Movie Diary
a) To All The Boys I've Loved Before
There's been a lot of handwringing about how Netflix is muddying the waters of traditional theatrical releases for major feature films, and also about how there's increasingly little room for movies that aren't big effects-driven event films in theaters. And while those are both real problems, I'm optimistic enough to think that one is kind of the solution for the other. That is to say, while Netflix's move into big effects-driven movies with stuff like Bright has been divisive, genres like rom-coms that thrive with smaller budgets and less famous casts are ripe for Netflix, as proven by the decent buzz around the recent Set It Up and the absolutely huge reaction to To All The Boys I've Loved Before. The latter is as charming as everyone says it is, Lana Condor and Noah Centineo have great chemistry and will get long careers out of this movie, but what I really liked was the light touch with both the romance and the comedy, the plot wasn't too hard to predict but they let each story beat fall in place in an interesting way. I'm really over teen movies referencing John Hughes movies, though, like we don't need to tip the hat to him every single time, it's just overkill at this point.
b) Black Panther
I tend to be a little cynical about the way all the big action franchises are kind of hoovering up any new filmmaker who shows some promise with lower budget fare and gives them a giant epic to direct. But Ryan Coogler seems like a best case scenario, it's been fun to watch him scale up from Fruitvale Station to something ten times bigger in Creed and then to something ten times bigger than that in Black Panther. I didn't love some of the big painted CGI backgrounds -- I'd love to see them film the sequel in Africa and build huge Wakanda sets -- but it didn't really matter because the fight choreography was awesome and it was such a good ensemble cast, so many enjoyable performances from Chadwick Boseman and Letitia Wright and Winston Duke and Andy Serkis and on and on.
c) Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle
I barely even remember the first Jumanji movie, I feel like its something that would get played during class in elementary school that I'd put my head down and fall asleep during, but this was pretty fun. The movie went like 18 minutes with the 'real' characters, relatively unknown teen actors establishing the story, before you meet their video game avatars and get The Rock and the other actual movie stars onscreen, which seems risky. But it really paid off because most of the comedy was derived from how the avatars differed from the people and Jack Black and Kevin Hart in particular having a lot of fun with that. In the second half of the movie it became a surprisingly poignant Saving Private Ryan-lite with Nick Jonas as Private Ryan, but all around it was a good example of a movie that was better than it had any right to be.
d) Lady Bird
Is it unreasonable that I stan so hard for Jennifer Jason Leigh that I resent Greta Gerwig a little? Probably. This was good, though. Most of the music in the first half of the movie was from the mid-'90s, so I unconsciously assumed that's when it took place, and then felt a jolt of confusion when a Justin Timberlake song played. It really did a good job of capturing that moment of adolescence where you're aspiring to be someone you're not and your attempts get punctured by reality.
e) Blame
Blame, written and directed by actress Quinn Shepherd when she was about 21 years old, came out around the same time as Lady Bird and I wish Shepherd's accomplishment had gotten as much attention as Gerwig's (it was hard not to think of parallels since Nadia Alexander's hair in Blame is dyed similarly to Saoirse Ronan's in Lady Bird). Blame is a more serious movie, sort of loosely based on The Crucible through the lens of a high school production of The Crucible, pretty impressive for a low budget debut feature and I liked the artful, unexpected way the story resolved itself and played with your expectations.
f) The Snowman
It's easy to approach The Snowman as a horror flick with a slightly ridiculous premise that got terrible reviews and did okay at the box office, but it's kind of fascinating how it was clearly aiming to be something much more respectable and prestigious. After the success of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Hollywood wanted more Scandinavian crime thrillers and optioned Jo Nesbo's novels about a detective named Harry Hole (and listen, that name is your first problem), and at one point Martin Scorsese was attached to direct. Eventually The Snowman made it to theaters with Let The Right One In director Tomas Alfredson and a very respectable cast including Michael Fassbender and Charlotte Gainsbourg and J.K. Simmons without anyone apparently realizing that the story could easily be seen as silly with the wrong marketing campaign. The movie's not terrible but I kinda feel like Val Kilmer is the only person in it who probably saw what kind of movie it actually was.
g) Roman J. Israel, Esq.
