I did an interview with Dan Deacon a while back about one of his songs being used in Priscilla, but I hadn't actually seen the movie, so I'm glad it finally made it to Max. It's funny, Sofia Coppola doing a period piece like Marie Antoinette with music from a completely different time felt like a bold signature at the time, but it's become so commonplace in the last 20 years that it barely registers as an aesthetic decision in Priscilla. I think Priscilla kind of does benefit from being released fairly soon after Baz Luhrmann's Elvis -- they're not quite counterparts, but it makes Priscilla's focus, and relative lack of Elvis music and iconography, feel more organic and gives it space to focus on Priscilla's perspective. I wish they'd continued to hold back from showing Jacob Elordi in flashy Elvis regalia, though, when they started to do a little of that toward the end it just didn't look good. Cailee Spaeny is fantastic in this movie, though -- I really liked her in "Devs" and her performance really carries Priscilla, I hope she gets more lead roles this substantial. Biopics often require an actor to play somebody in vastly different ages, and Spaeny plays someone from the age of 14 to the age of 28 as convincingly and seamlessly as anybody ever has. 

I remember seeing Gladiator in the theater and getting caught up in the spectacle of it all and being really impressed by Joaquin Phoenix's performance and really becoming a fan of his with that movie. If you'd told me then that Ridley Scott and Phoenix would someday make a Napoleon biopic together, I probably would've been pretty excited. But I dunno, at this juncture it feels like just about the least interesting thing either of these guys could do with their talents. I mean even as a kid in school, Napoleon was one of the more dynamic, memorable historical figures you learn about it, and it just felt like the movie flattened him and his story into generic biopic mush. 

While the whole GameStop stock market thing were happening, people were already talking about how it was gonna be a movie someday, but they should probably have realized it probably wasn't going to be a very good movie. I rolled my eyes a lot at The Big Short, which seems to be the trendsetter and role model for the last decade of movies that tried to turn big unwieldy true stories into tight, character-driven comedies. Dumb Money doesn't disappear up its own ass with clever storytelling devices as much as The Big Short, though, and lets an engaging cast carry the movie pretty well. Ultimately, though, there's too many poorly thought out composite characters and ciphers, too many oversimplifications, and it all just feels very shallow. 

This movie seemed to come out at the moment when Taika Waititi had really cycled around from being an underdog media darling to this overexposed guy people were sick of. And I dunno, this was nothing special as a folksy, formulaic sports movie, sometimes the humor was broader than it needed to be, but it's a bit better than the reviews it got. 

While I was washing Next Goal Wins I decided to put on another recent soccer move, and it was certainly the better of the two, I always enjoy a good Bill Nighy performance. 

Before the Please Don't Destroy guys were hired by "Saturday Night Live," I'd really enjoyed some of the viral videos they'd made with highly specific jokes about Shailene Woodley or David Foster Wallace. And I kinda wish their "SNL" stuff was a little more like that, but "SNL" doesn't have as much tolerance for that kind of niche humor that might go over most of the audience's heads, I get that. I hoped there'd be a little more of that kind of humor in Please Don't Destroy's first movie, though. It's good but just too often going for wacky and absurd instead of witty and creative, I definitely got some laughs out of it, but I wanted more from it. 

It's kind of fun to watch a movie about a superhero that I've never heard of, so many of these comic book movies come with so much established comic book lore and previous adaptations and cultural baggage that it's nice to actually watch an origin story not knowing where it's going. Just an okay movie, though. 

I wasn't sure if I'd like this, but once a goat was given the ability to talk and started speaking with Alan Tudyk's voice, it got pretty fun. Kind of engaged in a lot of classic Disney fantasy movie tropes, subverting them less than Frozen, but still putting a charming twist on things with a really good voice cast and a story that wasn't too predictable. 

I think the Trolls movies have really superseded Shrek as the most visually hideous big animated movies, I just hate to look at these characters. The latest movie had some fun parts, though, I was tempted to explain all the boy band references to my son but he was enjoying it just fine without understanding that stuff. I feel bad for the other members of *NSYNC that they waited 20 years for Justin to want to do something with them again and he shoehorned it into the 3rd movie of an animated franchise. 

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »