#same goes for any holiday i didn't list but you got the point after three didn't cha you combative fucks

[ecle-c-tic]

Sometimes I forget tumblr's prime demographic is like edgy teens and people who haven't developed a prefrontal cortex bc omg some of the takes are absolute dog shit and totally unrealistic

[joi-in-the-tardis]

Thing #1: Yesterday I got a text from my stepbrother (stepmom's son) saying "Mom finally gave me your number after 3 years of pestering..." And then he went on about the Bengals and football.

It's not that I don't like him. And I do consider him one of my brothers, even if we aren't blood related. But, I had asked my stepmom not to give him my number. I remember one such conversation about it (there were a few):

Her: *stepbrother* keeps asking for your phone number. Me: Don't give it to him. Her: He just wants to talk to you. Me: If he calls, I won't answer. Her: Maybe sometimes you will. Me: I won't. I won't answer. I don't answer phone calls.

Firstly, I think this is another example of someone I make an exception for thinking I treat everyone else the same way. This happens a fair bit in my life... Most people don't see me interact with other people so they don't know that they are special to me and I make exceptions for them. I talk to my stepmom on the phone. I answer her calls. However, she's on a list of three people that I talk to on the phone with any kind of regularity (it expands to maybe five for emergencies). Outside those three exceptions, I hate talking on the phone. I've hated it since I was a kid. Chit-chat is not my forte. (As an aside: I remember one year my mom made me call all the kids I was inviting to my birthday party-on a rotary phone no less- and I started every phone conversation with "hello, who is this?" which got her increasingly upset... but I remember being so confused because how was I supposed to address the person on the other end of the phone if I didn't know who they were? She never made me do that again.)

Secondly, I have been witness to and been on the other end of phone conversations with my stepbrother (for example, back when we had house phones and anyone in the house had to answer them with no caller ID). He does this constant stream of muttering. Half of which I can't understand. And it goes on and on and on. It's like being trapped in a social expectation hell. No, I will not answer the phone for that.

I'm sure she just got tired of him asking and finally gave it to him. I'm trying not to be mad at her. But I am irritated because I told her not to. Admittedly, I go out of my way a little to keep the people who contact me through my phone kinda small. I remember just a couple years ago I avoided my phone so much of the time because someone used it to constantly dump her drama on me and that was stressful af.

Thing #2: My supervisor texted me yesterday to say that the store manager is probably going to ask me to work on Thursday. Which, first off, she's the one that mangled our schedule so that I only had 35.5 hours this week. So, I'm not feeling very generous. She made this schedule knowing full well that this weekend is both Valentine's Day weekend and Bengals at the Superbowl. It's not my fault she's an idiot, nor is it my obligation to give up my day off to fix it.

Secondly, I put in to have next weekend off to visit my girlfriend. If I work tomorrow that means I will be working 9 consecutive days leading up to driving 8 hours. Uh, no thank you. I would like to point out that I purposefully chose the weekend after the holiday so as to disrupt the department the least amount.

So, my plan is to tell her no unless she's willing to swap it for Friday or Saturday. I don't think she'll do that, either. Do I need the money? Sure. Would I rather be home? Absolutely.

All last year whenever we had someone on vacation (that's 9 times!) we were told we couldn't work a 6th day to make up for the missing person. Which means I baked twice as much before there was no baker and then had to clean up the mess the day after, each time. And now it's suddenly perfectly fine to have us all work 6 days in one week. No. Nuh-uh.

Everyone else seems to roll with this better than I do. But, if you're constantly an abusive asshole to me (and my co-workers) and then you turn around and want something? I have no desire to deliver.

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior 10/8/21 - NO TIME TO DIE, THE RESCUE, MASS, LAMB, NIGHTSTREAM, and More

It's a very special week here at the Weekend Warrior because October 10 will be my 20th (!!) anniversary as a film critic and the 20th anniversary of me doing a weekly movie preview column, mostly about box office but also with reviews and other stuff. Pretty cool, huh? (I’m celebrating this occasion by writing this column to the music of Public Enemy’s Apocalypse 91 which is 30 years old this month.)

Of course, this column wasn't called The Weekend Warrior in the early days, as I was instead doing "Half-Assed Analysis” at a long-gone Hollywood Stock Exchange fan site called HSJ.org. But then, it was a conversation with Mirko P. from ComingSoon.net (R.I.P.) that got me on the track of changing the name to "The Weekend Warrior" even though it would be a year before I would actually bring it to ComingSoon for 12 ½ wonderful years. The column has gone through a number of transformations and evolutions and iterations over the years, sometimes it being called something different just 'cause I didn't want to go through the ordeal of explaining to one of my bosses at a website that "The Weekend Warrior” is my own, and if I leave, it goes with me.

