ghostlightreviews

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I'm actually annoyed at how much I enjoyed The Flash. After years of anticipation for some kind of Flash movie, watching this particular one go through almost every shade of production hell only to top it off with Miller getting embroiled in a string of assault, battery, kidnapping, and peace disturbance charges has been quite an experience.

It's difficult not to sully the movie as a piece of media with a hundred awful extenuating events, after all there is no case for Death of the Author here, Miller and Warner Bros. are very much alive and very much responsible and accountable for all wrongdoings. I deeply hope that Ezra Miller is getting the mental health treatment they need and will find time to openly apologize and make reparations for the widespread harm they have caused in due course. Additionally, WB is not innocent in its contributions to toxic working environments and unfair payment practices to both Writers and Actors. So, please, bear all this in mind during moments of praise dolloped throughout this review.

That being said:

This was way more fun than it should be considering the mess that preceded it.

Ezra Miller is (despite their personal life) incredibly charming and affable in both roles, not to mention still a talented performer who dragged out some real emotion in the final act. Sasha Calle pulls out a measured and organic performance in Supergirl, she is unfortunately burdened with a script and a film that doesn’t deserve her. Keaton, I think, makes me the most sad. After delivering a poignant and deftly crafted Riggan Thomson in Birdman, an actor haunted by the spectre of his superhero past, constantly trying to escape the shadow of the capeshit he spent his life performing in, there is a remarkable lack of awareness from Keaton’s agent and himself in getting back into the Batsuit not once but twice in the span of a few years. That Bat Credit Card was maxed out I guess.

Maribel Verdú as Nora Allen is particularly lovely for the short amount of screen time she has, a real emotional pillar in a silly silly film.

Everyone else was either fine or too completely average to be noticeable.

God, this film looks fucking atrocious. I won’t hear that the speed force scenes VFX were intentional, from top to bottom The Flash looks like a slop of shit, over saturated colours one minute, washed-out Snyder browns and greys the next, and just absolutely inconsistent visual storytelling. Some scenes look okay but not for a film that costs as much as this one, I think there is a stark contrast between intentionally stylized VFX and miscalculated attempts at the aforementioned. There are a couple of really nice practical costumes that basically get sidelined for weirdly clingy green screen abominations.

Okay, comic book asshole hat on now, there was no reason for this to be a half-assed Flashpoint adaptation. As a concept, Flashpoint is not so inaccessible to the general viewing public that you couldn’t just do it fully or not at all. I’m not even sure there is a solid enough reason to not just make The Flashes’ first film just him dealing with his own shit and using Jai Courtney to set up The Rogues as Captain Boomerang. I get that there is a desire to tie up loose ends from the Snyderverse and boot up a new Cinematic Universe at the same time, but it’s so messy that it muddles a really executable Comic Book movie concept.

Ultimately, I think this is where The Flash stumbles the hardest, a promising cast is let down by a film that is so deeply entrenched in the nonsense of a half-baked previous cinematic universe and trying to set one up that doesn’t even exist yet. What a waste. Then to achieve some of the ugliest looking VFX shots in the past decade, all this in a world where Marvel films exist? Truly amazing how hard they fumbled the bag on this.

My biggest hot take is that DC just fundamentally doesn’t get who Barry Allen is. Ezra is great but they play Barry so much closer to how a live-action Wally West Flash, to the point where I don’t get why they gave them Barry at all.

But by far the most filthy thing the film does is a parade of CGI ghouls in a startlingly bad multiversal moment right at the climax of the film. Dragging out the rubbery digital corpses of Adam West and Christopher Reeves is truly abominable and looks so bad, having a weird plasticine Nic Cage Superman when I know he’s the kind of actor who would have been there in a heartbeat to shoot a scene is bizarre AND to leave out two very much ALIVE actors who have catapulted The Flash into mainstream fame, John Wesley Shipp and Grant Gustin, the latter of which just ended a prolific tenure as Barry Allen this past year is unforgivable. Especially when the TV Flash found room for a fun Ezra Miller cameo, to completely ice out Gustin is really awful. But I guess par for the course for a film studio that, is currently actively ignoring fair working conditions for writers and actors, just vaulted a completed Batgirl project starring Brendan Fraser, and has a history of hiring abusers to create projects for them.

