Kay Cook

[excerpted from my full review on Medium - KCookandCatsCo] 'you’ve never read Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho: good. It’s probably the worst book — novel or otherwise — I’ve ever read every word of besides the Bible. And at least the Bible had Ecclesiastes. Presumably, you’ll eventually be asked: is there a movie that’s definitively better than the book? Yes. It’s American Psycho. It is the K. Cook & Cats, Co. Culture Critics Ur-text for a film that is better than the book it adapted. Somehow, Mary Harron (director, co-writer) and Guinevere Turner (co-writer) spun straw into double-platinum, and I knew K. Cook & Cats, Co. Culture Critics was due for a rewatch, this time with the script in hand. Here’s a link, and I’d recommend downloading it and keeping this script, because it’s a masterclass in satire, filled with quotable line after quotable line. But it’s more than quotable; it’s substantive. And, as we discovered in our rewatch Saturday, the film has, if anything, more relevance and significance today than it did in 2000 when it was released. If you missed our The Apprentice review, well, you have only to click that link to catch up. We didn’t bother finishing that film. We found The Apprentice to be crass, boorish, irredeemable trash. Not for nothing, that’s exactly what I think of Bret Easton Ellis’s opus, too. (do people call him BEE? They should 🤔) I criticized that film for being — despite its ostensible anti-Trump inclinations — very Trumpian in its execution. I think that The Apprentice was (I guess) attempting to explain how it is we got here, how we wound up with the man we all know as President Donald Trump, but the movie is as dumb and classless as the man it’s lampooning. Not so, American Psycho. The film has a deft touch, and it needed it. Every facet of the film is flawlessly calibrated and nuanced, subtle, trenchant, starting (literally) with the iconic font... So that’s the kind of thoughtful, detail-oriented labor that went into designing and filming American Psycho. But who is this Patrick Bateman? I would argue Patrick Bateman (as portrayed by Christian Bale in Mary Harron’s creation) is what The Apprentice was going for: a blueprint for how to read Trump’s feelings (as such) and motivations and — to the extent he has one — inner life, though, as a bonus, that’s not even what this film was trying to do..." [Read our full reviews on Medium - KCookandCatsCo]

[excerpted from my full Medium review - KCookandCatsCo] "... One thing to key in on re: my feelings about the film is my reaction to homage or allusion. While I’m still on board with what the film is doing, this GLaDOS similarity is charming and fun. Once I turn on the movie, everything it’s copying or pastiching seems so much better than The Wild Robot that it is almost insulting. When your film is working and doing something worthwhile, you can allude to and reference other creative works, and it seems like being part of a fun, in-crowd moment. If your film isn’t working — fuck off with that. It reminds us, the audience, that there are better films out there, that the filmmaker is aware of them and could, theoretically, have done better; should have done better. Additionally, as comps start to add up, if quality isn’t keeping pace, it starts to feel less like the film is alluding to other quality media so much as mining them or trading on their quality without any of its own to speak of. Boy, did the comps ever start to really rack up as this film plodded through its runtime. Here, I open notetaking having put the phone away six minutes in, after announcing to BlueSky that this seems like a worthwhile film. And it’s all pretty rosy until the first sign of trouble, when Roz decides to power down and learn to speak as do the only inhabitants of this island, the wild animals. The way the film grapples with that is by having the things the animals are saying spelled out, but with hieroglyphs in place of the letters, and there’s a montage of, like, code-breaking, essentially. Of course, that isn’t the way codes (usually) work, and that isn’t the way language works, oh, and wait — so all the animals are speaking the same language? Animal-language? Humans have English, British English, Australian English, French, Portugese, Farsi, several others, and then all the animals just have the one Animal-Language? Well… huh. That’s kinda nothing..." [review continues on Medium - follow us on BlueSky or Medium at KCookandCatsCo]