Anyway, I have taken a few weeks off over the years, particularly earlier this year when it just didn't seem a good time to be trying to predict box office, and I was starting to get burnt out on reviews. Now, the column is kind of back to being mostly about box office but with a few reviews, which is how I've always intended it.

Who knows if I'm going to continue this on that much longer, because honestly, there's no money and very little reward, and it does take a lot of time to write this up each week, especially with all the work I have to do for Below the Line. Anyway, for now, I'm going to keep it going, and we'll see how it goes. But Happy 20th Anniversary to me, and I can promise you… there won't be 20 more. NO FUCKING WAY.

Before we get to this week’s theatrical releases, I feel the need to mention the first of a bunch of October horror film festivals, as NIGHTSTREAM will begin on Thursday and run through Oct. 13. This is an amazing streaming horror/genre film festival that was instituted last year by four festivals, the Boston Underground Film Festival, the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, the North Bend Film Festival, and the Overlook Film Festival when all four were cancelled due to COVID. Some of these are still happening this year as physical in-person festivals but Nighstream continues on. Some of the guests at this year’s Nightstream are The Green Knight director David Lowery; Akela Cooper, who wrote the recent James Wan horror film, Malignant; horror and special make-up FX legend Greg Nicotero, who is also the showrunner on the Creepshow anthology series, and more.

There are so many movies and events going on in the week of Nightstream but some of the highlights include the World Premiere of Jefferson Moneo’s Cosmic Dawn, Scott Friend’s feature debut, To the Moon, and the Virtual Premiere of Scott Barber’s doc, This is Gwar, as well as much more.

You can see the full list of movies here and learn how to get a pass at the official site.

Let’s get to some other movies hitting theaters...

Obviously, the big release of the weekend and maybe the month is the 25th James Bond movie, NO TIME TO DIE (MGM), once again starring Daniel Craig in his final outing as 007, his fifth movie in a run that started with Casino Royale in 2006 and 15 years later, it’s coming to an end.

Obviously, this being Craig’s last stint as Bond is a big draw for the movie, but there are other interesting things to note First, it’s directed by True Detective’s Emmy-winning director Cary Joji Fukunaga, who is making his biggest budget movie to date, having started with smaller films like Sin Nombre and Jane Eyre, and then getting more attention for his festival favorite, Beast of No Nations, starring Idris Elba, who for a while, people seemed to want to play the NEXT Bond.

Much of Bond’s colleagues and friends from past movies are back including Naomi Harris as Moneypenny, Ralph Fiennes as M, Ben Whishaw as Q, but it also brings back Jeffrey Wright, who was introduced as Felix Leitner in Craig’s first film, Casino Royale, and also a few people from the last Bond movie, Spectre, which wasn’t received as well as the previous one, Skyfall. (More on those things in a bit.) Christoph Waltz played Blofeld in Spectre (for better or worse), and he’s back, as is Léa Seydoux, who played Bond's love interest, and actually she continues said role but brings more to the plot.

The new cast is pretty significant, starting with Oscar winner Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody) as the new arch-villain, Safin, and actually, there’s also a new 007 in Lashana Lynch, who replaced Bond after he retired from MI6. There’s another “Bond Girl” (if you don’t mind the outdated trope) in Ana de Armas, who previously starred with Craig in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, which feels like it was made 500 years ago but actually has a sequel shooting as we speak. In fact, Armas seems to be getting the best notices from everyone who writes about the movie, even though her section probably isn’t more than 15 minutes long.

I’m not going to say more about the plot. You either don’t need to know it in advance cause you’re seeing it anyway or you don’t WANT to know anything, and good for MGM for being able to keep the plot and lots of stuff secret despite the movie being delayed for 18 months due to COVID.

That’s right. No Time to Die was probably one of the first movies delayed due to COVID, and it definitely wasn’t the last, but MGM (and EON Productions) really stuck to their guns, and didn’t allow a streamer to come forward with millions and millions of dollars to put James Bond on streaming. (Granted, Amazon did come forward and ended up buying MGM outright earlier this year, and we’ve yet to see how and when that will come to fruition. As far as I know, Amazon has nothing to do with MGM’s 2021 releases, of which there are a few still to come.)

