The Stranger

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the Mercury Review

Dom Sinacola — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:07:00 -0800

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie opens in wide release on Friday, February 13. by Dom Sinacola

This story was originally published by our sister paper, Portland Mercury.

For nearly 20 years, Torontonian best friends Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol have chronicled the everyday existences of Torontonian best friends Matt (Johnson) and Jay (McCarrol) as they attempt to book a show for their band, Nirvanna the Band, at local venue the Rivoli.

Granted, they've never acknowledged that their band name might be a huge distraction for potential audiences, nor have they ever really contacted Rivoli management to ask about the venue’s scheduling process. In two decades, they’ve never even played a public show. Still, their mission abides; sometimes it means skydiving from the Canadian National (CN) Tower for some good old-fashioned viral marketing.

Nirvanna the Band the Show is that 20-year chronicle—a seemingly never-ending autobiographical narrative, like Karl Ove Knausgård’s six-volume My Struggle—that details their daily, repetitive, and sometimes dangerous schemes to score a show at the Rivoli.

What began as a baby-faced web series in 2007 and eventually graduated into a Viceland sitcom in 2017, is now Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. It's tantamount to their lives’ work. Distributed by Neon, recent Oscar-darlings who brought us The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value, the release of this film is second only to getting a gig at the Rivoli.

The movie is exceptionally funny, especially with an audience. Dopey gags, painful stunts, and mean-mugging abound as our protagonists accidentally transform their RV into a time machine, using Back to the Future as a blueprint to hatch a plan to, of course, get a show at the Rivoli.

Finding themselves in 2008, they’re confronted by achingly specific allusions from the first Obama administration. (Remember the original lyrics to Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started”?) So Matt and Jay must follow Doc Brown rules to get back to their future without changing their past.

Convinced by pop figureheads like Robert Zemeckis and shows like Entourage that the elemental tides of storytelling, fueled by farce and nostalgia, will allow them to accomplish all they put their minds to—which in this case is headlining a show at the Rivoli—Matt and Jay of Nirvanna the Band are slightly fictionalized versions of the real-life Matt and Jay. They’re two normal-ish elder millennials who have siphoned themselves through movie and TV tropes into timeless, innocent weirdos.

Thus, at the heart of Nirvanna the Band, meticulous parody and avoidance of copyright infringement rubs up against the bleak reality of urban life, creating a giddy friction between the bracing stupidity to which Matt and Jay devote themselves and the drudgery experienced by everyone else.

In fact, much of the anxious hilarity of the Nirvanna the Band the Show came from wondering, often aloud, what exactly was real and what was scripted. With cinematographers Jared Raab and Rich Williamson following Matt and Jay everywhere, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie also wavers, like its episodic predecessor, between faux documentary and hidden camera prank extravaganza.

But rather than exploiting cringe humor or just messing with unsuspecting normies, Matt and Jay discover a kind of freedom to be themselves while indulging their deeply cinematic impulses.

Once furnished with a studio budget, these impulses lead to some of the most dumbfounding scenes I’ve had the good fortune of witnessing in a theater. Yet, beneath the shock and awe, the Movie is the careful craft of dedicated artists. When Matt and Jay encounter their 2008 selves, the project doesn’t rely on de-aging CGI, but hundreds of hours of work from editors Robert Upchurch and Curt Lobb, who picked through old footage from the show’s initial web run. Behind Jay and Matt’s mania is a team quietly dedicated to unearthing miraculous material.

Similarly, outside of the thinly veiled facsimile of his life in Nirvanna the Band, Johnson has been a prolific filmmaker. After cutting his teeth on Nirvanna the Band the Show, he followed up his feature debut The Dirties (2011) with Operation Avalanche (2016), a comedy thriller about faking the Moon landing in 1969, which involved Johnson’s crew bluffing their way into NASA offices to surreptitiously film whole scenes on a shoestring budget.

In 2023, Johnson made Blackberry, a partly fabricated “true story” of the founding of the titular company, featuring a squealing, baldpated Glen Howerton. The next year, Johnson starred in Kazik Radwanski’s Matt and Mara, in which he played an over-talkative guy named Matt, likely riffing on himself as much as he is in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Instead of inhabiting a character, he piles on layers of pop cultural patinas.

