Movie Diary
a) Splitsville
I put on Splitsville expecting the usual mid-budget dramedy about troubled marriages and got something much better than that, with a unique comic tone (including the longest, most violent fight scene I've ever seen in what was otherwise not at all an action movie) and a clever way of approaching its premise with both heart and a sort of absurdist sense of humor. Kyle Marvin and Michael Angelo Covino are...how do I say this? They could star in a Geico cavemen commercial without spending a long time in the makeup chair. And they wrote a movie (directed by the latter) where their characters sleep with Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona, which may be the most over-the-top filmmaker wish fulfillment since Woody Allen's prime. But it's a great cast in a pretty memorable movie.
b) Dust Bunny
Applying auteurism to television is usually misguided, but I consider Bryan Fuller as close to an auteur as TV's ever had, and I'm a huge fan of his colorful, imaginative, emotive approach, but I never really thought too much about whether I wanted him to transition into film. I don't know if he even wants to, Dust Bunny began life as a pitch for an Apple TV anthology series I never saw and just being its own thing. Really enjoyed it, Mads Mikkelsen and Sigourney Weaver and child star Sophie Sloan are all great in a creepy, surreal story of a girl with a monster under her bed.
A fun movie in the style of Pitch Perfect or Bring It On about college-level Bollywood dance competitions, written by Hasan Minhaj. Seeing Maitreyi Ramakrishnan in this reminds me how great she was in "Never Have I Ever," really someone who lights up the screen and has sharp comic timing, I hope her career soars.
I enjoyed "The Mandalorian" well enough but it really felt like they abandoned most of what was charming about the show in the pursuit to making movie feel like more than "3 or 4 episodes that you pay to see in a theater." Just no real storytelling rhythm, lots of eye-rolling new characters and barely any of the show's familiar supporting cast, and a bunch of clashing styles of visual effects that felt like they weren't even in the same movie.
e) Unabomber
Didn't think much of this, the 2017 miniseries "Manhunt: The Unabomber" wasn't a masterpiece but it was more compelling than this, with Jacob Tremblay playing a young Ted Kaczynski and really doing nothing with what should be a pretty meaty role.
Nate Bargatze manages the unlikely feat of being a clean Christian comic who does material about being a husband and dad but has enough of a dry wit that he's a decent "SNL" host and not the star of a CBS sitcom (yet). His first film vehicle is a dud, though, really corny outdated premise, overcooked execution, only a few scenes where Bargatze and Will Forte get to be genuinely funny.
Part of what I really enjoyed about Ready Or Not is that it didn't really escalate and get surreal and over-the-top until the very end. So I worried that any sequel wouldn't be as good without being able to have that bit of surprise at the climax, but it's really fun, they just picked up right at the first movie's close and took off in a crazy sprint, continuing to keep the violent thrills coming with a great new supporting cast including Elijah Wood and Shawn Hatosy. Also all respect for them for using Here I Come as the subtitle of the second movie, it took the Now You See Me franchise until the third movie to use the title Now You Don't.
I just watched this recently, just a couple days before the announcement that it's being adapted into a series. Really good movie, easily the best thing Adam Brody's ever been in, gets some comedic mileage out of the familiar failed-former-child-prodigy premise but takes it interesting places and gets surprisingly dark by the end.
I really enjoyed this doc about the first decade of the Red Hot Chili Peppers story, focusing on the adolescent friendship, addictions, and tragedy of the Hillel Slovak era. Flea really lays things out there and is very painfully honest, I have a lot of respect for how vulnerable he is in this movie. Anthony's story of seeing Hillel's mother before she died and making amends is really beautiful, too. It's kind of refreshing to watch a music documentary that's completely about the band's first few albums, before they wrote any of their big famous hits -- as a fan of The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, it was cool to see that album get its due a little. I was a little annoyed that they had an AI deepfake Hillel voice reading his journals (like, there's no reason you can't just have an actor do that), and that they go to pains to make it the story of Hillel, Anthony, and Flea even though Jack Irons is right there in the interviews. It was also fun to see Michael Beinhorn on camera for the first time, he comes across just as intense as he does in all the stories of albums he's worked on.
A pretty good doc I watched recently while working on my Patti Smith discography piece. It was filmed on and off for about a decade after Smith's return to music in 1996. It's in black and white, and very early on Smith riffs about Dylan's Don't Look Back and how they should reenact some scenes from it, which is entertaining.
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