Movie Diary
a) A Real Pain
I watched Jesse Eisenberg's directorial debut When You Finish Saving The World a few months ago and found it amiable but a little bland and lacking it in memorable moments or characters. A Real Pain has a bit more going on, particularly Kieran Culkin's Oscar-nominated performance, although I think Eisenberg is equally strong, the movie really works because of how well they play off of each other. Culkin plays a charismatic asshole much as he did on "Severance," so I wonder if he's got any other gear to operate in, but for the time being I'll happily take two great, somewhat similar performances. The writing is a little heavy-handed, I think it'd be a better movie if some of the subtext was left unsaid instead of gradually being pulled out of the characters' mouths, but I liked it.
Nicole Holofcener is really a seasoned pro at the kind of witty, character-driven movies about messy adult relationships that Jesse Eisenberg is just starting to get good at. You Hurt My Feelings is a tense, uncomfortable movie about feelings of inadequacy and the gray areas between politeness and dishonesty, but it's also just a joy to watch and full of sweet and funny and real moments of human interaction, great performances from Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michaela Watkins and Jeannie Berlin. I also enjoyed the meta casting of real life spouses David Cross and Amber Tamblyn playing the most miserable and hateful couple you've ever seen.
I listened to a ton of Sly and the Family Stone to make my deep album cuts playlist in the days before watching Questlove's new documentary, so I was really primed to enjoy it, and I did. Sly Stone has kind of dropped out of show business for the last few decades, very occasionally making brief, unpredictable public appearances. And as you can imagine, if Questlove had actually gotten Sly to sit down for an interview, you probably would've heard about it, but it's still a very compelling and complete movie without that. In fact, the way the movie ends, with some of Sly's children giving an update on what he's like as an old man, is kind of sweet, especially after you've experienced the rollercoaster ride of Sly's meteoric rise and slow decline. I appreciate the frank interviews with people like D'Angelo and Andre 3000 who are not just Sly fans but guys who've struggled with fame and resisted the trappings of show business in their own ways, but my favorite parts are the interviews with members of the Family Stone about the band's weird journey and how some of their classics were made.
d) The Gorge
I'm a big fan of just watching movies without seeing any reviews or long trailers in advance, and The Gorge is a good example of why I do that, although if I go into too much detail here it would kind of undermine my point. I put on The Gorge one night just expecting some kind of boilerplate action thriller where Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play snipers in some kind of military skirmish. Instead, it was a very engaging story that was sort of a rom com with barely any dialogue for 20 minutes, and then became sort of a horror movie with a totally unexpected premise. Once the dialogue got going, it wasn't especially well written, but the cast and the special effects were still pretty good, it really surprised us.
e) Slay
My wife and I have a Valentine's Day tradition of watching horror movies and eating Chinese takeout. This year she picked a movie and then I picked a movie, and this was her pick, a horror comedy about drag queens who roll into a small town when there's a vampire outbreak. I love horror comedies but I feel like the genre has become really diluted in recent decades with a lot of low budget movies that are neither funny nor scary, so I was cautiously optimistic. Slay is pretty good, though, they had a lot of fun with the premise and while it wasn't really scary, the action scenes and visual effects were a little stronger than I expected.
f) Longlegs
This was my Valentine's Day pick, although it got too late for us to finish so we picked it back up the next night. I really enjoyed it, although I feel like I would either like it a lot less or a lot more on second viewing, and I don't know which way it would go, because so much of the first viewing is about getting those first glimpses of Nicolas Cage's character, of piecing together the backstory, and so on. The way the movie used the music of T. Rex and made it creepy and sinister in this context was very inspired, I am sometimes a skeptic about Cage's more over-the-top performances but I thought he was excellent and Alicia Witt was even better.
The kind of studio comedies that were in theaters 10-20 years ago are still being made, but just quietly dumped out on streaming services. You're Cordially Invited stars Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon in a premise similar to Bride Wars, directed by Nicholas Stoller of Forgetting Sarah Marshall fame, and I'm basic enough to mostly enjoy it. As with most movies by Apatow-adjacent guys like Stoller, You're Cordially Invited is about 20 minutes longer than it needs to be, and has a couple of climactic physical comedy bits that don't really land, but it's still largely some very watchable comedy professionals doing what they do well, including the top-billed stars as well as Jack McBrayer and the adorable and funny Geraldine Viswanathan, who I will watch in anything. One thing the movie does well is avoid pairing up Ferrell and Witherspoon as potential romantic partners, and then making that possibility feel surprisingly plausible and charming by the end.
I expected very little from this, but Jim Rash, wearing a different neckerchief in every scene he was in, really livened things up, Ray Romano was good comic relief too. I think at some point people just got used to putting Scarlett Johansson in comedies because she's not much of a dramatic actress, but she's as funny as a heart attack, the movie instantly would've been twice as good with a lead actress with actual comedy chops.
For some reason the second Beetlejuice movie opens almost exactly like the second Ghostbusters movie. I adore the original and have probably seen it 50 times, and as unnecessary sequels go it was in the 'good enough' category where it didn't feel like an embarrassment. It had that uncanny valley quality, though, I never got comfortable with it, felt more like a parody than a continuation. I was amused that the character played by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Jones in the original is quickly killed off in a claymation scene here.
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