Movie Diary
It's always great to get Spike Lee and Denzel Washington together again, I really enjoyed it even as I rolled my eyes a little at certain plot points, depictions of the music industry, and A$AP Rocky's performance. Not Washington's best late period performance, but the one where his goofy big ass veneers feel the most suited to the character, and I loved all his scenes with Jeffrey Wright and Wendell Pierce.
b) The Lost Bus
I guess it's inevitable that there'd be a California wildfire movie from the director of United 93 and Captain Phillips, not bad for a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller but I kinda treated it as background noise.
c) Damsel
I checked out a lot of 2018 movies my recent list, and this was probably the biggest surprise in terms of movies I just watched on a whim. Directors David and Nathan Zellner both act in the movie, and David Zellner's role turns out to be much bigger than I expected after one of the (spoiler alert) putative main characters dies pretty early in the movie, which I think is a pretty risky thing for a not very famous actor-director to do but it really worked in terms of Damsel's dark comedy and subverted expectations.
A far more famous Robert Pattinson movie from 2018 that I was a little less impressed by, I thought by far the weakest of Robert Eggers's four features so far. I respect what he was trying to do with a minimal black and white movie with an atmosphere of growing dread, I mean Eraserhead is one of my favorite movies, but I don't think he entirely pulled it off.
e) Broke
I like Wyatt Russell a lot as a comedic actor but he was good in this more somber western drama, I feel like reviewers may have overrated it a little but it was fine.
This was pretty good, although I don't know if it lived up to how hyped as I was the first time I saw a trailer. Like it would've been really impressive as an episode of a horror anthology series, but as an 87-minute feature it was just okay, good atmosphere and a moderately well constructed story but not especially scary or memorable.
g) Pavements
One of my friends lives in Greenbelt and I'll hang out with him down there sometimes and do the trivia night at the New Deal Cafe. One night he invited me to go with him to see Pavements at Greenbelt Cinema and it was a pretty cool little spot, I didn't realize there was a theater down there that got some arthouse limited release movies that I'd usually expect to only see in a major city. So often rock documentaries and biopics are well made but don't feel true to the spirit of the band they're about, and Alex Ross Perry succeeded in making a movie about Pavement that really suits them with its sense of humor and ridicule of genre conventions. I particularly liked the way the 'five movies in one' format allowed them to just cram the movie with so many different versions of so many different Pavement songs, sometimes covered by other indie bands or done in a musical theater style. It makes sense that the band sees Lollapalooza '95 as a low point, but as someone whose favorite Pavement album is Wowee Zowee, I'm a little annoyed by how both the movie and their latest best-of compilation treat it.
h) Her Smell
After watching Pavements, I decided to check out Alex Ross Perry's previous movie about a fictional alternative rock band, and I had kind of mixed feelings about it. The way the story was told in five vignettes in different time periods was well done, but at some points the story felt a little drawn out and threadbare, I personally thought Elisabeth Moss was a little miscast as a Courtney Love-ish self-destructive rock star, I just didn't buy her in the role and thought the movie could've been great with the right lead actor. I also found Keegan DeWitt's score really irritating and unwelcome, it just felt it was trying to add unsettling tension to scenes and wound up feeling kind of distracting and taking away from the atmosphere.
I'm generally a big fan of Nicole Holofcener, she makes these deceptively 'small' films about difficult episodes in regular people's lives that have a lot more to say about modern relationships and material realities than most other movies. The characters in The Land of Steady Habits all felt like real people I could have met in my life, but I thought Ben Mendelsohn was another really miscast lead, his character was written so well as a kind of person I've known and somehow he wasn't believable in the role at all, just totally wrong for the part.
Two or three members of my family will sometimes go to the movies together, but it's fairly rare that all four of us will go to a movie, I think we've only done it three times: Moana 2, The Bad Guys, and The Bad Guys 2. My kids and I have read all of Aaron Blabey's Bad Guys books, and I have to say, I like the movies a lot more than the books, which are kind of forcefully wacky and rambling but seldom pay off with real laughs. Pierre Perifel's movies take lots of liberties with the plots, tighten them up and make them snappy little kid-friendly versions of heist movies, and the voice cast is great.
k) Wicked
I imagine this was probably pretty amazing on Broadway back in the day with Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, and while Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are great vocalists, it kind of feels like they forcefully removed the stage musical energy from Wicked for this cathedral of pastel CGI puke and didn't replace it with much movie musical magic. It's not bad as spectacles go, but I'm sure a much better movie could have been made of Wicked.
l) Snow White
Rachel Zegler is so talented and makes such a perfect Snow White, I feel bad that her performance got wasted on this movie, the color scheme wasn't as annoying as Wicked but the overall look of the CGI was even worse.
