Movie Diary
a) Shiva Baby
I have low expectations for autobiographical dramedies about complicated romantic situations and family dysfunction, they're often pleasant movies that I root for but there's such a glut of them and so many are forgettable and mediocre. But Shiva Baby really stands out, great debut feature from Emma Seligman that makes me anticipate whatever she does next, the way you get a great little snapshot of every character's life in one day, all their secrets and conflicts under the surface, you as a viewer knowing things the characters don't know, it's so well constructed and fun to watch. And Molly Gordon is great and steals every scene she's in.
b) Passing
Ruth Negga is great in this, I hope she gets another Oscar nom, she's so incredibly talented. I love the look of the film, the black and white obviously functions on kind of a symbolic level but also has a way of flattening differences in skin color and making the pervasive racism at the heart of the story feel more absurd. Some of the dialogue felt a bit on the nose, but the end was really poignant and tragic and I didn't see it coming.
c) Red Notice
You may wonder who watches crap like this, and the answer is that I do, I watch crap like this. I was actually really pleasantly surprised by Red Notice, it's the rare action comedy that really balances both genres well. Credit for that goes to writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber, who's made comedies (Dodgeball, We're The Millers) and a straightforward Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson action movie (Skyscraper) before and seemed to delight in weaving them together. It also reminded me a lot of the Anne Hathaway movie The Hustle, three characters constantly double crossing each other and changing alliances, it was all very silly and entertaining.
Zack Snyder's Army Of The Dead was another recent Netflix action comedy that I found fairly charming, and they've moved very quickly into making it into a franchise: there's an upcoming sequel and an anime sequel spinoff series, and also Army Of Thieves, which is sort of a prequel about one of the most entertaining characters from Army Of The Dead, Ludwig Dieter, directed by the actor who plays him, Matthias Schweighofer. It's a little bloated -- there's no reason a movie with stakes this low should be over 2 hours long -- but pretty entertaining.
I've never shared Tom Petty's view that 1994's Wildflowers was the best album he ever made, but it is a very good one. And apparently a bunch of footage from the recording of the album was only just discovered in the last couple years and was assembled into this new documentary, which also has new interviews with Rick Rubin, Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, and other people who worked on the album. Petty's entire career was already given a lavish documentary in Peter Bogdanovich's 4-hour Runnin' Down A Dream, so it's kind of cool to get another doc that zeroes in on one particular era, when Petty was getting divorced, changing labels, parting ways with longtime drummer Stan Lynch, and making the most ambitious album of his career, made all the more bittersweet and poignant by the fact that everyone in the movie is looking back at it after Petty's been gone a few years.
f) Hamilton
Other than maybe hearing bits of the cast recording album in passing, I had managed to kind of not experience the Hamilton phenomenon at all in the last 5 or 6 years, and as people became more and more passionately for or against Hamilton, I just wanted to remain neutral until I had a chance to see it for myself. And then the movie came out, and I took over a year to finally sit down and watch it, but I'm glad I did. And of course the musical did so much for the careers of everybody involved that I ended up watching this just already feeling like a fan of many of the performers from other things like Renee Elise Goldsberry and Daveed Diggs and Jasmine Cephas Jones. I have mixed feelings about Lin-Manuel Miranda's whole hip hop Schoolhouse Rock thing and there are moments that made me cringe, but overall it's a pretty impressive and entertaining thing, and every moment of Jonathan Groff as King George is hilarious.
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