Movie Diary
a) The Cabin In The Woods
I'm generally in favor of playful or satirical horror movies that goof on the genre in some way or another, but this just didn't really work for me much at all. It wasn't the slightest bit scary or creepy (which was mainly a problem because they wasted so much money or effects, many of which were dimly lit and crappy-looking), but it also wasn't that funny, aside from the Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins stuff. And the more they tried to escalate the premise for bigger laughs, I just got further away from caring about what was going on at all.
b) Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
I just kinda had this movie on in the background one night when I was up working on a writing deadline, but when I did pay attention to it I found the direction and the kid actor's performance really cloying.
c) The Descendants
This movie was far from perfect, but I found it surprisingly affecting, particularly for an Alexander Payne movie since I think of his stuff as being really dryly funny. Shailene Woodley kind of held the movie together as a good foil for Clooney's character.
d) The Sitter
I'm totally fine with David Gordon Green totally hijacking his own legacy as a 'serious' filmmaker to direct a bunch of goofball comedy, because I thought George Washington was a crock of shit anyway. This movie was just OK, though -- the turn halfway through where Jonah Hill's character became a little sympathetic was played well and wasn't totally expected, given how nasty most of the humor in the first half was. As many dumb, useless gags as funny ones, though.
e) The Thing
Haven't seen the original, and I know I really should, but I thought this was aight, as these things go. The gore and effects got pretty wild and over the top but never truly scary, whole thing didn't have that much of a pulse to begin with.
f) 50/50
Out of all the movies and TV shows and people living with cancer in the last few years, this felt more involving and less contrived than pretty much all of them, and not just because I know that the screenplay was autobiographical and fact-based. The way the whole thing unfolded and took on all these emotional contours felt really organic, and I thought maybe Seth Rogen would feel forced as comic relief but he worked pretty well. First time I believe Joseph Gordon-Levitt as anything besides a girly little space alien.
g) Dream House
I'm usually good about avoiding spoilers, but sometimes with I'm halfheartedly watching a movie and don't really care how it ends I start looking up plot summaries on Wikipedia or whatever, and when I did this less than halfway through I was just astounded and became fascinated with what a totally awful idea the whole thing was. I actually am kind of surprised and disappointed in Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz that they read this script and thought it was a good idea.
h) A Dangerous Method
This is one of those movies where the true story it's based on is so damned interesting that I find myself much more curious about what really happened than whatever dramatic license the filmmakers took with it. I don't know how to really critique Keira Knightley's performance since she was playing a deeply insane person but even with that in mind it felt a bit much and rang hollow.
i) Wild Target
I'm starting to get to the point where I will watch Emily Blunt in anything, not just because she's really quite attractive, but because she always gives a good performance and generally seems to have good taste in projects (well, I just remember she was in The Wolfman, but hey, exception that proves the rule...oh wait she was in Gnomeo & Juliet? fuck). So even though I have a pretty strong aversion at this point to post-Tarantino hitman comedies (or post-Guy Ritchie British hitman comedies), I gave this a shot and really enjoyed, Blunt and Bill Nighy are great together and there's a nice weird energy to the whole thing.
j) Daydream Nation
While Emily Blunt generally rewards my loyalty, Kat Dennings punishes my desire to watch her in anything over and over with Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist and "2 Broke Girls" and so on. I kind of expected this to be worst of all, since it's called Daydream Nation and has a major character named Thurston, and the pullquote used to promote the movie calls it "Juno as re-imagined by David Lynch, or a funnier, sunnier Donnie Darko," which, fucking hell. It was almost kinda sorta good, or at least entertaining, though? In terms of both plot and cinematic style it was just a trainwreck of bad and/or incompatible ideas, but it didn't take itself too seriously at least. It was weird to hear a line from Beautiful Girls ("a girl like that's just born with a boyfriend") repeated almost verbatim.
k) Pretty Persuasion
Like Daydream Nation, this movie kind of goofs on the cliche of high school girls being involved with older male teachers, and mines it for a lot of black comedy in a way that reminds me of The Opposite Of Sex, in a way that resembling movies from nearly a decade earlier made it feel kind of dated. It kind of got me started on this odd train of thought about how cynical or satirical takes on inappropriate relationships between teenage girls and adult men have kind of been this preoccupation of middlebrow dramedies ever since the turn of the century when Election and American Beauty and Ghost World came out. It's kind of creepy.
l) The Good Student
After watching a couple movies about high school girls and their teachers, I decide to make it a creepy triptych and also watched this, which I think wanted to be a black comedy but was just kind of dumb and sitcommy and edgy in only the lamest way possible.
m) Femme Fatale
A lot of models have tried to make the jump to movies and turned out to be completely bereft of some quality that makes that leap possible (although somehow Malin Akerman still gets cast in things, bafflingly). So I think Rebecca Romijn deserves some credit for really having screen presence, regardless of her acting skills or roles or whatever, and it almost seems like a shame that the one time she got to carry a semi-big movie it sunk like a stone. This is really pretty good, though, has to be one of the better later De Palma movies and the kind of retro, Hitchcockian stylized direction makes its kind of silly, lurid elements work better than they have a right to (although the heist setpiece at the beginning is just absurd by any measure).
n) The Birds
Speaking of Hitchcock! Somehow never saw this before, not really in the vein of his films that I like best, but it was cool to finally watch something this iconic for myself, there are a few visuals that are just kind of amazing.