I went into this movie for the big scenery-chewing performance by the star but ended up with kind of a surprisingly dour morality play. So when I realized that this was writer/director Dan Gilroy's follow-up to Nightcrawler it kind of started to make more sense.
h) Collide
c) Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle
I barely even remember the first Jumanji movie, I feel like its something that would get played during class in elementary school that I'd put my head down and fall asleep during, but this was pretty fun. The movie went like 18 minutes with the 'real' characters, relatively unknown teen actors establishing the story, before you meet their video game avatars and get The Rock and the other actual movie stars onscreen, which seems risky. But it really paid off because most of the comedy was derived from how the avatars differed from the people and Jack Black and Kevin Hart in particular having a lot of fun with that. In the second half of the movie it became a surprisingly poignant Saving Private Ryan-lite with Nick Jonas as Private Ryan, but all around it was a good example of a movie that was better than it had any right to be.
d) Lady Bird
Is it unreasonable that I stan so hard for Jennifer Jason Leigh that I resent Greta Gerwig a little? Probably. This was good, though. Most of the music in the first half of the movie was from the mid-'90s, so I unconsciously assumed that's when it took place, and then felt a jolt of confusion when a Justin Timberlake song played. It really did a good job of capturing that moment of adolescence where you're aspiring to be someone you're not and your attempts get punctured by reality.
e) Blame
Blame, written and directed by actress Quinn Shepherd when she was about 21 years old, came out around the same time as Lady Bird and I wish Shepherd's accomplishment had gotten as much attention as Gerwig's (it was hard not to think of parallels since Nadia Alexander's hair in Blame is dyed similarly to Saoirse Ronan's in Lady Bird). Blame is a more serious movie, sort of loosely based on The Crucible through the lens of a high school production of The Crucible, pretty impressive for a low budget debut feature and I liked the artful, unexpected way the story resolved itself and played with your expectations.
f) The Snowman
It's easy to approach The Snowman as a horror flick with a slightly ridiculous premise that got terrible reviews and did okay at the box office, but it's kind of fascinating how it was clearly aiming to be something much more respectable and prestigious. After the success of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Hollywood wanted more Scandinavian crime thrillers and optioned Jo Nesbo's novels about a detective named Harry Hole (and listen, that name is your first problem), and at one point Martin Scorsese was attached to direct. Eventually The Snowman made it to theaters with Let The Right One In director Tomas Alfredson and a very respectable cast including Michael Fassbender and Charlotte Gainsbourg and J.K. Simmons without anyone apparently realizing that the story could easily be seen as silly with the wrong marketing campaign. The movie's not terrible but I kinda feel like Val Kilmer is the only person in it who probably saw what kind of movie it actually was.
g) Roman J. Israel, Esq.
I went into this movie for the big scenery-chewing performance by the star but ended up with kind of a surprisingly dour morality play. So when I realized that this was writer/director Dan Gilroy's follow-up to Nightcrawler it kind of started to make more sense.
h) Collide
Anthony Hopkins and Ben Kingsley are both guys who, for all their justified acclaim and awards, seem to just say yes to all sorts of crappy projects. So it makes a certain sense that they would finally end up in the same movie and it would be something as undistinguished as Collide, which starred Nicholas Hoult and Felicity Jones after Zach Efron and Amber Heard dropped out. There's a big ridiculous Hopkins/Kingsley showdown at the end and Jones looks surprisingly cute as a blonde, but otherwise it's pretty dreadful.
My kids found this on Netflix and it's just as terrible as you can probably guess from the title. I would actually like to see "MST3K" or one of those types of shows. They actually go back and forth between depicting the baby dinosaur with CGI and with a puppet.
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on Thursday, September 06, 2018 at 9:35 AM.
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