The Movies of September: The Month in Theaters and Streaming

Photo by Rennett Stowe from USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Ten movies in theaters during the month of September. I did something different this month. On the notepad I write all the movies I see (in the order I see them,) I also kept track of every single movie I watched on physical or streaming so that I could talk about them here. I think I’ll be doing that going forward as two movies got added to streaming recently that I will be watching within 48 hours of writing this article. SPOILERS AHEAD!! Let’s get on with it, shall we?

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

This movie was fine. It’s straddling a B- to B for me, mostly due to the fact that the villain, The Mandarin, was already a mulligan. They didn’t nail it. He’s this world conqueror who got bored with conquering but somehow avoided the history books and any of the conflicts of the last five hundred years or so. He’s also not truly evil, which undercuts a lot of his menace. I never really felt like he was that much of a threat. He also doesn’t even call himself The Mandarin, which is dumb. Ben Kingsley is there in much more than just a glorified cameo. He’s funny, and I like all of his scenes, but his presence really detracts from the seriousness of the enterprise. And there’s plenty of convenience as well. The worst part of the whole thing is there was just not enough to talk about with this movie to fill a full review article by itself. Because that was the plan before I saw the movie.

The Card Counter

Excellent film. Solid A. Only thing that hurts it is Tye Sheridan’s character needed more to do before the third act. It doesn’t help that while he isn’t a terrible actor, he’s basically Discount Ansel Elgort. Ansel Elgort is a better actor than him in virtually every respect. But beyond that, Oscar Isaac delivers as he virtually always does and Tiffany Haddish continues building her dramatic chops I first noticed in Here Today. Willem Dafoe was also excellent, although I wish he was in the movie more. This movie will almost surely be on streaming in short order. I hope the Academy doesn’t overlook it, but I have a feeling it will.

Copshop

Movie of the month without a doubt. Brilliant action flick. This came out of nowhere to be one of the most enjoyable movies I’ve seen all year. A+. I wasn’t even aware of this movie until about the day I saw it. Went in virtually blind, didn’t even watch the trailer. Essentially, a bottle episode inside a police precinct in the middle of nowhere Nevada. Gerard Butler and Frank Grillo are great as is the main character whose name I’m too lazy to look up (she’s very good, though,) but the standout is Toby Huss. Toby Huss is a renowned character actor, especially for kids who grew up in the ‘90s. I love him most for playing Nitro in the criminally underrated Down Periscope, but he was also Artie on The Adventures of Pete & Pete. The stylish title credits listed him in the opening, and I was just waiting for him to show up; he delivered hard. In a more rational world, he’d get a Best Supporting Actor nomination for this, but that wouldn’t happen in a million years.

Cry Macho

God, this was disappointing… A C, at best. Clint Eastwood is great with what he gave himself to do. The issue is the script. The conflict the movie goes with doesn’t exist for a large chunk of the movie, as the plot spins its tires in the mud of tedium for most of the middle. The movie isn’t very long, but the ending just sort of happens in the last five minutes to conclude both the entire thing and the core conflict. The core conflict ended up amounting to nothing, the tension at hand is never tied up, and it just didn’t really feel over. Did Eastwood run out of money? Was this really the ending intended? Really?!?

The Lost Leonardo

A documentary about the painting known as Salvator Mundi. It’s a solid B+ as far as informational documentaries go. Although it’s the kind of thing you could get from reading a few articles about it, I liked the talking heads interview style, much like what Edgar Wright did with The Sparks Brothers. I don’t wish to spoil anything, which means I can’t really discuss the documentary any further.

Blue Bayou

Uh… A C- barely. This is a message movie, on immigration. Unlike the Candyman reboot sequel, it didn’t lend itself to any other genre but drama. Good dramas are make or break almost solely based on the script. And this script is a mess. The main character was adopted from South Korea as a child and got in trouble with the law. Since his adopted parents (who apparently abandoned him almost immediately) didn’t fill out the proper paperwork, he was never made a citizen. This puts him on the glide path to be deported while he has a child on the way. Tugging at the heartstrings to influence public opinion, which is pretty much the point of message movies like this, only works if you don’t build the plot on a series of incredibly unlikely circumstances. Extreme cases work for emotional pandering but rarely truly affect public opinion. The third act lays this bare. A good chunk of the middle is spent trying to get his foster mother who raised him to show up at his deportation appeal hearing. Something happens to make that event completely pointless. The performances are generally excellent, as they usually are in these clearly Oscar bait pictures, but the script is such a mess.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Probably the best new drama film I saw this month. Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield bring it, as do the other supporting characters. The only thing that lets the movie down is it acts like the audience has zero knowledge of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. We all know Jim went to prison for fraud, although I was not aware of how bad it truly was (over $90 million, apparently,) yet the movie spends too little time on the fraud part. It just very quickly falls apart for them with only “Hey, Jim, can I talk to you about the thing?” whispering several times throughout the movie. It’s from Tammy Faye’s perspective, and she clearly wasn’t intimately aware of the fraud as she almost surely would have gone to jail otherwise, so I can understand that to a degree. But Jim was almost constantly hounded in the press for scandal after scandal throughout his time in the public eye. Jessica Chastain is easily in high contention for Best Actress, although something could come out of nowhere in the next three months and steal her thunder. I just know Jennifer Hudson won’t be doing it, hopefully… Solid B+ to A-.

