Movie Diary
In the week between Christmas and New Year's, I mourned Rob Reiner by rewatching Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, and The Princess Bride. Appropriately, Spinal Tap II felt a little more like a reunion tour than a sequel -- playing the hits rather than extending or resolving a narrative. It's hardly essential, although it got a few laughs out of me ("it won a Holdie," Nigel shredding with the Celtic pub band), but I was filled with appreciation for the fact that Reiner at least got to end his career with a nice little victory lap of one of his greatest achievements.
b) Jay Kelly
Noah Baumbach has co-written some enjoyable movies (The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Barbie) but I don't really rate him as a director at all, I think he's technically smart and occasionally insightful but not talented or original enough to make great art. And Jay Kelly is another movie where you can kind of see all the wheels turning and it never really takes off. George Clooney's performance carries the film, partly because it's so easy to substitute our world's feelings about him as a great movie star with Jay Kelly's world's feelings for him (although it felt kind of annoyingly lazy that a highlight reel of Jay Kelly's filmography was actual clips of Clooney hits). Unfortunately, Clooney is acting opposite Adam Sandler, who's given some great performances when a role is tailored to his strengths, but is just an absolute dogshit actor in a more straightforward role, stiffly reading lines, absolutely unconvincing as a normal man with a job and adult responsibilities and a deep yearning for love and friendship. His scenes with Laura Dern were particularly lifeless, which was especially annoying given that Dern was the best thing about Marriage Story and easily could've been given the room to repeat that here.
I'm not a Paul Thomas Anderson hater like I am with Baumbach, but I definitely don't look at him as reverently as a lot of people do these days. In some ways I like early work the most, and I have vague plans to rewatch a lot of his post-'90s movies because they just didn't really connect for me the first time around. I liked One Battle After Another a lot the first time around, though, I don't know if it's the towering masterpiece it's been made out to be, but very good and not at all a disappointment, Leonardo DiCaptrio and Benicio del Toro and Chase Infiniti are all so great in this.
d) Eddington
Eddington has been lumped in with One Battle After Another and some other recent movies as examples of auteurs making films that very directly address the political landscape of 2020s America. I think Eddington came out a little half baked, though, the weakest of Ari Aster's four features (even Beau Is Afraid, while flawed, is more than the sum of its parts, while this is less). The tonal ambiguity in Aster's movies is usually a strength, but it felt like he wanted to make a movie about COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and antifa hysteria in an 'equal opportunity offender' way that felt progressively more toothless as the story escalated and got more violent. The live action equivalent of a "South Park" episode.
e) Roofman
An excellent movie, either Channing Tatum's best performance or his best performance that wasn't in a full-on comedy, definitely not as lightweight as the commercials make it seem like it will be.
f) Bugonia
I think if I could pick any job to have in the film industry, it would be a casting director, because so much of what works or doesn't work for me in a movie has to do with casting. For instance, Emma Stone is the absolute perfect actor for Bugonia and it's hard to imagine anyone else working as well in that role, much like her previous collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos. But Jesse Plemons, I don't know, obviously a gifted actor who's been great in lots of things, but I feel like this movie could've had a different, better energy with someone else in that role. The closing montage was kind of amazing, but I didn't really feel anything about the twist that made it possible, in a weird way I think I liked Bugonia the exact same amount that I would have if the ending was a little more conventional and expected.
g) Together
Together is a great vehicle for its leads -- it's more fun to watch Alison Brie and Dave Franco play a troubled couple who are being physically forced together by a mysterious force while knowing that they're a happily married couple in real life. And they're both seasoned comedic actors who have enough dramatic range that they give the story some gravity when it's needed, but lean into how funny it eventually gets. But as someone who's very down with body horror films, I thought it wasn't a home run and it was easy to imagine a more seasoned horror director doing something much more impressive and memorable with this premise.
