Movie Diary
I'm enough of a philistine that I've never seen a Jane Campion film before The Power Of The Dog, but I liked it. In some ways I felt like it was a better There Will Be Blood, right down to a less obnoxious Johnny Greenwood score. Benedict Cumberpatch is pretty amazing, he can really become a character so thoroughly and convincingly, and the story didn't really go where I thought it was going to in a good way. I don't know how old Peter was supposed to be or if they specify his age in the novel, but it felt like Kodi Smit-McPhee was too old for the role -- we're used to 25-year-olds playing teenagers in all these high school shows, but I think the ending would've had more impact if Peter wasn't this full grown 6'1" man towering over the rest of the cast.
Films directed by famous actors have a mixed track record, but you can reasonably expect them to get a good cast and help them shine, which is certainly true of Maggie Gyllenhaal's directorial debut, which got Oscar nominations for Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley. "Yellowjackets" recently overcame my weariness of stories that require different actors to portray the same characters at different ages, and Colman and Buckley pull it off pretty amazingly here too (although I think of Buckley's nomination as a belated apology for being snubbed for Wild Rose). The Lost Daughter feels like the kind of novel adaptation where some of the character's psychological states or thought processes were easier to get across on the page and become a little labored in the movie, but overall a really strong directorial effort for Gyllenhaal.
Guillermo del Toro is someone that I always want to have a blank check to make whatever he wants, good bad or ugly, and after The Shape of Water he probably pretty much has that. Nightmare Alley is a remake of a 1947 film I'd never heard of, starring someone I'm kind of sick of, Bradley Cooper. But the ensemble does great work (Dafoe, Collette, Jenkins, Straithairn, Steenburgen) and I enjoyed it even if it didn't leave a huge impression on me.
Biopics have always been awards season bait, but this year's Oscar nominations really lay bare how much they've almost become these unapologetic actor showcases that are seldom great overall films. 8 of the 20 nominated actors this year are from 5 biopics, only one of which got a Best Picture nod. The Eyes Of Tammy Faye's 2 nominations, for Jessica Chastain's performance and for Beset Makeup and Hairstyling, are entirely due to Chastain's tranformation into Tammy Faye Baker. And it's impressive, yeah, but the movie itself feels kind of flat and dutiful, and Andrew Garfield is as ill-fitting and miscast as Javier Bardem was in one of the other nominated biopics, Being The Ricardos.
This was a pretty fun, above average Marvel flick, although that scene on the bus in the beginning was so much better than the rest of the movie that the other action sequences felt anticlimactic.
Emily Blunt at one point seemed to almost exclusively pick projects I enjoyed, but listen, I'll settle for her being good in a substandard movie now and then if that's what she wants to do. Dwayne Johnson had some lines that gave me a sensible chuckle in the exact way the guides on the jungle cruise ride gave me a sensible chuckle last time I went to Disney World a couple years ago, so mission accomplished there.
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on Wednesday, February 09, 2022 at 11:53 AM.
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