Movie Reviews
Film Review: DIG! XX – SM Mirror
DIG! XX is the reconceptualized version of one of the most celebrated rock documentaries ever made, DIG!. It is the story of The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols, two bands from the late 90s who were both considered “Next Big Things” by record company A&R representatives and label heads. It is the tale of the friendship and rivalry of the two band’s leaders, the brilliant “mad genius” Anton Newcombe, and the much more amenable and socially acceptable Courtney Taylor-Taylor, as much as it is about the fight between artists and record labels. You can watch DIG! XX online until Sunday, along with other Sundance films, on the film festival’s website.
The film’s synopsis is this: “DIG! XX is the 20th anniversary extended edition of the rock documentary DIG!, which adds new narration by The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Joel Gion, features 40+ minutes of never-before-seen footage, and brings this epic tale to today.”
“DIG! XX looks at the collision of art and commerce through the star-crossed friendship and bitter rivalry of dueling rock bands — The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Through their loves and obsessions, gigs, arrests, and death threats, uppers and downers, and ultimately, their chance at a piece of the profit-driven music business, they stage a self-proclaimed revolution in the music industry.”
Ondi Timoner, director, camera operator, musician wrangler, and editor of DIG! and David Timoner, camera operator, interviewer, and editor of DIG! XX definitely deserve so much credit for spending seven years filming the documentary when the two bands were not yet as successful as they would eventually turn out to be. The film’s images, shot on several different formats, have been gloriously upscaled, and the sound mix and quality have been enormously improved.
The Timoners filmed on faith and with the cinematic instinct that they had chosen worthy subjects. They would be rewarded beyond belief by that faith as the film went on to win the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance 2004. They should be commended for listening to that same instinct when it came time to film. When I interviewed Ondi, she said, “So, a lot of the magic of Dig! is just kind of knowing when to show up.” The proof is in the film.
The screening of DIG! XX at Sundance was prefaced by a short video from fan and musician Dave Grohl of Nirvana and The Foo Fighters, who named DIG! as his favorite rock documentary and thinks just as highly of DIG! XX. Ondi has named several rock and pop legends who are fans of the film, but Grohl has gone on the record at the festival. He also said that the film shows you what it is really like to be in a band.
One thing that I would recommend to you as a viewer of the film, and I definitely recommend that everyone watch DIG! XX, a new and even better film, is to view it from the perspective of what is currently going on in our society regarding A.I. Artists, musicians, actors, fine artists, and writers are feeling the existential threat of A.I. since many people have decided that it is a way to make art and consume art without having to deal with those pesky artists. Or pay them.
People love art but seem to hate, fear, and misunderstand artists. I believe that stems from the fear that the average consumer feels when faced with the concept of the creative urge. Many want fame and approval, but putting themselves on the line in front of a crowd and exposing their emotions and vulnerabilities is something they are terrified of.
They can’t understand the creative process, and it frightens them. It also angers them that these sometimes arrogant and strange musicians and other creatives can do it. It stirs envy that curdles into a hatred of the creators, and I think this is essentially why corporations and executives, depressed about their lack of creative ability, seek to take advantage of artists and take the majority of the profit from art that is commercially available. They enjoy swindling artists that they feel inferior to because it gives the crime that extra zest. Make no mistake: the music industry has been stealing from artists for decades.
Anton Newcombe is a highly intelligent musical savant, polymath, multi-instrumentalist, musician, band leader, producer, and fine artist who has primarily been misunderstood because of his anger and dark humor. When I interviewed him for The Recording Academy, I found out how much he loves creating music and how his live shows have actually morphed into events where he puts so much energy into creating a mystical experience.
Newcombe has also spent many years and some time in the documentary telling anyone who will listen that the music industry is a “Mafia.” If you think of some of his “antics” as being similar to the testing that Jim Morrison used to be known for, he might be slightly easier for you to understand, but remember that to him, this is a deadly serious fight for his life. Making music and art is everything to him; when he feels that his creative autonomy and survival are being threatened, he will react badly. No one else is quite like him, even though his importance in music has been likened to that of Bob Dylan by no less than Anthony Bourdain. He is one of the most extraordinary musical talents of the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first centuries.
