Movie Diary
For all his shortcomings and his patchy track record, I have enough fondness for M. Night Shyamalan's better films and his odd, fairly unique sensibility that I tend to root for him. But Split, his most critically and commercially successful movie in about 15 years, is a total piece of shit and I'm kind of disgusted that people were okay with it. The central tenet of the movie, that James McAvoy is a crazed killer with 23 distinct personalities, is by itself just an offensively stupid and irresponsible depiction of mental illness and disassociative identity disorder. But James McAvoy's actual performance is just a laughable waste of his talent and his commitment to the poorly conceived role. One personality is a macho New Yawk guy, one is a lisping 9-year-old boy, one is a fancy lady, he wouldn't run through this many simplistic stock characters in a night of hosting "Saturday Night Live." And the final scene of the movie, the one that ties the story into one of Shyamalan's actually good films, is so painfully awful and poorly executed it actually makes everything that precedes it seem even worse.
b) 1922
This is by far the best of the three Stephen King adaptations that have starred Thomas Jane, but that's not necessarily saying a whole lot since the other two are Dreamcatcher and The Mist. As a story there isn't much to it, it's more or less a The Tell-Tale Heart kind of thing about a murderer undone by his own guilt. I love Molly Parker and she really kind of had a great role in this despite the fact that she was dead for most of the movie.
c) Wheelman
I feel like there's this whole weird little bubble of action movies like Drive and Baby Driver about men of few words who spend most of the movie behind the wheel of a car, which, I dunno, it's bordering on tiresome. Seemed fairly exciting but I was pretty tired when I watched it and might have managed to nod off a bit.
d) Fist Fight
A comedy where the entire movie leads up to a fight between a grown man and a co-worker is not a bad idea, despite the fact that Tim Allen did it over a decade ago. Anyway, it's pretty fun, particularly the scenes with lots of improv from Jillian Bell and Tracy Morgan. It's odd to realize that Ice Cube playing a blustery tough guy not unlike his '90s rap persona is not something you see in his film roles that often, he kinda got into a much more laid back niche from Friday onward. But it is very entertaining to just scream on people and intimidate them for the whole movie. It's interesting to me that Max Greenfield from "New Girl" came up with the idea for this movie and produced it but isn't in it, especially since it's really easy to picture him in the Charlie Day role, so I wonder if that was ever the plan and just didn't pan out for some reason.
I feel like this is one of those sequels like Magic Mike XXL where it capitalized well on the goodwIll and sleeper hit success of the first movie but isn't actually as good. It's perfectly fine, and adds Peter Stormare and Laurence Fishburne to the rogues' gallery of badass aging actors, I just didn't think it was as memorable as the first. One thing I will always remember, however, is how ridiculous the subtitles looked in the portion of the movie that took place in Rome.
f) Life
I found it refreshing how little the promotional campaign gave away of what happens in this movie. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a pretty boilerplate Alien-type movie where the cool creepy-looking space monster picks off most of the human cast one by one. It was pretty unapologetically grisly and pessimistic, which I respected, but it could've been executed better. It seemed to set up a good idea for a sequel, but this movie was really not profitable, so that won't happen.
g) Why Him?
I had like a half hour to kill in a hotel room recently and put on HBO and watched the middle of this movie, and then went back later and watched the beginning and the end. Obviously, that's a terrible way to watch a movie, but this was not a particularly good movie, so the stakes were low. But it was interesting to see that middle section first, because all the scenes where James Franco and Bryan Cranston talking about Franco dating Cranston's daughter and wanting to marry her but she was completely offscreen. She is in the rest of the movie a bit but still, it was interesting how little the woman at the center of the story was present for it.
This is one of the low budget movies Taika Waititi made before he got the Thor: Ragnarok job. It's basically a mockumentary about ancient vampires living in a flat in New Zealand. Really funny stuff, felt very influenced by Monty Python movies in the way they kind of dedicated themselves to the premise while still being incredibly silly about it.
This is about some teens who watch a fictitious cheesy '80s horror movie and then magically end up inside the movie, a summer camp slasher flick, and have to avoid being killed by the movie's villain. Like most horror comedies, it kind of veers from funny to scary and I prefer the first half where the comedy is a little more present, but overall it was pretty enjoyable, good execution of the concept.
Speaking of cheesy '80s horror movies, this is a famously bad 1985 sequel to a well regarded Joe Dante movie. We haven't seen the original The Howling, which is really no matter because this movie has a more or less completely different cast and only tangentially related story. We watched Howling II because it was the subject of an episode of the podcast "How Did This Get Made?" that we went to a live taping of in D.C. (I'd never really heard the podcast before, but my wife is an avid listener, so I got tickets for her birthday). We missed the screening of the movie before the taping, so we watched the movie at home after listening to Paul Scheer and Tig Notaro talk about how terrible it was for a couple hours. And I think that worked out surprisingly well, the show was really funny even without having seen the movie yet, and the movie was funnier to watch after already hearing people point out all the strange terrible details.
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on Sunday, November 19, 2017 at 12:34 PM.
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