Movie Diary
Sean Baker's last feature Tangerine was a memorable, exciting low-budget movie shot on iPhones, and The Florida Project is a step up in production values that still maintains a lot of the same freewheeling energy, putting Willem Defoe opposite several child actors and an adult lead, Bria Vinaite, who'd never acted before and was found on Instagram. It's kind of funny to think that Defoe got an Oscar nom for a role that is practically a stock beleaguered landlord character, but he brings just the right amount of gravity to it and is a good counterpoint to all the inspired amateur performances. I would like to think that Baker's stories about people on the fringes are more empathetic than exploitative -- the end of the movie hit me really powerfully -- but the fact that Vinaite has been cast in Harmony Korine's next movie does arouse my suspicion that it's a little bit in Korine's more lurid lineage as well. Plus the title seems to just own up to the idea that this is part of that recent Magic Mike/Spring Breakers/Pain And Gain/'Florida Man' episode of Atlanta-style pop culture fascination with the trashiness of the Sunshine State.
b) Show Dogs
I've been taking my eldest son to the movies for about 3 years now, and of the over a dozen kids' movies we've gone too, many of which I outright enjoyed, this was definitely the worst. It's a live action movie where a bunch of dogs' mouths are CGI'd so they speak with celebrity voices, and Ludacris is the grouchy police dog who has to solve a crime with a human partner played by Will Arnett. We saw the movie on its second weekend in theaters, when an offensive scene about genital fondling had been removed from the movie, although I dozed off in the middle so I'm honestly not sure if it was in our screening or not.
c) Anon
Gattaca director Andrew Niccol and the star of his 2011 film In Time, Amanda Seyfried, reunite for another dystopian sci-fi flick where the main revelation is that Seyfried is very cute with dark hair. The premise is kind of interesting with the idea that in a future where there's no privacy and no crime, one woman starts murdering people while maintaining her anonymity, but in effect it kind of feels like a Minority Report knockoff.
d) Dunkirk
The most surprising thing about Dunkirk, for me, was its running time. Each of Christopher Nolan's last 5 movies had been longer than the last, with Interstellar topping out at 169 minutes. So when I hear 'structurally ambitious World War II movie,' I just assumed it would be an epic, not a tight 106 minutes. I'm glad he exercised that restraint, I just didn't know he had it in him. The idea that the movie is told through action and very little dialogue was a little oversold, there's a decent amount of speaking roles, but I do think the whole 'less is more' approach worked well, in terms of capturing a very specific moment in the war and why it mattered.
This was interesting because it was basically the plot of a steamy erotic thriller murder mystery except it takes place in the 1830s and everyone remains very composed and fully clothed even when they're arguing or fucking or accusing each other of murder.
f) Baywatch
It's interesting to think that 1987's Dragnet set the template for dozens of films over the last 3 decades: turn an old TV show into a movie with roughly the same premise but a new cast and either re-do the drama as a comedy or turn it into a much broader or more meta kind of comedy, as much a parody as an homage or adaptation. Baywatch was kind of a campy pop culture phenomenon that was ridiculed by everybody, including its stars, even when the show was on the air, so there's nothing new about David Hasselhoff showing up for a goofy cameo, but I thought the movie did a decent job of letting the comedy drive the whole thing, only getting too puerile a couple times. There's a running joke with The Rock's character addressing Zac Efron's character as things like 'One Direciton' or 'Bieber,' but then he calls him 'High School Musical,' which is so meta it gave me a brain cramp.
I never heard of Eugenio Derbez's 2014 comedy Instructions Not Included, but it was the highest grossing Spanish language film in U.S. history, so How To Be A Latin Lover is kind of designed as his English language crossover. Ken Marino directed it and it's chock full of mostly white American comedy staples like Kristen Bell, Michael Cera, Ben Schwartz, and all the Robs (Lowe, Riggle, Huebel, and Corddry). Derbez's middle-aged wannabe playboy is kind of a predictable stock character, but he plays it really well.
One of my kids picked this movie off the Netflix menu and I found it kind of enjoyable, although it's also kind of an upsetting human Bambi story where the kid meets the dragon immediately after his parents die. I'm amused that Bryce Dallas Howard did this immediately after Jurassic World, like she decided to give her career over completely to big, scaly creatures.
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on Tuesday, June 05, 2018 at 1:43 PM.
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