[excerpted from my BlueSky and Medium movie reviews - KCookandCatsCo] "...there was oodles and oodles of charm, and a richness and substance that were honestly surprising. Every few moments, a scene or shot struck me as gorgeous (when Gromit first enters the garden, and the gate swings wide to reveal it to us, the audience, wow!) or fascinatingly staged or crafted. I wrote in my notes (Ezekiel, my tiny hedgehog ward, often presents those on our Insta) that surely, surely the water had to be post-production/after-effects, right? And it is. Naturally. But the sparing and judicious use of what is colloquially referred to as ‘CGI’ (like, what does that even mean, you know? If you think any image that reaches you in a modern film hasn’t passed through numerous computers at many points, I hope it’s nicer there on whatever planet you’re living on) in Vengeance Most Fowl lead to some really spectacular vistas and settings/scenery that I wouldn’t have even thought possible, given the aesthetic and the medium. I don’t know whether in the moment I just needed to see a goofy clay man treat his canine best friend really well for 80 minutes, or what made it resonate so profoundly, but we found no fault in the way Wallace treats Gromit, and it speaks well of him, and well of the whole of the intellectual property. No matter how outlandish or zany, all films live and die on the quality of their characters, and (clearly) no one here at K. Cook & Cats, Co. Culture Critics holds being fictional against a character. Don’t get us started on 1973’s Disney’s Robin Hood — btw, I reject any external attempts to shame or tease about that; that movie is a weird, inappropriately-sexy 1970’s honeypot sting-op of a film authored by creepy animators and dubiously-motivated executives, and I’ll not be shamed about what crushes I may or may not have had on any of those characters, thank you very much. …which is to say, a quality character is a quality character, and sometimes fictional characters can be realer and truer than people we meet in day-to-day life. That’s the Magic in Movie Magic. Wallace is delightful, and Gromit is delightful. Feathers McGraw — a penguin, not as my notes mistakenly say a few times, a chicken, though he masquerades as one, and fooled us for a bit — is a malicious, cold-hearted delight. The whole affair is utterly charming, and — to our tastes, with no nostalgia or pre-existing love for the property — way sweeter, nicer and better than it even needed to be. In stark contrast to Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim (our review’s subtitle: Bored of the Rings; what’s that tell you?), despite delving into a well-mined IP, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl feels essential and vital, even though it’s clearly treading on familiar ground, what might amount to fanservice, perhaps, to those who know the entirety of the Wallace & Gromit canon. I don’t know that we found this to be life-changing cinema, but I don’t know that it purports to be, either. And while your mileage may vary, for our money, you can’t be what you can’t see, it’s easier to be what you do see, and perhaps it can change lives to watch this good-hearted, upbeat, hyper-British, Gumby-looking inventor be kind to his bestest-best friend, Gromit the dog — who’s to say? Either way, it’s time well spent." [Follow on BlueSky and Medium for more movie reviews - KCookandCatsCo]

[Excerpted from my full reviews on BlueSky and Medium KCookandCatsCo] "...I had a novel experience watching Emilia Pérez. I’ve never been glad to be trans before. I like who I am, always have (for better or worse, I’m my own biggest fan), and while I can say that I am grateful every day that I’m a redhead, and while I’ve been grateful for hard-won lessons stemming from deconstructing and reconfiguring my gender/identity along the way and how the whole experience has (some pun intended) shaped me, I’ve never had a thought that you could directly translate to: ‘I’m so glad I’m trans.’ But… I’m so glad I’m trans, and it’s because this movie is terrible and nominated for 13 Academy Awards, and it’s absolutely bonkers. I think if I were cis/straight (heaven forfend), I’d be too timid or ‘not my place to say,’ to shout very loudly about how dreadful I think this movie is. But, gratefully, I feel totally within my critical rights to say: woof! This movie is so bad and such a bizarre misfire — and is so lauded —that I am compelled to say, politely, and with all due respect: how the fuck did this happen? And how the FUCK did it get nominated 13 times?" [Read my full reviews on Medium or BlueSky - KCookandCatsCo]

