Movie Diary
a) Dual
Dual is the third thing I've watched in the past couple years with the premise that in the near future, people with terminal diseases can create a clone of themselves to take their place in life after they die. In the others (Swan Song and an episode of the anthology series "Solos"), the idea is that only the dying know. In Dual, it's all out in the open and well known, but Karen Gillan's character, Sarah, survives her illness, after her clone's been created and has met her husband. The thing is, her husband likes the clone more than the real her (perhaps relevant, perhaps not: director Riley Stearns's wife left him for Ewan MacGregor, oof -- it's okay, man, my wife would too). And the law about clones is there can't be two versions of one person running around, so the two Sarahs are required to fight each other to the death to decide who gets to be the real Sarah. I really like it, doesn't lean too hard into the comedic aspect of the premise but has some very funny moments and some cool eerie ones, and the first Aaron Paul performance I've really really liked.
b) Smile
This was a perfectly average mainstream horror movie. The premise and the jump scares were all pretty much what I anticipated from the trailers, and there were a couple really memorable surprising images that went a little beyond what I expected. Nothing spectacular but I enjoyed it, and I hope first-time writer/director Parker Finn has some stuff up his sleeves besides inevitable Smile sequels.
An Ashton Kutcher/Reese Witherspoon rom com on Netflix seemed pretty unappealing to me, but I saw that it was the directorial debut by "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" co-creator Aline Brosh-McKenna and decided to give it a shot. And I thought it was pretty good, well written, although Kutcher really was poorly cast, just did not know how to convincingly play the character he was supposed to be. Like, Dude, Where's My Car? is a classic to me, but he doesn't have the range to play a real adult. I like movies where a character really loves one particular band whose songs become the de facto score, in this case The Cars.
When I was 17, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest was my favorite novel, and Jason Segel on "Freaks & Geeks" was the character I related to most on my favorite show. So the announcement that Segel would play Wallace in a feature film filled me with complicated feelings and discomfort, so I didn't watch The End Of The Tour the first 8 or so years it was out. But then I was watching Segel on "Shrinking" and thought, y'know what, I should finally check it out. And I have to say, both the movie and Segel's performance exceeded my expectations, it was a very well made and nuanced portrait of Wallace, and funnily, it actually has quite a lot in common with that other movie about the reporting of a Rolling Stone profile, Almost Famous. But seeing the movie managed to make me even more uncomfortable with its existence -- the whole thing is about Wallace's reticence to be written about in a magazine, and it wound up as a movie, much of it about his interviewer's weird Salieri complex, which I'm sure would've given him the howling fantods.
I liked this, but it also felt like one of those things where it wouldn't have been embraced so much by critics and festivals and the Oscars if it was in English, it reminded me a lot of some moderately ambitious/pretentious American comedies, right down to the extremely tiresome "character takes psychedelics and there's a surreal sequence with special effects/animation" scene. Great performance from Renate Reinsve, and a few pretty memorable, well written moments amongst the more familiar elements. Horrible song over the ending credits, though.
f) How It Ends
How It Ends was written and directed by the husband-and-wife team of Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones (although I guess they're now divorced), and I really liked their previous films Breaking Upwards and Band Aid. It's one of those early pandemic movies where people just wrote and shot something on the fly because they had extra time -- it's the last day on Earth before a meteor hits, and Lister-Jones's character is walking through Los Angeles and runs into dozens of people and has these short absurd encounters. Basically it's an excuse for a small crew to shoot scenes outside with COVID-19 safety protocols with a ton of celebrity cameos (Bradley Whitford, Fred Armisen, Colin Hanks, Helen Hunt, among others). But I really liked the weird little touches like people being followed around by an embodiment of their younger selves, and they managed to move the story forward in a lot of the sketch-y vignettes in a clever way, I almost wish they set out more deliberately to make a great movie with these ideas rather than a fun little cameo-heavy pandemic project.
g) Good Boys
An R-rated comedy about 6th grade boys seemed like an inherently funny idea and probably Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's attempt to make Superbad with an even younger set of characters. But I dunno, maybe I'm just not the target audience but this fell kinda flat for me.
h) Work It
Netflix original movies are all over the map quality-wise, but they've gotten pretty good at the kind of frothy teen comedies that used to be released in theaters. Work It is a dance movie with a sort of Pitch Perfect-ish sense of humor, and the story hit the usual predictable beats in a pretty satisfying way, I enjoyed it.
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