I've loved Val Kilmer as an actor for a long time and occasionally you'd see these peeks at his personality on social media that were really charming, and I was so sad to hear about his throat cancer diagnosis a few years ago. So it's really emotional to watch this documentary he made telling his life story, now that he's cancer free but he barely has a voice left to speak with, and the movie very cleverly and movingly solves this problem by having Val's son Jack, who sounds just like him, reading his father's narration. There's a certain amount of social media transparency we're used to seeing from celebrities now, but the fact that this movie star was just making home movies all through the '80s and '00s and you get this candid footage of Marlon Brando and Kevin Bacon and so on is really neat, and helps the movie not be all film clips and newsreels like a lot of retrospective docs. I never knew about his brother that died as a teenager, or how many years he put into his Mark Twain project until the cancer cut it short, so many bittersweet stories. I just loved the doc, even though it pretty much breezed past my two favorite Val Kilmer movies, Real Genius and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, in about 5 seconds each. 

One of my favorite movies of the past year, Sound of Metal, was about a musician going deaf, and CODA, about a young singer with deaf parents, is a story with some similar elements but goes in a very different direction. It hits a lot of familiar notes of a story of a prodigy with a difficult and unusual life, and it's taken some fair criticism for how over-the-top the plot gets in making the only hearing member of a family seem burdened with being their interpreter at all times, which is both unrealistic and feels a little forced as storytelling. I also thought it was odd that Apple+ doesn't default to subtitles for the ESL dialogue -- I didn't turn on captions at first because you could kind of get the gist of what was being said without them, but as the movie went on I'm glad I put on captions, there were some great lines I would've missed. But for the most part the movie works, with Eugenio Derbez jumping energetically into the 'stern but caring mentor' role. And Troy Kotsur's performance is just remarkable, he expresses so much with his face and body even with you barely hearing his voice. 

I have no problem with only three actors from the first Suicide Squad movie returning for the second movie, since the idea that it's dangerous work and people die all the time is baked right into the premise. But I do wish they'd been able to being back Jared Leto and Will Smith for 5 minutes to be among the canon fodder killed off in the entertaining opening scenes of The Suicide Squad. James Gunn totally gets how this whole thing should be done much more than David Ayer did, and it's it's fun to see a comic book movie that just revels in being a silly hyperviolent spectacle instead of taking itself a little too seriously. The movie didn't rely on Margot Robbie too much to carry it and John Cena and Daniela Melchior were great too. 

I respect that Mads Mikkelsen still makes movies in Denmark even after finding success in Hollywood, but I hadn't seen any of them until I saw the poster for Men & Chicken and simply knew it was something I need to see. And I'm glad I did, because apparently Danish filmmakers will let Mikkelsen play a broader range of characters than the villains and killers he usually plays in American and British films, and he's just a great comic actor, incredibly funny in this movie about two brothers in search of their real father.. The story takes some pretty bizarre twists and turns, but Mikkelsen and Soren Malling are both hilarious and I just loved this strange, gross movie.

John David Washington was excellent in BlacKkKlansman and Malcolm & Marie, but I think his relative inexperience as a movie star comes through a little more in an ostensibly simpler movie like Beckett, a straight ahead action movie where he plays an American on vacation in Greece who ends up on the run from a criminal syndicate. He's decent at the action stuff and makes you really feel like he's in pain in a movie that starts with a car crashes and then proceeds to him constantly getting stabbed and shot at. But there are long stretches of the movie where he's the only character onscreen or the only English-speaking character onscreen, and he just doesn't carry it the way some capable mook like Bruce Willis would. It doesn't help that Italian director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino doesn't really have much visual flair and will do cheesy shit like play a shot in slow motion when he wants you to recognize a character from earlier in the movie. Boyd Holbrook, who was great in Logan, is another entertaining villain here -- at one point Beckett pins him down and interrogates him about the conspiracy, and he goes "Google it," which is just about the only really good line in the movie. 

My son was very excited to watch this Netflix animated movie where Lin-Manuel Miranda is the voice of a singing kinkajou. It's a sweet little movie, some sad parts made him cry but mostly he enjoyed it. Miranda wrote better songs for Moana, though. 

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »