THB #685: For Whom The Bong Tolls

It seems to be a thing right now.

Soderbergh has a new movie… Black Bag… and it’s got all of his amazing craft… but never quite sparks into something magic.

Boon Joon Ho has a new movie… Mickey 17… and it’s got all of his amazing craft… but it is so overloaded with stuff that it is constantly losing track of its core ideas and not becoming what it clearly wants to be.

And Berk & Olsen, a directing team you have likely never heard of, as they haven’t ever had a movie released on more than a handful of screens in the U.S., have a new movie… Novocaine.. and its not nearly as ambitious as the other two films from masters of this era of cinema… and it works pretty darn good. (Still under embargo on the film, which opens next weekend, by the way.)

There’s a bunch of “pretty good” that has been in the marketplace since the start of the year. How commercial they have been has been a somewhat separate conversation. One of Them Days… Companion… Paddington in Peru. Entertaining movies. $48 million, $21 million, $31 million.

The only really ambitious movie, financially, this year, has been Captain America: Brave New World, which was not good, but will pass $350 million worldwide on Friday.

Snow White is 2 weekends away. Robert DeNiro playing opposite himself in Alto Knights is also there. Jason Statham closes out March with A Working Man, which is a spiritual sequel to The Beekeeper with David Ayer directing both (and the actual Beekeeper 2 set to be directed by Indonesian thrill-director Timo Tjahjanto). Also that weekend, Universal’s Blumhouse release, The Woman in the Yard.

There are some reasonably commercial titles out there.

But the greatest hope for film lovers are the ones from the great filmmakers.

I was really hoping that the good reviews of Mickey 17 were going to make it a great surprise after its been sitting on the shelf for a long while. But it was, in my opinion, more love for Bong and the actors than a realistic representation of the film.

Thing is, Bong’s ambition and the general epic size of the the film are compelling, even if there are long stretches in which the storytelling goes absolutely off the rails.