Movie Diary
The time travel comedy is a subgenre that tends to aim low for lots of self-referential, self-aware fun like Hot Tub Time Machine. And Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice isn't entirely an exception, but I found it to be a pleasant surprise, a gleefully ridiculous movie that hides its heart long enough that you might be caught off guard by the sweet, clever third act as you realize that every single character in this movie has watched a lot of "Gilmore Girls." Vince Vaughn and James Marsden are both the right kind of comic actors who can play their parts like a straight-up crime drama for enough of the movie for the silly parts to hit harder, and my favorite moment is Keith David yelling "it's raining titties over here!" while "Ants Marching" plays in a strip club,
As a father, I pretty much know what to expect when my sons want to go to the movies and see one of Illumination's animated blockbusters, and both of their Mario movies are weaker than Despicable Me but better than The Secret Life of Pets. My kids seemed pretty happy with this one, much like the last one, and as before, I mostly only chuckled when Bowser voiced by Jack Black was onscreen. I hoped that Donald Glover's addition to the cast as Yoshi would add to the entertainment value, but he just did the little Yoshi squeaks and occasionally said "Yoshi," kind of pointless casting, anybody could've done that and you'd never guess it was him.
c) Eternity
It's a thought experiment that people have proposed many times before: if you're reunited with your spouse in the afterlife, what happens with people who outlived a husband or wife and then remarried? Eternity is just a feature-length exploration of that question, with Elizabeth Olsen as a women who dies and has to choose between her first husband who died young in a war, and the second husband she spent over 60 years with. I liked it, but it might be the most conventional A24 movie ever, if it had been written in the '90s it probably would've starred Julia Roberts or Tom Hanks. Eternity is no Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but in its best moments, it's a similarly affecting meditation on relationships and the disconnect between idealized memories and reality, Olsen and Miles Teller were good and really brought the premise to life, and John Early and Da'Vine Joy Randolph were good comic relief characters. Ultimately a little forgettable and less than the sum of its parts, though.
People talk about a lot about how studios try to advertise movie musicals now without letting people know they're musicals, but man I really had no idea that The Testament of Ann Lee was a musical until people started singing in the middle of scenes. It's also an origin story of the Shakers, but it's not a Book of Mormon-type satirical musical, although, almost more of a horror movie in tone. Usually I kind of roll my eyes when a historical film stars an actor who's way more beautiful than the real person was or probably was, but it kind of works here, if Amanda Seyfried was starting a religious movement I'd be like, to quote Maria Bamford, "sure, I'll join your cult." Also, there aren't many American actors these days who seem to be capable of decent British accents, but she's one of them, I was impressed.
I think Alien and Aliens are classics and everything else that has come out of that franchise, including last year's hit series "Alien: Earth," has squandered its potential in really irritating ways. Alien: Romulus kept my hopes up for longer than usual, I was pretty on board with it right up until that final monster, that was a really stupid twist, I'd have a much higher opinion of the movie if it had just ended 20 minutes earlier, it was already pretty action-packed up to that point. Fede Alvarez really has a great eye, I liked his earlier movies but I was really impressed by how he nailed the Alien aesthetic with some dazzling modern visual effects.
f) Crime 101
This was better than I expected it to be based on it being a crime movie with a stupid title starring two Avengers and one of the X-Men. Nick Nolte looked really rough in this movie, I was joking around about it on Twitter earlier this week but I hope he's okay!
I'd never seen this, the 1987 adaptation of The Running Man starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's funny just how very 1987 its vision of 2017 is, but also a little scary how prescient its game show dystopia was, better than I expected it to be.
Edgar Wright's recent Running Man adaptation is different from the earlier film in some interesting ways, some I liked and some I didn't, but overall I think a better movie, a little overlong but worth it for that third act. I hope Wright gets back to something more quirky and/or personal after this, though.
This cleared the low bar of being better than Crystal Skull, although I was still amused at just how ridiculous the plot ended up being. Keep scrolling if you want to avoid spoilers for a blockbuster from 3 years ago, but it's fucking hilarious that the villain is like "I'm going to go back in time and kill Hitler, but for evil reasons." I'm a little baffled by Phoebe Waller-Bridge's career, it's been almost a decade since "Fleabag" debuted and this is the only other substantial live action role she had in her thirties?
I heard this was going to be on PBS and I randomly found one night that it was about to be on, I really enjoyed it. An 80-minute film about a career that spanned 60 years and 100 albums is inevitably only going to scratch the surface, I wish it got more into just a few specific records or compositions. But I thought it had a good mix of interviews with collaborators and insights from talking heads, and I liked how they delved into his early days in Chicago, his experimentations with synthesizers, his unlikely commercial breakthroughs, fascinating stuff.
I drew heavily on Graeme Thompson's Phil Lynott biography Cowboy Song when working on my recent Thin Lizzy piece. But I also put on this 2008 documentary that had low production values but a pretty decent amount of insight in interviews with a few band members, friends, and rock writers.
l) Labyrinth
My wife loved Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal growing up, while I grew up on all the other Jim Henson stuff but not those. I will often play David Bowie's music while the family's eating dinner, and "Magic Dance" invariably comes up on the Amazon Echo shuffle, and my son loves that song now, so his mother took the opportunity to do a Labyrinth movie night. It was fun to finally see it, Bowie's performance is so ridiculous, in a good way.
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