Month: July 2025

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Eddington

Eddington

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Eddington may represent a first for cinema, a mainstream movie making light of a modern pandemic.  To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a humorous take on SARS, Ebola, the opioid crisis or AIDS.  This isn’t to say that such a movie couldn’t have been made.  As George Carlin once noted, there’s no topic that’s off-limits when it comes to comedy.  However, using a traumatic event like the Covid pandemic as the source of laughs requires a take no prisoners approach, no matter how insensitive it may be perceived.  That’s the fundamental problem with Eddington, which is too selective in the targets and too gentile in how it handles what it does take aim at.  The movie is timid where it needed to be ruthless, circuitous when it should have been forthright.

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Jurassic World: Rebirth

Jurassic World: Rebirth

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Remember Nedry, the fat guy played by Wayne Night in Jurassic Park?  Rebirth hopes that you do, because its opening scene is a weird callback to his character.  Seventeen years ago, before the events in Jurassic World took place, the scientists at InGen were just starting to experiment with dinosaur DNA.  One scientist curiously tries to eat a candy bar just before entering a controlled environment.  The guy is a slob and carelessly drops the wrapper just before he enters a sealed chamber with a dinosaur in it.  The wrapper gets sucked into the door’s ventilation and shorts it out.  Uh oh.  In the rush to lock everything down, the candy bar guy is left staring face-to-face with a very nasty dinosaur.  The lesson here is to not be a slob, because the repercussions are fatal.

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F1: The Movie

F1: The Movie

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F1: The Movie would have been an entertaining movie regardless of who was cast in the leading role.  It’s infinitely better with Brad Pitt in the driver’s seat, though.  As one of the few remaining actors who is also a star, Pitt gives the movie its electricity.  It also helps that he’s comfortable with putting his rugged good looks on display again.  If Pitt had insisted upon obscuring his good looks with glasses, a beard and long, scraggly hair, few would want to see that movie.  (If you got my reference to Pitt’s supporting turn in The Big Short, congratulations!)

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Elio

Elio

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If science-fiction films have taught us anything, it’s that meeting aliens from another world should scare us.  Time and again, the aliens that show up just want to kill and eat us.  Films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., which depict aliens as being benevolent and even helpful towards humanity, are notable exceptions to the rule.  Elio joins that short list because the aliens the eponymous character meets are a very friendly group who actually need his help.  Unfortunately, Elio can’t make up its mind as to what story it wants to tell, forgoing adventure and excitement implied by its premise in search of emotional payoffs.  The resulting film is fine, but it could have been special.

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