An upcoming sequel reminded me that I never got around to seeing this one. It kinda felt like an uninspired offbrand Stephen King story with its supernatural twist on a serial killer story, wasn't impressed at all.
n) Devo
Devo are one of those bands I've always enjoyed but I think I love them more and more as time goes by and I learn more about them, and this documentary was really engrossing and well done. I knew a lot of the story but there was some amazing footage, and really interesting anecdotes I'd never heard (for instance, David Bowie and Brian Eno recording lots of overdubs for Devo's first album and the band just turning them down in the final mix). And it was interesting to see the members of the band explain how subversively infiltrating pop culture both did and didn't work out the way they planned, and wound them up in these unexpected places like "The Merv Griffin Show."
This documentary was really pretty moving, I was 15 when the first Lilith Fair happened and was still so totally entrenched in the male-dominated alternative rock mindset (although I had an enormous crush on Sarah McLachlan and loved all her singles), but now it's so clear that it was a really remarkable moment in time with so many artists who I appreciate more decades later. I loved just hearing how much the odds were stacked against them and how much they had to push against the music industry's conventional wisdom, and how even skeptics like Chrissie Hynde eventually joined the tour and had a great time. A huge bummer to be reminded, though, that they tried to revive the tour in 2010 and it kind of fell apart, the doc really made me wish it was something that just continued for decades.
p) Dig!
I had seen bits of this movie before but didn't sit down to watch the entire thing until I was preparing for my recent interview with Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre. And it was interesting to take in that movie's famous, unflattering depiction of Newcombe and then get to talk to the actual guy and see how he feels about it and what context the last two decades of his life put that movie in now. A pretty entertaining movie, though, I enjoy any rock doc that feels a little like a real life Spinal Tap.
q) Shirkers
Shirkers really something special, Sandi Tan tried to make a film with her friends in the early '90s, and it took years and years for her to figure out why it never got finished, and that story became this documentary. It's bittersweet and frustrating to watch and you're left with a lot of unanswered questions, but I really enjoyed the journey of these passionate kids falling in love with film and music and art and trying to make something, even if it turned out in any way they could've expected.
I started reading Jeff Chang's great new book without really having seen any of Bruce Lee's movies so I've started to rectify that, and Fists of Fury was the only one of his major works that I was able to easily stream for free, which ended up feeling like a pretty great introduction. I really liked how the rest of the cast, especially Paul Wei, played off of Bruce Lee and made his charisma and physicality that much more powerful.
s) Suspiria
I wanted to watch the 2018 remake of Suspiria so I started with the 1977 original. And man, it's one thing to hear about how influential Dario Argento is but a whole other experience to see his work and see how much his use of color and camera movement and music has been interpreted or attempted in a million other things.
t) Suspiria
Watching Luca Guadagnino's remake right after the original really highlighted how a really professionally made modern film by an acclaimed director really has almost none of the juice or visual flair of a good '70s movie. Not a bad movie but it feels kind of pointless to use the original's story without any of its artful verve.
A really impressive debut by Kitty Green. I feel like a lot of post-'me too' fiction is kind of heavy handed, but this is a finley detailed fly-on-the-wall account of office life with these subtly ominous moments that drive home the point without overstating it.
I love Regina Hall and I wanted to check out this movie that I guess was a turning point in her career where she started to get a wider variety of roles that weren't full-on comedy. Great performance, Haley Lu Richardson is really funny in it too, and I guess Hall and Junglepussy hit it off on this movie and that's how they ended up working together again in One Battle After Another.
w) How It Ends
Most of the stuff I've seen Theo James in has been pretty good, but this apocalyptic action movie felt pretty generic.
I have slightly more mixed feelings about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's legacy since she passed up the opportunity to step down from the Supreme Court while she was still alive. And this movie just feels like a poorly aged remnant of a widespread cultural effort to make people horny for RBG, which totally worked because I was absolutely feral watching Felicity Jones in this movie, good lord she's gorgeous.
y) Cam
I expected this horror movie about a camgirl to be one of those 'screenlife' movies where the entire thing takes place in various laptop windows, but it wasn't really that, and was pretty successfully eerie and original.
z) Extinction
I like Michael Pena and Lizzy Caplan a lot, but it feels like they got stuck in kind of a middling sci-fi spectacle movie that had been intended to have a much bigger budget and bigger stars before it was downsized.
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