Monthly Archives: March 2025

Death of a Unicorn

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Last night, I saw a sneak preview for Death of a Unicorn[1] at the Alamo Drafthouse[2], which comes out today or Friday and so I must quickly review, lest it all have been in vain. Unfortunately, despite the straightforward spoiler of the title, it is somewhat difficult to describe.

Okay. You know Mary Poppins? I’m sure there’s a better example, but I cannot think of one. Anyway, if you leave Mary Poppins out of the movie, it’s fundamentally a movie about a dad[3] who spends too much time at work focused on his career, when really all his kids want is more time with him, not the things he provides for them by working so much? Paul Rudd plays about as far against type as I can imagine in the role of that dad, and his nebbishy helplessness really makes it hard to believe, even though the character is written in a way where it could still work. It’s not to say he was bad in the role, just that I think the casting was too far of a stretch.

Anyway, he and his thankfully college-aged daughter Jenna Ortega are travelling to a corporate retreat where Rudd is hoping to get the promotion that will, after a few years, have them set up for life where she’ll never want for anything ever again, and it’s clear Ortega has heard this song and dance before, because she could not be more done with it. And this “will he or won’t he” family drama schtick might easily have been the entire movie, except that while driving through the nature preserve toward their destination, distracted by a fight and allergies, he plows into a little white horse crossing the road.

Well, okay, it’s not a horse.

A handful of other events ensue, and also the remainder of the cast is introduced, and now the movie is instead (also? probably also) about what the several characters will do with the situation that has fallen into their laps. Have they a panacea? A miracle that will change the world? A way to get rich beyond any dream of avarice? Or, based on Ortega’s research into a pretty cool series of real life tapestries, do they simply have a problem?

One of the genres into which this movie falls should provide a hint.

[1] Eagle-eyed subscribers to this site will note that I did not see Captain America 4, about which fact I have a pretty complicated set of emotions. But it’s probably indicative of something. Especially since the odds of another date night before it leaves theaters is…. low.
[2] Side note from the half hour of cool random film geekery: did you know that the Three Stooges made a movie (well, probably a short, but I don’t know for sure) about traveling to Venus to meet a unicorn, and also it was a musical, and also it was in 1959??? I knew Moe lived into the 1970s, but I had no idea they were still working that late! …and still in black and white that late, though if it were made for TV I guess that would not be weird after all.
[3] I wonder if they’ve ever made this movie about a mom. I think they have not.

Lucky (2020)

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I don’t know that I exactly liked Lucky, but I respect the amount of catharsis it must have provided for the writer / star, Brea Grant, and probably for a non-trivial number of people who have watched it.

So there’s this self-help author whose premise is Go It Alone, ie how to fix yourself instead of relying on someone else to fix you, and that premise was a best selling big hit with multiple printings, but now the publisher is not sure if they even want her next book, plus she doesn’t especially have one. Okay, fine, but then at night in bed with her husband, she sees someone outside, and he’s very blasé about how it’s the guy who comes to kill them every night. She is understandably confused about this, so he calls her a drama queen and leaves.

And then the dude comes back. And keeps coming back. Unraveling what the actual hell is going on constitutes the remainder of the movie. We learn more about May, more about her husband, a little more about her career, and a lot more about how capable she is at self-defense / how incapable the dude is of killing her. It’s sometimes pretty funny, usually mind-bending, eventually over the top in a way that was probably not necessary to get the point across, and ultimately a little opaque right at the end, post- the Message Received part.

I think the best chance this has to be a good movie instead of a useful one is if it was a critique of her self-help premise, in addition to the rest of what it was, which was a metaphor about the lived experience of American women. But I’m not 100% sure if it actually was both, since, like I said, it’s a little opaque. Probably it lost its way making sure we got the metaphor part.

All in all, I preferred Promising Young Woman.

The Gorge

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A few days ago, before I got entirely sick, I watched The Gorge, whose preview I had been intrigued by while watching, I don’t know, probably an episode of Severance? I cannot say with any certainty if it was entirely a popcorn flick or if the fault is my being sick, but yesterday when I was preparing to write this interview, I had no idea what I had watched, only that I was pretty sure it was, y’know, something.

So there’s this guy who’s a sniper who is completely detached from his life and his job, just adrift, you know? And Sigourney Weaver offers him the chance to get away from it all via a year-long, top secret, completely isolated assignment. Like, too secret for her to even explain it, but when he gets there (via parachuting and a several mile hike), the guy he’s replacing is there to explain the deal.

Here, then, is the deal. Two towers, on opposite sides of a gorge. He is on the western side, representing the countries of the west, who have been tasked to guard the gorge from there. Also, there’s an agent in the eastern tower representing the countries of the east, who presumably has been offered the same deal, but since the two towers are not allowed to have contact, it’s impossible to be sure. In the gorge is… something. Perpetually clouded, but things crawl out sometimes, and the whole mission is to prevent them from escaping. Premise: set.

Execution: well, mostly good? Lots of exciting action set pieces, yay. Anya Taylor-Joy as the eastern agent was just fun all the way around. The main dude was… well, okay, more than a little wooden, and I could not decide if it was the character or the actor, so that’s at least better than it could have been on average, but honestly a wooden character isn’t much fun, either, so. Effects were, I was going to say A+, but all special effects these days are either great or (rarely) abjectly terrible, such are these days of the future.

Mostly worth checking out, with one caveat: the last line of the film is just an awful stinker. Be warned!

Blind Rage

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Since October, I have been buying cheap (or often free) Kindle books. Like, 99c for seven books kind of thing. I’ve spent maybe $30, and increased my digital library by hundreds of titles. Are most of them garbage? Okay, probably. But it gives me something to read when I don’t have anything but my phone handy.

The first of these books that I’ve actually read is Blind Rage, the first volume of an eight book series called Under the Breaking Sky. It steals heavily from Cell, and is otherwise about what you’d expect out of a not quite zombified airport thriller. Set in Denmark and with maybe five or so main characters, it tells the story of the day a weird hole appeared in the sky that causes anyone who looks at it to go blind and enraged, such that they hunt down anyone they can hear, to rip them apart or bash them to pieces. (But not each other.) Then the thing in the sky goes away, until it comes back again 12 hours later. And again. And again.

So, I lied earlier though. A small percentage of the population is unaffected. Most of the main characters are this type, and the book (and probably the series) is entirely about them trying to stay alive, and maybe eventually trying to figure out how this is even happening? Beats me, and I’m not holding my breath. It’s an apocalypse, I’m just a long for the ride.