Movie Diary
a) Reminiscence
Reminiscence is the debut feature by Lisa Joy, showrunner of "Westworld" with her husband Jonathan Nolan and was also a writer on "Pushing Daisies." And it's pretty good, although it's a little somber in that Nolan style that rubs some people the wrong way. I always like the combination of a noir tone with a futuristic sci-fi backdrop, though. It's weird to realize that in 25 years of constant dystopian movies, this is one of the first since Waterworld that's actually about the sea levels rising in the future.
b) Annette
French director Leos Carax's first English language feature Annette is a very strange film, a musical with songs by Sparks, starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. There's murder and a singing puppet baby and Driver playing a very odd sort of a standup comic who performs in a green bathrobe. It felt to me like a slightly more successful and fully realized version of Charlie Kaufman's most indulgent movies like Synecdoche, New York, I didn't love it but I liked it.
Vacation Friends doesn't sound like a real movie title, it sounds like one of those movies the characters in Seinfeld go see. It's a pretty good old-fashioned studio comedy, though, John Cena and Lil Rel have a good John Candy-and-Steve Martin chemistry going as an unpredictable goofball and his uptight foil, and it's cool to see Meredith Hagner from "Search Party" with a big feature role. That said, the first 1/3rd of the movie that actually took place on the vacation was the best part, it kinda went downhill from there. One of the weird revelations of Vacation Friends, however, is that when you put normal middle-aged guy hair on John Cena, he looks, to paraphrase another Cena movie, like Dominic West ate Dominic West.
d) Cruella
Doing a Cruella de Vil origin story movie seemed like a bad idea to begin with and everything I'd heard about it was pretty discouraging. But perhaps I just managed to set my expectations so low that there was nowhere to go but up, because I found it moderately charming. To make your star an American faking an English accent, and have her offscreen narrating for the entire first 15 minutes, is a particularly risky choice, but Emma Stone managed to carry this movie even though it didn't deserve her.
Netflix did an animated spinoff movie of "The Witcher" in the style of their other violent 'adult anime' shows like "Castlevania," and it was very good, wouldn't mind a whole series or more movies in this vein.
Coming of age in the '90s, I loved those Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark books, especially Stephen Gammell's incredibly creepy charcoal illustrations. So I was pretty excited to hear that a film adaptation produced and co-written by Guillermo del Toro was on the way, although it took me a couple years to finally watch it. And I was pretty happy with it, the decision to not do an anthology film and sort of string together several of the original stories within a linked narrative worked out well. But I don't think I'll have any nightmares about it, maybe just because I've aged out of the target demographic.
This low budget horror comedy from 2014 was not particularly good, but Kat Dennings and Ray Wise are in it, and there's a funny John Waters cameo, so I thought it was a decent little waste of time.
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