Filmsuck

20/08/2024

New Filmsuck essay on the 1963 noir heist film ANY NUMBER CAN WIN, starring Jean Gabin and Alain Delon. The contrast between the two actors makes the stardom of each more brilliant. https://www.patreon.com/filmsuck?view_as=patron

18/08/2024

Good news, everyone! ALIEN: ROMULUS isn't bad!

If you guessed that our film critic Eileen Jones would hate Alien: Romulus, buddy, you guessed wrong. The corporate manipulation and betrayal in the Alien films don't lose their fascination over the course of their many variations.

14/08/2024

It hardly needed to be said, but in case anybody wondered, I was there to witness the tanking of BORDERLANDS during the August movie doldrums.

Borderlands is officially a box office disaster. Even Cate Blanchett can’t save it.

13/08/2024

Latest Filmsuck episode we call "Faye Dunaway: Don't F**k with Me, Fellas!" It deals with the new HBO Max documentary, FAYE, on the life and long career of the thorny but fascinating star, which includes such memorable films as BONNIE AND CLYDE, THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, CHINATOWN, NETWORK, MOMMIE DEAREST, and BARFLY. (Open to the public!) https://www.patreon.com/posts/110036840?pr=true

06/08/2024

New Filmsuck essay on my intense nostalgia for BEETLEJUICE (1988), which I only discovered when seeing the preview for the upcoming sequel BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE, coming out September 6th. https://www.patreon.com/filmsuck?view_as=patron

04/08/2024

Hard to believe I'm still watching M. Night Shyamalan films. And reviewing them! Some masochistic urge, I guess.

Trap is a deeply silly thriller — and further proof that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan is among the most uneven filmmakers in the history of the medium.

30/07/2024

New Filmsuck episode! We're celebrating Scottish-born actor Deborah Kerr ("...rhymes with star!") whose stardom in 1940s England got her a Hollywood studio contract and a "ladylike" star image she had to fight in order to get better roles. She ought to be better known for her unusual air of compassion and worldly wisdom and her many great performances in such films as THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP, BLACK NARCISSUS, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, TEA AND SYMPATHY, HEAVEN KNOWS MR. ALLISON, AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, THE KING AND I, BONJOUR TRISTESSE, SEPARATE TABLES, and THE INNOCENTS. https://www.patreon.com/filmsuck?view_as=patron

29/07/2024

It seems I've given up at this point. My review of DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE:

"After an immensely profitable opening weekend, Deadpool & Wolverine is on track to dominate the international summer box office. Clearly, it’s hit a sweet spot for audiences. It combines nostalgia for superhero movies past with a relentless barrage of witty acknowledgements that the whole genre, when you get right down to it, was all a bunch of crap anyways.

"The crap theme is very thoroughly sustained..."

Well, it IS.

Deadpool & Wolverine’s cynical mocking of all things Marvel is its secret weapon. No wonder it’s making a killing at the box office.

28/07/2024

This week’s Filmsuck essay is on a little known MGM musical called LILI, and carries on the theme from our recent Filmsuck episode on carnival films. LILI, too, takes place at a carnival, but some of the main characters here are puppets that save our main character, a homeless orphaned teen named Lili in more ways than one. Lili is wonderfully played by Leslie Caron right after she became a star in her debut film, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951). Eileen discusses the strange emotional intensity and unusual subject matter of this Great Obscure Films #3: LILI (1953). Read here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/108504708

24/07/2024

What a summer. I'm exhausted. Here's my review of TWISTERS, which is a big mindless hit:

"Anyway, you know without being told whether you’d like to see CGI tornadoes wreaking havoc all over Oklahoma, pursued by the people who love them....[I]f you’re bent on seeing TWISTERS, be warned — there’s a whole lot of contemporary country music yeehawing along with director [Lee Isaac] Chung’s handsome 35 mm imagery. Be sure to factor that into your moviegoing considerations."

In Twisters, Glen Powell, Hollywood’s newest MVP, spins a formulaic script into good old-fashioned summer box office gold.