Actually, the fact that MGM is releasing this one on its own is an interesting point in itself, because it’s been almost 20 years since the studio has done that with Pierce Brosnan’s last Bond film, Die Another Day. In the time since then, MGM has been co-distributing its films with other studios until fairly recently -- the last four Bond movies were released by Sony Pictures. I’m not gonna throw shade at MGM, because they’ve been doing a fantastic job with No Time To Die, essentially marketing the movie once back in early 2020 and then again for its final release spot this Friday. In between, the movie has moved a number of times as COVID just kept ambushing its planned release date. Any weaker studio (like, say Sony) would have just sold the movie off (as Sony has done many times over the past 18 months until finally having a theatrical hit with Venom). Interesting how that works out, huh? MGM took over Bond, and now it’s releasing the new Bond a week after Sony’s biggest 2021 hit, essentially killing its chances at having a decent second weekend.

Others are seeing how well Venom did and are assuming that the box office is back, and that Bond can do even BIGGER numbers, but you need to take a few things into account, including something called REALITY. And it comes from the wonderful box office archive site, The-Numbers.com, which I have been using for those 20 years mentioned above.

Up until Daniel Craig took over the role, the biggest opening for a Bond movie (not accounting for inflation) was Brosnan’s Die Another Day with $47 million. Casino Royale opened with just $40 million in 2006, but it proved to have significant holiday legs as more people discovered it and decided that the new direction of tougher and grittier and more violent action was for them. It made $167 million domestically and $594 million globally. A few years later, Quantum of Solace had a much bigger opening of $67.5 million but made almost the exact same amount domestically -- the reason? People didn’t like it as much as Casino Royale, so it was more frontloaded.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Sam Mendes took over the 50th anniversary Bond movie, Skyfall, four years later, and that was generally as well received as Casino Royale, so that it set a new opening record for the franchise with $88.3 million and OVER A BILLION worldwide. Woo! Three years later, Spectre was going to introduce two classic Bond villains, Blofeld and Jaws (played by David Bautista) but it once again wasn't received that well, and it opened lower with $70 million and “only” made $200 million domestically vs. the $300 million of Skyfall. It still made over $879 million globally, but a final movie for Craig was always going to happen.

Now I’m going to talk about why I don’t think No Time to Die is going to break the opening record set by Skyfall, and believe it or not, it's not because of COVID. This is the thing. Bond clearly peaked with Skyfall and then it dropped down with Spectre, and that movie wasn't that well-received either by critics or fans with 63% from the former on Rotten Tomatoes and 61% from audiences. That is basically Quantum of Solace numbers and down from Skyfall's 92% and 86%. You take that disappointment and then you add six years, which is how long it's been between Bond movies, and you have a lot fewer people interested in shelling out money to see another Daniel Craig movie. There's no way around the fact that people are just burnt out on Craig and maybe Bond himself, and it really would take a huge wave of positive reviews to get them back.

Also, and unlike Venom, Bond is about as white as you can get in terms of a fanbase. I'm sure there's some African-Americans and LatinX movie fans who enjoy the action and stuff, but do you think you would see the entire James Bond collection in their Bluray libraries? I'm sure there are some, but they may be outliers, because Bond is the kind of Baby Boomer anti-woke un-PC franchise that the Millennials have been warning you about for years. It also doesn't have as big a female fanbase as other franchises (like Marvel) so that's another audience that might not rush out to see the movie. Sure, some changes have been made, including additions like Lashana Lynch or as she's better known, "WHO?!?!?", and de Armas, as well, but it's still the same old James Bond. Fukunaga just didn't try hard enough to make the necessary changes, or maybe he wasn't allowed to, because EON's Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. WIlson still hold very tight reins on the Bond films. Whatever has been done may not just be enough and who knows how many will want to see No Time to Die just to give Craig a glorious send-off? There's also the matter of No Time to Die being almost an hour longer than Venom -- longer run time, less screenings, less money per screen. It's simple math.

I already reviewed the movie for Below the Line -- I liked it but had some issues -- and it’s sitting pretty at 83% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, which is a good sign for getting the interest of fans to return to theaters for a movie that won’t be available on streaming on VOD for quite some time, I’d imagine.

I’m feeling generally bullish (or is it bearish?) on No Time To Die, especially with how much better Venom: Let There Be Carnage did last weekend compared to my prediction (OUCH!) but I’m also keeping track of that REALITY I mentioned before. Not just COVID on this one, but also opening the movie earlier overseas where the movie can be easily bootlegged and put on piracy sites for people who just don’t want to chance it at movie theaters yet. (I’m going to be writing more about this soon, but I have seen probably 100 movies or more in theaters since they reopened in NYC, and I get tested regularly. I have not tested positive for COVID once.)

