Video Store Rental Reviews #11: Magazine Dreams (2023), Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), The Gypsy Moths (1969)
DVD reviews in the year 2025.
Netflix holds roughly 6,500 titles.
Max and Peacock are about the same.
Hulu has a bit more, at just over 7,000.
My local video store has over 36,000 distinct titles that don’t disappear at the end of every month.
Here are reviews for three of them:
Magazine Dreams (2023)
Aspiring bodybuilder Killian Maddox struggles to find human connection in this exploration of celebrity and violence. Nothing deters him from his fiercely protected dream of superstardom, not even the doctors who warn him of the permanent damage he causes to himself with his quest.
section: new arrivals
Jonathan Majors is (was?) an incredible actor. In just about five years of work, he turned out several memorable performances, from The Last Black Man in San Francisco to Da 5 Bloods to They Harder They Fall to Creed III. His performance in Magazine Dreams was supposed to be the one that cemented his status as one of this generation's most interesting new minds.
Unfortunately, he's also not a good person, as determined by a court of law by a jury of his peers. The allegations and eventual misdemeanor assault convictions, followed by his utterly bizarre attempts at redemption, coincided with the planned release of Magazine Dreams, which was eventually shelved by Disney's Searchlight Pictures. As a result, it felt like a movie that only really existed in an alternate timeline, one where the film's strong word-of-mouth (particularly Majors' attempt as his own Travis Bickle character) out of Sundance capped off his perfect 2023 triptych, following his heel turn in the Creed franchise and his baton-taking in the Marvel Universe.
Distribution company Briarcliff Entertainment, presumably buying the film for pennies on the dollar, saw the chance for slim profit margins on a DVD release (which they've made explicitly clear will not be a Blu-ray or 4K release - the DVD is occasionally too dark to make anything out) and put the disc out this past March. The movie, an all too obvious Taxi Driver for our times, is fine, with Majors' performance the reason to see it then or see it now, depending on how you feel about such things.
Writer/director Elijah Bynum's film plays all of the minor chords, finding the dark comedy and psychological thrills in the story of a wannabe bodybuilder. His carved-out physique is both physically and psychologically intimidating, often actually scary in the most intense parts of his breakdowns and delusions, though it's hard to tell who can get the credit for that.
It's tempting to think that it's Majors, as Bynum's script is often so ham-fisted that it feels like a parody of Scorsese's freakout films. I mean, he names the character Killian Maddox, for Christsake. That's fucking ridiculous. And in 2025 (2023ish), not 1976 and not 1982, the character is too familiar to us in the real world to feel special to this particular film. What makes De Niro's losers and loners so interesting is how unknown they are to the viewer. You never know what they're going to do next. In our current zeitgeist, incels and shooter-types are nothing new and it's only Majors' ability to squeeze out some empathy (there are some moments where you do kinda feel where this guy's coming from - like when three racists beat the shit out of him with a pipe, that's obviously terrible) that gives the film any real heft. Unfortunately, taking another note from the Scorsese handbook, the film's unclear ending just can't stick the landing in the same way and the whole thing feels incomplete.
That's fitting, I suppose. Incomplete. It feels as appropriate a word as any to describe Jonathan Majors' career. But now that I've seen the movie I was never supposed to see, I don't feel like I have any unanswered questions.
Bang the Drum Slowly (1973)
The story of a New York pro baseball team and two of its players. Henry Wiggen is the star pitcher and Bruce Pearson is the normal, everyday catcher who is far from the star player on the team and friend to all of his teammates. During the off-season, Bruce learns that he is terminally ill, and Henry, his only true friend, is determined to be the one person there for him during his last season with the club. Throughout the course of the season, Henry and his teammates attempt to deal with Bruce's impending illness, all the while attempting to make his last year a memorable one.
section: drama
I've been trying to make my way through the Cinématographe releases - I've covered a few of them in this column and others elsewhere on this site - but they're coming out faster than I can keep up with, so I've had to just pick up the ones I'm most interested in. Luckily, a baseball picture featuring a young Robert De Niro is the exact kind of thing that I'm interested in.
In the movie, De Niro plays New York Mammoths catcher Bruce Pearson, recently diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. The only person he tells is the team's star pitcher, Henry (Michael Moriarty), seemingly his only friend because Bruce is sort of odd and kind of a loner on the team. Not only does Henry keep his secret, but he does Bruce one better: he puts him into his contract. If he's pitching, Bruce has to be catching. It's like when Nathan Eovaldi told the Rangers that they had to sign Kevin Plawecki, which no team in their right mind wanted to do.
He does this, of course, to give Bruce some financial and job security in his final months. His parents (not his scheming girlfriend) will get a little nest egg, and Bruce will spend his final days busy and happy. Oh, and there's the companionship too. He teaches him a card game and hangs out with his family. But we all know how it's going to end. It's like Brian's Song.
Like any good baseball movie, it's about more than baseball. As film critic Noah Gittel wrote in his 2024 book Baseball: The Movie, "The film opens on an establishing shot of the Mayo Clinic, where Pearson has just received his diagnosis. Instead of a traditional rise-and-fall arc, Bang the Drum Slowly sees life as a long, slow fade-out in which its players struggle to redeem a hopeless situation. Its climactic moment comes not during a game but in a long rain delay..."
I won't spoil what happens next, but as any baseball fan knows, rain delays are all about waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Waiting for what's next. What could be.
The Gypsy Moths (1969)
Three skydivers and their travelling thrill show barnstorm through a small midwestern town one Fourth of July weekend.
section: John Frankenheimer
The Gypsy Moths is about a trio of skydivers who travel from town to town doing their high-flying (high-falling?) show for the locals. When they arrive in beautiful, scenic, picturesque Benton, Kansas, group leader Burt Lancaster takes the show to the limits. In an attempt to make it more and more exciting, he starts pulling his parachute later and later in his freefall. The film's ending is unfortunately inevitable.
But it’s not really about the ending. For starters, director John Frankenheimer shoots the hell out of the skydiving scenes. I put this on after being wowed by his 1966 movie Grand Prix and the driving sequences in that film, and while the action of falling through the sky isn't quite as visually exciting as the Formula One cinematography in that film, it doesn't disappoint. This was 1969, when those stunt guys were flying through the air, a cameraperson had to fall with them. Think about that.
The other two guys are Scott Wilson and Gene Hackman (another reason I grabbed this one off the shelf; surely Hackman rentals have increased in the past few months), and even though Lancaster isn't really my guy, the three work as a great trio. There's a funny scene where they go to a nudie bar and Gene falls in love with one of the ladies. But I get it, the movie also features side character Bonnie Bedelia in her film debut and I believe that I fell in love with her - her beauty alone deserves a Blu-ray, while I was stuck watching an unfortunately ugly DVD.
It's also a great July 4th movie (I started this one on the morning of the holiday, the third and final reason I picked it up) because it's not about ra-ra jingoism or the president or some historical event. It feels like how a lot of people all across this country use their day off, by doing something stupid like watching someone do something stupid, in this case jumping out of a plane and trying not to splat on the ground like a cartoon. Some have better luck than others.
Credit: Each plot synopsis from Letterboxd via TMDb.
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