Movie Diary
a) Arrival
I feel like this movie is in this little mini genre of movies that attempt to tell earnest, emotional stories about the human condition under the guise of a big sci-fi movie with spaceships and expensive visual effects. But the most famous movies that have attempted that, Contact and Interstellar, are pretty middling and divisive films, and I think Arrival succeeded in a lot of the places where they failed. I am forever complaining about trailers and ad campaigns giving too much of the movie away, and Arrival exercised great restraint on that count, so I hesitate to even say too much about the story. But I liked the way the concept was unspooled, and the visual effects were really cool, especially the aliens and especially the weird sideways gravity thing.
b) You Get Me
One of my guilty pleasures is how Swimfan did a high school version of a trashy erotic thriller, and You Get Me is very much an attempt at the same thing. But listen, it's no Swimfan.
c) CHiPs
Making expensive movie versions of campy old TV shows has been commonplace since the '90s, but it felt like some kind of desperate nadir last year when studios spent tens of millions of dollars on Baywatch and CHiPs and then seemed shocked that people weren't interested. I feel bad for Michael Pena because he deserved a better shot at headlining a major film. Dax Shepard directing Kristen Bell in a bathing suit on a "hey check out my wife!" tip was pretty weird, but she did look amazing.
d) Kong: Skull Island
My long running joke/sincere criticism of King Kong movies is that there's an island full of giant animals and fucking dinosaurs and making it all about the big gorilla is kind of burying the lede. So if nothing else, Kong: Skull Island is a pretty good corrective to that issue. But it really felt like less than the sum of its parts, especially when you take into account what a big talented cast it had. Sam Jackson and John C. Reilly are incapable of not being entertaining, so they definitely stepped up. But the director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, is one of these guys who went straight from small budget pictures to an enormous $100 million effects budget, and I don't think he really made that jump well.
e) Hidden Figures
This was pretty spectacular, I really love things like this that capture just what our space program was up against in the '60s and how completely mind boggling their success was and how many brilliant people had to work together to make it work. And the cast was obviously pretty splendid, Taraji P. Henson in particular. My wife is a PhD. and I really liked watching a film with her that paid such beautiful tribute to women of science.
f) Office Christmas Party
It's really amazing how these big ensemble comedies can just get together a dozen people who always play the same kind of character and have them all play to type. You know exactly what you're getting from a Jason Bateman character, from a T.J. Miller character, a Rob Corddry character, and so on. It wasn't bad, Kate McKinnon and Sam Richardson in particular had great moments, but it was just so totally predictable even when it escalated to the crazy 'unpredictable' climax.
g) Trolls
Of all the big animated movies that my kids have had in rotation in the house lately, this is definitely close to The Secret Life of Pets in the running for most irritating. Troll dolls were always weird and creepy so I guess inevitably they'd make a movie and it'd be weird and creepy.
h) Florence Foster Jenkins
You never watch a Meryl Streep movie and say she was no good in it, but this was really one of those Oscar noms she didn't need, nobody's ever gonna remember this movie in the overall context of her career.
i) Cell
Cell phones have become such a big piece of horror movies because either they're a plot point or they're oddly absent or have to be rendered unusable for the story to move forward. So it was kind of fun to see this Stephen King adaptation where cell phones are the catalyst of this zombie apocalypse. It really just wasn't any good, though, even the super bleak ending just wasn't satisfying.
j) The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
My wife liked the Hunger Games novels so we went to see the first 3 movies in the theater, but then she saw the last movie with her mom so I'm just now catching up to it. And really, I respect how the story ended, but after the 2nd and 3rd movies took it to some interesting places, I felt like it was pretty anticlimactic, a few good sequences but it felt like a lot of the best supporting characters were barely in it, definitely my least favorite of the series.
Of all the big animated movies that my kids have had in rotation in the house lately, this is definitely close to The Secret Life of Pets in the running for most irritating. Troll dolls were always weird and creepy so I guess inevitably they'd make a movie and it'd be weird and creepy.
h) Florence Foster Jenkins
You never watch a Meryl Streep movie and say she was no good in it, but this was really one of those Oscar noms she didn't need, nobody's ever gonna remember this movie in the overall context of her career.
i) Cell
Cell phones have become such a big piece of horror movies because either they're a plot point or they're oddly absent or have to be rendered unusable for the story to move forward. So it was kind of fun to see this Stephen King adaptation where cell phones are the catalyst of this zombie apocalypse. It really just wasn't any good, though, even the super bleak ending just wasn't satisfying.
j) The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
My wife liked the Hunger Games novels so we went to see the first 3 movies in the theater, but then she saw the last movie with her mom so I'm just now catching up to it. And really, I respect how the story ended, but after the 2nd and 3rd movies took it to some interesting places, I felt like it was pretty anticlimactic, a few good sequences but it felt like a lot of the best supporting characters were barely in it, definitely my least favorite of the series.
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on Thursday, December 07, 2017 at 1:39 PM.
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