Also, I don’t really know Elisabeth Banks as an actress but I did like the previous movie she directed (and starred in), the 2019 reboot of Charlie’s Angels (reviewed here).

Okay, so call me naive (I’m sure a lot of you will call me that and worse) but I went into Cocaine Bear not realising it was an out and out comedy. I mean, I knew it was based... or in this case perhaps ‘inspired’ is a better word... on a true incident in 1985 and I knew there was never going to be a shred of reality or truth to the way the real life events were depicted. Two things are true... one is that, while dumping drugs out of a plane, a man’s parachute failed to open and he died from the fall. Two, a bear ate a quantity of the cocaine he dropped. Those are the only two things that this movie shares with the actual incident, as far as I can tell. In reality, the bear died from the consumption of the narcotics within five minutes (and is now stuffed and displayed somewhere).

This film is about the rampage of the bear as she goes to protect her two cubs from interfering humans and, mostly, tries to find more cocaine to consume. It’s also about various disconnected bunches of humans who find themselves in the forest (or park as they are in the US, from what I understand, not bearing any resemblance to UK parks so much... at least not the ones I know). Of these humans, my ‘favourite performances of the movie’ shout out go to Kerri Russell as a mother trying to find her teenage daughter, Alden (Han Solo) Ehrenreich as a grieving member of a drug cartel who has been sent to the forest to find the drugs along with his friend played by O'Shea Jackson Jr. and, last but by no means least, Scott Seiss... who I just found out is exactly the person I thought he reminded me of in only his second ever part in a movie. Seiss, it turns out, is the man who does those ‘angry retail guy’ sketches and posts them on YouTube and twitter... and yeah, this guy definitely deserves to be in more movies after his hilarious performance in this, I would say.

Lastly, Ray Liota is also in this film and he gets a dedication in the end credits (stay for two post credits scenes, by the way, if you want to catch every drop of the movie). Ray plays the nasty guy who wants his drugs back and sends his boy to get them. It was his last movie role before he died, one week after recording his ADR for this one.  

And it took a while to grow on me, truth be told. As I said, I was expecting more of a modern, retro exploitation film than a comedy and comedy certainly isn’t my favourite movie genre (unless it’s got The Marx Brothers or Woody Allen in it, you’re going to have to work hard to get me to stay). So for the initial set up, I was less than comfortable with a film that was obviously being played for laughs with some quite broad comedy but, after a while, I began to get on board with it. After all, it’s competently put together (with a caveat I’ll get to) and it’s well acted by a whole host of comic performers... it’s too long to list all of them here. For me though, I really got into it when the emergency Ambulance showed up with Scott Seiss on board as one of the paramedics, partnered up by the equally excellent  Kahyun Kim. The scenes which follow their arrival are quite funny and pulled me into things, for sure.

It is a fun movie and, yeah, I was rooting for a lot of the humans to survive it. That being said, I thought the film was edited in a peculiar manner. There are gaps where it’s implied what’s happened in scenes cross-cutting between sets of characters rather than seeing the actual things happening, making almost unnatural jumps in the narrative. Now, I really don’t mind not being shown everything and filling in the gaps for myself without being spoonfed data but, I dunno, a fast paced comedy movie seems to need those kinds of moments more, I would have thought. My first thought was that it was a level of competence, or lack of, in terms of what ended up on screen and my initial assumption as I was watching was that the crew hadn’t been able to capture all the footage they wanted. However, there’s a really odd editing decision later on where a flashback to a scene we didn’t see is suddenly cut into a conversation (leaving me completely baffled for a minute as to what I was watching) and I realised that coverage wasn’t the problem, this was an artistic decision on the part of the director. So, yeah, it’s not the way I would have gone with the movie but the film doesn’t lose much clarity from this approach and it works just fine, I guess.

All in all, after about a half an hour into the movie, I have to say that I had a pretty good time with Cocaine Bear and would certainly recommend it to my friends who like comedies. I’m still in two minds as to whether I’ll follow this up with a Blu Ray purchase a little way down the line (maybe when it hits the sales). But, a good evening at the cinema at any rate and, if drug fuelled bear rampages played for comic effect are your thing, you will definitely want to give this one a go.

Solo

Corellia Warfare

Solo - A Star Wars Story
2018 USA Directed by Ron Howard
UK cinema release print.

Warning: At some point near the end of this review there will
be a big spoiler. I’ll warn you about it again as it approaches.

Okay, so I’ll be honest and say I really wasn’t expecting the new Star Wars spin off, Solo, to be any good. In fact, after hearing about the troubled production history of this particular film and adding in the fact that I didn’t think much of either Rogue One or The Last Jedi, I was pretty much expecting this movie to be almost unwatchable. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found that this was one of the very few of the new wave of Star Wars movies I actually quite liked.

