Movie Diary
Every year there's at least one A24 movie that Letterboxd types go nuts about and get totally outraged when it gets no Oscar nominations, and The Iron Claw was this year's Uncut Gems. So I went into it with reasonably high hopes, particularly because I don't know that much about '80s wrestling, so I figured I wouldn't get hung up on visual or historical accuracy the way I do when music biopics drive me crazy. Invariably, though, I started furrowing my brow when two major life events would happen in consecutive scenes, and I'd go online and realize those two events occurred years apart in real life, and then realized they erased an entire Von Erich brother from the story (apparently a movie where 4 out of 5 brothers die young is fine, but 5 out of 6 brothers dying young is just too much!). Maybe being a journalist has turned me into a bad audience for biopics, but dammit, I feel like if the truth is interesting enough to make a movie about, you might as well tell the truth as much as possible in the movie, nobody needs all this lazy Hollywood shorthand and compression. And the movie's biggest stylistic flourish, the afterlife scene...I don't know, man, knowing a guy said he wanted to kill himself to join his brothers in Heaven, actually depicting that happening is incredibly fucked up. And of course I at least knew enough about '80s wrestling to recognize that Aaron Dean Eisenberg was laughably bad as Ric Flair. But listen, I'm only going on about this stuff because they were just frustrating shortcomings in an otherwise really impressive, emotionally affecting movie with excellent performances from, Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Holt McCallany, and Lily James.
I think Will Gluck's first two movies, Fired Up and Easy A, are two of the funniest studio comedies of the last 20 years, even if his work since then has been a little more anonymous and uneven. So I was curious to see Anyone But You, the biggest rom com in a while and Gluck's second biggest box office hit to date (after, uh, the first Peter Rabbit movie). I found Anyone But You kind of a letdown, though, there were just so many forced, overly complicated "physical comedy" setpieces that made it feel like a Farrelly movie. Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney were charming enough and had chemistry, and the success of this definitely cemented them as movie stars, but it just felt a shaky bridge to get everyone to better career prospects.
Now that there's a pretty strong consensus that Jennifer's Body is the best or only particularly good movie Diablo Cody's written, I'm glad she got another crack at a weird high school horror comedy, even if Lisa Frankenstein isn't quite up to the same standard. I felt like it started off slow but got a little more demented and entertaining by the end. It was directed by Zelda Williams, daughter of Robin, and I feel like he'd be proud of what an absurd and playful movie she's made.
She Came To Me is one of those rom coms where you've got some inherently silly situation where Peter Dinklage is married to Anne Hathaway and sleeps with Marisa Tomei and he's just miserable for the entire movie. It's also a little surreal and dreamlike and has a large cast and subplots and I wish it all got tied together well. Instead, it just kind of ends with a shrug, and Bruce Springsteen singing easily the worst song he's ever written for a film.
I am generally very pro-Anne Hathaway and miss her movie star peak, so when I saw she had two movies recently hit streaming I decided to watch them both. And The Idea of You is the less ambitious of the two but also more successful at what it was going for, kind of a playful wish fulfillment spin on the Harry Styles/Olivia Wilde relationship. Michael Showalter was one of the first cast members on "The State" to have a catchphrase back in the day ("I'm outta heeeere"), but he's fostered a pretty good career behind the camera including this, The Big Sick, The Lovebirds, and The Eyes of Tammy Faye.
f) Argylle
I thought Kingsman: The Secret Service was a silly little fun movie and went into Argylle hoping for the same basic deal. And it was mostly decent, just a bit too long, and by the second big twist I was kind of checked out and just waiting for them to get it over with. Also, there's a thing where Bryce Dallas Howard will look at Sam Rockwell, blink, and imagine she's seeing Henry Cavill -- they could've done that two or three times to get the point across, but they did it maybe 200 times, over and over, it got really really annoying.
This new Disney+ documentary is pretty good, but with so many big expansive music docuseries happening, it almost feels like they went too small with a doc under 2 hours covering the 60-year history of one of the most important American bands ever. There was some great footage, some insightful interviews, but I'm sure it could've been a lot longer and more in-depth.
This documentary is about the Bosnian genocide in the '90s, and how U2 got involved in doing satellite link-ups with Sarajevo during the Zoo TV Tour, writing Passengers' "Miss Sarajevo," and eventually played a concert in Sarajevo in 1997 after the end of the war. It's easy to be cynical about U2's overly familiar role as compassionate activist rock stars, but this movie is pretty moving at times and tells the story well, although it's funny that the emotional climax of the movie features the band performing in their goofy PopMart Tour outfits.
The last shows of Queen's tour in support of The Game, really right there at the climactic end of their reign as a superstar act in North America, were filmed in late 1981, shortly after the release of "Under Pressure." It's been released many times on VHS and DVD and CD over the years, often under the title We Will Rock You, sometimes packaged with their Live Aid performance. But recently it was released in theaters and on Disney+ as Queen Rock Montreal. And man, I'd seen lots of clips before but the whole thing is just awesome, I love hearing how they take those big lavish studio tracks and reproduce them as four guys with minimal taped accompaniment (except for "Bohemian Rhapsody," where they just play the middle part of the song straight off the album).
j) Amy
I wrote about Amy Winehouse recently, and while I was working on that I watched the 2015 documentary about her, which I think I'd been afraid to watch when it came out. And man, it is rough to just see how young she was when her life went off the rails, even before she made Back To Black, just this tragic arc happening in plain view of the public and nobody doing much to stop it. I understand why her family was unhappy with the film but I thought it was relatively fair to everybody, just really depressing and hard to watch.
k) UglyDolls
My son watched this one day and I was kind of impressed with the visuals, they did a good job of transferring the look of the UglyDolls plushies to animation, especially when something like the Trolls movies are genuinely hideous.
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