Deadpool & Wolverine (no spoilers)

(M) ★★★★

Director: Shawn Levy.

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney, Leslie Uggams, Aaron Stanford, Matthew Macfadyen.

"You could've just paid the man instead of shooting up his shop."

A film's success is often about meeting expectations. A horror movie should scare, an action film should be exciting, a comedy should make you laugh, and a Deadpool movie should be full of a hilarious mixture of ultra-violence and a hitherto unwitnessed level of swearing.

On that front, Deadpool & Wolverine is an incredible success, and really it's all that matters. The Merc With The Mouth is flat-out funny as he rips down the fourth wall while simultaneously kicking it in the dick. Subtle this is not. And the added bonus is that Wolverine is along for the ride (as are a handful of unexpected but very welcome cameos). 

The plot, for what it's worth, sees Deadpool (Reynolds) approached by timeline cops the TVA (as featured in the TV series Loki) with a very special offer that will spare him from the demise of his universe, which has been left unstable due to the death of its "anchor being" Wolverine (Jackman).

Deadpool heads off on a journey across the multiverse to find a new Wolverine to help him save his timeline, which leaves them both trapped in The Void facing off with a dangerous mutant named Cassandra Nova (Corrin).

If you didn't like the previous Deadpool films, don't bother with this. D&W is for Deadpool fans and MCU completists... and that is all. It's filled with enough profanity to kill a nun, and throws its violence around like it's going out of fashion. It's a sweary, bloody gagfest that will have a certain type of juvenile sense of humour in stitches from start to finish. 

It's also full of some marvellous superhero cameos, most of which are set-ups for the kind of meta in-jokes that make Deadpool movies so much fun for those in the know. This is Deadpool's first foray into the MCU (thanks to Disney buying 20th Century Fox), so that meta-ness is dialled up to 11 as the filmmakers get a bigger toybox of characters to play with. And there's a real sense of joy that comes with that - every wink and nod at the audience seems to fill Reynolds with genuine delight.

There's a perverse joy to how insane this is. That Jackman snikts out the Wolverine claws one last time (maybe/probably?) for this immature swear-fest is funny in itself, and the number of high-level cameos being wasted here is gold. Perhaps the only downside is that Corrin's delicious performance as Cassandra Nova is too good for a film that is essentially an endless parade of dick jokes dressed up in spandex.

Similarly, the film really grinds to a halt whenever it tries to talk about its feelings. It's necessary and it's fine, but the gearbox definitely clunks a few times when Wolverine gets the melancholies. On the one hand, it gives the film stakes to fight for, which is important when both your main characters are essentially unkillable and morally ambiguous.  

It's not going to win over new fans, nor is it going to be mentioned in the same breath as top shelf superhero movies like Avengers: Infinity War or The Dark Knight, but it works. It's exactly what a Deadpool movie should be and kudos to Disney for having the brains and balls to let it be that.

Welcome to the MCU, Deadpool.

Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on August 9, 2024.

(M) ★★★★

Director: David Terry Fine.

Dirty Pop is now screening on Netflix.

Spot the manager.

I was a grunge kid who grew up worshipping at the altar of alternative rock. In the early '90s, I bought Nirvana albums, and stashed my New Kids On The Block tape in a shoebox, never to be played again. The rules of the era were simple. Alternative music was cool. It was real and it meant something. It was made in garages and bars by real musicians, like me and my friends.

Pop, on the other hand, was fake, plastic, soulless and meaningless. It was the real devil's music, admired by vacuous idiots and purveyed by talentless hacks. It was the sound of capitalism and boardrooms. It was manufactured and therefore entirely meaningless and not real.

Of course, these ideas are naïve and overly simplistic - the reality of the music industry, especially in the '90s and '00s is far more nuanced than this black-and-white mentality that I held so dearly in my teens and early 20s.

But watching Dirty Pop makes me think I wasn't so far off the mark.

This three-part doco series (why isn't just a movie?) digs into the diabolical world of Lou Pearlman, who ripped off "mom-and-dad investors" to the tune of around half a billion dollars to fund his lavish lifestyle and voracious appetite. Oh, and to bankroll NSYNC and Backstreet Boys.

This is a story that's been told a few times before, including in the doco The Boy Band Con, which was produced by NSYNC member Lance Bass. But it's a story that bears repeating because it's so crazy, and Dirty Pop repeats it well.

