'Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey' Is The Future Of Movies?? Plus 'Magic Mike' and 'Your Place Or Mine'
#213: "Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey," "Magic Mike's Last Dance," "Your Place Or Mine," "Bread and Tulips," "Physical: 100"
Edition 213:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
This week: Yes, I saw the Winnie-the-Pooh horror movie. It’s very real, and very ridiculous, but it may predict where the industry is going. Then we’re talking Magic Mike, the latest Netflix rom-com disaster, the beauty of video stores and even a reality TV show. Talk about a grab bag! In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” a serious spy movie about … Tetris.
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey
In case you haven’t seen the headlines, yes, they absolutely made a horror movie out of the beloved Winnie-the-Pooh characters. The err … Pooh Extended Universe, if you will. In this version, Pooh and Piglet mercilessly and brutally hunt a group of girls who book a remote Airbnb in 100-Acre Wood. That’s it. That’s the movie. It’s as insane as it sounds.
How, in our world where intellectual property (IP) is the most precious commodity on earth, did this happen?
Simple. Last year, the original “Winnie-the-Pooh” book from 1926 emerged from the complex web of U.S. copyright law and entered the “public domain,” which meant that it could be used in any new derivative works without paying (interestingly, the version of Pooh wearing a red shirt, i.e. the Disney version, won’t lapse until 2061).
It was free, and an enterprising young Brit named Rhys Frake-Waterfield saw an opportunity to make the most shocking version of the story possible. Frankly, he’s a genius, because as soon as the trailer dropped a million websites picked up the story of the childhood hero turned bloody murderer. It was a viral sensation, and suddenly a microbudget movie made for less than $100,000 has made $1.8 million and counting. This week, the AMC in Los Angeles made a couple special screenings available, and the one I was at was packed. Mr. Frake-Waterfield is going to be a rich man.
Whether the movie is good or not is sort of besides the point. There’s really no plot, the acting is amateur and the production looks like it cost about $5. It joins the “campy horror” movement that’s taking over the genre at the moment, movies not trying to scare you as much as get you to laugh at moments for being so obviously scary. As I talked about with M3GAN, I’m not a fan of “so bad it’s good” comedy, but I’m less mad about it here because rather than using that toolkit ironically, this movie extends a long tradition of exploitation films — schlocky B-movies that focus on shock, awe, blood, gore, and female nudity, produced for a dime and sold for a dollar.
The kills are over-the-top gruesome and not at all realistic. For example, when one girl’s head gets rolled over by a car, her eyeball pops out. It’s gross, sure, but nobody would mistake it for being anatomically accurate.
My theater audience was a true peanut gallery: laughing at ridiculous dialogue and overly dramatic music, clapping and cheering at some of the kills. It was an immersive experience. And though you likely won’t watch this movie in a theater, I highly recommend getting a large group of people together and encouraging everyone to laugh and make commentary through the whole thing. It’s the best possible viewing experience.
This movie matters less for what it is than what it represents, which is nothing less than the future of movies. Trust me, I know that’s a big statement for a slasher flick starring an adorable, honey-guzzling bear. But I actually believe it.
Moviegoers love of IP is well-established at this point. All 10 of the highest-grossing movies at the domestic box office last year were sequels or franchises. We’re 30 Marvel movies deep, and during the Super Bowl I saw a trailer for the 10th Fast and Furious movie. Insane. Familiar names are what brings people out, and that fact isn’t changing anytime soon.
And the way copyright law works, combined with when television was invented and popular culture rolled out of the past 100 years, more and more relevant IP is going to hit the public domain soon. In 2023, Sherlock Holmes. In 2024, Mickey Mouse (though this one is sure to spark a high-profile legal challenge). Dozens of other smaller properties too.
For the next generation of young filmmakers, IP could be an easy springboard to bigger exposure. Up until now, making an IP movie was exclusively for those with blockbuster budgets, and now someone can make a movie with built in brand recognition for less than $100,000. That’s a massive opportunity. This time it was a B-movie, but next time it could be a clever, creative indie about Sherlock Holmes. I’d watch that in a heartbeat.
If that happens, then Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey will be more than just an instant cult classic. It’ll be a watershed moment in the indie film business. And then one day someone will use its IP to make a sequel. No spoilers, but lets just say Tigger and Eeyore are still available and waiting by the phone, sharpening their axes.
Something New
Magic Mike’s Last Dance (Theaters): There’s a baseline of quality one can expect from director Steven Soderbergh, but it’s also important to remember that this man makes zero distinction between high art and low art. He’s the only person you’ve ever heard of who will watch the reality show “Below Deck,” the French film Irma Vep, and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind on the same day (if you haven’t looked at his latest edition of his annual media diet, I highly recommend it). I love Soderbergh because he’s unafraid to just try stuff out, and doesn’t really care about his reputation or keeping his body of work pristine.
