Movie Diary
Alien invasion movies are often more exciting in theory than in execution, but No One Will Save You is honestly one of the best that I've ever seen. It's kind of funny that for two years in a row, the most acclaimed Hulu movie has been a movie with little dialogue about a young woman battling an alien invasion -- I think this one's even better than Prey. Kaitlyn Dever's just been too good in too many totally different projects to not be a big star at this point, she managed to carry the emotion of every scene but also pull off the weird dark comedy at key points. And the design of the aliens was pretty creative, I liked that they didn't all have the same body.
b) Theater Camp
Theater Camp stars a lot of the coolest people in comedy right now (Molly Gordon, Ayo Edebiri, Jimmy Tatro, Patti Harrison) but also star and co-writer Ben Platt, who's extremely uncool after the Dear Evan Hansen movie. He kind of lends Theater Camp credibility as a hardcore theater geek, though, so it feels like it's people making fun of themselves than just ridiculing an easy target.
Flora And Son is from John Carney, the writer/director of Once and Begin Again, so you kind of know what you're getting into with a charming, romantic movie about music with original songs. But I felt like it was less saccharine than I was expecting, Eve Hewson's character Flora is a single mom who curses like a sailor, the story and the relationships don't really proceed in a predictable way or get a forced ending, it's more charming by not trying to be perfectly charming.
When I was a kid I went a probably not uncommon phase of just checking out every Roald Dahl book at the school library, I just love his stuff. When it was announced that Netflix bought the Roald Dahl Story Company, though, I figured they'd just be trying to turn more of his stories into Willy Wonka-type pop culture franchises. So it was a pleasant surprise that they got Wes Anderson to make some shorts of Dahl stories, an inspired pairing of director and material that highlights Dahl's weird dark sense of humor.
e) The Flash
Back in 2014 someone important decided that Ezra Miller was the Tobey Maguire that DC needed to turn The Flash into a franchise, and they never wavered from that conviction even as Miller turned out to be a violent criminal who they had to hide for a year before The Flash finally came out and underperformed. Miller's screen presence is more like a young Chris Kattan, and some of the comic relief moments in The Flash are so wacky that I found myself laughing out loud, but more at the movie and with it.
f) Office Race
With the decline of theatrical studio comedies, Office Race feels like the kind of thing that would've gotten a wide release 10 or 15 years ago, but now it just airs on Comedy Central. And that's fine I guess, it's just a moderately amusing movie with Beck Bennett and Joel McHale, with a premise that, as my wife pointed out, is pretty similar to Run Fatboy Run. It was decent, though, the whole McHale subplot was pretty entertaining.
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on Thursday, October 05, 2023 at 10:28 AM.
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