Get red-pilled OG in theaters and on HBO Max December 22nd.

CANDYMAN (Directed by Nia DaCosta, 91 minutes, 2021, USA)

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC No horror movie monster has as much socio-political bite as the titular demon in Candyman, Clive Barker’s riff on the Bloody Mary same-my-name trope. The first film in the series, 1992’s Candyman setup the franchise’s tragic origin myth, introducing us to Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd), a late 19th Century artist and son of a slave killed by an angry mob when he fell in love with and fathered a child with the white daughter of a wealthy landowner. Daniel wasn’t simply lynched either, these things require both a tragic backstory and a horrific ending to propel them into the stuff of legend. After Daniel’s right hand was severed, he was then smeared with a honeycomb stolen from an apiary, and stung to death by bees. This horrific end kept his soul from resting and allowed him to live on and torment those who were foolish enough to summon him by saying his name five times in a mirror.

Candyman is set in 1992 and follows a white college student named Helen Lyle (Virgina Madsen), who is doing her thesis on urban legends and bears a striking resemblance to the woman Daniel Robitaille fell in love with. While investigating a series of deaths that are later attributed to a drug dealer in the Cabrini-Green housing projects show goes by the nickname Candyman, Helen eventually stumbles upon the real deal. From there Helen tumbles down this surreal rabbit hole where myth becomes reality, which takes a shocking toll on her sanity as she is blamed for a series of deaths she claims were perpetrated by the ghost of Daniel Robitaille, aka Candyman. The film has become part of the modern horror canon.

Twenty-nine years later, writer-producer Jordan Peele and director Nia DaCost have delivered a reboot that was worth the wait. The film functions as a direct sequel to the first film more or less, leaving behind any real mention of the other mediocre sequels to refocus the hooked avenger’s mythology into a much more socially relevant configuration. Set in now-gentrified Cabrini-Green circa now, the film’s protagonists are Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and Brianna (Teyonah Parris) a well todo black couple this time living in the newly posh neighborhood. The trouble begins when Anthony, a once-edgy visual artist who’s lately been accused of having lost the streetwise authenticity that made him a name commodity in the local art scene, decides to go poke around what’s left of the old housing project and, inevitably, leads him back to Candyman.

In Peele’s telling, Candyman has become a spell-casting incantation that allows black men who die in horrific and unjust ways to exact their vengeance on those foolish enough to Say His Name. This premise affords Peele the opportunity to tackle systemic racism, police brutality and poverty through a horror movie prism, as he did to great effect in Get Out. Aesthetically Peele’s reboot is very much inspired by the original, the cinematography features a similar stylistic approach composition and lighting, as well as the high contrast, drab color palette and the way the camera pans over the architecture of the Chicago cityscape transmuting it into an otherworldly hellscape. The atmospheric score completes the presentation by using heavy low frequency tones and bass to accentuate the scares and keep the audience in a perpetual state of unease. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II puts forth a real vulnerability on screen that allows the audience to latch onto him as a character. It’s a dynamic performance that is shockingly reminiscent of Virgina Madsen’s take in the original in how we are forced to watch helplessly as he goes from handsome and confident to unraveling at the seams. Teyonah Parris on the other hand offers an intense and understated take opposite Abdul-Mateen.

Candyman is flawless in its execution, hitting all the obligatory horror beats and imbueing its namesake with a renewed and relevant sense of purpose. Nia DaCosta and Peele have elevated Candyman and transformed him into a demon of vengeance, giving him a depth and social relevance absent in his machete wielding, hockey mask-wearing contemporaries. While the first film functioned as more of a twisted love story, this film is an exploration of the cyclical nature of violence in the black community. It’s a concept that may be a bit too abstract or heady for some, but is way more terrifying than a guy with a hook for a hand. Simply put Candyman is both a dense and brutal horror masterwork and a pitiless deconstruction of systemic racism in America that will no doubt be the subject of debate and discussion for years to come.

THE TOMORROW WAR (directed by Chris McKay, 138 minutes, USA, 2021)

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC The Tomorrow War has the guy who directed The Lego Batman Movie attempting to deliver a heartfelt Terminator-eque action spectacle that ironically feels as if it was spit out by an AI. The film’s high concept story of humanity in the final throes of a losing war with an unstoppable alien race, who out of desperation draft their fathers into their war via time travel, has promise as a premise. But it becomes cliche to the point of trite when it comes to its execution. Heavily influenced by the Tom Cruise vehicle, Edge of Tomorrow, The Tomorrow War eschews that film’s cleverness and fearlessness, in favor of something more wholesome and saccharine, that feels more like it’s trying to click a checkbox on a demographic assessment, rather than tell a story.

In what feels like an unmade Bruce Willis vehicle from the ‘90s, we have Dan Forester (Chris Pratt), a biology teacher and former Green Beret, who is sent 30 years into the future only to be put under the command of his little girl Muri (Yvonne Strahovski), now a grown-ass woman, world-saving scientist and take-no-prisoners Army Colonel leading the charge against the alien onslaught of the titular tomorrow war. Think if Sarah Connor was enlisted by John Connor in the war against the machines. Muri is in the process of orchestrating humanity’s last ditch effort to take out the aliens, and recruits her father in the mission that she hopes will turn the tide of the war by taking out the queen of the invaders, a tip of the hat to James Cameron’s Aliens. But that’s as close as this film gets to sci-fi royalty because in the days leading up the mission the film loses itself in a melodramatic spiral as Dan discovers he didn’t become the father he thought he would be. He then spends the rest of his time attempting to mend that relationship before humanity’s last stand, in a way that almost feels like some bizarre incestial love story.

The Tomorrow War has all of these things that ultimately should work, and sometimes do to varying degrees. The action set pieces are effective, the narrative is derivative — but ultimately serviceable, the alien creatures definitely have a distinct nightmarish look and you have a  curmudgeonly wisecracking J.K. Simmons, as Pratt’s long-estranged Vietnam vet father to complete this package. But the film ultimately fails in the execution of its human story, because Chris Pratt who sees himself as the charmingly boyish beacon of hope just can’t let the credits roll with him being a shitty dad. So because of this we are forced to endure an ending that feels both unnecessary and tacked on, as he completely redeems his character in every way shape and form, in I might add, a bizarre homage/knockoff of John Carpenter’s The Thing. This coda really hammers home the script-by-algorithm nature of these streaming service tentpoles. It’s simply two plus hours of content to consume with a name star attached and shit blowing up all over the place, which works out pretty well if you like that kind of thing.