[Excerpted from my BlueSky and Medium reviews KCookandCatsCo] "...I love it when movies take big swings, big bites at the creative apple, and this movie is aggressive in advancing its purpose and vision. It honestly got me hyped. When someone is excited to share their message, plus I’m open to receive it and the message is worthwhile — that’s when the magic happens. And this movie is movie magic. It transcends the trappings of film and does something bold, exciting and new whilst vivisecting and living inside of a societal dynamic at least as old as rape, itself. See The Substance. I think you owe it to yourself, if you favor art and being challenged, and you agree with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living, is actually no kind of life at all. Your mileage may vary. It might not be comfortable or fun or exciting or pleasant, and it might be challenging, provocative and uncomfortable. Maybe your experience watching The Substance will be all of those things. But the experience you have, and the thoughts you wrestle with afterwards, will be well worth the journey, because this film has something substantive and worthwhile to say, and it says it effectively. That’s — for my money — the whole f*cking point." [Read my full reviews anywhere and everywhere: KCookandCatsCo]

[Excerpted from my full review on Medium] "... My expectations going in were LOW. I brought a new friend with me, and he promptly fell asleep, and I believe slept through the entire thing until the climactic battle (spoiler alert: there’s a climactic battle!) woke him up, and he tried to pretend as though he had been awake for the entire thing. Even though I had bleeted several times about him being hilariously asleep. He would later run me over with a car, twice. I’ll cover that in my The Brutalist review. I’ve mentioned before (Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice and Mufasa: The Lion King, recently) that I think very little of sequels, on the whole. I’ll write this up eventually, too, but I think there is precisely one good Star War, and it was shown to people in theatres in 1977. Raiders of the Lost Ark — a real film. Any other Indiana Jones movie? Basically a live-action Saturday-morning cartoon. Not for nothing, I think Spielberg and Lucas kind of feel that way, too. Oftentimes, my feelings with sequels is, basically: ‘what are we even doing here, folks?’ Like, obviously, the studio wants the creatives at their, I don’t know, desks or drafting tables or whatever, and wants the paying customers in our theatre seats, but like… why are we all obliging them, just because they happen to own the IP we’ve all tied ourselves to? So a sequel has to be pretty solid for me to take it seriously, and moreover, needs to kind of know what it’s about. Another good contemporary example (notwithstanding that the movie was cobbled together from episodes of a proposed television show) would be Moana 2. Both Moana 2 and Gladiator II speedrun through big chunks of their stories (‘we’ve all seen Gladiator I, so heads on a swivel, lads, we’re at the scene where they fight animals now, action!’) and — if we’re doing this whole sequel thing, and I guess we are — let’s have some fun with it. Tone-wise, Gladiator II has the good grace not to be nearly as ponderous or self-important as its predecessor. I would argue this is kind of a fun romp. Dead wife, reason for vengeance, yada yada yada, Denzel Washington plays Alonzo Harris in 2nd-century Rome, the twin ginger emperors are a fuckin’ hoot, let’s go. Get to the good stuff. And it does! Gladiator II was a delight..." [Read my full review on Medium (KCookandCatsCo)]

