More Than One Lesson

2021 hasn’t been the busiest year in the world of film or television, with many releases and productions still being delayed, but Marvel Studios has already churned out more in a calendar year than ever before. Four TV shows on Disney Plus along with two films already released and two more movies to come before year’s end. This MCU avalanche has kicked off the franchise’s Phase Four as Marvel charts a new course after its decade in the making payoff of Avengers: Endgame. 

Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) is a young girl in high school but she’s already had a great responsibility aiding her family. Both of her parents and her older brother are deaf so her ability to hear has helped them greatly in their family fishing business in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Going out on the water every morning before school makes staying awake through the day difficult and her classmates mock her for being the child of deaf adults (or “CODA”). Her great escape is singing, which she joyfully does around her family who can’t hear her anyway. She honestly has no idea if she’s any good at it or not. Nervously, she joins the school choir to find out. To Ruby’s surprise, she’s not only good, her teacher Mr. Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez) sees something incredibly special in her.

Five years ago, almost to the day, I wrote my first ever review for More Than One Lesson. It was for Suicide Squad and I concluded it with, “In this age of constantly remaking the wrong movies I can’t help but feel that Suicide Squad is exactly the sort of movie that someday should be remade. There’s potential with this premise and these characters. David Ayer couldn’t deliver. Maybe in about twenty years, someone else can. Maybe we’ll get to see the Suicide Squad this movie should have been.” Well, it’s not really a remake and it’s 15 years earlier than I had predicted but Warner Bros. and DC clearly learned from their mistakes on the 2016 film. That movie was taken out of Ayer’s hands and edited by a trailer company to try to fool audiences into thinking they were seeing a James Gunn film. This time, WB and DC actually hired Gunn and it would appear that they largely stayed out of his way creatively (or as much as ever happens with movies like this). While the end result is certainly not a masterpiece, it is a significant improvement over its predecessor.

Thanks to technology and social media, today we are able to document as much of our lives as we please but long before smartphones or Instagram, Val Kilmer was shooting thousands of hours of footage on film and video from a very young age. Having recently survived a throat cancer diagnosis that has left him needing a tracheostomy tube to breathe and speak, he is using that material to tell the story he has long wanted to tell about acting and about the “line between truth and illusion.” Directors Ting Poo and Leo Scott have taken the actor’s treasure trove of footage and crafted a fascinating and moving look at Kilmer’s life.

When the basic premise of a film is Nicolas Cage plays a man in search of his lost pig, it’s highly probable that one’s first thought will be, “Oh, man, get ready for Full Cage.” Some people will be excited by that, others won’t. But from the very start, Michael Sarnoski’s excellent debut feature reveals itself to be something else entirely and Cage reminds those who may have forgotten just how great he can really be without going “Full Cage.” Pig, it turns out, is something very special.

After the release of Die Hard in 1988, action movies for the next decade imitated Die Hard. Then in 1999, The Matrix came along and action movies imitated that. Then it was the Bourne movies with their frenetic editing, but since 2014 the most imitated action film has been John Wick. From its trailer and based on part of its premise, it would appear that Navot Papushado’s Gunpowder Milkshake would be another in a long line of riffs on the Keanu Reeves franchise and while there are certainly similarities, there’s a more lighthearted tone here that some audiences may not appreciate. While Papushado’s film certainly has its issues, there’s an inventiveness and sense of fun to it all that make this well worthwhile. Just don’t expect the grit of Wick.

There’s a scene near the end of Ed Wood where a couple of Baptists who are funding Ed’s “supernatural thriller,” Plan 9 From Outer Space question his ability as a filmmaker. It’s a breaking point for the already harried director, who runs off the set declaring, “These Baptists are stupid, stupid, stupid!” Despite the struggles, Ed’s movie is completed and released soon after. I can imagine a similar moment taking place in 1973 when horrified members of the Lutheran Society first watched George A. Romero’s The Amusement Park, a film they commissioned to raise awareness about the plight of the elderly. The two key differences being that Romero was a decidedly more talented filmmaker than Wood and unlike Plan 9, The Amusement Park was shelved, seemingly to be forgotten forever. But 48 years later, Romero’s movie is finally being released to the world and it absolutely deserves to be seen.

For the past few years, Tyler has been kind enough to post my annual Bob Awards to this site. Every year there are a few key films that for one reason or another I am not able to see in time and when I finally get around to some of them, I regret not having seen them sooner. A past example of this was 2018’s Suspiria, particularly for the performance of Tilda Swinton. For obvious reasons, there were a few films in 2020 that I simply haven’t had the opportunity to see yet but there is one that was released on Hulu in plenty of time that I just didn’t get around to. Until now. It pains me because Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round is almost certainly the best movie of 2020 that I have now seen.

Science fiction stories inherently ask audiences to suspend their disbelief, but good sci-fi storytellers know that while they are allowed to ask us to accept an improbable or even impossible premise, that there must be a sense of reality to prop it all upon. Stowaway director Joe Penna and co-writer Ryan Morrison thankfully understands this. What they have crafted is a nicely realized sci-fi film that is far more interested in moral dilemmas and inviting the audience into the situation at hand than it is in heady abstract ideas.

Will Hawkins (Kevin Quinn) is a troubled teen who has moved from home to home since the death of his parents. After A Week Away’s opening scene in which he is arrested for “stealing a police car,” which he isn’t driving at any point during said scene, we are given Will’s lengthy rap sheet as he is told the only option now for him is juvenile hall. Will’s officer (Ed Amatrudo) tells the audien – I mean, Will, that he’s a “great kid,” even though he’s just given us no evidence of that. It’s indicative of the many problems to come that between both the stolen police car and our protagonist’s personality, A Week Away jumps right into the, “Tell, Don’t Show,” school of screenwriting.