I find this to just be sort of an odd project. It’s a satire of Hollywood excess…but mostly targeting troubled Vietnam productions like Apocalypse Now that have little relation to the ‘00s studio/star system upon which the film’s characters are built. It has some funny moments, largely thanks to a scene-stealing McBride, but I find it generally pretty unfocused and meandering. The Jack Black character, in particular, feels fairly incidental to the rest of the proceedings. I also think any…

There’s interesting material in this, even if I don’t really think it all comes together satisfactorily. The idea of using the noir template to tell a mythical story, without really departing from the gumshoe roots of the noir is intriguing, and the way Lawrence shoots it to have the light of the unseen God often overwhelm the frame, rather than the dark, works. I’m just not really sure the film, for all its invocation of the nature of religion, has…

I am baffled by the overwhelmingly positive response to this film. 

The most common praise of this film seems to be that it recalls the exploitation films of the 70s. I don’t agree with that at all. Those films tended to be short, breezy afairs that were aware, on some level, of what they were. That doesn’t mean that some didn’t have greater thematic ambitions; they did. But those films, above all else, wanted to entertain. Brawl in Cell Block…

I was really coming into this with an open mind, as I think this is the type of film where there is a knee jerk dismissive response from certain film fans - especially given the omnipresent marketing campaign. But God did I dislike it. It’s bloated and meandering, with a hideous visual palette, all in service of delivering the audience Great Value Wizard of Oz. Of course, while it stops to point at all the iconography it wants the audience…