"Heart Eyes" Review

 Holiday themed horror movies have been a thing since Halloween. Even Valentine's Day has had Cupid, Valentine, and two versions of My Bloody Valentine. Now entering the chat is 2025's Heart Eyes, an odd mashup of rom-com and slasher flick which brings some levity to the murder movie game.

We open with a couple staging their proposal in a vineyard. It's so choreographed that she's mouthing his proposal along with his saying it. When their photographer hidden in the woods calls to say he didn't get the shot due to lens flares, they redo it. But then a masked killer kills them all and we're off to the races.

After a montage of news reports about the Heart Eyes Killer (named for the mask he wears) who has killed couples the previous two year in Boston and Philadelphia, we then meet Ally (Olivia Holt, Cloak & Dagger) who is waiting for her convoluted coffee order with her bestie, Monica (Gigi Zumbado, Bridge and Tunnel) at a Seattle coffee shop. There she meet cutes Jay (Mason Gooding, Cuba Jr.'s nepo baby, Scream 5 & 6), who drinks the same coffee order and they bump heads literally. Since she's hurting from a breakup, she's not looking for love.

She's also in trouble at work because her grim commercial concept for the Valentine's Day jewelry has caught backlash online, annoying her boss, Crystal Cane (Michaela Watkins, Casual). She's brought in a consultant to come up with new pitches and of course it's Jay. He invites her to dinner to discuss pitches and Monica takes Ally out to shop for clothes in a typical rom-com montage.

Naturally, dinner goes poorly because he's flirting with her and she doesn't believe in love and when they leave they run into her ex-boyfriend and his new girl. She kisses Jay and says they're dating because that's what you do in these movies. Watching them from a distance is Heart Eyes who somehow manages to beat them to her apartment and hide in her closet (spoiler alert!). They escape, but when the cops arrive at a nearby park where they fled, they arrest Jay as the killer.

To go further would spoil the twists and turns - some of which are too twisty turny for their own good - but Heart Eyes falls into the post-ironic territory that the Scream series has lived for three decades with the added element of borderline parodying rom-com tropes. It knows how dumb they are, thus embraces them with references to late-Nineties comedies like Romy & Michele's High School Reunion. Current pop culture also gets checked with a pair of detectives investigating the case named Hobbs and Shaw played by Devon Sawa (Idle Hands, Final Destination) and Jordana Brewster (the Furry Fastness series), prompting Ally to ask, "Like the movie?" and eliciting blank reactions from the cops.

Speaking of which, I know Seattle was big on the whole "Defund the Police" insanity, but a segment of the movie is set in the least-populated, dimmest-lit, large urban area police station ever. If these was Podunksburg, Nowhere, perhaps; but not a major city. And the obligatory bonus reveal scene is just being random while copying a movie or three any general horror movie fan will spot. Two of the writers wrote Freaky, the 2020 body switch horror-comedy where Vince Vaughn's serial killer soul was swapped with a teen girl's, which explains the humorous slant.

Overall, Heart Eyes is an amusing little romp that only bogs down when it's decides to be serious for a moment and while the weirdly small scale of the production at times is distracting, it's not fatal. While I liked the mashup of rom-com parody and slasher flick tropes, the horror fan missus (she's seen all three Terrifier movies) didn't care for it because "It didn't know what it was trying to be." She's wrong, of course, but including for balance.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"September 5" 4K Review

Even though the Oscars ceremony was held earlier this evening, there are still a few stragglers left from the Oscars Death March so what better time to catch up with the last Best Original Screenplay nominee I hadn't seen, for a movie I'd never even heard of before the nominees were announced: September 5, a docudrama about the day Palestinian terrorists attacked the 1972 Munich Olympic Village, killing and taking hostage members of the Israeli team, ultimately resulting in the deaths of 11 athletes.

Beginning in the wee hours of the morning, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro, Silvio Dante in The Many Saints of Newark), the head of the control room is supervising maintenance while the top brass and talent go to rest. After a while, gunshots are heard from the nearby Village. When they realize there may be a hostage situation, they recall the crews to cover it and violate the no calls edict from ABC Sports President Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard, Green Lantern) to bring him and head of operations Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin, The Thin Red Line) back to work. Their translator, Marianne (Leonie Benesch), is the glue holding the operation together as she monitors the police radio and German media.

