Archive for the ‘Movie Reviews’ Category

A-. A thoroughly entertaining crime movie. A useful commentary on guns, and a somewhat unbelievable commentary on human nature.

I think I’m getting to the bottom of the barrel with 2022 movies. At least, critically acclaimed movies that I’m likely to also like. I’m not sure how to find the critically declaimed ones that I’ll like.

Brooklyn – B-. I was entertained. It was well done for what it is, which is a dramatization of a romance novel set in the 1950s. I was not the target audience. I was shocked to find out that the screenplay was written by Nick Hornby, because absolutely nothing about this film felt like Nick Hornby. I was even more surprised that the novel was written by a man, because everything about this felt feminine when I watched it. Much more Jane Austen than Charles Dickens. I thought about it a little more than realized that the perspective on the primary female character is in fact a very male one (hints of, “women in general aren’t to be trusted.”) But it’s not my thing. It did stimulate thoughts around immigration and emigration and how those things are so very different in the United States now, yet so universally unchanged.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande – B. I knew absolutely nothing about this, having only read the Rotten Tomato critic consensus which reads, “Sexual awakening stories aren’t in short supply, but Good Luck to You, Leo Grande proves you can still tell one with a refreshing — and very funny — spin.” It’s not entirely wrong–it’s a sexual awakening story… about a 65 year old woman. It feels like you might want to include that in your single-sentence review? More importantly the whole thing felt like an apology for sex work. I’m not unsympathetic to the case being made, but I struggled to connect with either character or feel much urgency about the central issues. The acting was terrific, even if I ultimately found the characters unbelievable. I’m also not sure what was “very funny” about it, or how the thing is described as a “comedy”. Not only did I not find it funny, it never occured to me that I was supposed to.

Aftersun – B-. I think this was a reasonable idea, questionably executed and poorly shot with overly-artistic ambitions. It’s supposed to be a pensive woman “remembering” a summer vacation she took with her father when she was an 11 year-old girl, but you’d be forgiving for not understanding that because like so many art house films, it winds up substituting obtuse for clever, hoping you’ll think you’re too dumb to notice the difference. The cinematography was probably supposed to be edgy and presumably evoke a sense of remembering, but mostly was just crap. And I’m not much holding against it the transition scenes that are supposed to be an 11 year old with a camcorder, but the fact that the whole thing looks like it was shot by someone with the compositional sense of a monkey who’d been to film school and was trying hard to do the opposite of everything it’d seen there. Still, the characters felt real, the acting was great, and I at times soaked up all subtlety in the very real dialog that unraveled at a glacial pace and gave me time to contemplate the nothing that was going on.

Official Competition – C+. My lack of research and preparation lead to me to watch a film about filmmaking, one of the worst kinds of films. Filmmakers are insufferable about how important they think they are, and as a whole haven’t reached a point where I believe they’re allowed to reflect upon this in public. The saving grace here is that this was funny, and the fact that filmmakers take themselves too seriously is maybe the central thesis. I was entertained through most of it, all the way up until the absurd climax and ridiculous resolution. I think had it managed to be even funnier than it was, I would have liked it better.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. – B-. I read the book when I was Margaret’s age, and don’t remember enough of it to remember how true to it the film wound up being. A commenter on Marginal Revolution called it a “Period piece,” which is a much better review than I think I’ll manage. As someone who grew up in a secular household with parents who had the same backgrounds as Margaret, my feelings about religion when I read the book were, “Why does she care so much? Should I care?” As a teen, I’d sometimes reflect back on Margaret with a bit more sympathy, but in my 40s, I’m over it. It was a well-done adaptation, I enjoyed watching it, but I’m not sure that the world needed it.

Saltburn – F. Everything about this was terrible. I paused it about halfway through and asked Joanna if we could just stop watching it, but she said she wanted to see it through. When it ended, I asked her if she was glad we’d seen it through–she admitted that she wasn’t. It’s a bad story, poorly told, and relies on a reveal that wasn’t really a reveal. I don’t understand the motivations behind anyone who created it, but the world would be better off without it.

Love at First Sight (2023) – I can’t properly rate this. It was not a “good” movie, but I really did enjoy it. Maybe all I want in life are decent romantic comedies, and this one checks all the usual boxes.

Maybe going through and watching critically acclaimed movies is actually working for me. I’m mostly just plugging in the movies that are well-liked by critics into Criticker and watching anything that Criticker agrees I’ll like. This is working better than it usually does.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On: B. I’m not much of a fan of animation. Or kids’ movies. This is… maybe only sort of either? It’s live action, except that the main character is an animated shell. And while there’s nothing in this movie that’s inappropriate for kids, I’m not sure it’s a kids’ movie? It’s not paced like a kids’ movie, and it doesn’t feel packed with the obnoxiousness I’ve come to expect from, say, Pixar. Instead, it’s a careful look at the modern world from the perspective of an innocent, well-meaning shell. The good humor is good, but even the dumb humor is somehow endearing. It’s like nothing else I’ve seen before (though it did remind me slightly of the Everything is Alive podcast), and that’s perhaps the best thing about it. The plot is not strong–it exists only to let a shell show us how he see the world, and that’s fine.

