Emily Perez: Drug Cartels Are Selena Gomez’s People

Yikes. That sums up the film nicely. Do we really need to say more?

So as many of you know this film has been in the headlines recently for all the wrong reasons, what it should be getting attention for is pushing questionable gender science, having course and vulgar songs that make WAP look like a children’s nursery rhyme and of course softening Mexican drug cartels that kill thousands of people every year.

It is quite funny to see the situation that critics have gotten themselves into on this one, as of course they have to support the film with a trans lead, but now as more and more things about said lead are starting to come out, these left wing critics are starting to have to say things that they may once have said was transphobic.

For me the biggest issues with this film is taste, there are a number of moments and choices in the film that feel in bad taste, simply put. To make a musical about the cartels is simply insensitive and at worst wrong. Worse yet this decision makes the tone of the film feel at times schizophrenic to the subject matter.

Overall, a bad decision all round.

0.5/5

Pros.

It is laughably bad

Cons.

The songs

It pushes bad science

The acting is awful

It has tonal problems

The pace is off

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Rumours: A Fitting Takedown Of Justin Trudeau

Summary

A group of politicians gather together to write a joint statement, things then get out of hand.

I enjoyed the satire of this film, I thought that it tried to do something different and poke fun in a smarter way at politicians and the wider political climate. However, certainly not all the aspects of it came together, I do think that some of the weirder stuff from the third act went a little bit too silly, I could see what they were trying to say but I think that it started to lose the intelligence it had built up in favour of trying to be more out there for the sake of it.

The cast is quite good I would say that this is Cate Blanchett’s film through and through and she does tower above everyone else in it. She is not the main character and the film acts as more of an ensemble yet whenever she does have a scene she steals it.

I wouldn’t say it was a laugh a minute, I would say that they are more few and far between but the film did make me laugh a few times and does have some good jokes in it, if you like the humour of something like VEEP, you will like it.

Overall, an original film if one that doesn’t completely work

3/5

Pros.

It has charm

It is original

Blanchette is good

Cons.

The third act doesn’t work

It has pacing issues

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Kraven The Hunter: One So Bad Not Even The Critics Could Pretend To Like It

Summary

With a whimper the SSU dies.

I think everyone could tell you that this film was going to bomb before it came out, it had disaster written all over it from its moment of announcement.

Sony needs to answer a very simple question, why do we need villain films without Spider-Man? The answer is we don’t.

This film once again is a villain origin story that tries to make the villain cool and likeable, as it is too afraid to have them be anything other than an anti-hero as who wants a true crime film that shows the rise of one of Spider-Man’s greatest foes and has him always be evil. No they have to be made into the good guy in some way even though that means the idea of them later banding together to form the Sinister Six to fight Spider-Man another good guy makes no sense at all.

The drugs must be in plentiful supply over at Sony for them to make such an unenforced error like this, or maybe they just don’t realise what audiences want. Remember gang Madame Web was a great film it only flopped as the critics hated it.

It also features other Spider-Man adjacent characters and messes with their origins and backgrounds too, as who watching this will care about the comics right.

Overall, a necessary death.

2/5

Pros.

It has some fun moments

The action is good

Cons.

It gets the source material wrong

It feels the need to make Kraven a hero

It is too long

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Creature Commandos Season 1 Overview: James Gunn’s Fragile Ego

Summary

The DCU is born.

Right from the off something about this series struck a bad chord with me. It’s taken me a while to really think about what’s wrong with it and be able to articulate that, here is my best attempt.

Firstly, this feels like a spin off of the Harley Quinn animated show, and by that I mean the humour is exactly the same, however, where that show allows its characters to have serious moments this shows allergic to that. Whenever there will be a tragic or sad moment the writer will feel the need to undercut with a quippy joke or some sort of absurdist visuals.

Secondly, and relating to the first point, each of the Creature Commandos has tragic back stories, and this is bad for two key reasons. Chiefly, it shows a lack of any genuine villains in the show, which is supposed to be about a team of villains going on missions, as well as a fear of anti-heroes and not having everyone be sympathetic. Moreover, these back stories are often quite depressing, so the show feels the need to overcompensate by having it side by side with the present timeline in which something absurd or silly will be happening in order to get away from the sadness. This cheapens it.

Thirdly, the humour as I’ve mentioned in my previous two points is really what ruins this show and runs through all of the criticism, It is juvenile, gross out, and often edgy for shock value. I don’t think I laughed once during the entire run of the show.

Fourthly, and perhaps worst of all, is the fact that one of the sub antagonists of the show are the Sons of Themyscira, who are portrayed as incel online nerds. Not only does this feel like screw the audience, but also feels like Gunn personally taking shots at his critics. This is potentially catastrophically bad as it shows that Gunn is a reactionary and shows how even mild criticism of him can find its way into his projects and affect them in a major way, hence he’ll get more of it. It also destroys any kind of confidence one may have in his upcoming Superman film, and you have already seem him coming out to attack haters on that and to respond to criticism. The Sons are of course horribly cringe and die off in humiliating ways in order for Gunn to own his critics.

