Movie Diary
a) Elemental
My 8-year-old wanted to see this and my 13-year-old came long with us, and I'd say we all liked it but didn't love it. Elemental is definitely too pleasant and competent to really deserve some of the Pixar obituaries it's inspired. It's better than, say, The Good Dinosaur, but it's probably a bad sign that Pixar let the director of The Good Dinosaur make another movie and lost money again. I liked that it was basically a romcom (my 8-year-old shielded his eyes when they kissed at the end), although the 'culture clash' plot about people from two different cultures falling in love felt very cliche and superficial, nothing profound or even relatable there. The voice acting, dialogue, and visual aesthetic mostly worked, though.
Sarah Snook has only had a few supporting film roles since "Succession" began so I was excited to see her in the lead role in this Netflix movie. And while I would agree with a lot of the criticisms about the plot and the overall execution, I think I liked it more than most people, great performances from Snook and the child actress Lily LaTorre, a few creepy moments and reveals that worked really well amongst others that didn't quite land.
c) Men
Another horror flick that got unenthusiastic reviews that I still wanted to see, and probably had a slightly above average opinion of. Jessie Buckley is great as ever, but the movie really hinges on Rory Kinnear's very strange role(s) and the whole thing really wound up very far from what I expected, even having seen Alex Garland's previous work. At least one bit of FX just kind of looked crappy, but mostly I appreciated how audacious it was and not in the ways people seemed to want a horror movie called Men to be, at worst I think it's a noble failure, or maybe something that will be evaluated more positively in the future.
d) The Wonder
A decent period piece with Florence Pugh as an English nurse who's summoned to an Irish village to examine a girl who supposedly hasn't eaten for months but isn't starving to death. It's based on a novel and feels like one of those movies that probably worked better as a novel, like maybe something about the interior of the characters was lost in translating it to a visual medium, but Pugh was excellent as usual.
The first Ant-Man managed to survive a great director, Edgar Wright, leaving in pre-production, and his replacement, and his replacement, Peyton Reed (director of Bring It On and several other less distinguished studio comedies), did a pretty good job with a couple Ant-Man movies. The third movie in the series, however, actually made me think, for the first time in years, "oh yeah, Edgar Wright was supposed to do these, he might have been able to actually pull this one off." Quantumania just tried to be a way bigger sci-fi thing than either of the earlier movies, and Peyton Reed just seems totally lost, throwing the characters into some of the ugliest CGI landscapes I've seen since the Star Wars prequels. And yet it was still intermittently a pretty watchable movie whenever they just let Paul Rudd be Paul Rudd.
My kids put this on the other day and it was a pretty silly little movie, didn't really deserve to have Samuel L. Jackson and Mel Brooks in the voice cast but it was still fun to hear them.
I watched this as part of my research while writing about Alice Cooper recently, and it was an entertaining little career overview. Some of the director's creative decisions really irritated me, though, there was a lot of repurposed stock footage or scenes from movies manipulated to sort of seem like a depiction of a story someone told that wasn't caught on camera, even when it's pretty obvious that's what's happening it feels like kind of a gross thing for a documentary to do.
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on Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 8:59 AM.
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