Movie Diary
a) Hit Man
It feels like a lot of people are invested in the idea that more movies should be released in theaters and they would all make money, despite all evidence to the contrary. But Hit Man definitely feels like one of those movies that could've played well in theaters if Netflix hadn't snapped it up after it got great reviews at festivals. Glen Powell and Adria Arjona have been good in several things before but this feels like it could make major stars out of both of them and they have great chemistry, and I enjoyed the slightly unpredictable little twists and turns the story took. It's a little odd that two Texans, Glen Powell and Richard Linklater, adapted a Texas Monthly article about a Houston man and the resulting movie takes places in New Orleans, but they made good use of the setting, and I'm just happy anytime a movie is set outside New York or L.A. in a very casual way like that.
I have a low opinion of most modern American Godzilla movies, partly because they never seem to know how to balance the monster action with the human actors. Considering that Godzilla Minus One won a visual effects Oscar on a $10 million budget, I went in expecting the action scenes to be great, which they are, but I was pleasantly surprised that the human drama is genuinely emotionally affecting.
c) Night Swim
A recent Blumhouse horror movie I hadn't heard anything about and decided to blindly check out, about a cursed pool that kills people or whatever. Considering how real the fear of drowning is for most people, it should be pretty easy to make a genuinely scary movie out of this premise. But I dunno, it never really came together, Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon felt overqualified to carry this subpar movie.
d) Madame Web
At least I knew that I was getting into a bad movie with this one. As far as infamously bad Marvel movies, though, I dunno, at least it was better than Morbius. You can do worse than centering your poorly conceived comic book movie on four extremely attractive women, I guess.
Paramount+ has gone heavy on music documentaries, and this is one of the better ones I've seen lately. Cyndi Lauper recently announced a farewell tour before she retires from performing, which isn't covered in Let The Canary Sing, but it still feels like a pretty complete overview of her career. I've always had a fondness for Cyndi Lauper and her music but this movie really did a great job of articulating what's special about her as a singer, as a songwriter, as a public figure, as an activist and advocate, it's really a wonderful movie and I teared up a few times watching it.
CNN has a 'FlashDocs' unit that does little one hour documentaries on current events, and I watched this recent one on Beyonce's Cowboy Carter. Considering that Beyonce rarely does interviews anymore and probably isn't doing her own doc about this album, I thought this was pretty well done and put the album in a proper context, and I always enjoy seeing my esteemed colleague Chris Molanphy on TV. I thought it was interesting how Rhiannon Giddens, who plays on "Texas Hold 'Em," was very frank in her interview about how she wasn't that thrilled with Beyonce's performances with The Chicks at the 2016 CMAs and kind of felt like it overshadowed Charley Pride's performance and Giddens performing with Eric Church that night, I like that they were willing to show that perspective in addition to mainly praising Beyonce's venture into the country world.
A recent animated feature co-directed and co-written by Jared Hess of Napoleon Dynamite fame. A cute little movie about a pony who pretends to be a unicorn, my son really liked it. My wife was slightly vexed by the way humans and animals can talk to and understand each other in this movie but animals still have the same pet/livestock role in society that they do in our world, which I agree is a little weird when you think about it, but I just kind of bought into it for the sake of the story.
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on Tuesday, June 11, 2024 at 12:28 PM.
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