Remarkably Bright Creatures plus Short Takes on some other cinematic topics

After This You’ll Never Want To Eat Octopus Again 

(if you ever did before)

         

Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke

I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative.  However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, though better options may be coming soon.  (Note: Anything in bold blue [or near purple] is a link to something in the above title or the review.)

My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”

(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)

However, if you’d like to know more about rationale of my ratings visit this explanatory site.

         Remarkably Bright Creatures (Olivia Newman)

                               rated PG-13    114 min.

Here’s the trailer:

        (Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size; 

        activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)

 

If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy).  To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows: 

⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.

WHAT HAPPENS: Set in the fictional Washington state seaside village of Sowell Bay (actually shot in the Vancouver, British Columbia town of Deep Cove and the Vancouver Aquarium), this movie essentially has 2 parallel—and ultimately intersecting—storylines: (1) The first is about Marcellus, an aging Giant Pacific octopus in Sowell Bay’s aquarium, who gives us his thoughts on his years-long captivity and his general distain for humans (we can hear what he’s thinking [voice of Alfred Molina], but he doesn’t interact vocally with any of the human characters) which often results in his retreat into camouflage so they’ll have trouble seeing him, even in plain sight; he often escapes from his tank, yet can’t leave the building so why no one ever puts a lock on the top screen I can’t explain; (2) The more complicated story involves elderly Tova Sullivan (Sally Field) who works as a night janitor in the building, frequently shares her grief with Marcellus about the death of her husband some time ago, the death of her teenage son, Erik (Brandon McEwan), much longer in the past (his watery demise was ruled suicide; she still hopes it was accidental); the other main character is Cameron Cassmore (Lewis Pullman), a new arrival come to the area in search of his never-known father, but when his rickety van (left to him when his largely-absent mother died) breaks down he can’t afford to have it fixed so he takes a temp job replacing Tova who injured her foot on a slippery floor (they get off to a poor start as she insists on showing up, telling him how to do all of his cleaning tasks).  Somehow (I’m not clear), he thinks his missing father is local real estate guy Simon Brinks (Chris William Martin) so after he makes peace with Tova they find Brinks’ address, go to confront him.  Although, when they arrive an elderly, angry man chases them away.

 Our human protagonists slightly go their separate ways for a bit as Cameron becomes interested in Avery (Sofia Black-D’Elia), owner of a local paddleboard shop, but backs off when he learns she has a young son, laments that his band, Moth Sausage, is breaking up.  Tova meets with her Knitwits knitting group (Joan Chen, Kathy Baker, Beth Grant), chances upon Adam Wright (Dan Payne), an old classmate of Erik’s who tells her about a girl, Daphne Cassmore (Sasha Craig), Erik was having a secret affair with.  By chance, Brinks finds Cameron in a café, explains he’s not the young man’s father but simply a gay friend of his mother, with the fathers of both Daphne and Brinks furious with their children for who they are.  ⇒Cameron has a high-school ring he found in Mom’s van which he thought was a link to Brinks so in disgust he throws it into the aquarium’s dangerous wolf eels tank.  Then we’re back to Marcellus who escapes his tank to retrieve the ring despite getting deadly bites; Tova finds him and the ring, puts him in a bucket, tosses him off the end of a pier so he can die in his own environment, then realizes the ring belonged to Erik, so she and Cameron surmise Erik was Cameron’s father, Tova’s his grandmother.  All’s well that ends well as Tova’s now open to attention from grocer Ethan Mack (Colm Meaney), Cameron stays in town to renew his interest in Avery.⇐

