Month: August 2023

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter

The Last Voyage of the Demeter

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If you’re familiar with the mythology of Dracula, you already know the fate of the Demeter and its doomed crew going into this movie.  The ship left Romania bound for England, encountered fierce storms and a strange man on board and the crew disappearing one by one.  When the Demeter reaches shore, the crew are nowhere to be found.  The ship’s undead cargo, Dracula, wisely disembarked for London long before he could be discovered amidst the shattered remains of the ship.

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The Beanie Bubble

The Beanie Bubble

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By the time you read this review of The Beanie Bubble, the internet will already have produced at least a dozen think pieces discussing 2023 as “The Year Brands Came to the Movies”.  I would assume that they all touch on what is the most logical reason why movies are suddenly suffering from brand-itis: marketing these movies is so much simpler than selling a biography.  What would you be more inclined to watch, a movie about Ty Warner and the people behind the company that produced beanie babies, or a movie about the untold story of beanie babies?  Marketing a movie about a product is so much easier because generations of people are familiar with Beanie Babies.  It stands to reason that they’d be interested in a movie about a product they bought at some point in time.

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Meg 2 The Trench

Meg 2: The Trench

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Every year Hollywood releases a silly blockbuster that wants nothing more than to entertain us.  Two years ago it was Venom: There Will Be Carnage.  Last year brought Jurassic World: Dominion.  This year’s model is Meg 2: The Trench, a movie that figures the best way to keep the audience amused is not by being just a Jaws rip-off, like its predecessor, but by ripping off as many movies as possible within its two hour runtime.  Never fear, the Jaws elements are still there.  However, they are left in the dust in this movie’s quest to become the buffet dinner version of action movies.  Case in point: the opening scene, where a prehistoric monster eats a prehistoric monster until our friend the Megaladon arrives.  I half expected to see Adam Driver’s ship land in the background.  (For those unaware, that’s a 65 reference.)

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Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer

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In retrospect, Christopher Nolan was always the obvious choice to make a movie about Robert Oppenheimer.  As a director, Nolan has spent most of his career making movies with puzzle narratives.  I can think of no other director who could better relate to the man who solved the biggest puzzle of physics: how to harness atomic energy, the underlying power of the universe?  Given how simpatico Nolan is with his subject, it seems that it was only a matter of time when Nolan would make a movie about the father of the atomic bomb.

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