Movie Diary
I still have pretty fond memories of seeing 300 in the theater and what a fun over-the-top popcorn movie it was, and I wish Zack Snyder had stuck to his strengths of orchestrating big silly brawls instead of wading into superhero epics like Watchmen and Justice League where there's a lot of delicate mythology and characterization to get right that's a bit out of his depth. So Army of the Dead was satisfying in that Snyder finally dialed his ambition back to simply doing something as entertaining as Dawn of the Dead and 300, but I also just enjoyed the execution, great ensemble cast with some of the best performances coming from people I'd never seen before (Matthias Schweighofer, Nora Arnezeder). It's a shame that Snyder went to the trouble of replacing Chris D'Elia but then put fucking Sean Spicer in the movie, though.
b) Emma
I took a Jane Austen class in college so I've read all her books, but Clueless was my first exposure to anything Austen, and it's kind of hard for me to read Emma or watch any adaptation without constantly thinking of Clueless. Of course, I skipped the previous movie because I can't stand Gwyneth Paltrow, but this new one with Anya Taylor-Joy was pretty good, excellent casting all around.
Most the movies that Judd Apatow has directed have existed primarily to give a rising comic actor a star vehicle that packages their persona perfectly and allows them to headline more movies. And The King of Staten Island feels pretty successful at putting Pete Davidson's whole deal into an enjoyable 2-hour movie, even if it didn't get a theatrical release because of the Covid lockdown and I have a hard time imagine it selling a ton of tickets even if it got the chance to. But I liked it, it had the right combination of dirtball silliness and heart. Apatow scored the movie like an iPod shuffle, though, there was a romantic montage of middle-aged parents on a date set to Fabolous's "You Be Killin' Em" and later for no apparent reason a string quartet cover of Red Hot Chili Peppers.
I really liked The Favourite but thought The Lobster didn't really work, but both made me curious about Yorgos Lanthimos and made me wonder what my opinion of his work overall really is, so I felt like I should check out another one of his movies. And I had pretty mixed feelings about this one, and felt like if it was executed just a little differently I might have loved it, but it just pissed me off instead. The Killing of a Sacred Deer takes places in America, but only 1 of the 5 leads is American, and only Colin Farrell speaks with an Irish accent, but Barry Keoghan speaks with a bad American accent while still having these very distinct Irish rhythms and intonations, while also having this sort of distant monotone delivery. And the movie might have worked if Keoghan, sort of the mysterious villain of the movie, was the only character who spoke like that, but nearly all of the dialogue is delivered in this flat way, devoid of emotion, even when the words seem like they should have exclamation points ("He's really funny. I laughed so hard my ribs hurt." "Yes, he is very funny."). Even when Farrell and Nicole Kidman eventually express some emotion, it's pretty muted relative to the gravity of the situation, and this is one story where I think maybe just letting the actors go over-the-top and melodramatic would have served it better -- you don't really get the sense that this ordeal is ruining this family's lives because they seem kind of blank and sullen from the very beginning.
e) Chinatown
I was looking around for a movie to watch one day and was pleasantly surprised to see that Chinatown was one of the few 20th century classics that Netflix actually has, and I'd never seen it in full before and really should fill in that knowledge gap. I'm a big Nicholson fan and this is definitely one of his best performances, love the way he gets to deploy his smug one-liners throughout the movie but you gradually see the confidence kicked out of his character as the story goes on. The sound effects haven't aged well, though, the punches sound like a video game.
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on Monday, June 07, 2021 at 9:02 AM.
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