NOW STREAMING ON AMAZON PRIME

THE PROTEGE (Directed by Martin Campbell, 109 minutes, USA, 2021)

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC The Protégé is an unconventional actioner starring Maggie Q as Anna, an assassin on a mission to avenge her fallen mentor and father figure Moody (Samuel L. Jackson). Moody’s taken out while digging too deep into the pair’s latest gig, which would’ve sent them to Vietnam, where the assassin found Anna – who managed to kill his targets before he had a chance. It’s this humanizing moment when the killer saves the life of the young girl, by taking her in and smuggling her out of Vietnam, that gives the film a different vibe than the more archetypical entries in this genre. Pair this with Michael Keaton, who plays a cultured upper management assassin, who works for the parties responsible for Moody’s death, and you have a fun dynamic that puts some dimension into a story that even manages to bake some genuine twists into the question of why Moody was killed. I personally found it a solid actioner that avoids the more exploitative trappings, cartoonish violence and nudity, in favor of character development and story.

With this in mind, I sat down earlier this week (after showing proof of vaccination and a negative COVID test) to chat in person, with the star of the film, Maggie Q. After starting her career as a model, Maggie, who was an American working in Hong Kong, was recruited into the HK film industry in the early aughts and started her film career in pulpy action fodder such as like Gen-Y Cops and Naked Weapon, eventually making the jump to big budget American action spectacles such as Mission: Impossible III, Live Free or Die Hard and most Recently the Divergent series. The Protégé is sort of the culmination of her action work, putting her front and center in a starring vehicle that feels tailor made for her, even leaving the door open for a sequel or two. Being a fan of Hong Kong cinema and fight films in general, I had a blast chatting with Maggie who discusses not only her career’s unlikely beginnings, but the trajectory of the action genre which has been embracing these recent female led action properties.

PHAWKER: So you had an interesting trajectory as an actress. You started out as a model, then you were kind of sucked into the Hong Kong film industry and you were “trained as an action star.” You say that a lot and I’ve always been fascinated by it, because I’m a fan of Hong Kong cinema and you were like even mentored a bit by Jackie Chan. Would you elaborate on that? Like how you went from modeling to kicking ass and taking names?

MAGGIE Q: I have no idea. I was working in Hong Kong. I was not in film and Jackie (Chan) had a management company at the time and they sort of came looking for me and said, “hey, listen, we want to put you in films.” I didn’t know why, I didn’t know why they were looking for me. I wasn’t an actor. I had no clue what the deal was in terms of why me? So anyway, they came to me and said, we want to represent you and I said, no, initially, because I didn’t want to be an actor. I didn’t have any experience. I had nothing to offer. So I don’t know why I would’ve said yes to this big name and his company, if I didn’t feel I had anything to give to them. So I told them that in six months, if people are still looking for me, we can have another conversation. I guess in six months they were and so we started a relationship and that’s kind of how it all began.

PHAWKER: Was it like a bootcamp or how were you trained for action films?

MAGGIE Q: The issue is in Hong Kong, there’s no time or resources to do, like what Keanu did on The Matrix, like have six months to train. So they sort of just throw you in and you just have to be capable. I think it really was the best school, because you don’t have a choice, but to perform, and to perform at the highest level or you’re out.

PHAWKER: So in The Protégé, I noticed that there’s some parallels between the film character Anna and your actual life. You’re both from Vietnam and are bi-racial. Were you involved in the script writing at all? Was the character tailor made for you or did that come after the fact?

MAGGIE Q: Oh no, I wasn’t involved at all. I mean, we were all involved with our tweaks and sort of our takes on the characters that were already written and how we wanted to make them better, like myself and Michael, and Sam especially. So we sort of worked in that way, but no, it was written. Funnily enough, they had different incarnations of this film years before they tried to make it. It was different actors, different actresses, you know, the whole thing. So it never got made and somehow it nicely dovetailed into what we have today.

PHAWKER: One thing I really liked about the project is it kind of attempts to view Vietnam and the Vietnam War through a different prism, than one we’re more accustomed to. Do you think we’re finally getting to the point where we’re starting to actually kind of come to terms with that and a more realistic view on the country and the war?

MAGGIE Q: Yeah, I mean, I wanted to portray a mixed race person in the film as well as show Vietnam is like one of the leading economies in the world, in a world-class city. Right, and it is. You’ve only really seen those regions in periods that we’re married to in our heads. So, you’re finally not seeing in a war movie for the first time, I would say.

PHAWKER: So one thing I noticed about the choreography of the fight scenes, is you sort of have that super smooth, fluid fighting style reminiscent of your Hong Kong work. Did you have any sort of say in your choreography? There definitely seemed to be some Wushu influence in there.

MAGGIE Q: I just think I am very smooth when I fight. I’m definitely not a Wushu person. Our choreographers, they were all European, so we didn’t have any really Asian influence in that way, although they are all influenced by martial arts, because obviously. I had a lot of say in my fighting. I mean they choreograph what they have in their mind’s eye and then it comes to me and then I make the tweaks I want to make, and if I don’t have to, fantastic. But a lot of times I do jump in and say, well I’d like it more like this, or more or less like this, and we kind of work together in that respect.

PHAWKER: I liked that the fights felt more grounded. Because when you’re forced to use your body to give you leverage when you’re fighting to give you that edge and weight advantage in taking out bad guys and landing a punch. It’s not like you punch them and they fall down, you actually have to build that momentum to put them down, so it’s more believable when you do.

MAGGIE Q: And this is it. Sometimes when I spy things that aren’t realistic, like I get, very like “guys, we really have to protect these characters by rooting these fights in reality”. Number one, number two, Martin (Campbell – Director) does not like big fantastical action at all. He likes it to be practical and something that could actually happen within the realm of the storytelling. So we were kind of married to that.

PHAWKER: I have to say the chemistry between you and Michael Keaton was great. What was that like working with Keaton and what was it like kicking Batman’s ass?

MAGGIE Q: First of all, one of the most enjoyable experiences of my career was collaborating with Michael, because he is such a collaborator, he’s so generous of spirit, you know, just as a human and as an actor. So, I was able to really dig in. We really were able to dig in together and were constantly calling each other and texting each other about ideas and things that we had. So that was really fun. Fighting with Batman. That’s so funny, I never thought about that when we were making the film until we were done and people were like, “you realize who you were fighting?” It only came up last week. I couldn’t believe that I actually, I mean, of course I remembered him as Batman because he’s one of my favorites, but I was not thinking. I think maybe you just try to compartmentalize and just do what you have to do in front of you and you don’t think of anything else, or maybe it’ll be overwhelming.

PHAWKER: So that brings me to the fact that these action vehicles always get sequels.

