Movie Diary
I'm not saying this is as good as the new school classic Game Night but it definitely mined the same "rom com characters dropped into an action movie" territory well. I thought it was overall better than the previous Nanjiani/Showalter movie, The Big Sick, and the funniest Issa Rae performance I've seen to date. Not especially memorable but good for an afternoon's distraction.
b) Uncut Gems
There's a certain kind of A24 movie that people get kind of insufferable about, but I will say, this is a much better movie than Spring Breakers, I don't want to dismiss it like that. That said, the flourishes that made it not just a straight up crime thriller, like the overbearing score and the psychedelic microscopic zoom-in shots, didn't really add much to it for me. It all just felt like window dressing on a simple story of a kind of pathetic, self-destructive character who's made life worse for everybody around him circling the drain for 2 hours. Adam Sandler's performance was fine, maybe other people root for Howard Ratner more because they have happy associations with Sandler's face and voice, but I just heard him yelling the same way Happy Gilmore yelled at Bob Barker or whatever and felt no particular fondness for this shitheel of a protagonist.
c) Rocketman
Bohemian Rhapsody made more money and got more awards. But Rocketman is a far better movie, despite Dexter Fletcher essentially directing both (although John Reid, who managed both Elton John and Queen is, oddly, played by two different "Game Of Thrones" actors in each respective movie). Both movies played fast and loose with the facts and the chronology of the artists' catalogs, but Rocketman's more fanciful heightened reality excuses it more -- although I was irritated by them shoehorning John Lennon into the origin of Elton John's stage name, and someone saying "this is the best thing I've heard since Let It Be" before signing Elton to release his first album, which predated Let It Be). And while a few sequences made me roll my eyes, the bolder and somewhat more cartoonish approach paid off, it really felt like the movie was a celebration of Elton and Bernie's songs that captured the spirit of their records better than most music biopics (and made room for less overexposed tracks like "Amoreena" and "Take Me To The Pilot"). I never thought any movie star would have enough physical resemblance to play Elton John convincingly (Tom Hardy, laughably, was at one point attached to star in this), but Taron Egerton looked the part and sang in Elton's distinctive style pretty impressively too.
The original Zombieland kind of felt like a mainstream tipping point for horror comedy and zombie movie satire that became really oversaturated with diminishing returns in the following years, and I always say that a decade is way too long to wait to make a sequel for a comedy. But I never really stopped enjoying the original whenever it popped up on cable, and this is a solid sequel, I will watch Woody Harrelson and Emma Stone play stock Woody Harrelson and Emma Stone characters anytime and if they're shooting zombies at the same time, all the better. Zoey Deutch was really funny, too, the new additions to the cast were all pretty welcome.
For the first hour or so this was about what I expected, a charming little British movie from the director of Four Weddings And A Funeral about a group of book lovers who bond together on a small British island occupied by Germans during WWII. But the second half of the movie is all about how one of them fell in love with a Nazi captain and how he was one of the good Nazis and all the people who were opposed to their star-crossed romance are the bad guys in the story, I really have no patience for that bullshit.
My 5-year-old loves this movie and has watched it so many times, even though it really is pretty creepy for a kid's movie, it kinda gives me hope that he's gonna watch a lot of horror movies with me when he's a teenager. Not a bad movie, Dan Harmon co-wrote the screenplay years before creating "Community," but I really do dislike the aesthetic of the animation.
I grew up in the era of Don Bluth's weird movies competing with Disney features and I have vivid if not always fond memories of them, but I somehow have no memory of this one, which my son found on Netflix, where Glen Campbell voices a rooster who dresses and sings like Elvis Presley and a human boy is transformed into a kitten. A lot of these Bluth movies just feel like a childhood fever dream to me so it kind of makes sense somehow for this one to just kind of seemingly surface out of the fog of the past.
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on Thursday, June 04, 2020 at 10:04 PM.
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