Whether it’s the aforementioned skydiving incident or sneaking onto a crime scene outside of Drake’s mansion, the hint of reality in the movie’s every moment is more than enough to sustain the spectacle. Even now, I can feel my stomach churn knowing that when Matt is standing on top of the CN Tower, trilby staying on his head by sheer will, there is more of a chance than not that Johnson actually did that.

Laughing, sometimes, is just what happens when your brain doesn’t know what else to do with the information being presented. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is a tribute to the unbelievable shit you can pull off with your best friend and a few professional-looking cameras.

Do Matt and Jay make it back to the present? They have to, because Nirvanna the Band must go on, and more importantly, must play at the Rivoli. Someday. They have no other choice. For the real-life Johnson and McCarrol, this is Nirvanna the Band the Show the Existence, the stuff of crazed movie magic.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie opens in wide release on Friday, February 13.

Train Dreams Go on When I Close My Eyes

Dom Sinacola — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 14:00:00 -0800

Also beautiful: William H. Macy! by Dom Sinacola

This article originally appeared in our sister publication, Portland Mercury.

Train Dreams introduces us to the story of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) by considering his life's footprint on a map. Orphaned early on, he grows up by the Moyie River in Idaho, before finding work in the 1920s as a logger, traveling west to the old growth forests of Washington. He never sees the ocean but comes within 90 miles or so of the coast. He doesn't make it very far eastward, either.

His life was small. Our narrator—the wizened tone of Will Patton—says as much in the movie's opening moments. Robert didn’t cover much ground; he was geographically insignificant and arguably unremarkable. The only thing exceptional about Robert is his quiet. Director Clint Bentley may have given Train Dreams a narrator because Robert is a soul who needs one. Someone’s got to sound out his loneliness.

All of this we learn with a few words and fewer minutes. Adapted by Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar (who together wrote last year’s Sing Sing) from a novella of the same name by Denis Johnson, Train Dreams takes Robert's story and gives it shape and weight.

Events on Robert’s timeline threaten to enlarge his life. He courts his one and only love, Gladys, (Felicity Jones, who seems to be playing her character from The Brutalist: a long-distance wife carrying the fire of a better life in her chest) and together they build a cabin and family by the river. But Robert must leave every year to find work. First he's laying rail lines to open up the forests and then he's logging, tramping into eastern Washington for months while his young daughter grows exponentially every time he sees her anew.

Left to right: uncredited baby as Baby Kate, Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier.Adolpho Veloso, courtesy of NETFLIX

Afield from his home, Robert experiences first-hand the sea change of the Pacific Northwest as industry arrives to the country’s final frontier, in the early 20th century. Workers make way for machines and are then replaced by them. Diesel and electric power usurp steam; chainsaws cut away the need for an extra man to hold the other side of the saw.

These shifting rhythms are obvious but seemingly insurmountable to Robert. When he's a helpless bystander in the cold-blooded murder of a Chinese laborer, all he can do is see the man’s face in his dreams, more than any other face, for the rest of his life. Viscerally, the breadth of Robert's life can be measured not in expansion, not in the amount of ground covered, but in loss.

A demolition expert—of sorts—on a few of Robert’s logging crews, Arn Peeples (William H. Macy) plants the idea in Robert’s head that the trees they’re logging are centuries old. They represent thousands of massive lives cut down, in a way that no life may ever catch up again. Macy is stupendous, nearly unrecognizable with beady eyes peering out from a bushel of wet beard, playing Arn as an affable contradiction, in that he both blows stuff up and preaches about preservation. But Arn isn’t approaching his revelation from a conservationist’s guilt, just from the reality of their jobs. They are pulling down massive, magnificent creatures, demarcating their progress by reducing the land to one pockmarked with chode-like trunks.

Edgerton’s performance is plotted in the words that have escaped him—in the emotions he does all he can to keep down. But he's far from dour and even when the expected tragedy befalls him (as these kinds of stories typically entail), the actor reins in the immediate melancholy, giving it space and time to become part of the firmament of his existence. He plays Robert as a man who shares his grief with the world that surrounds him because that world is actually big enough to contain it. This is how he moves forward against the tides of loneliness that simultaneously swell and constrain his life.

