Movie Diary
Something that occasionally happens to me is I get booked for 2 jobs in one day with an awkward amount of time in between where I don't really have time to go home and have to bum around D.C. for a few hours, so I catch a movie. Last time that happened, I saw The Edge Of Seventeen, which had earned raves as "the best teen movie since whatever the last great teen movie was" (for the record, it was Easy A). And I thought it was pretty damn good. Even as a guy who didn't have an experience like Hailee Steinfeld's character has in the movie of losing a parent at a young age, it really managed to evoke what a hard year it is when you're 17, it kind of brought me back to that age. It's rated R and really a lot of the humor in the dialogue came from this having some of the most colorful swearing in a movie in recent memory, and Woody Harrelson and Hayden Szeto and Steinfeld are all great.
b) Other People
This is an autobiographical film directed by an "SNL" writer, about an "SNL" writer going home to his family while his mom's dying of cancer. It's one of those folksy movies where a comedy professional tells withering stories about their family, reminds me a lot of Tig Notaro's recent series "One Mississippi" in both content and tone, but not as memorable. Also I have a hard time buying Jesse Plemons as a comedy writer for some reason.
c) Search Party
Not to be confused with the unrelated "Search Party" sitcom I recently posted about, this Search Party is a movie full of sitcom stars from "Silicon Valley," "Happy Endings," "Community," and other good shows. It starts out kind of funny but quickly becomes a loud rambling wannabe Hangover, which I decided to say even before I realized that the screenwriter worked on Hangover II.
d) Youth
I went into this movie, about Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as two aging artists on holiday in the Alps kind of expecting an upmarket Bucket List and was pleasantly surprised that it was a really textured, beautifully directed film with a lot of great dialogue. This is Italian director Paulo Sorrentino's second English language film and I'm suddenly anticipating "The Young Pope" given that he created it.
e) Krampus
My wife and I were excited to sit down this week and watch a Christmas-themed horror movie, and usually horror comedies are right up our alley and the cast was promising. But as it went on, we really just got this sinking feeling and it turned out to be not much fun and in fact kind of a bummer.
f) Crimson Peak
I love Guillermo del Toro and appreciated that he finally did another movie kind of in the same wheel house as Pan's Labyrinth, even if that movie's in camera effects really put the CGI in Crimson Peak to shame.
g) The Giver
This movie has the most overqualified supporting cast of grown ups in any Young Adult novel adaptation, they really didn't need Jeff Bridges AND Meryl Streep (although the whole time this movie was out I seriously thought it was Anjelica Huston in the commercials, which would've made more sense).
My youngest son has been heavy into "Sesame Street" lately, so I put this on when it came on TV, it was funny to finally watch some of the movie that birthed the 'evil Kermit' Twitter meme. I didn't watch the whole thing but it definitely felt like a step down from the previous recent Muppets movie, and I felt very strange watching Scooter sing "Moves Like Jagger."
i) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
I'd somehow never seen the original movie before, so I put it on the other day, and kinda felt like I knew it already from all the famous scenes. I'm really impressed by how unrelenting it is, though, like you really feel the fear and suffering of the victims more than in most contemporary horror flicks.
I'd somehow never seen the original movie before, so I put it on the other day, and kinda felt like I knew it already from all the famous scenes. I'm really impressed by how unrelenting it is, though, like you really feel the fear and suffering of the victims more than in most contemporary horror flicks.
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on Friday, December 16, 2016 at 11:45 AM.
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