Disconnect movies

I watched two movies this past weekend, and they can both be described as "disconnect movies."

What do I mean by a "disconnect movie"?

It's a movie where any two storytelling elements -- whether that's genre, tone, time period, sets, props, etc. -- create a notable contradiction with how you've seen these elements used separately on previous occasions. They create a disconnect in your mind. 

When you've seen more than 7,200 films -- that's a milestone I passed last week -- you've seen every storytelling element at some point in isolation, on the spectrum from the most anodyne children's movie to the most hardcore fusing of sex and violence you can imagine in a mainstream movie. 

It's when things from very different parts of the spectrum get mashed up into the same movie that you take notice and sort of remember it. 

So the movie I saw on Friday night was The Bluff, a new Amazon movie directed by someone with the "can't be real" name of Frank E. Flowers. I've been trying not to watch most of the junk Amazon has pushed at me early on in 2026, but this now makes two straight 2026 viewings on Amazon Prime (after Relationship Goals on Wednesday night), so I guess my resolve is cracking. 

The reason The Bluff qualifies as a disconnect movie? It's a pirate movie, but it also has the violence of a Quentin Tarantino movie. 

You never see that, do you? 

Almost every pirate movie you've ever seen was designed to be consumed by viewers younger than 15. Sure people may die, but they die bloodlessly. The reason for this is that the production costs of a typical pirate movie mean it's going to the movie theaters and it's supposed to be seen by as many people as possible, to make back as much of both the production costs and the marketing costs as possible. 

No one dies bloodlessly in The Bluff. There's a man who gets his head smashed in by a seashell. There are arms and legs coming off. There's a man being blown apart by a cannon, although at least this one is from far away. 

The reason I suspect The Bluff gets away with this is that it has only about one scene at sea, with the rest taking place in a village in the Cayman Islands. So you can probably more than halve the production cost right there, and you aren't relying on the under 15 set buying tickets. 

I liked The Bluff more than I probably should have, awarding it three stars when it's likely no better than 2.5, simply because I found it interesting to watch a pirate movie with believable gore. You just don't see it, and after more than 7,200 movies, there's nothing I like more than something I've never seen. 

Then Saturday morning, I got in a cheeky 10:30 a.m. viewing of The Testament of Ann Lee. That makes two 2025 movies, after Sirat, that I have seen in theaters despite no longer being able to rank them, which I think is a commentary both on my anticipation for those movies and on the theatrical alternatives early in 2026.

The reason The Testament of Ann Lee qualifies as a disconnect movie? It's a period piece, set in the 18th century, and yet it is also a musical. I haven't seen one of those before either, and unless they make the movie version of Hamilton, I probably won't any time soon.

(If you want more of my thoughts on either of these two movies, I expect to have reviews up of both within a few days.)

Instead of just capping this post at "here are two examples of a term I just coined," I thought I would give you ten more examples -- five good, five bad. 

Before I do, as usual, I have to set out some rules. Actually, only one this time:

1) I am excluding from my list what you would call "mashup movies." That's not to say that there won't be two different sorts of movies mashed together among my choices -- that's kind of what I'm getting at here with the term "disconnect movies" -- it's just that I don't want to spend a lot of time on the movies that exist purely to mash two unlike things together. So you won't see me talking about Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, or Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, or Cowboys & Aliens. In short, I want these movies to come by their status as disconnect movies incidentally, as part of the more laudable goal of just making entertaining movies. 

I guess there is a quick other rule, or more of a disclaimer:

2) I'm not saying these are the five best or the five worst disconnect movies. There may be better or worse examples out there. I'm just saying these are the first five good examples I thought of and the first five bad examples. I don't have unlimited time to write these posts you know. Nor, I should say, are these listed in the order that I like them or dislike them. 

Five good disconnect movies:

1) The End (2024, Joshua Oppeheimer) 
Qualifiers as a disconnect: A movie set in a post-apocalyptic bunker that is also a musical.
Thoughts: Yes, there would be a cheeky, mashup-movie style mentality in Oppenheimer's film, but it isn't really possible to consider Oppenheimer's work in the same vein as mashup artist extraordinaire Seth Graham-Smith. After all, this is the man previously known for the deadly serious documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. When he makes a musical set in a post-apocalyptic bunker, he means it. 

2) Winnie the Pooh: Blood & Honey (2023, Rhys Frake-Waterfield)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Beloved childhood character Winnie the Pooh, murdering people.
Thoughts: Good? Didn't I put this one in the wrong category? No; you may recall from this post that Blood & Honey haunted me in the right way, even though it has among the tawdriest and most depressing explanations for its existence: that the copyright on this material had fallen into the public domain. It earned from me a marginally positive three-star rating on Letterboxd. 

