Thirty Minute Reviews: Week of April 22nd, 2024

https://open.spotify.com/episode/242lfdEmye7I4xUCjw8TB0

Coming off the highs of CinemaCon, it has been kind of a slow news week.

This Week In Podcasts

• Yesterday on Beware of Spoilers Adam discussed Challengers starring Zendaya
• Today on The Backlog Files we covered Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness
• On 4/25 Beware of Spoilers will be catching up with The Bad Batch
• On 4/26 in the morning, Beware of Spoilers will be covering the seventh episode of X-Men '97
• On 4/26 in the evening, Beware of Spoilers will be covering Boy Kills World
• On 4/27 in the morning, Beware of Spoilers will be covering The Girls on the Bus

Winners From The Indie Space

Last week saw the end of both the Phoenix Film Festival and the Cleveland International Film Festivals. Here are some of the winners from those two events:

Cleveland International Film Festival:

• Audience Choice: American Delivery
• Excellence in Directing by a Woman: Maggie Contreras (Maestra)
• Central and Eastern European Competition: We Have Never Been Modern
• Documentary Competition: Bye Bye Tiberias
• New Direction Competition: Femme
• Standing Up Competition (Films With A Social Conscience): Secret Mall Apartment
• Ad Hoc Docs Competition: Chasing Chasing Amy
• American Independents Competition: Thelma
• Global Health Competition: Small Town Universe
• International Narrative Competition: Thank You Guys
• Local Heroes Competition: Rogue

Additionally, the Cleveland International Film Festival is an Oscar-qualifying festival for the shorts categories so here are the winners in those categories:

• Best Live Action Short: Room Taken
• Best Animated Short: Anita, Lost In The Woods
• Best Documentary Short: Makayla's Voice: A Letter To The World

Meanwhile over in Phoenix, these films took home top prizes this year:

• Best Picture: Et Tu
• Best Documentary: ACID Canal
• Best Director: Robert Budreau (Queen of Bones)
• Best Screenplay: Max Tzannes (Et Tu)
• Best Acting Ensemble: Okie
• Best Community Spotlight Feature: Scarlet Winter
• Best Live Action Short: We Have Notes
• Best Documentary Short: Jack and Sam
• Best Animated Short Film: LUKi and the Lights

This Thursday marks the beginning of the Atlanta Film Festival which will run through May 5th. This week will also be the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Houston International Film Festival which are both Academy Award-qualifying festivals. Of note at San Francisco, they are screening Seeking Mavis Beacon, a movie I saw out of the Sundance Film Festival about two women's quest to find the model from the cover of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, and Sing Sing, a film starring Colman Domingo in a film that is an early contender for Best Picture at next year's Academy Awards.

Story 1: Christy Carlson Romano Reveals ID Came To Her For A Docuseries

About a month ago Quiet on Set debuted on Investigation Discovery (ID) and Max which highlighted some of the abuse levied at the child actors and writing staff of the various shows under the control of Dan Schneider at Nickelodeon. The show allowed former child star Drake Bell to come forward with the details of the abuse he suffered at the hands of one of the staff members who worked on shows like The Amanda Show. This week on a podcast with Miyim Bialik, former Disney Channel star Christy Carlson Romano revealed that she was approached by Investigation Discovery to do a similar show about her time at Disney.

Let me be clear, I am not trying to minimize what happened in any of these cases. What happened was heinous and steps should be taken to prevent this kind of treatment to befall people who work in this industry from ever happening again. That said, the fact that they are pursuing a second season focusing on the Disney Channel plays the hand of what Investigation Discovery, and by extension Warner Brothers, is trying to do. This is one massive corporation using their media subsidiaries to levy attacks against their key competition within a certain demographic.

And let's be honest, there has been no shortage of things that could be openly attacked over. They could have gone into the investigation that brought down Weinstein. They could have gone into the treatment of Judy Garland by MGM over the course of her contract with them. They could have investigated the dubious circumstances around the death of Natalie Wood and the decades of abuse she suffered in life at the hands of Warner Brothers. They could have talked about Andrew Kreisberg, one of the architects of the Arrowverse on the CW. They could have talked about Erroll Flynn standing trial for statutory rape. They could have talked about the House Un-American Activities Committee and the role Jack Warner had in the creation of the now infamous Hollywood Blacklist. They could have talked about the accident on the set of The Twilight Zone in the 1980s that killed Vic Morrow and two child actors under the age of 10 in a shoot that directly violated California state law.