Filmed around Spokane, eastern Washington, and western Idaho, Train Dreams is very plainly one of the most beautiful films of the year, rapt with the ineffable ways in which we are connected, bound even, to the dark and musty earth.

Of course, comparisons to filmmaker Terrence Malick (especially his 2011 epoch-defining film, The Tree of Life) are unavoidable. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso luxuriates in the unblemished forest, not only posing Robert’s tiny person against the majesty of the plants he’s hired to destroy, but holding long takes on busy logging encampments, allowing the viewer to live within the staggering depth of these images.

Unlike Malick, Veloso brings no symbols or portent to his lovely compositions, just the sense that such sights require our deference. When a tree falls, we feel that empty space where it once stood. We wrestle with that astonishment, at its sudden absence. Following the course of Robert’s mostly-wordless life, Train Dreams shows how technology has outpaced our capacity to hold anything in silent awe.

It's ironic, maybe, that Netflix bought this movie at Sundance for somewhere in the “high-teen millions,” affording it a short theatrical window to fulfill award requisites before debuting it on their service near the end of the month.

Because Train Dreams is indebted to the acute pain of loss—how that loss will get the smallest lives to emerge like huge grizzly-bear-gods from the flora of history—and Netflix is more responsible for the loss of theatrical culture than any other unyielding corporate monster, it’s a strange home for the film. A work like this, which is about the connectedness of all living things, does not belong on Netflix, where any sense of community goes to die.

This film is teeming with life. It should be seen in a theater, preferably in the Pacific Northwest—if you’re lucky. And it should be seen with Bryce Dessner’s sappy score simmering behind every inch of ground in its path, sawing the shit out of your heartstrings. For all of Robert’s silence, Train Dreams is loud with love, particularly for this green-dense place on a map that we call home.

Train Dreams opens at Landmark Crest Cinema Center, 16505 5th Avenue Northeast, Shoreline, WA; Fri Nov 7, tickets and showtimes and via streaming on Netflix, Fri Nov 21.

Bugonia Is a Good Time Yorgos Lanthimos Film

Dom Sinacola — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 11:55:00 -0700

The famous Greek director of strange and unsettling movies has made another strange and unsettling movie.

by Dom Sinacola

This story originally appeared in our sister publication, Portland Mercury.

Bugonia, the ninth and latest feature from Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, distrusts the human body.

Bodies, for Lanthimos, are ill-fitting shells. Uncomfortable carapaces. We wear them, often awkwardly, because we have to, but we’re typically struggling with the urge to take them off, trade them out, or—having failed to control our own—control those of others. Bodies betray us, fall apart, stop working, or inadequately represent our true selves. Maybe, if we’re determined enough, we can inhabit a different body by taking someone else’s.

In The Lobster (2014), Lanthimos’s strange and unsettling rom-com, single people are given a short time to find a romantic partner or risk being transformed into an animal of their choice. If unmatched, David (Colin Farrell) wants to be a lobster, so he can outlive everyone he knows.

Dogtooth (2009), the director’s international breakthrough, is a strange and unsettling satire about a very bad dad who imprisons his family inside their walled home, rebuilding their society—down to the language they speak—on a foundation of authoritarianism and incestual nonsense.

Poor Things (2023), Lanthimos’s recent Frankenstein riff and lavish Oscar bait, is a strange and unsettling fable that’s pretty explicit about the interchangeable nature of bodies. A pig head is sewn successfully to a duck’s body, among the film’s menagerie of impossible freaks. And if that’s possible, then why not utilize an adult human skull for a baby human brain?

These are stories of people wrestling with the world for control over their own flesh. Fascinated with how fragile and unacceptable he finds the human body—how gross it is, how easily it can be overtaken—Lanthimos fills his strange and unsettling films with characters pushing against the physical limits of their lives. They are suspicious of these bodies they’ve been given (by their parents, God, genetics, luck, whoever) and so are suspicious of all the accessories that come with those bodies, like family, friends, social class, routines, talents, words, morals, magic, love, time, etc.

