WLR #13

Deadpool & Wolverine

Directed by Shawn Levy

Look, maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s Wendy Lee. Maybe I’m just out of step with whatever trance has overtaken moviegoers. But hear Wendy Lee out…multiple people in attendance—actual adults—barked at the screen. Like dogs. Mean dogs. It was bizarre. Dare I say cult-like. And it didn’t stop there. The hyenas were cackling before the punchlines even landed, laughing in advance as if they were willing the jokes into being funny. It was like watching people cheer for a meal before the waiter even brought the food out—desperation masquerading as joy. For a moment, I genuinely thought some of the guys in the front row were going to strip down, take off their pants and jacket.

We might need MCU AA soon. People are fleeing reality so fast they’re ending up on Asgard. In metaverse number 6734. It was so boring. Penis jokes, N’SYNC dance breaks, the fourth-wall thing again. This was a movie afraid to be anything. Every five minutes, it begged for the audience’s approval like an untrained puppy, nudging you with another piece of fan service, terrified you might slip back into your own thoughts if the audience can’t say “that’s from...” every 10 minutes.

And maybe that’s the real tragedy here: I guess I just don’t know, girl. Maybe I missed the memo. Everyone else seemed to be having the time of their lives. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s Wendy Lee…

One-and-a-half-stars

Oddity

Directed by Damien McCarthy

It’s almost impossible to make a paranormal horror film that doesn’t feel like a joke these days, and somehow, against all odds, this one pulls it off—spectacularly, at that. It’s no small feat. Paranormal horror, as a genre, has become a kind of self-parody, stuck in an endless loop of tired jump scares, predictable twists, and creaking floorboards that no longer impress anyone. But this film sidesteps all that, walking the razor’s edge between fear and absurdity without ever toppling into the latter. I don’t have the time to elaborate, but I also don’t want to spoil a thing. Go see it!

Three Stars

Cuckoo

Directed by Tilman Singer

I was intoxicated again—but perfectly intoxicated, in better shape than I was for Quiet Place. Just enough penjamin, the right splash of Canadian Club. It played a role, of course, in what happened that night, but it wasn’t the only reason a film, one of the worst I’ve seen this year, became unforgettable. Maybe you’d have to be me, sitting in that dark theater, seeing what I saw. Drunk and stoned.

Because from the first frame, I wasn’t watching the film they made. I saw her. Seasick Sarah. It was her. That impossibly thin frame, the pale skin, those eyes, always slightly too big for the face that contained them, set against a jawline so sharp it seemed destined for ruin. And just like that, I was no longer watching some second-rate horror movie. Instead, I saw an adaptation of my novel unfolding on the screen.

The film I saw—well, the one I chose to see—had none of the cheap distortions, the shallow plot points that plagued the version playing for everyone else. I saw it all, conjuring it from memory and imagination: the two of them on the side of the road, Matt’s first high, Harry’s funeral, the afternoons throwing the pigskin with Trevor, the tension at the union strike, the robbery, death. I saw Eddie—the old trainer—grinning through his missing teeth. But, Sarah was there, in the flesh.. Every scene from my novel, projected perfectly, as if it had been waiting for the right actress to step in and pull it from my head onto the screen.

Hunter Schafer, embodied Seasick Sarah with an ease that felt both natural and inevitable. How strange it is to see something you invented—something so personal—reflected back at you in this way, without the actress even knowing she was doing it. It must be unreal to experience it for real!

It made me think: how incredible would it be to get Schafer’s thoughts on Where the Birds Play? I bet she’d get it. I bet she’d understand Sarah. And I guarantee it would play better than the movie they actually put on that screen—because whatever version they thought they were making had nothing on the movie I saw in my head.

One-and-a-half-stars for Cuckoo Three-and-a-half stars for Where the Birds Play