What a shame, there’s something special deep in the shit here, something that the audience has been robbed of. Some really fun and inventive moments on display, marred by a deep desire for people to remember Batman exists and used to be fun too. What a waste of everyone’s time and talent.

To be fair, the Looney Tunes moments with young Barry are so joyful and fun that we really just needed the whole film to feel like that.

1.5/5

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DISCLAIMER: The Barbie movie has one of the most tasteless and out-of-line jokes about Indigenous folks and smallpox, it’s dropped around 3/4 of the way through the film and is sincerely tactless in its use. To my knowledge, neither Greta Gerwig nor Noah Baumbach have yet apologized for or disavowed this line. To use Indigenous trauma as a cheap punchline is truly abhorrent and unless this line is visibly removed for digital and home release, along with a vocal apology from Gerwig, Baumbach, and WB I will not be purchasing.

Let’s start here, it feels like a miracle that this film even got made. But as a final product, Barbie is just a complex beast. Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach have written one of the funniest, snappiest, and most enjoyable scripts for a long time. However, as a tool of Social Commentary, it cuts a little dull in places but excels in many many others.

I think as far as Corporate and Capitalistic commentary goes, Barbie is a bit of a Wolf in Sheep’s clothing. It’s the narc at the party, sneaking around wearing a big Hemp Hoody saying things like “Hey, this party is sick bro who deals the drugs here I would like a one drugs to really get lit fam yeah”

It’s all been so clearly sanctioned by Mattel before making it to Final Cut that it’s clear how much they stand to gain by making themselves “the butt of the joke.” Akin to writing all the jokes for your own roast and then playfully acting coy when your friends start bringing things up. There is nothing truly anti-corporation about Barbie but because they play it like it’s some big fuck you to the Upper Crusts of Elite Society, it comes across as creepy and disingenuous at times.

When it comes to Social Commentary, Gerwig knows what she’s doing. For all of the pants pissing certain men on the Trad Right have been doing about Barbie, so many of them have been missing how beautifully it lifts men up too. Barbie tells us how men should be defined by more than just romantic conquest and relationship or by the things they own or have to pretend to like, and instead find identity in themselves and be comfortable in who they are without having to conform to the rigid standards of traditional masculinity and the Patriarchy. We also get a wonderful empowerment of women here too, exploring the vast beauty and majesty of womanhood as well as a pretty lovely introspection into motherhood too, with a remarkably moving montage towards the film’s climax.

On a technical level, the film slaps incredibly hard. A big shining star in Barbie is the Production Design, a massive and impressive set with a ton of Practical Effects sprinkled in to really give everything that toy come to life feeling that the story requires, even “the real world” has this plastic gloss to it that feels almost uncanny to watch, particularly prevalent in Mattel HQ.

Talent-wise this is a true ensemble production for the most part, everyone is playing their part with dedicated gusto and energy and nothing feels too out of place, Simu Liu is a little wooden as per usual, but even he does pretty well for the most part.

But really, who the fuck are we kidding, Ryan Gosling gives the performance of a lifetime here, perhaps only just rivalling his STUNNING performance in The Nice Guys. There isn’t another actor out there right now who has a better sense of comic timing and understanding of metaphysical and physical comedy. Ken is almost too good a character, to the detriment of the film, because Margot Robbie is just so wonderfully nuanced in the role that she plays so straight next to Gosling, we lose a significant amount of her talent when she’s playing Barbie so gorgeously organically. America Ferrera is also wonderful, I haven’t seen her in much since Ugly Betty and I wish she got more work unless I have missed a lot from her.

Everyone else is great too, really lovely to see a Trans woman in a key role front and centre in arguably the biggest film of the year and even better, front and centre for Warner Brother’s biggest film ever, get fucked, Joanne Kathleen Rowling.

With a score that’s barely there but a soundtrack fit to bursting with curated original tracks, for sure there are at least 4 songs on here to dangle in front of the academy during voting time, but if it isn’t I’m Just Ken then everything is bad, but fuck me if Billie Eilish didn’t make me weep with What Was I Made For l?

