See that? After going hard as hell on movies earlier this year to the tune of two dump posts a month, here's a two-month dump post. Slowing it down. Slowing it down so hard, you guys!
Once more, I'll be giving each movie a three-part rating of sorts - "Anticipation," "Enjoyment," and "In Retrospect," each ranked on a scale from 1-5. Thanks again, LittleWhiteLies, for lending me this concept.
Horrible Bosses
3-2-2
Always figured I'd see this one day, and that day happened to be a day when I flew across the Atlantic Ocean. This is really five years old already? Damn. The one thing I'd heard about it was how raunchy-dirty-sexy Jennifer Aniston was. Lo and behold, that's also the one thing I'll remember about it. The jokes were fine and the plot wasn't nearly as formulaic and predictable as it could have been, but it never all came together into anything special.
The Heat
2-3-2
What's worse than watching a movie on a plane movie? Watching an R-rated movie that's been hilariously and terribly edited for television on a plane. Actually, I take that back - the two dozen "piece of scums" and "frick yous" might have made this a more humorous experience. Nothing bad here - it's a standard Paul Feig-Melissa McCarthy collaboration - and the biggest pleasant surprise may have been Sandra Bullock's knack for physical comedy. (Then again I did see Miss Congeniality all those years ago - maybe this shouldn't have been so surprising.) Spy - which I saw earlier this year, but which came out later than The Heat - was much better.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
2-5-4
A real unexpected treat. This is the best I've ever seen Robert Downey, Jr. - yes, including in Iron Man - and it's also the best I've seen Val Kilmer. If you asked me to describe the plot I'd shrug, but it's a dark comedy and also an almost-sort-of-earnest noir thriller. Just a delight to sit through, and to watch, and to listen to. Absolutely makes me want to see The Nice Guys, the latest from Shane Black.
Sunshine
2-4-3
A crew of six astronaut-scientists is on a perilous mission to "jump start" the sun with an enormous nuclear bomb. The sun has grown cold and stagnant, you see, and everyone on earth is freezing. I liked this a lot, but could never shake the feeling that it was a slightly lesser version of Europa Report, a similar movie about a mission to Jupiter's ice moon that I saw last summer. (Yes, Sunshine is the older movie by seven years or so. But still!) This came flying off the rails in the third act, transitioning from an eerie-but-pretty science fiction flick into a full blown - well, another genre entirely, and even sharing which one would spoil it almost entirely. I liked this!
Not Another Teen Movie
3-4-4
How hadn't I seen this one before? And why was it so critically panned? This was - shockingly - hilarious. The 2000s saw a glut of shameless "parody" movies that got progressively lazier and less creative. Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, all of those sequels to Scary Movie. But where those were all content to hash together cheap pop culture references and stale jokes, Not Another Teen Movie was clever more often than crude and it was subtle just as often as it was blatant. Loaded with visual gags and tropes from what felt like every single high school movie from the '80s and '90s - and there were tons, you may recall - this thing just worked from start to finish. Maybe the fifteen years between when critics saw this and when I did have given me a rosier, forgiving, nostalgic perspective or something like that, but I thought this was absolutely great. Disagree? Consider how the high school movies that came out after this one (Mean Girls, She's the Man, Super Bad) were markedly different in tone and self-awareness than the high school movies that came out before it (American Pie, She's All That, Never Been Kissed). This movie so thoroughly deconstructed the genre that it had to be rebuilt from scratch. You know, either that, or 9/11 obliterated our collective ability to apply meaningful stakes to clique-crossing high school romances even in our fictional narratives. Or maybe it was a little of each? Regardless, oh man, Chris Evans was great here. Everyone was.
The Iron Giant
3-3-2
All kinds of hype preceded this. I remember seeing ads for this way back in 1999 and just having no interest at all. Seventeen years later I'd heard "ugh so underrated" and "it'll make you cry" and "the last great non-computer-animated movie ever made" enough times to finally go see what all the fuss was about. And folks - I'm still not seeing it! I'm sorry. Yeah, there's a certain tone here somewhere between '50s nostalgia and Cold War paranoia, but at the end of the day I have to call almost everything about this movie generic and formulaic, from the characters to their conflicts and right down to the resolution. Maybe a tad darker than most animated kids' movies, but only by half a shade. It just wasn't anything more than I assumed it was when I was eleven - and I didn't care back then, either. It's fine! Just fine, though.
That's all for now.
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