Movie Diary
The decision to simultaneously stream all the theatrically released Warner Bros. movies on HBO Max in 2021 has obviously wound people up about big anticipated movies like Dune. But I think one of the real benefits is that people can sit at home and waste a night watching an underwhelming movie like The Little Things without spending a bunch of money at a theater and feeling really ripped off. There's something I find grimly amusing about watching a bad movie where all the lead actors are Oscar winners, and I think they all fared differently here: Denzel Washington as dependably compelling as ever, Rami Malek kind of blandly lost and never really summoning much of a performance, and Jared Leto just shamelessly chewing the scenery and mustering all his oily asshole charisma, maybe my favorite role in his long mediocre career. Everybody hated the ending but I sort of thought turning the heroes of the movie into horrible corrupt failures and refusing to solve the mystery for the audience was one of the few interesting decisions in an otherwise painfully derivative movie.
Sidney Flanagan gives an incredible performance in Never Rarely Sometimes Always as a 17-year-old high school student from a small Pennsylvania town who travels to New York City with her cousin to get an abortion. And that's pretty much the whole story, details aside, you're just with this character for a few of the worst days of her life, and there are some brief indications of a dark backstory but you're mostly just watching a young woman deal with how horribly difficult this country has made it to get an abortion, but with very artful and absorbing storytelling, and at one point I just kind of wanted to cry my eyes out.
c) Locked Down
This got awful reviews but I have to say I really enjoyed it. Like a lot of other film and television conceived and produced in 2020, it's about the COVID-19 quarantine and hits a lot of the now familiar beats and mainly focuses on a couple of lead actors with occasional video conference calls with other characters. But Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor clearly relished the opportunity to spend most of a movie arguing and giving dramatic speeches and reciting poetry and interacting with co-stars on Skype, and I thought the way they gradually worked their way into it becoming a heist movie in the second half was kind of clever and entertaining.
I hope Chadwick Boseman does get an Oscar for this movie, it's totally deserved -- sometimes an actor's final role or one of their posthumous films gets awards buzz for sentimental reasons but he really did some of his best work here. Aside from that, I loved how much they retained the feeling of watching a play while making it look like a movie, and it was interesting to see a day in a recording studio, which can even at the best of times be kind of repetitive and dull, turned into the backdrop of a compelling drama.
I have not seen much of Steven Soderbergh's lower budget movies with heavily improvised dialogue, but this one was pretty enjoyable, I like how they told a story that could've been done in a much more polished rom com sort of movie and made it a little more rambling and introspective.
The second It movie got notably worse reviews than the first one, but I may be one of the few people who enjoyed the second installment more. The first movie had an impressive cast of child actors, but I just got more out of watching Bill Hader, James Ransone, Jessica Chastain, etc. playing the adult versions of the characters and there were some pretty crazy and intense scenes.
g) Deadpool 2
Most of my favorite Marvel movies are on the more comedic end of the spectrum (Thor: Ragnarok, Ant-Man, Iron Man 3, etc.) so I'm mostly down for Ryan Reynolds's almost exhaustingly wacky Deadpool movies. The sequel felt like it kind of upped the ante entertainingly after they saw what they could get away with in the first movie, and Josh Brolin and Zazie Beetz and the rest of the supporting cast are good additions, but there are definitely times when you just have to roll your eyes at the whole thing.
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on Monday, February 01, 2021 at 9:52 AM.
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