Starting us off is Eddington, Thank You, Charles, a neo Western satirical black comedy written and directed by Aery Astor and this, of course film stars Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Michael Ward, and.
Some other folks. Now, of course, Charles.
This film is set in twenty twenty during the pandemic in a New Mexico town where personal rivalries explode into public unrests.
So pretty much.
The easiest way to kind of think about this, This movie happens in May twenty twenty, and everybody is supposed to be massed up right in the state of New Mexico.
The only person.
That's not massed up and doesn't want to be massed up is actually the sheriff of the town, played by Joaquin Phoenix. You know, there's several scenes where him and the mare butt heads. The first time is when he's walking down the street and everybody he's the mayor's having a cabinet.
Meeting or a meeting in a bar and.
There's some homeless guy that's beating on the door that wants to get in, and he's called the sheriff to try to get the guy go away, and he goes man, he's a citizen man, he has the right to be here. So he plays sort of a maga esque sort of a character during the pandemic, right, so him and the mayor don't see eye to eye. The mayor's trying to
rationalize with him. There's another scene where, you know, you remember during the pandemic when it got this bad, where they had people waiting in line, and you know, we had to have our space is sixty and everybody just couldn't walk in. You had to stand in line. And of course he walks in the supermarket in front of the entire line, no mask, coming in there to shop for the homeless guy or some patron who was like, I can't breathe through my mask. So you have all
these dynamic that makes happening in the movie. Also, remember during the film, George Floyd is murdered. So now there are all these protests in the town BLM and Black Lives Matter, and man, I'm sitting next to a film critic of mind who is a colleague of our, Sam Leggott Junior, and we looking.
At each other and I'm like, too soon for this. This is just not the movie that I signed up to watch to night. It's too soon, Yes, sir, it is.
You know why, because now we are living in a time with no DEI and all this stuff that's going on, and then this is just five years ago. This is not like this is like twenty five years ago. This movie takes place five years ago. So I needless to say. I don't want to give away the twist, but the movie has a twist to it, right, and then it really gets weird.
Right.
So it got so bad because I didn't realize that the run time was.
Was it like two forty or something like that. I think it's it's a long movie, pretty long, and and and the movie.
Has several instances where you feel like it is going to.
End, and then yet it continues going. And I.
Told Charles, I said, the last time I saw a movie that had multiple endings like that was Lord of the Rings, Return of the King. But at least in that movie, you just kept giving me more good stuff. This movie was the opposite. It just kept getting worse and worse. And by the time it got to the end, you know, I also had parking that I had to deal with.
I realized I didn't realize the movie I put. I stayed for three hours.
I'm thinking most movies will be over in three hours, so I'm standing. I got up to the I didn't leave, but I stood in the wings because I was trying to wait for the movie to be over so I could run out to my car and get I get a text the next day, you walking out of movies talking about man.
I was standing in the wings.
I didn't walk out of the movie, so needless to say man. I'll just wrap the review by saying, in the end, Eddington is less a searing satire than a cautionary tale about what happens when even the boldest filmmakers let ambition run amok, and trying to distill the chaos of an era defined by fear, anger, and misinformation as their delivers of film that every bit as fractured as the world it betrays.
I gave this movie a D.
Did not like this movie at all, not