I remember being very skeptical of Inside Out before it was released and mocking the premise for resembling "Herman's Head," and then I watched it and went OK, fine, it's a pretty good movie. I haven't rewatched it much over the years but I regard it as a solid middle-of-the-pack Pixar movie, and my 9-year-old was excited to see the sequel, so we went last week. And I liked it, it may be one of the only Pixar sequels on the same level as the original, even if it has a lower bar to clear than Toy Story 2, I feel like the story got to me emotionally a little more, they definitely nailed the feeling of that awkward "middle school going into high school" moment of adolescence. 

Nicole Kidman plays a middle-aged mom who has an affair with a younger movie star in A Family Affair, and it's overall pretty similar to The Idea Of You, a movie I watched recently where Anne Hathaway plays a middle-aged mom who has an affair with a younger pop star. I was a little impressed with Kidman in Being The Ricardos, but I don't think comedy is her natural element and she just feels out of place in a light romcom like this (one of the rare roles where she gets to play an Australian, though! Good for her!). The scenes Zac Efron and Joey King have together are really the only ones that are funny. Efron's character reminds me of Adam Sandler in Funny People, where a real movie star plays a ficitonal movie star and they struggle a little to make the character's fake movies seem dumber than the actor's real movies. The subplot with the put-upon best friend played by Liza Koshy wound up being one of my favorite parts of the movie, though, felt like an abrupt reality check in the middle of the usual romcom cliches. 

Actors, even famous and successful ones, are sort of at the mercy of a lot of other people to create good roles and cast them. So I'm interested in the Hollywood tradition of actors who move into directing and/or writing, and Dev Patel seems to have made Monkey Man primarily to make himself an action movie lead when people didn't see him as a candidate for those kinds of roles. He also only directed Monkey Man himself after unsuccessfully courting Neill Blomkamp to do it, so I don't think it's too harsh to say that it's better as a star vehicle than as a directorial debut. I feel like the movie's weirdly paced at times and has a kind of outdated teal-and-orange look to it, but once the action picks up, it's a pretty exciting and well put together film. And it was refreshing to see something with more visceral emotion and cultural specificity than the average revenge thriller. 

Jerry Seinfeld is not an especially versatile talent. He found a voice as a standup and then spent several decades just plugging that voice into different projects, and one of them just happened to be one of the greatest sitcoms of all time. Since Seinfeld has "Seinfeld" money and doesn't need to work another day in his life, most of his later projects are unchallenging by design: documentaries about standup, "Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee," an animated movie about a bee who talks like Jerry Seinfeld, etc. Jerry Seinfeld's directorial debut feels wildly ambitious in the sense that I didn't think he could be bothered to make a period piece satire that is a little wackier and more concept-driven than anything the "show about nothing" guy has ever attempted. He doesn't really pull it off, but it goes by quickly and loudly and I didn't really mind it. Feels like a missed opportunity, though, that he made a whole movie about Pop Tarts that co-starred Jim Gaffigan but they never brought it full circle with a Hot Pockets joke. 

Another directorial debut from an actor, sort of an accidental running theme here, although Jesse Eisenberg does not act in When You Finish Saving The World. I'm not someone who needs an exciting plot to enjoy a movie. But as a slice-of-life movie about a few weeks in the life of a relatively ordinary family, this felt a little too dry and uneventful. I could love a movie like this if I enjoy spending time with the characters, if they were funny, but it was just a little dour, I identified with the father character Jay O. Sanders played who was kind of annoyed by everybody else in the movie. 

Trigger Warning is a funny stupid title for an action movie where lots of people shoot guns, but hey, it could've been worse, it could've been an actual movie making fun of trigger warnings. Jessica Alba was sort of positioned to be an action star early in her career with "Dark Angel" and Fantastic Four and it never really took, and she's not entirely plausible here as a badass special forces officer who takes on a gang and crooked cops in a small town. I thought it was a decent little action movie, though, at least until it ran out of steam toward the end. 

Gene Wilder wrote a memoir and recorded the audiobook version a few years before he died, so the new documentary Remembering Gene Wilder has the advantage of being about to use Wilder himself as the narrator. A lot of the movie sort of goes back and forth between Wilder tell a story about a Mel Brooks movie and Brooks adding his own side of the story. It works really well, although it makes me nervous that it'll inspire someone to do an AI deepfake of some other dead celebrity's voice in a documentary. Mostly, though, lovely movie about a wonderful person, worth a watch for any fan of Wilder's movies. 

Celine Dion has been through some hard times, her husband and brother both died in the same week in 2016, and then a few years ago she was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder (I wish it wasn't called 'Stiff-person syndrome,' which sounds kind of silly for something so awful serious). So this documentary is pretty heartbreaking, just watching this powerhouse singer who you're used to seeing so talented and successful, suddenly struggling with this terrible thing and coming to terms with losing her ability to sing much sooner than she'd ever anticipated. The contrast between the archival footage of her performing or being silly and funny on TV and her struggling to continue her Vegas residency is just so sad. But I'm glad she was willing to be vulnerable enough to make this movie, it's also a great celebration of her career and her personality and her resilience. 

Every generation has at least a couple hugely popular bands that make straightforward meat-and-potatoes rock but don't get much respect as artists. I see Nickelback as a perfectly okay band in that tradition, but I don't think Grand Funk Railroad ever had to deal with the kind of internet age invective that gets thrown at Nickelback. A documentary about the band hinging on the angle that Nickelback gets a lot of hate feels a little dramatic and self-pitying, but by the end of movie, just hearing about how people yell at Chad Kroeger on the street and the band members' children get bullied at school over Nickelback, I did feel sympathy for them, they're just some nice normal Canadian dudes who wrote some good power ballads. They have a sense of humor about it to a point and the whole movie isn't too whiny about it, I think it's overall a pretty good humanizing movie. 

This Paramount+ doc does a pretty good job of looking at the whole thorny issue of song lyrics being used against musicians in a court of law. It's a really important topic and I'm really worried about this situation getting worse over the next few years and they really explore it from different angles and in different situations well. 

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