SO WHAT? Whenever possible I like to cite a site with more plot details than I’m recounting as I try desperately to keep these posting to a much more digestible size than was my usual procedure even just a few years ago; however, the Wikipedia site for this movie offers little, although you might enjoy this from Netflix (some Spoilers) with background on the production and this summary of the Shelby Van Pelt novel (2022; Spoilers where the adaptation’s concerned) the movie’s based on.  I had some qualms about it as the final credits began to roll because it seemed to me that if Cameron had a reasonable idea about who his father was (even though he was wrong) and where the man was located, plus even though he didn’t have much interaction with his mother (as best I understood how his life had evolved) he knew her name and was able to be contacted by someone who knew who he was to pass on ownership of her dilapidated van, he wasn’t able to follow up on Mom, Erik, and Simon when he got to Sowell Bay rather than all of the floating plot lines resolved by pure coincidence, but if I wanted a feature film rather than a short subject I’ll just have to accept what the director and screenwriters Newman and John Whittington (along with novelist Van Pelt, whose plot strongly resembles the screenplay even though she includes other elements) offer.

 

 One aspect of this movie I, in retrospect, was quite pleased with, though, occurs when Tova convinces Cameron to put his hesitation about his musical ability aside, take advantage of an open-mic in the local bar where he sings an acoustic version of Radiohead’s "I Can't" which I can barely tolerate or understand when listening to the original version, but in the softer one the opening lines of “Please forget the words that I just blurted out / It wasn’t me, it was my strange and creeping doubt” feel heartfelt to Cameron’s unstable situation.  (Sorry, Radiohead; I’m just too damn old!)  Those who find this story sappy (of which there must not have been too many among the novel’s fans which, apparently, was a big hit with its readership) or just too convenient in the manner the mystery of Cameron’s father is resolved will just have to further decide if they can stretch into acceptance of an octopus’ thoughts, but for me that made this whole experience quite intriguing, along with Field’s solid command showing how her acting skills haven’t deteriorated with age (79) since winning Best Actress Oscars (Norma Rae [Martin Ritt, 1979], Places in the Heart [Robert Benton, 1984]).  The rest of the cast (even Marcellus, though mostly CGI) well-supports her also, for an heartwarming result.

(Sorry about the quality of this photo of Ethan and Tova; I didn’t have much to choose from.)

 

BOTTOM LINE FINAL COMMENTS: Given that … Creatures is a Netflix-only product you’d have to use streaming to see it (free to current subscribers; $8.99 a month [ads] or $19.00 [no ads]) where you’d get a generally-supportive response from the CCAL to do so: Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews at 83%, Metacritic average score notably lower, though, at 57% (however, just 18 responses so this might change later).  Among the supporters is Stephanie Zacharek of TIME: “[Field] knows how to be present in the moment, even when she's acting with an octopus, and she makes Tova’s suffering—and her preference for solitude—feel distinctive and lived-in. Pullman makes a perceptive, sympathetic match for her: you get the sense he pours more energy into listening than speaking. Remarkably Bright Creatures is a movie, like its cephalopod supporting star, with a gentle soul and an elusive spirit. It might not stick with you long, but it leaves a delicate print behind.”   Yet, some others must have provided negative reviews so here's an example from Variety’s Guy Lodge “[…] a fictional bouillabaise of moist-eyed melodrama, marine-life metaphor and all-purpose cod philosophy that, were it not title-bound to the bestseller it’s based on, could have opportunistically been called ‘My Octopus Therapist’ […] A hokey pileup of intersecting destinies and cornball coincidence, it hardly matches Marcellus’ own aloof intellectual tone […] Heavy on benevolent feeling and shy of outright human conflict, the film floats and sprawls and spirals like the creature to which it’s glowingly in thrall, but a bit of spine wouldn’t go amiss.“  So, Guy, no go, huh?

