Movie Diary
I loved Into The Spider-Verse and I was really happy to see that the team that made it was emboldened to make a sequel that goes further with its visual innovations, with its humor and storytelling quirks, with the emotion of the characters, everything. Hobie Brown and Peter B. Parker's baby were probably my favorite additions to the cast but I especially loved how Gwen was as much the protagonist as Miles was in this one. Still, like trilogies where the second and third movies are made together tend leave chapter 2 feeling like half of a movie, and that problem was especially pronounced in Across The Spider-Verse, even though at 140 minutes it's the longest major American animated film ever. That's kind of a temporary problem, though, since we have another great movie coming in 10 months.
I thought this was pretty great. With horror movies, sometimes you don't really know until the last scene if they stuck the landing. But that last little reveal in Bodies Bodies Bodies was perfect and suddenly put all the events of the story in a new light. In all the years of people trying to remove cell phones from the plot of modern horror movies to keep the story moving forward, setting a movie during a hurricane was really a pretty brilliant move, can't believe it took this long for somebody to think of that.
c) Missing
Apparently 'screenlife' is now the official genre name of movies where basically watch a story unfold through one character's computer and phone screens. And Missing is a sequel to 2018's Searching, although it's a completely different story with a different cast, with a teenager at home trying to figure out what happened to her mother who disappeared while on vacation abroad. I didn't like this nearly as much as Searching, or for that matter the 'screenlife' horror movie Unfriended, but maybe it's just that the novelty is wearing thin. I really started to roll my eyes during scenes with dramatic music rising in intensity as the main character tries to guess someone's Google password, fails, and gets locked out of their account.
d) To Leslie
The whole awards season drama with Andrea Riseborough getting a surprise nomination for Best Actress and people scrutinizing the campaign for her nomination instead of just celebrating a taltented underdog really annoyed me. But then, it was pretty hard to see To Leslie until it finally hit Netflix recently, and I'm happy to say that Riseborough's performance is great, the nomination was deserved. The story, of an addict and alcoholic dealing with their failures as a parent, is a familiar one for this sort of wrenching indie drama, but Riseborough really brings the character to life. I just wish she didn't have to share so many of her scenes with Marc Maron, who did not miraculously become a capable actor after he got more famous and started getting roles in real movies.
This was not entirely what I expected, and I wish Marcel becoming famous was not such a big part of the story, but it was pretty adorable and fun to watch. I love how you kept thinking of Marcel as this very simple, naive character, and then he'd come out of nowhere with some obscure knowledge or worldly wisdom.
There are a lot of big canonical movies I have not seen and I'm not in a rush to catch up on all of them but I try to get to one now and again, and this week I decided this was one to finally put on. Weird to have absorbed so many visuals and quotes from a movie over the years but still feel like there's a lot to absorb in really watching it. I loved Kubrick's visual language and the whole aesthetic of it, simply by depicting wayward teenage delinquents with completely different clothing, customs, and musical tastes than anything resembling contemporary youth culture, you get to kind of view the whole thing on a more abstract level. And in some ways the violence and depravity feels more jarring and shocking to me now than if I'd seen this when I was younger.
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on Wednesday, June 07, 2023 at 8:00 AM.
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