a) Widows
Man, this movie was fantastic, I'm kind of mad that it didn't quite climb out of the action movie niche and get more awards season love. In the wrong hands it could've been just a darker Ocean's 8 (which I would've been fine with). But Gillian Flynn's script and Steve McQueen's direction gave the whole thing this intense air of dread, so that you really get a visceral sense of of the mourning and desperation of Viola Davis and Elizabeth Debicki's characters, and the casual cold-blooded menace of Brian Tyree Henry and Daniel Kaluuya's characters, who were just incredible in every scene they were in.

b) The Angry Birds Movie 2
Not the best movie my 9-year-old has asked me to take him to see, but it was fun. They gave the Jason Sudeikis bird a love interest, a bird voiced by Rachel Bloom, which I would totally watch as a non-animated rom com. I did raise my eyebrow at the scene where a group of pigs called 'squeal team 6' ambushed the home of an enemy leader -- essentially a joke about the killing of Osama Bin Laden in a kids movie.

c) Stan & Ollie
As someone who's always cringed at fatsuits and facial prosthesis, I really have to hand it to the team on Stan & Ollie, I thought John C. Reilly actually put on the weight to play Oliver Hardy and had to look up and figure out that was not the case. This was really good, I generally think biopics are better when they focus on a particular isolated period of time instead of jumping through the years, and by setting this movie at the end of their careers, you kind of get the whole story unspooled as the baggage of their relationship. They also bucked biopic convention by casting the right moderately famous character actors for the part instead of squeezing the biggest possible star into the role. Sometimes I thought the director kind of threw dramatic strings over moments that would've worked better just letting the scene play unadorned, though.

d) Mary Poppins Returns
I have only the faintest memories of seeing the original Mary Poppins as a child but I was still impressed with how well this conjured the spirit and the aesthetic of the Julie Andrews version while still giving Emily Blunt room to make the role her own. She's so insanely talented, I love that she can pull this off in between being a badass in action movies. Lin-Manuel Miranda's cockney accent was a bit of a chore to listen to, though.

e) Ralph Breaks The Internet
There's a reason I don't like to watch a lot of trailers and previews -- I saw the hilarious Disney princess scene from Ralph Breaks The Internet when it made the rounds before the movie came out, so it was kind of anticlimactic many months later to see a movie where I already knew the funniest scene. A good sequel, though, they got a lot of comic mileage out of the premise.

f) First Man
Damien Chazelle and Ryan Gosling coming off of a big Oscar movie with the most transparent Oscar bait biopic imaginable, literally just picking up a script that Clint Eastwood was at one point going to direct, had me pretty well biased against First Man. But once it actually didn't get a best picture nom, I could at least drop some of my defenses and take it at face value, since I really liked Whiplash and thought even La La Land was well made despite its problems. And while Chazelle could only do so much to put his own signature on the now pretty well worn visuals of NASA movies, and it was a bit slow moving, it was a perfectly alright movie (but still didn't deserve any more than the visual effect Oscar it got.

g) Solo: A Star Wars Story
In my opinion, Star Wars movies are best taken as light entertainment, particularly something like this that just exists as a one-off fan service about the one character who seemed perpetually kind of amused and blithely disinterested in the mythology of the story he was in. But the behind-the-scenes drama around Solo and the change of directors threatened to overshadow the movie itself, and I guess it kind of did since anything less than billion dollar box office is considered a failure on this scale. But I tried to just look past all that and take the movie at face value, and I found it pretty enjoyable. I tend to hate when iconic roles that belonged to one actor for decades get handed off to a new actor, but Alden Ehrenreich was pretty good, probably better than his reputation, and it was fun to watch Donald Glover do a full-on Billy Dee Williams impression. The movie was a little darker than it needed to be, like literally, in terms of the lighting, though.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 09, 2019 at 9:39 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.