3) The People's Joker (2022, Vera Drew)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Well-known DC characters and transgender themes. 
Thoughts: Clearly the best of the movies discussed so far, Joker could only exist as a violation of copyright laws, not a result of them lapsing. But I'm glad it does exist because this is very moving in addition to being very funny, and more than besmirching the names of these DC characters, which DC and Warner Brothers would have been worried about, it just shows the reach and impact on them on all sorts of people in overcoming their lives' challenges. 

4) Prey (2022, Dan Trachtenberg)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Murderous aliens and comanches of the 18th century. 
Thoughts: Although this is not altogether dissimilar from the central dynamic of a movie I already excluded from discussion, Cowboys & Aliens, you can't see Trachtenberg sitting in a room and pitching it as a mashup, can you? His intentions were purer than that, and they gives us a movie without an ounce of cheek but plenty of excitement, the best in the Predator franchise to date.

5) Hamlet (2000, Michael Almereyda)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: To be or not to be, and a Blockbuster video store.
Thoughts: This may be a little bit of a cheat, or rather, a catch-all for a particular sort of trend when adapting Shakespeare: to set it in modern times with purposefully anachronistic elements. But it's still usually good, so it qualifies here. Usually; Tim Blake Nelson's O, the 2001 Othello adaptation, could go in the other list. 

Five bad disconnect movies:

1) Wild Wild West (1999, Barry Sonnenfeld)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: The old west and steampunk.
Thoughts: I have to admit, I had a harder time thinking up the bad ones, and I'm not sure how much this qualifies, because steampunk is, by definition, a sort of futuristic form of technology in a time where the steam engine was new. And in truth, the steampunk aesthetic may have been the only thing that actually worked about the movie. 

2) Colossal (2017, Nacho Vigalondo)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Kaiju and toxicity brought on by alcoholism.
Thoughts: Rarely have I struggled with competing tones as much as I did in Colossal, in which characters can make a kaiju appear halfway across the world by standing in a particular location in their town, and also display the sort of hostility toward one another that belongs in a Cassavetes film. 

 3) Nasty Baby (2015, Sebastian Silva)
Qualfiers as a disconnect: A gay couple struggling to conceive through a surrogate, and the murder of a homeless man.
Thoughts: I suppose what I just told you qualifies as a spoiler, but Nasty Baby a) is more than ten years old, and b) does not deserve to have its bizarre plot twist hidden. 

4) The Book of Henry (2017, Colin Trevorrow)
Qualfiers as a disconnect: A brilliant young terminally ill kid plotting to murder the abusive father of his neighbor.
Thoughts: Maybe you didn't know this was the reason you were supposed to stay clear of The Book of Henry, but there it is. 

5) Hancock (2008, Peter Berg)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: A superhero comedy and ... a very weird sort of serious superhero movie about eternal beings.
Thoughts: If you saw Hancock, you know what I'm talking about here.

Well I think you can tell I pretty much ran out of steam. I started this three days ago, so I better publish it and move on with my life. 

Lousy with two-time Oscar winners, and just lousy

The original Predator from 1987 famously had two future governors in its cast, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse "The Body" Ventura.

Predators from 2010? It had two future two-time Oscar winners, one of whom had already won one of his Oscars.

That's just one of the things I wanted to talk about in a post about the two movies in the larger Predator franchise -- if you don't count the Alien vs. Predator movies -- that I hadn't seen before this weekend.

When the movie-watching year resets and I can watch anything I want again, I've made a habit of completing little projects like this in recent years. Last year in February I watched The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3, which were the only two Spider-Man movies I had yet to see -- though maybe it would have been smart to wait for my younger son on that one, considering that he's since become a Spider-Man fanatic. Instead we've started this year watching Marvel movies he hadn't seen from the Captain America and Avengers franchises, which is another example of a project like this, though not in this case watching movies that I hadn't seen myself. (We also watched the original Spider-Man from 2002, since he was raised on Tom Holland as Spider-Man and only saw Toby Maguire in the role in that new Spider-Man movie from a couple years ago.)

I thought there was a similar thing in 2024, but perhaps not because I'm not seeing it. Though in 2023 around this time of year, I did complete the Rocky series with a viewing of Rocky II the night after I watched Creed III. 