The problem with this is that Warner Brothers is effectively attempting to act as a check on the rest of the industry, which would be admirable if it were not for the fact that historically industries self-policing never works. It also puts ID in the position where they are unlikely to report on things that may reflect poorly on people currently within the organization of their parent company. Considering how much movement there is within the industry and how many actors, directors, and executives metaphorically switch teams on a fairly regular basis, what's to stop the higher-ups at a studio from stopping a potentially negative story to air if a documentary was being produced about someone who now works for that studio? At the same time, the fact that basically each major studio has a documentary films studio at this point (Paramount has MTV Documentaries and Disney has National Geographic), how is it in the best interest of people working at these companies to hope that one of the competitors decides to look into what happened behind the scenes. This is exacerbated by the fact that most major studios are publicly traded and allegations against people currently employed by the studio could negatively impact the stock price, especially if situations look systemic and not isolated.

Let's look at a hypothetical. Say MTV Documentaries is working right now on a tell-all documentary about something that happened behind the scenes of like High School Musical or Hannah Montana. To be clear, I don't know if anything happened there or if there is anything in development, this is just hypothetical. MTV Documentaries is owned by Paramount and Paramount is currently for sale with Sony showing major interest in buying the studio. Now Sony and Disney have a close partnership when it comes to distribution and in other forms of income so what's to stop Sony in this hypothetical situation from telling Disney "hey we have this project that could make you look bad, we can pull the plug on production in exchange for certain concessions".

At the end of the day, the WGA, the DGA, SAG, and IATSE should all be working towards some kind of regulation or regulatory body by the unions because allowing the studios to decide who can tell their story, when, and who can be the ones to disseminate the information is a losing battle. This is not even something that the indie market can be relied on because independent documentaries cannot be self-distributed through Amazon Prime Direct so to get their message out there they would have to rely on distribution from one or more of the major studios. The fact that ID is sniffing around for its next big thing should be a wake-up call that these problems are more pervasive than people previously thought and that it should not be the job of the industry themselves to out it as more content that can be monetized later.

Story 2: Zack Snyder Is Back On His Bullshit

Would it be a press circuit for a Zack Snyder movie if he didn't spend a substantial portion of it whining about his past movies during it? This time he appears to be talking about anything but Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver, for good reason since the film is a dumpster fire, and is instead going back to his greatest hits and talking about what he would have done if he was in charge of the DC Universe.

Of course, relitigating his tenure as the head of DC's film slate seems to be Snyder's favorite past time instead of, you know, talking about the rich new universe he built from the ground up that he plans to milk a total of 6 films out of. This time he talked about how the idea to have Superman fight the Justice League in Justice League came from a conversation with Academy Award winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio (probably the closest Snyder will come to one outside the participation Oscar his fans astroturfed for him) where allegedly DiCaprio was the one who suggested that. Famously, DiCaprio did not appear as Lex Luthor in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and DiCaprio told Timothee Chalamet that he shouldn't take a role in a superhero movie but sure this really happened.

Also in the "sure, that happened" genre of statements, Snyder alleges that Tom Cruise was interested in playing the role of Rorschach in Watchmen after offering him the role of Ozymandias. Now I'm not discrediting this outright because the timeline does somewhat line up since Tom Cruise did not have a film release in 2009, it is suspect that he is only talking about major actors who are not easily accessible via social media that couldn't be bothered to validate his claims.

Let's be honest, it is not entirely Snyder's fault that he is forced to constantly relive his past failings in these press cycles because the members of the media who are doing these interviews keep giving him these easy layup questions designed to get a clickbait headline and he keeps answering because it would be rude to bluntly ask "can we talk about my current project and not what I did 15 years ago?" On the other hand, it is a bit of an indictment of both Rebel Moon and what the audience broadly thinks of Rebel Moon that there isn't the same energy around it. If it was me and I had a massive deal with Netflix to build my own cinematic universe exactly the way I wanted and I previously worked for some other company who treated me as poorly as WB did at the end of the contract, you couldn't pay me to talk about that over my current movie, yet here we are talking about Justice League three years after his cut was released, six years since the theatrical was released, and on his third film released since then.

