Movie Diary
a) Logan Lucky
A Steven Soderbergh heist comedy can be simplified and spun as, say, "Ocean's 11 in Appalachia," and there are certainly a lot of story beats and moments of obfuscation and revelation in Logan Lucky that play out very much like the Ocean's movies. But it has a certain tone and a certain warmth here that I wasn't expecting, in the last half hour of the movie I was just smiling ear to ear and clapping and cheering on these characters and wishing there was more time to spend with them.
They've still yet to have an actual teenager star in a Spider-Man movie, but Tom Holland is 6-8 years younger than Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield was in their first turns as Peter Parker, so he has a certain refreshing youthfulness. But mostly I liked that they finally got to put Spider-Man in a larger Marvel context and give the whole thing a little more of a playful cartoony context. The CGI of Spidey leaping through the air really sucked, though, it just didn't look anything like something happening with Earth's gravity. I feel like they didn't want to copy the special effects of the Sam Raimi movies but didn't know how to do it their own way.
c) The Circle
This wasn't quite as bad as 'adaptation of a Dave Eggers novel about the pitfalls of social media' had me expecting, it was reasonably well done as a story and as a movie. But it was still striking to me, as we're looking at exactly how Facebook has demonstrably made the world a worse place, that the scenario The Circle envisions is so far away from any practical questions we're currently facing about the ethics and shortcomings of social network sites in favor of some fairly hoary scaremongering about 'oversharing.'
You'd think Keanu Reeves would avoid ever again playing a lawyer with a southern accent after all the jokes about Devil's Advocate, but he took this role when Daniel Craig dropped out days before shooting was to begin. I like the way this story was framed, with the whole thing taking case during a court trial and you slowly getting the backstory as things are revealed to the characters or flashbacks illuminate where they're lying. I'm still not sure how I feel about the big twist of the story but I think I like the way they came around to it.
e) Sleepless
I wasn't expecting much from this crime drama that got middling reviews and box office, but I was really impressed by it. German director Baran do Odar, best known for directing the Netflix sci-fi series "Dark," gives it a great grisly sleazy ambiance, Michelle Monaghan gets the rare project worthy of her talent, and Scoot McNairy plays against type as a really nasty, memorable villain. As a Jamie Foxx/T.I. collaboration, it ranks up there with "Just Like Me" and "Live In The Sky."
This is one of those movies where the first I heard of it was in a theatrical trailer, which, even more than most trailers these days, gave away the entire story arc of the movie, which I really hate. So I watched it but my attention wandered because I felt like I'd already seen it, because trailers suck and ruin everything and I try to avoid them for good reason.
g) The Shack
This movie looked like such a ridiculous trainwreck of schmaltz in the ads but when I threw it on in the background for laughs I just got bored and never paid it any attention.
Dane DeHaan has such a bad track record for either painfully hammy performances and/or disastrous projects that I would say this is a much needed win for him just in that it wasn't bad and there was nothing wrong with his performance, even if the movie wasn't much of a financial or critical success. I liked the odd atmosphere of the movie, maybe I missed something about the premise but it seemed like it took place in some kind of unspecified 20th century past, but a heightened reality dystopia.
This is a movie came out the same summer as This Is The End, another apocalypse comedy co-starring Craig Robinson. That was a big hit and this one was a poorly reviewed direct-to-DVD obscurity, which is a shame, because I think this was a much better movie, a little more rooted in reality to make the absurd dark moments funnier. They really doomed it with that title, though, they could've called it practically anything else.
j) Immortals
Director Tarsem Singh, best known for the painterly visuals and flawed storytelling of The Cell and classic music videos like "Losing My Religion," has maybe one great movie, The Fall. And given his recent trajectory, I don't know if he'll ever make another, but I still like to check out the stuff he's gotten studio paychecks for and see how they are visually, and this one has some absolutely gorgeous color palettes and vivid imagery, but as a fantasy epic it's nothing special. It's weird to think that Stephen Dorff got 2nd billing on a movie in this decade that grossed over $200 million.
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on Wednesday, March 21, 2018 at 10:41 PM.
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