In a world of stale blockbuster hits with half-arsed visuals and cowardly politics, Barbie manages to entertain and hold itself high in progressivism, although occasionally leaning a little heavy into Neo-Liberal Wine Mom mode, but hey general audiences eat that up, and who am I but a silly little movie Ken to speak on that anyway, my job is just Cunt.

Michael Cera’s fight scene is possibly one of the best fight scenes of this year no fucking dip.

4.5/5

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a little while back I achieved some small level of mediocre tiktok virality with this video.

I thought seeing as it’s original poster (personsonable) was here on Tumblr and I’m late to the party, it should come back home.

so here it is, the “decay exists as an extant form of life” mushroom post, fully voice acted by me. hope you enjoy.

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A paint-by-numbers first act gives way to a snappy fun second act and a powerful third. Nimona is overall quite wonderful.

A far cry from Netflix’s BIG foray into Animation last year with the flawed but affable Sea Beast, hopefully, this signals a revitalization of the Animated feature.

It does feel like we’re in quite a special place for Animation, with Disney and Pixar bribing out one cookie-cutter sludge block after another, other studios are picking up the slack and taking advantage of the hopeful Whale Fall of Disney studios.

I’ve never read the graphic novel, and so all the following is purely based on my experience with the film alone.

Like, wow. An animated feature that is, not only, so UNABASHEDLY Gay from the outset, but queerness runs through the veins of Nimona like no other animated project I have seen. With Trans and Non-Binary themes serving as the heart of the story, it holds its themes closely but never shows its hand. The ideologies seamlessly integrated with the world-building and narrative effortlessly.

A particularly poignant and timely commentary on the demonization and segregation of marginalized groups, PARTICULARLY Trans and Non-Binary Youths. More to absorb here with subsequent and inevitable rewatches.

Visually really quite something, if not somewhat an acquired taste, at least for me anyway. Sometimes it looks stunning, other times it feels a little off in ways I can’t explain. In all of the best and worst ways, feels like watching a really well-made GameCube game. Gorgeous but occasionally a bit too much.

Riz Ahmed is a startlingly good actor…on screen. Unfortunately for him, every line he delivers here sounds like a dry read at a table. Not true but his whole performance sounds like he was seated for every line. It’s just not great, and it feels like an actual Voice Actor could have done Ballister higher Justice here.

Chloe Grace Montez is really good though, her energy is perfect for Nimona, and vibrant enough to bypass the lacklustre performance of her counterpart.

Eugene Yang is pretty good here as Goldenloin, a good debut!

I just wish Hollywood wouldn’t be so coy about hiring actual Voice Talent for its animated features, especially when they are as good as this one. Elevate your production, fuck star power, get the right talent.

Nimona, both on and off screen is a scrappy story of self-discovery, perseverance, identity, and fucking sticking it to the man as hard as you can. If I was Disney I would be SHITTING myself right now. Top-notch filmmaking here.

Banana Splits will always be the hardest possible track you could use in any action sequence. Just a true denotation of an unhinged chaos demon.

4.5/5

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A truly beautiful reflection on parenthood, loss, the journey of grief, and possibly most importantly anti-fascism.

We’ve been graced with two family films centred around rebellion and revolt, breaking rules for the good of society, and what a wonderful example to set to our youth.

Guillermo Del Toro is possibly one of the best directors working today. His love for cinema and storytelling is prevalent in every single piece of work he heads up. His design and his vision always impeccable.

Full review here:

5/5

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Love is a gift. It’s a gift of oneself given freely. It’s not something one can ever ask for. 

Truly magical. A modern mythological romance yarn, woven with care. It’s been so long since I’ve watched George Miller film, I forgot how utterly unique and individual his style is. Many try to imitate yet nobody quite gets the formula right.

I’ve seen others mentioning the sound design before I watched, and I’m always unsure of how people really measure how good sound design can be in a film, apart from the obvious, but hot damn does the sound in 3000 Years of Longing scratch a long dormant part of my brain. Like waking up at 3am and gulping down a gallon of fresh cold water, utterly quenching and revitalizing.

As always Miller crafts unique visuals with an supernatural edge that simultaneously force you to shy away and lean in closer. Some really visionary moments in this one including a mans whose head falls off and becomes a million spiders that made me want to vomit and rewatch it all at once. Horrible.

