Movie Diary
When someone waits until 25 years into a highly successful screenwriting career to try their hand at directing, it feels like a sign that they've got too much dip on their chip, and Aaron Sorkin is no stranger to an excess of dip. But his directorial debut Molly's Game was pretty solid -- it feels like he saved most of his rookie mistakes for his second feature as a director. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is pretty bad with hair/wardrobe and worse with music and general atmosphere, which are pretty unfortunate weaknesses for a period piece to have. The two scenes with Michael Keaton are top shelf Sorkin, but almost everything else rings false to the subject matter or gets dragged down by things like Jeremy Strong, who was great in Molly's Game, deciding to play Jerry Rubin as if he's always seconds away from saying "party on, Garth." Eddie Redmayne gave good Sorkin boy scout, though, I'd watch him in whatever zombie "West Wing" the guy comes up with next.
b) The Witches
A screenplay credited to Robert Zemeckis, Kenya Barris, and Guillermo del Toro reeks of years of rewrites in development hell, but I have to say that those 3 very different sensibilities are all present in The Witches in a more coherent fashion than I thought was possible. I assumed the project changing hands from del Toro to Zemeckis would make it more kid-friendly, but I watched this alone and I think if I watched it with either of my kids it would've sufficiently traumatized them. As a grown up Roald Dahl fan, though, I enjoyed it -- a lot of Dahl adaptations forego any voiceover narration that would put his chewy prose up front, but The Witches has Chris Rock voice the adult version of the protagonist, which is a surprisingly good choice and also amusingly made me try to imagine it as a very strange stylized "Everybody Loves Chris" reboot. I wouldn't say it was particularly good, but I like seeing Anne Hathaway ham it up.
It's exciting to see the Baltimore dirt bike world depicted in a semi-big deal feature film, even if it is ultimately a pretty formulaic coming-of-age hood movie where the lead actor is from Atlanta and really mangles the Baltimore accent. But Meek Mill came up in Philly's similar bike culture and does a decent job, even if it is a little jarring at times to see him play someone who is not Meek Mill while songs where Meek Mill raps about how great Meek Mills is blare in the background.
Stop Making Sense is obviously an all-time great concert film, but it's such a singular achievement that I can't help but roll my eyes at the universal praise for something conceived by the same guy, featuring a few of the same songs and a similar if not entirely identical approach to lighting, staging, and costuming. But hey, David Byrne put a unique sensibility into the world over 40 years ago and I'm fine with him continuing to mine it in sometimes familiar ways -- I'm never not going to enjoy hearing him sing "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)," even if I'm annoyed at the audience that clapped loudly at the false start (how do you guys not know how this song ends?!). Spike Lee, who did a similarly great job filming a stage production for 2018's Pass Over, knows exactly what to do here, and I kind of wish he was always making music movies. I didn't think much of the original American Utopia album when it was released 2 years ago, and I don't know if its songs and the Talking Heads chestnuts and Byrne's charming spoken interludes add up to anything particularly profound or cohesive, but it works.
Fantasy Island was a pretty weird show if you think about it for more than 2 seconds, and adapting it into a full bore horror movie is an inspired idea, but it didn't totally work here, a rare swing and miss for Blumhouse. As much as I love seeing Michael Pena in a lead role, it probably could've used someone else with a different vibe as Mr. Roarke, among the other tone and plot issues.
John Turturro is an all-time great character actor, and his quick scene-stealing role as Jesus Quintana in The Big Lebowski is a rare and memorable over-the-top moment in his career. But I dunno, it's weird that he apparently loved playing the flamboyant latino pederast so much that he decided to throw a few years of his life into writing and directing a spinoff film with the permission (but not involvement) of the Coen brothers. The movie's not terribly but it's deeply unnecessary, and probably could've been made with Turturro playing a totally different character. Amelie has a lot of sex in it, if you're into that sort of thing.
I don't really know why I put this one, I didn't even have that much investment in the Men In Black franchise when it was going strong, much less now that it's limping along. Rebecca Ferguson's campy performance as an alien is a good companion piece to her campy psychic vampire in Doctor Sleep, though.
I feel like this movie will be remembered for the weird historical quirk that the story of 2 teens who had to stay 6 feet apart came out exactly a year before everybody in the world started staying 6 feet away from each other. A nice little YA movie though, Haley Lu Richardson was as good in this as she was in Edge Of Seventeen.
i) Beneath Us
This movie, about undocumented workers taken captive by a wealthy American couple, feels like a less subtle, more violent grindhouse kind of approach to the same themes as Parasite. But it's well made and puts its points across well, I think I'd be a lot more impressed with it if it didn't have the misfortune to come out the same year as Parasite.
This low budget thriller was really bad and forgettable, but I liked the snarky line in the IMDb 'trivia' page -- "No razors needed here: Every main male character is Guy Perpetually in Need of a Shave (GPNS)."
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