Movie Diary
a) Malignant
With three of the biggest horror franchises of the past 20 years (Saw, The Conjuring, and Insidious) under his belt, it's kind of surprising that James Wan isn't more well known than he is at this point, I feel like he got more name recognition from doing Aquaman and a Fast & Furious movie. The buzz around Malignant got me really excited to see it, and I have to say, I didn't love it like some people did, it had a weird mix of tones and the wisecracking cop's awful quips felt out of place. But I'm really glad I managed to not read any spoilers and was totally blindsided by the twist, I recommend seeing it before they probably make a sequel where the advertising gives away everything that happened in the first movie.
b) Kate
Action movies starring women have enough of an uphill battle as it is, it seems a shame when one commits the unforced error of a premise that echoes a famous male-led action movie as much as Kate brings to mind Jason Statham's Crank, another movie where a badass professional killer is poisoned and runs around getting violent revenge as they face imminent death. But Mary Elizabeth Winstead really throws herself into the role well and there are some thrillingly choreographed fight scenes, and the charmingly cranky Woody Harrelson-type mentor character is played by Woody Harrelson, which I always like to see.
c) Nightbooks
It's fun to see Krysten Ritter chewing the scenery as a green-haired witch in this Netflix movie, it works surprisingly well considering that almost the whole movie takes place in an apartment with Ritter and two child actors.
d) Tenet
I will give some credence to Christopher Nolan's tantrums about demanding this be seen in theaters and admit that I could tell it would work way better in that environment, at home it was too easy to tune out or let my attention wander at times. But this was good, I was impressed by how the 'backwards' bits were filmed in a way that felt seamless and plausible, and tonally and conceptually it reminded me of Looper, probably my favorite sci-fi movie of the last decade. Having that dogshit Travis Scott song instantly play over the closing credits really breaks the spell of the movie, though.
"The Loud House" is one of my kids' favorite shows, it's a cute little animated sitcom about a family with 11 kids. A few months after the show debuted on Cartoon Network, it was announced that there'd be a theatrical movie, but then a few months after that, the creator of the show got fired amidst a bunch of sexual harassment allegations. And the show continued to be good without him, but I do wonder if some of that fallout effected the plans for the movie, which ended up just coming out on Netflix. It's a good movie, though, the kids were very happy with it.
I'd never seen this movie outside of a scene here or there, since I was in college when it came out and it was kind of a family movie, and I'd already seen High Fidelity and heard Tenacious D and it just kind of felt like a redundant extension of the established Jack Black persona. But it seems to go viral for some reason or another every few weeks and people really love it, so I decided to finally put it on, and it's pretty charming, I relate to Black in these things a lot as a kind of unabashed classic rock superfan. The plot is kind of ridiculous in parts, but I suppose that's kind of par for the course. Also it's kind of funny how many people in this movie have a color for a surname (Jack BLACK, Mike WHITE, Sarah SILVERman, there's even a small role by someone named Jordan-Claire GREEN).
As I said recently, watching HBO's new "Scenes From A Marriage" miniseries made me feel like a philistine because I'd never seen any Ingmar Bergman work, so I went back and kind of watched both in parallel (the Bergman one was originally also a miniseries but has since been edited together into a feature film). And I will admit that I prefer the more modern Hollywood production values and acting of the remake, but the original is great too and it's interesting to see in what ways they changed plot points.
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