5 Outside-the-Box Ideas to Help Director Ava DuVernay Get Her Hollywood Groove Back

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

Yesterday, I caught up with a handful of movies and TV shows as we’re in the middle of the dog days of August and I need stuff to write about. Thus, you’ll find a review of The Crow below the fold, and if all goes according to plan, a full review of Alfonso Cuaron’s upcoming Apple TV+ series Disclaimer* when that embargo lifts on Friday morning.

I also saw Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice on Monday night and came away pretty impressed with The Batman star’s directorial debut — and the fact that she resisted the urge to cast herself in the film, which would’ve been a rookie mistake.

Blink Twice is very much cut from the same cloth as Get Out, only this psychological thriller centers on gender instead of race. Naomi Ackie stars as an ambitious young woman who along with her friend (Alia Shawkat), accepts a trip to a private island owned by a billionaire Slater King (Kravitz’s real-life partner Channing Tatum). While it’s all fun in the sun, by night, sinister things are afoot.

Ackie gives a terrific performance here, but the entire cast is perfectly assembled, from Christian Slater, Simon Rex, and Haley Joel Osment as Tatum’s pals to Adria Arjona, Kyle MacLachlan, and the great Geena Davis.

I didn’t find the end of this movie entirely satisfying but I appreciate what Kravitz was trying to say, and I think the audience did as well, as the vibe heading out of the theater was a positive one. I think word of mouth is going to power this movie to a strong second weekend, but I guess we’ll see about that. I certainly think it’s going to play well on Prime Video, where the similarly ugly Saltburn proved to be a strong performer.

After Blink Twice, my buddy and I went back to his place and watched Milk & Serial, the new hour-long “horror feature,” per Variety, which called it “the year’s most unlikely hit.”

The found-footage film hails from comedians Curry Barker and Cooper Tomlinson, who make videos under the moniker That’s a Bad Idea that I’ve been watching on Instagram for years. They’re hilarious. And they’ve got great chemistry together. It’s almost like a Spade-and-Farley thing.

If you told me that Cooper and Curry were taking over the SNL Shorts gig from Please Don’t Destroy next year, I wouldn’t bat an eyelash. In fact, I’d advocate for it… if I didn’t think that these guys have such a good thing going I’m not even sure they’d necessarily benefit from being on SNL.

But Milk & Serial, for all its views (354,000 as of this writing), is not the answer, as it is, for all intents and purposes, largely unwatchable. This is a 62-minute movie that was an absolute chore to sit through, but I did it so that I can tell you, my readers, to save your precious time and skip this one.

By all means, keep an eye on Barker and Tomlinson, but this particular project is a big fat miss from a creative standpoint, regardless of how many people watch it.

Anyway, tonight’s newsletter features the latest InSneider Intervention piece, as Ava DuVernay is too damn talented to be sitting on the Hollywood sidelines, and I have some outside-the-box ideas to help the Selma director get her groove back.

There are also items about the returns of Yellowstone and Ted Lasso, Olivia Wilde’s sexual muse, Chris Pine’s new Italian-language film, Chris Pratt’s new co-stars, Bad Bunny’s latest Sony movie, and my thoughts on the trailer for the Christopher Reeve documentary Super/Man.

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