Alden Ehrenreich stars as the young Han Solo and I have to admit that, when I first heard this casting news I was really happy about it because I’d recently seen him in the wonderful Cohen Brothers movie Hail Caesar! (reviewed here) playing a singing cowboy and I thought he might be able to pull this kind of role off... would that it were so simple. However, as more damaging ‘on set’ stories emerged about him needing acting lessons and a, frankly, not so great couple of trailers where he looks and acts nothing like Han Solo (I noticed some of those moments were thankfully absent in the final cut off the movie), I was beginning to get very down about the whole thing.

As it happens, I needn’t have worried. Ehrenreich is superb as the young Corellian and he really does look... and act... exactly right in a lot of the scenes here. Everyone is saying that Donald Glover’s portrayal of a young Lando Calrissian (one of my favourite characters in the original trilogy) is the one to watch and, although he’s kinda okay (if somewhat more of a caricature of the original rather than something that convinces me it’s really the same character), I thought Han was definitely the scene stealer in this.

And Chewbacca, played in this one by Joonas Suotamo, is even cooler.

I have to say that when a certain scene comes up and Han is in peril, I realised about 30 seconds before Chewie entered the movie what was going to happen. It doesn’t matter though because he knocks it out the park here. Of course, in terms of the chronology of the characters, this is Chewbacca’s second appearance in the saga, after helping Yoda escape from Chewie’s homeworld Kashyyk in Revenge Of The Sith. The version of Chewbacca here seems strangely skinnier but maybe that’s because the situation he finds himself in is not an ideal one. He’s great in this movie, though, and it’s nice to see him forming a bond with the young Han Solo as the running time progresses.

There is also a wide range of new characters who all work very well in the film and have good chemistry with the lead, including Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton, Paul Bettany as the villain of the piece and Han’s lost love Qi’ra, as played brilliantly by Emilia Clarke.

And... it’s an okay movie. It’s not great Star Wars in terms of feeling but it is close and even when I had pause for thought during the first sequence, I remembered the prequel trilogy’s opening chase scene from Attack Of The Clones and realised the high tech Blade Runnerish feel of this moment was acceptable, at least  in terms of staying near to the spirit of what has gone before. There are also a lot of fan moments where various parts of the mythology pop up, including two returning characters from another film in the series, one of whom I will most definitely... and in the most spoilery way... get to soon. But, yeah... stuff like the dice, the mention of bounty hunter Bossk, the spice mines of Kessel and various other things are all touched upon here (although I was sad that this is the first ‘Star Wars’ film not to include C3P0 and R2D2 in it... they could have easily had them appearing in this one). It also doesn’t make the mistake, at least in this particular film, of ruining the exact line reading of Han and Lando’s past relationship from The Empire Strikes Back. It come close to getting it wrong but the lines in Empire will still, just about, read right... at least in this movie, as it stands.

Some of the stuff in this film is absolutely brilliant, like the train heist scene (why the heck would a light spacecraft owning civilisation be using trains?) and the way in which Han is portrayed as the ultimate good guy who thinks he’s the bad guy but... there’s also some bad stuff too. The structure of the film seems somewhat loose and doesn’t feel like it’s leading up to anything in terms of the way the action works. Also, the celebrated (by some viewers) Kessel Run scene, which we’ve been hearing about since the first movie in 1977, was really confusing and anticlimactic for me. Even the music in this scene sounds a little like warmed over John Williams... which it kinda is. John Powell’s score at this point starts quoting various Star Wars action motifs all muddled together (including one of my favourite John Williams cues, The Asteroid Field) but it somehow seems somewhat diluted here. I don’t know if this was because it’s deliberately dialled down in the mix, played by a smaller orchestra or even if it was the sound set up in the screen I saw it on that was amiss but, this scene felt like it could be a little punchier than it is here, that’s for sure. That didn’t detract so much from my appreciation of the movie though so, yeah, nearing the end of the movie I was in the state of mind that I was having a fun, relatively Star Warsish feeling, kind of good time and that it was one of the better of the late entries in the saga.

And then the thing happened...

And this is your big spoiler warning folks. If you haven’t seen this movie, do not read past this point.

So we already know the person who the lead villain of the piece is answering to is the ‘real’ villain and, after a not so surprising twist in terms of the allegiance of one of the characters in the movie, we finally get to see who the real 'menace' behind the scheme was and... my jaw totally dropped. There are few movies that manage to surprise me like this one did because there, on the hologram talking to one of the other characters in the film was... Darth Maul. Yep... the same Darth Maul we saw young Obi Wan slice in half with a lightsaber decades before in The Phantom Menace. He’s got robotic legs so it’s shown he’s survived somehow and, apparently, if I’d watched the Star Wars cartoon shows The Clone Wars and Rebels, then I would know how that character managed to survive his seemingly mortal wounds. I did get very excited for a minute because I realised this could maybe explain the lineage towards the villain of the first two films of the latest trilogy, Snoke. However, I then also realised that Maul couldn’t possibly have retained his woggly, baby making equipment after the wounds he received so I’m somewhat less excited about this reveal now. It is an interesting turn of events though but, alas, I can’t quite see how they can follow through with a final showdown between this character and our heroes in any future sequels because he’s already been killed off again by Obi Wan on Tatooine in the cartoons, apparently. Nice idea though and it certainly surprised me.