When you watch DIG! Xan audience’s natural tendency is to side with the group that seems more normal and happy, The Dandy Warhols, and deride the seemingly more dangerous band, The Brian Jonestown Massacre – even though rock and roll are supposed to be dangerous. When you watch both bands snort coke, the audience seems to give the Dandies a pass and only consider BJM as the dangerous druggies.
They’re both doing the same drugs.
One of the advantages of DIG! XX over the original is that the Timoners added the narration of Joel Gion, The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s percussionist and frontman. The first DIG! only had the somewhat snide observations of Courtney Taylor-Taylor, where he would talk about how well-adjusted and successful his band was and what a bunch of screw-ups BJM supposedly was. Occasionally, he would admit that BJM was a better band and that Anton was more of a visionary than he, but his version of the events colored the audience’s perception in a very real way. That’s called P.R. One of the things that Taylor-Taylor and the Dandies excel at projecting an image of success and normality. Gion’s witty ripostes rip back some of the narrative control of the film and are highly entertaining and enlightening.
The other advantage that Ondi and David Timoner gave to this update is that they could use the vast archive of footage sitting in Ondi’s garage and add scenes that give more context to the events. This is integral to this new version of the film because it shines a light on the band members’ personal motivations and, sometimes, changes scenes and the course of the film with new information. Film is a visual medium, and while voiceover and telling the audience what is happening is important, showing the audience what happened is even more crucial to storytelling.
For example, in one fight that BJM had on tour in Chicago, you can see Anton peacefully napping while the others argue. Does that mean that Anton is totally innocent? No, but it does show that not all of the angry arguments involved him. DIG! XX also shows his more sensitive, gentle, and hugely magnetic side that attracts so many people. Along with the tragic sequence about his parents and their emotional neglect of Anton, it goes a long way toward showing where his anger comes from, but also why people really want to be in his orbit.
Another is that the Timoners were also able to add newer footage almost up to the current day that shows that far from being a failure, Anton Newcombe and The Brian Jonestown Massacre had not only survived but were thriving while touring the world. One thing that happens at screenings of DIG! is that people assume that the ending means the end of BJM, which is far from the truth.
It is also important to remember that musicians, as more free-thinking and emotional people, have had a tendency to engage in substances and violence. Also, when one is drinking or doing drugs, there is a pronounced tendency to behave very badly. As Courtney Taylor-Taylor observes, “When you have a pack of junkies on the road, not eating, not sleeping and drinking. A lot. Will some of them get grumpy and start fighting? No, probably not.”
A fairly recent example of a musician engaging in violence in public is Cardi B reacting to having water thrown at her onstage and hurling her mic back at the person in the crowd.
Joel Gion’s new narration and additional footage give some perspective to the infamous Viper Room fight, in particular, which is needed. While violence is not cool, it does put the fights in perspective. It’s not just random violence from a terrible person.
Ultimately, the crowning success of DIG! XX is the willingness of the filmmakers, Ondi and David Timoner, to go back and add so much that it creates a much more vivid and accurate portrait of the events in the two bands’ lives. It is the best and most truthful rock documentary ever made because it takes such an unflinching and honest look at what musicians do, how they create, and what it is really like to deal with the music industry, which is nothing but a trap.
The filmmaker’s choice to show the unvarnished words and actions of Newcombe, in particular, are very instructive to musicians in the audience. It is a cautionary tale, but not against sticking up for yourself as Newcombe insists on doing, in his own darkly charismatic way, but against believing what record companies are telling you and conforming to rules that only apply to some.
