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Makol Bollay7. Springsteen: Save me from nowhere
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere could have been this year’s answer to A Complete Unknown, a drama about a respected American singer-songwriter who focused on one major point in his career. The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White made an effort to sing and play like Bruce Springsteen, and writer-director Scott Cooper had already made an Oscar-nominated film about an American singer-songwriter – albeit a fictional one – Crazy Heart (2009). Despite all this, audiences could not imagine watching the rock star wandering around New Jersey, living a simple love story, and recording an album of soothing tracks in his bedroom. What they wanted was the surging energy and urgent narrative that enlivens so many of Springsteen’s stadium anthems. He saved me from nowhere and he didn’t go anywhere. Although it can be refreshing when a biopic decides to focus on a small portion of its subject’s life, sometimes a “rags to riches/burning out/redemption” arc is what’s needed.
Pixar8. Elio
Pixar’s Inside Out 2 was the biggest movie of 2024, so hopes were high for the next animated film the studio would release. These hopes were dashed when Elio was released in June. It’s not that the movie was terrible, but it was fatally compromised. It’s a sci-fi coming-of-age adventure, conceived as a personal story by Coco’s co-director Adrian Molina, who drew inspiration from his isolated childhood on a military base. But then, in 2024, Molina left the project, along with other key employees, to be replaced by two different directors. The result was a cartoon that no longer had a compelling reason to exist; As with two other failed Disney films, Strange World (2022) and Wish (2023), it was difficult to summarize the plot or explain what was at stake. It seems like the movie could have been better if it had been left to Molina to continue working on it. Ultimately, the Disney alien that made a fortune this year was Stitch from Lilo & Stitch and not any extraterrestrial alien from Elio.
Universal Studios9. M3GAN 2.0
Why does M3GAN 2.0 crash? When M3GAN was released three years ago, it was a hit: The killer robot, with its long hair and pretty dress, was clearly designed to be a Halloween costume, and a clip of the Model 3 Geneative Android’s sinister dance routine went viral. All director Gerard Johnston had to do was make more of the same, and he could watch the money roll in. The flaw was that he decided not to offer more of the same. While both films could be described as sci-fi satires, M3GAN was a suburban thriller, and the sequel was a sprawling geopolitical thriller. M3GAN 2.0, on its own terms, was a lot of fun – but sometimes you have to give people what they want. “We all thought M3GAN was like Superman. We could do anything to it,” the film’s producer, Jason Blum, said on The Town podcast. “We can change genres. We can put it in summer. We can make it look different. We can turn it from a bad guy to a good guy. And we’ve classically overthought how strongly people will react to it.”
A2410. The broken machine
Dwayne Johnson has been one of the world’s biggest movie stars for more than a decade, both literally and figuratively, but there comes a time when every commercial titan wants to prove that he can present himself as a serious dramatic actor, too. And so The Rock made his Oscar bid — or at least an Oscar nomination — by starring in The Smashing Machine. All signs were promising, as Johnson had an established co-star (Emily Blunt), an established director (Benny Safdie, who directed Good Time and Uncut Gems with his brother Josh), and a true story about a mixed martial artist struggling with addiction. The problem was that Johnson wasn’t flexing many acting muscles that he hadn’t flexed before: he was a charismatic wrestler playing a charismatic wrestler. The only major difference from his previous work was that The Smashing Machine was depressing – and no one goes to see a movie starring The Rock because they want to feel depressed. However, you couldn’t help but feel sorry for the director. His brother directed another biographical sports movie, Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet, and it received all the acclaim that The Smashing Machine didn’t go to.
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