Movie Diary
a) Wolfs
Most of the times we've seen George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the same movie, top shelf directors like Soderbergh or the Coen brothers have been involved. So I was a little skeptical that Wolfs is directed by Jon Watts, best known for the Spider-Man movies with Tom Holland, would not be up to the job. Wolfs is really good, though, they get a lot of mileage out of the simple premise of two fixers who always work alone being forced to cooperate with each other. Austin Abrams is also a great foil for Clooney and Pitt's exasperated tough guys, the movie gets in and out briskly in 108 minutes without letting you learn most of the character's names and throwing a few good twists in there to keep you interested.
His Three Daughters stars three actresses I adore, and they're all kind of playing the kind of characters they're generally great at playing. Natasha Lyonne is a sarcastic stoner, Carrie Coon is stern and talkative, and Elizabeth Olsen is fragile and emotive. And they spend pretty much the entire movie in an apartment together waiting for their father to die. It's very stagey, sometimes the actresses feel typecast to the point of self-parody, and Carrie Coon gets these stilted monologues where she's saying hundreds of words at a time, but it's mostly a very good movie with a lot of great performances. Jovan Adepo, who worked with Olsen and director Azazel Jacobs on the great series "Sorry For Your Loss," really gives High Three Daughters a dramatic charge in his brief appearances, and the scene toward the end with Jay O. Sanders is a real emotional gut punch.
c) The Fall Guy
I only have the most vague memory that there was a show called "The Fall Guy" on TV when I was a kid, and I'm over 40, so it feels pretty obvious to me why a film adaptation did not make a ton of money. The Fall Guy is really fun and entertaining, though. I'm generally a Ryan Gosling skeptic who only grudgingly admits when his movies are guy, but The Fall Guy and The Nice Guys are the ones that get my wholehearted endorsement, made good use of Emily Blunt, Stephanie Hsu, and Winston Duke.
During the COVID lockdowns, Will Ferrell received an e-mail from a friend he hadn't seen a while, a comedy writer he'd worked with at "Saturday Night Live" and on several subsequent projects, who was coming out as a trans woman. And Will and Harper decided to go on a road trip together to celebrate Harper's new life, and get Harper comfortable with being out in the world as a woman, and they filmed a documentary along the way. Will & Harper is a really beautiful tribute to friendship above all else, and it's probably putting a lot of good into the world just to show a beloved movie star accepting his friend's new identity and caring enough to do this. But two people who've made a lot of broad, goofy comedy together were not going to let this just be a touchy-feely tearjerker movie, there's some fun little tangents, I get the feeling there was a really silly cut of this movie that they held back from out of fear of undermining the serious parts.
I Used To Be Funny is one of those movies that tells the story out of chronology with lots of flashbacks, sometimes jumping across three different periods of time within a couple of years. I don't think it was executed that well, the plot wasn't exactly confusing, but the jumbled order mostly served to withhold how dark the story was for the first hour before plunging you into some really sad, upsetting stuff. By the last stretch of the movie, when you understood everything that had happened, they brought it to a satisfying conclusion, but I have mixed feelings about the storytelling.
f) Pearl
I thought X was pretty good, but the Mia Goth multiple role gimmick was, I thought, the least successful part of the movie. And I was skeptical about it becoming a whole trilogy with a prequel movie, this just doesn't feel necessarily. Some good scenes, but didn't need to exist.
It's weird watching this movie version of a 'scary' game for kids, it really has the vibe and visual language of an R rating but pulls back just enough to be PG-13.
h) Spread
I know 'Tubi movie' is a pejorative that mostly translates to dramas and action movies with incredibly bad production values, but this is a solid little comedy starring Elizabeth Gillies, who I think is just great, I got to meet her for a minute recently when I worked on the stage show she does with Seth MacFarlane.
I wouldn't say the original Bird Box was a great movie, but it was a nice little zeitgeist-grabbing thrill ride that maybe could've been a franchise. Instead, Netflix quietly released a spinoff over five years later that takes place in Spain, and it just feels like it has none of the juice the original had, a couple exciting scenes but I just didn't care when I was watching it.
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on Friday, October 04, 2024 at 8:54 AM.
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