The new edition gives the audience even more of an inkling of what Newcombe is actually saying about music industry exploitation and a view of Taylor-Taylor’s lament, “If I was just a little bit smarter.” There is also a revelation about Taylor-Taylor that takes some of the shiny halo off his head, which is only fair. During the Q&A at Sundance, Dandy Zia McCabe also admitted that the inner workings of The Dandies were far from what was advertised as “the most well-adjusted band in the world.”
It gives the observant viewer the message that the system is exploitative and that unless you chart your own course, as difficult as that may be, you will lose. But concurrently, it tells you that you will pay a price for choosing your own path.
DIG! XX is magnificent and fiery, an artistic telling of a story that is frequently misunderstood because of our society’s tendency to put a premium on obedience rather than free will, even in art. Highly entertaining and shocking, it delves into the artistic soul and the insecurities that artists give to themselves and, inadvertently, to the audience.
DIG! XX is truly a new film that gives the audience the opportunity to understand everyone in the two bands better and discover why they did what they did—the beauty of music up against the greed and despair of humanity’s worst urges. It also gives people a humanistic portrait of how difficult it is to be an artist in a culture that only values artistic success in the form of wealth and fame.
There’s a photo of me (below) from the mid-1980s, when I was around age 5, standing on the hood of an old Plymouth in the overgrown field behind my childhood home. I’m holding He-Man’s shield in one hand and his sword, made of yellow plastic, in the other. (Unrelatedly, I’m also wearing an Incredible Hulk shirt in the picture.) And I’m grinning with pride because I have thoroughly conquered the jalopy. The vehicle never ran again, probably because I fucking destroyed it with my sword and shield. Around that time, I also had a He-Man birthday cake and a sizable collection of Mattel’s Masters of the Universe action figures. They were my first foray into toys of this kind, later replaced by G.I. Joe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and X-Men. However, my nostalgia for He-Man remains almost nonexistent today, perhaps because, looking back at the material, the mythology remains at once weird and unmemorable, and neither the popular animated series nor the 1987 film, Masters of the Universe, starring Dolph Lundgren and Frank Langella, holds up well.
Over the years, Mattel has tried to revive the toy line and cartoon, but the company’s biggest effort thus far is the new feature from Amazon MGM Studios, which reportedly spent upwards of $200 million on a blockbuster-sized Masters of the Universe. If the 1980s versions of this franchise unabashedly targeted the preadolescent boy demographic, the new iteration has been reconfigured (by a sausage fest of credited screenwriters: Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, and David Callaham) to adopt a more conventional mold. The movie also incorporates the last three decades of ironic reassessment: the series’ very 1980s obsession with bulging muscles; the loincloth-centric costumes, all of which look like rejected designs from Zardoz (1974); the vague eroticism between He-Man and several characters, including his nemesis, Skeletor; and the eccentricities of the cartoon, from the many heads thrown back in laughter to the bizarre characters—all of which started first as action figures (Stinkor, Mantenna, etc.), around which the writers built a lame storyline.
Despite its origins, Masters of the Universe sets out to become a four-quadrant feature, appealing to everyone, and in that, no one in particular. The story is too bloated for little children, with a 142-minute runtime that challenged the attention spans of the kids in my prescreening, who became restless after an hour. Admittedly, so did I. The material’s self-awareness and humor aren’t memorable enough to distinguish it from other, better examples in this genre, such as Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)—a movie that I enjoy more with each subsequent viewing. And director Travis Knight can’t decide whether the audience should take these characters seriously or laugh at their inherent silliness. He attempts both and does neither very well. The result did not rekindle my nostalgia for this chapter of my childhood; it didn’t create an exciting new take for audiences of all ages, either.