Emma Stone as Michelle Fuller, a tech CEO who may or may not be a murderous space imperialist. Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features

Bugonia is under the control of that suspicion. Scripted by rich-people-whisperer Will Tracy (writer on Succession, a TV show about rich people “working,” and also the author of The Menu, an extremely OK movie about rich people “eating food”), it follows the four-day kidnapping of tech exec Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) by amateur beekeeper Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a drone at a factory owned by Fuller’s company, who suspects Fuller is an “alien” hiding under the skin of a powerful capitalist.

In the shadow of an unspecified tragedy concerning Teddy’s mom (Alicia Silverstone) and the aforementioned tech conglomerate—involving, it’s implied, pesticides, factory farming, and the effect of these environmentally devastating operations on the mortality of adjacent small towns—Teddy’s convinced himself and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) that their abductee is actually from the Andromeda Galaxy. She’s been sent to Earth by a more advanced species as part of a human extinction scenario decimating bee colonies and mass-poisoning vast swathes of modern civilization.

In several brief monologues, Teddy makes it clear that a chronic ingestion of online media has radicalized him into action, but Tracy’s script quotes everything from Q Anon to Adam Curtis without indicting anyone in particular. He’s done his own research and he’s only arrived at one truth: that aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy are real, and they are here, disguised as humans, to hurt us.

Regardless of who’s to blame for Teddy’s psychosis, Bugonia sets an obvious link between Fuller’s influence and Teddy’s grief, especially in surreal, richly black-and-white interludes that depict a young Teddy placated by a yammering Fuller and her team.

But any direct connection between the two characters isn’t needed in a post-Luigi-Mangione world, where CEOs have become very public supervillains masterminding widespread misery. The biggest difference between Bugonia and the film on which it’s based (Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 Save the Green Planet!) is that modern audiences are much more primed than those from 20 years ago to accept that a tech CEO is a murderous space imperialist. Helplessness is rampant; feeling like you have no control over your life accompanies even the simplest tasks.

Jesse Plemons as Teddy, in this frame dressed like the simultaneously wan and greasy ghost of Kurt Cobain. Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features

Mining that latent sense that the world’s out to get us, Plemons plays Teddy as a man who’s been able to hone his desperation into determination. Working with Lanthimos and Stone on last year’s Kinds of Kindness—an anthology film where actors play three different characters across three segments—Plemons is at home in Lanthimos’s simmering, exquisitely physical atmosphere. In Bugonia, when he rides a bike—dressed like the simultaneously wan and greasy ghost of Kurt Cobain—Jerskin Fendrix’s excessively orchestral score practically lights up the screen. The intensity of Plemons’ energy, just him pumping his legs and grimacing, is liable to split the frame in two.

Similarly, Stone seems to know exactly how to bend her body into the odd shapes that live in Yorgos Lanthimos’s head. Bugonia is her fourth film with the director, and she’s transcended any reservations she could possibly have about the way he conceives of the human body on film. She spends much of Bugonia bald and lathered in bone-white antihistamine cream, resembling Klaus Kinski’s Dracula but less plagued by centuries of loneliness. “I’ve become the human being I never dreamed I’d become,” she says, summing up her director’s entire filmography, and maybe even his life.

Stone stays fearless as an actor, and Plemons matches her with a lack of inhibitions—their whiplash dynamic perfect for when the film takes wobblier swings toward some grotesque slapstick. As they plead, bicker, debate, somersault over, and gnash at one another, the truth of what’s going on—the identities of the people on screen, the capabilities of their bodies—begins to unglue. Anything could happen; no one is safe.

Though cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who’s been with Lanthimos since The Favourite (2018), keeps the director from indulging his more confusing quirks—no flagrant fisheye lenses and/or stubbornly chopping off key parts of the human body when composing shots—Bugonia is as viscerally upsetting as Dogtooth and as bitterly tactile as The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017). If this is the director at his most accessible, then his most accessible is still him rawdogging weirdness, wielding Green Day’s “Basket Case” with malice.

But what maybe makes Bugonia actually accessible, at least compared to the reputation of its director, is that Lanthimos has been able to take his distrust for the human body and amplify it into a strain of nervous but exciting cinematic anxiety. The guy’s strange and unsettling energy has never been so much fun.

Bugonia opens in wide release on Fri Oct 31, 120 minutes, rated R.

