Ungentlemen, Vampire Ballerinas, Lesbian Crime Capers, and Creeping Brains
Ran the gamut in my media consumption this week.
A round-up of stuff I’ve watched or otherwise did this week.
New Releases
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024)
I feel like a bit of a miserable bore for not thinking this film was more fun but, alas, I must live my truth. I like to do periodic check-ins with Guy Ritchie to see what the man is up to followed by a small break—I saw Wrath of Man but not Operation Fortune or The Covenant; I saw King Arthur but not what is seemingly the film in question’s unsuspecting forefather The Gentlemen. Five years later, Ritchie decided it was time to become the opposite of a gentleman, damn it!
And that’s where we land with The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, a title so clunky and unwieldy that after the film I overheard a fellow audience member struggling to recollect the title of what exactly they just saw (also, the word “ungentlemanly” just vaguely feels like something pulled from the 2010s era of epic bacon humor). Early reactions have been prone to call this Ritchie’s Inglourious Basterds and that’s not wrong though maybe a little shallow—Tarantino isn’t the only one to make a pop WWII action thriller after all. The general premise is somewhat fun in how it molds what appears to be a true story (though certainly embellished) into a winking, ridiculous action movie plot: Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear donning heavy prosthetic make-up so heavy and a performance so overplayed I can’t tell if it’s supposed to kinda be a bit) assembles a crew of the rather ungentlemanly variety, led by Henry Cavill’s convict character Gus March-Phillips, to lead a clandestine mission, what the movie bills as the first instance of black ops operations, to thwart the Nazis by sinking a U-boat stocked with months worth of supplies for the German naval fleet in order to give America an opening to join the war by sea.
Simple enough, and it gives ample opportunity to get straight to the good stuff: watching our team of brutes indiscriminately mowing down Nazis. And don’t get me wrong, watching a pack of Nazis get obliterated by a turret gun does scratch an itching part of one’s lizard brain, but I felt like I was waiting for the moment this movie would take off when it never really did. Weirdly, it combines a heightened run-and-gun, wise-cracking, blood-soaked tone with events that are, on the whole, sort of downplayed. It just never pops, and is sometimes actively irksome in its roguish humor. Its main mission and the characters embarking on it are so thinly developed that I was actually more interested in the parallel events of the two assisting espionage agents played by Eiza González and Babs Olusanmokun, whose exploits are given far more texture and consideration—maybe we can make a spin-off movie that’s just these two pulling off their own mission. Ungentlemanly Warfare is just too run-of-the-mill to truly recommend. At best it’s Ritchie on autopilot. At worst it’s close to a Matthew Vaughn or David Leitch movie.
Abigail (2024)
The directing duo known as Radio Silence (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) are back with a novel new concept: what if they made Ready or Not again but this time with vampires?
That’s maybe a bit unfairly reductive but it’s hard not to see Abigail as a direct reprise of that film as another mansion-set tongue-in-cheek horror comedy that does indeed include more bodies erupting into gallons of blood. Though perhaps overly safe for the duo who seem to be content relying on the tricks they already know will click with a general audience, Abigail is certainly better than those new Scream movies these guys put together and reminded me why I thought they had potential with Ready or Not in the first place. The very in-vogue sarcastic and facetious tone they imbue this film with may be starting to lose some of its luster on me (as evidenced by my thoughts on the film right above this entry), but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a few good kicks out of the gory antics held within—and I do think there’s something to be said for the novelty of this being initially structured as a crime caper that takes its time in revealing its vampiric nature, I only wish we lived in a world where the fact that the young girl this group of criminals captures for ransom is actually a monster was something that could have been concealed in the marketing!
Regardless, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett know what folks are coming to this film for and it’s delivered in spades: vicious Vampire Ballerina attacks, bodily mutilation, stakes through the heart, and a sufficiently ominous atmosphere in between the laughs. Certain scenes of Melissa Barrera roaming through the halls of the mansion armed with a pistol recall skulking around a similar residence in Resident Evil 2, which is to say that there’s a solid grasp of atmosphere here. The cast is game as well, particularly the always-great Dan Stevens whose character is taken a direction that allows him to get violent and dirty with his performance (shout out to the late Angus Cloud as well, turning in a weird and funny performance as an aloof wheelman). Twelve hours after seeing this movie I’ve already mostly left it in the rearview but for some reliable popcorn entertainment that gives you exactly what it’s advertising, you could do worse than this.
