Movie Diary
I play music when my family eats dinner but I don't really trouble my kids with my musical obsessions, I think my older son just listens to the same rap that most 15-year-olds today listen. So I was a little excited when he asked me to take him to see a movie about a musician I think really highly of, even if it's the Lego movie about Pharrell Williams. In fact I think that big silly conceit makes what's a pretty standard music documentary into something with wider appeal. The thing I didn't expect that really cracked me up was the Lego remakes of music videos -- I died at the Lego "Rump Shaker" video and another lady in the theater totally lost it at the Lego "Shake It Fast" video. I could do my usual thing and complain about the way the movie twisted or simplified music history at various points, but it felt more natural for them to take some liberties given how stylized it was. And it ultimately felt like a really fun way to celebrate the incredible career that Pharrell and the Neptunes have had.
b) Trap
I always try to give M. Night Shyamalan a chance because I really think that even on his worst day he's one of the most creative big name directors we've got. But this may be the most incoherent movie he's ever made. I'm not even going to get into Josh Hartnett's undeserved return to leading man status, because even if they had an actor who could pull off that role, the story would still be a mess. I just wish Shyamalan had a co-writer or something with more discipline to implement his ideas into a functioning plot.
c) Civil War
I didn't get around to watching this until right after the election, which felt appropriate even if Alex Garland, a Brit, seemed to shy away from any specifics about exactly why a civil war is plausible in near-future America or coming up with a plausible geographic scenario. As an action movie, it's great spectacle, there are excellent Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny performances and some well chosen needle drops (De La Soul and multiple Suicide songs), but by the end, though, it feels a little hollow, anything that it's saying about America or war or journalism feels very surface-level.
This was pretty good, Lupita Nyong'o and Frodo the cat were excellent leads. I don't really agree with people who say it's the best movie in the series, though, if anything it was my least favorite -- the 'day one' opening in A Quiet Place Part II was a lot more thrilling.
e) Canary Black
Kate Beckinsale as a spy in an action movie is a pretty good idea, but I kinda put this on as background noise, it seemed decent but I didn't hold it up to any kind of scrutiny.
Another decent movie that kinda wound up being background noise, charming cast but for a period piece the visual detail was really lacking, it just didn't rung true.
g) Time Cut
It's weird to think that "time travel slasher movie" is its own genre now. I like the idea of combining sci-fi and horror in this way, but it helps if it's done in a clever and self-aware way like the Happy Death Day movies. Time Cut just felt pointless and not even as good as last year's Totally Killer, which wasn't that great itself.
h) Thanksgiving
Eli Roth's fake trailer for Thanksgiving in 2007's Grindhouse was a good bit, and turning it into a real movie would've been a good bit maybe a year or two later. But 16 years later? Just feels like an idea way past its expiration date, even just culturally, it doesn't hit like it would've in 2007, and the twist at the end was pretty dumb.
There are already some pretty excellent Springsteen concert films, but Road Diary is something different, a look behind the curtain and how the E Street plans out and prepares for a tour. I especially like the rehearsal scenes, where they're shaking off the cobwebs and playing "She's the One" way too slow. For this latest tour, Springsteen mostly stuck to one setlist and didn't divert from it a lot, and really building a deliberate narrative flow, and it was interesting to see how and why he did that and how they still left room for spontaneity and kept refining the show and doing things like making the Commodores' "Nightshift" into this cool showcase for the backing singers.
Olivia Rodrigo only has two albums and I love them both, so it was fun to watch her concert movie knowing I'd get to hear all my favorite songs -- "Love Is Embarrassing" kicks so much ass. But she's still learning how to command a stage and her audience is so loud and so excitable that it doesn't translate to film that well -- she does a lot of yelling and hyping up the crowd instead of focusing on singing every line as well as possible. Still, her band is great and as a pop star who makes rock songs she gets to sort of split the difference in an interesting way.
Megan Thee Stallion is easily one of the best rap stars of the last few years and the whole situation with Tory Lanez shooting her is just horrible and it's a shame that it's still reverberating and is still the primary subject of a documentary about her. There's still some good stuff about the music and her career, but not as much as there could be. I didn't like the anime dramatization of the shooting, I don't think that was the right way to address that situation, but I'm glad she got to tell her story in this way.
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on Tuesday, November 12, 2024 at 3:12 PM.
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