Narratively, 3000 Years of Longing is a mottled and curious beast. A self-contained connected anthology of fables, connected by the thread of love, loss, anger, grief, and ultimately the folly of man. So sumptuous is the world crafted by Miller, that I was dreading the film ever ending, felt like the last day of a amazing vacation, bittersweet and anxious.

Many moments in this pass by all too swiftly for us to latch onto as an audience that I feel maybe deserved more exploration, but what we got to experience was more than enough. A study in loneliness that culminates in togetherness, a study in grief that culminates in closure, a study in love that ends with…love.

Some pretty explicit and unforgivable fatphobia here. Completely unnecessary to the plot and questionable as to why it was included, but it is brief enough to not marr the overall production, yet the fact that it serves as a mere sight gag/joke is really disappointing.

I haven’t seen a more horny film in a long time, every moment is unabashedly sexy and romantic (those gulps) and I’m surprised to not see more people talking about it.

Visually breathtaking, gorgeously shot, and sincerely performed. Such a great final treat at the end of a year of some fantastic cinema.

Each story we tell is a fragment in an endless shape-shifting mosaic. And this small pebble, like all stories, must end.

4.5/5

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A gorgeous little window into a year of family life. Beautifully shot and wonderfully cut together, this 22-minute single shot of three siblings building a treehouse somewhere in the Icelandic wilderness is probably the closest thing to Hygge or Gezillig manifest I have ever personally experienced on film. Strangely tense, achingly beautiful, and incredibly wholesome, Nest embodies the sibling experience with a tight portrait in a slim time bracket. Tension, relief, warmth, and petty grievances. This is what it feels like. 

Lovely

5/5

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On the surface, it’s a story about two friends who have fallen out and taken the falling out to a horrendous extreme. This might be just exactly what the film is about, the cloying and oppressive vibes of being stuck in a small island community whilst actively trying to end a relationship.

Banshees of Inisherin is more like poetry than a novel. It sits, fractal in its metaphor. Split in its subtext. McDonagh places the work in front of you and lets you figure out which of the many elements you relate to most. Maybe it sits one way in your first viewing, and another the next. Maybe it’s not that deep and is just another woeful tale of men unable to communicate with each other. The pride and loneliness that comes packaged in the patriarchy.  

Read full review here:

4/5

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Man, Jordan Peele can make a film that’s for sure. The man DOES NOT MISS. What a strikingly well-made film, deftly handling the trappings of modern-day exploitation and the media industry.

It never takes itself too seriously and allows its subtext and allegorical narrative to speak for itself with subtly symbolic imagery and carefully crafted nuance.

‘Nope’ isn’t just a symbolic piece of media though, it’s a really effective and spooky piece of Alien Invasion Sci-Fi cinema, that even if you were unable to connect with its secondary themes, you would still have a fucking blast watching it go down.

Full review here:

5/5

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I love the Guardians movies. Colourful, vibrant, sad, and joyful all at once. The Christmas Special is almost no exception to the rule.

Once Vol. 3 is released I would assume that the Guardians trilogy will be the best set of films Marvel has put out since they started their Cinematic Universe. Gunn knows what he’s doing, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, he’s one of the only working Comic Book movie directors/writers that actually understands how to translate from panel to screen.

Full review here:

3/5

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Incredibly annoying. A messy, narratively confused, and hyperactive movie that wastes some incredible theatrical musical staging and choreography to one of the most corporate Christmas films of recent years.

Classified widely by it’s own synopsis as: “A musical rendition of A Christmas Carol” and with Charles Dickens himself on the writing credits, the earth should shortly be reversing on it’s axis from the severe amount of grave spinning. Spirited seems to have the same sense of inflated ego as it’s lead.

Spirited is a true Christmas miracle, simultaneously under and overwhelming whilst assaulting your eyes and ears with a barrage of poorly written musical numbers that drag on at least a minute too long every time.

1/5

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The Marvel-fication of World War I. Just when you think it can’t do anything more tasteless another scene happens, then another, and another. Just a towering achievement of insensitivity to anyone except White people. 

