House of the Dragon (S2:E1 – A Son for a Son)

Set 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones, season 2 of House of the Dragon picks up days after the conclusion of Season 1. Westeros is on the verge of war as the already cloven royal family reals in the aftermath of Prince Luke’s death at the hand of his cousin Aemond. Unwilling to forego vengeance, will Queen Rhaenyra’s next actions set the whole of the country in dragon flames?

House of the Dragon (S2:E1 – A Son for a Son) Review

Season one of the series was already at a disadvantage when compared to the electrifying early seasons of GOT. However, it quickly found its own voice, distinguishing itself as a more deliberately paced affair far more interested in political intrigue than in being an epic adventure with global repercussions.

Episode 1 of this season continues the trend even though it also sets the groundwork for what look to be set pieces to rival the scope, if not the emotional connection of Game of Thrones. And that’s really where this episode suffers the most: a lack of emotional connection.

Unhelped by the two-year gap between seasons 1 & 2, A Son for a Son doesn’t possess the same connective tissue as even some of the weakest episodes of its older brother. Its characters seem to blend together with names that are even more similar and indistinguishable from one another than they are.

All in all, the somewhat slowly-paced episode 1 of season 2 of House of the Dragon is held together by good performances and promise.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Oh, Varys

• Game of Thrones had no shortage of strong women in leadership roles. However,  unlike Daenerys and Sansa, who went through hell only to gain power organically, or Cersei, who schemed and connived her way to power and ultimately ruin, the leading ladies of House of Dragon wield power much more like their male counterparts. Furthermore, the competence scale has significantly tipped in their direction.
  • With all of his flaws, even after losing his hand, Jaime Lannister’s character arc was both that of finding redemption and, once again, becoming competent. Season 2 of HOTD seems to be setting the stage to make the men more or less irrelevant.
  • It’s fairly subtle at this point, and I might be wrong about the show’s trajectory, but I doubt it.

House of the Dragon (S2:E2 – Rhaenrya the Cruel)

The drama continues as the consequences of Daemon’s impetuousness begin to bear poisoned fruit. The Red Keep is in turmoil, the king is furious, and war is inevitable.

House of the Dragon (S2:E2 – Rhaenrya the Cruel) Review

Rhaenrya the Cruel is another perfectly satisfactory entry into the series. The performances are consistently fantastic, and the dialogue is better than almost anything else out there right now. However, the show still hasn’t reached GOT’s intrigue or on-the-edge-of-your-seat thrillingness. Instead, it continues to give off a very soap opera-like vibe, though with infinitely better script, performances, and production value.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Floppy Wieners

• I’m all for the franchise’s complete omission of gratuitous nudity. It added nothing to the original series and served as little more than cheap titillation. However, while this series shows a marked reduction, they make a concerted effort to hide female nudity without the same consideration for the men. Don’t get me wrong, junk isn’t spinning in the wind in scene after scene, but they will show completely naked men (junk hidden) while giving half-ass-crack shots to women playing dancing whores. It’s not an accident.

Geography Schmeography

• One of the things that gave the original such a wonderful sense of scope was its clearly defined geography, as shown by clear racial and cultural divides. You know, like the totality of human existence was before cheap and easy mass transit was a thing. Heck, have you been to modern-day Japan or Norway? They’re filled with Japanese and Norwegians.

House of the Dragon (S2:E3-E8)

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Deadpool & Wolverine Review

With painfully few exceptions, Netflix’s Beverley Hills Cop: Axel F being among the most recent, legacy characters and legacy IPs, especially male or male-centric ones, have been kicked around and treated like family members that the big studios that own them are ashamed to acknowledge. So, when it was announced that The House of Mouse was going to bring back one of the most beloved comic/comic book movie characters of all time, featured in a film franchise known for its diarrhea and masturbation jokes, one could be forgiven for puckering up in some warm dark places.

