Movie Diary
a) Those Who Wish Me Dead
Taylor Sheridan, a supporting actor on "Sons of Anarchy" and "Veronica Mars," surprisingly has become a big name for gritty crime drama with screenplays for Oscar-nominated movies like Hell Or High Water and Sicario, and creating the huge cable ratings hit "Yellowstone." His latest as a writer/director, Those Who Wish Me Dead, stars Angelina Jolie as a down-on-her-luck smokejumper who rises to the occasion to save a kid who's being chased by two cartoonishly evil assassins after he witnessed them killing his father. It all inevitably climaxes with Jolie fighting the bad guys with an axe in the middle of a forest fire they caused, with lots of other acts of heroism and grisly violence in between. Jolie gives kind of a vacant performance, it's easy to imagine this all coming off better if you had someone with a little more presence like Charlize Theron in the role, but the casting that really sticks with me is Tyler Perry showing up in aviator shades for a few minutes to play the sinister crime boss who orders the murder of a child.
Taylor Sheridan, a supporting actor on "Sons of Anarchy" and "Veronica Mars," surprisingly has become a big name for gritty crime drama with screenplays for Oscar-nominated movies like Hell Or High Water and Sicario, and creating the huge cable ratings hit "Yellowstone." His latest as a writer/director, Those Who Wish Me Dead, stars Angelina Jolie as a down-on-her-luck smokejumper who rises to the occasion to save a kid who's being chased by two cartoonishly evil assassins after he witnessed them killing his father. It all inevitably climaxes with Jolie fighting the bad guys with an axe in the middle of a forest fire they caused, with lots of other acts of heroism and grisly violence in between. Jolie gives kind of a vacant performance, it's easy to imagine this all coming off better if you had someone with a little more presence like Charlize Theron in the role, but the casting that really sticks with me is Tyler Perry showing up in aviator shades for a few minutes to play the sinister crime boss who orders the murder of a child.
The Mitchells vs. The Machines is the debut film from Mike Rianda, who was one of the creative forces on one of my son's favorite shows, "Gravity Falls," and it's probably the best animated feature of at least the last 2 or 3 years, just a very funny kid-friendly update of the Terminator-style robot apocalypse premise. The robot voiced by Beck Bennett from "SNL" is the most consistently funny character, but Maya Rudolph's character gets a good moment toward the end, and the giant Furby talking like a comic book villain was hysterically funny. It was kind of novel how the movie had a very stylized computer animation look, but things that the main character imagined were laid over the scenes with hand-drawn animation or even occasional live action footage.
I'd never heard of this Australian horror comedy from a couple years ago, but my wife read something about it and wanted to see it, and it was pretty great. Lupita Nyong'o plays a kindergarten teacher who has to protect her students when their field trip stumbles into a zombie outbreak, and it might honestly be the best performance of her career, at turns hilarious and heroic as she leads a bunch of 5-year-olds around with a ukulele and kills zombies. The montage at the start of the movie of the male lead, Alexander England, fighting with his ex is a pretty great opening, too.
Like many people, my main frame of reference for The Woman In The Window is that wild New Yorker piece a couple years ago about how the author of the book is some kind of compulsive liar and con artist. And it's possible that those revelations contributed to the many delays of the film adaptation and the negative reviews for it now that it's finally out, but I think it probably would've been panned regardless. The first half hour did a decent job of building the mood that I had some hope for it, but then Joe Wright started making these campy directorial decisions and it kind of spiraled into nonsense from there.
One of the funny things about HBO Max streaming theatrical releases for a limited window of a few weeks is it makes me feel like 'oh no, I should watch Mortal Kombat before it's too late' even though I really don't care whether I see Mortal Kombat. It was alright for what it is, I think the casting was pretty good, Josh Lawson had a lot of fun with his role, but there were moments that were so cheesy and cheap-looking that if you'd told me it was a scene from one of the '90s Mortal Kombat movies I'd believe you.
I'm Your Woman is one of the most harrowing and violent crime dramas I've seen in recent memory, directed by Julia Hart, whose 3 previous films were all family-friend coming-of-age things. Rachel Brosnahan is the wife of a guy who's involved in some kind of crime syndicate, and one day he disappears and her life is plunged into chaos as she and her baby try to get to safety, and the whole movie is just kind of one terrifying ordeal, with a great stoic performance by Arinze Kene as one of her husband's associates who helps her. I really liked Aska Matsumiya's score, it gave a cool otherworldly undertone to a movie that was otherwise a pitch perfect '70s period piece but might have felt a little more generic if they filled the soundtrack with '70s pop music.
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