With two Backstreet Boys and a member of NSYNC holding court, as well as a number of Pearlman's former friends and employees, Dirty Pop dives deep into Pearlman's ridiculous ambitions. Their interviews are interspersed with huge amounts of archival footage that keep the story ticking back and forth between the then and the now, but also makes it feel complete and full of emotion.

The ace up its sleeve is Pearlman himself, brought back to life by the power of AI (Pearlman died in 2016). Some will argue that AI has no place in documentaries, but the usage here is intelligent and honest. It takes Pearlman's own words from his autobiography and real footage of the man himself, and uses AI to insert his words into his mouth. It's not misrepresenting Pearlman at all - they're his own words after all - and the doco points out it's doing this every time it does it. 

This aspect of Dirty Pop has been controversial, but it needn't be. They could have used the same words and had someone else read them, or had them appear on screen as text, but instead they put them in the mouth of the man who wrote them. That seems legit to me. It works, it's a cool way to introduce Pearlman's own ideas and voice into the story, and no one is being misrepresented. Get over it.

All that aside, the only real criticism is the sense of repetition that comes from making this three 40-minute episodes instead of a less-than-two-hour-long doco. It's an easy task watching this in one sitting, but the decision to split it up messes with the pacing. There are some questions and details that go begging, and some obvious absentees on the call sheet, but what it's got is good. 

Dirty Pop is great, in fact. It plants its seeds early, letting them grow and bear fruit like a good murder-mystery, and its use of AI is to be applauded. The editing makes the most of its interviewees and tells its story in a compelling way. It will probably leave Backstreet Boys and NSYNC songs humming in your head for days to come, but don't let that dissuade you from checking out this excellent doco miniseries.

Fly Me To The Moon

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on July 25, 2024.

(M) ★★★

Director: Greg Berlanti.

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Jim Rash, Ray Romano, Woody Harrelson, Anna Garcia.

"Sure is a nice day. Hate to spoil it by doing something 'actiony'."

Let's make something very clear. No, this isn't based on a true story. NASA did not fake the moon landing, nor did they ever intend to fake the moon landing. 

Here's an episode of my podcast explaining where that idea came from, and why it's not true.

But, self-promotion aside, let's make something else very clear - this movie isn't entirely about a fake moon landing. Despite what you may have seen in the trailers and press material, this plot point only enters the film about two-thirds of the way through, helping ramp up the tension and emotion of everything (because the real moon landing wasn't tense and emotional enough apparently).

While Fly Me To The Moon is somewhat about faking the moon landing, really it's about selling the Apollo 11 mission to the American people, and the importance and precarious nature of the space race at that time. But more than anything, it's a rom-com, that just happens to be set against the backdrop of trying to get Apollo 11 to the moon.

Johansson stars as Kelly Jones, a high-flying ad exec not afraid to bend the truth to get what she wants. When a shady government agent (Harrelson) brings her into NASA to fix the reputation of the moon mission, it rubs launch director Cole Davis (Tatum) the wrong way.

Fly Me To The Moon is silly and sassy, snappy and jazzy. It plays hard and fast with the truth, but somehow manages to squeeze some heart in among its paint-by-numbers characters. It's disappointingly predictable in places, yet it's also a solid, classically structured rom-com.

As with any rom-com, most of it hinges on the chemistry of the two leads, and Johansson and Tatum are good enough actors to ensure their on-screen relationship is, well, good enough. They never quite sizzle, but their acting chops ensure the film stays on target as it tries to get to the moon. Meanwhile Harrelson appears to be having a ball, dropping in to keep Johansson's character on her toes, and Romano, perhaps surprisingly, gives the film a much-needed heart.

The script is clinically good, to the point where it feels too predictable. Everything works, and it's  sporadically funny, and it manages to bring a small level of surprise thanks to the subplot involving faking the moon landing, which works as a ticking clock device for the plot and a trigger to send the love interests spiralling away from each other at the start of Act III. But both leads have painfully predictable backstories, and the film has a tendency to telegraph a lot of its jokes from a mile away.

Like a good Apollo mission, Fly Me To The Moon follows a safe trajectory with minimal risk, but it achieves its goal, and that makes for a fun voyage.