Jimmy Cork reviews new film releases Moonfall and Jackass Forever.
Image courtesy of Jimmy Cork, taken by Benjamin Fort and Robbie Jensen.
Cinema returned to its roots this weekend. In 1902, French filmmaker Georges Méliès created one of the first truly iconic pieces of cinema, A Trip to the Moon, a thirteen minute silent short film that follows a group of eccentric explorers who face off against an alien race who live beneath the moon’s surface. Though the film was never intended to be anything more than fantasy, it reflected how general knowledge of what was on the moon was very limited at that time. Now, 120 years later, cinema is returning to the moon in Moonfall, a film that presupposes that every discovery made about the moon in the past century was wrong.
The film, which stars Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry as astronauts who team up with a moon-truther (John Bradley), features what is arguably the most mind-numbingly insane conspiracy theory ever put to film. Moonfall depicts an artificially constructed hollow moon inhabited by a malevolent black swarm of AI. Director Roland Emmerich has made a career out of movie premises that don’t make much sense. Independence Day (1996), his most iconic and celebrated film, which chronicles humanity fighting back against an invading alien force hellbent on destroying American landmarks, is far from a logically sound film, but the charm of leads Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum and genuinely jaw-dropping scenes of earthly destruction make for a breezy, fun blockbuster.
That energy is not present for Moonfall, which is lacking in engaging performances and feels especially bogged down by an overreliance on greenscreens, despite its budget of $146 million. Even sequences void of any action, like a scene set at the Griffith Observatory, are made awkward by the lead actors being clearly composited into these locations as opposed to actually being there. The only explanation for this being that the film was shot mid-pandemic, entirely in Montreal, a place where approximately zero percent of the film is set in. It might be a film worth checking out if you are looking to marvel at some big, dumb, sci-fi insanity but so much of Moonfall is doomed to exist in the shadow of the much better films that preceded it.
As the credits to Moonfall rolled to the soothing sounds of Luka Kloser’s voice, my friends and I walked out of our theater, and after purchasing another ticket like the law-abiding citizens we are, walked right into our next film for the evening: Jackass Forever. Like the television series and the trilogy of films that came before it, this fourquel is completely devoid of plot and simply follows old (Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Wee Man, etc.) and new (Rachel Wolfson, Zach Holms, Sean “Poopies” McInerney, etc.) faces as they all compete to try to find the most amusing ways to injure each other.
The Jackass films occupy a somewhat unique space in modern cinema that can perhaps also be linked back to silent film. The antics performed in these films harken back to an era where if you wanted a stunt in your film, it was much more difficult to fake it with the magic of special effects, and more often than not, you would need someone like Buster Keaton (1895-1966) who was willing to put themselves at risk. The Jackass films have not been completely shy about this connection, as the musical finale of 2006’s Jackass Number Two features a house facade falling around Johnny Knoxville in direct homage to Keaton doing the same stunt in 1928’s Steamboat Bill, Jr.
The tone of the Jackass films is, however, much more juvenile than their silent film ancestors with this latest entry being particularly obsessed with the torture of the male genitalia. Stunts include Steve-O’s penis being completely covered with angry bees, Wee Man being tied to the ground wearing only a G-string stuffed with jerky and then having to face off against a hungry vulture, Preston Lacy’s scrotum being placed through a hole in a table and then being pummeled by a mechanical device wearing boxing gloves, and a particularly brutal cup test starring Ehren McGhehey involving a heavyweight boxer, a softball pitch, a hockey puck and a pogo stick. And that’s just scratching the surface.
Like Jackass has always done, many stunts in this film blur the line between rough-housing and reckless endangerment. As he did in the second and third installments, Johnny Knoxville takes a direct charge from an angry bull in this film but this brutal hit, which is showcased in slow-motion, resulted in 50-year old Knoxville sustaining a concussion, broken ribs and a broken wrist. We get to watch the moments immediately following the hit as Knoxville lies on the ground, eyes-wide, his trademark showman persona nowhere to be found, and starts asking simple questions like “What happened?” Absent from the mix are former Jackass stars Ryan Dunn, who died in a drunk driving accident in 2011, and Bam Margera, whose substance abuse problems led to him being ousted from the film. Margera has publicly stated disdain for his firing on social media, so much so that director Jeff Tremaine reportedly has an active restraining order against him.
Both films, at their best, could be described as “dumb fun”, but Moonfall’s non-stop barrage of non-sense may be too much for even the biggest disaster movie fans to stomach. Jackass Forever‘s simplicity, on the other hand, works in its favor as it puts the insane stunts front and center without pretending to be anything more than the low-brow docu-comedy that it is. Either way, if you’re looking to sit down in a cinema and turn your brain off, the movies have got you covered this week.