What follows is a fascinating look at the challenges of covering a rapidly changing situation with technology that is positively primitive by modern standards. Whereas everyone can now livestream from their phones to the Internet, in 1972 the revolutionary new mobile cameras required massive transmitter backpacks and only had wide-angle lenses meaning that they had to push a massive studio camera outside in order to be able to zoom in on the housing unit where the attack was occurring which was near the broadcast studio.

Arledge had to negotiate with other networks to have their slots on the satellite. To superimpose text on a screen required sticking letters on a black board and shooting it with a camera. 16mm film requiring development and editing on flatbed editors like a movie meaning it could be a half-hour before anything gets on the air. Engineers soldering leads to a telephone in order to get audio into the mixer for broadcast.

Then there are the ethical conundrums - poncy reporter Peter Jennings (who'd later become the anchor of ABC News) worried that calling the terrorists "terrorists" would be unfair to their feelings (so the media has been garbage for a looooooooong time) - and the realization that the bad guys were watching the coverage and learning what the cops were planning to do. The fog of war and balancing whether to be right or to be first in reporting comes into play at the climax. There is even a telling detail involving forging an ID to get a courier into the Village which silently exposes how lax security was.

 There used to be a time when movies about Heroic Journalists Bringing The Facts To The People were commonplace from All The President's Men (which is a lie because Woodward & Bernstein were basically handed the story by disgruntled FBI official Mark Felt - bka "Deep Throat" - out of a vendetta against Nixon) to the 2016 Best Picture Oscar-winning Spotlight, but as media became corrupted and politicized to the point where they became overt apparatchiks and propagandists to the Democrat Party, they have vaporized their credibility to the point where it's a safe bet to presume they're lying to us and a movie portraying them as heroes would be laughed off the screen.

This is why September 5 is kind of a unicorn in that it doesn't valorize these men as journalists per se, but portrays them as just hard-working professionals trying to get the facts out under extraordinary circumstances. Was Arledge hanging onto the story under ABC Sports purview rather than allow ABC News to take over for personal reasons? Probably, but he also knew that he could cover things better right there than reporters based in New York.

 When compared to the other four Best Original Screenplay nominees, the work of director Tim Fehlbaum, Moritz Binder, and Alex David stands out by not having massive issues with the script. They trust the audience to keep up with what's happening and not needing it spoonfed to them by Basil Exposition. We don't get much of a sense of what everyone's lives are like outside of working at the Olympics and that's a good thing because the story here is the story of Munich and terror and trying to inform the audience.

I would probably have never watched September 5 if it hadn't been nominated and I endeavored to see all the nominees, but I'm glad the writer's branch bothered to nominate ONE script which wasn't a Swiss cheese of plot holes, weak characters, and muddled theses. I didn't want to vote for any other the other four options; I would've voted for this. And it's over two hours shorter than The Brutalist, so definitely cherkitert. 

Paramount+ presents it in 4K Dolby Vision and if I hadn't checked I would've have known it was HDR because the gritty, period documentary-style cinematography doesn't look slick and shiny. There's nothing wrong with that, just that if you don't have a high-end TV or just want the Blu-ray, you're sacrificing nothing.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Paramount+.)

"A Real Pain" Review

 With all the Best Picture/multi-nominee movies available exhausted, my last stop on this years's Oscars Death March is the almost certain Best Supporting Actor winner & highly-likely Best Screenplay winner, A Real Pain, whose title is figurative and metaphorical and part of its problems. 

Kieran Culkin (Scott Pilgrim vs the World) is the titular pain (as indicated by the title card being flashed next to his face at the beginning AND end of the movie) in the form of Benji Kaplan, one of those free-wheeling guys who everyone seems to love despite being a, well, real pain at times. He and his cousin David (writer-director Jesse Eisenberg, Zombieland) are using money left to them by their Holocaust survivor grandmother to take a Jewish heritage tour of Poland and visit her old home.

