Pip: Welcome to Wanderings and … wonderings. — where the watch history is eclectic and the verdicts are not gentle.
Mara: Ben Gould has been revisiting some films that range from star-powered spectacles to stylized provocations to outright prestige disasters. Today we're covering all of that territory.
Pip: Let's start with the movies that exist mainly to remind you how famous their stars are.
Overblown Star Vehicles
Mara: The question here is simple: what happens when a film's entire reason for existing is its cast's celebrity?
Pip: The review of Mr. and Mrs. Smith doesn't leave much room for interpretation — "its purpose is to show the audience how successful and beautiful the two leads are."
Mara: Which means the film has nothing else going on. No story worth following, no reason to keep watching beyond the faces on screen.
Pip: Junior gets the same treatment — described as one of the flattest movies around, with a pregnancy premise that apparently never locates a single actual joke. Arnie carrying a child: funnier in the poster than in the runtime.
Mara: And that's the pattern — spectacle over substance, star power filling the space where a film should be. Which leads us somewhere even louder.
Stylized Chaos And Excess
Pip: Natural Born Killers is a film that wants to condemn media violence — and the review calls it out for doing the opposite.
Mara: Directly: it "appears to aim to be a condemnation of mass media and its obsession with lurid violence, yet luxuriates in the mayhem committed by our murderous couple."
Pip: So the critique eats itself. The style is the problem it's pretending to diagnose.
Mara: It's placed among Oliver Stone's worst — though not quite at the bottom, which Alexander apparently still occupies. The excess here isn't thrilling; it's just noise. And noise, it turns out, can also wear a prestige budget.
Scathing Takes On Prestige Flops
Pip: The Bonfire of the Vanities is a film with a famous source, a famous director, and a famous cast — and the review's verdict is that none of that saved it.
Mara: The line that lands hardest: "I thought Brian De Palma was meant to engulf daft, badly scripted projects with his patented style; whatever happened, the movie is that of visual neglect, as anonymous as the work of the next hack."
Pip: That's a significant charge. De Palma's whole reputation rests on style overwhelming material — and here the style apparently didn't show up either.
Mara: The review asks whether it was satire, whether it was meant to be funny, whether there was any underlying point at all. It finds no answers. Tom Hanks is specifically named as awful. The final word is simply "Rubbish."
Pip: There's something almost impressive about a film that fails to be anything — not even coherently bad. Just absent.
Mara: It's the prestige flop in its purest form: the reputation, the budget, the talent on paper, and then nothing on screen that justifies any of it.
Pip: Bad movies, it turns out, fail in remarkably consistent ways — vanity, incoherence, or just not turning up.
Mara: More films, more verdicts. We'll be back with whatever's next on the watchlist.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 