a) Parasite
I'd only seen Bong Joon-ho's big budget English language films (Snowpiercer and Okja) but really enjoyed them and rooted for him although Parasite's awards season triumphs and historic Oscar wins, so I was happy to finally sit down and watch this. And man, amazing film, best Best Picture winner since at least Moonlight if not longer, really appreciated the way the humor and little character moments and heist movie-like clever setups kind of lulled you into not quite expecting how sharply things turn to the darker second half of the movie. Went to sleep thinking about it, and woke up still thinking about it.

b) A Simple Favor
I really thought this was fantastic, I wasn't sure what to expect with a black comedy thriller directed by Paul Feig, but they really knocked it out of the park. As someone who's always thought of Blake Lively as kind of a bland and uninspiring screen presence (I may have made a 'Blake Lifeless' joke at some point in the past), I was really blown away by the performance -- the suits, the cursing in front of children, she just had this perfect blithe charisma to play against a classic Anna Kendrick performance as a nervous and chipper protagonist. The multiple twists in the story got increasingly over-the-top, but I like the way the story landed, they faked you out enough times that it was both relieving and satisfying the way it ended up. Really feels like this could be a future cult classic that people rediscover over and over and quote like Heathers or something.

c) The Willoughbys
A new animated movie on Netflix that my kid just watched the other day, based on a children's book by Lois Lowry. Maybe it was the very Royal Tenenbaums-y score by Mark Mothersbaugh, but it was very easy to imagine what this would've been like if Wes Anderson had done this as his next stop motion movie. But I liked the more straightforward fun cartoon way it was done here, good voice cast, a really neat animation style that I loved to watch.

d) The Kitchen
Maybe it's because I've been watching "Good Girls" lately but I kind of expected The Kitchen to be this sassy empowering movie about three women deciding to become criminal masterminds but there's nothing cute about this movie. Straight Outta Compton screenwriter Andrea Borloff, in her directorial debut, is like a sommelier, finding the right evocative classic rock song to pair with a scene of a guy getting shot in the head. This is jarringly violent movie, where '70s New York looks about as close to collapse as it's ever looked on film. There are so many deaths, most of which look like they really fucking hurt, but by the time there's finally a funeral scene near the end of the movie it felt like this was a world where funerals don't exist. Bill Camp and Margo Martindale really give great performances, and the the way it ended was kind of cool and unexpected. It was maybe half as good as Widows, but that's still pretty good.

e) Yesterday
Maybe I just kind of cycled through all my confused and annoyed music fan objections to the premise of Yesterday back when the movie came out last year, because by the time I sat down to watch it recently, I was ready to give it a fair shake and accept the movie on its own terms. And I gotta say, it was alright. I'm in general a fan of comedies like Groundhog Day that just throw a big weird premise at you but just ask you to go with it and don't try too hard to explain it, and I tried not to overthink the idea that The Beatles could disappear from 20th century history without having a huge butterfly effect on all popular music that came after (in that light, it's kind of mean for the movie to suggest that Coldplay and Ed Sheeran still exist in this world, but Oasis and only Oasis do not). In the end it was just a jukebox musical featuring one of the greatest songbooks of all time with a weird narrative conceit, and by that measure the songs really went a long way to bolstering the movie's trad rom com charms. The whole thing where Lily James was in love with a guy for years and he had no idea and just looked at her as a friend, though, it was ridiculous, less plausible than the Beatles stuff.

f) The Farewell
This was a really affecting movie about family and death, which spends its entire runtime building up all this emotion, and then undercuts it with the last 10 seconds before the credits roll. I respect that. Great performance from Awkwafina, who I still wish didn't go by Awkwafina, but hey what can you do.

g) Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot
Even if Joaquin Phoenix is playing a real person, the late John Callahan, in this movie, and they kind of needed an able-bodied actor to play a young Callahan before an accident left him paralyzed, I really just did not care for Phoenix's performance. Or maybe it was the script, which at one point had the wheelchair-bound and alcoholic Callahan reach rock bottom when he can't reach a bottle of vodka on a high shelf -- it all just felt kind of stupid and on-the-nose. There were some parts I liked, though, particularly when they'd cut between Callahan reciting the same lines about his life whether in front of an adoring audience, in front of an AA group, or in a normal social situation. Maybe Jonah Hill calling this movie the best acting of his career biased me against it, I just sat there waiting for something impressive to happen and his character didn't really seem to exist as anything but a sounding board for the main character.

h) Abominable
This and Smallfoot came out almost exactly a year apart, made similar amounts of money and got similar marks from critics. So which is better? Between the two big recent animated features about yetis, I think my elder son and I preferred the funnier Smallfoot, while my younger son and his mother preferred the less comedic but more objectively well made Abominable.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24, 2020 at 10:02 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.