Movie Diary
For years "Teen Titans Go!" has been one of my son's favorite shows, so I knew we'd be at the movie on opening weekend as soon as it was announced. But it can be hard for kid's cartoons to make the jump to movies and feel like a theatrical experience, especially a show like this that's more about the wit and unpredictability of the writing than the plots or the visuals. But Teen Titans Go! To The Movies wound up being almost on the level of The LEGO Batman Movie in terms of just being packed with all sorts of funny in-jokes and parodies of the DC Comics universe and superhero movies in general, including amusing stunt casting like Nicolas Cage voicing Superman. But as usual, a lot of the humor was silly enough to keep my 8-year-old entertained.
b) Annihilation
My wife read the novel Annihilation is based on and had mixed feelings about it, but was really curious to see how the visuals were brought to the screen. I didn't like it as much as Alex Garland's directorial debut, Ex Machina, but I'm glad I went into it with very few expectations about what the story could or should be and just got to be surprised by its strange, elliptical second half. I particularly liked Gina Rodriguez's performance, she really got to play a role she hasn't done before.
I have never sat down and watched all of The Room, I've mostly experienced the whole phenomenon via memes and brief clips and stories. So I didn't feel so attached to the movie's unintentional comedy that I was opposed to the idea of James Franco making an intentional comedy out of its making-of story. After all the praise and awards season hype I thought it might be the rare eccentric Franco project I'd actually enjoy. But really, I thought it was just kind of worthless and managed to flatten everything that's genuinely strange and intriguing about Tommy Wiseau. Plus once the script supervisor character showed up, it really just felt like it quickly turned into a dozen other movies where James Franco is a flighty weirdo and Seth Rogen makes sarcastic quips about him.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills sometimes that people seem to have largely agreed that Ryan Gosling is a perfectly good movie star and not a drag on most of the movies he appears in. But as much as the addition of Gosling and Jared Leto to the cast can drain my interest in a movie, this got good reviews and I tried to give it a fair shot, and liked how they decided to continue to the storyline of the original Blade Runner. But Gosling, my god, I swear he can't even read lines well enough to be a believable replicant.
f) White Fang
My toddler will pick just about anything off of the Netflix menu that has a dog on the cover, so it was inevitable that he chose to watch this recent Netflix animated film about a wolfdog's life in the Yukon. It's kind of a somber, realistic story from the animal's perspective, but it wasn't too scary for the kids to watch and the toddler found it pretty entertaining. My wife thought the animation style was a little too 'uncanny valley' but I thought there was a cool impressionistic aspect to the aesthetic that I liked.
As with a lot of fact-based movies and biopics, Battle Of The Sexes kind of left me wishing I'd just watched a documentary about the subject since the story was pretty interesting on its own and I had mixed feelings about the cast and crew's execution. Emma Stone is great but Steve Carrell sometimes pushes the movie a little too much toward broad comedy, even given the fact that the guy he was playing was a ridiculous clown, and then there are some scenes where Fred Armisen shows up and pushes it just over the edge.
Kingsman: The Secret Service was a fun little sleeper hit that helped make Taron Egerton into a rising star, and it also killed off most of the characters played by older, more established actors. But for the sequel, instead of trying to put more of the movie on Egerton's shoulders, it seems like they made it even more of an ensemble movie, bringing one of the dead characters from the first movie back to life, and adding Julianne Moore, Halle Berry, Channing Tatum, and Jeff Bridges to the cast. It's still a lot of fun, though, I was skeptical but I think they made the right decision to kind of make it feel bigger and more overstuffed and star-studded. Julianne Moore and Pedro Pascal are particularly entertaining.
i) It
I know some people who are too scared of It specifically or clowns in general to see this movie, but when I watched it I just didn't feel scared at all. That led me to the theory that the problem with It is either you're too scared of clowns to enjoy it or not enough, but that's probably not true given how hugely successful this movie was. I'm kind of glad they decided to break this up into 2 movies, though, the cast for It: Chapter Two looks promising and maybe I'll appreciate the first one more once they put it all together.
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on Tuesday, August 07, 2018 at 3:30 PM.
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