August Movies Part 2: Together & Weapons

You know what's fun in the summer? Heading into a dark theater and watching a clever and bizarre horror movie. Bonus points if it makes you laugh. This month, we've got two such films, one more comedic than the other, but both great examples of the wild and crazy imaginations of horror filmmakers.

Together: Written and directed by Michael Shanks, this movie stars real-life married couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco as Millie and Tim, a couple who have recently moved away from the big city into a rural area so Millie can pursue a teaching job at a local school. Their relationship is a little rocky, with Tim being extremely apathetic and indecisive, while Millie is clingy and trying to get their lives on track. One day they get lost on a hike in the woods, it starts raining, and then they fall down a hole and discover a mysterious cave. They drink the water from a pool in the cave, and that was their biggest mistake. Because that water has magical properties and they are now in for a wild ride.

What follows is a very funny and weird body horror film about what happens when a couple starts to literally become one. Initially it's just little things where they wake up to find their legs are stuck together and they need to pull them apart - they blame mildew. Then one night they wake up and Tim is eating Millie's hair and choking on it, and it is all chalked up to being some sort of crazy sleep terror. But of course, things keep escalating and eventually, it becomes clear that there are forces that are trying to get them to fuse into each other, in the ultimate expression of co-dependency. The movie is a great treatise on couples who think that they have to be just like each other, to such an extent that they become indistinguishable from one another, and it's a deliberation on whether that is truly the point of true love. Of course, it's not actually that profound, and it's mostly just extremely hilarious. If you need a 100-minute diversion, this is exactly the kind of thing you should seek out on a summer afternoon.

Weapons: Written and directed by Zach Cregger, who directed the 2022 movie Barbarian that I loved, this is a twisty and compelling movie about the people of a small town who all wake up one day to find out that a bunch of children all got out of their beds at 2:17 am, walked out of their houses, and have now completely disappeared. All of the children were in the same third-grade class, and their teacher, Ms. Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) is under attack by all the parents and townspeople, who think she had something to do with this. Meanwhile, she has no idea what happened, and why Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher) is the only student in her class who didn't disappear that night. No one will let her talk to Alex, and she is paranoid and helpless. The action picks up one month after the incident and we will follow five different characters to see how their lives intersect with one another over the course of a few days until we eventually solve this mystery.

The script is tight and has a Rashomon feel as you get the perspective of these different characters and their lives in this town. I won't go into too much detail because the delight of this movie is in watching it unfold and finding out who are the key characters in this tale and how their lives will intertwine to produce the insanely dramatic conclusion. There are so many jump scares, and you will spend a lot of time peeking through your fingers as you anticipate something extremely creepy about to take place on screen. But there's also a lot of humor sprinkled throughout, especially as events start to get increasingly bizarre and the characters are just absolutely baffled at what is happening to them. It's great storytelling and perfect summer entertainment, so head to the theater, as long as your nerves are up to the challenge.

August Movies Part 1: The Naked Gun, Freakier Friday, The Life of Chuck

I'm behind on blogging this month so prepare for a deluge of random reviews. That's what summer's for!

The Naked Gun: Directed by Akiva Schaffer, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, this is an 85-minute spectacularly silly movie filled with sight gags, a billion puns, and the dumbest jokes imaginable. If you're having a tough day and want to see Liam Neeson disguised as a little schoolgirl, this is the movie for you. 

Neeson plays Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr., the son of Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) from the original Police Squad! TV show and subsequent Naked Gun movie franchise in the 80s. Like his father, Frank Jr. is a detective who doesn't play by the rules but manages to be surprisingly effective, much to his supervisor's chagrin. When he meets the sultry Beth Davenport, played by the delightful Pamela Anderson, he is pulled into a twisty murder case, trying to figure out who killed her brother and what devious criminal plans must be thwarted along the way. Fans of the original franchise will eat this movie up, whereas for someone like me, it was a perfectly apt diversion. My favorite joke? A shot of what is clear Crypto.com Arena, with a sign renaming it as Ponzi-scheme.com Arena. Readers, I chuckled.