Fortunately, the main duo’s affinity for the character shines through in scene after scene as Jackman’s dour Wolverine plays rage-filled ying to Reynolds’ neverending diatribe of sophomoric yang. This dynamic was attempted in Deadpool 2 with Josh Brolin’s Cable but fell flat due to a number of factors, Cable’s lack of character development chief among them. In Deadpool and Wolverine, the chemistry sings.

Whereas 2 sometimes felt relentless and chaotic, by keeping the focus tight on its two charismatic leads and infusing it with the perfect combination of heart, humor, and brutal violence, Deadpool & Wolverine effortlessly soars past the dreg that has become the MCU specifically and Disney programming in general.

Another shining star atop the film’s refrigerator art, as Wade and Logan go on a worlds-spanning adventure, good-naturedly harpooning many of the MCU’s blunders and missteps via The Merc with The Mouth’s signature meta-humor, the Deadpool & Wolverine delivers scene after scene of the best fan service ever put to film. Do not go hunting for spoilers, and hide your eyes from all of the marketing because D&W’s cameos are beyond next-level, and each one discovered before its time will rob you of much of the movie’s magic.

All of these warm and fuzzies aren’t just good but are dearly needed because the film’s plot is only slightly more undercooked than its villain. Played with aplomb enough to almost make up for being little more than a glorified plot device, Emma Corrin, best known for her role as Princess Diana in The Crown, manages to squeeze out and amplify both drops of character development written for her Cassandra. Performing real-life magic, she manufactures a three-dimensional performance virtually from thin air.

Ultimately, Deadpool & Wolverine is a savagely hilarious action-adventure comedy that relies on a lot of fun action sequences, tons of charisma, and gallons of chemistry between its leads. By the film’s end, your face will hurt from smiling.

WOKE ELEMENTS

It’s The 3rd One

• There’s a sprinkling of sacrilege that inches its way past modern cinema’s ubiquitous overuse of the Lord’s Name. This is why I didn’t endorse the film as Worth it.

It’s Only Gay If You Don’t Laugh

• The marketing campaign had some fans worried that Deadpool & Wolverine would lean hard into the bromance that Reynolds has been hinting at since the first Deadpool. However, the movie avoids this like the plague and instead dishes out a continual barrage of gay jokes that lampoon homosexuality rather than glorifying it.

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Twisters

After experiencing a brush with death, one-time storm chaser Kate Cooper will have to face the deadly storms that killed her friends if she hopes to overcome her crisis of confidence and develop a way to stop future twisters from taking any more lives.

Twisters Review

1996’s Twister was far from high-concept cinema, but it knew what it was and maximized what it had to offer to its fullest. Although billed as a “standalone sequel” to the original, Twisters is best described as a remake or reboot, as it is unrelated to the original except for a handful of Easter eggs. Like many other reboots, Twisters is comparatively weak sauce to that of its papa.

Even though there is no denying that Twisters’ special effects are significantly superior to that of the original, and those who see it in IMAX or XD will be viscerally rocked by the chaos of its digital storms, the fact of the matter is that this sequel/reboot/remake relies far too heavily on its technical superiority to carry the film.

The original filmmakers clearly demonstrated their understanding of the material by peopling their story with fun, if two-dimensional, characters and building a rudimentary but thematically identifiable narrative around the film’s action. Audiences had those for whom to root and root against and the film even managed to sprinkle in some emotional ambiguity with the love triangle between Bill Paxton’s, Helen Hunt’s, and Jami Gertz’s characters. In short, audiences were given a reason to care.

While those responsible for Twisters attempt to do the same, only Glen Powell’s perpetual wry smile gives any semblance of being an even marginally realized character. The rest of the cast are bland, interchangeable, and forgettable. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays the lead, Kate, who is an amalgam of Paxton’s “human barometer,” who has an almost 6th sense about the storms, and Helen Hunt’s character, who was singularly driven by an early tornado-related tragedy.

Jones gives a serviceable performance but is hampered by a paper-thin plot and a major character arc that is seemingly overcome after a good night’s sleep until it unnaturally pops back up 45 minutes later for some artificial second-act conflict. Of course, in true modern Hollywood fashion, that conflict is easily and almost immediately overcome after a bit of conversation.

