Day: April 17, 2025

Thick Rural Drawlin’ Mississippi Patois…Can’t Cut Through It, Y’All

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Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a popcorn movie…a cheeseball thang…half-promising, half-wallow, aimed at the schmoes. And you’d better believe it’s been overpraised. I suspected as much when the first reactions broke, and now I know.

At first it’s a Mississippi folklore comic-book fable (great music, ecstasy dancing, sweaty sex, good cunnilingus), and then Coogler flips a switch and it becomes an ultra-violent schlock vampire flick that hits too hard and just bleeds, howls, groans and sweats all over the place.

Sinners is peddling comic-book country lore…actually impactful, storied, mythical and not half bad during the semi-realistic first 40%, but once the X-treme vampire stuff kicks in it’s basically coarse, bloody, gut-punch schlock. Crimson geysers, ragged bite wounds, wooden stakes, burnt flesh. Primitive slop.

Young Miles Caton is a gifted Delta Blues singer-guitarist — Robert Johnson reincarnated. And hangin’ with 89 year-old Buddy Guy at the very end is a treat. The musical sequences in the juke joint are joyful and jumpin’. And yes, the sight and sound of a chorus of Irish vampires singing Irish folk tunes under the moonlight as the bloody-faced Jack O’Connell dances an Irish jig is wonderful (O’Connell is probably doomed to play surly villains from here on) — the most bizarre spectacle I’ve ever seen or heard in a monster film.

And the buffed-up Michael B. Jordan, playing twin criminal brothers from Chicago, is straight and sturdy enough. He also gets laid twice, or rather the brothers make out separately, one with Hailee Steinfeld (turning 30 next year), another with Wunmi Mosaku.

But the second half is just crude vampire mulch. Much of the drawlin’ dialogue is unintelligible…so slurry and mumbly that I knew early on that I had no choice but to resort to the Wiki synopsis. Skim through this sucker….Eugene O’Neill, it ain’t…crazy, cartoonish gruel…pulp mythology.

And Autumn Durald Arakawa’s cinematography is way too dark. That or the Westport AMC’s projector lamp is close to death.

Yeah, there’s an obvious racial current or metaphor…Coogler sprinkles in a few Klanners, fat rednecks and dumb crackers straight out of Mississippi Burning, and they all meet with just desserts. Jordan filling them with hot lead a la Billy Wilder‘s St. Valentine’s Day massacre is part of the grand finale…yeah!

Sidenote for fanatical bully contingent:

I’m a deepwater cinephile with the usual exacting standards…the standards met and fulfilled by thousands of filmmakers throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries.

All the Metacritic and RT critics know there’s virtually no upside to slamming (or partially slamming) an ambitious Ryan Coogler movie that deals with deep-south racism and plays like a grindhouse flick from Sam Arkoff, and so they all put on their ballerina shoes before reviewing it.

I don’t play that tip-toe game.

“Day Drinker” Rundown

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I’ve begun to read Zach Dean‘s script of Day Drinker, a frothy thriller currently filming in Spain with a gray-haired Johnny Depp, 61, as an alcoholic named Kelly.

I’m only up to page 15, but it’s pretty clear that Kelly will either end up sober or a lot less shitfaced.

Dean’s story cruises around on a private yacht. Madelyn Cline, 28, plays the proverbial hottie; Penelope Cruz portrays a criminal of some sort.

Wikipedia says director Marc Webb (who always directs lightweight stuff) has actually been filming on the Canary Islands (Santa Cruz de Tenerife)

Depp’s Kelly is a friendly, enjoyable rogue…a charming fellow who needs to be sipping something at all times.

Dean’s script has a jaunty feel — I’ll give it that much. It ends with a twist,.

Casting Doesn’t Feel Right

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Nobody is a more passionate fan of Olivia Colman than myself, but she’s just not young or hot enough to play Benedict Cumberbatch‘s wife in The Roses (Searchlight, 8.29).

The 51-year-old Colman is only a year and a half older than Cumberbatch, but she looks…okay, not like his aunt but his slightly older attorney or business partner. She doesn’t look wifey-wifey.

When it comes to marriage, men who are doing well professionally always choose someone younger and hotter (i.e., arm-candy factor). Okay, some marry women their own age but if they do, the women are always significantly more attractive than the man, according to boilerplate male hotness standards. Regardless of age, the wife never looks older and is always hotter than the husband.

This was true of the dynamic between Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in the original The War of the Roses (’89). Turner was and is a decade younger than Douglas, and pretty much looked like her Body Heat self in that Danny DeVito-directed 20th Century Fox release.