Movie Diary
Considering that The Super Mario Bros. Movie shattered all records with the biggest opening for an animated movie ever, both of my sons (7 and 13) were unsurprisingly keen to see it, so I took them over the weekend. Much has been made about this is an actual kids' movie with a divided reaction between delighted children and bored snobby adults (as opposed to Pixar movies that stimulate all ages), and that is pretty much how it felt for me. Illumination has some pretty funny movies (particularly Despicable Me) but I only laughed a couple times. I'm not a dedicated gamer but I grew up with early Nintendo systems so probably 50% of my lifetime video gaming experience is with various Mario games. So I was down for a silly little movie full of easter eggs and references for people who've played the games and it wasn't actively annoying like, say, the Secret Life of Pets movies.
I've seen M. Night Shyamalan's ups and downs long enough to not set my hopes too high anymore, but Knock At The Cabin's cast was at least pretty promising, particularly Dave Bautista and Ruper Grint, who was great in "Servant," which had some of Shyamalan's best work in recent years. Unfortunately, I don't think this really worked. People seem to like the novel it's based on, The Cabin At The End Of The World, but in addition to giving the story a stupid new title, Shyamalan also gave it a stupid new ending, and I just kind of shrugged at the violent hysterical melodrama of it all when it was over.
c) Ghosted
Chris Evans and Ana de Armas's romcom action movie is more engaging in its opening meet cute sequence than when the spy stuff starts happening, or maybe I just prefer romcoms to action movies. Either way, a pleasant but mild movie that could've used someone with a sense of humor punching up the script before they spent all that money filming it, the leads aren't really charismatic enough to carry the movie without snappy dialogue.
d) Cocaine Bear
I wish this movie wasn't "based" on a true story because it's kind of fucked up that a bunch of cocaine fell out of a plane in 1985, a cocaine ate it and probably died almost instantly, and they turned it into a wacky comedy about a bear going on a drug-fueled rampage. It's like if Snakes On A Plane was based on a real incident but some snakes just suffocated and died in a storage cabin. That said, I love a good man vs. nature thriller, Crawl is one of my favorite movies of the last few years, and I thought Elizabeth Banks did a fine job directing Pitch Perfect 2, so I wanted Cocaine Bear to be good, but it was just too self-consciously goofy. I knew it was gonna suck when it opened with a quote from Wikipedia and a bunch of newsreel footage and old PSAs about drugs.
This was pretty thrilling and well done, been a while since a historical war epic had this much life to it. Probably should've gotten some Oscar noms, at least Viola Davis or costume design or something.
The big unique flourish of Moonage Daydream is that it's David Bowie in Bowie's own words, with his voice from various interviews and other recordings providing all the narration over a dizzying array of concert footage, documentaries and television appearances over his whole career. So it's not a typical music doc with talking heads and a cradle-to-grave narrative -- the movie opens with Bowie already a star performing in the early '70s, touches very briefly on him marrying Iman, and kind of breezes past the last couple decades of his life. But all that means is that it's a devoted celebration of his work and how he thought of it, juxtaposing some great live performances with some of Bowie's typically insightful, intellectual and self-deprecating observations about how and why he made music. I feel like there was some missed potential here in how it resisted a filmic narrative arc or rhythm and didn't pack the punch it could have on an emotional or sensory level, but still pretty good movie.
g) Dead Ringers
I had not seen David Cronenberg's 1988 film Dead Ringers when I started watching the recent Amazon Prime series based on it, so I figured I'd check it out. I have mixed feelings about it overall, but Jeremy Irons is great in it, probably one of the best, most nuanced depictions of twin siblings by a single actor that I've ever seen. Definitely makes me very curious about the Marcus twins that the story was loosely based on and the differences between fact and fiction.
Another movie I checked out because I'm watching the current TV series remake, although Fatal Attraction is a far more famous movie so I feel like I already knew the entire plot before watching it. I have a soft spot for Adrian Lyne's directorial style because of Jacob's Ladder, and the tension and ambiance he creates really frames Glenn Close's performance well, but in some ways this movie has aged pretty poorly.
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on Monday, May 08, 2023 at 8:02 AM.
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