Movie Diary
I don't like to watch movies on my laptop with headphones, but I've been doing it more lately, just because I'm home with my kids so much these days. And I've noticed that watching scary or suspenseful movies can be a lot more intense that way. My stomach was in knots pretty much the entire time I watched The Invisible Man, but the first 10 minutes were actually the hardest to watch. It's just a long, mostly silent scene of a woman trying to leave her abusive boyfriend in the middle of the night without waking him up, and before you've even seen him do anything, you're just terrified because you can see how afraid of him she is, which is really a testament to how good an actor Elisabeth Moss is. A movie like this could very easily just devolve into something ugly and pointless like Hollow Man with Kevin Bacon, but the plotting and the acting are grounded enough that even when the sci-fi stuff kicks in it all feels plausible and horrifying. After this and "The Handmaid's Tale," I really just want to watch Moss be happy in a rom com or something.
b) 21 Bridges
I had wanted to see this before Chadwick Boseman died, and especially now as his posthumous legacy inevitably gets boiled down to biopics and Marvel, I'm interested in his other work. And 21 Bridges is a pretty good crime drama, with Boseman as a cop and Stephan James as the accused cop killer he's hunting down. And it's great to just watch their scenes together, two great actors who can be brooding and intense but have a certain immutable warmth and humanity trying to see eye to eye in a charged situation where they're supposed to be enemies. A lot of the movie is kind of too loud and bombastic, long action scenes and an oppressive score, but the Boseman/James scenes, and the great little supporting turns from J.K. Simmons and Keith David, make it worth checking out.
c) The Way Back
This is the 2020 The Way Back with Ben Affleck, not the 2010 The Way Back with Colin Farrell (or, for that matter, the 2013 The Way, Way Back with Steve Carell). Just as Gone Girl's casting kind of capitalized on Ben Affleck's public image, The Way Back feels like he's playing an everyman version of the depressed divorced alcoholic Affleck we see in tabloids. But in a way this role asks more of Affleck that he's not quite capable of, he's still just a really limited actor. I was amused when Melvin Gregg, who played the basketball star Marcus on "American Vandal," was an NBA player in High Flying Bird, and once again he's a basketball player in The Way Back, his name is even DeMarcus.
In my mind Yesterday and Blinded By The Light are kind of twinned, two 2019 movies that are both love letters to classic rock icons but are about British men of South Asian descent. But they're pretty different movies, and Blinded By The Light, a more straightforward coming-of-age story, is by far the better of the two. It goes for big, earnest, on-the-nose emotional moments, but so do the Bruce Springsteen songs the movie deploys to great effect, so it's a fitting tribute. And it felt like the right time to watch it, with a new Bruce album around the corner. I didn't find it a little funny, however, how much the movie takes pains to contrast Springsteen's music with synth pop, but the kid loves Born In The U.S.A.
e) Inheritance
Inheritance opens with Patrick Warburton as a wealthy man who dies at the wheel of his car. In a video will he leaves to his daughter, he reveals that there is a bunker under their house, and when she goes down there, Simon Pegg is being held captive down there in a silly-looking wig. Incredibly, Inheritance is not a comedy. Instead, it's a very solemn thriller that plods on kind of monotonously after those initial revelations to a kind of inevitable end. I always thought Simon Pegg had some untapped range for drama, he always seemed to make a point not to repeatedly play the same stock character in his comedies, but he's at least 20 years younger than the character he's playing in Inheritance and the bad wig, old man makeup, and shaky American accent add up to a total misfire of a performance that could have saved the movie if they'd just cast someone older.
The John Wick sequels are good and mostly maintain the charm of the first movie, but they remind me a bit of the Kingsman sequel, the way these franchises seem to attract more and more stars with each movie, so suddenly you get all these super famous actors in supporting roles (including Halle Berry in both). Some of these star turns are fun, but they feel a little antithetical to the spirit of the first movie letting Keanu Reeves just bask in the spotlight and drive the whole thing. That said, I really enjoyed seeing Asia Kate Dillon from "Billions" in a campy over-the-top villain role.
g) Bloodshot
This movie with Vin Diesel as Bloodshot was supposed to launch a Valiant Comics cinematic universe, but it's a pretty shaky start, I don't know if we'll see more movies of him or other Valiant characters. It's just not even very good by Vin Diesel movie standards. It came out in March right before theaters started closing, but it probably wouldn't have made a whole lot more money even if it hadn't.
h) Ana
This movie takes place in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, with Andy Garcia as a struggling car salesman who befriends a young homeless girl. Kind of a nice character-driven movie but a little dull with a lot of silly story beats to get them to a contrived happy ending.
Sort of a stoner comedy directed by Lefty Frizzell's granddaughter, not bad for a debut feature but didn't really hold my attention. Kyle Mooney from "SNL" was well cast as the pathetic roommate.
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on Tuesday, October 06, 2020 at 10:21 AM.
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