Frances McDormand is a national treasure so I'm happy that she has a shot at winning a third Oscar, and for a much better film than the last one she won for. For a fictional movie based on a non-fiction book, I like the way Chloe Zhao split the difference and used a lot of the real locations and a few of the real people from the book but dramatized things just enough, the humanity of the characters felt so unforced and fully realized. It'll be interesting to see Zhao follow this with a $200 million budget Marvel movie. 

I watched this the same weekend as Nomadland and it ended up feeling like a double feature about how terribly this country treats its elders. Rosamund Pike was so fantastic in Gone Girl that I was always disappointed that it didn't immediately propel her into a lot of big projects, and so I feel odd about her most buzzed about role in 6 years being a sort of calculating sociopath that gets compared a lot to her Gone Girl character (I know Pike has made plenty of other movies, but I never seem to hear anything about them, so I'm open to recommendations). That said, this is not really the same kind of movie, certainly not as good but also meaner and tawdrier in a way that I enjoy, the way the story escalated once Peter Dinklage entered the picture was really unexpected and enjoyable. It puzzled me that people seem to struggle with whether to root for Pike's pretty awful character or congratulate themselves for not rooting for her, it didn't seem like a hard call to me. I also thought Nicholas Logan was really good and memorable in a fairly small role, and Eiza Gonzalez with messy curls is one of the most beautiful humans I've ever seen. 

I think the hardest kind of sequel to pull off has got to be a beloved comedy that's more than a decade old. Once people have watching a movie like Coming To America on TV over and over and quoted it to each other a thousand times, there's really just no way to recapture that dynamic, even if you do manage to make a really funny movie again. And Coming 2 America is not a particularly funny movie -- I'm not sure I laughed out loud once. But it is fun enough, seeing Eddie Murphy play all his characters from the original, all the callbacks. Kenya Barris, who already made a Shaft movie feel like Shaft-ish, did his part to fill the script with some corny of-the-moment cultural references, way too many song-and-dance numbers and tedious G-rated stuff like taming a lion with a can of cat food. But Jermaine Fowler is deserving of the big look he got in this movie and held his own in driving the B plot, even if it did make the whole thing feel like they were afraid to rest the movie on Eddie's shoulders again or he just didn't want to do as much. 

It's now been over 20 years since The Matrix, but it still feels kind of a bold move for a movie to open with a guy in a dreary office job finding out that his entire life is a simulation and his real body is hooked up to a big contraption that's feeding this narrative to his brain. To Bliss's credit, it goes in a pretty different direction from there, and I mostly like it, because it ends up being a little more emotional and character-based, but has a few moments that mess with your head and keep you guessing about where the story's headed. Ultimately, it didn't totally work -- casting Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek for a kind of dry, serious script was a strange choice, they would've carried the movie better if they sprinkled a light romantic tone in with the sci-fi like The Adjustment Bureau, but I would say it's at least a pretty interesting failure. 

It's weird to see a movie like this more than a year after it captured the zeitgeist, but I managed to go into it without knowing the entire story. I definitely disliked it and kind of wish it didn't exist, but it was okay, I guess. I think Joaquin Phoenix is great sometimes and sometimes goes too over-the-top, and he really shouldn't have gotten an Oscar for this bloated origin story junk, I'd never put his joker on the level of Ledger or Nicholson. 

My 11-year-old son really wanted to watch this and it became kind of a nice family movie experience. The CGI dog weirded me out in the trailer, but I was ultimately pretty impressed by the technical accomplishment of the digital St. Bernard and have to acknowledge that you wouldn't be able to do all of this with just a real trained dog in front of the camera.

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