Movie Diary
My wife kind of scoffed when I put on a movie called The Sheep Detectives, but she was in tears about 110 minutes later. A really charming, funny movie with a decent mystery and some surprising emotional depth. I feel like they could've gotten a British actor for Nicholas Braun's role instead of him attempting an accent, but a pretty minor quibble.
b) Backrooms
My son talked about going to see this with his friends on opening weekend, but for whatever reason that didn't happen, and he and I ended up going to see it while we were on vacation in Rehoboth a couple weeks ago. I don't see a lot of big zeitgeisty movies while they're still in theaters, but I'm glad I got to see this one. I was skeptical for the first half or so that it was going to be a little underwhelming once you got the basic premise, but there were just so many fascinatingly creative visual flourishes. And as the story got darker and more bizarre I found it really engrossing, one of those movies that has really stuck with me. I'm not entirely sure how I'd rate it, that might take a repeat viewing, but I was pretty impressed.
I like Brett Goldstein as an actor and screen presence but have found his projects as writer/creator to be a bit hit and miss. "Shrinking" is great, and last year's All of You was a dud, but I would put Office Romance squarely in the hit category, I really enjoyed it. I feel like Jennifer Lopez being Goldstein's co-star makes it feel even more like a familiar, conventional romcom than it is. But the writing is sharp, there are some nice clever turns in the story, the two leads have surprisingly convincing chemistry, and Betty Gilpin absolutely steals every scene she's in, one of those deranged, committed supporting turns that totally elevates a movie.
Another kind of formulaic romcom, but one of those moderately high concept ones where the guy pursues the girl without letting her know what strange coincidence brought them together and she eventually finds out and it becomes a problem. Zoey Deutch is the lead and at one point it was going to be Hailee Steinfeld, and I think that's a lateral move because if either of them is in something I'm going to watch it. Nick Offerman has a few decent scenes as comic relief but it feels like they could've leaned more into it being a comedy, but a sweet little movie.
e) Hoppers
I didn't know much about this Pixar film before watching it, and I'm glad I didn't, because it was a lot of fun to discover just how strange and convoluted the premise was. I'm not going to say it was up there with Up, but it reminded me a little of that, that and Turning Red are the Pixar comparison points I'd go with.
f) Green Room
Last month I went on a big binge of movies from a decade ago while finalizing my lists of my favorite films of 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015, and this might have been the best of the ones that were new to me. The loss of Anton Yelchin is so fucking sad, especially because he was making movies as good as this and Thoroughbreds just before he died. Patrick Stewart playing the villain was an inspired turn, he's not asked to do that often but he's great.
After I watched Green Room, I was curious to see Jeremy Saulnier's earlier low budget feature Blue Ruin, which was available on some D-list free streaming services like Fawesome.tv. But for whatever reason, when I cued up Blue Ruin, Fawesome.tv encountered some issue or glitch and started to play a completely different movie, and I watched it for a good long while going "wow, he really improved quickly with Green Room" before realizing that it was something else. And Enter the Requiem may genuinely be the worst movie I've ever seen, just so many baffling acting and directing choices, closer to The Room than a garden variety bad film. I wouldn't even recommend it for a "MST3K" or "How Did This Get Made?"-type thing.
My wife came home midafternoon one day when I was watching this, and I said "As you know, I don't really care to know much about movies before I put them on, so I had no idea this movie about British lepidopterists was going to be dangerously horny." Pretty good movie, though.
It's funny to watch Joachim Trier's only English-language film now, knowing that he'd go on to become a much bigger deal in American without making any other movies fully in English. Pretty good film, good performances from Jesse Eisenberg and Isabelle Huppert. The subplot with Rachel Brosnahan felt kind of pointless and tacked-on, although I can't complain because she's so gorgeous in this movie, and it's funny to see a sex scene between two actors who'd go on to play Lex Luthor and Lois Lane (though not in the same movie).