Enough historical precedent. The reason to watch Predators (2010) and The Predator (2018) seems obvious enough. I'm clearly a new devotee of this series, having placed both of Dan Trachtenberg's live-action Predator movies in my top ten of their respective years, first Prey in 2022 and then most recently, Predator: Badlands just this past year. Although I may like Prey more, Predator: Badlands was even higher than Prey, #5 vs. #7 -- which says more about the quality of the competition than an absolute value for each film. The animated Predator: Killer of Killers also did very respectably in last year's rankings, but nowhere near the top ten. 

I'm going to finish this project off with a rewatch of Predator: Badlands tonight, since it's just recently arrived on Disney+. I suspect I'll write about it tomorrow, but don't hold me to that.

Another reason it was important to watch these movies is that I have been implicitly damning them every time I write about a new Predator movie I like -- which was not exactly fair, given that I'd never seen them. I don't diss them specifically, of course, but I have assumed it was safe to refer to the entire franchise as a "moribund franchise" that Trachtenberg raised out of the depths of its despair. 

I started with Nimrod Antal's Predators on Thursday night, though I didn't finish it until yesterday afternoon/early evening/later evening. Despite the interruptions, I liked it almost enough to recommend it, though in the end it fell short of that at 2.5 stars. I was sort of glad that it dipped in quality near the end, because that added weight to my previously risky argument that the franchise hadn't been any good before Trachtenberg came along. (At least not since the original.)

Shane Black's The Predator, which leaned heavily into what people think is his strength, an almost Joss Whedon-style, f-bomb laden joking camaraderie between the characters? Well that wasn't good from the start. I didn't get anything out of that one, despite the presence of likable actors like Olivia Munn, Keegan-Michael Key and Sterling K. Brown.

In a piece like this, I might ordinarily go into the plot of the two movies, talk about what worked, talk about what didn't work. To be honest, I'm not really feeling that today. So let's get to the headline bit about the two-time Oscar winners from Predators, and see what energy I might have left over to talk about The Predator.

So you'd know that Adrien Brody was the star of Predators -- at least, I knew it, as he was the only one I definitively remembered from the ads I saw of it 15 years ago. You'd also know that Brody just won his second, and presumably final, Oscar last year for The Brutalist, having first won for The Pianist in 2002. (I didn't realize the structural similarity of those two titles until just now.) It being the probable last was one of the reasons he wouldn't get off the goddamn stage.

But you probably wouldn't know that a then-unknown Mahershala Ali was in, and one of the first killed off in, Predators. This is when he was still credited as Mahershalalhashbaz Ali. Ali didn't become known to most of us until he won his first best supporting actor Oscar for Moonlight six years later, before winning his second for Green Book only two years after that. If memory serves, Ali spent only a reasonable amount of time on stage. 

Winning multiple Academy awards is not completely uncommon -- it's also been done this century by Emma Stone, Daniel Day-Lewis, Frances McDormand, Cate Blanchett, Renee Zellweger, Christophe Waltz and Sean Penn, with Hillary Swank, Denzel Washington and Anthony Hopkins having won a second this century after winning their first last century. But having two in the same movie, especially when it's a Predator movie, still strikes me as pretty unlikely. (What little we knew at the time about the potential of Ali.)

Having the characters dropped unconscious from a craft in the sky into a game preserve on a distant plant, and having to awaken mid-air in order to deploy their parachutes, is a good way to get us into the action and set the scene. I was on board for this and thought I could, potentially, be watching another prestige object in the Predator series. In addition to those already mentioned, the film collects a watchable group that includes Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Danny Trejo, Walton Goggins, and a surprise later appearance from Laurence Fishburne as a guy who has been there a lot longer, and has the crazy to prove it.

But as the movie went on, and as the Predators were revealed more and seemed less interesting, it became more and more mid. The affection for this film by Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen is not totally unfounded, but I'm glad to say this has nothing on Trachtenberg's movies.

The Predator, which I watched immediately after finishing up Predators last night, felt off to me from the start. This is also a frame story featuring a core cast of about seven characters who get picked off one by one, though in this case most of them are part of a ragtag military group who like to give each other shit, almost excessively so, to the point of affectation in the script. They're led by Boyd Holbrook, who has never been a favorite of mine, though as mentioned before, I do enjoy Munn, Key and Brown. There's a Moonlight connection with this one as well, as Trevante Rhodes is also in the cast, though this movie does show the limits of his charisma and I think explains why he hasn't continued to have much work. (Thomas Jane has never been a favorite, though Alfie Allen is always fun to see, because it always makes me think of his sister and the song she wrote about him.)

This story is a bit more all over the place, taking place on Earth and involving alien tech being passed around between shady military people and these ragtag soldiers, as well as a biologist played by Munn. The story also involves the neurodivergent son of Holbrook's character, played by Room actor Jacob Tremblay, who was such a revelation in that movie and so flat in this one, only a few years later. Anyway, it's jokey and messy and for the most part I just wanted it to be over.