Freakier Friday: Do I remember anything about the 2003 Freaky Friday movie? No. Was I still looking forward to seeing this sequel written by Jordan Weiss and directed by Nisha Ganatra? You bet!  Jamie Lee Curtis and Linsday Lohan are back as Tess and Anna, the mother and daughter who switched bodies in the original movie and got a literal lesson in how to walk in another person's shoes. Now, Tess is all grown up and made the choice to be a single mom, so she has a teenage daughter of her own, Harper (Julia Butters). Harper's archrival at school is a new girl named Lily (Sophia Hammons), and when the two girls get into a fight, their parents are brought in to speak to the principal. Well, turns out Lily's father, Eric (a very hot Manny Jacinto, with a hot British accent), is a young widower, and sparks immediately fly. Within six months, he and Anna are ready to get married, much to the deep objection of their daughters, who still hate each other. And so, of course, the universe decides another body swap is in order. 

Except this time, the two teenage girls swap bodies with the two older women, and it's all twice the fun. It's silly, it's predictable, you'll forget everything you saw the minute you leave the theater, but you'll have a good time while you're watching it. Jamie Lee Curtis is probably the most committed actor to the bit -- maybe that's why she's the one with an Oscar -- but it's clear everyone involved is having a ton of fun, and sometimes, that's all you want from your silly summer sequel.

The Life of Chuck: Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, based on a novella by Stephen King, I would be hard-pressed to tell you anything about what this movie is about. I started watching it on streaming, and then pulled up Candy Crush on my phone and promptly stopped paying attention. The movie starts as a story about a teacher named Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan) who are living at a time when the world seems to be on the brink of ending. The news is always terrible, and the planet seems to be in trouble, and everyone is in a constant state of panic. And yet in this midst of this chaos, there are billboards for a man named Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) and we get the story of how this man lived his life and why life is a wondrous thing, full of beauty, and we must seize the moment every day. And there's a scene where he dances for a very long time with a stranger on the street.

I don't know why this movie stars all these British actors doing American accents, and it was just so vibey that I completely checked out. If there was a plot, I'm sorry, I did not notice it. I'm a huge Hiddleston fan, but this movie just felt too anodyne to compel me in any way. Upon reading the Wikipedia plot summary of this film, I can see that oh sure, there was some structure, but again, none of it felt like it had anything important to say. If you love this movie, please let me know if I'm wrong and this movie deserves a second viewing, but my first certainly left me with no impression whatsoever.

July Movies Part 4: Happy Gilmore 2 & The Fantastic Four: First Steps

To close off the month of July, I watched one movie on streaming and one in the theater. Both were perfectly adequately movies that could serve as a good distraction this weekend, so give them a try!

Happy Gilmore 2: First off, I had never seen Happy Gilmore, so my husband quickly rectified that oversight in my film viewing by making us watch that movie earlier in the week. Then we tuned into Happy Gilmore 2, so I could see exactly how much nostalgia was baked into this sequel. Written by Tim Herlihy and Adam Sandler and directed by Kyle Newacheck, Adam Sandler is back as the titular angry golfer who wanted to be a hockey player but turned out to have a flair for golf instead. Spoiler alert, this movie kicks off with him being widowed, so what then follows is a descent into alcoholism and depression, which he then claws himself back from as he has to raise money to send his beloved daughter to ballet school in Paris. A noble goal, if ever there was one.

There are a lot of callbacks to the original movie, and you can bet that almost everyone from the original has returned to this film (unless they're dead, in which case they still might make an appearance). There are also a lot of cameos from new folk who were clearly huge Gilmore fans that wanted to ensure they showed up in the sequel. There's a plot involving an upstart golfing league that's trying to make golf cool again, and Happy will side with a bunch of famous professional golfers to defeat these newbies. It's all very silly and fun, and exactly what you would expect. This movie is perfect fan service so if you loved Happy Gilmore, hop on the couch and tune into Happy Gilmore 2.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps: Written by Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer, and directed by Matt Shakman, this movie is aesthetically glorious. The production design by Kasra Farahani captures a futuristic 1960s New York and is wonderfully reminiscent of the cartoons. It's all very fun and fabulous (and dare I say...fantastic?). The cast of Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach is unsurprisingly great, and the quartet look like they are having a lovely time as they banter with each other and save the planet from certain doom. There's the added complication of Sue Storm being pregnant, and the worries of whether the baby will have weird powers, and that storyline just keeps building and building as they encounter a giant cosmic being named Galactus who wants to annihilate Planet Earth. The stakes are high.

I would have recommend this movie without reservations, but the problem is that it came out one week after Superman and really pales in comparison to that movie. While all the right elements are there, the script is just not tight enough (as evidenced by the presence of four screenwriters, never a good sign), and the middle of this film drags interminably and goes off into a lot of unnecessary tangents that ultimately don't pay off. It's still a decent movie, but it misses the mark to be a truly good one.