MAGGIE Q: Yeah.

PHAWKER: Who would be your sort of ideal heavy for the next film? Male or female? You know, which DCU or MCU character’s ass would you like to kick next?

MAGGIE Q: Wow. Oh my goodness. Yeah, I guess I, maybe I’d like to fight Wonder Woman.

PHAWKER: Oh, that’d be fun.

MAGGIE Q: That would be good, because as a kid, like I was a big Lynda Carter fan, like that was like my show. I wanted to be her, and I dressed up as her and I pretended I was her. So that would be like a childhood fantasy and then Gal (Gadot), she’s such a great woman and I love her personality. She’s a really, really nice lady. So it would be fun.

PHAWKER: So finally, do you think the action genre has gotten better? Because like now we have Charlize Theron, and she has her own action vehicles and Scarlett Johansson, and she has her action vehicles and now you’re doing The Protégé and we have these women now leading the charge in these more empowering narratives?

MAGGIE Q: I mean, I hope so, because you know, opportunities obviously are few and far between. So I suppose if we get the opportunities and we do it well, it’s going to create more opportunities. So hopefully that is the case.

PHAWKER: I love that while this film definitely trafficks in the tropes of the sexy female assassin sub-genre you manage to imbue her with more of a realism, because she’s more established and she’s not being groomed or like this ingenue. We actually see her go on this journey.

MAGGIE Q: It’s a couple of things. I think it’s casting women of a certain age who have a gravitas and a history that they bring to the screen, which I think is infinitely more interesting. Then casting great actresses like Charlize and Scarlett. These are really talented actresses and you’re putting them in a genre where they’re giving weight to everything else that’s happening and we didn’t do that before, because there was an era where the acting was secondary to what was happening. I think audiences are too sophisticated for that now, to be honest. I think we are moving in a different direction.
Video link: https://youtu.be/yGU8Brj0FxA

ESQUIRE: We haven’t ordered. We don’t have food yet. We don’t have coffee yet. Just talking. Waitstaff whir around, trolleying quinoa bowls and acai.

The scene sends Owen’s memory to another restaurant, which makes him smile. He and Wes Anderson were writing The Royal Tenenbaums, the 2001 movie for which they were nominated for a best-original-screenplay Academy Award, and as part of the backstory, they made up a restaurant called Sloppy Huck’s, which Royal Tenenbaum (played by Gene Hackman) used to take his kids to when they were little. “It was this place with peanut shells on the floor and an odd menu with stuff like rhubarb pie and corn-fritter casserole,” he says. “There were those jukeboxes at each booth, right on the table, that you could flip through. And bullet holes in the window, because bad guys had tried to rob the cash register a couple of times, so Sloppy was always alert.”

He’s fifty-two. His skin is tanned and healthy—ruddy—and he has enviable blond hair that always looks like he went swimming in the ocean a half hour ago and it dried in the sun, annoyingly perfect. The blue eyes are as blue as they are in the movies, or bluer. His ball cap has a logo of a half doughnut, half taco, a totem from a recent movie shoot in Saratoga Springs, New York. (A man who owned a taco-and-doughnut shop gave it to him.) He does not place his phone on the table, the way most people do. He answers questions not as if he’s being interviewed but rather as if he’s standing in the corner at a party, chatting and telling delightful stories.

I’m starting to wonder, How long do we have for this breakfast? Will he have to leave soon? Are we going to ride the bikes?

“Sloppy Huck’s didn’t make it into the movie,” he says, smiling down.

He asks questions. He is well-read. Very well-read. We parse the divergent narrative styles of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He tells me about a book his brother Luke gave him recently: a biography of an obscure Swiss writer named Robert Walser. He mentions picking up a copy of The Snow Leopard not long ago, a book he says means a lot to him.

I, meanwhile, am asking him the normal interview questions, not yet getting where he is going. What exactly is the story going to be?

I bring up Loki, the smart, fun Marvel series he starred on for Disney+ as agent Mobius, with Tom Hiddleston. “We did a press junket for that yesterday,” he says.

“They asked me a lot about—‘It sounds like you had to be convinced to do this.’ I don’t know where they’re getting that. That isn’t true. The director just called me and told me the idea, and I wanted to work on it. But somehow what seems to be in their press notes, maybe, is that I know zero about the MCU. I don’t know a ton about it, but I know—”

He pauses.

“Actually, yeah, I probably don’t know that much about it. I kind of know about Iron Man. I’ve seen Aquaman. He’s swimming in jeans. No one can swim in jeans! That was my argument with the kids about Aquaman.”

(Speaking of Loki: Owen is known to improv lines on set, and in one scene in the first episode, Loki is acting very self-important during Mobius’s interrogation. Mobius simply says, “You’re just a little pussycat.” “All Owen,” Hiddleston tells me.)

It’s not that Owen is uninterested in talking about this stuff, but pretty soon he’s drifting away from it, telling me about when he was in Atlanta filming Loki and he made up a leaf-catching game for himself and his kids. “We play that you have to catch it with one hand and run,” he says. “It’s nice because it gets you looking up.”

He bobs his head almost imperceptibly, squints and smiles almost imperceptibly, and almost whispers: “Yeah. The Leaf-Catch Game.”

“What did they ask you?” is my probing inquiry. MORE

SUICIDE SQUAD (Directed by James Gunn, 132 minutes, USA, 2021)

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC James Gunn helming a Suicide Squad film should have been an easy win. The director previously adapted a property for Marvel few even knew existed when he brought Guardians of the Galaxy to the MCU. That film has became a pop-culture touchstone and represents a watershed moment for the director. Gunn cut his teeth making no-budget indie films for Troma that trafficked in transgressive humor and buckets of gore. After a falling out with Marvel — a fence that has since been mended — Gunn was lured to the DC film universe. There he was offered to work his brand of magic on a property about a similar group of outlaws on a mission, aka The Suicide Squad. DC’s supergroup of villains who are doing good in the hopes of shaving some time off their prison sentences, which originally was an easy way for the comic creators to explain why the villains of DC were constantly getting out of jail. This film is a soft reboot that brings some of the surviving members from the first film back with fresh new looks and a harder R-Rated attitude.

The truly ironic thing here is the original Suicide Squad was kind of DC’s knee jerk reaction to Guardians of the Galaxy. The original Squad was rumored to have been much darker before they cut a trailer that was similar in tone to Guardians, replete with needle drops and quirky jokes and Gunn-esque banter. After the overwhelmingly positive fan reaction to that trailer, the film was then recut by a third party – the ad firm that cut the trailer, with additional reshoots to further mimic that stylistic tone. This resulted in a bastard child that failed in my opinion like most of these DC films because of tonal imbalance due to pandering to fan reactions to trailers when they should be trusting their directors. So landing Gunn, the original auteur who crafted the film they tried and failed to replicate, on the sequel to said film seemed to really make sense.

