Despite a lifelong love of the Looney Tunes, I confess I’ve never enjoyed a single feature length movie starring the Warner Bros. roster… to me, the anarchic nature of those cartoons makes the seven minute length the perfect amount of time before exhaustion sets in (even if you watch a whole bunch of them in a row). On top of that, the Road Runner cartoons were never my favorites, due to their inherent repetitiveness (the first cartoon was designed by creator Chuck Jones as a satire on chase cartoons, not a new entrant in the genre). So I was surprised by how much I loved COYOTE VS. ACME, a funny, smart, and surprisingly heartfelt satire on corporate America (which I’m sure had nothing to do with its shelving by clueless Warner CEO David Zaslav in 2023). The movie shows remarkable restraint in its usage of the A-listers, with Bugs, Daffy, and Porky reduced to effective cameos, while Tweety Bird plays into my favorite line in the film, as given by John Cena as the ACME corporation’s head attorney: “You TAWT you taw or you TAW? I don’t pay you to TINK, I pay you to TEE!” The understated animation thankfully lacks the overdone texture and shading of previous big screen Looney Tunes, and the integration with the live action aspects is wonderfully done. Will Forte as an ambulance chasing Albuquerque lawyer (hmmm, sounds familiar) is a perfect foil for both Cena and Wile E. Coyote (who’s given far more depth than I ever thought possible). It’s just a really, really fun time.
TONY
I was skeptical of the very notion of a posthumous biopic of Anthony Bourdain, given the complexity of the man’s story and the apocrypha that defines the very genre. But while the film’s focus on the impactful summer of 1975 the chef / author spent in Provincetown, MA certainly contains many made-up elements, so did Bourdain’s own account of that part of his life in his own KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL, so it doesn’t feel like a betrayal. Rather, this unexpectedly languid and sweet coming-of-age story captures what it must’ve felt like to be swept up in a life in which passion and debauchery was as vital to life as air, water, and (eventually mostly) food. Dominic Sessa is just terrific as the 19 year-old wannabe writer, a narcissistic, reckless, but smart and talented lovable asshole (I guess… he was complicated, is the point). In the end, the movie feels almost like a culinary BATMAN BEGINS or CASINO ROYALE, with all the trials and tribulations of its protagonist serving as an origin story for an amazing, inspirational, and ultimately heartbreaking saga to come.
Let’s just say that I dozed in and out of sleep for about 40 minutes through the middle of this movie, and feel like I missed absolutely nothing. The plot (A section of a California suburb gets transported to prehistoric times) feels like it sprung from the mind of a 12 year-old, the script from a five sentence AI prompt, with A-List actors walking through rote scenes of mayhem wrought by CG dinosaurs (at least these ones have feathers) and a trite ending that once again shows that all marital problems can be solved by living through a nightmare together and realizing how much you still love each other. I guess. Awful.
SUPERGIRL
Sigh. Make that Sighs. A plurality of Sighs.
SIGH #1: This is the first Superman-related movie that I did not see in the theater in my entire life (that’s a long time, kids). I had every intention, but life got in the way, and then suddenly, there it was on streaming, so. For me, that’s a bummer.
SIGH #2: The movie itself. I didn’t hate it, but it was such a missed opportunity, a neutered, watered down adaptation of a truly wonderful story, one that redefined Supergirl and gave her a complexity that made her far more than just a female version of Superman (seriously, read WOMAN OF TOMORROW by Tom King, Bilquis Evely, and Matheus Lopes). The casting is fine, but the writing is so flat, the action so generic, the color palette so bland (especially compared to the source material), Lobo is utterly superfluous, and the ending is an utter sellout. The tools were there; The end product was just that: product.
SIGH #3: That the movie was so infamously compromised by studio interference makes me not only sad about how SUPERGIRL turned out, but, paired with both my feelings about LANTERNS (which I’ll share when the season is over) and the impending Paramount / WB merger, gives me extreme pause concerning the future of the still-new DCU. I mean, sure, it’s a giant corporate entity overseeing a very corporate IP, but this aging fanboy had such high hopes after last year’s SUPERMAN. Now I’m not so sure.
And finally, SIGH #4: The fact that our current horrific, toxic culture doomed SUPERGIRL before it was even finished. Misogyny, intractable toxic fandom, clueless online commenters elevated to critic status by the two-headed democratization of social media, and virulent superhero haters all conspired to doom this film. I firmly believe that even if it had been a better movie, it still would’ve faltered at the box office.
ONE FINAL SIGH, JUST FOR ITS OWN SAKE: Sigh.
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