[Excerpted from my review on Medium] SPOILER ALERT "...… boy, that fucking twist-ending with the trans, Mexican mystery-Cardinal from Afghanistan was dumb and soapy, wasn’t it? I have to work backwards to get at my thoughts (it’s my mind palace, and none of yours), and I may never forget walking out of the theatre, dumbfounded, going… what? It seemed so beneath this movie. I say that as a very politically-active (politically-mouthy, at the very least) trans person, myself. I’m certainly not opposed to seeing more trans stories in mainstream media (don’t remind me; Emilia Pérez is one of my homework assignments, and literally the only thing I’ve heard about it is that it’s polarizing and features some kind of trans something), but… I’m not sure this is one? Nothing about the performance (performer’s lived experience, either, not that it’s his fault he was cast in this weird, dumb role; he seems like a sweet, lovely guy and I wish him the best) really reads as authentic, and the ‘twist’ feels a little precious, clever-for-clever’s sake. And it kind of ruins this movie. Granted, Conclave is very soapy and melodramatic from the first frame. It’s a bunch of gossipy busybodies in cassocks following each other around The Vatican, and asking one another ad nauseum who they think is the most popular girl in school. There are, of course, barely any actual women. If you place a story in this setting, that’s a given, so I don’t fault the script for that. If anything, divorced somehow from that bizarre, trans-card-up-my-sleeve ending, the script is really solid and kind of sets the viewer (this viewer) up for disappointment, because at the end I’m left wondering, “… oh, this is what it was all for?" People with all kinds of different political backgrounds and expectations feel similarly cheated by this twist ending. I don’t think it’s political, the revulsion we seem to be feeling. I think it’s narrative instinct, like, ‘This isn’t a good story, yuck!’ which again, is too bad, because what got us to the dumb ending was pretty fun. That’s how I would describe this movie, ultimately: pretty fun. The cinematography I would describe as, ‘reveling in the sumptuousness of sparsity,’ because everything is geometric lines and designs and huge, empty, cavernous spaces, and the camera work does a terrific job of exploring those spaces and their dressings. The set dec is similarly top-notch. If anything, almost everything this film does, it does well… up until that brutal ending. So how much does absolutely shitting the bed narratively cost an otherwise good film? Do I like this, or don’t I?..." [Read my full review on Medium (KCookandCatsCo)]

[Excerpted from my full review on Medium] “… Speaking of which, as awards-buzz goes, this movie doesn’t have much. The AMPAS nod is no more than that — a nod, Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Stan was honored with a Golden Globe (Best Performance by a Male Actor — Musical or Comedy), plus he won the Silver Boar (ever heard of it?) at the festival A Different Man premiered at, the 74th Berlin International Film Festival (ever heard of it?), and that’s… about it. It’s too bad, but it makes a lot of sense. Like I was wondering in the [trailers section], how do or would you market this movie? And yeah, you can’t; people have to do it for you. So here we are...” [Read my full review on Medium (KCookandCatsCo)]

[Excerpted from my full review on Medium (KCookandCatsCo)] "... Year One is not a movie about history, nor is it even set in any credible historical context. In Harold Ramis’ screenplay, the Biblical brothers Cain and Abel are contemporaneous with Abraham and Isaac, as well as the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Year One is also not a film driven by its plot, since main characters Oh (Michael Cera) and Zed (Jack Black) (I wish I were kidding) are moved along from place to place by a string of absurd, poorly-justified events, and every character in the movie looks as though they crafted their beards from salvaged shag carpeting. In fact, in the grand tradition of Seinfeld, the movie seems to be about nothing at all. Though the plot certainly can be summarized, there is no real point in doing so, in light of how irrelevant it is to the value of the film. And that’s fine. After all, Monty Python and the Holy Grail isn’t about anything. Mel Brooks’ History of the World: Part I is about even less, and both are wildly, historically inaccurate, even deliberately and gleefully so. And your mileage may vary, but lots of folks enjoyed those films. I doubt many will enjoy this one, pun intended. Year One is really about individual performances. Ramis isn’t afraid to close in on his actors with the camera at least two or three times per scene, particularly with his two leads. Cera, of Superbad fame, excels anytime he is given even a brief instant of screen time. Some might complain that he appears to be phoning in his performance. After all, his understated mumbling and self-effacing lines are so quick and quiet that many of his best might go unnoticed in a theater crowd too busy laughing at the overabundance of scatological jokes — a tragedy considering how much of a lift he gives a movie that would otherwise be roundly awful. Black, on the other hand, is dreadful in virtually every scene, and exponentially more so when the camera closes in for his disingenuous and stuttering improvisational lines. One example is the line, featured in trailers, where Black’s character, Zed informs his tribe (as he is being kicked out) that he is starting a new tribe, a better tribe, and that it will be called the ‘Muscle Tribe of Danger and Excellence.’ It takes him 10 times as long to deliver the line on camera as it did you to read it, because he has to hem and haw and stammer with each new word. Hilarious, it isn’t. Still, even Cera’s comedic aptitude might get tiring without a blustering, overly-exuberant, idiotic foil to cleanse the palate. Fortunately, Black is not the only actor responsible for bearing the load. The cast is a grab bag of performers, both humorous and serious, each with at least one or two genuinely funny moments. Particularly hilarious is Oliver Platt as Sodom’s hedonistic high priest, though all the second-billed talents perform well and without making the movie seem cluttered. The movie is a fun watch, though the screenwriting vacillates wildly between snappy and obnoxiously dull. It might be worth watching, if one can get past scenes of Black eating human excrement or masturbating. Ultimately, the film’s true value may lie in putting Black next to Cera, from whom he has hopefully learned a thing or two about humor and subtlety." [Read my full review on Medium (KCookandCatsCo)]

