EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN, Vol. 38 - April 2022

Everything Old is New Again
Vol, 38 - April of 2022

By: “Doc” Hunter Bush, Podcast Czar

Well, you done got me Jared Leto! You fooled me good! Though I’m writing this slightly ahead of time, I’m sure that, come April 1st, we’ll all realize that Morbius was a colossal April Fools Prank perpetrated by the new master of goofs - Jared Leto.

*applauds*

Well done, sir. I should have seen it coming. With the benefit of hindsight, obviously there was no way that Morbius was supposed to be a real movie, but Mr. Leto’s commitment to the bit is unimpeachable. From setting up a fake IMBd page, to sending out bogus screening invitations, to getting a bunch of his Hollywoo pals to appear in the fake trailer; all the details were just right. But by initially setting the release date much earlier, then repeatedly pushing the date back, again and again until finally settling on April 1st (the plan all along) he got me hook, line, and sinker. All I can say is… Bravo!

Welcome fellow fools to Everything Old Is New Again, the column where I review the trailers for upcoming films and series based in some way on a previously existing idea. Maybe it’s a book, a comic, a TV series, an older film, a song, whatever - if there’s something new being made from it, I’ll endeavor to cover it. And yes, occasionally I get fooled by an Andy Kaufman-level performance art prank from Jared Leto.

Down at the bottom of the column, I’ll spotlight something on streaming that isn’t new, but still meets EOINA criteria and tell you a little bit about why. So even if none of the new releases tickle your fancy, there’s one last recommendation for you to check out.

Let’s get started!

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PREMIERES

EOINA relevant films coming to screen of all sizes

APRIL 8th


Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (dir. Jeff Fowler)
Where: in theaters

Back in 1991, the Sega Genesis home gaming system introduced us all to the plucky blue hedgehog who liked to go fast: Sonic. The sequel introduced us to his pal Miles, the fox with 2 tails which he could use to fly like a helicopter, and their co-op gameplay helped you, the gamer, complete Sonic’s main goals: collect rings and chaos gems, defeat the villainous Dr. Robotnik, and of course - go fast. Over time, the games and spin-off animated series’ and comic franchises have elaborated the game to have a huge and weirdly operatic storyline with dozens of characters, none of whom have had the kind of cultural penetrations of Knuckles the echidna, an initially adversarial character who softens into a kind of anti-hero (spoilers?) over time. Taking a cue from its source, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is introducing both Tails (voiced by Colleen O’Shaughnessey) and Knuckles (voiced by Idris Elba) and bringing Robotnik (Jim Carrey) back from the weird fungi dimension he found himself in at the end of the original with even more and greater powers to torment Sonic (voiced by Ben Schwartz) and his human pal Tom (James Marsden). The plot this time seems more centered on the gems than the rings, but we’re definitely building towards a more game-familiar version of Robotnik as we see him here piloting an enormous mecha-something-or-other to wreak havoc!

Big Sonic fans aside, this might look like a pretty skippable offering, but it has a not-so-secret secret weapon: Jim Carrey. It took me a little while, but when I finally got around to watching the first film, I fell in love with Carrey all over again. As a character, Robotnik is kind of a blank slate. Besides his look and his continual failures to convert all animals into robots, there isn’t a lot to work with, a fact that Carrey uses as a platform to get back to some classic Carrey wackiness. I’m still not personally visiting theaters, but I cannot wait for this to hit VOD.

Ambulance (dir. Michael Bay)
Where: in theaters

Michael Bay - director of films like the excellent Armageddon and recently the increasingly abysmal Transformers franchise - is back, directing an action movie about some people in an ambulance that probably will not transform into a big robot (but I can’t say for sure). Based on a 2005 Danish film from director Laurits Munch-Petersen, Bay’s Ambulance stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jake Gyllenhaal as Will and Danny Sharp (respectively), brothers who rob a bank. Before you go judging them, Will has a good excuse: he needs the money! Oh, wait. Maybe that’s not a super great excuse. I mean, he doesn’t even say what exactly he needs it for, but he keeps mentioning his wife & daughter so maybe they have gambling debts or something. Anyway, the robbery doesn’t go as planned and the two are forced to flee into an ambulance containing an injured police officer and then go on the run. So they’ve upgraded from armed robbery to kidnapping, BUT on the plus side (for them) the police, lead by Capt. Monroe (Garret Dillahunt), are unwilling to openly fire on them since they’re in the presence of “a brother cop”.

This trailer has a lot of dialogue leading me to believe that they might be examining what exactly makes someone “the bad guys”. Is it the guys committing a non-violent yet still armed robbery, or the guys just itching to open fire on them? Or perhaps the larger financial system? Regardless, I don’t expect much of a deep dive into these themes and concepts, but I do expect explosions, which the trailer has to spare.