Story 3: Fallout Renewed For Season 2 on Amazon Prime

Amazon Prime's Fallout series has been a massive hit for the streamer, so much show that it has reinvigorated interest among the general public in the games including the much derided Fallout 76. Coming off that, and to no surprise to observers considering tax breaks were already given to Amazon to shoot season two in California, the show has been officially picked up for a second season.

Ordinarily that would not be enough of a story on its own, however the release strategy of Fallout has once again reignited the debate over whether the binge model or the standard weekly release model is better for the longevity of a show. We had this a little bit earlier this year with Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender but because Netflix rarely if ever uses the weekly release cadence, it was not as big a conversation. The difference here is that Amazon occasionally uses the weekly model with shows like Rings of Power, Invincible, The Power, The Boys, and Wheel of Time being released weekly while A League Of Their Own, Paper Girls and now Fallout have been released following the binge model.

The staying power of shows released weekly is far greater than that of shows released all at once, and that's purely because it is staying in the cultural conversation longer. Even a show like The Bad Batch will be talked about two weeks from now more than Fallout because the show is being released weekly instead of dropped all at once. At this point, it's a baffling decision for anyone to dump a series out in the binge model, even Netflix, since the evidence points to weekly releases being better for generating interest in the content being released.

Story 4: Trailers Released For Transformers One, Hit Man, and Trap

This week we saw three new trailers released for movies coming out later this year. Starting out with the biggest name, Transformers One will be hitting theaters on September 20th and, I have to say, this trailer has made me less interested in the film than I was when it was announced, mostly because the visual aesthetic is nothing too special. I'm also not a fan of the voice performance by Chris Hemsworth as Optimus Prime, but the narrative idea of seeing Optimus Prime and Megatron before they became the characters everyone knows.

The second trailer is for Richard Linklater's new film Hit Man, which follows a relationship between an undercover cop who poses as a hitman to arrest those trying to hire him who ends up getting involved with a woman who needs his help. Linklater has always had a gift for writing romance and Glen Powell has proven himself to be a fantastic leading man.

The final trailer is for Trap, the latest film from M. Night Shyamalan about a man and his daughter who go to a concert that turns out to be an elaborate trap to catch a serial killer. It is interesting that the "twist" has been revealed in the trailer, namely that the father is the serial killer in question, when the synopsis does not mention that at all so it will be interesting if there is another twist later in the movie.

Story 5: Quinton Tarantino Scraps The Movie Critic

No one is telling Quinton Tarantino that he can only make ten movies, and no one is strong-arming him into counting both parts of Kill Bill as one movie so he fits in under this arbitrary limitation. That said, he has ceased work on The Movie Critic, the film that would have been the tenth and final movie he released in his career.

In a way, this is kind of a sad story because we are watching a man paralyzed by the weight of his own legacy and this misguided belief that if you make more than 10 films you are doomed to mediocrity. Look at Richard Linklater who's 10th film was the 2005 Bad News Bears remake but has since made Boyhood and Before Midnight. Martin Scorsese's 10th film was The Color of Money which came before Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, The Departed, and The Last Temptation of Christ. Fincher just crossed his 10th film recently with Gone Girl which would have deprived the world of Mank and The Killer. Dunkirk was Nolan's 10th and he only won his first Oscar for Oppenheimer this year. Acclaimed French director who ushered in the French New Wave movement Jean-Luc Goddard would have hit his 10th in 1965. Should Disney be concerned now that Cameron just crossed film number 10 with Avatar: The Way of Water? Are Schindler's List or Jurassic Park bad just because they came after The Color Purple which was Spielberg's 10th film?

The point is this idea that he only has 10 movies before he has to retire is a weird one, not based in reality and is going to leave him where he only has the 10 movies he's released so far (the Kill Bill movies count as one in his mind) or he releases this elusive final movie and the self-imposed stress to make it perfect could result in him delivering a lackluster swan song.

Bonus Time: Deadpool & Wolverine Trailer 2

So considering we are behind on the episode anyway, we might as well talk about the new trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine. When Marvel announced that the trailer was coming out this week on Sunday, I was surprised because I would have bet that the trailer would drop the week of the NBA finals for the ESPN synergy or the week that Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes came out.

What's most interesting about this trailer is the fact that the show Loki is very clearly "required reading" to understand fully what is going on here. The TVA and the void play key roles and it appears that a not-unsubstantial amount of time will be spent dealing with stuff in the void. The interesting part is not that they are tying together various aspects of the interconnected universe because that has been the promise since phase 4 was announced in 2019 and Feige said that the shows and the movies would hand back and forth between each other.