 

 Clearly, I enjoyed … Creatures more than the negative opinionators, but even if it doesn’t sound like something you’d like to watch maybe you can content yourself with my usual finishing device of a Musical Metaphor, this time (What else could I choose?) The Beatles’ "Octopus's Garden" (1969 Abbey Road album) where, in some manner, Tova and Cameron could join Marcellus in his proper homeland: “We would be warm below the storm / In our little hideaway beneath the waves / Resting our head on the seabed / In an octopus’s garden near a cave.”  Still, much of the movie belongs to the humans so, even as I’m slipping into Spoiler territory, I’ll also offer Paul Simon’s "Mother and Child Reunion" (1972 Paul Simon album)—"No, I would not give you false hope / On this strange and mournful day / But the mother and child reunion / Is only a motion away”—as long as you’ll sing along with it, slipping in “Grand” each time before he says “mother.”  Maybe you’d  also like to go for a swim now that the weather’s starting to warm up in some places (the undersea’s waiting for you).

        

SHORT TAKES

            

Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:

 

We encourage you to visit the Summary of Two Guys Reviews for our past posts* (scroll to the bottom of this Summary page to see additional info about your wacky critic, Ken Burke, along with contact info and a great retrospective song list).  Overall notations for this blog—including Internet formatting craziness beyond our control—may be found at our Two Guys in the Dark homepage.  If you’d like to Like us on Facebook (yes?) please visit our Facebook page.  We appreciate your support whenever and however you can offer it unto us!  Please also note that to Post a Comment below about our reviews you need to have either a Google account (which you can easily get at https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount if you need to sign up) or other sign-in identification from the pull-down menu below before you preview or post.  You can also leave comments at our Facebook page, although you may have to somehow register with us there in order to comment (FB procedures: frequently perplexing mysteries for us aged farts).

 

*Please ignore previous warnings about a “dead link” to our Summary page because the problem’s been manually fixed so that all postings since July 11, 2013 now have the proper functioning link.

 

If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here at the blog please 

use my email address of kenburke409@gmail.com—type it directly if the link doesn’t work.

           

OUR POSTINGS PROBABLY LOOK BEST ON THE MOST CURRENT VERSIONS OF MAC OS AND THE SAFARI WEB BROWSER (although Google Chrome usually is decent also); OTHERWISE, BE FOREWARNED THE LAYOUT MAY SEEM MESSY AT TIMES.

          

Finally, for the data-oriented among you, Google stats say over the past month the total unique hits at this site were 71,591.  (As always, we thank all of you for your ongoing support with hopes you’ll continue to be regular readers.)  Below is a snapshot of where those responses have come from within the previous week (appreciation for the unspecified “Others” also visiting Two Guys’ site):

The Bride! plus Short Takes on some other cinematic topics

“I would prefer not to”

(a response frequently uttered by females in this film, noting their independence from norms;

taken from Herman Melville’s 1853 short story, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street)

Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke

I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative.  However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, though better options may be coming soon.  (Note: Anything in bold blue [or near purple] is a link to something in the above title or the review.)

My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”

(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)

However, if you’d like to know more about rationale of my ratings visit this explanatory site.

 The Bride! (Maggie Gyllenhaal)   rated R    127 min.

Here’s the trailer:

        (Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size; 

        activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)

If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy).  To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows: 

⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.

WHAT HAPPENS: We begin with the ghost of long-dead Mary Shelly (Jessie Buckley) expressing frustration at not living long enough to publish an even-more horrific sequel to her famous Frankenstein novel.  Then we’re in 1936 Chicago where Ida (Buckley also), employee of top gangster Lupino (Zlatko Burić), has her consciousness taken over by Shelly, starts revealing her boss’ crimes, is thrown down stairs to her death by henchmen Clyde (John Magaro) and James (Matthew Maher).  Across town, the Frankenstein monster (Christian Bale)—now Frank—visits Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Bening) who’s reanimated animals, so he, alive/lonely since 1810 wants her to create a companion which they accomplish not by piecing together body parts but bringing life back to a corpse which (for some reason I didn’t catch) is Ida, still possessed by Shelly.  Ida’s lost her memory so he tells her she’s Penelope (Penny), they’re married, she’s only scarred because of an accident, although she’s hesitant to embrace him yet.  They go to a movie starring his favorite song-and-dance man, Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), then go dancing at a club where 2 men try to assault her so Frank kills them, tells her to leave him, but she stays.  They hitch a train to NYC, he kills a security guard who discovers them.  They arrive, go to another movie, but Shelly takes over, berates an obnoxious patron so they have to leave, end up at a big party where Frank meets Reed, dances like him, as does Penny who leads this whole crowd into wild, energetic moves.