Nobody 2: Twice the Carnage, but Not Enough

Dom Sinacola — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 10:23:00 -0700

I legitimately was hoping to see a man’s [redacted] maimed by a [redacted]. by Dom Sinacola

There is a scene in Timo Tjahjanto’s The Big 4—his Netflix-backed 2022 action comedy/abattoir—that gives you all you need to know about the Indonesian filmmaker behind Nobody 2.

Amidst an endless array of carnage and climactic, intestinally-forthright fight choreography, the camera's perspective follow a combatant's face, as it's stuffed into a toilet bowl.

But that's not enough for Tjahjanto. The toilet must also brim with pieces of shit, and that character must also open his mouth to scream, inhaling all the shit water, in close-up.

But that's still not enough. The aforementioned character’s face is wrenched from the bowl and immediately stabbed with a broken toothbrush, mixing incomprehensible fluids and unholy bacteria into the violent scene to fester under the skin.

It’s a blessed assault on our senses, and like that toilet, Netflix has become filled with Tjahjanto’s deeply affecting exploitation flicks. In brutal crime epics like 2018’s The Night Comes for Us, the director seems to have an intimate understanding of how bodies can move around a room, and then how every part of that room can be used to puncture those bodies apart.

While upsetting to many stomachs, the results of Tjahjanto’s on-screen indulgences can also be extremely satisfying displays of action cinema. His protagonists are typically brutal criminals who find redemption through Herculean feats of pain endurance and barely-won fights to the death. Tjahjanto's melees come with clear emotional stakes; we wince hardest when we care about a character whose flesh not just splits, but ruptures, sizzles, curdles, and explodes.

Which is why the budding Nobody film series—Bob Odenkirk and Derek Kolstad’s entry into the canon of psychopathic family men committing atrocities dressed up as dad justice—is a good fit for Tjahjanto’s first go with a big Hollywood studio.

The original Nobody (2021), which followed archetypically wussy middle manager Hutch Mansell (Odenkirk) as he reveals to his family his secret past as a contract killer for the US government, dampened the pleasures of its violence with oppressive antihero tropes. The more Hutch demonstrated his penchant for delivering 300 Russian mobsters to death’s doorstep, the grimmer the film got, edging around the catharsis a good cinematic bloodbath can provide by making the whole affair feel, well, not very much fun.

Nobody 2, by contrast, revels in the cognitive dissonance of Hutch’s hyper-violence, and finds glee in it. He is a mass-murdering tool of the military industrial complex, but he is also a stalwart family man, which means we can root for him using his powers for good—or at least goodish—even if we know that violence will only beget violence. There will always be a worse bad guy behind the worst bad guy. Watch ‘em all die!

As the sequel begins, having burned the obshchak (a treasury of money shared by Russian oligarchs), Hutch has returned to carrying out “assignments” for the government, only this time he’s working to pay back all the money he destroyed. Because, you see: There are always more powerful forces at work than the main baddie from the first movie. So, back to killing as his 9-to-5 he goes, but after a particularly harrowing mission, Hutch requests a “break” from the institutionally sanctioned butchery to take his family on a little vacation.

Echoing Nobody’s opening montage, Hutch’s all-consuming job threatens to estrange his family. His solution is to “make memories” with them by going to Plummerville, a middle America destination for budget-friendly amusements, based on Hutch’s own fond childhood memories of eating hot dogs and riding duck boats. With his dad (Christopher Lloyd, wiry party grandpa) cramped in the back of the car between the kids, Hutch leads his family on an excursion that turns as quickly sideways as cinematographer Callan Green’s whip-tilting camera.

Inevitably, Hutch learns that there was an obvious reason his dad, a retired FBI agent, brought him to Plummerville so long ago. A prime trading hub for an incredibly lucrative criminal enterprise led by the evil-er-than-the-last-guy Lendina (Sharon Stone, clearly having a good time)—overseen on the ground by Sheriff Wyatt Martin (John Ortiz) and his fellow Sheriff, leering worm Abel (Colin Hanks)—Plummerville’s a wholesome town surreptitiously crammed with thugs, henchmen, and cronies.

