Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about how Martin Scorsese bummed out his producers when he didn’t just make plain his disinclination to make sequels of any of his original works (which rules his 1986 The Color of Money, which continued the story of Paul Newman’s pool-shark character “Fast Eddie” Felson from Robert Rossen’s 1961 classic The Hustler), but, worse yet, directed 2006’s The Departed to be specifically sequel-proof. (Aside from “Marky” Mark Wahlberg and Vera Farmiga, everyone of consequence in that film dies.) Scorsese’s point was that he was dealing with a changing of the guard in motion-picture producers, who were more enthused about creating franchises out of hit movies than putting out films that people might, y’know, wanna see decades from now. Well, we’ve been dealing with that production mindset for seventeen years now — when’s the next changing of the guard due? Will we know it when the Yeomen Warders finally arrive? Levora then tells Schulz, not for the first time, that he really enjoys reading Schulz’s reviews when he attacks films that go out of their way to be “hatefully bad” (per Schulz). No joke: When reading of a film that Schulz deemed to have no redeeming values and was so offensively bad that it didn’t even offer any of the consolations of a camp kick, one can feel Schulz’s critical faculties clicking into place as he weaponizes his wit and has his merry way with the target of his scorn. Directed by Scott “No Relation to Evelyn” Waugh, Expend4bles (aka The Expendables 4 *sigh of relief*) is filled with “insulting little moments” where the cast (Jason Statham, Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Megan Fox, Tony Jaa, Iko Uwais, Jacob Scipio, Levy Tran, and Andy García) pull the kinds of looks that say, “Aren’t I cool for what I just did?” and a person who’s watched whatever atrocity unfold feels compelled to scream out, “NO! YOU AREN’T! YOU ARE ALL HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE PEOPLE!!” Expend4bles might as well have been titled “ExpenFoibles,” except that “foibles” denotes minor weaknesses or eccentricities, whereas Schulz thought Expend4bles felt like it was written by war criminals for war criminals about how great it is to be a war criminal. (The culprits in this caper are Kurt Wimmer, Tad Daggerhart, and Max Adams, for the record. Call the Hague!) This film may, in fact, be Schulz’s pick for Worst Film of 2023. There are only three months left, so there may be something more awful in transit — but those filmmakers will have had to do their best to do their worst. Then there’s Dumb Money, a palate-cleanser of sorts, directed by Craig Gillespie and starring Paul Dano, Pete Davidson, Vincent D’Onofrio, America Ferrera, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, Sebastian Stan, Shailene Woodley, and Seth Rogen. It’s an adaptation by screenwriters Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo of Ben Mezrich’s 2021 book The Antisocial Network, and it differs from Expend4bles in just about every conceivable way: Whereas the former wants you to watch stuff blow up, the latter expects you to keep track of how its subject (the GameStop short- squeeze of 2021) unfolded and why it had repercussions for those involved in it — not just financially, but behavior-wise as well. The latter expects you to have a brain in your head, whereas the former couldn’t care one way or the other. The trio gives props to Ferrera, who seems to be having a banner year, before proceeding to discuss Cassandro, Roger Ross Williams’s film about Mexican luchadores, specifically Saúl Armendáriz, aka Cassandro (played by Gael García Bernal), the first lucha-libre wrestler to be openly gay and be allowed to win fights. Cassandro is still around today, still performing (and, crucially, not wearing a mask), and something of a national icon. Were it not for those details, the film would have been formulaic and have left Schulz adrift with its failure to address some of the really interesting aspects of Cassandro’s story. Then there’s Bishal Dutta’s It Lives Inside, concerning Megan Suri as Sam, an Indian-American high-school student who wants to blend in among her snow-blind-white peers, but has to reckon with her heritage in a fat hurry when the one other Indian-American student, Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), is found to be controlled by a Pishach, a flesh-eating demon from Hindu mythologies that feeds off fear and loneliness before eventually devouring its subject. It Lives Inside is an effective horror film, inasmuch as those who weren’t raised in Hindu-worshipping households will learn a thing or two about what might flip out their fellow Americans. That, and it’s got great performances, including Betty Gabriel (one of Schulz’s favorite horror-film actors, having established herself in Jordan Peele’s 2017 Get Out), make it worth checking out. As for previews, Levora notes that filmgoers appear to want to repeat the Barbenheimer phenomenon by watching both Saw X (the tenth installment in the Saw horror franchise) and PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie (a Canadian computer-animated superhero comedy film based on the television series PAW Patrol) and calling it “Saw Patrol.” If Friedrich Nietzsche’s definition of a joke is “an epigraph on the death of a feeling,” then “Saw Patrol” may result in millions of cases of inadvertent genocide, so — beware. Perhaps you might want instead to see the re-release of what is considered one of the best concert films ever made (though The Band’s 1978 The Last Waltz, directed by Martin Scorsese, has also received similar praise): The Talking Heads’ 1984 Stop Making Sense, directed by Jonathan Demme (RIP). This is your opportunity to enjoy the enhanced sound, and, hell, perhaps kick up your heels in the aisles with a friend (as people of a certain age did back when Stop Making Sense was first released). The vibes around this extended-play remastered re-release have been so powerfully positive that it seems to have repaired the rupture between guitarist-frontman David Byrne and the rest of the band (bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz, and keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison) in time for its showing at the Toronto Film Festival this year. Aside from their 2002 icy induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Byrne and the band had stood at daggers drawn since December 1991, when Byrne rather passive-aggressively informed his bandmates that he had no further interest in working with them. Now they’re friends again, or at least friendly. Whether this will lead to an outright Talking Heads reunion, where everyone in the band shows the world the neat little tricks they’ve all picked up in the interim, or if too much blood has passed under the bridge for anything like that to occur again, remains to be seen. While the Heads figure out their business, attend to your own, and have fun at the movies!. . .

“Expend4bles,” “Dumb Money,” “Cassandro,” and “It Lives Inside”