 Then, Chicago Detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his “secretary” (no lady cops, please) Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz), tracing Frank’s murders, show up; Wiles recognizes Ida, but she kills a cop in the action that follows; she and Frank escape in a stolen car as they head to Niagara Falls.  The crime spree becomes national news leading to Lupino executing James for (mistakenly) thinking he didn’t kill Ida, sends Clyde to finish the job.  Wiles and Malloy are also on the trail of the monsters, catch up with them, Wiles tells Penny she’s actually Ida, then wounds Frank before she shoots Wiles in the foot.  Frank tells Ida/Penny the truth of her situation, just as Wiles tells Malloy he and Ida were going to take down Lupino, foiled when she disappeared; he retires, gives his badge to Malloy.  ⇒Clyde shows up, kills Frank (he was sure more resilient in those old Universal movies).  The Bride (her new self-chosen name) takes Frank’s body back to Dr. Euphronius, followed separately by Malloy and Clyde, with Clyde killing The Bride in the doc’s lab.  Malloy arrives with cops who arrest Clyde even as Shelly somehow encourages the doctor to revive the monster bodies which she does.⇐ If you’d like more plot details and production background, please go to this site.

SO WHAT? When this film first came out I was interested in seeing it due to my love of what it’s somewhat inspired by, Universal Studios’ Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935), which is on my long-standing list of Personal Favorites.  In that older movie, a fine mix of horror and humor, we have Colin Clive as the reanimator (“It’s alive!”), Boris Karloff as the Monster, Ernest Thesiger as the hilarious fully-mad-scientist, Dr. Pretorius.  It also features Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelly, telling this tale, and, much later, the Bride created as a mate for the Monster, just as in The Bride! we have Buckley as both the ghost of Shelly and the evolving Ida/Penny/The Bride (makes it a bit confusing at times as to what she’s saying is actually Shelly talking or the ongoing evolution of Ida).  Other cinematic references briefly woven into what occurs in The Bride! include Ronnie Reed as a Fred Astaire-like on-screen charmer (with Penny seemingly as Ginger Rogers when she dances with him), Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933), Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), and Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974)—there could be others, but these are the ones which I recognized.

 

 Still, The Bride! is much more than a collection of movie references as it focuses on Shelly’s anger at not living long enough to publish her intended, more disturbing sequel to Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)—although in that novel there’s already a foundation for The Bride of Frankenstein as the Monster demands a mate but the doctor refuses (as is shown in del Toro’s film)—followed by her inhabiting revived Ida to put her literary intentions into reality, even as Bale’s Monster is more sympathetic than we’ve seen him before.  As in the David Rooney review below, some critics are not impressed with the DEI (if you will) emerging-female-consciousness attitudes screenwriter William Hurlbut provides here, but such rejection is countered by director Nicole Ackerman, whose article’s title, “Hollywood still isn’t ready for women to take risks,” makes clear how her argument will proceed, so I encourage you to read it as it provides a useful exploration of what Gyllenhaal seems set to accomplish with this film.  (Although you might well ask both why Shelly, who died in 1851, wasn’t able to write her intended sequel [even though she wrote several other books] given the first novel came out when she was 19 yet she died at 53, as well as why her ghost would wait until 1936 to seek her long-simmering revenge, but we shouldn’t be too demanding of what generally works as a fictional story, should we?)  Logic concerns aside, I found The Bride! to be fascinating in its concepts and unanticipated developments, a marvelously-unusual addition to Frankenstein lore, what Buckley should have gotten an Oscar for, not Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025).