My biggest qualm with Ambulance is that for some reason someone in the marketing dept. is obsessed with audiences knowing that it’s set in Los Angeles. In the logo, the L and A in AMBULANCE is highlighted and the trailer features the Bobby Womack version of California Dreamin’, (but instead of just playing the song, it’s still chopped and screwed so as to become much more annoying, as is the style of film trailers at this time). I just don’t get it. Is that a sales tactic? Are Los Angeles set films more likely to draw theatergoers? Wouldn’t we just be able to tell from watching the flick? Cuz if not, that’s a whole other problem, right? But does it matter?

I’m sure this’ll be fun. I’ll catch it streaming.

15th

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (dir. David Yates)
Where: in theaters

J.K. Rowling is a hateful stain on popular culture and nobody even seems excited for this twaddle. Just reboot Harry Potter, since that’s what you’re building up to, and get it over with. We live in a franchise mobius strip hell anyway, let’s not belabor the point.

22nd

The Bad Guys (dir. Pierre Perifel)
Where: in theaters

Based on a series of kids graphic novels from Australian author Aaron Blabey, The Bad Guys follows a group of animals (wolf, shark, piranha, snake, and tarantula) usually not thought of in the best light. These anthropomorphic animals (voiced by Sam Rockwell, Craig Robinson, Anthony Ramos, Awkwafina, and Marc Maron respectively) are thieves, burglars, and all around nogoodniks. BUT what if they weren’t? What if people stopped viewing them as “bad guys” and treated them …good? Yes, I know what you’re thinking: it *IS* a very similar thematic through-line to Ambulance, but this one seems more fun.

This animated flick sees the titular group pretending to reform and then, after Wolf (Rockwell) receives genuine praise for good behavior, actually attempting to turn over a collective new leaf. A lot of the gags here are visual, and the animation really sells them but I think we can all agree, Shark’s most famous theft being stealing the Mona Lisa while disguised as the Mona Lisa is a hilarious concept all around. The animation here (from DreamWorks Animation) is really smooth, very pretty and has a great sense of motion. I’d never heard of this, but it looks great!

SPOTLIGHT - Not new, but recommended EOINA material

1st

William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) (dir. Baz Luhrmann)
Where: HBOmax


On the podcast I cohost - Hate Watch/Great Watch - we’ve been running through the films of Baz Luhrmann (a bit of a change of format for us, but it’s been fun). We started with Romeo + Juliet, and not only did it hold up exceptionally well for me despite my not having seen it in a decade plus, but after discussing it with my cohost Allison Yakulis, I found new things about it worth appreciating. If you haven’t seen this in a long time, or perhaps never, AND if you can handle the whole modern setting/archaic language conceit, I cannot recommend this enough. And after you (re)watch it, listen to our episode HERE!

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Thanks as always for reading. If you find anything above that you’d like to talk about, drop a comment below or reach out on some social media platform - twitter, instagram, letterboxd - or another! Let’s talk movies! Thanks also to the MovieJawn crew of course, for making MJ a great place to read about/hear about/talk about movies!

If you’d like more from me, the aforementioned Hate Watch/Great Watch podcast is a great place to start. Alongside Allison Yakulis, in April we’ll be finishing up our Baz Luhrmann miniseries - Lovin’ with Luhrmann - with an episode on his very first feature Strictly Ballroom (1992) dropping on the 6th! Then, if you’re tired of all the high-falutin talk about love and craft and passion that Lovin’ with Luhrmann brought about, we’re pulling a complete tonal 180 to talk about 1998’s scumbag comedy Dirty Work starring the late great Norm MacDonald and directed by the sadly also late great Bob Saget (both of whom were missing from the Oscars’ In Memoriam presentation btw). That episode drops on the 20th, so blaze it if that’s your thing and then catch the episode via MovieJawn or anywhere YOU get podcasts!

Until next time - Long Live the Movies!

And don’t take any wooden nickels from Jared Leto.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN 13

Everything Old is New Again, Vol. 13 - January and February 2020

by Hunter Bush

Happy (nearly) New Year, readers! As we bid a fine farewell to 2019, if you're someone who enjoys a little bit of the bubbly maybe raise your glass to EOINA. Exact date aside, I've been writing this column for Moviejawn for three years! Huzzah and cheers!

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Or wait. No. You can actually go read any of the old EIONA columns here or on Moviejawn. I don't know what I was thinking. (RIP Rutger Hauer).

