Movie Diary
I thought this was excellent, one of the better horror movies in recent memory. Rebecca Hall's performance and David Bruckner's direction laid the groundwork and let it just be a sad story about grief before the really supernatural stuff started happening and the twist kicked in. There were maybe a couple climactic scenes that I didn't think totally worked, but I really liked the ending and how it all hung together.
This reminded me a lot Star Wars: The Force Awakens, in that it gave you some engaging new characters in a purportedly new chapter of the story before sneaking an insane amount of familiar faces, parallels with the earlier movies, and other fan service in the back door. And to be honest, I think that approach worked fairly well in both cases, throwing a little Paul Rudd and Carrie Coon romcom stuff in there was pretty charming and kind of lulled me into not anticipating where the climax would go. Not great but better than I expected.
Language Lessons is one of those projects conceived in the early days of the pandemic that consists almost entirely of two characters talking to each other on Zoom, which is a pretty crowded genre by now, but I would say it's by far one of the best that I've seen. Natalie Morales, who's been likable in a lot of supporting TV roles, makes her directorial debut and gets to show her dramatic range a little bit, and while I'm kind of tired of seeing Mark Duplass in every third small budget dramedy, he's good in this too. It starts out as a guy just getting Spanish lessons that were bought for him as a gift, but it only takes about 20 minutes for a kind of unexpectedly heavy plot to be set in motion and it's at times pretty engaging and poignant, loved the ending.
Perhaps never before has a "kid's movie" been more overtly crafted to appeal more to their parents. I'm 40, and spent years of my childhood enjoying "Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers" and years of my adulthood enjoying The Lonely Island's videos and movies. My kids don't really know about of that stuff -- one of them saw the old "Rescue Rangers" series for the first time when Disney XD ran it the week of the movie's release -- and had no interest in the movie at all, most of the nerdy Roger Rabbit-style riffing on animation history was amusing to me but went completely over their heads. As an Akiva Schaffer movie, I'd rank it well behind Popstar: Never Stop Stopping and Hot Rod, but it had some pretty clever bits in there.
My kids like these Sonic movies, which is kind of funny, because they've never played or even seen the games. I will admit that Jim Carrey is pretty entertaining in them, although it's just weird hearing Idris Elba voice a cartoon echidna.
It's kind of remarkable that there are so many interesting stories within World War II that there's still things like this, a British operation to fool the Germans into thinking that the Allies were about to invade Greece, not Italy, that haven't already been a movie. I don't know if the whole love triangle subplot was true to life or just kind of wedged in there to make it more Hollywood, but I liked it, Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen and Kelly Macdonald made for an excellent cast.
g) The Dry
I put this on one night while I was finishing a piece and it just kind of breezed past me, seemed OK.
Recently I couldn't find a newer movie I felt like putting on and decided to finally watch Boogie Nights all the way through for the first time. I remember back in the day my brother tried to get me to watch it once or twice and I just never sat through the whole thing, but it's kind of nice, having seen most of Paul Thomas Anderson's other movies, to go back and finally see probably his best one. I probably appreciated it more now since there are so many actors I love who had early career-defining roles in this. It's also interesting to think that there was a time when there hadn't been that many period pieces about the '70s yet. The big '90s movies that took place largely in the '70s were Goodfellas and Boogie Nights, which both seemed to hit the target better than almost anything since then, maybe in part because Anderson was so heavily influenced by '70s film and Scorsese was a '70s filmmaker.
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on Tuesday, May 31, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
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