Overall, it is nice to see a more mature tone and some of the ideas were good, but the humour, the lack of meaningful emotion and Gunn’s fragile attempt to own the haters all result in this being a damaging start for the DCU, and a red flag for this summers Superman. :

2/5

Pros.

The mature tone

A few good ideas

Cons.

The humour

The backstories

Gunn’s fragile ego

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Skeleton Crew Season 1 Overview: The Duffer Brothers Need To Sue

Summary

Star Wars steals from Stranger Things.

Honestly, as far as recent Star Wars shows go this wasn’t bad. That’s not to say it was perfect, I would place it in the watchable category.

For the most part this is a fairly self-contained adventure, we don’t really interact with iconography or characters from the Star Wars universe we would expect to see, we see some X-Wings, a lightsaber and a few things are mentioned in passing but that is really all. There is distinct Goonies and Flight Of The Navigator vibes to this, but I would say the biggest influence is Stranger Things. To see Star Wars lift so many themes and ideas from Stranger Things is depressing on a number of levels, to see one of the kings of the science fiction genre have to borrow from the new upstart shows just how bad of a situation Star Wars is in.

The journey itself was interesting there were certainly ups and downs, and some episodes hit harder than others but for the most part it was entertaining. I liked the mystery around Ad Attin and I thought the new droid, voiced by Nick Frost, was a welcome addition to the universe. The child actors were probably the weakest part of the show, I will not rag on the child actors too much as it seems like low hanging fruit, however, it must be stated that their emotions were all over the place and they were badly directed.

My biggest bugbear with the show was the fact it introduced yet another survivor of Order 66, at this point the Empire seems incredibly incompetent. This of course is Jude law’s character who the series teases with the will they won’t they question of is he a Jedi, at times you are lead to believe that it’s just parlour tricks or that maybe he is force sensitive, but no the final episode has him reveal that he is in fact a Jedi or was. Moreover his origins and how he survived order 66 a so incredibly vague you question why it was even brought up at all, clearly it was done to set him up for his own show where it would be explored in more detail.

Overall, not as bad as the Acolyte not as good as Andor.

3/5

Pros.

It is watchable

It has fun moments

It feels very disconnected

Cons.

The child actors aren’t very good

There is yet another survivor of Order 66

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Cinema Issues: State Of The Box Office Address Start Of 2025

Written by Luke Barnes

In this cinema issues article we are discussing the contraction of the entertainment industry. If one was to cast their gaze upon the 2025 release schedule it would be perfectly acceptable for them to ask what happened to make it to 2025? For those of you that don’t know, with the destruction of COVID and the writer’s strikes, there was a mantra in Hollywood to make it to 2025 as this was seemingly the year when things would get back to the 2019 normal. This was pre the wildfires.

As such this mythical 2025 was going to also see the box office recover to 2019 levels, as it’s been steadily below over these past few years, and in order to do that there was going to be a lot more films releasing each month than in previous years. However, to go back to our opening image there is in fact not a lot of films releasing each week in 2025 so far. Whilst yes there will be some films set to come out in 2025 that have not yet been given formal announcements and release dates, it seems the idea of masses of new releases might be a pipe dream, why is this?

Crucially there are two things Hollywood didn’t account for with the 2025 dream, the first being an obvious and sustained change in audience viewing habits, with more people waiting to watch films at home, being more choosy with the films they watch due to higher ticket costs, and of course the audience’s rejection of slop. The second key fact is the death of the movie star. When discussing the death of the movie star it can’t be stressed enough how important the rise of social media has been, influences and youtubers have given the public new role models seemingly more accessible, more down to earth, and more like them. Audiences have begun craving authenticity, as such the very performative and fake world of Hollywood has lost its allure, the actors who still maintain rabid fanbases do so with a keen use of social media or by giving off the persona of being nice people, whether true or not.

The death of the movie star has left Hollywood unable to move forward, it needs radical change to continue to exist, yet if there’s one thing Hollywood executives are frightened of doing it’s doing anything new. As such I expect 2025’s box office to languish behind 2024 which wasn’t good to begin with, we’re miles off from 2019. I believe looking at the calendar now and of course there can always be new announcements and upsets, but I would say that there is one surefire billion grosser film in the fourth coming Jurassic World, and possibly another in Superman if the stars align. That aside the box office looks quite sick this year, there are not a lot of films and the ones that are don’t seem to have the draw that could make the box office healthy.

The worst thing is in its floundering attempt to combat these problems Hollywood won’t take drastic action, the action of course that’s needed is a slashing of film budgets in half or more, in addition, films need to stop pushing divisive messaging and being targeted towards niche and specific minorities rather than the widest possible audience. Hollywood needs to decentralise, it needs to move outside of the LA ecosystem, films need to be made on a budget of $50 million, a raft of new original films costing that amount or below could allow for greater creativity and potentially some new franchises rather than mining the same wells.