David is, of course, the uptight Felix Unger to Benji's Oscar Madison and suffers the indignity of watching Benji immediately become the life of the party with their tour group which includes a middle-aged divorcee (Jennifer Grey, Dirty Dancing), a Rwandan genocide survivor who converted to Judaism when he emigrated to America (Kurt Egyiawan, House of the Dragon), a older couple and is led by a non-Jewish English-Japanese tour guide, James (Will Sharpe, The White Lotus). He encourages them all to pose like the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes as David gets stuck with taking photos with their phones.

 He also has dark moments like a freakout when he becomes outraged that they are riding in the first class section of the train when "80 years ago we would've been packed like cattle in the back," storming out of the car. He is also critical of the guide, getting in his face over how he conducts the tour. But after these dark moments, he sometimes acts as if he has no idea why people are looking at him warily.

The missus had tried to watch this previously and turned it off after 10 minutes and her advice to me was to do the same because "you'll get the gist of what it's about and Culkin's performance in that time." Since it's only 90 minutes long, I figured I could through it, but I will admit that I wanted to shut it off two or three times because I didn't find Benji's antics cute. I've known too many "a-holes everyone loves" in the real world.

About 50 minutes in David has an emotional monologue filling in some backstory and I decided to tough it out to the end and was disappointed to find that by the end nothing has really changed between David and Benji. There is no Big Moment of Understanding/Change/Acceptance. They go back to the lives they led before the trip, so what was the point?

If this wins Eisenberg a writing Oscar it will be because the Academy loves when actors write - past winners include Sarah Polley, Emma Thompson, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Billy Bob Thornton - and he gives most of the cast some good scenes to play and imbues them with more than just the cartoon outline too many movies settle for. It's too bad that the overarching narrative didn't match up to the details. His directorial eye is interesting and harkens back to an observational style from the 1970s and 1980s; I'll be interested to see more. The weakest leg of the tripod is his performance, which is your stock Jesse Eisenberg batch of tics.

Which leads to the biggest mistake Oscar made - a frequent criticism this year across several acting categories - which is putting Culkin in the Supporting Actor category. He is the titular character and clear protagonist (as well as antagonist), so the only reason he's in Supporting is because Eisenberg is the bigger star and it's his creation, but David is de facto the second banana here. As with Zoe Saldana with Emilia Perez, Culkin will win because he's a lead actor in a supporting category. (The Academy needs to stop this junk the same way the Emmys and Golden Globes desperately need to stop pretending The Bear is a comedy.)

 Ultimately, A Real Pain is a minor letdown hampered by an undercooked narrative framework from which the moments are strung. 

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"A Complete Unknown" 4K Review

 The last major nominee from this year's Oscars Death March is James Mangold's by-the-numbers Wikipedia-entry-but-less-detailed biopic of Voice of the Boomer Generation Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, named after a line from his song "Like A Rolling Stone." Nominated for eight Oscars - Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor & Actress, Sound, and Costume Design - it is a triumph of imitation performances & period detail fetishism and for anyone who wants to spend a couple of hours watching a famous person's life story without ever gleaning an insight about them, it doesn't get much more middling than this.

 Nominated Timothée Chalamet stars as Dylan, a 19-year-old who has hitchhiked from Minnesota to New York City in 1961 to meet his idol, Commie folk singer Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy, Halt and Catch Fire). Learning that he's institutionalized with Huntington's disease, he treks to the hospital where he finds Guthrie being visited by Commie folk singer Pete Seeger (nominated Edward Norton, The Incredible Hulk). After introducing himself, Seeger notes Dylan's guitar case and encourages him to play them a song since he says he's so influenced by Guthrie.

Well, the song impresses Seeger so much be begins introducing him around the Greenwich Village folk scene where he immediately snags a Commie girlfriend, Sylvie (criminally UN-nominated Elle Fanning), a side romance with Commie folk singer Joan Baez (nominated Monica Barbero), a record deal, and within a few years is a massive star, chased by fans, picking up women right and left, and chafing at the rigid strictures of folk purists, broadens his sound culminating in the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival set where he "went electric" and won the crowd over with his boldness. Just kidding, they freaked out, booed him, and threw stuff at the stage, almost fomenting a riot because if there's anyone more violent than a methed-up speed metal crowd it's folkies.