The movie has done very well overseas, scoring $121.3 million in its first weekend, but I still don’t think it will open over $80 million in North America. But I do think it will be close, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it opens somewhere between $75 and 80 million.

Without knowing if any of the movies below might be going wider (but highly doubting it), here’s what the weekend Top 10 might look like. Actually, let’s make that the top 8 cause last week’s #9 and 10 were so odd and I have no idea if anything is expanding wider, as I write this:

1. No Time to Die (MGM) - $76.5 million N/A

2. Venom: Let There Be Carnage (Sony) - $31.5 million -65%

3. The Addams Family II (MGM/UA Releasing) - $9.3 million -45%

4. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Marvel/Disney) - $ 3.5 million -43%

5. The Many Saints of Newark (New Line/WB) - $2.1 million -55%

6. Free Guy (20th Century/Disney) - $1.3 million -45%

7. Dear Evan Hansen (Universal) - $1.1 million -57%

8. Candyman (Universal) - $700,000 -47%

I think there are just way too many great movies to pick just one "Chosen One,” but since I probably should decide, I'm going with Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi's new documentary THE RESCUE (National Geographic). You may remember Jimmy and Chai from when they won the Oscar for Free Solo, and their latest is just as good. The rescue in the title refers to the 2018 rescue of an 11-kid Thai soccer team called the Wild Boars and their coach when they became trapped in the Tham Luang caves in Northern Thailand, as the annual monsoon season hits early, flooding the caves in which they’re exploring.

To fully understand how they got trapped, you have to have some idea of the structure of this underground cave system, and this film does a great job explaining how the monsoons create flooding in the caves and how much harder it is to get someone out of them when the rain just won’t stop. Two British cave divers, John Volanthen and Richard Standton, are called in to survey the situation and figure out if there’s a way to get the dozen trapped out alive, as time keeps passing until it seems like those kids are trapped without food longer than any human can survive. Seemingly, thousands of locals and foreigners come to the caves in hopes of helping, whether it’s trying to pump out water or dig new tunnels to try to find where the kids are trapped (which is a difficult task in itself).

There’s a good chance you were watching the news and you know the results of this elaborate and daring cave diving rescue, but you definitely don’t know how the plan was developed and pulled off until you actually watch it as it’s taking place. The underwater and cavern footage of the kids and their saviors is absolutely second to none, and it’s hard not to get emotional in the way Chin and Vasarhleyi assemble the footage with the music.

The Rescue is an amazing movie, maybe as good as the duo’s previous one, Free Solo, and it may be the best recapturing/documentation of an important news event that I’ve seen in recent memory.

I was seriously close to having multiple "Chosen Ones” this week, because there are a few other very good movies, including Fran Kranz’s directorial debut MASS (Bleecker Street), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and deservedly received mass praise and stellar reviews. I don't want to say too much about the movie, because its emotional power may lay in not knowing too much about it in advance. The simplest plot is that it involves two couples meeting in the room of a church to have an important face-to-face about a difficult subject, one that needs resolution and absolution from both parties. If you like great writing and amazing performances, than the work of Reed Birney and Anne Dowd (as one couple) and Jason Isaacs and Martha Plympton (as the other) will make this movie a can't miss.

Again, without getting too deep into what the couples discuss, Mass is written and directed similar to one might do a 90-minue one-act play, but it begins with us seeing the people who work at the church trying to set up the room where this eventful tete a tete will take place. It’s surprisingly witty and even elicits a few laughs from Breeda Wool, who is so nervous and awkward about the meeting that’s about to happen.

When the two couples arrives, that’s where we really get into it, but it still starts out slow, a re-aquaintance phase between the two couples, who clearly have a difficult past, try to get through the niceties before getting into the serious conversation at hand. And here is where I’m gonna put a HUGE SPOILER IN HERE FOR THE NEXT PARAGRAPH.

As with so many movies, Mass deals with gun violence and the survivors of the types of school shootings we’ve seen far too many times in the last two decades. Isaacs and Plympton’s son was killed by the other couple’s son, who turned the gun on himself. It creates this dynamic where both couples have lost a son they loved, but Dowd and Birney are put in a spot where they have to try to explain their son’s behavior and if they saw that he was capable of such violence before the shooting took place.

The actors are all terrific, and while you might think a dialogue-heavy movie with four actors sitting at a table might not do much for you… well, first of all, you can go see No Time to Die if that’s more your speed … but Kranz’s direction is more than just getting these emotional performances out of his actors but also capturing it on film and editing it to best effect. There’s even an imperfection to the camera work, sometimes focusing on one actor while another is talking, that makes this long conversation feel even more authentic, as if you’re a fly on the wall in that room.