The Suicide Squad picks up sometime after the first, with the Squad once again recruited by Amanda Waller to head down to the South American island of Corto Maltese. Their mission is to erase all traces of “Project Starfish,” a top secret doomsday weapon research project of “extraterrestrial origin,” when a military coup risks it falling into anti-American hands. After the group who you think are the movie’s titular protagonists (but in actuality are a sacrificial diversion meant to run interference for the real Suicide Squad) are killed off, we then follow the violent hijinks of a group of convicts-turned-commandos lead by Bloodsport (Idris Elba). The rest of the roster here includes the scene-stealing Peacemaker played by the massively underrated John Cena, the Sylvester Stallone-voiced King Shark, Polka-Dot Man, and Ratcatcher 2. They are later joined in their quest by Harley Quinn and Rick Flag who are the only two characters who genuinely care for one another, which is the biggest flaw in the film.

The Suicide Squad has Gunn coming in hot on his R-rating with plenty of fucks, tons of gore and probably the most taboo of thing in American movies: full frontal male nudity. It’s all here, and it should be glorious, and hilarious, but it’s missing something — heart. The reason the Guardians films worked so well is because you got the feeling that this band of outsiders were a dysfunctional family and by overcoming their personal differences it made them not only stronger but better people in the process. Here, we are just waiting on the group to turn on one another in what feels like an episode of Rick and Morty. Project Starfish, it turns out, is literally a giant starfish from outer space that destroys the capital city of Corto Maltese using Alien-style face-sucking mind control to turn its citizens into homicidal zombies hell bent on killing the Squad. This is basically what happened in the first film as Deadshot, I mean Bloodsport, has to choose to be a leader to get the Squad to the finish line of their mission and save his daughter.

I am not going to even try to touch the bizarre, anti-American subtext that feels like an empty plot device to facilitate a full release for our remaining team at the end. But this film just fails on so many levels, sorely lacking the emotional gravitas of Gunn’s previous spandex clad outings, it’s derivative and resorts to simply throwing against the wall whatever sight-gag humor he hopes will stick to the lowest common denominator. I mean by the time we see the third person ripped in half by a giant shark and Taika Waititi O.D. on heroin, we’re painfully aware that The Suicide Squad is the film equivalent to a Calvin pissing on the Marvel logo sticker on the back of a Telsa.The sad truth here is while there’s some really cool shit here. The original Suicide Squad, which was essentially a poor man’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, had more heart than Gunn’s and I hate to say it but less is sometimes more in the shock department. While being mildly entertaining, yet ultimately forgettable, this Squad could be Gunn’s first superhuman misstep; here’s hoping he gets his head on straight and his shit together before Guardians Three. 

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Free Guy takes a concept we’ve seen before, the character who suddenly realizes he’s living in a simulation, but elevates this idea with the surprisingly nuanced how and the why of the narrative. The film stars wisecracking Ryan Reynolds as a Guy, an NPC or Non Playable Character, who works as a bank teller in a video game called Free City. The game is like Grand Theft Auto where gamers come and let loose whatever carnage they see fit on the city’s peaceful inhabitants, who have learned to blissfully accept this behavior of the players they have dubbed the “sunglasses people.” This is due to the special specs that facilitate the head up display in the game. When Guy falls for a mysterious sunglasses wearing woman (Jodie Comer) one day, this sends our naive NPC down a rabbit hole of enlightenment where he discovers he’s a character in a video game after pulling a pair of reality-shades from a fallen player.

Where things actually get interesting here is when we discover that the A.I. in the game, which is the reason for Guy’s awakening, was possibly stolen from a pair of estranged programmers. One of them is trying to prove their claim against the company who released Free City and the other one works for them. While the film delivers on the Ryan Renold’s PG-13 family friendly ad libbed raunch as you’d expect, it’s the story outside of the game of the pair of creators who are united by their creation that really drew me in. One of these devs is played by actor/musician Joe Keery, who is probably best known as Steve in Stranger Things. As Walter “Keys” McKeys in Free Guy he delivers a much more subdued character than we are used to, showing a new side of the young actor I didn’t expect. I really dug Free Guy and earlier this week I got to chat with Joe via Zoom, not only about this film and em>Stranger Things of course, but also his music and a little indie he did about a homicidal Uber driver in Spree.

PHAWKER: So you shot Free Guy two years ago. What was your 2020 like? I know you’ve been busy making music and I know you just finished a season of Stranger Things, as well.

JOE KEERY: Yeah, I mean, we were shooting season four of the show, right when everything had shut down. So we shot for about three months, took a break from about March to September and then kind of started shooting in September until we finished quite recently. So you know, I was really lucky to have something to do and some work to slip my mind towards, to do something in my downtime. I was just focused on doing music and trying to stay creative and kind of like everyone else doing a lot of cooking. I think like everybody else in the world I baked some bread.

PHAWKER: So your song “Keep Your Head Up” was a gift in 2020. I can’t wait for the rest of the new album, any update?

JOE KEERY: Yeah, no, I just finished obviously the show and so now I’m going to kind of shift focus to that, and hopefully sooner rather than later. It’s something that I really love to do and enjoy in my downtime and feel pretty lucky that people are down with it and into it. So I’ll keep cooking it if you guys keep listening to it, I guess.

PHAWKER: So I really dug both your previous films Spree and Slice, and I started to notice looking at your filmography you sort of pick these roles in films that have these social messages embedded in them. Even Free Guy. There’s interesting stuff underneath the veneer there for people that want to dig deeper. What do you look for as an actor when you’re reading scripts? Like what are you looking for that sort of your feelers go up where you’re like, I want to do this project?

JOE KEERY:That’s a really tough question. You know, I’m still pretty, pretty early on in my career. It’s kind of hard to say what really intrigues you. Usually it’s doing something that’s a lot different than the thing that I had just previously done and then it’s just kind of a gut gut feeling, really.

I remember reading Spree and thinking it was an amazing commentary and it was kind of risky, but then meeting Eugene, the director of that movie, I felt like he was the guy for the job and had the movie inside him. It’s really just about putting faith in the director that you’re working with every time it’s kind of a little bit of a roll of the dice, but that’s what makes doing these projects so fun. I guess the only thing that I’ve realized is that you have to do projects that you’re passionate about, and if you’re not passionate about it, you know, it’ll show. So luckily I’ve been able to work on things, like Free Guy, where I’m just really passionate about the story and the people that I’m working with.

