Movie Diary
Armageddon Time has a really impressive cast including Jeremy Strong, Anne Hathaway, and Anthony Hopkins, but it's really a coming-of-age movie where the main character is a 6th grade boy, played by Banks Repeta. And he gives a good performance, maybe it's not fair to the kid, but I kind of found myself bored by the scenes focused on him, and waiting for more scenes of the supporting cast -- Strong in particular is great, really shows his range in this with a different kind of role. But maybe it was just the movie wasn't that interesting, it's director James Gray's autobiographical period piece and it just kind felt a little self-indulgent, wasn't really sure what the point of it all was other than to make a movie about how people were just as racist in the early '80s as they were before the civil rights movement.
Like most people, I kind of laughed just at the existence of the movie, the title and everything, but it's a pretty decent little horror movie. Since it's a period piece about the '80s, though, most of the music in the movie is stuff listened to by the teenage girl character, there are all these kind of sudden hilarious needledrops of, like, "She Sells Sanctuary" or "We Care A Lot" while Russell Crowe is dressed up like a priest riding around on a Vespa. It's kind of annoying how every movie about possession and exorcisms is so derivative of The Exorcist in its effects and imagery, though, like yes that's an amazing movie but please try to do your own thing.
This was a charming, sad movie. Yara Shahidi was hopelessly miscast as an introvert who's self-proclaimed fashion role model is Mr. Rogers, but I liked the friendship between her and Odessa Adlon, who's going by Odessa A'zion now (maybe trying to beat the nepo baby allegations?).
d) Love Again
When I saw that there was a rom-com about a music critic learning a valuable lesson about love from Celine Dion, I joked that it was based on Carl Wilson's 33 1/3 book. This was a passable romcom, Celine's scenes were definitely some of the best parts, I enjoy things like this or LeBron in Trainwreck where some enormous celebrity who's not in a lot of movies pops up playing themselves in a supporting role and turns out to have good comic timing.
The first Shazam! movie was fun and exceeded expectations, and then the sequel got treated like a total flop, but honestly I would say this is only a little weaker than the first movie, it was fine. I like the superhero movies that know they're silly and own it.
I remember this movie coming out early in Aubrey Plaza's sort of transition into more substantial roles. I liked this movie a lot, but Plaza was better in Emily The Criminal, she didn't quite have the chops to play the sort of unhinged obsessed character in Ingrid Goes West, but it was still an excellent movie, kind of skewered Instagram culture as a dark comedy really well. Kind of sad to see a movie like this that got some nice festival/critical buzz six years later and realize that writer/director Matt Spicer has yet to do another feature.
g) mother!
Another movie from 2017 that I just know got around to watching. Somehow I managed to hear a lot of chatter about this movie without getting it spoiled for me, and I was pretty curious about what generated such divided reactions. And I will say, I kind of rolled my eyes when I realized what the movie is about, but I liked it for the most part, particularly the first half when you don't really know what's going on and you're just confused and stressed out right along with Jennifer Lawrence's character. I don't have really strong feelings about Darren Aronofsky, but he definitely excels at kind of putting you inside a character's head when they're losing grip on reality (Black Swan, Pi, Requiem For A Dream) and mother! at least works really well on that visceral level.
This is one of the better animated features I've seen from Netflix, my kid watched it a couple times and really dug it. Fun to see Bowen Yang voicing the villain in a kids movie.
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