Movie Diary
I was pretty thrilled to hear that T.T. The Artist's documentary about Baltimore club music was being exec produced by Issa Rae and released by Netflix. Of course, I announced many years ago that I'm writing a book about the same subject, and this mostly just reminds me that I still haven't finished it, which sucks, but I promise I will, and seeing this movie and all the positive attention it's gotten was definitely motivating. Dark City Beneath The Beat is a quick 65-minute movie full of dazzling performances from various local musicians and dancers, as much an extended music video as a documentary, full of places and people I know and love, so maybe it's hard for me to be objective about it, but I really enjoyed it. And there were some great documentary moments too -- I especially liked Blaqstarr talking about his first local hit, "Tote It," I've interviewed him multiple times and never got that story out of him. I was a little disappointed that only maybe half of the music in the movie was Baltimore club in the classic 130 beats per minute sense, but that at least served to show the musical variety of the scene as it is now.
b) Spontaneous
Spontaneous, the directorial debut from screenwriter Brian Duffield, is a movie about how teenagers start spontaneously combusting at random, specifically members of the senior class of one high school. Someone is perfectly fine at one moment, and then they suddenly cease to exist, their blood spraying all over whatever friends or classmates are in their immediate vicinity. But it's mostly a pretty charming rom com about two of the teens who fall in love while they helplessly wait to see if they'll be the next ones to explode. And that odd combination of gore and comedy, of existential dread and romance, manages to work. This could be one of those movies that builds a cult over the years like Heathers or Jennifer's Body.
I like a good fx spectacle as much as anyone, but modern Godzilla or King Kong movies tend to bore me -- it seems like the harder they try to stack the deck with skilled actors on the ground looking up at the monsters, the more futile the effort seems to be. Kong: Skull Island came the closest to actually using its overqualified cast well, but this falls far short of that, and it just made me sad to watch Bryan Tyree Henry pad out the movie with poorly written banter. Eiza Gonzalez in Godzilla vs. Kong is about the best anyone has looked in a movie since Eiza Gonzalez in I Care A Lot, though.
As much as cable and various streaming services cost now, I'm loathe to pay extra for any individual movie. But my kids were both pretty excited to see Raya And The Last Dragon, and I figured buying it on Disney+ would be worth it, as much as kids tend to rewatch movies. But it was really just an okay movie and my youngest only ended up watching it twice, so it felt like kind of a wasted purchase to me.
e) Jojo Rabbit
As someone who grew up on Mel Brooks lampooning the Nazis, so I can appreciate the kind of wild-eyed mischief that Jojo Rabbit is going for, although the movie only really took it a step further enough to make me laugh a handful of times. The songs used at the beginning and end of the movie were brilliant -- recognizing the songs and then suddenly realizing which versions they used was just hilarious. One of the better Best Picture noms of its year I suppose, but not a better movie than What We Do In The Shadows or Thor: Ragnarok.
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