20/07/2024

Latest Filmsuck episode! We're talking about the darkening effect of carnival/amusement parks in summer movies, with special focus on the 2009 indie comedy ADVENTURELAND. https://www.patreon.com/filmsuck?view_as=patron

19/07/2024

The climax of the film SOME CAME RUNNING features a heart-wrenching tragedy and a Ferris wheel that director Vincente Minnelli became absurdly obsessed over, according to star Frank Sinatra—to the point of moving the giant apparatus slightly over instead of just moving the camera. The incident took so long that “Sinatra bolted toward his limo, dove into it headfirst, and ordered the driver to the airport. He went back to Los Angeles, and Dean [Martin] went with him,” said his co-star Shirley MacLaine. Minnelli said of the event: "Folklore suggests that the Ferris wheel had to be moved three inches to satisfy my esoteric tastes. The reason for the move was somewhat more practical. The camera wouldn't pick it up in the long shots unless it was moved six feet. It was important that the Ferris wheel be seen from all angles, since it was the focal point of the scene." We’d say that’s a fairly reasonable explanation, wouldn’t you?

18/07/2024

Awwwwww Bob Newhart died.

He was a show-business neophyte when he stammered his way to fame in 1960. He went on to star in two of TV’s most memorable sitcoms.

18/07/2024

Again, we just can’t get enough of people who know what’s up.

18/07/2024

What a weird-ass movie. My review of FLY ME TO THE MOON.

Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson try to win the 1969 space race in Fly Me to the Moon. But its heavy-handed history lessons ruin the fun.

18/07/2024

We love a realist.

17/07/2024

It’s all aboard the ta**ry train to the crawling-with-carnies amusement parks that spring up in summer in this week’s Filmsuck episode. Your co-hosts talk about the 2009 gem ADVENTURELAND starring Jesse Eisenberg, Kristin Stewart, Ryan Reynolds, and Martin Starr as artsy young people trying to escape the suburbs but stuck working at Adventureland for the summer. Also under discussion are other summertime films featuring the often-dark and foreboding effects of carnivals, fairs, and amusement parks, such as ZOMBIELAND, THE LOST BOYS, and SOME CAME RUNNING... Listen to a very summer appropriate episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/108235217

16/07/2024

In THE AWFUL TRUTH (one of the films Eileen focuses in the recent Filmsuck essay), Dan Leeson, played by Ralph Bellamy, has this to say about mothers that has us thinking–might this have been the inspiration for the famous quote from Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO? “A boy’s best friend is his mother…”?!

16/07/2024

Blissfully happy with a billboard of herself up in New York, Gladys Glover from the film IT SHOULD ONLY HAPPEN TO YOU pursues her 15 seconds of fame with abandon, learning the hard (and long) way fame really isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

16/07/2024

Maybe I was just in no mood for Yorgos Lanthimos' KINDS OF KINDNESS. (The smug bastid!)

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness is a nearly three-hour anthology film about the human capacity for cruelty. It’s exactly as fun as that sounds.

16/07/2024

Just a reminder

The only good thing we have to say about the reactionary film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy is that it’s so boringly told you’ll forget about it in an hour.

12/07/2024

For this week’s Filmsuck essay, Eileen is viewing the latest Criterion Channel series: “Columbia Screwball.” Romance in the lens of class strife and gender battles are two of the central issues Eileen focuses on as she analyzes some of her favorite films of this collection of screwball comedies made at small but mighty Columbia Pictures. A tribute to such dazzling films as IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, THE AWFUL TRUTH, and HIS GIRL FRIDAY, should have you queuing up some of these films yourselves. But the focus in this essay is on two more obscure comedies starring Judy Holiday and Jack Lemmon, George Cukor’s IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU, and Mark Robson’s PFFFT, that show how screwball began to shift in the ultraconservative 1950s. Read this week’s essay on one of Eileen’s favorite genres here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/107773503

12/07/2024

Liza Colón-Zayas who plays Tina in THE BEAR, discussed her feature episode, “Napkins,” with the Daily Beast. Directed by Colón-Zayas’s co-star Ayo Edebiri (Syd), this was your co-hosts’ favorite episode of the latest season because it pumped the brakes on fancy narrative and stylistic techniques and put the focus back on exploring the lives of characters that make the show so great. “Honestly, it’s a little nerve-wracking when you have younger directors, not because they are not capable, but like Tina, in my own head, it’s like, ‘Do I have to fight for my life here?’” said Colón-Zayas before adding that it was actually the “total opposite” working with Edebiri, whom Colón-Zayas described as “so easy and supportive.”