I was really impressed by Sarah Polley's writing and direction in this. Great depiction of Toronto, too, really made it seem like a lovely place to live. And I say that as someone who doesn't particularly enjoy movies where the entire story is a love triangle, but this felt really lived-in and true to life (I imagine it may have been autobiographical, given that Polley divorced and remarried in the years before Take This Waltz came out). Polley really captured the intimacy of a marriage, as played by Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen, and the intimacy of flirtation and a new or potential relationship, as played by Williams and Luke Kirby, in really insightful and realistic ways.
k) Lincoln
While going through early/mid-2010s films I caught up on some big historical Oscar flicks I missed at the time, including this, which I enjoyed more than I expected to. I'm not always over the moon about Daniel Day-Lewis but he's undeniably great here, and there's a gallery of great supporting performances comparable to Oppenheimer.
l) Selma
Another big biopic I was overdue to watch. Really made me appreciate Ava DuVernay's talent, feels like she had a very strong sense on what episodes from Martin Luther King Jr.'s life to present to make it feel like his story and not just a narrative from a history book.
m) Frank
Of the Michael Fassbender movies about indie rock that partially take place at SXSW, Frank is far better than Song To Song. I think the true story of Frank Sidebottom/Chris Sievey would've made a much more interesting movie than this heavily fictionalized riff on it, though.
A pretty good unsettling low budget horror movie about a mysterious archeological discovery in northern Canada, really built to a good unsettling climax. Kind of a bummer that Nick Szostakiwskyj has only directed one more feature in the decade since, this is the kind of thing that should be a calling card to build a career on.
o) Mojave
William Monahan won an Oscar for his screenplay for The Departed but the rest of his filmography makes him seem like kind of a one hit wonder (and The Departed was adapted from a Hong Kong film, after all). He wrote and directed Mojave, which stars Garrett Hedlund as this cartoonishly badass Hollywood filmmaker who decides to go wandering around the Mojave Desert and meets a drifter played by Oscar Isaac. Some of Monahan's directorial choices are laughably bad, and the story takes a few head-scratching turns before a pretty stupid ending.
A weird psychological thriller with Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth, didn't particularly care for it.
One of Elle Fanning's first really meaty roles in her transition from stardom to Oscar-caliber serious drama, a pretty good '60s period piece by British director Sally Potter.
r) Bachelorette
I had seen bits of this on cable in the past and enjoyed everything else Leslye Headland has done ("Russian Doll," Sleeping With Other People, etc.) so I assumed I would like it once I finally watched the whole thing, and I did. Not that different from a lot of other ensemble comedies starring women that revolve around a wedding, but the dialogue's very sharp and I found it a little more enjoyable than the other big one of that era, Bridesmaids, and I could watch early 2010s Lizzy Caplan and Isla Fisher all day.
s) Holy Motors
Even after seeing Annette, I felt a little unprepared for just how bizarre Leos Carax's previous film Holy Motors is, or that Eva Mendes and Kylie Minogue would be down for something this surreal.
I think there are limits to the practicality of identity-based casting, people should generally stick to playing characters of their own race, but actors should be allowed some measure of freedom to portray someone who is not exactly like them. That being said, this movie about a facility where people with different behavioral disorders was really derailed by Robert Sheehan's portrayal of a man with Tourette's and Dev Patel's portrayal of a man with OCD, I cringed a lot at their broad, hacky performances. You could probably make a much better version of this film with actors who actually have those conditions or have some lived experience with them -- in fact this is one of Zoe Kravitz's best roles, and she drew on her own struggles with anorexia.
u) Extinct
My son found this very odd 2021 animated film on Netflix, which has a mostly American cast and crew but was only released theatrically in Russia and China, where Rachel Bloom and Adam Devine play "flummels," rabbit-like creatures who have donut holes in the middle of their torsos.
Another one my son watched on Netflix, a bit more charming, with a sort of retro animation style.
w) Seal Team
I don't think there were any, like, Osama Bin Laden jokes in this, but it's still slightly disturbing that this animated film about a military crew of fur seals was probably inspired by SEAL Team Six. Good on them for getting the singer Seal to make a cameo, though.
The best of my son's recent Netflix finds, a pretty cool looking Mexican production with stop motion animation that's apparently a prequel to a series called "Frankelda's Book of Spooks."
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