The thing I find very interesting about this series -- when I think back to the original and Predator 2, which was actually the first film in the series that I ever saw -- is that I'm not sure any of the movies has any plot connection to any of the other movies. The first sequel would have been the most likely, but because Schwarzenegger didn't return, replaced by Danny Glover, whatever connective tissue there was would have been pretty thin. And it takes place in an entirely different environment. So I'm going to say there was basically none. 

My thought was that Trachtenberg's movies were supposed to connect to each other, but so far, the three are very different. My understanding was that Killer of Killers was supposed to lay the groundwork for Badlands, but an explicit connection between them was thin if it existed at all. I suppose the most similar two movies are Predators and Killer of Killers because both focus on Predators fighting people who have been chosen specifically for representing a different brand of warrior that can challenge them. Did we mention one of the characters in Predators is a Yakuza hitman who's good with a sword? That itself is very similar to one of the three stories in Killer of Killers, albeit from a very different time period.

One funny similarity I did notice? The two movies I watched in the past two days were both exactly 107 minutes, with the one I'm going to watch tonight being only one minute longer than that. The original Predator is 107 minutes and Predator 2 is 108. Trachtenberg's previous two do deviate from that formula just a little, with Prey seven minutes shorter at 100 and the animated movie, perhaps unsurprisingly, running only 85 minutes. 

I'm not quite so interested in getting a holistic view of the entire Predator series that I need to rewatch either the original two movies, rewatch Killer of Killers or Prey, or see the one Alien vs. Predator movie I haven't seen. Besides, there are only so many days in a weekend. But I do look forward to rewatching Badlands tonight, and I'll let you know if any holistic impressions emerge from that viewing. 

Technically accurate but semantically dishonest

Which of these "award-winning movies" is not like the other?

Awards for Past Lives, according to Wikipedia:

Best Woman Screenwriter - Alliance of Women Film Journalists
Top Ten Films of the Year - American Film Institute Awards
Best Director - Asia Pacific Screen Awards
Outstanding Achievement in Casting - Artios Awards
Best First Feature - Astra Film and Creative Arts Awards
Best Original Screenplay, Best First Film - Austin Film Critics Awards

And that's only the A's. Point proven, I will stop there.

Awards for Prey, according to Wikipedia:

Outstanding Sound Editing for a Limited Series or Anthology, Movie or Special - Primetime Emmy Awards
Best Streaming Film Premiere, Best Costume Design, Best Creature FX - Fangoria Chainsaw Awards
Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing - Non-Theatrical Feature - Golden Reel Awards
Best Original Score - Streamed Live Action Film (No Theatrical Release) - Hollywood Music in Media Awards

Awards for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, according to Wikipedia:

Feature Big Budget - Comedy - Artios Awards
Best Supporting Actress - Critics Choice Movie Awards
Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy - Golden Globe Awards
Best Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy - Golden Globe Awards
Best Original Poster - Golden Trailer Awards
Best Supporting Actress - National Society of Film Critics Awards
Best Supporting Actress - Online Film Critics Society Awards
Best Adapted Screenplay - Writers Guild of America

Awards for Movie 43, according to Wikipedia:

Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Screenplay - Golden Raspberry Awards

Now, some of these awards may be a bit fringe, but at least you would write home about them.

Not so for the "accolades" for Movie 43.

So I am trying to figure out Amazon's angle here. 

They are promoting four random movies to us that all are considered "award winners" -- a technically true statement. The thing that separates them from being completely random, I would guess, is that perhaps they are all new to the service within the past few weeks, or at least returned to the service after a temporary departure.

But wait -- Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was an Amazon original movie. It debuted there. There would be no conceivable reason it would have ever left, because where would it go? Streamer originals are on the service forever and ever after, amen. 

So that doesn't explain the pairing of these four movies. And surely, if they just wanted four awards winners, they'd have literally hundreds of other movies on the site that would qualify, especially given the number of existing bodies that lavish formal praise on movies that are never going to get an Oscar nomination. (I mean, even the Teen Choice Awards and MTV Movie Awards exist.) 

What possible incentive could Amazon have for elevating Movie 43 alongside these other films, all of which were critical favorites in one way or another, with maybe only a few detractors for Borat and essentially none for the other two? 

The movie was an all-time turkey, and any of their customers who watch Movie 43 will surely know this right away. They may then investigate why Amazon promoted it to them as such, and find out the technical accuracy of the term "award" -- while still grumbling at the deception.