As we head towards the end of this piece you can expect to see Hollywood shrink in the coming year and become more reliant on re-releases.

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Conclave: The Oscars Get It Wrong Again

Summary

A gathering of the cardinals is made appropriate for the 21st century, and you better like it you bigot.

So I had forgotten about this on first release but then I saw it later and excitedly remembered it and thought I’d give it a watch. On the surface this film should have been good, a sort of papal intrigue drama film about deciding who would be the new Pope. Yet whilst there was some of that there was also a lot of modern day filler like a whole plot about one of them being intersex, as it is 2024/2025 and you cannot release a film unless it has some form of representation like that.

Moreover, I found the dialogue to be a little stiff, what I mean by this is that for films that have lots of long drawn out scenes of people talking you need them to be gripping and yet here whilst the performers brought gravitas I found a lot of these scenes ended up feeling overly long. This film was always going to hinge on the quality of its writing, and sadly it got let down.

I don’t really see how this got nominated for an Oscar outside of the fact it has been a slow year, there is interest and a well put together narrative sans one sub-plot, I bet you can guess which, but by and large it doesn’t come together in the way an Oscar nominated film should.

Overall, another odd choice for Oscar nomination.

1.5/5

Pros.

It has some interesting moments

It is not your average slop

Cons.

The intersex storyline and how needless it is

The writing is patchy

There is pacing issues

It was broadly disappointing

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One Of Them Days: Yet More Stereotypical Black Women

Summary

A film chocked full of stereotypes.

This film would have been considered incredibly racist if it was directed by a nonblack person. Increasingly certain parts of cinema are defining a black woman as either wise and sage or like they are here, it is two separate stereotypes that are continuing to put these women in a box. The worst thing of all is that here these women couldn’t get anymore stereotypical unless they randomly broke out into jive every few minutes, and the writer of this project is herself a black woman, so she is perpetuating a racist stereotype against other black women.

The film itself is allergic to originality and is the same thing we have seen countless times before two sort of losers have to fix a problem, here it is getting rent money, and hijinks happen along the way. Again these hijinks further the stereotypes I was previously discussing as the two leads, played by Keke Palmer and SZA, constantly get into fights with various groups of people, which again feels like it is leaning into stereotypes.

None of the performances were very good either, I didn’t feel any warmth to any of the characters.

Overall, very much January fare.

0.5/5

Pros.

It is short

Cons.

It stereotypes black women

It is generic

It isn’t funny

It has pacing issues

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The Rig Season 2 Overview: A Sinking Feeling

Summary

Amazon needs to burn more money so they made a sequel series to something that didn’t need it.

The Rig came out a while ago, and I wouldn’t say it was popular, I never saw anyone talk about it on social media for example, and for the most part the ending of the first season closed out the loop. This secondary season was in no way needed.

There also seems to be far less to do this time around, the new season is mainly split between a refugee camp, post wave, and a new rig, if you would permit me. For the most part it is just folks stood around talking, and the few times they do venture outside of this it looks cheap.

I found the characters also to be much more unlikable this time around, we some of the relationships not making a lick of sense, it felt as though they had in new writers who just didn’t get the characters and couldn’t be bothered to read the scripts for the first season so just wrote this with no frame of reference.

Also and this may be a little mean so I’ll keep it brief but Emily Hampshire has clearly had plastic surgery and it is distracting in a bad way, she looks uncanny valley but in real life. Also because of whatever she has done whenever she tries to emote her face doesn’t really change in any way and that also takes you out of it.

Overall, a disappointing and unnecessary second season.

1/5

Pros.

It is laughably bad

Cons.

It doesn’t justify its existence

It has a terrible ending

Emily Hampshire is distracting

It is too bloated

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Section 31: Michelle Yeoh Has Embarrassed Herself Post Oscar

Summary

An old woman embarrasses herself.

I won’t claim to be the biggest Star Trek fan, I don’t watch every show and I don’t know all the characters. However, I have tried to keep up with modern Star Trek and have covered it before, it is sad to see things get worse and worse in the way it has but here we are.

I have to ask you dear Reader what place does S and M have within Star Trek is it empowering to see Michelle Yeoh dominate men half her age? Not really it is embarrassing. The way this film/series extension, whatever it is, treats Yeon as a woman half her age, it expects you to believe her as this badass matriarch when she looks as though a gust of wind would have her collapsed on the floor. Honestly Yeon’s team seem to have a knack for scoring her roles in the worst fantasy and science fiction stuff they can.

I watched the last few episodes of Discovery to try and make sense of this, as I had long given up on the show, it was a painful experience. Even with that I was pretty confused as to what was going on, after I got situated I found the science fiction narrative to be convoluted and badly conveyed. A lot of things happen that don’t make sense with the character or their motivations and this screams to me of bad writing and why I stopped watching Kurtzman Trek in the first place.

Overall, embarrassing.

0.5/5

Pros.

It is good to laugh at

Cons.

It is embarrassing

It is a vandalization of the franchise

Michelle Yeon

It makes little sense

It is a waste of your time

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