You know where this is going: Hutch can’t help but cross Lendina’s operation, unable to just have a normal week off with loved ones. Meanwhile, several baseball teams worth of expendables fatally discover that Hutch is not some “random tourist,” all of it well-wrangled by a seasoned action director.

Odenkirk, who alternates ably between regular man and homicide god, appears energized by working with a new voice, one likely eager to get a solid budget and some recognizable stars. If only Tjahjanto seemed similarly jazzed.

For as much mayhem as the director can capture, Nobody 2 never pushes as far as we know Tjahjanto is capable of pushing. Too much happens off-screen. While many of the perspectives Tjahjanto finds to witness Hutch’s frequent brawls bear bloody fruit—a warehouse massacre is particularly fascinating seen from inside, through the sliding door, of the van where Sheriff Martin’s son (Lucius Hoyos) is helplessly bound—we know the director is capable of showing us so many more gratuitous sights.

I legitimately was hoping to see a man’s [redacted] maimed by a [redacted]. That is the catharsis I deserve. (And, what, we couldn’t afford a “Holiday Road” needle drop, Universal?)

Alas. Though guts are literally spilled and beautiful jawlines sliced into pieces of salami, practical stunts employed liberally, Tjahjanto drives this summer vehicle like he’s unchallenged by the course. Nobody 2 has glimpses of impeccably tuned filmmaking, but nothing as thrilling as everything Tjahjanto’s made before. That may not be enough, but it’s all we’re going to get.

Nobody 2 opens in wide release on Fri Aug 15, 89 minutes, rated R.

This review originally appeared in our sister publication, Portland Mercury.

Dinosaurs Deserve So Much Better Than Jurassic World Rebirth

Dom Sinacola — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 17:05:00 -0700

At the end of my screening for Rebirth, a movie that sucked shit, the audience clapped. by Dom Sinacola

Jurassic World Rebirth will bring in a billion dollars at the box office. Which makes this review mostly inconsequential. Look in your heart; you know this to be the case. Despite unanimous critical consensus that the franchise's previous film Jurassic World Dominion (2022) is execrable, it still made somewhere around $1.4 billion. You don’t need me to tell you whether or not to pay for a ticket to Jurassic World Rebirth; you statistically will anyway.

Maybe this is just another sign that critics are meaningless vestiges of the movie industry. As some folks on the internet like to say: Facts don’t care about your feelings. In the place of discerning taste and nuanced discourse, there is only the knowledge that there will always be another Jurassic movie, another summer blockbuster overrun by more immense and scarier monsters than the last one, motivated by one more fictional rich asshole ignoring history to spit in God’s face, accompanied by one more A-list actor with an eight-figure price attached to their dignity. At the end of my screening for Rebirth, a movie that sucked shit, the audience clapped.

Oh well. This is the march of progress unabated, manifest in franchises that never end, in successive features with titles that become more and more interchangeable and sometimes use colons like gateways to subterranean barrel bottoms heretofore unscraped by directors who are more project managers than anything. Except Jurassic World Rebirth, like Dominion, doesn’t have a colon in its title (ironic, because it’s so full of shit, etc.), and, like Dominion, isn’t even really a dinosaur movie anyway.

Rebooting three years after the “events” of Dominion, Rebirth uses overly expository TV news coverage to catch us up on the prehistoric creatures who, following the disasters of Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, broke free of containment—nature “found a way” as franchise philosopher Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) opined—and, for a short time, coexisted with humans.

Now, the remaining dinos who weren’t wiped out by climate change and disease have congregated along the equator, mostly on small tropical islands where we’re told that the hot, “oxygen-rich” environs best match that of the Cretaceous period, or something.

We’re also told that public interest in dinosaurs is waning, that people just aren’t romanced by the same old spectacles anymore. As the world moves on from getting gobsmacked over what was once a technological miracle, uber-wealthy wads like pharmaceutical exec Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) must find new ways to exploit the creatures.

Luring her in with the promise of a small fortune, Krebs convinces Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a mercenary riddled with PTSD, to accompany a small team into the equatorial Dino-Zone—no humans allowed, according to “every” country on Earth, a collaborative international decree that is a more fantastical concept than dinosaurs coming back to life—and retrieve some samples of dino DNA for the purposes of pharmaceutical research.