What's interesting is that there is a negligible difference between the amount of time required to "know everything" going into The Marvels and the amount of time going into Deadpool and Wolverine considering both are two seasons of television (Ms. Marvel and Wandavision for The Marvels compared to both seasons of Loki for Deadpool and Wolverine). There was a concerted effort to amplify complaints about this going into The Marvels that is absent here, a decision likely tied to the gender and ethnic demographics of the two films in question. In fact, one could argue that Loki is probably more integral to Deadpool and Wolverine because it establishes the general multiversal rules and someone can walk into The Marvels and have who Kamala Khan and Monica Rambeau explained to the audience within two lines of dialogue each.

At the end of the day, I'm confident in the quality of this film because Ryan Reynolds takes it seriously. It'll be interesting to see how it plays compared to the rest of the movies, especially going into the next Avengers film in two years.

This Week At The Box Office

Probably this weekend's biggest surprise is that Civil War held strong against Abigail but besides that, the results are to be expected.

1. Civil War: $11.1 Million
2. Abigail: $10.2 Million
3. Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire: $9.4 Million
4. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: $9.0 Million
5. Spy X Family Code: White: $4.8 Million

You do have to hand it to the anime fans who consistently show up for theatrical releases to movies within franchises they like. I'm unfamiliar with Spy X Family but the show does seem interesting in concept.

Coming To Theaters This Week

This week sees two major releases coming to theaters. Luca Guadagnino's latest film Challengers arrives this Friday with special advance screenings happening throughout the week. This film follows Tashi, a tennis prodigy who turns to coaching after a catastrophic injury ends her competitive career leading to a conflict between her husband and her ex-boyfriend. Also hitting theaters this week is Boy Kills World which follows a deaf and mute boy with a vibrant imagination who harnesses his imagination to become a killing machine after the death of his family.

Coming To Physical Media This Week

We have a few big ones coming to home media this week. The complete fourth season of Max's Harley Quinn is coming to DVD and Blu-Ray alongside the second part of the animated adaptation of Crisis on Infinite Earths. In terms of theatrical releases coming to home media, this year's surprise hit The Beekeeper and Drive-Away Dolls both arrive on DVD, Blu-Ray, and 4K this week.

Revisiting Spider-Man (2002)

As part of Sony's plan to recapture some of the lost revenue from their slate being almost exclusively Spider-Man-adjacent movies and a failed Ghostbusters sequel, all eight live-action Spider-Man movies are being rereleased in theaters. Considering that until the Amazing Spider-Man movies with Andrew Garfield I hadn't seen any of these in theaters, I figured this would be a good time to revisit the movies on a weekly basis.

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man is an interesting film because it was one of the first if not the first non-Batman examples of a good comic book adaptation that leans into some of the campier aspects of the source material. Is it a little goofy that Tobey Maguire is playing a high school student who does not look anything like he had been in high school in the last two decades? Yes. At the same time, does this movie do a fantastic job of nailing the visual aesthetic that would be used from here on out for Spider-Man's movement and fighting style for the next few movies? Also yes.

Probably the weakest aspect of the entire Raimi trilogy in my opinion is the relationship drama and related love triangle between Peter, MJ, and Harry. Not only does it not age well but because of how the relationship is handled over the course of the three movies it just feels a little off the whole time. On the other hand, the performances in this film are fantastic so this film is clearly number one in our ranking at this point, though I think it will fall to the middle range by the time we move through the entire eight films.

Programming Note

One of the major festivals we like to cover on Beware of Spoilers is Tribeca, which is starting to release information regarding its slate for the 2024 festival. Last year at their gaming and immersive experience show, they featured games like Chants of Sennaar and Stray Gods, both of which were reasonably large indie releases for 2023. As of right now, there is not a major release on the level of Elemental last year to definitively say what our coverage plan will be, nor is there a concrete schedule in place to select showtimes.

That said, I do think there is a non-zero chance that Inside Out 2 similarly debuts at the festival and, if not Inside Out 2, Kinds of Kindness is also a candidate for the centerpiece film that has not yet been announced. The gaming and immersive showcases will not be announced until the 25th so hopefully over the next few weeks we will be able to announce what we will be covering from that show and when.