Director James Griffiths and actor/writers Tim Key and Tom Basden made an award-winning short film in 2007, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island, and 18 years later they turned it into a feature that's currently on Peacock, and it's really good. I kind of use the word 'dramedy' as a pejorative sometimes because there are so many 'grown up' movies that are all both sad and droll in the same ways, but The Ballad of Wallis Island really deftly mixes together tones. Tim Key's character is a little eccentric and embarrassing, a lottery winner who books his favorite folk duo for a private reunion performance, and there are a few moments where I laughed really hard at the unpredictable things that come out of his mouth. But there's a lot of emotion in the story that comes out in a gradual and unforced way, and things between Basden and Carey Mulligan's characters don't really go where you expect, it's a lovely little movie.
Echo Valley is a thriller on Apple TV+ written by "Mare of Easttown" creator Brad Ingelsby. It has a couple of decent plot twists -- I liked the smaller twist midway through the movie, but I saw the big one at the end coming a mile away, and it would've been a more satisfying movie if they'd gotten to it more elegantly or unexpectedly. It's by far the best performance I've ever seen from Domnhall Gleeson, he's kind of casually menacing and unpredictable in a really charismatic way, and there's a charge to all the scenes he's in. But a lot of the movie is Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney playing these one-note characters that are much harder to watch, a put-upon mother and her troubled daughter.
This Netflix movie is the kind of Vince Vaughn movie that used to be in theaters, a charming low stakes comedy about a NYC guy grieving his mother who decides to open a restaurant where Italian-American grandmothers cook their favorite recipes. One of those movies that just knows it has a strong premise and a great ensemble cast and just tries to not get in the way of that. And listen, Susan Sarandon...still got it!
My wife hadn't seen Prey, but she saw an ad for Dan Trachtenberg's animated follow-up Predator: Killer of Killers and was excited about it, so we watched both movies back-to-back. Killer of Killers is pretty fun, I don't think I liked it as much as she did, but I dug the animation style and the way they made it seem like an anthology and then tied the three stories together, that was fun. Definitely excited to see what Trachtenberg does with the next theatrical live action Predator movie later this year.
Mountainhead is "Succession" creator Jesse Armstrong's directorial debut (surprisingly, he didn't direct any episodes of the series even though he wrote most of them). And it feels very much like he had an idea for an episode that he never found a place for in the series and decided to burn off as a standalone movie, sort of like when Aaron Sorkin would force "West Wing" episode ideas into "Studio 60" episodes. But Mountainhead is pretty good, makes excellent use of every member of its small cast of four (Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef), even if I feel like the story ran out of steam once Armstrong got the points across that he wanted to.
This doc does a pretty great job of sort of stepping away from the larger-than-life mythology around Led Zeppelin and just explaining how the band happened, all the music that influenced these guys and all the headwinds in rock culture and the music business that made it possible for them to show up and just become a phenomenon. It's a little flat and straightforward, but again, that almost kind of serves the approach they took, and it's cool that they got good substantial interviews with the three living members of the band -- I'd never heard John Paul Jones talk much before and I just kinda love the sound of his voice. Apparently the filmmakers went to great lengths to find some rare John Bonham interview audio so that his voice could be part of the movie along with his bandmates, and I'm really glad they did that, although I wish there was more of that in there.
Bono is pretty divisive as far as frontmen of huge bands go, but I have a higher tolerance for his hammy charisma than a lot of people do, partly because I think U2 has a fantastic and unique sound. So I went into this expecting to enjoy it about as much as a U2 concert, but I did not. I sort of expected he'd do something stripped down like Springsteen on Broadway, but it's a pretty big production with an orchestral backing band and a seasoned film director, Andrew Dominik, making it all very lavish and cinematic and more than just footage of a stage show. But Bono comes out of the gate singing fucking "Vertigo" and it takes quite a while for him to do a rendition I like of a song I like, it just didn't do much for me on a musical level, impressive as it was.
I've seen a lot of Jerrod Carmichael's standup and various TV projects, but somehow I totally missed that he directed a feature film, On The Count of Three, in 2021. It's about two friends who are both depressed and suicidal and make a suicide pact, and Carmichael and Christopher Abbott are really funny together. But I thought the first half was much better than the second half, where it feels the screenwriters wrote themselves into a corner and did this generic action movie climax and then ended the story with a shrug.