PHAWKER: So what was it like switching the kind of the character dynamic up and playing a game designer who’s more in line with the lovelorn nerd Dustin in Stranger Things rather than Steve? Was it a different mindset or like, what was it like for you internally?

JOE KEERY:It’s a lot of fun, really just a different challenge. I think that’s something that I’m always looking for, job to job is just to do something that’s kind of different. I get to play this kind of aloof, confident, maybe not the brightest crayon in the box character on Stranger Things and to play a much more intelligent character, but somebody who doesn’t really have a lot of confidence was a fun challenge.

PHAWKER: Free Guy is all about video games. Are you a gamer at all?

JOE KEERY:I mean here and there. I mean, I played Pokemon as a kid. I played some in N64 as a kid, played a few here and there, not a ton of online gaming. So I had to do some work there. But I have a pretty good understanding of the video game community.

PHAWKER: Speaking of which, games and technology are things folks tend to be really passionate about, and getting something wrong can definitely impact how people perceive your performance. What kind of research did you do prior to shooting the film with your character Keys who’s a game designer?

JOE KEERY: The research I did was based more around the world building side, because I think that’s kind of what Keys is at the end of the day, he’s a world builder at heart. I really enjoyed how at the top of this movie, he had kind of gone through this heartbreak with him and Millie, who he had worked so hard with to create this game. They sell it to this company and to Antoine, played by Taika Waititi, and then the game is shelved and he ends up just working at this dead end job at Antoine’s company.He starts in this kind of depression, and then his character really kind of goes through this journey in parallel to Guy and that was something that was appealing to me about the character.

PHAWKER: Speaking of Waititi, what was it like filming your scenes with Taika? Because it seems like there was a bit of improv in his performance. Was the script the gospel, or was there more improv scene to scene?

JOE KEERY: He is a mad genius, man. I really was looking forward to working with him. He’s a writer, director, and actor. I love his movies, love his shows and that’s kind of what he does on set. I mean, he’s kind of directing, writing, acting all at the same time. Shawn (Levy) said out somewhere out there, there was like a 39-minute blooper reel of just only improv stuff that was not scripted. No, he doesn’t have any fear. He’s not afraid to fail. He’s just got a lot of confidence and that can be difficult as a performer when you’re on the spot, but it was amazing watching him work and being around and being able to do the scenes with him. Yeah, generally we would get what was on the page and then, yeah, Shawn would just let him run wild.

PHAWKER: Finally I have to ask, can you tell us what we can expect from the next season of Stranger Things

JOE KEERY: I can’t say much, but I can say that in the next season… [Joe acts like the sound is out on the Zoom Call as he mouths words without actually saying anything]

PHAWKER: [laughs]

JOE KEERY: I just finished my own work for the season, so I’m officially wrapped after a very long shooting process, which was tough for everybody. Just given the circumstances of the world, obviously, but these guys, the Duffer brothers, have poured their hearts and their souls, their entire lives into this show. They do not take a break. They do not take a vacation. They are constantly either writing, editing, or directing this show for the past five years, since it came out and they’ve been working tirelessly to bring this new season to everybody. I just think that they are such visionary guys and I still can’t quite fathom how I got linked with these guys and in this show. So personally, this is the season I’m most looking forward to seeing just because it’s been such a long process and the script I think is pretty different and has a really large scope. So I believe it will be worth the wait, like I usually say, but not much more I can say.

NOW PLAYING IN A THEATER NEAR YOU

ANNETTE (Directed by Leos Carax, 139 minutes, France, 2021)

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC French writer/director/film critic Leos Carax, responsible for the absurdist masterwork Holy Motors, is back with an oddball operatic musical called Annette, for which he collaborated with Sparks, aka the greatest band you’ve probably never heard of. Sparks is comprised of brothers Ronald and Russell Mael who for the past 55 years have somehow managed to remain bleeding edge of music, with just the right blend of complexity and quirk. If you’ve seen Edgar Wright’s the excellent Sparks doc The Sparks Brothers, you know the brothers Mael have spent a rather large portion of their career trying to make their way to the silver screen. Given the brother’s proclaimed love of Goddard and the French New Wave, it only made sense their cinematic debut would come courtesy of the more culture savvy French. And it was worth the wait — Annette is a weird-beard tour de force.

Unlike Holy Motors, which utilized an episodic narrative structure, Annette is near-linear in its storytelling. The plot unfolds in the celebrity-obsessed fishbowl of Hollywood, where stand-up comedian provocateur Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) marries the world-famous soprano Ann Defrasnoux (Marion Cotillard), and after a whirlwind romance, conceives a daughter  they name Annette. For reasons not entirely clear, Annette is portrayed as a wooden marionette (hence the name) in contrast to her very much living and breathing costars. Think of Annette as a female Pinocchio, definitely not CGI, very practical, and often unnerving until you get used to her. The story soon takes a turn for the tragic when Ann is lost at sea one stormy night on their yacht, amid whispers of foul play.

Given Sparks love of eccentric metaphor and wordplay, the choice of the marionette is more than a weird stylistic choice and in fact serves two purposes. Firstly, the marionette represents the fact that the children of celebrity couples are often relegated to simple objects or things to be fought over in custody battles. Secondly, it’s only after Annette speaks out against her father for putting her on tour to capitalize on his wife’s death that she becomes a real girl.

The music here is a mix of deep cuts from Sparks’ back catalog, largely drawn from 1974’s Propaganda (“Thanks But No Thanks” and “Bon Voyage”), mixed with new compositions written specifically for the film. The meta opening number “So May We Start” starts in a recording studio with Sparks recording the song before handing off the melody off to Driver and Cotillard who then get into wardrobe, into vehicles and into their respective first scenes. This amid meta-lyrics about production budget concerns and audience etiquette.

Like Holy Motors, Annette is very raw. Performances feel less rehearsed than improvised in single long takes, that highlight both the intensity of expression and the exhaustion that invariably ensues. In the beginning the film’s look is heavily inspired by old Hollywood with its heavy use of rear projection and dream-like cinematography, with everything picture perfect to the point of artificiality. But the unreality slowly erodes over the course of the film’s tw-hour running time and by the end we are very much in the gritty real world.

Driver shoulders much of the film and his performance exceeds the highwater mark of his work in Marriage Story. Henry McHenry is unlikable and unhinged and his comedy act is a series of monologues that are internal explorations of love and anger painfully externalized on stage, often performed in speedos and a bathrobe. He is a conflicted father, struggling with regret and battling his demons in front of an audience. Think embarrassing over the top performance art meets poetry slam, all while breaking into the occasional song.