The lack of conflict is arguably the Twisters’ greatest downfall. The original gave us a love triangle, two disparate teams competing for the same goal, and a single overriding goal driven by tragedy for which to cheer. While these were separate elements, each served to build up the others. This new film gives us overzealous YouTubers chasing the same storms as the protagonist but for clicks, and treats the scenes in which both are doing their thing as though one is in the way of the other. In reality, the giant storms are big enough for both of them, and neither is in the other’s way at all, giving the characters’ early animosity toward one an unnecessary and artificial flavor.

Although both films require truckloads of convenience, contrivance, and fuzzy physics to exist, You could almost believe that the events of the original were possible. Twisters takes it to a whole new level with Powell’s character’s truck, a truck driven into the heart of several tornadoes without getting even a pit in the windshield.

A modified RAM dually, it is virtually impervious to the finger-of-God-power of the film’s storms thanks to some one-inch steel reinforcement and a pair of hydraulic augers. These augers burrow two feet into the earth, anchoring the truck against winds that rip foundations from the ground. It’s a silly idea, but one that audiences could perhaps suspend their disbelief for if the rest of the film were any fun.

Unfortunately, even Twisters’ action, while technically sophisticated and realistic, is largely unimpressive thanks to a combination of the aforementioned lack of emotional connection to the various story elements and equally egregious pacing. What story there is flows at a glacial pace only to be interrupted by the occasional world-ending storm, which often feels like it is over before it begins.

Having not seen the original Twister since it came out in theaters (saw it at a drive-in), I streamed it last night on Max just to see if I was unfairly comparing this new iteration against the nostalgic warm and fuzzies. I am not. Do yourself a favor and save money on theater tickets and popcorn, get some dollar-store snacks, crank up the big screen, and rewatch the original.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Lip[stick] Service

• The film tries to play the “boys are easily fooled by pretty girls” cliché for about half a second, to the point that a song playing in the background says as much.
  • I didn’t ding it much because the boy in question was never fooled, not even once.

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Thelma

When 93-year-old Thelma discovers that she’s been the victim of a phone phishing scam, she decides to take the law into her own wrinkled hands.

Thelma Review

Thelma’s first-time writer/director, Josh Margolin, weaves a tale grounded in the delicious and often ridiculous reality of the human condition. Superficially a parody of the modern action flick, with panache, heart, and humor, Margolin and company deconstruct the genre’s tropes to spin a tale that, at its core, is about the importance of feeling self-sufficient and how the slow deterioration of age can rob us of this. More importantly, Thelma is about embracing the reality of you and adapting to overcome our frailties rather than wallowing in them.

June Squibb, who also voiced Nostalgia in this year’s Inside Out 2, is superb as the titular Thelma. Her first leading role in a career spanning decades, her deceptively deep performance perfectly embodies the very ontology of “grandma.” She is sweet and loving, confused but not senile, feisty but not cartoonish. Her character is the perfect blend of excellent, sincere storytelling and an actress who is the embodiment of the character she is playing.

The story is straightforward and artfully simple, but Margolin’s direction and Squibb’s sweet demeanor and wonderful performance make it impossible not to fall in love with Thelma immediately. Subsequently, her vigilante quest for justice quickly feels as though it is your own. As the audience quickly latches onto Thelma, the electric current between the material, direction, and performance grounds viewers in such a way that they experience the same heart-stopping sensations as Thelma navigates seemingly mundane obstacles, as they would watching James Bond maneuver through a deadly laser maze, with the added benefit of being able to laugh at yourself for your investment in such absurdity.

Unlike in last year’s 80 for Brady, in which a group of elderly women shared one last adventure that relied heavily on convenience and unrealistic happenstance, Thelma is almost completely believable and all the better for it.

With a simple story made gripping thanks to a great mix of characters, perfect pacing, and great performances, Thelma is a delightful way to spend an hour and a half at the theater. It is absolutely Worth it.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Nothing

• Nada.

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