All kidding aside, A Complete Unknown really should've been called Dylanmania (slogan: "Not Bob Dylan, but an incredible simulation.") as it's little more than a series of performances of early Dylan tunes loosely connected with the barest reeds of plot which provide no insight as to how he became a genius (if you buy into that stuff) he is regarded as. Sylvie (who is Suze Rotolo, who appeared with him on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, in all but name after Dylan requested they change that) sees his old school notebooks with his birth name, Robert Zimmerman, on them and complains that she feels she doesn't even know who he is. We're never told that "Dylan" was cribbed from poet Dylan Thomas because why should a biopic fill in the bio stuff?

Other than frustrations with his first album being all covers by mandate of the label and annoyance at the attention fame brings, he doesn't seem to have to overcome any obstacles. He shows up at a party at peak fame with a fashionable black girl with an English accent and after they hit the sidewalk, he leaves her there as he walks off. She's befuddled and says, "But, I love you," to which he replies, "I don't even know you." Who is she, where'd they meet, why'd he take her to the party, and why did she feel more of a connection to him than vice versa? No idea to all of the above. Bob's just a ladies man, we suppose.

So we're left with the lead actors very impressive performances where they do all their own playing and singing with the performances recorded live, not pre-taped, AutoTuned, then played back to lip-sync along to. Chalamet says it was a 5-1/2 year process to create his performance, learning to play guitar - he recently hosted Saturday Night Live and served as the musical guess as well, performing obscure Dylan tunes - and how you imagine a grumpy, introverted, young Bob Dylan would behave is precisely what Chalamet delivers. Norton and Barbero similarly nail their mimicry duties with the latter displaying an amazing simulation of Baez's crystal clear soprano. Imitating Dylan is always fun because no matter how caricatured you go, it's still in the ballpark. To his credit, Chalamet doesn't overdo it, but that's also the problem.

I have a MAJOR problem with how many Oscars have been won by actors doing what I've termed "imitation performances" where they have a huge leg up on crafting their performances by having massive amounts of reference footage to study and then are graded by how good an imitation they've done.
 found an out-of-date list at IMDB that listed 29 winners since 2000 and omitted recent winners such as Renee Zelwegger (as Judy Garland in Judy), Rami Malek (Freddie Mercury, Bohemian Rhapsody), and Jessica Chastain (Tammy Faye Baker, The Eyes of Tammy Faye).

There have been 100 acting nominees since the turn of the millennium and one-third have won and many more have been nominated as with the three nominees. In 2015, the only Best Actor nominee who had to create an original character was Michael Keaton in Birdman. All the rest were imitations of Stephen Hawking, Chris Kyle, Alan Turing, and John du Pont. Of course, Eddie Redmayne won for sitting in a wheelchair with a frozen grin in The Theory of Everything, which I hated.

 In a year where category fraud (putting actors playing lead roles in the supporting fields to boost victory chances) was rampant when they weren't flat out denying legitimate females a chance in order to virtue signal wokeness with a man in Best Actress, the Actor's Branch added to their shame by favoring Barbero's imitation over Fanning's subtle aching soulfulness which made her Sylvie the most human performance in a Madame Tussaud's wax museum. I've been a fan of hers since Super 8 - if he haven't seen it, watch it and keep in mind that she was only 12 when it was filmed - and here's to hoping she gets more showcases for her gifts and some acclaim.

Director/co-writer Mangold has done the biopic thing before with 2005's Johnny Cash story, Walk The Line - which won Reese Witherspoon an Oscar for imitating June Carter Cash and Joaquin Phoenix a nomination for imitation Johnny Cash - and directed the two good solo Wolverine movies with The Wolverine and Logan, but here it's flat and uninspired work, relying on the imitations to elevate the whole shebang.

While it mostly sounds like I've been hating on A Complete Unknown, it's not a bad movie, just a woefully underdone story which was overpraised by the Academy. Mangold's directorial nod should've gone to The Brutalist's Brody Corbet or Dune: Part Two's Denis Villeneuve as well as Barbero's going to Fanning. If you're a fan of Dylan, you'll like it; if you hate Dylan, it's tolerable; if you want to know more about the man, here's his Wikipedia page.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.