Again, the writing and performances and direction of Mass makes it one of the most powerful dramatic works this year. I’d love to see any of the four main actors get awards attention, but especially Dowd and Isaacs, who have been so deserving of awards love for a very, very long time.

Icelandic filmmaker Valdimar Jóhansson's LAMB (A24) is a very different movie, this one starring Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snær Guðnason as Maria and Ingvar, a couple living on a sheep farm (or rather, a lamb farm -- I honestly don't know the difference) who make an incredible discovery when a lamb gives birth to a child they decide to raise as their own. Invar's brother Pétur is not only not impressed but he thinks they’ve gone crazy, but there’s a lot of far more nefarious things going on in and around their remote and isolated farm.

This is a really fascinating film, one that’s fairly subdued but Johansson and his cinematographer (Eli Arenson) beautifully capture the vast landscapes of Iceland and gives us a real idea of how remote and isolated the farm where it mostly takes place is. He also does a great job building on the mystery of this child and the tension that surrounds where it came from, and yet, I’m not sure I’d consider Lamb to be horror, even if A24 is maybe marketing it in that direction. Really, it’s more magical fantasy mixed with character drama, and Rapace is just great as always, really impressing me with her skills delivering baby animals and driving a tractor.

If you dig a bit deeper, you’ll discover that Jóhansson wrote the screenplay with one “Sj��n,” an author who has contributed to Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark (one of my favorite musical movies) and also wrote The Northman, Robert Eggers next movie.

This is a terrific debut by Jóhansson -- I have an interview with the director over at Below the Line, too -- and it will be highly interesting to see where he goes from here.

I was hoping to watch and review SOUTH OF HEAVEN (RLJEfilms), the new movie from Aharon Keshales, the co-director of the fantastic Israeli thriller, Big Bad Wolves, which stars Jason Sudeikis, Evangeline Lilly, Mike Colter, and Shea Whigham, but I fell foul of a lousy screener and just didn't have tie to watch it before writing this week's column. Sudeikis plays Jimmy, a convict who has served 12 years for armed robbery who gets early parole, and he swears to give his childhood love Annie (Lilly), who is dying from cancer, the best final year of her life.

I also didn't get a chance to watch Russian filmmaker Evgeny Ruman's comedy GOLDEN VOICES (Music Box Films), which opens in New York and L.A. this weekend. It stars Maria Belkin and Vladimir Friedman as Raya and Victor, the Soviet Union’s popular film dubbers who have been translating film classics into Russian for decades. When the country collapses in 1990, the Jewish couple decides to move to Israel in hopes of finding employment. When she answers a help wanted ad looking for “pleasant voices,” she ends up working as a phone sex operator catering to the Russian community in Israel while he falls in with black market film pirates.

I also just haven't gotten around to JUSTIN BIEBER: OUR WORLD (Amazon), directed by Michael D. Ratner, which seems like the fourth or fifth documentary about the global superstar, this one that goes into the making of his 2020 New Year's Eve concert after a three-year hiatus atop the Beverly Hills Hilton for 240 invited guests and millions via livestream. It will stream on Amazon Prime Video this Friday.

A couple horror movies streaming this week are THERE’S SOMEONE INSIDE YOUR HOUSE (Netflix), the new movie from Patrick Brice (Creep), which hits Netflix and involves a masked assailant targetting a high school graduating class to expose the darkest secret of each victim, forcing a group of misfits to band together to stop the killings.

Shudder gets V/H/S 94 (Shudder), the latest anthology horror movie made up of five installments, directed by Simon Barrett, Chloe Okuno, Ryan Prows, Jennifer Reeder, and Timo Tjahjanto. I haven't watched it yet but that's quite a rogue's gallery of horror/genre filmmakers there.

Streaming on Amazon Prime Video are the next two installments of this year's batch of Welcome to the Blumhouse movies, Axelle Carolyn's The Manor, an eerie tale set in a retirement home and starring the legendary Barbara Hershey, and Ryan Zarazoga’s Madres about a young Mexican-American couple having their first child in ‘70s California where he’s sent to work on a farm where the wife finds a talisman and a box with belongings of the former resident. Both of them debut on Amazon Prime Video this Friday, too. Also, you can read my interview with Ms. Carolyn over at Below the Line.

Other movies that just didn't fit into my schedule this week include:

ASCENSION (MTV Documentary Films) VENGEANCE IS MINE (Vertical) PHARMA BRO (1091) KNOCKING (Yellow Veil Pictures)

Next week’s wide release is David Gordon Green’s horror sequel, HALLOWEEN KILLS!