Movie Diary
a) Black Bag
I wish every great filmmaker was a little more like Steven Soderbergh, directing one or two features almost every year of his career, working with large and small budgets in a variety of styles and genres but plenty of identifiable signatures and pet topics. I would say Black Bag is minor Soderbergh, but again, when a guys is almost 40 movies in, I'm happy with a reasonably unique and finely crafted minor work. I don't particularly like Michael Fassbender as an actor or as a person, but it's still got a pretty strong ensemble cast, with Tom Burke as a standout, and feels like a novel sort of spy movie where a bunch of petty personal resentments and affairs get mixed up in the espionage and dominate the plot. It's pretty short and kind of feels like it comes to a very quick and sudden climax when there could've been a whole extra 20 minutes of, if not action, then some more scene changes and twists or speeches, but I respect that maybe it was probably deliberately contained to something smaller.
b) Nickel Boys
RaMell Ross made a lot of very strong aesthetic decisions in Nickel Boys, including the first-person camera perspectives for the main characters, that really gave it a unique, engaging feel that draws you into what's, essentially, an extremely sad and upsetting story about the late Jim Crow era. I wasn't as into the heavy use of stock footage montages, though, it's like suddenly this very purposefully filmed movie keeps looking like low budget sitcom interstitials for a few seconds here and there.
c) Babygirl
I don't think I liked Halina Reijn's second feature as much as Bodies Bodies Bodies, but I liked it, and I dug that it had a very different tone and sensibility, makes me curious to see what she does next. The two most memorable uses of music in the movie were both from big 1987 albums, which makes me wonder if Reijn was deliberately calling back to the Fatal Attraction heyday of erotic thrillers and positioning Babygirl as a gender-swapped update. Maybe that's a reductive lens to look at it through, but it definitely reminded me of those kinds of movies, in good and sometimes bad ways. Also pretty interesting to see Antonio Banderas cast against type as a boring, ineffectual lover.
It's always annoying when a director gets a strong franchise going and then hands the reins to someone else and the quality immediately goes down. I didn't even know going into Paddington In Peru that it wasn't directed by the same person as the first two movies, but I very quickly started to suspect that was the case while watching it and had to google and confirm my suspicion. Paul King, who directed the first two Paddington movies, was too busy making, ugh, Wonka, to do a third Paddington movie and handed the job off to Dougal Wilson, making his debut feature after directing many music videos for Coldplay, Massive Attack and others. Not a terrible movie but the feel just wasn't the same.
This is a movie I wish I'd watched before all the awards and everything, just because it feels like it blunted the impact of it all to have already seen all the praise and debate about its point and how it communicated it, but I'm a Johnny come lately with a lot of movies, it just happens sometimes. The night vision thermal imaging camera in the night scenes kind of threw me off, just felt like an extreme byproduct of the dedication to using natural light, but I don't know, I'll give the benefit of the doubt that it was a strong creative decision that I just didn't understand, but as I was watching it, it just felt like oh the movie's just gonna look like shit for these scenes.
As much as I liked Longlegs, it made me want to go back and check out Osgood Perkins' earlier work. It's a short movie and very minimal sort of ghost story/murder mystery, lots of whispering and mostly takes place in one small house, but I liked it, it felt like a very fully realized
The other night my wife read something about this movie or saw a clip or something and was intrigued, and immediately put it on. Olivia Thirlby plays a woman who becomes invisible at the age of 12 and lives her entire life just sort of moving through the world alone and unseen, until she meets one guy who can see her, played by a pre-"Reacher" Alan Ritchson. A pretty intriguing and original spin on an old premise, but at some point it feels like writer/director Claudia Meyers got to interested in the thematic and metaphorical resonance of the idea that she didn't bother to make the plot hold together, or even let it go unexplained in an appealingly mysterious way, there's just a lot of stuff left hanging in the air. Still a pretty cool movie, but a frustrating one, with a weirdly random supporting cast (Megan Fox, Jim Gaffigan, and the late David Johansen in his final acting role).
I think pangolins are really cool, cute animals, but I mostly just knew them from photographs, had never seen them at a zoo or seen much video footage. So I was excited to watch this Netflix documentary, which is really lovely and heartwarming but also a bit upsetting because it gets into how much pangolins are victims of poaching. But at least you get this beautiful story of the pangolin Kulu and the guy who nurses him to health and bonds with him until he's ready to go into the wild and live on his own, and I found it delightful that there's apparently a home for pangolins called the Pangolarium.
I watched this while working on my recent piece about Clapton, and I was pleasantly surprised that both the filmmakers and Clapton himself look back on his career pretty thoughtfully and it's not just an overly flattering paint-by-numbers biography of a rock legend, even if it's nothing revelatory.
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