Catching Up On Some 2024 Releases
Imaginary (2024)
I’m not really sure how much grace I have to afford this movie. The cinema of Jeff Wadlow (Kick-Ass 2, Truth or Dare, Fantasy Island) has consistently been pretty batshit terrible but somehow he’s outdone himself with this lazy drivel. Original horror concepts aren’t usually the first movies I’d call cash-grabs necessarily, even if they’re made on the cheap with the knowledge they’ll easily recoup their budget however many times over, but man if this doesn’t feel like they’re weaponizing that knowledge into tricking audiences into forking over hard-earned cash for the most witless collection of horror cliches I’ve ever seen be smashed together. The tropes of every horror movie of the 2010s are mangled into something painfully brain-dead; I have to think all the actors here are aware of it as well for how stoic and wooden every performance is, though it doesn't help that every line is seemingly written to be as awkward and clunky as possible. Just bad all around. Fake, not real movie.
Drive Away-Dolls (2024)
It’s pretty funny to me that during their break-up Joel Coen went off and made a solemn and artful rendition of Macbeth and Ethan Coen came through with a dipshit crime caper movie that you’d expect to be made by…the Coen Brothers. The diametric split of the two of them laid bare for everyone to see!
I had fun with this movie despite how extremely slight it feels when all’s said and done—or maybe I liked it specifically because it felt light and cheap. It feels a little bit like someone trying to do an approximation of a Coen Bros movie without the same technical or writerly command, but as a weird little offhand B-movie lark it’s quite fun and I laughed a lot. Can’t go wrong with something this loose and eccentric that’s only 84 minutes long.
I Made It Out To The Gig
I went to see Jeffrey Lewis this past Sunday when he and his band—currently but seemingly inconsistently known as Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage—came through to give everyone their fix of indie punk and sardonic anti-folk. I’m still new to Atlanta and had never been to the venue, called eyedrum (all lowercase), but I had to laugh walking it to realize it was an extremely tiny room in some kind of DIY collective art space—it practically felt like a house show. And it ruled! I’m a relatively new fan of Jeffrey, only having found his music in the last couple years while he’s been releasing albums since around the time I was born in the late ‘90s. He’s is one of those artists that over the past couple years I’ve liked but never loved outside of some key songs, but I feel like I really got Jeffrey Lewis seeing him live. His appeal is niche and not for everyone, but he’s maintained a consistent cult appeal over the past few decades. He and his band ran the gamut of his discography, including full-band cuts from their latest record Bad Wiring and Lewis solo stuff from when his records consisted mostly of him and an acoustic guitar. I didn’t really know what the big Jeffrey Lewis songs were necessarily (besides maybe “Back When I Was 4,” which he conspicuously did not play after an audience member repeatedly requested it to the point of annoyance) but they ran through some of my personal favorites like “Depression! Despair!,” “Sad Screaming Old Man,” “The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song,” “LPs,”and I was especially happy they played “Arrow,” the track that got me into Lewis in the first place after Rosie Tucker did a cover of it on their last album. Lewis also had what he described as “low-budget films,” which were slideshows of drawings that he flipped through, essentially making an electronic comic strip, as he and his band sang the accompanying story/song. These included a story about an evil hand, a chapter in what seems to be a much longer series about the history of communism, and, my personal favorite, a horror story called “Creeping Brain,” about, well, a creeping sentient brain. I thought these were maybe new stories he had devised, but I was surprised to find a video posted by my own writing home Paste Magazine of him performing Creeping Brain all the way back in 2008 (when the band was apparently being labeled as Jeffrey Lewis and the Jitters)! I’ve linked it below, it is well worth your time (you can also find this entire set on Youtube which I would also recommend watching if you want more of the Jeffrey Lewis experience):
Stuff I’ve Had Published Recently
Oh hey! I write other places too sometimes! Here’s some stuff I’ve had published lately:
A review of another new release this week, Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver, for Paste Magazine.
A ranking of every Dirty Harry movie for Paste Magazine.
A retrospective of Wally Pfister’s Transcendence for it’s 10th anniversary at Awards Watch.
A retrospective of Crank: High Voltage for it’s 15th anniversary, looking at how it’s always encapsulated the heart of America in its crass, postmodern vulgarity.