The King’s Man sits in an awkward space, desiring emotional gravitas, making multiple clumsy lunges at it, whilst also trying to retain its core audience from the first two films with vibrant music and silly quippy jokes. The end result is messy and confused, and a lot of moments that the audience is expected to take seriously speed past in a blur of nonsense. 

The Lizard from Spider-Man made Voldemort cum whilst seductively eating Bakewell Tart, 10/10 best film ever made. 

Full review here:

1.5/5

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For a lot of people, I think Endgame really seemed like the film the MCU had been building towards for a long time.

As a lifelong comic book reader, I think I’ve been waiting for this current era of comic book movies. I’ve been waiting for the general public to catch up so that we can finally get into MAD multiple reality colliding plot lines that will inevitably become Doctor Who levels of convoluted and only really die-hard fans will remain to try and piece together the mess that is the cinematic universe, and by golly are we getting there with No Way Home.

It started with last year's D+ foray into the timelines with ‘Loki’ and ‘WandaVision’ and now we get the big bucks, blockbuster reward.

Hot Take: This whole film should have just been the three Spider-Men cyberbullying J Jonah Jameson.

Full review here:

3/5

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Just going to marry A24 at this point to be honest.

Is there a film they’ve distributed that I don’t love? I don’t think so.

They have an uncanny ability to make horror as a genre sophisticated and smart. X could have easily been a generic slasher but ends up holding so much more subtextual value as well as a truly incredible deep double performance by Mia Goth that will be studied in acting classes for a long time after she is gone.

Wonderful framing, gorgeous shot composition, great colouring, eerie soundtrack, and tastefully shot and handled sex scenes that don’t exploit the actors involved.

Full review here:

3.5/5

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CONTENT WARNING: Review includes brief mention of disordered eating, starvation, child loss, abuse, neglect, SA, and Religious trauma.

With a disarming opener, Sebastián Lelio leads you into what you think will be a Brechtian piece of Epic Theatre, played out on screen. Only for the mechanic to be immediately sidelined and brought up exactly two more times before the film ends.

Incredibly strong performances all around for the most part. Pugh delivers another deeply organic performance, Stanislavskian in it’s depth and execution it seems almost ethereal when pitch up against this disconnected Epic. The board is inhabited by a veritable who’s who of “guys that are contractually obliged to be in all British movies” we were just short of a Jim Broadbent this time, which I think is actually a crime in the UK.

Full review here:

4/5

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I need to get this film out of my head. I have to exorcise Elvis from my soul and Baz Luhrmann needs to pay for the thought crimes he has committed unto my brain.

RENT FREE, this film has been living with me since watching it. I’ll only watch it again too. It’s going to fucking happen. Against all my better judgement I’ll watch it again and probably like it just as much. Right, curtains up, let’s do it. Let’s talk about Elvis (2022) and Elvis Presley.

I’ve had the music of Presley underscore my entire childhood, likely a reason I came into this film with some level of excitement and intrigue pre-programmed in. My dad is a huge Elvis fan and like some kind of latent, dormant, hereditary disease, that fanboy lives in me too. There it lurks, lying in wait for a moment like this where a bombastically unabashed maximalist makes a biopic in the most insane way he possibly can.

To effectively organize my cacophony of thoughts, let’s break it down like this:

- Does ‘Elvis’ work as a biopic?

- But Baz, what about the Cultural Appropriation?

- But Baz, what about the pedophilia?

- Does Elvis work as a piece of entertainment?

- But Baz, what about basic pacing and narrative structure?

- Baz please leave me alone, I have a family, please don’t hurt me anymore.

Full review here:

2.5/5

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Visually striking, messily plotted, and with a mixed bag of voice talent, The Sea Beast is a welcome departure from the increasingly corporate offerings of Pixar, but doesn’t come remotely close to these studio on its most middling days, but does vastly surpass the frankly messy and irritating vibes of Illumination.

The Sea Beast is a good jumping off point for Netflix to try and reach some level of LAIKA's projects.

So often the film looks beautiful, the Hunters are varied and mottled with all of the palettes of humanity, the monsters (for the most part, looking at you RED) are adventurously drawn, and the environment pops with character and almost storybook-like energy.

Full review here:

3/5