This year I got to review my first Nic Cage movie (a lifetime high point for sure) and at one point my phone autocorrected part of some rant or another to include the phrase "skunk of a bitch", so I'm just gonna make that mine now. I'm owning it. One thing I'm disappointed in about the past year is that I didn't watch nearly as many new movies as the year before. In 2018 I logged 68 so I spent some of 2019's final days trying to close that gap and ended up around 60. How about you? Any highlights you're especially proud of, let's hear 'em!

Now, looking ahead: This latest Everything Old Is New Again installment will be covering all the Remakes, Adaptations & Long Gap or Legacy Sequels or Requels (there are a lot of terms flying around out there y'all; watch your heads) for January & February of 2020. In this column's crop of flicks, there are a handful of movies that still have not dropped trailers despite their looming release dates, which is always a bummer (I was waiting for Polaroid to drop for about 3 years before it sneaked onto VOD late last year; still haven't watched it).

On the plus size, I noticed a higher-than-average instance of what I think of as Girls To the Front films. Movies with female leads would be considered rare in, I would imagine, almost any subdivision you choose as your data pool, but in the nook I've carved out here they're even more scarce. Yet within these two months, I spotted three instances of ladies leading what would traditionally be male-lead films. I shouldn't have to say this but I'll say it anyway: that's a good thing! Everyone should get the chance to see themselves represented onscreen because movies are for everyone! That's what's so great about them!

With that in mind, let's see what's to be seen.

The Devil's Horn : On Destiny and Dentistry

Prologue :

Get To Know Your Author with this handy-dandy List of Facts!

1 : I love lists.
2 : I have bad teeth. It's genetic. Thanks, Mom and Dad!
3 : I am a big fan of Stephen King and in particular his Dark Tower book series.
4 : Apophenia is the word for when human beings find hidden meaning in otherwise random stimuli.
5 : I think of myself as a "human headache" because of my propensity for Cognitive Dissonance.

End Prologue.

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That was... fun, right?

OK, so maybe some of those things need a bit of elaboration. First, lists are great and very useful, so we're gonna skip right over that. The teeth. I have genetically softer tooth enamel which makes me more likely to have cavities and to need dentistry. Despite brushing / flossing / etc-ing, I lost my first adult tooth about five years ago.

My dentist was a very cool, friendly, older Asian man. He knew this was my first time having anything like a tooth pulled, so he was really great about keeping me informed about what was going on; I went with the shots rather than the gas, so I was conscious. Near the end he told me he was almost done but was having some trouble getting the tooth all the way out of the socket and he didn't know why but it was nothing to worry about.

After a minute more, he finally gets it, rinses it off and shows me that the root has an unusual bend in it that goes a different way than anticipated, and was the cause of the struggle. He tells me this by leaning over me, slowly pulling his face mask down and saying "We call it The Devil's Horn..." to which my inner monologue response was "What. Is. Happening?" Eventually I left, all doped up and tasting blood and carrying my "Devil's Horn" tooth in a little sealed medical baggie.

The Devil's Horn

Jump to a few months back, I chipped another tooth and didn't think much of it. Of course it got exponentially worse over time and on Tuesday of last week, I went in and had that bad boy taken out too. Same sort of thing happened except this time the tooth was on my lower jaw, and those can be tougher to remove I was told. The tooth was pretty hollowed out and broke during extraction, meaning the dentist was left to remove the roots one by one. The last root started giving him trouble and after he got it out, he told me it was hooked like a letter J. "I guess all your teeth are fighters" he said.

"Well there's your problem"

So I rode the train home with what felt like a whole tube sock stuffed in my mouth, trying not to drool blood on myself and spent the next few days on a mashed cauliflower / rice pudding / apple sauce diet. The highlight of my 2016 it was not.

Follow me on Twitter

One of the details I picked up in the dentist's office was the tooth in question was tooth number nineteen. In the Dark Tower series, the number 19 is of particular significance and when it shows up, it's usually a sign that something of special importance is happening, so you'd better be careful and pay attention. So hearing that really piqued my attention.

I was in the exam room, having an x-ray taken when I noticed the room number: 2125.

2 + 12 + 5 = 19

And it continued like that: My file number was 0195951, tooth extraction surgery bay was 1D14. I'll let you all do the maths yourselves. It's not hard because there are no rules. This is an example of Apophenia. Like I said above, it's the word for when people find significance in what is otherwise absolute random nonsense. It's how you may think you hear your name being called in a crowded store or think you see a cat out of the corner of your eye. There's a related condition called Pareidolia which is when you see things that are not actually a face but look to you like a face; like Jesus on a piece of toast or the Face On Mars.

