Movie Diary
Looper is one of my favorite movies of the decade, and I've had very mixed feelings about Rian Johnson directing an installment of the current Star Wars trilogy, especially now that he's been subsequently hired to create an additional new Star Wars trilogy. If you consider someone to be a pretty original filmmaker and can't wait to see what they come up with next, the idea of them spending 5-10 years of their prime as the custodian of a big familiar franchise, I dunno, it bums me out. So even though The Last Jedi is really good, it just makes me think about the unfinished screenplay languishing on Johnson's laptop now. In particular I liked just seeing more of the new cast, Daisy Ridley and Oscar Isaac and Adam Driver are all so good in their roles, and Benicio del Toro and Kelly Marie Tran are great new additions. For months I had managed to avoid spoilers while hearing vaguely about fan backlash, and kind of expected there to be some kind of huge dark twist that pissed people off, but I was kind of surprised that the movie was so divisive. At most I thought it was kind of lame that [major character] pulled a cool trick to avoid a violent death and then just kind of voluntarily died moments later, but nobody even seems to care about that.
b) Coco
This was pretty wonderful. I have a hard time now evaluating kids' movies after one view because I the ones my kids like end up playing in our house a couple dozen times and I develop completely different feelings about them over that kind of repetition, for better or worse. But I really liked the story and the music and the way family and music were woven through the story, could very well wind up my favorite Pixar movie since Up.
I like the Marvel movies most when they don't take themselves too seriously, and tend to most enjoy the ones that have a distinct comic voice (Iron Man 3, the first Avengers, Ant-Man, though I'm a little neutral on Guardians). And Thor: Ragnarok is definitely the funniest and most offbeat movie in the MCU to date, I can see how it's not everyone's speed but it was so enjoyable to see Taika Waititi treat this huge budget and this big canvas of Marvel mythology as a ridiculous playground.
It's a good illustration of how Marvel movies have found and nurtured a sense of humor while D.C. has avoided figuring out that whole aspect of making a popcorn movie as much as possible that The Justice League only has a decent amount of levity because Avengers director Joss Whedon was brought in for rewrites and reshoots. The movie was less of a mess than I expected, perhaps because I really expected a mess, but I think the fun of seeing the cast come together helped a lot, The Flash and Cyborg were good. Henry Cavill's weird CGI'd face was so distracting, though.
This was fairly fun and stylishly directed. But it was also one of those movies that was just so obnoxiously on-the-nose with constant needle drops of iconic '80s pop songs to remind you that it takes place in the '80s, to the point that at one point they basically remade the Reservoir Dogs "Stuck In The Middle With You" scene with "99 Luftballoons." There's one particular scene in Atomic Blonde that I thought was one of the best, most impressively choreographed fight scenes in recent memory, uh, the one set to "Father Figure" for some reason.
f) The Sound
Christopher Lloyd has had dozens of the TV and film credits in the last 20 years, but a lot of it has been so low profile that it feels like he fell off the face of the earth after being staple of so much pop culture of my youth. So when I see that he's done a movie that's not, like, for kids, I get excited that it could be some late period gem. But this thriller with Rose MacGowan was kind of a letdown, I liked the concept but it involved a lot of people typing on phones/computers and the way the text splashed across the screen was really poorly executed and made the movie look cheaper and more slapdash than it otherwise was.
I kind of feel like Alien and Aliens are about as good, and as good for different reasons, as just about any 2 movies from the same franchise, but pretty much everything else from the franchise is a total wash, and every movie seems to fail to understand what worked about those movies in a new way. This one I didn't pay too much attention to when my wife watched it since I didn't much care for Prometheus, but it seemed maybe better than that. I'm kind of confused by Katherine Waterston, like she agreed to some Faustian bargain where she gets to be in major films but she often has the most terrible '80s mom hair bowl cut that makes her look older than she is.
I remember seeing a trailer for this movie and rolling my eyes at another poignant movie about a precocious, near magical young child. But it wasn't until The Book of Henry came out a few months later that I started reading the awful reviews and realizing just how ridiculous the movie's plot was and kind of wanted to see it for myself. And it really is just fascinating to watch all these professional actors just soldier through this weird awful idea as if it was all gonna work out. But aside from the crazy plot twists it's really just insufferable how poorly the genius kid's dialogue is written to sound like neither a realistic child nor a realistic adult. Naomi Watts probably owes her career to the fact that she said yes to stories like Mulholland Drive and I Heart Huckabees where some actors might not have, so maybe it was a matter of time until her adventurousness ended up in a legendary farce like this. But it's also weird to see people like Sarah Silverman and Bobby Moynihan carry on like this is just a regular movie.
i) Gifted
This is more like the kind of boilerplate poignant movie about a precocious child that I thought The Book of Henry was going to be. And while there were some obnoxious scenes that played like a Good Will Hunting about a 7-year-old girl. But I think I mostly enjoyed this for the extremely real chemistry between Chris Evans and Jenny Slate that turned into an IRL relationship after they made this movie.
j) Allied
Much like Gifted was interesting partly because it sparked a romance between co-stars, this spy movie is largely infamous because of the gossip that Brad Pitt's marriage ended because of an affair with Marion Cotillard. Which is funny because his first marriage ended because of an affair with a co-star of a movie about spies. Anyway it's not bad, good ensemble, I was pleasantly surprised that Lizzy Caplan turned up in this with an enjoyable supporting role.
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on Tuesday, April 17, 2018 at 11:18 PM.
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