Zora knows the trip is a huge risk, especially because the dinosaurs whose DNA they must extract are supposedly the largest animals to ever exist on the planet, a statement the audience just sort of accepts because every new Jurassic film introduces the newest, worst, and/or best dinosaur varietal. Hyperbole has lost all meaning when the same shit just keeps happening. Every attempt to harness genetic power, to build one more bigger and assuredly better theme park attraction, has been met with mass death and generational punishment. But also: That money’s just too good.

Archetypes aggregate. Krebs talks the obligatory self-righteous paleontologist, Dr. Henry Something (Jonathan Bailey), into joining the expedition, providing a beautiful nerd to conjure up the basest unrequited sexual tension with ScarJo’s ceaselessly competent soldier. Soon, Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), an old mercenary cohort of Zora’s with comparable trauma, signs on as well, because a broken man must nobly sacrifice himself at some point in these films. And he has a boat they can use.

Completing the crew are a smug hot-shot (Ed Skrein), a quiet and helpful French-speaking man (Bechir Sylvain), and a woman whose personality swaps between Dancing and Murdered (Philippine Velge), all requisite dinosaur fodder. Thusly, we embark on a jungle cruise, vaguely reminiscent of Apocalypse Now, into the heart of darkness, i.e., an unnamed island in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of French Guiana.

Meanwhile, a father (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), adorable young daughter (Audrina Miranda), college-bound daughter (Luna Blaise), and the oldest daughter’s dipshit boyfriend (David Iacono) use that same summer to sail across the Pacific Ocean on a 40-ft sailboat, because that’s a reasonable thing to do. The family inevitably crosses paths with Zora’s team, the cast ballooning to more paper-thin characters than any brain can conceivably care about. So when they make it to the island and discover that it’s teeming with genetically cross-bred dinosaur mutants and everyone starts dying at the jaws of hyper-real digital freakazoids, you may also feel dead inside.

Director Gareth Edwards has proven capable of spectacle, especially in conveying an upsetting sense of scale in something like 2014’s Godzilla, but in Rebirth, every incomprehensibly huge beast is immersed in a surreal melange of uncanny environments. Edwards affords a few fleeting moments for characters to soak in what they’re witnessing with astonishment—refuting the film’s earlier claim that people can’t feel much for these dinosaurs anymore—but then pulls the frame back to a giant vista covered with giant dinosaurs, and suddenly the weightlessness of the vision takes over. The magic’s extinguished.

Completely gone is the awe of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Jurassic Park—gone is the cosmic terror and jubilation of seeing a dinosaur. Maybe that seems quaint in retrospect, now that we have the power to “see” anything we can ostensibly imagine. But if that first film is about the visceral power, and irrevocable cost, of creating such a momentous spectacle, then every sequel since has been about what a bad idea it is to make sequels.

Because sequels are inherently evil. I’m sorry to put this so bluntly, but it’s true. The Jurassic World movies act as if they are warning against our idiotic nature to take everything good about popular art and grind it down to the nub, but that’s exactly what those films and those filmmakers are doing, giving into the loudest morons and the elemental forces of capital to ruin all beloved cultural artifacts via lifeless, juiceless rebirths. We cannot leave anything well enough alone.

Toward the beginning of Jurassic World Rebirth, Dr. Henry sighs, "Nobody cares about these animals anymore. They deserve better." It's hard to disagree. Dinosaurs—the real creatures who represent so much fascination and curiosity and wonder that we’ve pretty much ejected from our collective dreams—deserve so much better than this.

In fact, you deserve so much better than this.

Jurassic World Rebirth opens in wide release Fri July 4.

Dev Patel's Directorial Debut Monkey Man Is a Paean to Visceral Movie Violence

Dom Sinacola — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 16:05:00 -0700

Monkey Man begins playing at theaters in wide release Fri April 5. by Dom Sinacola

We go to the movies to watch people get hurt. There is no shame in this; human beings have a built-in urge to witness pain. Whether it’s emotional or physical, we line up at the theater to see our collective trauma made big and loud.