I liked Sean Baker's earlier movies Tangerine and The Florida Project, and had mixed feelings about Anora after its big triumph at the Oscars, so I was curious to go back and see the movie in between that I'd missed, Red Rocket. And man, I don't know. The accolades this movie got look kinda crazy to me now. Around the time Baker made Red Rocket he very explicitly talked about his personal mission to "tell stories that remove stigma and normalize" the lives of sex workers and other marginalized people, which I think really reaffirmed the sense a lot of people had that he's doing really brave, important work. But Red Rocket, I don't know, it's a film that has about as much respect for its characters as your average Farrelly brothers comedy. I'm not one of those people who thinks a movie is inherently flawed or problematic because the protagonist is flawed or problematic, but if you made a personification of all the negative stereotypes about adult film stars, that would basically be Simon Rex's character in this movie, a foolish and compulsively dishonest loser who spends the whole movie stealing from people and grooming a teenager. Again, I'm not offended per se, but I didn't feel like the direction or the acting really elevated the subject matter, it all felt kind of snide and lurid but not particularly funny.
Few things get me more excited to see a movie than a horror movie that comes out of nowhere to become a big word-of-mouth success. Talk To Me was pretty good but I don't know, pretty quickly after the premise was laid out, I got a little bored with it and was just kinda riding out the fact that the acting and direction was good without being on the edge of my seat or caring about the face of the characters. Like the ending was really well done, but it was also really easy to see where it was going, so it didn't feel as satisfying as a classic horror movie ending. Also, the movie subjects you to just a ton of terrible Australian hip-hop.
As much as I loved Hereditary and Midsommar, I was not in a rush to set aside three hours to watch Beau Is Afraid after all the middling reviews or even just the poster that looked like total dogshit. But I'm glad I finally got around to it, it's definitely not as good as Ari Aster's first two features, but I found it pretty compelling in just the sheer volume of disturbing imagery and scenes that the movie inundates you with. That said, I kept thinking about how it would've taken just a couple different casting decisions and a different directorial tone and this would be a full-on comedy, albeit a pretty dark comedy, and I almost wanted to see a version that took itself less seriously.
I kind of figured that the instrumental version of 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P." in Anatomy of a Fall was this fleeting minor thing that people talked about a lot because it was such an odd musical choice, but no, it's genuinely something you hear for a substantial stretch of the film and becomes an actual significant plot point. I liked it, but I dunno, it didn't really feel like a Best Picture nom to me, like if this exact same movie was made in America with an American cast, I don't think it would've gotten the level of awards love it got, it would be looked at as just another courtroom drama.
A movie called The Ritual just came out in theaters but this is a different one from 2017. My wife read something about it and was intrigued and wanted to watch it, and I'd seen and enjoyed director David Bruckner's other movie The Night House, so I was down. Pretty solid horror movie about four friends walking through a creepy European forest, lots of great atmosphere and good scares. I particularly liked the dream sequences where Bruckner would kind of combine the forest location with other locations from the character's memory in these surreal ways.
The Pale Blue Eye is based on a novel that's one of those 'historical fiction' things that places real people in fictional situations -- specifically, a young Edgar Allen Poe (played by Harry Melling) assists a detective (played by Christian Bale) in investigating murders at a military academy. A decent little mystery plot, but the whole Poe aspect feels tacked on and pointless. But Melling is really well cast, I'd watch him in a Poe biopic.
Took me a couple years to check this out after its big Oscar run, but I'm glad I did, the musical sequences are so over-the-top and cool. The way they put Indian historical figures into this colorfully stylized, heightened reality was a much more interesting way to combine fact and fiction than something like The Pale Blue Eye.
I didn't like this as much as Flow, the other recent word-of-mouth hit European animated movie with no dialogue, but it was pretty good. As a big Wall-E fan, though, I'm just starting to reckon with how much fiction there is that aims to make the audience sympathize with a robot's emotions and how I feel about that given all the moronic shit people are doing with artificial intelligence these days, including believing it's their girlfriend or boyfriend or therapist.
I don't begrudge directors for taking big money gigs, if this is how Barry Jenkins gets the kind of financial freedom he deserves for making Moonlight, cool. But a live action/CGI remake of a Disney animated classic that's patterned after The Godfather Part II definitely feels like something of a waste of a talent, and I feel like Moana 2 would have benefited from Lin-Manuel Miranda's songwriting more than this did.
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