Movie Diary
a) The Gray Man
The Russo brothers have a pretty good track record for directing entertaining stuff, from Marvel movies to some of the best episodes of "Community." But their latest big Netflix movie was kinda boring for me. I feel like a broken record complaining about Ryan Gosling being a boring movie star, and I should be fair to him, because he was good in The Nice Guys and even La La Land, but he was a drag in The Gray Man, Chris Evans being a moderately fun villain couldn't save it.
I think it's a shame the studio lost its nerve about releasing the movie under its original announced titled The Lost City of D, but otherwise I thought it was great. Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum are both so good at physical comedy and get so many great character-building moments that make the fun premise come alive and not feel too cheesy or contrived. And Daniel Radcliffe, as always enjoying himself playing against type and keeping his career interesting, is a great villain.
I always thought it was kind of embarrassing or annoying that the Spider-Man franchise got rebooted so many times partly over intellectual property technicalities and we wound up with 3 actors in the title role in the space of like a decade. But I have to hand it to Marvel for turning lemons into lemonade and getting all of them back together in a multiverse storyline. I hated that all the leaks and social media spoilers took away the element of surprise, but I still found it a lot of fun to watch.
I hold Sam Raimi in pretty high esteem and think his Spider-Man movies are still a high watermark for superhero movies, so I was really looking forward to this one, and it delivered. Nice mix of horror and comedy (the Pizza Poppa scene is already one of my favorite Bruce Campbell moments ever) and trippy creative mindfucks. It still felt a little less than the sum of its parts in that MCU way where so much exposition and fan service and brand-building and dot-connecting can get in the way of just making it a fully satisfying film in and of itself, but overall I really liked it, my favorite MCU movies since Ant-Man and the Wasp, maybe even Black Panther.
I don't 'hatewach' much but sometimes I just want to put on a movie while I'm writing that I can afford to ignore if I want to, and so I put this one despite pretty well knowing I probably wasn't going to think highly of it. I mean I think pretty highly of Adam Driver but he couldn't do much to make it worthwhile. That one sex scene was so Showgirls that I almost wonder if they leaned in to making it campier after they realized it was going to be a bad film. And while Al Pacino has been in even worse films, I still felt kind of bad for him for having to do scenes opposite Jared Leto's ridiculous mama mia Italian accent.
The latest Father of the Bride remake is not as funny as the Steve Martin one I grew up on, which was 2nd tier Steve Martin anyway -- I don't know if Andy Garcia really has the gift for comedy to carry a movie like this. But it was light and enjoyable enough. It's annoying to see someone as funny as Ana Fabrega from "Los Espookys" underused in a small supporting role.
Woody Harrelson and Kevin Hart both seem to make an action comedy every year, so it feels sort of inevitable that they'd co-headline one eventually. I'm a fan of the 'regular person stumbles into a crazy spy movie plot' trope, but the presence of Kaley Cuoco reminds me that it's been done much better before, including recently in "The Flight Attendant."
h) The Fallout
I put on this movie just assuming it was some kind of coming of age drama, some high school kids going about their daily lives. And then, 5 minutes into the movie, you hear a loud sound, and it's gunshots, and the characters you just met survive a school shooting. It was so jarring and unexpected for me that it kind of helped me relate to everything that came after and care about the characters more, whereas if I knew it was a movie somewhat about a school shooting, I might not have watched it. I realize that by writing this I may prevent someone else from having the same experience with the movie, but again it happens in the first 10 minutes so I'm not too worried about 'spoiling' that.
i) Hypnotic
A psychological thriller about hypnosis that had a lot of potential in the premise but really just fell flat, disappointing.
j) The 355
A great cast, hoped it would be a fun and stylish action movie with an all-female cast like Ocean's 8 with spies or something but it was just kind of underwhelming.
I wish more of this movie was Anne Hathway and Willem Dafoe as daughter and father, I thought that made a more interesting story than where things went once Ben Affleck showed up.
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on Wednesday, August 10, 2022 at 10:26 AM.
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