The Duke (2020): B. So British! Worth it for the old married repartee. Which is really good since it’s worth watching just for that, but otherwise this movie doesn’t have a lot to offer. The plot is predictable (literally old news!), the character development ranges from non-existent to uninteresting, but the acting and dialog is fantastic.

Girl Picture (Tytöt tytöt tytöt): B+. This felt fresh, maybe because it’s Finnish. The central character is a difficult girl and she’s difficult in ways that resonate. This pretends to be a “coming of age” film, and it technically is, but these characters didn’t really feel like teenagers to me. There are really two stories that are not exactly related, and I find myself unsure why they’re interwoven. But it checks a lot of boxes for me, and I really enjoyed it.

The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin): B+. We randomly watched these back-to-back, and while they are completely different movies, there were some unexpected similarities. Both were filmed 4:3, which seems to be the edgy artsy choice these days, maybe just because it’s a choice you can easily make in the digital world. I mostly didn’t even notice with Girl Picture which had a rough handheld aesthetic, but the landscapes in Quiet Girl felt like they deserved better. But 4:3 forces you to focus on the actors, and this is about the Quiet Girl after all. Slow, but never boring. My biggest complaint is that the only subtitles I could find were just for the Irish parts, but the English parts were nearly unintelligible. Some of this seemed on purpose, the conversation between adults only producing vague comprehension for the child witnessing it at a distance.

Emily the Criminal: B. This is the most mainstream American thing we’ve watched in awhile. It does claim to be a “thriller”, and it even has a minor car chase scene. It was unusually popular with critics given the premise, and we’d gotten pretty far along in the movie before I was able to figure out why. At first it seems like so many crime movies–hard-up character falls ever-deeper into crime, but the story it builds around this is anything but typical. Emily is not, it turns out, a normal young woman who just happens to fall into a life of crime. The movie makes this clear from the beginning, but I’m so used to the trope that it took me awhile to believe this was actually different. The movie is her character development, and it does not develop in the way I’d think it might. There were so many interesting choices in this movie–this a crime movie, but there is no fetishization of crime, neither is there any moralization. The point of this movie is not to tell you that crime is bad–presumably you know that. Also, there are no guns! This is a crime thriller with no guns! Also the title seems unimportant, but it turns out it’s a fantastic title that’s carefully explained. I love that. There’s also a fantastic dive into the horrors of what I’ll call American Business Culture, which I think is widely taken as an indictment of capitalism in general, but I think it’s that’s a far less interesting take than what’s actually going on.

Smoking Causes Coughing (Fumer fait tousser): B- This has a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, not because it’s fantastic, but because it can absolutely pierce the insane tolerance to the whiles of normal film that movie critics build up. The genre is listed as, “Comedy, Fantasy, Horror,” and that checks out. I think it’s technically an action hero movie, which goes against my principles, but it’s actually a series of comedy-horror vignettes which aren’t all that funny or horror-inducing but are…. thought provoking? I’d like to give it props for being only 1:15 long yet covering plenty of… something.

The Man in the Hat: B. This isn’t actually a French movie (It’s a UK movie), though it’s set in France, and the half-dozen lines of dialogue are in French. It’s mostly dialogue-free, very weird, and also pleasantly delightful. While not especially coherent, it manages to be more plot-driven than the rest of the French movies I’ve watched lately. It’s got a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes for much the same reasons as the previous mention–it manages to be completely unlike any other movie.

Zero Fucks Given (Rien à foutre): B-. Probably worth watching just to watch Adèle Exarchopoulos. It’s slow-moving, subtle, but eventually coherent. The rare art house movie where the last half is significantly better than the first half. The premise–young flight attendant comes to terms with life–isn’t much, but I’m impressed with how subtly some pretty intense stuff was presented. The flight attendant details were hilarious and mostly-believable, though I think the euro budget airlines have to deal with stuff that I did not.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (technically Belgian, not French): C+. Rated by a not-insignificant number of critics as the greatest movie of all time. It’s not my thing, but if you’ve ever wondered how much emotion could be conveyed by a single actress peeling two potatoes for 10 minutes, this sets a pretty high bar. It’s more than 3 hours where nearly nothing happens, and yet I was never tempted to turn it off. I did not find the experience of repeatedly waiting for a very slow elevator that’s always on the wrong floor to be pleasant, but I do appreciate the filmmaking. The most pleasant parts of the film are when Jeanne manages to leave or return to the apartment and the elevator-riding scenes are cut! Somehow we, the viewer, are occasionally allowed to imagine the elevator ride ourselves! Or maybe not even think about the elevator ride!