A protracted opening establishes the distant realm called Eternia, where sword-and-sandal heroes stand alongside robots and flying ships with laser guns. Eternia’s resident baddie, Skeletor (voiced by Jared Leto, doing an R-rolling master-thespian thing), wants the Sword of Power, which imbues its wielder with, as you might guess, power. But it’s kept in Castle Grayskull, home of King Randor (James Purefoy), who’s disappointed by his son, Adam (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt), a young boy more interested in goofing around than learning to fight. When Skeletor attacks the castle and proves victorious, the Enchantress (Morena Baccarin), the magically inclined protector of Grayskull, sends Adam away to Earth along with the coveted sword. What happens then? Did a couple of farmers adopt him à la Superman? Or did he grow up in the foster system? The writers ignore such practical questions, picking up the story years later, when the adult Adam (now a hulking Nicholas Galitzine) works in corporate human resources. After Adam finally locates his sword, which was lost when he was transported from Eternia to Earth, he eventually finds his way home with the help of his childhood friend, Teela (Camila Mendes), to retake Grayskull from Skeletor.
Knight’s main source of inspiration, besides the cartoon and earlier movie, seems to be the similarly themed cult classic Flash Gordon (1980). Masters of the Universe’s music features identical-sounding Howard Blake-style guitar riffs and, to echo the original songs Queen wrote for Flash Gordon, the production uses Queen’s “Princes of the Universe” on the soundtrack. In other areas, Knight directs a conventional franchise movie with choppily edited and CGI-heavy battle scenes full of anonymous violence, lifeless chase sequences, digital backdrops resembling video-game environments, and shameless product placements for Coca-Cola and Amazon. The VFX sometimes look impressive; at other times, they look cheap and generic. Fortunately, Knight’s production also offers practical effects and prosthetics for some characters, most memorably the cyborg Trap Jaw. Knight’s secret weapon is costume designer Richard Sale, who visualizes the inherently absurd look of these characters, for better or worse, in tangible garb. The actors inhabiting the excellent costumes don’t have much to do, though. Ask yourself why they hired Kristen Wiig to voice Roboto, a bland robot character whose dialogue could have easily been performed by anyone else, or even just replaced with the beeps and boops of a Star Wars droid. When you have Kristen Wiig, use her.
Elsewhere, Masters of the Universe attempts to be self-aware in its irony and sexually suggestive underpinnings. There’s a running gag about how practically everyone can’t keep their eyes off Adam after he becomes his heroic alter-ego, He-Man, given his oiled-up muscles and blonde locks. But under Adam’s pink shirt, he still looks buff, making his eventual Hulk-like transformation into a muscle-bound barbarian unremarkable. Elsewhere, I liked the detail of Adam growing up on Earth and forgetting everyone’s names on Eternia, so he makes up their names based on their physical characteristics. A man with a big metal hand becomes Fisto (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson), and another with a metal head-butting helmet becomes Ram-Man (Jon Xue Zhang). The writers take advantage of this with veiled dirty jokes about fisting and Ram-Man “giving head” to Skeletor’s goons. That’s about as clever as the movie gets. As for character development, there’s almost none. Skeletor, for instance, wants to be bad for the sake of being bad. His motivations are nonexistent, resulting in an obvious, uninteresting, and one-dimensional villain.
A key series in the conservative, Reagan-era 1980s, the Masters of the Universe cartoon and previous movie valued strength and power, muscles and might. Today, that message has negative, regressive associations with the political right, which often looks at this period from a fond standpoint. To avoid alienating any part of their audience, the filmmakers desperately try to please everyone with a mild progressive commentary to counter the franchise’s original themes. Adam’s character must learn to “be a man” to please his father, King Randor, and his makeshift father figure, Man-at-Arms (Idris Elba, in a chummy reformed drunk role). But there’s also a half-hearted message that Adam, having worked in human resources, knows the value of empathy and emotional intelligence. For a while there, the movie even claims you can’t solve every problem with muscles—that is, until He-Man resolves the conflict by pummeling Skeletor with his fists. The movie’s message is ultimately nonexistent. The committee making this movie has carefully avoided any line-in-the-sand worldview, all in an attempt to manufacture a box-office hit that will please everyone and offend no one.
