In the new film The Fall Guy, a producer character played by Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham describes her formula for making a successful movie. She says you have to surround the meat of the film with “sexy bacon,” those aspects that make the whole thing more attractive.
Here, the sexy bacon is Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, and it’s that pairing that makes this film loosely based on the 1980s TV show so much fun.
Two of the most underrated films of the last 10 years were The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Ready or Not. Both were released late in the summer and were pleasant surprises that successfully blended humor with classic genre appeal (action and horror, respectively). The latter even made my list of my favorite films of 2019 (it ranked #6).
Coincidentally, both films’ creators are back with new releases this week. While their new movies aren’t as good as these other works, they are still worth checking out.
In Luca Guadagnino’s last film, 2022’s awful Bones and All, Timothée Chalamet played half of a young cannibal couple in love and on the run from a society that doesn’t understand them.
Now, Guadagnino’s followup features Chalamet’s Dune 2 costar playing a man-eater of a completely different sort.
In Challengers, Zendaya is Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy at the center of a love triangle involving her husband, Art (Mike Faist, West Side Story), and Patrick (Josh O’Connor, The Crown), who is Art’s former best friend and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend.
In this day and age, when evidence of how divided our country is can be found just by turning on any one of the multiple 24-hour news channels, do we really need a fictionalized cautionary tale of how bad things can get?
Not really.
But Alex Garland’s dystopian new film Civil War is exactly that. It plops us right into the middle of a United States where all the dire predictions we’ve been hearing about for years on CNN, Fox News, and the rest have come true. It’s not a pretty sight. But it is a pretty great movie.
For 50 years, Steve Martin has been different things to different people: For those of a certain age, he was a “wild and crazy” standup comedian, whose shows and albums broke records in the late 1970s. To others, he’s the star of classic films like The Jerk, Three Amigos!, Roxanne, and All of Me. To others, he’s the star of family-friendly movies like Parenthood, Father of the Bride, and Cheaper by the Dozen. To others, he’s a sophisticated writer of New Yorker articles. To others, he’s a musician and composer, who collaborated with Edie Brickell on the Tony-nominated Broadway musical Bright Star. And to others, he’s the co-creator and star, alongside Martin Short and Selena Gomez, of the Hulu TV show Only Murders in the Building.
Suffice it to say, the man has invented and reinvented and reinvented himself multiple times throughout his career, adapting to the highs and lows — which is why today, he probably has fans of all ages.
However you know Steve Martin, you’re likely to know him a little better after watching Steve! (martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces, which premieres on Apple TV+ this week. Directed by Morgan Neville (Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and the Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom), the roughly three-hour doc is broken into two parts: “Then,” which traces Martin’s rise through the standup circuit, and “Now,” which documents many things since then.
It’s the middle of March 2024, but moviemakers seem to have their minds on the 1980s. This week, two films are dropping that hope to recapture the fun of much loved movies from back in the day.
Are they worth seeing?
Read on to learn what I thought of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and Road House.