Lost At Sea

Hey, look! There are only five movies opening this week! And just one film festival! However did we get so lucky?

… well, here’s the catch.

Baywatch: I have recently become aware of the term “nothingburger”, which describes a manufactured object or a situation that’s entirely devoid of substance. Dax Shepard’s CHIPS was a nothingburger. Baywatch is a nothingburger with cheese.

Paris Can Wait: Tina stands up for Eleanor Coppola’s first dramatic feature, which stars Diane Lane as a woman towrn between her distracted husband (Alec Baldwin) and his far more engaged business partner (Arnaud Viard). Sounds like eminently reasonable counterprogramming for this weekend.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales: It’s better than On Stranger Tides, but it’s still pretty lame, thanks to a generic quest narrative and a truly exhausting performance from Johnny Depp. But Geoffrey Rush has his moments, and I did like Kaya Scodelario as the new Keira Knightley.

Population Zero: Documentary filmmaker Julian T. Pinder pivots to fiction with this fake true-crime investigation that pivots on a real Constitutional loophole. I have never been an especially big fan of Pinder’s work … but even for him, this is some bullshit.

The Transfiguration: Michael O’Shea’s feature debut is a really smart reworking of the ambiguous vampire narrative first set out in George A. Romero’s Martin, situated in the projects of Queens and played out between a weird kid and a slightly older girl. Virtually every vampire picture is name-checked, and the one that isn’t is ably represented by a Larry Fessenden cameo. Well done.

Have a good weekend, everybody. Is it still raining? I’m afraid to look.

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