I'm generally in favor of playful or satirical horror movies that goof on the genre in some way or another, but this just didn't really work for me much at all. It wasn't the slightest bit scary or creepy (which was mainly a problem because they wasted so much money or effects, many of which were dimly lit and crappy-looking), but it also wasn't that funny, aside from the Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins stuff. And the more they tried to escalate the premise for bigger laughs, I just got further away from caring about what was going on at all.
b) Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
I just kinda had this movie on in the background one night when I was up working on a writing deadline, but when I did pay attention to it I found the direction and the kid actor's performance really cloying.
c) The Descendants
This movie was far from perfect, but I found it surprisingly affecting, particularly for an Alexander Payne movie since I think of his stuff as being really dryly funny. Shailene Woodley kind of held the movie together as a good foil for Clooney's character.
d) The Sitter
I'm totally fine with David Gordon Green totally hijacking his own legacy as a 'serious' filmmaker to direct a bunch of goofball comedy, because I thought George Washington was a crock of shit anyway. This movie was just OK, though -- the turn halfway through where Jonah Hill's character became a little sympathetic was played well and wasn't totally expected, given how nasty most of the humor in the first half was. As many dumb, useless gags as funny ones, though.
e) The Thing
Haven't seen the original, and I know I really should, but I thought this was aight, as these things go. The gore and effects got pretty wild and over the top but never truly scary, whole thing didn't have that much of a pulse to begin with.
f) 50/50
Out of all the movies and TV shows and people living with cancer in the last few years, this felt more involving and less contrived than pretty much all of them, and not just because I know that the screenplay was autobiographical and fact-based. The way the whole thing unfolded and took on all these emotional contours felt really organic, and I thought maybe Seth Rogen would feel forced as comic relief but he worked pretty well. First time I believe Joseph Gordon-Levitt as anything besides a girly little space alien.
g) Dream House
I'm usually good about avoiding spoilers, but sometimes with I'm halfheartedly watching a movie and don't really care how it ends I start looking up plot summaries on Wikipedia or whatever, and when I did this less than halfway through I was just astounded and became fascinated with what a totally awful idea the whole thing was. I actually am kind of surprised and disappointed in Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz that they read this script and thought it was a good idea.
h) A Dangerous Method
This is one of those movies where the true story it's based on is so damned interesting that I find myself much more curious about what really happened than whatever dramatic license the filmmakers took with it. I don't know how to really critique Keira Knightley's performance since she was playing a deeply insane person but even with that in mind it felt a bit much and rang hollow.
i) Wild Target
I'm starting to get to the point where I will watch Emily Blunt in anything, not just because she's really quite attractive, but because she always gives a good performance and generally seems to have good taste in projects (well, I just remember she was in The Wolfman, but hey, exception that proves the rule...oh wait she was in Gnomeo & Juliet? fuck). So even though I have a pretty strong aversion at this point to post-Tarantino hitman comedies (or post-Guy Ritchie British hitman comedies), I gave this a shot and really enjoyed, Blunt and Bill Nighy are great together and there's a nice weird energy to the whole thing.
j) Daydream Nation
While Emily Blunt generally rewards my loyalty, Kat Dennings punishes my desire to watch her in anything over and over with Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist and "2 Broke Girls" and so on. I kind of expected this to be worst of all, since it's called Daydream Nation and has a major character named Thurston, and the pullquote used to promote the movie calls it "Juno as re-imagined by David Lynch, or a funnier, sunnier Donnie Darko," which, fucking hell. It was almost kinda sorta good, or at least entertaining, though? In terms of both plot and cinematic style it was just a trainwreck of bad and/or incompatible ideas, but it didn't take itself too seriously at least. It was weird to hear a line from Beautiful Girls ("a girl like that's just born with a boyfriend") repeated almost verbatim.
k) Pretty Persuasion
Like Daydream Nation, this movie kind of goofs on the cliche of high school girls being involved with older male teachers, and mines it for a lot of black comedy in a way that reminds me of The Opposite Of Sex, in a way that resembling movies from nearly a decade earlier made it feel kind of dated. It kind of got me started on this odd train of thought about how cynical or satirical takes on inappropriate relationships between teenage girls and adult men have kind of been this preoccupation of middlebrow dramedies ever since the turn of the century when Election and American Beauty and Ghost World came out. It's kind of creepy.
l) The Good Student
After watching a couple movies about high school girls and their teachers, I decide to make it a creepy triptych and also watched this, which I think wanted to be a black comedy but was just kind of dumb and sitcommy and edgy in only the lamest way possible.
m) Femme Fatale
A lot of models have tried to make the jump to movies and turned out to be completely bereft of some quality that makes that leap possible (although somehow Malin Akerman still gets cast in things, bafflingly). So I think Rebecca Romijn deserves some credit for really having screen presence, regardless of her acting skills or roles or whatever, and it almost seems like a shame that the one time she got to carry a semi-big movie it sunk like a stone. This is really pretty good, though, has to be one of the better later De Palma movies and the kind of retro, Hitchcockian stylized direction makes its kind of silly, lurid elements work better than they have a right to (although the heist setpiece at the beginning is just absurd by any measure).
n) The Birds
Speaking of Hitchcock! Somehow never saw this before, not really in the vein of his films that I like best, but it was cool to finally watch something this iconic for myself, there are a few visuals that are just kind of amazing.
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