From Buster Keaton breaking his neck on Sherlock, Jr., to Johnny Knoxville breaking his neck on Jackass Forever, cinema is, down to its bones, an art of violence. Dev Patel seems to know this intuitively. Monkey Man, the British actor’s directorial debut, is a paean to the transformative, spiritual power of cinematic violence. Sopping wet and bathed in crepuscular neon, the film goes hyper-gnarly on human flesh.

Patel plays an unnamed street-urchin-turned-street-fighter who, disguised in a ragged gorilla mask, sublimates his rage in nightly, rigged fights set up by greasy promoter Tiger (Sharlto Copley). Glimpses of the origins of that rage, as well as why Patel’s character’s hands are so badly scarred, emerge as he plans the ultimate vengeance: A takedown of the police chief (Sikander Kher) who killed his mother, as well as the political-slash-cult leader (Makrand Deshpande) who enabled the chief and destroyed our protagonist’s village. By “takedown,” Patel clearly means “brutally murder.”

With cinematographers Simon Temple and Sharone Meir—the latter most recently, and most appropriately, lensing John Woo’s also-flagrantly-violent Silent Night—Patel pushes his protagonist through a pastiche of incredible action cinema. There are obvious echoes of John Wick, especially to the tune of “hirsute man in beautifully-fitting suit massacres whole room of thugs” (though Tenet-heads may remember John David Washington’s kitchen brawl as a nice corollary to Monkey Man's gory kitchen melee), but Patel also points to grim Korean thrillers like The Man from Nowhere and The Villainess, or to the squelching, viscera-spattering mayhem of Indonesian action filmmakers like Gareth Evans and Timo Tjahjanto, or even to the Hindi blockbusters of Shah Rukh Khan, whose Koyla from 1997 Patel cites as a particular influence on his character’s dripping, beady-eyed mania. One could even claim that Monkey Man’s training montage, in which our hero develops an unspoken bond with renowned tabla drummer Zakir Hussein to push his body to the limit, is modeled after the training montage in Rocky III, when Rocky must learn what it takes to find another fighter’s rhythm.

All of this foundational violence Patel infuses into Monkey Man’s action scenes, a barrage of hand-to-hand (and knife-through-hand) combat, intensely edited and kept close to the pores, but still given a solid sense of space. They’re demonstrations of both Patel’s physical prowess and the ravenous grasp he has on a production teeming with so much energy. This is satisfying action: By tracking Patel’s unleashed simian warrior, a lithe and restless silhouette, through higher and higher echelons of disposable opponents, we are promised the ultimate payoff when he reaches the top.

Dev Patel as Kid, although no one actually calls him that in the film (left) and Pitobash as Alphonso (right) UNIVERSAL PICTURES

This is how it goes for revenge flicks, and Monkey Man is, among many styles and subgenres that could apply, a revenge flick. It’s a power fantasy too, at least to the extent that in it an oppressed outsider is empowered to incinerate the oppressor down to its rotten roots.

Inspired by the story of Hanuman, the monkey god described in memories of his mother, Patel’s titular gorilla-masked vigilante becomes a hero for India’s marginalized, even seeking refuge in a temple maintained by a small group of hijras (India’s “third gender”) for the aforementioned training montage.

An introduction of con men and sex worker archetypes, along with various downtrodden-coded extras, provides the so-called monkey man a solid cause for which to sacrifice his body. Patel beats the point over the head by making overt comparisons to the reality of India’s still-prevalent caste system, interspersing footage of police brutality and government-sanctioned beatings with the film’s extreme bloodletting. But shallowly drawn characters and grisly by-the-books backstory hardly matter once the carnage begins, which is relentless and obliterative.

Maybe that’s too blunt a reading of the film’s worldview, that the only response to oppressive authority is total annihilation. Patel likely does not think a vigilante—however emboldened by social justice—should lead a one-man war against a major metropolitan police chief. But violence absolutely courses through Monkey Man. It defines it.

Where even John Wick could be interpreted as a treatise on how murdering every person on earth is bad (violence begets only more violence, etc.), Monkey Man wields vengeance as a way to cleanse one’s soul. There is no lesson here, only exorcism. There is no moral question here, only the face of a guy who definitely deserves it, pounded to a bloody pulp. My god, it’s invigorating.

Monkey Man begins playing at theaters in wide release Fri April 5.