BOTTOM LINE FINAL COMMENTS: The Bride! opened in domestic (U.S.-Canada) theaters on March 6, 2026 (taking in $12.7 million [$23.8 million worldwide]), but now is available on streaming where it rents for $9.99 from Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV, although many in the critical establishment dip into OCCU territory, with the Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews at 57%, the Metacritic average score at a surprisingly-close 55%.  Despite such mediocre numbers, though, there are some who agree with my rating such as Caryn James of the BBC (MC 80%, 4 of 5 stars, same as me): “At times it's as if the film itself was stitched together from the parts of other movies, but collecting all those bits and pieces is a sign of Gyllenhaal's huge scope and ambition. […] For much of the film the Bride is more an idea of female empowerment than a person, and the presence of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, doesn't help. [… Yet] throughout, even when The Bride! is short on emotion, its bold vision is exhilarating.”  However, a more typical reaction comes from David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter (MC 40%): "In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s aggressively punky reconsideration of the reanimated monster spouse, she becomes a laborious study guide for a Feminism 101 class, emphatically indicating points on sexual violence, consent, bodily autonomy and female power. She even yells ‘Me too!’ late in the film. […] The implied terror is merely grating dialogue and a central performance so loud, fussy and mannered that it mutes any power to unsettle that the story might have had. […] If any of this were amusing or suspenseful or frightening or tender or soulful or something, it wouldn’t be such a joyless slog.”  Didn't like it, huh?

 

 For me, it’s no slog at all, just an intriguing collage of other cinematic elements which takes so many unexpected turns with Buckley and Bale providing nuanced elaborations on what we might know from previous depictions of these characters (including Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein [2025]—but with no presence of a Bride, despite the monster’s insistence—which earned another 4 stars from me).  Still, if the clear feminist foundation of this latest exploration of what happens when you bring someone back from the dead’s not fully appealing to you maybe you’ll like my standard device of a review-wrap-up Musical Metaphor, this time "The Monster Mash," a 1962 hit for Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers (on their 1962 album The Original Monster Mash) which I was debating using as the film neared its end but thought “No, that’s too silly” until Gyllenhaal used it as the credits rolled, so if it’s good enough for her as another twist on The Bride’s tale it’s good enough for me.  Also, “For you, the living, this Mash was meant too”; if you sing along just say Two Guys sent you!

          

SHORT TAKES

                  

Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:

 

We encourage you to visit the Summaries of Two Guys Reviews for our past posts* (scroll to the bottom of this Summary page to see additional info about your wacky critic, Ken Burke, along with contact info and a great retrospective song list).  Overall notations for this blog—including Internet formatting craziness beyond our control—may be found at our Two Guys in the Dark homepage.  If you’d like to Like us on Facebook (yes?) please visit our Facebook page.  We appreciate your support whenever and however you can offer it unto us!  Please also note that to Post a Comment below about our reviews you need to have either a Google account (which you can easily get at https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount if you need to sign up) or other sign-in identification from the pull-down menu below before you preview or post.  You can also leave comments at our Facebook page, although you may have to somehow register with us there in order to comment (FB procedures: frequently perplexing mysteries for us aged farts).

 

*Please ignore previous warnings about a “dead link” to our Summary page because the problem’s been manually fixed so that all postings since July 11, 2013 now have the proper functioning link.

  

If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here at the blog please 

use my email address of kenburke409@gmail.com—type it directly if the link doesn’t work.

                    

OUR POSTINGS PROBABLY LOOK BEST ON THE MOST CURRENT VERSIONS OF MAC OS AND THE SAFARI WEB BROWSER (although Google Chrome usually is decent also); OTHERWISE, BE FOREWARNED THE LAYOUT MAY SEEM MESSY AT TIMES.

             

Finally, for the data-oriented among you, Google stats say over the past month the total unique hits at this site were 77,380.  (As always, we thank all of you for your ongoing support with hopes you’ll continue to be regular readers.)  Below is a snapshot of where those responses have come from within the previous week (appreciation for the unspecified “Others” also visiting Two Guys’ site):