a) The Irishman
First of all: I Heard You Paint Houses is so much better a title than The Irishman on so many levels, and it's sad that Hollywood is allergic to keeping the title of an adaptation's source material if it's longer than 3 words, even if the movie is 3 hours long. Second of all: I'm glad that Scorsese got to make the movie as long as he damn well pleased, he's certainly earned that right, but I do wonder if something as impeccably paced as Goodfellas would have experienced the same kind of lagging momentum this occasionally had if he'd gotten to make it an hour longer. Overall, I liked this more than I expected to, Pacino lights up the screen in his scenes so much that I didn't mind that he sounds more like Grover from "Sesame Street" with each passing year, and though I've taken it as a given that De Niro's become less expressive and more one-note over time, he did well in a role that required a lot of him.

b) Marriage Story
I've never much cared for Noah Baumbach, but Adam Driver has been on such a roll lately that it seemed silly to pass on the performance he might win an Oscar for. It really feels like Baumach is more Woody Allen-lite than ever, though, right down to the entertaining Greek Chorus supporting cast (including Alan Alda) upstaging the wooden leads (including Scarlett Johansson). There were some poignant observational kernels here and there I related to both as a husband and as a child of divorce, but even to the extent that it felt like the autobiographical elements were employed self-deprecatingly, I dunno, it felt gross watching him rewrite the story of the cliche midlife crisis affair that ended his marriage. And I was disappointed with the stagey climactic fight, it felt more like Adam in season 3 of "Girls" being a ham in his play than the more reined in performances Driver has given in other film roles.

c) Spies In Disguise
When this Will Smith-as-a-pigeon animated movie came out, I saw people on Twitter recirculating a 2005 Billy West interview where he lamented that expert voice actors like himself had been sidelined in the post-Pixar era of the biggest movie stars getting all the voice work in major animated films, and he jokingly offered up the scenario "I'm Will Smith, I'm a kangaroo!" as an example. It was a very gripe for him to make, but I think a poor example -- Will Smith, after all, is a guy who became a star standing a vocal booth making his voice jump out of speakers years before anyone cast him in a movie. And Spies In Disguise rests on his effortless charisma more successfully than any live action movie he's done in a long time, but the whole thing is very entertainingly put together, felt like a lower stakes Incredibles in how it succeeded as an action movie and a kid-friendly parody of action movies.

d) Long Shot
On paper this seemed like a pretty predictable boilerplate Seth Rogen movie, a Knocked Up-style story of him hooking up with a famous blonde babe with a dash of lazy geopolitical intrigue like The Interview. And it is that, but it surprised me by at times feeling like a gender-swapped version of one of my favorite rom coms, The American President, and every scene with Bob Odenkirk was hilarious, they found a funny way to have a stupid shallow POTUS character that didn't feel like a transparent Trump joke.

e) Hellboy
So many conflicts in film development are kind of easy to break down to predictable roles of the creator versus the studio and so on, so it was kind of interesting to see a more complicated situation play out with the third Hellboy movie. Guillermo del Toro wrote and directed the first two movies, collaborating with the creator of the original Hellboy comics, Mike Mignola, on the story for the second one. But there was this prolonged breakdown where Mignola developed the story for the next movie, del Toro wouldn't direct or even produce if he didn't get to write the screenplay himself, and then Ron Perlman wouldn't come back without del Toro involved, and so this whole weird creator vs. director thing ultimately resulted in a reboot movie with David Harbour in the title role and nobody wanted to see it. And honestly, the movie would've been fine if I hadn't seen the other two movies to have a frame of reference to compare it to, I just did not like it remotely as much as the del Toro/Perlman iteration.

f) The Professor
Sometimes I just pick a movie that looks middling but not entirely worthless and put it on as background noise while I'm writing on a deadline, and that movie was The Professor a while back. I don't remember much about it, other than that Johnny Depp's character was dying of cancer and seemed to be just getting high and hanging around much younger women and being self-destructive just like Depp seems to be in real life these days anyway, it was a weird role for him to take.

g) Can You Keep A Secret?
If Alexandra Daddario thinks she can keep making generic rom coms and I will watch them just because she's in them she's absolutely right, but I don't have to be happy about it. This one was especially weird because so much of the story hinged on her being this plain girl with low self esteem who can't believe this handsome rich guy is interested in her so the whole cast has to pretend she doesn't look like Alexandra Daddario.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 16, 2020 at 1:02 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.