Movie Diary
Pixar's track record with sequels is about even with its track record for original films (i.e. almost everything that isn't Cars is superb). But outside of maybe Toy Story 2, I have started to get the feeling that they've been kind of inessential and easily forgotten -- I found Monsters University and Finding Dory perfectly satisfying, but my kids never asked to see them again like the originals and I scarcely thought of them thereafter. So it's hard to say if the immediate afterglow of The Incredibles 2 will last, but I feel like it's a strong candidate for the best Pixar sequel to date and as good as The Incredibles -- I might even prefer it, simply because it also includes the madcap hilarity of the Jack-Jack Attack short. I also liked the way it moved the characters around into uncomfortable positions and got some comedy and character development out of it. I was pleased to see my 8-year-old son getting wise to superhero tropes enough that he saw the 'ally who turns out to be the villain' twist coming.
b) Hereditary
I enjoyed the hell out of this, and yet I am casting a suspicious eye at lot of the praise for this movie as emotionally harrowing and/or that one horror movie every year or so that 'transcends' or 'reinvents' the genre. I've long loved Toni Collette and this was absolutely one of the best performances of her career and I hope she wins awards for it, but I feel like people have underestimated the comic edge of the movie, particularly the second half, the humor inherent in particular her and Ann Dowd's performances -- it's a credit to Alex Wolff and Gabriel Byrne that they gave the movie enough enough dramatic gravity that people didn't entirely read the ending as funny enough to cheapen the traumas of the first half. I'm not saying it was cheapened per se, in fact I liked the movie's sense of humor and the wildness of the story's conclusion. But I do wonder if I'd like it as much on a second viewing or find it as sad and gripping in those early moments, knowing what was coming.
c) Set It Up
This is a sweet, well-written rom-com with a couple big laughs and a novel conceit about two assistants who try to play matchmaker for their bosses and end up falling for each other. But mostly I think I just found Zoey Deutch totally adorable and got caught up in the movie purely based on that.
d) The Neighbor
William Fichtner is such a great, undervalued character and the perfect lead for a thriller where a married guy starts to develop feelings for his pretty young neighbor who's in a troubld marriage. Unfortunately, I thought it fell apart a little by the end, like they didn't know whether to go really dark but weren't about to have a happy ending, so they just wound up with something kind of sad.
Even though Richard Linklater has done some more polished mainstream movies like School of Rock before, it still surprises me, given the scrappy, handmade, almost amateurish and improvisational air of a lot of his work, that he can pull off something that looks more or less like generic studio fare. In fact, I put this movie on and watched a good amount of it before I glanced at the IMDb page and realized he'd directed it, which I somehow hadn't even heard during the entire promotional cycle for it. I kind of expected a dour, humorless movie about a trio of Vietnam veterans burying one of their sons, but I thought the story and the characters ended up having a little more light and life to them.
I remember sitting in a theater watching a trailer for The Mountain Between Us and, knowing that Idris Elba was starring in The Dark Tower soon and not really having any idea what the Dark Tower books, thought that's what this was until the title came up at the end, which is, in retrospect, pretty funny. It's decent, but probably could've been an unbearably bland romance movie if it didn't have 2 exceptionally talented and attractive lead actors, on some level it's just fun to watch Elba and Kate Winslet, particularly since he actually keeps his British accent for once and she pretends to be American (although it was a weird little "The Wire" flashback for him to mention that he lives in Baltimore while looking but not sounding like Stringer Bell).
This is a goofy movie my kids wanted to watch about a slimy space creature who eats oil and decides to live inside a truck. But it was kind of charming and I always like to see Jane Levy from "Suburgatory" getting work.
This movie is about the true story of Arizona firefighters. I kind of expected a pretty boilerplate drama about real life heroism, but I was impressed by the writing and performances, particularly in the storyline about Josh Brolin and Jennifery Connelly's marriage and jhow it captured the emotional state of being with somebody who risks their life every day and learning not to rely on them or expect them to come home.
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on Tuesday, June 26, 2018 at 10:36 AM.
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