Still, Driver, acting opposite a puppet, manages to sell Henry and his fragile father daughter relationship which slowly evolves into the dark heart of the film. Ultimately, Henry chooses to push his daughter away just when you would expect him to hold her close. This stark choice magnifies the film’s darker moments and portrays the consequences of Ann’s death on Henry and just how far he is willing to go to keep his dark secret safe, and his daughter on tour making money. It’s not for everyone, films this uncompromising rarely are, but for those that give themselves over to Annette are in for a wild ride.

VAL (directed by Ting Poo & Leo Scott, 109 minutes, USA, 2021)

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC  Val is culled from 40 years of footage shot by Kilmer who was never apparently without his trusty video camera, obsessively documenting everything from his highschool stage plays to his recent victory over throat cancer. While enticing the casual viewer with peeks of his time on such iconic films as Batman, Top Gun and Heat, this doc pulls back the curtain letting fans in on the psychology behind his approach to acting, while painting a intimate, tragic and ultimately hopeful story in the process. While I’ve never been the biggest Kilmer fan, I was lured in by the film’s trailer that carried an immense emotional weight with its depiction of him overcoming cancer, while teasing the prerequisite beats of the actor’s greatest hits.

Narrated by his son who sounds uncannily just like his father here, and actually had me doing a double take, the film’s story plays out in a circular fashion. The film starts in the present and then jumps to Kilmer’s childhood and eventually catches the audience back up to Kilmer’s being diagnosed with cancer while on tour performing his one man show Citizen Twain, raising funds for a film on the iconic writer he hoped to make. The film has Val digging into the tragedy that would color most of his life and career: the death of his 15-year-old brother Wesley who drowned during an Epilptic seizure while under the supervision of his father. As children, Val would be in front of the camera while his brother Wesley was the creative force behind their early childhood shorts. This love of cinema would eventually lead Val to New York and Juilliard where his first big break awaited him, starring in an off Broadway production alongside a very young Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon.

This story presented here is dripping with a rare humanity thanks to how directors Ting Poo and Leo Scott chose to present the star and his footage, which is not as self serving as you’d probably expect. Kilmer has always rubbed me the wrong way because of how arrogant he came off in interviews and press.This film tears away this pretentious exterior by not simply giving us the literal method behind his tortuous acting process, but showing our subject warts and all, in ways most would never dare. The doc not only digs into Val’s difficult reputation as an actor and his strained relationship with his father who never forgave himself for his son’s death. It also tackles Kilmer’s divorce from Joanne Whalley, which Kilmer partially faults his all consuming preparation for his turn as Jim Morrison in The Doors. We witness all of these events play out narrated with a sobering and sometimes humorous perspective that has the actor owning every second of it as it plays out on screen.

Being a comic book fan, for me the one of the most striking moments was Kilmer deconstructing his time on Batman Forever, which was one of the actor’s more absurd and commercial roles. After Kilmer, predictably, laments how hard it was pushing a performance through the rubber suit and how he craved for more creative endeavors as an actor, we cut to Kilmer and Welsy’s take on the caped crusader as kids to further show how personal the role was to him. This segues into a very profound statement from Kilmer about his REAL disappointment in the role, was because “every boy wants to BE Batman, (but) they don’t necessarily want to play him in a movie.” It’s a rare perspective only granted by time, age and survival that illuminates Kilmer’s outlook allowing him to riff on these kinds of meaningful observations filled with heart and introspection.

The most surprising thing however is through all of this strife and tragedy presented here, Val still attempts to leave the viewer with a sense of hope, both for the film’s subject and life in general. Throat cancer may have robbed Kilmer of one of his most precious tools to an actor, his voice, but that hasn’t robbed him of his self expression. Nowadays when not on the pop-culture convention circuit meeting fans to make ends meet, Kilmer spends his time with his children, collaging or painting, which led to him opening a small gallery that also functions as a gathering space for like-minded creatives. Probably be the best way to describe the style of documentary is a cinematic collage, since it incorporates all of these different forms of media and perspectives and it works flawlessly.  At the end of the film you can’t help but root for him, you may not have to love him, but the doc takes the harder path of helping you to understand the enigmatic actor and that is what ultimately won me over.

BLACK WIDOW (directed by Cate Shortland, 133 minutes, 2021, USA)

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC While all her male Avengers counterparts launched with their mandatory solo vehicles, the Black Widow standalone film has quietly languished in development hell ever since it was teased circa 2010’s Iron Man 2. I honestly thought the film had lost any relevance it once had,  given that’s she perished in Endgame, and we are now neck deep in the new batch of heroes who have stepped in to fill the vacancy left by their battle with Thanos. But after a decade in development limbo and a lost year of delays thanks to COVID, we finally have the Black Widow film and that long gestation process has birthed a film that I don’t think could’ve have been made or released by Marvel before now, largely due to its dark themes and unflinching take on the character.

Black Widow is a prequel of sorts, and is basically a bottle episode of the MCU. The film begins in Ohio, in 1995, when Natasha’s “father” Alexei (David Harbour) comes home after work and announces to his “wife” and two young “daughters” that their deep cover mission in the American suburbs is over and they must escape back to Russia.  We soon discover the girls were nothing more than props in this ruse as the credits roll to an orchestral version of Smells Like Teen Spirit and they are cast aside. The next time we see the young “sisters” they are pulled from a shipping container dirty, crying and then separated. We then jump to right after the events of Captain America: Civil War, where Black Widow receives a box from Yelena (Florence Pugh) that leads her to Budapest, to her long lost “sister,” who’s on the run from Widow’s previous masters.

Yelena alerts Natasha that the man who once ran the Red Room, the shadow Soviet organization that trafficked in and trained young girls in the Black Widow assassin program, is still very much alive and active. Natasha was tasked with killing Dreykov (Ray Winstone) to prove her loyalty to  S.H.I.E.L.D. and it’s here we discover that because Natasha had broken through the psychological conditioning of the Red Room. To keep this from happening again Widows were conditioned through a powerful drug regimen as well. Yelena sent for Natasha when she was freed by an older rogue Widow, who she was tasked in killing.  It’s during this mission that Yelena is freed, but it’s immediately after killing her target that she fully comprehends the gravity of  what she has just done, i.e. killed her savior. The sisters then set off to find their lost “dad” and go on a family trip into the underbelly of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to take down the Red Room once and for all.