I wish Rian Johnson was alternating Benoit Blanc movies with other features -- it's been 13 years since Looper, his last movie that wasn't Star Wars or Knives Out -- but he's really good at this stuff, I can't complain, and so far each one is distinct enough that it feels like a worthy addition. Jeremy Renner going down the stairs got maybe the biggest laugh out of me of any moment in the series.
i) Train Dreams
A pretty good movie with Oscar buzz. Once again I felt a little nitpicky about casting, though. I've never really been blown away by Joel Edgerton, he did okay with quietly brooding through the whole movie, but as soon as William H. Macy showed up I thought about how much more engaged I'd be in the story if it was an actor as good as Macy in the lead role. I also didn't love Will Patton as the narrator, or the amount of narration, sometimes it feels like a crutch or creative failure for a screen adaptation of a book to have a lot of voiceover instead of channeling what was on the page into visual storytelling, dialogue, and the nonverbal expressions of the actors.
Adapting Stephen King is particularly difficult work, and Mike Flanagan is one guy who's shown that he's up to the task. I haven't read the 2020 novella The Life of Chuck, but it feels particularly unsuited for adapting for the screen, like Flanagan was almost giving himself a heat check, especially since it's not a horror story -- although its depiction of climate change and environmental collapse in the near future is about as visceral and haunting as any I've ever seen. It's a really interesting, thought-provoking movie, I liked just about everything about it except the narration by Nick Offerman. I'm not even really faulting Flanagan for using narration because it was probably necessary in this instance, but Offerman just done way too much voiceover work in commercials (or, like, fake commercials on "Last Week Tonight") for his narration to not give The Life of Chuck this inappropriate feel of an or a work of satire. Like it annoyed me so much that I wish they'd just realized that and recut the movie with another narrator.
After watching The Life of Chuck I decided to watch an earlier Flanagan adaptation of a Stephen King book that I'd missed. And I really liked it, Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood's performances really made the material work on the screen when there's a lot about the story that probably seemed unfilmable on paper. The whole 'moonlight man' thing almost felt like an unnecessary bonus subplot, though, it's a very Stephen King kind of flourish but I think the movie might have been stronger without it.
"Lover, You Should Have Come Over" was one of the most incredible pieces of music I'd ever heard when I was 17, and I've read so much about Jeff Buckley over the decades since then and pored over so much music and ephemera. I was curious to see an actual feature documentary about him (named after a lyric from my favorite song!) but wasn't sure if it would feel like I had anything left to learn. But Jeff's mother, and two serious girlfriends, most of the members of his backing band, and a few other musicians he knew (Aimee Mann, Ben Harper) really shared a lot, in some instances I almost felt like they overshared. As much as I've obsessed over how sad the story of Jeff's tragically short life is, the movie left me feeling like it was even sadder than I ever knew, which is not a great feeling but I appreciated it as a fan.
Watching this soon after the Buckley doc felt like an interesting flipside -- Counting Crows came out around the same time as Buckley, sold a lot more records, and Adam Duritz lived through his personal crises to tell us about them now as an old man. But it's a similar snapshot of the same era, in fact it focuses so fully on the first two Counting Crows albums that there's just a very quick postscript at the end to note that the band is still around and released an album a few months ago. That means, fortunately, that almost half the film is about Recovering the Satellites, an album that I really adore, and it gave a lot of illuminating context to the experiences Duritz was writing about, and how purposeful he was in putting the band together and deciding how those records should sound, down to whether the guitarist should use pedals or not, or whether the keyboardist should just play piano and organ with no synths. I came away from the movie really admiring him more as a musician and a bandleader.
n) Cover-Up
A great recent Netflix doc about Seymour Hersh, really gave me a renewed appreciation for what investigative journalism was in his era and the lengths people would go to to get a story.
o) Let It Be
I watched Peter Jackson's "Get Back" miniseries without ever going back to the original 1970 film at the time, but after devouring "The Beatles Anthology" recently, I decided to keep going through all the Beatles stuff on Disney+ and watch this. Probably better than it gets credit for at this point, it captures a lot of great personal and musical moments, but it definitely feels like the Jackson version renders it a lot less essential.
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