End of spoiler zone!

And that’s me done on this one. John Powell’s score seems a little less Star Wars than I thought it would be but certainly seems consistent with a lot of this composer's other work. I like this guy a lot but he’s not who I would have picked to score a Star Wars movie, that’s for sure... the score is still nicely done though and maybe giving it a different feel was kinda the point (it certainly plays better as a stand alone listen than The Last Jedi CD... asides from the awful song... but, for goodness sakes, why do they keep missing off the end title music on these things... oh, right, they want us all to double dip an expanded CD edition in five to ten years time. Got it.). Who knows what’s in the minds of the people bankrolling these things at any given moment? All in all, though, Solo is an enjoyable bit of light space opera and, like I said, probably the best of the series we’ve seen since the release of The Force Awakens. I’ll probably revisit this one again before it leaves the cinemas.
Star Wars at NUTS4R2

 Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 

Episode 2: Attack Of The Clones

Episode 3: Revenge Of The Sith 

Solo

Rogue One 

Episode 4: A New Hope

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode 6: Return Of The Jedi 

Episode 7: The Force Awakens 

Episode 8:  The Last Jedi

Episode 9: The Rise Of Skywalker

Hail, Caesar!

Hot Hail

Hail, Caesar!
2016 UK/USA/Japan
Directed by The Coen Brothers
UK cinema release print.

Ha! You know, when I first saw a trailer for this movie on the internet sometime last year, I thought the idea of this one looked promising but I was in no way expecting this to be a good movie. It looked like a whole bunch of actors and film-makers having a whale of a time and, quite often when this happens, you often find the people making the movie are going to have a far better time than the audience who are going to be watching this. I might cite the 1967 version of Casino Royale or 2015’s Mortdecai (reviewed here) as examples where this tactic seems to seriously backfire on the studio.

Another problem I have, and which made me fairly wary is that, much as I love some of the Coen’s movies dearly, I do find them a bit hit and miss and, over the last five or six years, I have found their movies definitely in the miss category, for me. I love the Coens of The Big Liebowski, Oh Brother Where Art Thou and The Man Who Wasn’t There but some of their other stuff seems to be less emotionally involving to me.

Well, I needn’t have worried on either count, as it happens, because although it took me 20 minutes or so to warm up to their latest opus, Hail, Caesar!, I absolutely loved it, once it got going. The film stars Josh Brolin as famous Hollywood ‘fixer’ Eddie Mannix, a fictional version of the real person who works here in a made up studio where thinly disguised ‘Coenised’ movies from Hollywoodland’s rich legacy are in production. When famous film star Baird Whitlock, played by George Clooney as a kind of Charlton Heston via Victor Mature type, is kidnapped from the set before the completion of his latest movie Hail, Caesar!, it’s up to Eddie to get him back while still trouble shooting other problems with various stars who work for the studio.

In a nice touch to the William Wyler version of Ben Hur, the fictional Hail, Caesar! shares the exact same subtitle of that movie, A Tale Of The Christ. There’s even a hilarious scene where Clooney is trying to channel the same look of reverence that Heston does in Ben Hur, when Christ gives him water on his journey to be a galley slave, although the roles are slightly twisted around here, just like a lot of other stuff in this movie is nicely subverted... such as the gay subtext highlighted with a joke in the sailor’s song and dance number performed by Channing Tatum as Burt Gurney, this film’s equivalent of Gene Kelley.

Other people who populate this film are Tilda Swinton in a kind of dual role playing a kind of ‘twins’ version of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, Ralph Fiennes as Laurence Laurentz and Scarlet Johannson doing a kind of earthy version of famous water dancer Esther Williams. The character which made it completely watchable for me though, is the role of Alden Ehrenreich as ‘singing cowboy’ sensation Hobie Doyle. I don’t know who this guy is but he’s phenomenal. Sure, he gets some good laughs in scenes with Ralph Fiennes character as the studio attempt to ‘change his image’ but it’s his other role in the film which really help bring this all to life.