While Marvel is known for action that relies heavily on comedic beats to offset the tension, we quickly discover one thing is off limits in this film and it really locks the tone for the piece. I mean aside from that opening, where we essentially witnessed human trafficking of young girls. When the two women rescue Alexei from prison, who is the comedic relief here, he immediately jokes that the reason Yelena is giving her “dear old dad” a hard time is simply because it’s her time of the month. Yelena then launches into why she can’t have a period, graphically describing the Black Widow “graduation ceremony,” i.e. the forced hysterectomy she endured as part of her conditioning. Like I said, “dark themes” and “unflinching takes.”

I’ve been a huge fan of Florence Pugh since her turn in Midsommar, and here she’s a force of nature on screen. Not only does she have the requisite action chops, she kills when she fires off a volley of  Marvel’s trademark meta-comedic one-liners, just like the boys. David Harbour here is pretty damn great as well as the Russian super soldier, the buffoonish Red Guardian. I just love how Harbour adds depth and sadness to what was meant to be a knock off Captain America, who has no doubt seen better days.  While Johansson long ago established her ass-kicking action bonafides, she finally gets some real time to inhabit the character’s skin and explore Natasha within some quieter moments without having to struggle with the fragility of the other male egos on screen. We are treated to some rather genuine moments of introspection on screen as we see her make peace with her past which gave her the strength to sacrifice herself in Endgame.

I personally think if this came out any sooner, it might have been diluted in some way or Black Widow would have had to have Captain America show up for a two-hander in the third act. Instead we get what is arguably the darkest character film in the MCU and a film I know some will sadly write off simply due to the fact that there’s a woman superhero in the forefront of the poster. But this story really isn’t for them. The film also has a much more complex relationship with death and consequence given our protagonist and where she ends up in Endgame. This plays off her recurring themes of unfinished business about having a lot of “Red in her ledger.” Black Widow was worth the wait and actually does this character and her shadowy world justice, while taking care to finally give her the narrative arc she desperately deserved. Also while this is a very self-contained plot, stick around for those credits, because there are some repercussions for an upcoming Disney plus show. Hint: we just might have our new Black Widow in Pugh.

ARMY OF THE DEAD (directed by Zack Snyder, 148 minutes, USA, 2021)

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Of all the bizarre announcements that came from Netflix’s blank-check spending spree a few years back, when almost every A-List director got some insane vanity project green lit, was Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. This was a project he had been working on since 2004, which incidentally was when he did the impossible and remade Dawn of the Dead — George Romero’s classic deconstruction of consumerism aka his “zombies in a mall” epic — and actually knocked it out of the park. Since then he’s gone on to be the driving creative force of the DC universe and in the process become one of the most divisive personalities in comic book cinema thanks in part to the infamous phenomenon that was the #ReleasetheSnyderCut movement. It’s only been a matter of months since that four hour Justice League magnum opus hit HBO Max and now, Army just hit Netflix and could easily be one of his best films to date.

Army of the Dead is an old fashioned heist film that traffics in the zombie genre to up the ante and enrich its world building. In this alternate history a zombie military asset from Area 51 escapes while in transit and spreads its plague across the Nevada desert, until the undead eventually overrun Las Vegas. The city is then quarantined and walled off with shipping containers after a failed military campaign to cleanse Sin City of the undead scourge. To celebrate the Fourth of July a few years later the president plans to nuke the city and take it back once and for all. I can only assume this unnamed president is Trump because that would be the only explanation for the bizarre Sean Spicer cameo. Now this is where our hero Scott Ward (Dave Batista) comes in. He’s a down on his luck veteran who, after fighting in the zombie war, currently flips greasy burgers for a minimum wage. Scott  is recruited by a somewhat suspicious casino owner – Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) to get a crew together, venture into Vegas and recover $200 million from his casino vault before it gets nuked.

With the zombie craze having run its full course three times over since Dawn, Snyder instead looks outside of the sub-genre cribbing from Aliens for the film’s narrative engine and Richard Matheson’s novel I am Legend for its mythos to deliver one of his most focused and enjoyable films to date. It’s the rare Netflix action film that doesn’t feel like it was written by an AI, but Dead moves rather organically delivering its action beats and gore at an enjoyable clip, even throwing a few curve balls our way. Coming in at two plus hours, it’s actually one of the shorter Snyder films that while imbuing our humans in peril with their motives and backstories, surprisingly does the same with their undead counterparts. Pulling another page from Romero’s playbook here, we have zombies with genuine character arcs and societies that have evolved in their time while in Vegas developing their own social hierarchy.

My only knock on the film would be that while visually it’s your standard gorgeously shot sun-drenched action film in the desert, sometimes Snyder, who is also credited as Director of Photography, experiments with a really shallow depth of field. This happens primarily in dialog heavy scenes with varied degrees of success. Sometimes it works and others it’s painfully distracting as the characters fall in and out of focus while attempting to deliver performances. Dave Batista who is usually the supporting heavy or the comic relief really makes a decent action hero here and does his best not to get upstaged by an impressive supporting cast including the likes of Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana De La Reguera, Theo Rossi, Garret Dillahunt and Tig Notaro. It’s just the kind of eclectic ensemble expected in a heist film, where the lead is as good as his crew.

This genre film has the requisite pulse-quickening action and nauseating gore, but surprisingly it has a heart as well. When Batista has to rely on his daughter Kate (Ella Purnell) who works in the quarantine area outside of Vegas to get him in, we soon discover she’s been estranged since witnessing him killing her mother and his wife when she was turning into a zombie; which had to have done some real damage to both of their psyches. This offers a bit more backstory for the actors to chew on and bit more depth for the audience to appreciate as the story progresses and we see how that event shattered both of their lives and their relationship. It’s that thought and character development that takes this high concept idea that could’ve been sheer novelty and gives it enough depth and heart to not only work, but show that Snyder still has it as the film ebbs and flows from family drama to heist film to adrenaline soaked crowd-pleaser.

GODZILLA VS KONG (Directed by Adam Wingard, 113 min., USA, 2021)

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC The original King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) was a weird East meets West affair that simultaneously exploited Japan’s burgeoning obsession with professional wrestling and celebrated the 30th anniversary of Godzilla’s corporate overlord, Toho Co., Ltd, by having the two larger than life icons duke it out on the big screen. Now almost 60 years later, we are getting an American-produced rematch that wants to be the Batman Vs Superman of the Legendary Monsterverse. The primary difference here is that director Adam Wingard (You’re Next, The Guest) fully embraces the humorous, weirder, more sci-fi elements of these films instead of plumbing the darker depths that the franchise has trafficked in thus far.