That’s exactly the problem with Masters of the Universe. It’s so afraid to have a perspective or be about something that nothing onscreen has an impact. This is not to say every movie must have a substantive message. Sometimes, a mindless adventure is enough. However, even on those terms, there’s no tension or danger here because Skeletor is never all that menacing, and Adam alternates between self-parody and earnest heroism. None of the emotional beats land, not the many father-son dynamics nor the hero’s journey. And the production’s competing tones, from its intentional camp to its sword-swinging adventure, lack the balance of wit and scope that Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves so delightfully captured. For much of the runtime, I felt bored and, aside from a few chuckles at the childish humor, disengaged from everything happening. Perhaps Roboto describes the movie best when referring to life as “a series of absurdities leading to infinite nothingness.”
Photo: Brian the Barbarian
Movie Reviews
‘Masters of the Universe’: What Critics Are Saying About the He-Man Movie Starring Nicholas Galitzine and Jared Leto
He-Man lands in theaters Friday, and reviews for Masters of the Universe are now in.
The film, a live-action adaptation of the Mattel franchise from director Travis Knight, follows Prince Adam of Eternia, who crash-lands on Earth as a child and is separated from his Sword of Power. Raised as an ordinary man named Adam Glenn, he eventually recovers the sword and returns to save his homeland, where he faces off against Skeletor.
Nicholas Galitzine stars as He-Man/Prince Adam/Adam Glenn, while Jared Leto plays the villain Skeletor. The cast also includes Idris Elba as Man-at-Arms, Camila Mendes as Teela, Alison Brie as Evil-Lyn, Morena Baccarin as Sorceress and Kristen Wiig as Roboto.
Masters of the Universe celebrated its Los Angeles premiere last month, where the original He-Man from the 1987 film, Dolph Lundgren, praised Galitzine’s performance while speaking with The Hollywood Reporter: “You need a guy who is a leading-man type, and the muscles and the strength are secondary. You can always create that, and I think Nicholas did that. He built himself up. When I did it, it was a little more like I had the physique and had to access my boyish side to find the character.”
As of Tuesday, the movie holds a 74 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. To find out what critics are saying, read on.
THR’s Frank Scheck wrote, “The film winds up feeling so much like one of those fringe festival musical theater parodies that you find yourself waiting for the characters to burst into song … Masters of the Universe touches all the fan-serving bases, with a fun cameo by a certain star of a previous film incarnation and enough post-credit sequences to guarantee several sequels. But it all comes off as terribly forced, as if everyone involved was already trying to figure out exactly how much they’ll earn signing autographs at future Comic-Cons.”
IGN’s Clint Gage wrote, “Masters of the Universe is so much funnier than I expected, and the fight scenes are choreographed and photographed in a way that gives the sequences just enough flair to make them stand out (even if they’re not revolutionizing superhero style fisticuffs on screen). While Nicholas Galitzine and Idris Elba provide the thematic structure to the film, Jared Leto’s Skeletor gives a delightfully weird and cartoonish energy to every scene he’s in.”
YouTube critic Jeremy Jahns also highlighted Leto’s performance in his review, “Standout performance and character in Masters of the Universe: Jared Leto’s Skeletor,” Jahns said. “He was the most fun happening on screen at any given time.” He also added, “It does feel like a few different movies crushed into one. A few different ideas of what a Masters of the Universe movie should or would be. And most importantly, it had these moments of heart and life lessons that I actually liked that didn’t always land because sometimes the comedy is just there to eclipse it.”
Inverse’s Ryan Britt wrote, “The idea of navigating your childhood hopes and fears, and incorporating those things into your adult life, is — somewhat appropriately for a movie based on an old cartoon — at the heart of the film. Not everyone who goes to see Masters of the Universe will have grown up with He-Man, but this film will make you wish that you did. And, at the same time, it’ll make you feel grateful that he’s back and quite literally, better than ever.”
The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee had a less favorable take on the film, writing in his review, “Amazon’s head-scratching $200m-budgeted misfire fails to explain why so much time, money and effort has been wasted on a movie based on a toy that kids just don’t play with any more … There’s just too much distracting confusion here — from Galitzine’s unsure performance to the script’s swirl of competing tones to the very question of why this needed to exist — for it to transport us as we both hope and expect.”
