Alright, let's mix things up a bit. There's this website - or at least a British magazine that has a website - where they review movies with three separate scores. Lots of professionals review lots of things in this manner, sure, but what makes Little White Lies stand out is that the categories are "Anticipation," "Enjoyment," and "In Retrospect." Their argument for these ratings, which I think they've been using for ten years, is that the three categories encompass the totality of the audience experience in a way that breaking a movie down into different elements doesn't. For instance, say you're rating a movie based on "Acting," "Production," and "Story" - what do you do with a movie that suffered in all three of those aspects but that stood out for other reasons entirely?
"Anticipation" is, roughly speaking, how much hype or excitement you had going into a movie. "Enjoyment" is strictly how entertained or interested you were for the duration of the movie. And "In Retrospect" is the extent to which the movie stays with you after it ends. Obviously these are all entirely subjective ratings, and yet it's clear what each one means.
I like the idea here, so I'll shamelessly borrow it, at least for this movie dump, and who knows? Maybe it'll stick. Little White Lies uses a 5-point scale for each category and I see no reason to shy away from a full-scale format lifting. Enjoy!
Cloud Atlas
Anticipation: 3 - Always wanted to see this one, but wanted to read the book first and waited three and a half years to do so. The book underwhelmed - though if anything this made me want to see the movie even more. Nervous heading in, but also very invested.
Enjoyment: 4 - Three-hour run time, occasional subtitles, full attention necessary at all times. If this was slow or uninteresting at any point in the first hour or so, I'm sure I'd have tuned out. But I didn't! Actually pretty thrilling from start to finish - though that's one perk of telling six stories in parallel.
In Retrospect: 3 - Some of the action sequences will stay with me, and there's no denying the unique feel of the movie overall, but much like the book I fear the movie hasn't successfully left me impressed in a lasting way. The coolest scenes in the movie feel like the kind of stuff the Wachowski sisters pull off in every Sense8 episode.
Best in Show
Anticipation: 2 - I'd seen a few other Christopher Guest movies and even bits and pieces of this one; more or less knew what I was getting into.
Enjoyment: 3 - Short and funny with nary a misstep. Toyed with giving a 4 here, but somehow I can't go that far. Maybe because I was already familiar with the movie and its best lines and scenes? I dunno. Feels like I'm underselling it with a 3, but, 3.
In Retrospect: 3 - Proven staying power as a cult classic but completely inconsequential in a bigger sense.
Captain America: Civil War
Anticipation: 4 - I find the endless onslaught of formulaic Marvel movies tedious as all hell and I rarely want to see these movies in theaters, or even at all. All the same, I'd been oddly excited about this one for several months.
Enjoyment: 4 - Excellent! Twelve distinct superhero characters and each one felt fleshed out. Plus a plot that made sense and wasn't too contrived. The ending couldn't quite bear the weight of the stakes and philosophical tension the film had built up, but kudos to a Marvel movie for having stakes and philosophical tension in the first place.
In Retrospect: 4 - A fight scene at an airport sets a new standard for PG-13 superhero movie fight scenes, but the whole thing feels more like a chapter than a story. That's the blessing and the curse of tying two dozen movies across ten years into one continuity, I guess. If nothing else, this is the sequel The Avengers deserved.
Rugrats in Paris
Anticipation: 1 - Scene: Mothers Day, family gathered in the living room for a lazy Sunday. After perusing the On Demand options for ten minutes or more, my sister put this on in the background, probably thinking something like "this will be funnier than just turning the TV off." No one cared enough to turn the TV off and just over an hour later the movie was finished.
Enjoyment: 2 - Minimal attention paid. Nothing too cringeworthy here, but also nothing good.
In Retrospect: 1 - Neither the first Rugrats movie nor the last. Beyond that, who cares?
Look Who's Back
Anticipation: 2 - A German movie about what might happen if Hitler just sort of showed up in the present day. I'd heard of the book, and gave this a shot on Netflix one night.
Enjoyment: 2 - Subtitles play a lot better with drama than with comedy, and the tone of the movie was never really clear to me. Was this Idiocracy? Was it Borat? The joke/scare here is that after everyone initially laughs off fish-out-of-Nazi-Germany Hitler, a few people start to realize he has some good ideas about what to do about all the - [looks left, looks right] - Muslims. My biggest question is how much of the pro-Hitler anti-immigrant sentiment coming from man-on-the-street interviews was scripted or at least loosely guided, and how much was the real deal? Same sentiment either way, but obviously a much heavier gut punch to modern Germans (and the rest of us) if this was fact, not fiction.
In Retrospect: 3 - At one point, I shit you not, the Hitler character claims he will "make Germany great again." This was filmed two years ago. The movie ends with a montage of real-life newsreel footage of Islamophobic protests around Europe while Hitler, surging in popularity as he begins a political campaign, says to himself, "I can work with this." Yikes!
Wow, only five movies this month. I love it!
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