Dear Evan Hansen

This movie is fine. The issue is that a core part of the Broadway musical it’s based on, which I haven’t seen, was stripped from the movie. Julianne Moore plays Evan Hansen’s mother and is portrayed as a largely absent single parent and just isn’t in the film much. In the musical, the first song is hers. It makes her come off as a caring mother who wants her son to get better, even if she doesn’t really understand him. They removed that song, for some reason. Probably to focus on the main character, as the actor’s father was an executive producer of the film. It is the same actor who played the role on Broadway. His age wasn’t distracting as the peanut gallery who only saw the trailer made it out to be. That sort of stuff has never bothered me. The big problem is that Evan Hansen is not a good person. He seems to face zero real consequences outside of missing out on love. And then it just sort of ends. I think it needed to focus more on the character who took his own life, which is also a part of the first song that was cut. In a rush to kick off the plot, that character is largely an afterthought with almost no lines before he commits suicide. That first song sets up his family dynamic in his own words before his death, something done in awkward conversations later in the movie. I understand Julianne Moore is probably not a very good singer, but why cast her, then? The actress who had her part on Broadway won the Tony for Pete’s sake! I did tear up at least twice during the movie, so it still got me. B- to B.

The Outsiders: The Complete Novel

This is the “director’s cut” of the movie that was first released on DVD in 2005. I don’t know if I had seen this version before, as I had seen the movie once prior. I don’t remember when I saw it, but I did enjoy it when I did. My girlfriend had never seen it, and it was a Wednesday night screening. Most of the now star-studded cast were unknown at the time. Hard to think of a movie with mostly unknowns who went on to such big things. While Animal House is similar in that regard, is Kevin Bacon really on the same level as Tom Cruise? I love him, but he isn’t. Solid B+ to A-.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

Not enough Carnage. B- to B. I saw it the night before I’m writing this. The banter between Venom and Tom Hardy is great, but that ends up being most of the movie. The mid-credits scene is fantastic and can only make Sony happy. Woody Harrelson is excellent as always. I won’t say anymore. I probably liked this more than the first one, although I have yet to see that movie again. The villain is definitely better.

ALL OTHER MOVIES

I only saw eight other movies this month, as I got sidetracked with a bunch of TV shows. Star Wars: Visions and What If…? on Disney+ and Warrior on HBO Max most especially. I can highly recommend all three of them.

Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much is free on YouTube, which is ad free with my YouTube Premium subscription. It’s a documentary about a superfan of The Price Is Right who led to a perfect bid during the Showcase Showdown, although he was not the contestant in question. It’s a solid informational documentary, talking heads style again. Solid B.

With the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, I watched United 93 for the first time. Excellent film. Solid A to A+. Harrowing drama with mostly unknowns at the time, although one of the main stars would go on to play Jerry “Hands” Espenson on Boston Legal. Just watch it. It’s on Peacock.

Four Good Days is a drama about a woman trying to get clean off heroin with the help of her mother whose patience for her drug-addled daughter has nearly vanished. It’s barely worth talking about. It’s an F. I regret seeing it. The performances are good from Mila Kunis, Glenn Close, and Stephen Root for the material they gave them. But the plot is terrible and leads to something that ends up meaning nothing. Just sucks the drama and tension right out of it.

Luca was fantastic. It is free with Disney+. Finally saw it. Solid A to A+. A movie about friends in a small coastal town in post-WWII Italy. Just watch it.

The Conjuring 2 was very good once it got going. There’s a solid half an hour of the movie shortly after the opening where not much of real merit happens. And not much tension is really built. But when it does pop off… Good golly, Miss Molly. I give it a B+. Similar problems that the first one had, although that one was better.

There’s a movie that I had been meaning to see for years and finally noticed it on HBO Max. Seven Samurai was disappointing. It is a three-and-a-half-hour movie where two and a half hours are building tension for the obvious conflict, and the last hour has maybe fifteen minutes at best of that conflict. The action that it has is excellent. One character in particular gets an amazing speech about an hour to an hour and a half into the movie. But there is too much buildup to a pay-off that really isn’t worth it. There is easily an hour or more that could have been stripped from this movie, and it wouldn’t have lost anything of real value. The issue is the way things get telegraphed. I got things so much earlier than the rest of the characters, so when the reveals happen, they don’t hit hard. The reveals aren’t shocking. Of the seven samurai who die, two die right at the end of the battle within about a minute of each other while the only other one to die once the battle actually kicks off (one dies in a surprise attack against the other side before the actual battle) dies off screen. It’s a C because it is an important and influential movie to see, but I’m not happy about it. I wanted to love this movie. And I just didn’t.

I rewatched Toy Story 2 with family for the first time since maybe a rental, if not since I saw it in theaters. While originally meant to go directly to home media, it got a theatrical release that further developed the Pixar brand. It’s a solid movie that isn’t as good as the two movies in the franchise that sandwich it. Definitely better than the fourth one, though… Solid B+ to A-.

I rewatched Who’s Harry Crumb? with family as well. Great film. Much like Fletch, a hard scrabble detective story that relies heavily on the comedy stylings of the lead actor. John Candy is excellent. Lots of jokes that just could not be made today. And a good soundtrack. Solid B to B+.

And that’s everything. Lots coming in the month of October, in both theaters and streaming. The Guilty on Netflix and Queenpins on Paramount+ are the two movies I mentioned in the opening. They will both show up in October’s round-up. That’s my guarantee!*

*Not legally binding.