a) Booksmart
The discourse around this movie has been weird, basically a bunch of adults rallying around a teen movie and almost seeming mad at actual teens for not caring about it. But it's pretty good, I'd say, as a 30-something, I'm always happy to see a high school movie that isn't obsessed with explicitly or implicitly channeling John Hughes and other '80s movies. In a way it kinda felt like an unintentional riff on Say Anything... though, like Beanie Feldstein's character was another version of Diane Court, the straight-A student valedictorian who suddenly realizes upon graduating that she could've been having more fun the whole time. I really enjoyed the supporting cast most of all, though, Skyler Gisondo from "Santa Clarita Diet" and Noah Galvin from "The Real O'Neils" were great and Billie Lourd stole every scene she was in, I didn't realize until after the movie that she's Carrie Fisher's daughter and it was driving me nuts why she seemed so familiar.

b) mid90s
It's weird to think that Superbad is now such a canonical coming-of-age movie that a decade later we have one of its stars directing his own acclaimed coming-of-age movie while his sister stars in her own acclaimed coming-of-age movie (Booksmart) that's widely regarded as a gender-flipped successor to Superbad (I have nothing against Superbad, it's fine I guess -- I think at this point I'm mostly appreciative to it for launching Emma Stone's career). I didn't care for mid90s at all, and it shouldn't have been too hard for me to identify strongly with it, as someone who's about the same age as Jonah Hill and was kind of a skateboarder-adjacent budding teenage dirtbag in that period. One thing about teen shows/movies is that the actors are often so much older than their characters that when you get the rare 13-year-old character who actually looks like 13, like Sunny Suljic (who was actually 12 when this was shot), it really kind of grabs your attention and brings home just how small kids are when they start becoming little pubescent delinquents. But I dunno, there was this flat affect realism to the whole movie that just didn't work for me, even when the period details were right and the story was intense it kind of felt like a very drab and po-faced take on adolescence.

c) Bad Times At The El Royale
When I started seeing ads for this I kinda thought it could go either way, might be great and might be terrible. It got pretty good reviews but I didn't care for it at all. I've come to kind of hate the whole genre of using hotels as a way to tie together vignettes about different people checking into a hotel (Four Rooms, Identity, "Room 104," and so on). It just felt like a big ambitious mess of people playing simple archetypes in a broad campy version of the 1960s and by the time the big mysterious story fell into place I really just didn't care. I really like Lewis Pullman, though, he was as good in this as he was in "Catch-22."

d) A Star Is Born
I've been rolling my eyes about this movie since the moment it was announced, just the idea of Lady Gaga acting in Bradley Cooper's directorial debut remaking an oft-remade old Hollywood classic, everything about this just did not appeal to me, and I was kind of appalled by people loving the movie and "Shallow" going to #1. But OK, I'll fess up, this was a good movie, I think Cooper did his homework and did an impressive job of turning himself into a singer and guitarist, and casting Sam Elliott as his brother so that his speaking voice made sense as Sam Elliott-ish. I smiled a lot in the first half of the movie, the love story was genuinely engaging. I wasn't as into the second half, maybe just because of the sad inevitability of it, and it didn't entirely feel earned on some level. But it's not like it's an uphill battle to make it plausible that a famous, beloved musician would descend into a downward spiral of alcoholism. I'm still annoyed that Andrew Dice Clay is getting rehabilitated with roles in Oscar movies, but I actually didn't recognize him the entire time I was watching him in this, so good on him, I guess.

e) The Shape of Water
Guillermo del Toro has such unique gifts as a filmmaker and is one person who I always want to see work with bigger budgets and more resources. So in a way I was rooting for and celebrating The Shape of Water's success and Oscar glory long before I even saw it, and it almost felt anticlimactic to finally see it. It's very good, though, Sally Hawkins really held together the movie in a way that I think few other people in that role would have been able to.

f) Baby Driver
This didn't really come out that long ago, but it feels like forever since something with Kevin Spacey in it came out without being tainted and hobbled by his presence. But it's also a movie where he plays a supporting role as an unredeemable bad guy, so that part of the movie still functions pretty well. Really fun, entertaining movie, the car stunts were so wild and well executed that I wish Fast and Furious movies took some cues from this. I never liked Ansel Elgort but I will admit that he was perfect for this role, his whole tall arrogant boyish vibe was just what the character needed.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 21, 2019 at 12:38 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.