Our Dumb Blog

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!