[Excerpted from my full review on Medium (KCookandCatsCo)] "... Land of the Lost is about two scientists of questionable academic legitimacy, a stoner tour guide and a libidinous ‘missing link’ primate who discover and explore a Salvador Dali-inspired wilderness filled with the flotsam and jetsam of various cultures across time and space. In fact, the audience is reminded every two or three scenes, lest they forget, amid the bathroom humor, sexual harassment posing as hilarity and endless scenes of muttering and slapstick, that this movie DOES purport to have a plot. Lost might as well not. The movie drags in its best moments, but nowhere more so than when ‘science’ and other narrative minutiae must be dealt with, usually in perfunctory, obligatory fashion. Shoeleather has never tasted more like shoe leather. The events of the tale serve as thematic shoehorns, shoving the actors into a (seemingly) endless series of two- or three-minute-long sketches which are unquestionably amusing, but better suited to a forum like Saturday Night Live or Ferrell’s comedy website Funny or Die. Ultimately, the eclectic landscape, a sort of inter-dimensional middle ground that is neither past nor present, and is littered with half-buried statues of Big Boy, Viking sailing vessels and an unfortunate ice cream truck, serves as a perfect metaphor for the comedic space the film inhabits. The frequent sex jokes that involve both spoken and visual references to masturbation, and a scene involving aliens progressing from making out to full-on extraterrestrial intercourse, along with perhaps the most gratuitous use of the F-bomb in cinematic history, prevent the movie from being categorized as a family movie. Additionally, the bathroom humor is too pervasive for the movie to genuinely appeal to anyone older than grade school, though the sight of Will Ferrell dousing himself in dinosaur urine, then running through his by-now-famous ‘I immediately regret that decision’ routine is, shamefully, enough to make this reviewer laugh. Ferrell, one of the original and most-notable members of what USA Today dubbed the ‘Frat Pack,’ seems to gleefully inhabit this space virtually every time he’s confronted with a movie camera, and probably many times when he isn’t. Audiences are either forced to either embrace their inner junior-high-school boy or miss out on understanding Ferrell's popularity and cultural significance. It’s no coincidence that, as many sociologists lament the prevalence of extended adolescence in Western culture, Ferrell has become comedy’s reigning It-man. Anna Friel is attractive and magnetic, though watching her character get molested half-a-dozen times can and should inspire squirms. Tour guide Danny McBride has a smattering of hilarious one-liners amid a great deal of drivel, coming off seeming like a pale imitation of Ferrell, or a lesser acolyte. This movie is unlikely to be remembered as one of his better ones, or as one of his worst, or remembered at all. Featuring physical sets that are too bizarre to ring true and too cartoonish to inspire awe, jokes that vacillate wildly between too juvenile for adults and too adult for kids, and a throwaway plot that might as well not exist, Lost does not make much of an impression. In the end, this movie is mediocre and no one will suffer for avoiding it, though many likely will from seeing it." [Read my full review on Medium (KCookandCatsCo)]