Movie Diary
Oscar season is weird because the awards ultimately feel more like a validation of individuals and their entire careers than their specific nominated work, so I end up rooting for someone regardless of whether I've seen the movie or how much I liked it. I've thought that Rose Byrne has been a consistently great actress since "Damages," but as someone who's done a lot of their best work on television (and only has two Emmy noms and no wins), I didn't really expect her to ever get a shot at an Oscar. And her nomination for If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is very deserved, it's a very intense film fully driven by her performance. It reminded me of Eraserhead and Jacob's Ladder, both big films in my personal canon, in the way you're kind of inside someone's head for two hours, going through very stressful experiences from their possibly distorted or exaggerated experience -- I had a headache the night I watched it and just felt unbelievably horrible by the time I finished it, but in a way where it felt like I just experienced the movie very acutely. Of course, that's offset by the film's dark sense of humor and the colorful casting decisions like Conan O'Brien, A$AP Rocky, and Ivy Wolk -- I was amused that they had to flatten and tame O'Brien's hair, because he couldn't be a stern and unfriendly therapist with a fabulous pompadour. Writer/director Mary Bronstein also has a supporting onscreen role, and she's gorgeous and made a really original film, I adore her now.
I'm not one of those people that considers Nebraska to be Bruce Springsteen's very best album (I put it at #6), but I will grant that it represents one of the most interesting chapters of his story that really shaped his legacy. And while I generally prefer musical biopics that focus on a specific era rather than spanning an artist's entire life, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere unintentionally makes the argument that there's not really enough there for a movie, padding things out with gratuitous childhood flashbacks and mood-setting. Jeremy Allen White rises to the occasion, not a transcendent performance but a damn good one. The second-billed actor, Jeremy Strong, isn't really given enough to make Jon Landau's relationship with Springsteen seem as interesting as it actually is, and ends up with possibly the worst performance of his career, delivering clumsy rock critic-therapist-philosopher analysis in a stupid Woody Allen voice. The third-billed actor plays the guy who sets up the 4-track in Bruce's rental, and the fifth-billed actor plays Bruce's fictionalized composite girlfriend who has no relevance to the story or the songs. Imagine how good a Springsteen movie could be if it was about his band and his relationships with guys like Clarence Clemons and Little Steven! I remember someone joking 20 years ago that Yeah Yeah Yeahs drummer Brian Chase looked like Max Weinberg, so it was very amusing to see him play that role in a Springsteen biopic. And I will say, '80s period pieces can be pretty irritating if the hair's wrong, but Odessa Young looks fantastic in feathered '80s hair.
c) Ash
My wife and I have an old tradition, going back to our first Valentine's Day as a couple, of ordering Chinese for dinner and watching horror movies on VDay. Our eternal struggle is whether to try to find a really good horror movie, or go for something low budget and obscure and embrace the possibility that it will be terrible. This year, we put on a movie that looked promising, Ash, and after we started it, I realized it was Flying Lotus's directorial debut that I'd heard about. As the first feature from a musician, Ash is really visually impressive, especially considering that it was made on a six figure budget, just really inventive and memorable imagery. From a story standpoint, it's a bit more familiar, not too different from Alien, and sometimes the dialogue-driven scenes were a little flat and made me miss the parts where there was almost no dialogue -- call me a hater, but I think Aaron Paul might genuinely be a bad actor? He always sounds so stilted and unnatural. But overall, Ash is pretty good, I recommend it and hope Flying Lotus makes more films.
We finished Ash early enough that we decided to make it a double feature and watch one of the low budget movies that caught our eye: a movie called Night Carnage with a plot description about "a blogger who is also a werewolf." And I gotta say, if you enjoy watching shitty B movies, I highly recommend this one, they really don't make 'em laughably bad like this very often anymore, "Mystery Science Theater 3000" could genuinely make a good episode out of this. Digital blood is added in post-production, the werewolf costume looks like it was bought at Spirit Halloween, and the father of one of the main characters gives a long expository speech at the beginning of the movie and then has one of the most unconvincing onscreen deaths I've ever seen.
I Saw The TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun was born in the '80s like me, and made a movie that's a loving tribute to how good and obsession-rewarding TV for teens and tweens was in the '90s, complete with cameos by "The Adventures of Pete & Pete" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" actors, and a fictionalized show named after the Cocteau Twins compilation The Pink Opaque. There's a lot more to it than that, but I really connected to that nostalgic element about adolescent escape, and it made me hope for a happy ending for the characters, which made the way the story does end feel all the more haunting.
Oh I just hate this movie's title, I know two of the main characters have a baby in this movie but it makes it sound like a "Muppet Babies" version of the Fantastic Four. It's above average for a 2020s MCU movie but I don't love it, it's irritating to see Vanessa Kirby introduced to the wider public in something like this after her incredible performance in Pieces of a Woman, Joseph Quinn has no juice to play a fun character like Johnny Storm, and The Thing and the Silver Surfer improbably look worse than they did in previous movies.
I'm pretty sure commercials for the 1994 film Threesome introduced me to the concept of threesomes (this was about a year before the "menage a trois" episode of "Seinfeld"). I never saw Threesome, probably because it's about a threesome with two guys, one of whom is played by Stephen Baldwin, but I did watch the unrelated recent film The Threesome, which is about a threesome with two girls, both of whom are played by actresses I find extremely attractive. It end up being a pretty tame and heartwarming little story, but Ruby Cruz is absolutely adorable and Jaboukie Young-White gets in some good comic relief moments.
I put this on one day when I just wanted a movie on as background noise and ended up finding it a lot more engrossing than I expected. I don't think Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield really even have onscreen chemistry, they're just both such good actors that they made me believe them in these roles. It felt a bit emotionally manipulative -- the chronology of the story is all jumbled up and nonlinear, mostly to extract maximum suspense from a cancer plotline -- but the quality of the writing and acting was high enough that I happy let it manipulate my emotions.
i) Relay
A pretty good little conspiracy thriller, but I put it on as background noise and it never quite commanded my attention enough to be much more than background noise.
A better conspiracy thriller, not perfect, but a reminder of how talented Kathryn Bigelow is, and frustrating to see that her first feature in 8 years was a Netflix movie that barely appeared in theaters.
k) Love Hurts
Maybe my expectations were just on the floor because of how bad the reviews and word-of-mouth for Love Hurts were, but I thought it was a decent little action comedy. Ran out of steam a bit by the end, but okay overall.
A pretty good Netflix doc about the great films of 1975, although it felt like everyone wanted to talk more broadly about the '70s or mid-'70s but the conceit of the film required them to fit their observations and narratives into this really specific 12-month sliver of time.
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