a) Playing With Fire
Every movie I've taken my son to see in the theater so far has been a cartoon, or at least something with giant robots or talking animals. But he wanted to see the John Cena smoke jumper movie, so we went to a full-on live action movie, albeit a really silly one. It felt really slapdash and poorly made even for a kid's movie -- for instance it seems as if the screenplay called for a 1-year-old baby, and then they cast a 3-year-old girl and kept in all the scenes that only would've made sense with a baby. Still, it was genial and entertaining enough by the sheer force of the cast, including John Leguizamo and Keegan-Michael Key, and my son enjoyed it. It was weird to see Judy Greer flossing to a BTS song with John Cena, she definitely deserves better gigs, but at least she's getting pretty high profile work these days. And it amused me that Brianna Hildebrand played a very similar role here to what she played in in a completely different context in the second season of "The Exorcist."

b) Glass
Unbreakable was always one of the movies that made me want to defend M. Night Shyamalan from (mostly valid) criticism, and then he went and fucked it up by making it into a trilogy where the last 2 movies center around a new character that I can't stand. So I went into this movie bracing myself for more of James McAvoy's asinine performance as The Horde, which is of course in the first hour of the movie so much that you barely see Samuel L. Jackson's title character. But I have to say, there were things about Glass that I liked, the execution was clumsy in that usual Shyamalan way but I like the way he returned to the themes of Unbreakable and brought them full circle in a couple ways I wasn't expecting, even if they didn't land as the 'mind-altering twist' he loves to frame the end of his movies as.

c) Lying And Stealing
A really well done and entertaining movie where two insanely good-looking people hook up and commit some crimes together, with Theo James and Ratajkowski giving better and more compelling performances than I necessarily expected from two insanely good-looking people. It's a shame this got quietly released directly to VOD, it feels like the kind of thing that would've been a sleeper hit in another era, recommended if you enjoy Soderbergh heist movies (there's even a scene that felt like a direct homage to a specific scene in Out Of Sight).

d) Greta
I liked Isabelle Huppert's performance, and how the story gradually unfolded and escalated, I avoided spoilers or ads so I wasn't sure exactly where it was going. But by the end it felt like they just went over-the-top with it, and in a way it had the same strengths and weaknesses as the episode of "The Romanoffs" where Huppert played a similarly manipulative character.

e) Head Full Of Honey
This movie had a lot of beautifully shot scenes of a European road trip but otherwise it was kind of background noise to me.

f) Cold Pursuit
This was the latest Liam Neeson violent revenge fantasy movie that was overshadowed by Neeson talking about his own violent revenge fantasies in an interview. I didn't pay much attention to it but it didn't seem like I was missing anything.

g) Look Away
A pretty decent low budget horror movie, took some pretty familiar tropes (person seeing a different version of themselves in the mirror, finding out they had a dead twin, etc.) and made a pretty compelling movie out of it thanks to India Eisley's performance.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 3:05 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.