11/07/2024

From our favorite episode of Season 3 of THE BEAR, about how Chef Tina (Liza Colon-Zayas) first arrived at The Beef, desperate for a job. Tina’s admission to Mikey captures the brutality of ordinary working class experience, which crushes people’s aspirations to the point that they’re forgotten, disavowed, or otherwise left in the dust.

11/07/2024

Hayley Mills won a Juvenile Academy Award (a half-size version of the golden men we’re familiar with and the last one of its kind ever given) for her performance in POLLYANNA. Not only did she never get to accept the award because she was off at her English boarding school, where the statuette arrived via post, but she never knew about the ceremony or her achievement in the first place. It was presented by Shirley Temple and received on Mills’s behalf by Annette Funicello. When Mills did receive it, it sat on her mantle for decades before the thing actually went missing in the ‘80s when she left to shoot SAVED BY THE BELL. The Academy had gone so far as to destroy the mold once the award was discontinued, so Mills joked that they should give her a full-sized one to replace it, but they refused. Years later, when she paid a visit to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences headquarters, then president David Rubin presented her with one.

10/07/2024

A spirited exchange for THE spirited young actress. A quote related to our essay on Hayley Mills.

08/07/2024

Hayley Mills is a dazzler in nearly every role she ever played, and in our new Filmsuck essay. Starting with the sweet and joyous POLLYANNA, we get a sense of how Mills—even as a child actor—blew her scene-mates out of the water. Under a restrictive contract with Walt Disney until she refused to renew it at age twenty, Mills wasn’t able to take many of the more interesting roles she was eligible for–such as Stanley Kubrick’s LO**TA, for example–resulting in some regret from the actress as well as doubts about her acting abilities. However, Eileen celebrates her lesser-known non-Disney roles, playing a disturbed and disruptive teenager in the 1964 drama THE CHALK GARDEN, and a rebellious Catholic schoolgirl in THE TROUBLE WITH ANGELS (1966). Dig out that Aperol, prop your feet up, and enjoy this summery Hayley Mills essay as we rectify the lack of attention her late teen/young adult roles received: https://www.patreon.com/posts/106748727

07/07/2024

My review of the new biography MISS MAY DOES NOT EXIST: THE LIFE AND WORK OF ELAINE MAY, HOLLYWOOD'S HIDDEN GENIUS includes lavish praise of her great 1970s films A NEW LEAF, THE HEARTBREAK KID, and MIKEY AND NICKY.

A new biography of writer-director-performer Elaine May makes a strong case for her canonization as one of our greatest comic talents. Unfortunately, Hollywood never knew what to do with her.

06/07/2024

The Bear is finally back, so of course, we’re covering it. This week your Filmsuck hosts talk Season 3 of the Hulu/FX show we’ve come to love, only this time around, there are a few notes. What started as a dynamic and powerful show has somewhat faltered this season. The culprit? Well, according to your hosts, it's awkward artiness combined with a deliberately designed theme for the season that might be termed “stasis and shouting.” Many of the characters are stuck in frustrating holding patterns and lashing out at each other, with Carmy and Cousin Richie leading the pack as they reach new levels of animosity while the rest of the staff of The Bear struggles to keep up with the demands of Carmy’s perfectionist vision of attaining a Michelin star. Don’t get us wrong, we aren’t done with the show, which still boasts a great overall narrative and memorable characters and terrific actors and the rare quality of taking ambitious creative risks. We just hope the show’s writers stop trying to be so fancy–they’ve got enough awards already–and sail out of the narrative doldrums next season. Listen to Filmsuck’s thoughts here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/107240282

06/07/2024

The most famous line from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, spoken by Martha, is a quote from a 1949 Bette Davis movie, BEYOND THE FOREST. Playwright Edward Albee loved the idea of casting Davis herself as Martha, and Henry Fonda and James Mason were originally considered for George. Of course, fate would bring us Liz and Dick as rumors swirled about how closely they were drawing on their own notoriously tumultuous relationship.