Lately, that’s meant a bunch of projects which feel insignificant. Unsane and High Flying Bird were shot on an iPhone, and Let Them All Talk was shot on a cruise ship. It’s very different from the Netflix “half-baked” complaint. These movies are fully considered, they just feel like the scratch pad rather than the masterpiece.
That is perhaps even an overly generous reading of this third Magic Mike movie, which is thoroughly ridiculous and has little regard for narrative logic. On one hand, what do you expect. People come to a movie about male strippers for the same reason they might go to a male stripper show, and that reason is not because they’re expecting Dostoyevsky. But it’s sad because the first Magic Mike is a legitimately great movie, and was able to marry the high and low. As we go along, it just feels like every good thing gets crushed underfoot of the franchise behemoth. This version isn’t as fun, and dare I say not even as sexy, as the two previous entries.
I’m sure it’ll do fine commercially, for obvious reasons, but readers of this newsletter would be best served to stay away and check out Soderbergh’s other work (last year’s Kimi was awesome, on HBO Max).
Your Place Or Mine (Netflix): I didn’t have any problem with this cookie-cutter, Hallmark-style romantic comedy — the new Netflix specialty — until I reached the final 10 minutes. That’s when I got to what might be, quite literally, the worst profession of love speech in rom-com history. It’s nonsensical, it’s not romantic, but maybe it’s not altogether surprising, since I think it might be the only seen in the entire movie when the two romantic leads are actually in the same room?
That’s the whole premise of the movie, that these long time best friends who live on opposite coasts spend a week living in each other’s houses, communicating via FaceTime, and realizing they’re in love. They were going for The Holiday meets You Got Mail, but Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon (who have each proven their ability to be charming and romantic in these types of movies before!) have no chemistry together, and it sinks the entire project.
After that fateful, awful speech, the movie wraps up with subtitles. Subtitles! Written in the style of a 12-year-old’s journal. It’s so bad it’s offensive, and because of it I will hate this movie until my dying day.
Something Old
Bread and Tulips / Pane e Tulipani (2000): I’m using this movie, which is currently unavailable to stream or rent, as an excuse to talk about physical video stores. For folks around my age and a little older, our introduction to movies was at Blockbuster and other similar establishments. I miss walking in with no idea what I want and confronting the walls of endless covers, then walking out being so excited to try something new. But today I’m going even a step further and give a shoutout to real video stores like the one I walked into in Los Angeles for the first time this week.
These are palaces to cinephilia, with posters on the walls of obscure B-movies no one has ever heard of and the masked odor of marijuana covered by air fresheners. The movies are categorized by director, with colored tabs signaling the start of each one, complete with a photograph. The people who work in these shops seemingly know everything about movie — let us not forget this is environment that birthed Quentin Tarintino — and don’t blink twice when you ask about an obscure Italian movie you can’t find anywhere on streaming. Coming in consistently is almost equivalent to a graduate degree in film studies. No streaming service can replicate that.
If you ever find one of these movie meccas, I’d recommend you check out this beautiful, Italian romantic comedy about a middle aged woman re-finding the meaning of her life after being left behind by her family’s tour bus. The setting of Venice is gorgeous, the characters are so lovable, and of course the food looks delicious. It’s so much better than the dime-a-dozen Netflix rom-coms it’s not even funny.
Something to Stream
Physical: 100 (Netflix): I didn’t watch any more movies this week to recommend to you all because most of my movie-watching time has been monopolized by this Netflix competition show. It’s addicting! I haven’t been this hooked to a show since maybe “Squid Game,” which makes sense because this show is basically a real life version…minus the whole getting shot in the face part. The show has assembled 100 of the most fit people in Korea, from every discipline — wrestlers, CrossFitters, gymnasts, bodybuilders, rugby players, etc. etc. — and makes them face off against each other in extreme physical competitions. Win or go home. It’s incredible to watch, and every episode ends on a cliff-hanger that makes you pound the watch next button.
Reality TV fans might also like “Full Swing,” the new F1-style documentary show following the PGA Tour. Personally, I found the tennis show “Break Point” more exciting, but getting a behind-the-scenes look at top golfers is undeniably awesome. As I told a friend this week, no matter how good the shows are, their true measure of success will be whether or not they can replicate the insane conversation rate of show-watchers into legitimate fans of the sport that “Drive to Survive” has. That seems like an impossible task to me.
Trailer Watch: Tetris
An intense, Cold War espionage thriller about….Tetris? No, seriously. That game with the falling blocks. Taron Egerton’s ridiculous mustache and “The Final Countdown” background music suggest this movie realizes how ridiculous it is, but the actual footage looks as serious as Argo, or Spielberg’s Munich. This will be a real test of whether AppleTV+ still has the Midas touch.