Kong Vs Godzilla picks up more or less where King of Monsters left off, with humanity struggling to come to grips with their newly-diminished standing in the food chain. Godzilla, who was once believed to be humanity’s protector, is on a world wide rampage. Apex Cybernetics, the military-tech giant, is desperately searching for an energy source to power a new weapon that will rid the earth of the giant lizard once and for all. The quest for said power source leads us to Kong, who has grayed up a bit since we last saw him in 1973. Skull Island, no longer the paradise it once was, has become a stormy wasteland, but they don’t know where else to hide the giant ape from Godzilla, who we discover is his natural enemy, as they are both categorized as apex titans. Leaning into Bill Randa’s (John Goodman) “Hollow Earth” theory from Skull Island, a group of scientists hope to relocate Kong in the subterranean Shangri La and, in the process, find a fabled source of ancient energy to kill godzilla.

Madison Russell (Millie Bobby Brown) leads the charge for team Godzilla alongwith Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), an Apex whistleblower who is also trying to understand the reason behind Godzilla’s recent rampages. Even though Brown is relegated to a rather conspiracy-ridden Stranger Things-esque storyline, she has the chops to hold her own on screen.  Leading Team Kong, strangely enough, is a rather timid Alexander Skarsgård as Nathan Lind, who is playing against type as the Hollow Earth expert and ex Monarch employee recruited by Apex to escort Kong into the Earth. Oddly enough, the humanity and heart of the film lies in Kong’s story. We discover during his journey that Jia (Kaylee Hottle) a young Iwi, has taught Kong sign language and by doing so has given humanity a voice in this battle. This isn’t something completely new, since in the Toho films humanity was able to communicate with Mothra through her tiny, twin fairies.

There are two kinds of fans of American Godzilla films. Those that love the monster-on-monster madness that the franchise offers and was the bread and butter of the Japanese films, and those that can’t seem to wrap their minds around the fact that not every film keeps with the more arthouse trappings of 2014’s Godzilla, Gareth Edwards’ brooding but bedazzling masterwork. While the first film in Japan was also was more of an art film, deconstructing the horrors of atomic war, with each subsequent entry (32+ films in total so far) after, it strayed farther and farther from that path to court the younger fans who showed up year after year for Godzilla ’s latest smash-’em-up adventure.

While I hate that every film these days is trying to unlock some shared universe a la Marvel, Wingard delivers a film that with its two concurrent storylines feels like it could almost topple over at any moment, but it surprisingly doesn’t thanks to its  unrelenting all-action/no-exposition momentum. Keep in mind we are four films deep at this point and it appears to all have been working up to this spectacle powered by Bayhem-esque explosions and awash in neon hues as the fate of the world once again hangs in the balance. High art this isn’t, but it sure is a hell of a lot of fun, and might be the one that for me really captures the absurdity and glee of those later Godzilla films in the Toho canon. As far as Legendary’s films go this entry feels more in line with Kong: Skull Island, its loud, its bombastic and completes the franchise’s transition to popcorn tentpole, dropping all the arty pretension of King of Monsters, which no doubt will upset those looking for another dark dissection of the follies of man vs nature. Instead we have hover ships flying inside the earth and the savior of the human race is a giant monkey who speaks sign language and has a magic glowing axe. I loved every second of it.

GODZILLA VS KONG IS NOW STREAMING ON HBO MAX

BILLIE EILISH: The World Is A Little Blurry (dir. R.J Cutler, 140 min., USA, 2021)

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Early on in Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Bit Blurry, the Apple+ documentary that charts the meteoric rise of the young green-tressed pop phenom, there’s a moment at a sold out concert where Eilish parts the crowd of screaming preteens like Charlton Heston in the Ten Commandments so security can carry out an injured girl. Obviously shaken by the ordeal, Eilish asks the crowd if they’re okay, she then emphatically states “they need to be fucking okay, because they are the reason she’s okay.” It’s raw, unscripted and heartfelt, and the doc spends its entire runtime chasing the purity of that one moment to no avail.

The film begins, as these films always do, with the obligatory collage of home movie footage documenting Billie’s many musical endeavors from toddler to teen, and her transition from dancing to singing. This is after she tragically ruptured her hip growth plate at the age of 13. Not missing a beat before hitting 14, Eilish pens “Ocean Eyes,” her first song with her brother Finneas to get some love on the radio. Fast forwarding three years, we see her recording When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, the debut that would make her a household name, and the rest as they say, is history.

The film effortlessly entwines Billie’s wholesome sitcom-eque home life with her ascension to pop stardom — one minute she’s trying to get her driver’s license, and the next she’s going on her first tour. Director R.J. Cutler keeps the narrative light while hitting the story beats of her career up until this point: recording Bad Guy with her brother in his bedroom, her embarrassing turn at Coachella where she forgot the lyrics to her own songs and finally her triumphant domination of the 2020 Grammys for the grand finale.

The best bits in documentaries like this are when the subject forgets they are being filmed and their mask slips for just long enough for the camera to get a glimpse beneath the veneer. That’s what made Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana so damn great and eye-opening for non-fans: unguarded moments where, for example, Swift laments her remaining shelf life as a popstar – like a real person. There’s not really a moment here where Eilish doesn’t come across as self-conscious, and her moments of quiet introspection often feel coached, rather than spontaneous. While there’s a brief mention of Billie’s struggles with self harm and another of her living with tourettes, it really feels like she’s not ready to explore her own demons yet. This point is underscored by Finneas who laments offhandedly about how “woke” Billie is about her cultivated personae and how it’s viewed online.

Because of that, The World’s a Little Bit Blurry lacks any real gravity or friction and feels more like cinematic fanservice. About the only high drama in doc’s nearly two and a half hour run time is an argument between Billie and Finneas about his desire to make “commercial music that appeals to the masses” or  when Eilish decides to break it off with Q, her long time boyfriend.  While the brother/sister argument is dispatched in record time when mom to brokers a truce, Q spends the majority of the film standing up or flaking out on Billie at various events. That is until he deserts her when she needs him most — during her disastrous Coachella performance — and that is the end of Q.

Given the recent crop of schadenfreude celebrity docs, I really can’t hold it against the film that Eilish is so well-adjusted and it’s actually a refreshing change to feel good about the subject after the credits roll. But I can’t help but think this project was probably a bit premature, that we need to give Billie a bit more time to grow comfortable in her own skin and gain some perspective. I would have preferred a doc about the artistic angst she will no doubt face when making the followup to Where Do We Go, all the while looking back on her seemingly effortless rise. While curious onlookers and casual fans will no doubt enjoy TWALBB, the super fans — those looking for the source of her midnight-dark narratives — might have to wait a bit longer for the Invisiline-rocking 16 year-old to let us in on the secret.