5 Movie Reviews: Zombieland Double Tap, Dolemite is My Name, Laundromat, Honey Boy, and Terminator Dark Fate

Zombieland Double Tap: "Zombieland" is innovative in its special effects and in an era when one out of every three movies has people shooting at people in some form, that's quite a compliment. The film is littered with clever narration and on-screen text but the use of both treads the fine line between additive and cloying.

More importantly, the film has chemistry between its quartet who form a found family and the introduction of Zoey Deutch as a valley girl along with cameos by Luke Wilson and Thomas Middleditch are comic highlights.

For someone who has no inherent attraction to the zombie genre, I thoroughly enjoyed this film and that's saying a lot.




Terminator Dark Fate- After three extremely underwhelming sequels, it’s pretty miraculous alone that James Cameron and company managed to make something halfway decent. Like “Logan”, a future-leaning genre is given n post-modern Western feel by setting it in the desert landscape of Mexico. While the return of Linda Hamilton’s  Sarah Connor character was hyped up as the missing ingredient, she’s a disappointing straw man, and it’s really Arnold Schwarzenegger’s mellowed-out performance (as opposed to his annoyingly silly performances in “Terminator: Genysis”) that steals the show. The high-water mark of the franchise was “Terminator 2” which combined the state-of-the-art action and novelty factor with a Spielbergian story of a kid and an unconventional parent figure. Although McKenzie Davis and Natalia Reyes have their pluses, this film doesn’t capture that magic from “Terminator 2” but the action is a non-stop adrenaline rush.


Dolemite is My Name-The “film behind the film” genre can get pretty tired but Rudy Ray Moore was such an audacious anamoly (I was planning to use the word “original” until I realized he stole his act and still remained a likeable protagonist) that his biopic is worth exploring. The rags-to-riches rise of Moore is a tale of perseverance, adaptation to the times, and is laced with underlying racial commentary without being preachy. The show boasts a strong ensemble but no one overshadows Eddie Murphy which is the way it should be: His performance needs room to  shine.


The Laundromaut-The film will garner comparisons to “The Big Short” because of the fourth wall devices, focus on financial fraud, and the loose cobbling together of different plot threads. This film is a bit more stylized (the typography is quite heavenly) but it’s a pretty apt comparison. Because “The Big Short” came first, this one’s going to look fairly derivative by comparison, but it also is a film that feels a bit pretentious and uninspired outside of its gimmickry. For an ensemble film, the film seems to put its focus in the wrong places as well. Some of the subplots don’t seem to have a suitably meaty arc and (some are going to differ from me) Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas’ characters are underused here. The two are treated as emcees to tie together the string of events rather when they could be more deeply involved in the story themselves. Still, the cast is rather impressive and the film has its moments.


Honey Boy-The film is difficult to take because it portrays parental abuse so barely, but it is an assured work of art. Shia LaBeouf has been a very unconventional star and this is a culmination of much of his grappling with himself that’s happened in public. He faced the same hurdles of growing up under the limelight that has befallen other child actors and he's been charged with drunk driving, plagiarism, bad relationships with co-stars, concealing on-set relationships, and and misbehaving so badly during a Broadway performance that he got thrown out of a theater and sent to jail. Rather than follow the script during his rehabilitation,his form of damage control in these situations, he used transparent honesty. This resulted in one of the funniest interviews I've ever seen on Jimmy Kimmel, the I'm Sorry Tour, and the thing where he watched his own movies. And now this film.

Are the Oscar Best Picture Picks Duds? Defending the Academy

As long as there are movie fans and those movie fans have access to the internet, you will always hear complaining that the Oscars get it wrong. I'm not sure if it's a non-conformist streak in my character or a love for playing devil's advocate, but I often like to take the opposite point of view that by golly, those Oscars often get it right like no one else!

