Movie Diary
Netflix has such a spotty track record with feature films outside of the big awards season stuff like The Irishman, and Jamie Foxx has already starred in a couple quickly forgotten Netflix action movies, Project Power and Day Shift. But They Cloned Tyrone has been getting some great word-of-mouth buzz and I really enjoyed it. It features a sci-fi riff on conspiracy theories that takes place in the present day, but the clothes/hair/dialogue all have a stylized Blaxploitation aesthetic, feels like the arrival of an original new voice in writer/director Juel Taylor. The movie lost a little momentum once Kiefer Sutherland just walked in and gave a speech explaining the whole conspiracy, but otherwise a really sharp, memorable movie with a great cast. It feels like John Boyega's been waiting a decade for a star vehicle as good as Attack the Block after he was sorely underused in those Star Wars movies, and it's nice to get a hilarious Jamie Foxx turn shortly after his health scare.
I was clicking through Hulu and looking for something to watch and stumbled on Pretty Problems, an indie comedy that won the audience award at SXSW last year. It's about a struggling middle class couple who make friends with some rich people who invite them for a weekend getaway in wine country, with a standout performance by J.J. Nolan as their unpredictable, impulsive host. I've never seen anyone in this movie before but three of the lead actors co-wrote the screenplay. And if studios still made non-franchise theatrical comedies this is the kind of thing that should be playing in multiplexes if it was a little slicker and had one or two familiar faces.
c) Gray Matter
When I watched the new season of "Project Greenlight," it made me very curious to check out the movie they made, Gray Matter. Given how much of the show circle around them scrambling to fix the screenplay's problems, I was pleasantly surprised that Gray Matter had a pretty solid and engaging story, I'd probably rank it just behind Feast as the second best "Project Greenlight" movie to date. Meko Winbush did pretty well as a first time director making a sci-fi movie on a small budget, there were some decent visual effects here and there but a lot was conveyed in the acting and camera movement. Elements of the plot reminded me of both X-Men and Looper, which were (accidentally?) exacerbated by the fact that Garrett Dillahunt had a shaved head and played a character reminiscent of both Professor X and Dillahunt's character in Looper.
In the year of Air and Tetris and that Flamin' Hot Cheetos movie, it really feels like these corporate brand backstory movies have just become a ridiculous trend. And here comes an inauspicious movie directed by one of Al Gore's daughters and the singer from OK Go about the brief, baffling Beanie Babies craze that I lived through in the '90s (and not, as I hoped, about Beanie Feldstein's 4-month run starring in a Broadway show). I liked it well enough, though, I'd say it surpassed my low expectations. The cast is strong, and honestly I'm just smitten with Geraldine Viswanathan and will watch her in anything, but the movie treats its subject with just the right amount of seriousness and silliness, and Zach Galifianakis is a good choice to play an asshole CEO.
e) 65
I think Adam Driver's rep as an actor is totally deserved, but looking at his project choices, he certainly hasn't been in some stinkers in between blockbusters and prestigious auteur movies, but it still surprised me that he signed on to be in a generic-looking sci-fi dinosaur movie. 65 is a pretty refreshingly direct and unpretentious movie about a guy rescuing a teenager by firing laser guns at dinosaurs, nothing to write home about, but in the age of super bloated action movies, a brisk 90-minute movie like this hits the spot.
f) Insidious
The Insidious franchise now has five movies and has made almost a billion dollars, but it occurred to me that I don't know a single thing about these movies and decided to check out the original from 2011. And man, I think I'm pretty agreeable when it comes to formulaic horror movies, but this managed to feel as flat and dated as some of the '80s movies it's derivative of. Like, I know Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson can really act but this movie makes it seem like they can't. I laughed out loud when the kid did the 'mic drop' gesture over the table and everybody's chair flew backwards, just an incredibly goofy movie, not scary at all.
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on Wednesday, August 02, 2023 at 8:52 AM.
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