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.
No comments:
Post a Comment