One thing people need to acknowledge by the very nature of its large membership, a voting  body like AMPAS will naturally veer more towards some kind of consensus with few extremes. If you put the 1,000 most vocal critics of the Oscars in a room and asked them to vote for their Best Pictures of the year, I would bet money that their most idiosyncratic choices would cancel each other out and you would be left with the commonalities like The Martian, The Revenant, and Spotlight. 

When we look at the main criticisms leveled at the Academy, the same contradictory criticisms often pop up: They either don't reflect the views of the public, or they don't acknowledge the more experimental fare below-the-radar. Otherwise, everyone points to a few bad choices over the years and just uses that as proof that the Academy is terrible.

Personally, I think the Best Picture nominees in the past few years do a good job of balancing populist picks, artier films, ambitious experimental stuff, and straight genre stuff that's done well. I wouldn't want them to go too indie because I feel like films should resonate with the public and even if the best film by critics' views was something that screened for two weeks in Toronto and Tribeca, it's not something the public will enjoy being a part of on Oscar night.

So here's my expanded case:

For the Populists:

• Avatar is the highest grossing film ever and it got nominated, and ET, Exorcist, Sound of Music, Godfather, and Titanic were all box office record breakers of some sort.
• Nominees Rain Man, Forrest Gump, ET, Saving Private Ryan, Avatar, Toy Story 3 and American Sniper were all the top grossing film of their year
• Nominees Martian, American Sniper, Gravity, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, The Help, True Grit, Social Network, Toy Story 3, True Grit, Inception, District 9, Up, Blind Side, Avatar, and Ingloruious Basterds all won their opening weekends in the 10-picture era
• Among others that haven't made any of those lists list Mad Max: Fury Road, Spielberg's films (War Horse, Lincoln and Bridge of Spies), Wolf of Wall Street, The Artist, and The Fighter have all been crowd-pleasers

For the art house crowd:

• Films like Beasts of the Southern Wild, Amor, District 9, Brooklyn, Winter's Bone and Room were all films that had very, very little chance at finding a widespread audience before Awards Season boosted them.
• Nearly every popular visionary film director out there: Michelle Haneke, Wes Anderson, Thomas McCarthy, Richard Linklater, Steve McQueen, Kathryn Bigelow, Lisa Cholodenko, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky, the Coen brothers (4 times) and Neil Blokamp have all gotten a turn at the bat with Best Picture nominations. A few years ago, you could have said, some of the more interesting film directors like Wes Anderson or Alfonso Cuaron or Richard Linklater have never been nominated. But no longer.
• Last year, you two films that had never been done before stylistically in Boyhood and Birdman and this year Revenant and Room were both stylistically very original.

For the socially-conscious crowd:

• Six films in the expanded BP era-Selma, Precious, Help, 12 Years a Slave, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Blind Side- have had black narratives and black casts and the majority of those have had a black director. Each of those black directors got a major boost that allowed them greater creative freedom on their next projects.  While one can conceded that  Blind Side might be geared toward glorification of the white protagonist in the story at expense of the black protagonist, that is not the case with the other five films. I would also argue that Blind Side does teach us  something about the black experience. After all, Michael Oher (the film's subject) is a real person.
• Another nominee, Life of Pi, tells a story set in another 3rd world region: South Asia.
• Three of this year's eight films feature a woman protagonist
• Spotlight is about a struggle against the ultimate patriarchal society. Big Short is about the uneven distribution of wealth and economically disadvantaged.
• Last year, we had a film about a physically disabled person, a film about a gay person, a film with a black theme, and a film about a broken family
• The year before, we had a feminist film (Philomena), a film about transgender righs (DBC), a film with a black narrative, an action film with a female protagonist (Gravity), a film taking place in the 3rd world with an illuminating look of the struggles of people in the Global South (Captain Phillips), and another film about the effects of the rich on the financially disadvantaged (Wolf of Wall Street)
• Of the last six Oscar-winning directors, one has been a woman, four have come from a non-English speaking country, one has been East Asian, two have been Mexican