Hobie is obviously a parody of the Roy Rogers/Gene Autrey cowboy stars of yesteryear and can perform some neat tricks as demonstrated here. He even has his very close parody of a Gabby Hayes style sidekick who, obviously, gets all the laughs from the fictional audience when he takes his date to see one of his films. And about that ‘date’. This movie is very much a film watcher’s movie... like a Quentin Tarantino piece, a lot of the pleasure in watching it is derived from how many famous movie references you can pick up on. A real movie spotter’s pursuit, is this. We only hear her name teased a few times in the movie, for a while, and as soon as I heard her name, Carlotta Valdez, my brain was on fire. I spent the next twenty minutes or so of the movie agonising where I’d heard it before until it finally kicked in and I realised that this was the name of the fictional, historical figure that Kim Novak is pretending to be channeling for the benefit of James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo. Oh my gosh, I thought to myself, are they going to go the whole hog and make her look like the ‘Portrait of Carlotta’ right down to the iconic hairstyle in the Hitchcock movie?

As the film wore on and I realised the Coens weren’t taking the strength of their parody too seriously (I’ll get to that in a minute) I then started thinking that maybe they were going to have Hobie dating a parody of the Mexican Spitfire, Lupe Velez, herself. As it happens, it turns out Hobie is dating a version of the famous actress Carmen Miranda and, it has to be said, Veronica Osorio, the wonderful actress playing her here, makes it more than apparent who she’s supposed to be in her very first scene. She is an absolute delight in the role and her scenes with Alden Ehrenreich, as Hobie entertains her with both a real lasso and, later, a spaghetti lasso, are just so charming they will probably win your heart right over. However, Hobie’s solo scenes as he goes after the kidnappers are equally great and... I’ll briefly mention those in a little while.

George Clooney, of course, is also brilliant in his role and when it turns out he’s kidnapped by communist writers, his scenes with them are pretty funny too. And it was nice to see Patrick Fischler as one of those writers... I always wondered what had happened to that guy who played the video store clerk in Ghost World and... here he is. He has a very distinctive face which makes him a good person if you want someone to stand out and add texture to a crowd. Clooney is marvellous, though, and the more stuff he makes these days which border on almost parodying himself, to an extent (with a little bit of stretch), forces me to admire him more and more as both an actor and a star as the years go by. Some people might be afraid to take on this kind of role but, as usual, Clooney gives it his all.

Now there are some problems with the parody in this movie, to be sure, and I’ll highlight those soon enough, but one of the things which made me stop worrying about the authenticity of a lot of the stuff on show in the movie is that, it soon becomes obvious that the Coen’s just don’t worry too much about making it all authentic. These are broad strokes which create a brief impression rather than full blown homage and, as such, it kinda works at its own level. Where it’s less satisfying is when some aspects of a parody are finely tuned to the smallest details but maybe slightly tarnished by another element being less so...

For example, the sailor’s song and dance number, headed up by Channing Tatum, is an incredible movie moment. It’s clear that the choreography and dialogue of those big MGM mid-fifties numbers have been studied here to the nth degree. And Tatum has obviously been looking at Gene Kelly and the way he moves, the way his face expresses (or doesn’t always) and the way he delivers his lines... it all works really well. As does the consistency of the simplicity of the colour scheme of the set being used. However, what doesn’t work about this scene is the veracity of those colours themselves. The MGM films used to be... well, over the top and almost over saturated beyond belief in those movies... the colours here, while simply wrought, have none of the luminosity of the hues used in the films the Coens are trying to emulate in this scene... which kind of spoiled the overall effect of it, for me.

Another example would be Carter Burwell's score throughout the movie. Now this must have been a dream job for a composer to work on as he has to cover a range of musical styles due to the nature of the content... but I noticed that he was more successful in some styles than others... although that might not have been his fault. For instance, the music he delivers for the Hail, Caesar! movie within a movie scenes are typical in structure and tone of the kinds of scores these films were getting by the likes of Dr. Miklos Rozsa but... well, they just don’t seem to have the same punch or over the top-ness, over scored quality of the originals. However, like I said, it might not be the composer’s fault, it might just be mixed too far back into the background compared to the way the music would have been mixed into a genuine Roman/Religious epic of the mid 1950s so... well I’ll find out once the CD arrives.

The composer does do some really great stuff here too though and, getting back to Hobie going after the kidnappers, the scenes where the Coen’s get almost metatextual and use the vernacular of the 1940s and 1950s film noirs to tell that part of Hobie’s story is faithfully backed up by Burwell with something which really does the trick in those sequences. So, yeah... looking forward to this score arriving in the post sometime soon.

And that’s what I thought of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Hail, Caesar! Once it starts coasting along the movie is a real breath of fresh, or maybe that should be reconditioned, air midst a cinematic climate where no other film is being made quite like this one at the moment. So as far as subject matter and approach are concerned, there’s nothing else like it out there currently... so if you want to see something different then check this one out. I, for one, had a great time with this movie and if you’re a fan of old school Hollywood movies then you’ll probably have a good evening with this one. Definitely a big thumbs up for this one... if I had a massive, giant thumb to do that with.