In this episode, I’m joined by my friend Sam Watermeier from Midwest Film Journal to review Matt Reeves’ The Batman in a non-spoiler and spoiler discussion!
Matt Reeves’s dark and angsty noir take on Batman finally hits theaters this week following production hiccups and multiple release date changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Batman finds a young Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) struggling to make a difference in Gotham two years into his nocturnal crime fighting. Following the biggest drug bust in Gotham City PD history, a cryptic serial killer begins murdering Gotham officials and leaving notes at each crime scene.
Uncharted is successful enough as an action-adventure movie with decent chemistry between the leads. It’s biggest shortcoming is how often the film is forced to struggle to rise above its, at best, mediocre script.
In this episode, Tiny, Ben, and I continue our journey through Roger Ebert’s Great Movies List. In this installment, we discuss Hitchcock’s Psycho, Connery’s 3rd outing as Bond, Goldfinger, and Ridley Scott’s Alien. We also discuss the 2022 Academy Award nominations and debate the merits of music biopics and toxic fandom.
Sometimes a formulaic romcom can be fun and other times it can be excruciating in its obviousness. Marry Me, the new romantic comedy starring Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson, falls somewhere in the middle. The charm of Owen Wilson’s Charlie carries a little bit of cache when offset by the fame and spotlight of Lopez’s Kat. However, the film’s insistence on doing nothing unique with its concept and instead steering into the tropes of the genre is its ultimate downfall. Marry Me offers nothing to the romantic comedy canon that hasn’t already been explored to death in the late 90s and early aughts. It’s as formulaic as they come without much entertainment value.
Kenneth Branagh’s follow-up to 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express finds Agatha Christie’s iconic detective Hercule Poirot entangled in a murder plot aboard a cruise ship on the Nile. Adapted from Christie’s 1937 novel, Death on the Nile is an exercise in laborious plotting, weak characterization, and astonishingly poor visual effects. As a murder mystery, it suffers from an overabundance of motives and red herrings that are too easily introduced and dismissed. While Branagh does bring some slight pathos and intrigue to his portrayal of Poirot in the film, it’s not enough to leave a worthwhile impression.
In this episode, Mike and I gush over the latest installment in one of our favorite franchises of all time. In non-spoiler and spoiler sections, we discuss all things Scream (2022)!
In this episode, I welcome my friend Sam Watermeier (Midwest Film Journal) back to the show to review The Matrix Resurrections! I also share the podcast’s and my writing stats for 2021 and countdown my Honorable Mentions.
It’s been two and a half decades since Scream (1996) revitalized the slasher genre and changed the game for mainstream horror with a clever, meta script from Kevin Williamson brought to life by Wes Craven’s masterful direction. Scream ’96 was as much a twisted love letter to the horror genre as it was a slasher in its own right. And it garnered three sequels of varying (though all solid) quality. Now, the directing team behind 2019’s Ready or Not, Radio Silence (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett), have brought the Scream franchise back with Scream (2022), an endlessly clever and violent “re-quel” that honors Wes Craven’s legacy and shows reverence for the franchise he created with writer Kevin Williamson.
Happy New Year and welcome to The Obsessive Viewer’s 2021 Year in Review episode! It’s our annual episode where Tiny, Mike, and I share our movie viewing stats for the year and our top ten favorite movies lists. So join us as we reflect on another odd pandemic year and hope for a better year in 2022.
See for Me is a home invasion thriller with a unique spin. The lead character is blind and relies on a service app called See for Me, where an operator guides the user through their phone’s camera. It’s a fine enough hook for the film to start with but See for Me quickly shoves the concept aside for a more formulaic thriller. Sadly, what could have been an interesting entry in a tired subgenre turns into a dull limp to its expected finish line.
In this episode, Fekkes and I catch up and review Spider-Man: No Way Home. I was originally going to double up and pair this with a review of The Matrix Resurrections, but we went long enough to make this it’s own standalone episode!
Eighteen years have passed since the Wachowskis concluded The Matrix trilogy and were met with varying degrees of disdain and disappointment from the fan base. Now, Lana Wachowski (sans sister Lilly) has brought audiences back into the Matrix with The Matrix Resurrections. With this installment, Wachowski reintroduces us to Neo and Trinity and some familiar (and not so familiar) faces as they find themselves once again at the whim of machine overlords who’ve imprisoned humanity in a simulated world.
The Indiana Film Journalists Association has named “Mass,” an intimate and harrowing drama about two sets of parents facing off over a shared tragedy, as Best Film of the Year. It won four awards total, including Best Original Screenplay for Fran Kranz, the first-time writer/director who also was named Breakout of the Year, and Best Ensemble Acting for the cast of Reed Birney, Ann Dowd, Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton.
In this episode, Tiny and I discuss the IFJA nominations and the news of a Villeneuve adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama before diving into some Extended Potpourri! We then round out the episode with special post-screening recordings discussing West Side Story and Nightmare Alley.