Because technical accuracy only matters in the legalese that comes at the end of an ad for a new erectile dysfunction drug, or a bargain basement attorney. It only matters if you are trying to indemnify yourself against an angry customer who wants to sue you because something happened with your product that you didn't tell them was going to happen. So you tell them what could happen, and wash your hands of it, and basically live with the fact that you may end up burning some of your future customers, because that's the nature of your particular industry. There are enough potential future customers to compensate for the loss. 

There is no good reason to burn a potential steaming customer, given the comparatively small value of encouraging them to watch any individual thing on your service. Streaming content is inherently a crapshoot, and any streaming customer knows that. The streamer's job is to make the content available, to suggest that you might like it if you liked something similar to it, and to give it a certain visibility in accordance with the streamer's own belief in the content, its own advertising philosophy and perhaps its own agreement with whoever leased the content to give it a certain amount of prominence for a certain amount of days. The rest is just caveat emptor.

But then if you go out of your way to label garbage like Movie 43 as an award winner -- and place it next to three other movies that won awards for legitimate reasons -- you are engaging in actual dishonesty toward your customer that could damage your brand. 

And for what? What do you gain if an additional ten thousand people stream Movie 43? (Answer in the comments, if you know. I really want to know.) That is not an exaggeration given the way ads like these tend to flood our devices, likely going to millions of us, if not billions. (Okay, not billions.) 

You're more likely to lose those ten thousand people as customers than to get them to watch another movie that might be recommended according to their interest in Movie 43, or whatever the flimsy value is that Amazon might get out of this. 

They won't leave because they didn't like this one movie. That can happen any time you click play.

They'll leave because you told them they would like this movie because it was an award winner, when the only awards it won were named after that universal gesture you make with your mouth and tongue, expelling breath outward and creating that farting sound that unmistakeably indicates your disgust.

Leave technical accuracy to the pharmaceutical companies.  

Man vs. Beast

My top ten of 2022 has gotten a real jolt this past week with two great new genre movies with similar themes, and even similar titles: Prey and Beast.

I was expecting to like Prey given the buzz I had heard about it. I had heard nothing about Beast, but when I saw (during the opening credits) that it was directed by Baltasar Kormakur, whose Everest I really liked, I developed expectations for that too.

Simply put, both are terrific. And they have a surprising amount in common. I'll try to talk about the similarities without slipping into spoilers, so feel free to venture onward if you haven't seen one or both films. If it sounds like a spoiler, don't worry -- I've determined it's something you learn very early on, or can even intuit from the advertising. 

Both films come down to a showdown between a single man -- if we are using "man" in the same way as we say "mankind" -- and a formidable opponent who is rightly considered a beast, whether that's an alien predator or a psychotic lion out for vengeance. In Prey it's a young woman, the Comanche Naru (Amber Midthunder), who is trying to prevent the predator from overrunning her tribe in the Great Plains of 1719. In Beast, it's Dr. Nate Samuels (Idris Elba), who has brought his teenage daughters to see their deceased mother's South Africa homeland, and who must fend off a rogue lion trying to avenge the death of its pride at the hands of poachers.

That makes a good transition to the fact that both movies have a bunch of bad apples hanging around to make trouble for our protagonist and to ratchet up the body count. In Prey, it's the trappers who also roam the Great Plains, who seem to want to make menace wherever possible in addition to collecting animal furs. In Beast, it's the aforementioned poachers, who set their own trap for a pride at the film's opening, shooting down all but one of them.

Then we have to consider the natural setting of both films, even if they differ from one another. Both films take place in rugged, undeveloped terrain, where the characters are cut off from assistance from others -- either because you can't radio for assistance in 1719, or because the remoteness and other geographical features kill the mobile service and leave walkie talkies as a poor replacement. 

It would be tempting to draw a comparison between the people themselves, but only in Prey are they natives. There are African natives in Beast, but the action falls to Elba and his daughters, plus their white South African friend played by -- you guessed it -- Sharlto Copley.

There may be some additional points of comparison but I can't get into them without getting into spoilers.

Both films are fun, exciting and bloody. Because of its native cast, Prey put me in mind of another excellent action movie involving native inhabitants of the Americas, that being Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. Beast doesn't have that direct source of comparison for me, but you can think of it in the same vein as something like Jaws -- and also just a superior example of one of my favorite genres, which is "normal people stranded in the wilderness, up against frightening odds."

Anyway, for now, they are both positioned in my top ten of the year -- in rather elevated spots, actually. They may not stay there -- I still have four solid months of movie watching in 2022 before I settle on my final rankings -- but if they do, I'd be proud to have them.