"I think it looks like Michael Myers." - quote attributed to Bryan Bierman

But the example most germane to my story is something known as "the 23 enigma" which posits that most significant events and occurrences can be linked to the number 23. Despite this term being coined by famous big thinker Robert Anton Wilson and attributed by him to beat generation giant William S. Burroughs, we're probably all most familiar with it from the Jim Carrey starring psychological thriller also-ran The Number 23 (2007).

"All righty then!" - quote attributed to William S. Burroughs

Briefly, the movie is about Ace Ventura finding a mysterious book about his own life and somehow the number 23 is involved I guess? Whatever the reasoning, he becomes obsessed with it and then there's a twist ending, like maybe he was dead the whole time? (*1) I do not remember and honestly, who could give a shit?

(*1) : I swear I did actually see the movie... pretty sure.

In the Dark Tower books, once the importance of nineteen is brought to your attention, you (and the characters in the story) can't help but see it everywhere but it is especially on my mind because there's a Dark Tower movie coming (!!!) and I could almost not be more excited. Is it going to be exactly what I've always wanted out of a Dark Tower adaptation? No, there is literally no way that is possible, but it doesn't mean I won't enjoy it.

Can you tell they're well-loved?

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POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOR THE DARK TOWER...


As briefly as possible, The Dark Tower series follows Roland, the last gunslinger in a world not quite our own, on his quest to reach the titular Dark Tower: the center of everything. The axis on which all of existence turns. And along the way there's gunplay, magic, monsters, love, death, offensive language, psychotic A.I., interdimensional travel, astral projection, Hey Jude, twinners, thinnies, Todash chimes, literally the most important flower in existence and an oddly endearing Bumbler named Oy.

I KNOW IT SOUNDS LIKE A MESS, and it is, but HOLY LORD IS IT SATISFYING. What it says about not just a person's capacity for love and change, but also what it says about the nature of stories is completely inspiring. And also very fun.


...SPOILERS END


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To help promote the movie, an app was released tied to a fictional corporation within the book series, SOMBRA. The SOMBRA app is free (*2) and gives you access to an NCP (North Central Positronics) Scanner that... doesn't do a whole hell of a lot. Unless, that is, you point it at the Dark Tower cover of Entertainment Weekly or certain tweets sent out by the film's stars, Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey or even Stephen King himself.

(*2) : If the app weren't free, I wouldn't have it. So far this blog has made me... zero dollars. But if I ever figure out how to monetize my ramblings, I'll buy so many pay-apps it'll make your head spin!

This is actually pretty cool.

Earlier this month, if you had a code from certain exclusive versions of the Dark Tower related children's book Charlie the Choo-Choo, you could access an "employees only" area of the app and take a test to see if you have The Shine. I took it and I totally do.

SO many people I wanna redrum this year...

Do I think there's any significance to my tooth being number 19? Not really. But also: yes. I am fully aware that I only really caught the 19 reference because I'm so swept up in Dark Tower stuff in expectation of the movie (*3) but at the same time, maybe it is the universe telling me to pay attention right now. And that, folks, is Cognitive Dissonance for you.

(*3) : The Dark Tower film was originally scheduled to be released on February 17, 2017 but was recently pushed back to July 28th. UPDATE: Subsequently pushed back to August 4.

According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cognitive Dissonance was "the test of a first rate intelligence". I know, I know, #humblebrag (*4) but I seem to do this... frequently. My "Human Headache" epithet is based on the idea that you can give yourself a headache by holding two opposing viewpoints at the same time.

(*4) R.I.P. Harris Wittels.

The most prevalent example is my ability to believe that superstitions are just silly & fun, yet to simultaneously follow several superstitions in my personal life. I pick up heads-up pennies, I never consciously step on cracks in the sidewalk, I hold my breath when driving through tunnels, etc. I'm not sure when these things started but regardless, they continue. And, as discussed, I simultaneously do and do not believe in the concept of "Signs From the Universe".

You could say I'm a Walking Contradiction, but no one would get that Green Day reference

"What's the point of this, Hunter?" you may be asking. That's a very good question; (*5) you're a very astute reader and I hope you'll continue to read my writings. The point is whatever you believe in, maybe now is a good time for you to pay particularly close attention. 2016 has not been a friendly year for most of us but maybe if we're all paying a little closer attention moving forward, 2017 can be better.

(*5) : I have a question for you. How do you know my name?

So as we all wait out the clock on this... garbage-fire of a year, I'll leave you with some unsolicited advice. Take it or leave it. Your call.

This in now the 2nd thing I think of when I hear the phrase "garbage-fire"

Pay attention.

Be as good a person as you can manage.

And maybe read more. Might I suggest The Dark Tower series?

"Long days and pleasant nights." - old mid-world saying

Happy holidays and best wishes through the New Year!

UPDATE: Here's the first official trailer for The Dark Tower movie (finally):