Carolina Caroline, 2025.
Directed by Adam Rehmeier.
Starring Samara Weaving, Kyle Gallner, Kyra Sedgwick, Jon Gries, Tommy G. Kendrick, P.J. Sosko, Gregg Gilmore, Jamald Gardner, Matthew Smitley, Ed Formica, and Robert Stevens Wayne.
SYNOPSIS:
A young woman joins a charming con man on the run, leaving a trail of crime and passion as they hustle through the Southeast in search of her estranged mother.
The eponymous Caroline of director Adam Rehmeier’s Carolina Caroline has never properly met her mother. That woman abandoned her and her father (Jon Gries) before she was one year old. Moving to South Carolina and growing up there, it’s also safe to say that the unfulfilled Caroline, working at a local convenience store and coming home to a father with no ambitions to leave his comfortable home chair let alone get out and see the world (actively dismissing soccer in the process, suggesting that there also might be some unsurprising internalized racism given his age and having only known the South), hasn’t properly lived.
A chance encounter with scuzzy but charming con man Oliver (Kyle Gallner, playing in the type of role he regularly excels in), which mostly consists of Caroline observing a mental-manipulation hustle at the cash register, swapping dollar bills with confused clerks to come away with more money than he entered with, lures her to him. Impressed with her ability to pick up on the small-time psychological heist, Oliver decides to take Caroline on as his protege and partner in crime. Naturally, his fascination is also romantic, considering Caroline is an attractive woman played by Samara Weaving.
While going out to dinner together, Oliver also demonstrates a wealth of knowledge about human behavior that helps him predict how people will react in certain situations, opening the door for him to steal something of value or play successful mind games. This also greatly intrigues Caroline, as part of the reason she has never expanded her horizons beyond her small South Carolina town is that, deep down, she fears there are similarities to her mother and that she will end up hurting someone. Meanwhile, as we are watching this, we justifiably wonder if trusting Oliver at all will come back to haunt her.
Nevertheless, as the duo embarks on a string of crimes across the Southeast that gradually escalates in seriousness (at first, it is teaching Caroline how to perfect the cash register con, but not long before moving into identity theft and actual bank robberies resembling Bonnie and Clyde), it is called into question which one here might be more dangerous in the grand scheme of their characterizations. The eventual destination is South Carolina, where Caroline will hopefully meet her mother and get answers to her burning questions, including why she and her father were abandoned in the first place.
And while there is no denying that Carolina Caroline is an effectively performed film with layers and nuances that fortunately saved the film from one-dimensionality, often drawing immersion from lived-in locales (whether it be towns themselves or the bars and banks characters end up in), with the occasional person who comes across more as someone pulled off the street rather than a traditional actor, some of the screenwriting here from Tom Dean borders on hokey and unconvincing.
This also leaves the film feeling as if it is sometimes nervously afraid to commit to the story’s grimy grittiness, more concerned with keeping the characters likable than with pushing them a step too far into moral ambiguity. It’s all a bit too clean and safe for a movie about a woman slowly becoming a career criminal whilst smitten with her mentor/friend, either testing herself to see if she can be destructive like her mother, or as a means to find a semblance of freedom in justified thieving and separate herself from a boring life. Samara Weaving is terrific throughout, but especially in the later stages, determined to push back against a terrible hand of cards dealt to her in life, ready to make her own future at any cost.
To put it bluntly, though, too much is accomplished by depicting robberies and intimacy through montages, typically filled with country songs, that don’t necessarily allow one to invest in the characters and their actions. There is a hollowness underneath the otherwise entertaining surface. Even the title and nickname Carolina Caroline feels like a misguided eccentricity, and something that belongs in that straight-up romance. Thankfully, the direction and performances capture the humanity of the characters and the story, making the inevitable third-act tragedy engaging and heartbreaking.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder
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