Movie Diary
So many veteran filmmakers are making TV projects for the first time these days, but I was a little surprised to hear that Joel and Ethan Coen would make an anthology series for Netflix. But it turned out they just couldn't bring themselves to make episodic television, and decided to bundle all 6 stories together into one film that got a small theatrical run to qualify for the Oscars. And I have to say, I think they made the right decision. There's only maybe one story, the Liam Neeson one, that didn't really land for me, but I think this odd little batch of tales plays better as pieces of a whole watched in one sitting than if they'd been broken up into episodes. It still doesn't feel like a major work for them, but it's an enjoyable one. Tim Blake Nelson in O Brother, Where Art Thou? is one of my all-time favorite performances in a Coens movie, so his opening segment as Buster Scruggs is a great entertaining start to the movie, but there's a lot of great performances from Tom Waits, Bill Heck, Chelcie Ross, and another O Brother alumnus, Stephen Root. And I laughed so, so hard when James Franco said "first time?"
My son has always loved reading The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and I've tried to steer him more toward the classic 1966 cartoon I grew up on rather than the Jim Carrey movie, but I think he just likes anything Grinch. And he really enjoyed the latest adaptation that's very much in the style of other Illumination movies like Despicable Me. I thought it was alright for what it was, better than the Carrey version but not by a huge margin. I don't really like the Benedict Cumberbatch's voice, it's probably for the best that the Grinch didn't sound British but it sounded like he just did Hugh Laurie's American accent from "House."
c) Red Sparrow
I wasn't expecting much out of this movie but I was pleasantly surprised to realize that it was directed by Francis Lawrence, Constantine and I Am Legend and all his music videos are so consistently great-looking and full of stirring imagery and well choreographed action. So even when there isn't that much to the story, as in the case of Red Sparrow, it's still pretty enjoyable, and I felt like Jennifer Lawrence pulled off a pretty difficult performance notwithstanding her bad Russian accent.
d) The Post
Even though The Post has two huge movie stars toplining it, it felt like an ensemble piece that brought a lot of people who'd done their best work on television, like Carrie Coon and Bob Odenkirk and Bradley Whitford and Sarah Paulson and Zach Woods, up to the big leagues to act alongside Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in a Spielberg movie. A while back I worked on a shoot for a lawn mower commercial with a guy who'd worked on The Post and he had interesting stories about how they prepared the exteriors so that they modern D.C. could look like the 1970s, in a way I think that's the biggest technical achievement of a movie like this.
I felt like it was hard for me to not watch this movie mostly through a meta lens, both of knowing that Christopher Plummer replaced Kevin Spacey at the last minute, and of having already watched the TV series about the same story, "Trust," that came out around the same time. I much prefer "Trust" (mainly became Brendan Fraser is far more interesting in the Fletcher Chace role than Mark Wahlberg), but I was a little surprised how visually similar the two projects ended up being even with some major creative differences.
I will probably never get sick of by-the-numbers Owen Wilson buddy comedies, even if this one where Wilson is the laid back brother of the more uptight Ed Helms is especially by-the-numbers. I got a few laughs out of it, but the format of them meeting various characters who may be their father, it got old fast.
A weirdly upbeat ahistorical movie about P.T. Barnum seemed like the oddest runaway box office hit, but I guess people really like the songs. And there are a lot of them, it seemed like there was almost more singing than dialogue, which was probably a good thing given the cheesy story. As someone who likes Moulin Rouge, though, I dunno, watching this felt like probably how people who hate Moulin Rouge feel watching it.
It seems so unlikely that the same Doug Liman whose career was launched by Swingers would become a reliable purveyor of big budget action movies, including one of my favorite in recent memory, Edge of Tomorrow. American Made reunites him with Tom Cruise but feels a lot simpler by comparison, even if like Edge it's kind of rare opportunity for Cruise to lead a complicated double life and not be the purehearted good guy who comes out victorious in the end.
At this point studios churn out slick computer animated kids' movies full of familiar celebrity voices with such ease that it's kind of easy to assume that there's a reliable formula for making them well and that even the ones that aren't Pixar masterpieces are going to be decent. So it's almost impressive just how bad Norm of the North is, I put it on for my kids because they love seeing polar bears at the zoo, but it's really just crap, I don't think they even finished it.
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on Friday, November 16, 2018 at 12:41 PM.
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