Movie Diary
After Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone's last 2 collaborations were nominated for Best Picture, Kinds of Kindness got a relatively quiet release with no awards season hooplah, which made me very curious to see it. And while even Poor Things was relatively out there, Kinds of Kindness definitely feels more pointedly uncommercial in a way where I suspect they spent their blank check on this one with the studio saving the promo budget for their next project. Part of that is because Kinds of Kindness is an anthology movie, with the same handful of actors playing different characters in 3 different stories, which is just not a recipe for a hit. And part of that is because each of those stories is a weird, morbid parable sort of in the vein of Killing of a Sacred Deer, except I kind of hated that movie and mostly enjoyed this one, although I almost don't want to think about it too much or try to really figure out what it was all about, I have no idea if it would hold up to any scrutiny.
In A Different Man, Sebastian Stan plays a man with neurofibromatosis. thanks to some Oscar-nominated makeup and prosthetics, and so does Adam Pearson, who actually has neurofibromatosis in real life. And both of their characters are actors in a play, making the whole thing kind of a metacommentary on acting and show business's attitudes toward disabilities and deformities. Pearson's great and it's the first time I've seen a Stan performance that I thought was better than mediocre, and it's a good, thought-provoking movie. The story ultimately felt really contrived, though, like the entire movie, much like Emilia Perez, only existed to turn the main character's identity into a clever plot device, so I don't know, I have mixed feelings about it.
My son got all three of Peter Brown's The Wild Robot books for Christmas, and we've really enjoyed reading them together as his bedtime story lately. So after we finished the first book, we watched the recent movie adaptation, which took a few liberties with the story and characters (most significantly in greatly expanding the role of the fox, voiced here by Pedro Pascal), but mostly got the spirit of the book down well and added some endearing comedic moments. Chris Sanders also directed Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, both of which get a lot of repeat viewings in our house, and I think The Wild Robot probably will in the future as well.
If you watch a favorite show every week and they do something big and different like a musical episode one week, it's really exciting to get something unexpected like that. Trying to serve up a surprise in a sequel to a blockbuster film is a lot harder, though, especially when Joker: Folie a Deux was preceded by two and a half years of news trickling out about Lady Gaga being cast in the movie and it being a musical. Conceptually, I think it could've been something special with the right execution, but it just felt all wrong, and personally I can't really stomach Gaga singing standards unless she's got Tony Bennett there to ground her a little.
I think Amy Schumer's first big film vehicle Trainwreck holds up pretty well, but her latest movie for Netflix, a Happy Madison production directed by Adam Sandler's nephew, feels like a big step down. It has some laughs, Urzila Carlson really steals a few scenes, Damon Wayans Jr. gets a couple really funny moments, for the most part it falls short even just by the standards of a comedy with a silly premise.
f) Carry-On
Netflix's most popular feature film of 2024 is this kind of stupid thriller about attempted airline terrorism. For a comedy guy, Jason Bateman definitely has a certain amount of range and pull off stuff like "Ozark," but I dunno, he felt miscast here, what a weird role for him, I have to wonder if the movie would've actually been compelling with the right person playing that part.
Tyler Perry's latest will mostly go down in history as one of those otherwise ignored movies that became part of Dianne Warren's annual parade of Best Original Song nominations. But doing a World War II epic with a $70 million budget really proves he can do pretty well as a conventional director when he wants to. I never thought Dean Norris was a particularly good actor, though, and he's terrible in this, he makes every scene he's in worse with his goofy Foghorn Leghorn accent.
h) Awake
This came out on Netflix in 2021 and got panned (24% on Rotten Tomatoes!) but my wife and I watched it the other night and thought it was pretty solid. Suddenly every person on the planet is incapable of sleeping, and Genesis Rodriguez tries to figure out why her daughter is one of the only people who can still sleep. So, y'know, another high concept apocalypse movie that just didn't capture the zeitgeist like Bird Box or whatever, but I thought it was well paced and compelling. And Mark Raso, who previously directed the amiable dramedy Kodachrome, really stepped up as an action director for this, some really impressive sequences done in one continuous take.
One of those low budget films full of recognizable TV actors that I always seem to end up watching on cable or Netflix, about a small town bookseller who adopts a 2-year-old. It turned out to be a lot more sentimental than I expected and kind of touching, but also a little boring.
I've enjoyed a lot of the things that NBC has put together for the 50th anniversary of "Saturday Night Live." And this Questlove-directed documentary is probably the best of the bunch, a long and thorough look back at some of the best and most memorable music performance. The segments about the more infamous performances (Fear and Elvis Costello and Sinead O'Connor) were the best parts, and the sort of montage/mashup sequences were amazingly well done, some of the best editing I've ever seen of something like that. I wish they got into one of my personal pet topics, all the as-yet-unreleased songs artists have debuted on "SNL," but it's a great doc.
Without even planning it that way, Bjork's new concert film was released on Apple TV+ days after I ranked all of her albums, so I had just spent a lot of time with her catalog and was really primed for it. I was kind of annoyed that it was just kind of unceremoniously thrown into their ongoing 'Apple Music Live' performance series instead of being treated as a distinct feature film, though, since Bjork has talked about how she spent 10 years planning out and conceptualizing this tour and the film of it. Visually it's pretty amazing, although I'm partial to her more earlier stuff, so I was a little let down that there is only one '90s song in the entire film. But at least it's one I love, "Isobel."
This Disney+ doc is framed around Elton John's final U.S. show at Dodger Stadium in 2022, and his first stadium show at the same venue in 1975, with John and an interviewer poring over his career as the guiding voiceover. It's pretty good, I thought they got to the root of John and Bernie Taupin's creative dynamic really well, and there's just tons of cool archival footage, stuff like him playing "Tiny Dancer" for a camera crew just after it'd been written, or tracking the vocal for the original "Candle in the Wind."
m) Beatles '64
Obviously the Beatles' initial international explosion in 1964 is one of the most familiar and storied chapters of the band's history, but it's fun to see it zeroed in on as the topic of a whole feature. A lot of the footage is previously unseen and amazing. But what I like even more than the candid moments with the band are the interviews with the fans, that turn the usual faceless screaming hordes of Beatlemania into these brief individual profiles with these really sweet and passionate young music fans. David Lynch, who was at the Beatles' first U.S. concert, is one of the talking heads, in a great little segment that I guess is one of his last film appearances. I also love Ronald Isley and Smokey Robinson talking about being covered by the Beatles and the band's relationship with Black music.
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