Lengthy post this month, as movie-watching picked up a bit with TV and schoolwork both dying down a bit, particularly for Thanksgiving. Enjoy these fourteen takes.
Han Gong-ju
Total late-night on-a-whim streaming choice. This one had great reviews and ratings across the Internet but, meh, I dunno, nothing great in my book. It's the South Korean story (based on a real one) about - well, it's not clear what it's about at first. A new girl with a dark past or secret shows up and when we eventually learn why she was exiled from her hometown (it's not because of something she did), yeah, it's absolutely infuriating. I'd shake my head at the South Korean justice system, but frankly, what happened there wasn't all that different from plenty of our own dark episodes here in America. Okay, if you don't care - spoilers - there was a big old teenage gang rape scandal, except the cops bungled the investigation and prosecution something brutal, and poor girl Han Gong-ju ends up needing to live elsewhere. Does that sound depressingly familiar or what?
In the Heart of the Sea
This could and should have been a better movie. Based on the true story of a whaling ship that gets wrecked by a white whale two-thousand miles out to sea - the very event that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick - and directed by Ron Howard, on paper this looks like a prestige drama with an outside shot at some Oscar nominations. But dramatically, there's so much juice the movie never bothers squeezing out of some very ripe and appetizing fruit. The captain and first mate hate one another, for one thing, but after their managerial differences come to a head in an early storm, the rivalry is never revisited. It doesn't linger and it doesn't resolve. It just sort of goes away as a plot point. The whaling sequences are satisfying and well-paced, but after the big whale attack that sinks the ship and leaves the surviving crew drifting through the South Pacific in three little whaling boats, the pace slackens. These are desperate, starving, thirsty, sunburnt men, but the movie's content to just note the passage of time with "38 days stranded" intertitles rather than digging deep into their misery. Chris Hemsworth lost a lot of weight in order to look like an emaciated poor bastard, but if you weren't looking for it, you wouldn't even notice it; the movie doesn't seem to care whether or not you even do. There's a brief philosophical discussion about two thirds of the way through about man's place in the world - the kind of shit Melville made hay with for hundreds of pages in Moby-Dick - but as soon as it starts, it's gone. And the most harrowing part of the historical incident - when the desperate crew turns to cannibalism in order to survive - is, frustratingly, referenced and mentioned but left off screen entirely. I guess they really wanted that bloodless PG-13 rating. It's just annoying - there were so many elements of a genuinely great movie here! But no one seemed to care enough to actually make one out of them.
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
There are smart comedies and there are dumb comedies, and both kinds can be good and both kinds can be bad. At their worst, "smart" comedies are kind of boring and toothless. At their best, "dumb" comedies are laugh-a-minute exercises in simple-minded escapism. (Oh yeah - there are also absurd comedies - dumber than dumb comedies - with over-the-top characters who behave more like cartoons than real people. Anchorman, Zoolander, Austin Powers, Dumb and Dumber. They can be good or bad too. But I digress.) Anyway, one thing it seems like every dumb comedy struggles with - the good ones and the bad ones alike - is maintaining a level of humor through the transition to the third act. You see it all the time. First act is loaded with jokes and hilarity as we meet the characters and establish the very simple story beats. Second act, hijinks ensue and everything escalates, and occasionally we're taken a little too far over the top, maybe even approaching the aforementioned "absurd comedy" status. But almost invariably, the movie pumps the brakes on the humor as shit gets real for our bottoming out heroes - usually fuck-ups to one degree or another - and we've gotta press pause on the comedy for a moment so that the ten-minute redemption arc can play out. It's a catch-22. The third act is tough to push through without the laugh rate dropping off, but without some sort of resolution, the story feels aimless and the movie can suffer anyway. Credit, then, to Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, for neither softening up nor abandoning any pretense of a narrative arc. No, this movie managed to be pretty funny - stupid, of course, but funny! - from start to finish and didn't deviate from a safe but formulaic structure, either. That's not to say it was a great movie - I've called it both "dumb" and "formulaic," haven't I? - but for what it is, and what it's trying to be, it's not bad at all. (Anna Kendrick's wig, though - why? There's just no reason for that wig. That wig was distracting and weird and made Anna Kendrick seem miscast even though she wasn't and man, just, really, why?)
The Intern
So as the results rolled in on #ElectionNight2016 and the unthinkable began to unfold, Marissa and I agreed that we didn't need to watch the coverage anymore. We decided to watch a movie. She insisted it had to be one she'd already seen, since she knew she'd be glued to her phone looking at election results and would pay no attention to the movie. I insisted it be something I hadn't seen, so as to distract me from doing the exact same on my phone. Hence: this. And you know what? Marissa had the right idea; I didn't pay a lick of attention to whole ten-minute chunks of this thing, refreshing my phone and reading all sorts of punditry on what was happening. (Why I ever thought a middling romance-free rom-com would distract me from the most important night of the year, I can't say. Wishful thinking?) To whatever extent I actually saw The Intern - eh. Not my bag, really. Cute story I'm sure, but when Election Night 2016 is happening, who could possibly care about Robert DeNiro proving his value to Anne Hathaway? (Yes - he's the intern, if you didn't know from the previews.)
Ghostbusters
This was fine - just fine - up until the third act, which was a mishmash of CGI nonsense and humorless, no-stakes action-packed fuckery. I think the pre-release backlash to this movie's very existence was an embarrassing shame, but I also think this movie never really needed to exist in the first place. Not because the first Ghostbusters is such a sacred treasure; quite the opposite. There's just nothing compelling about Ghostbusters that made it something we had to revisit, all-female cast or otherwise. (Okay, guys - confession. I have never seen the first Ghostbusters all the way through. Just bits and pieces, including the whole ending. It came out four years before I was born. What do you want from me?) At first, this was funny enough. But the funniest person in it was Chris Hemsworth. (Not a hot take - Marissa agrees!) I dunno. It wasn't great. But it wasn't not great because it was a female-driven action-comedy; it wasn't great because it was a needless and kind of shitty remake of a movie that maybe itself wasn't all that great in the first place. Is that okay? That's okay, right?
Secretary
Way earlier in the year, Marissa and I watched Fifty Shades of Grey and it was about as terrible as expected. Shitty plot, distinctly unsexy, no chemistry at all between the two leads, and a complete lack of an ending - what's more to hate? Anyway, I've had my eye on this 2002 kinky cult classic for a long time. You may be familiar - Maggie Gyllenhaal is James Spader's secretary, and he treats her like absolute garbage and emotionally and physically abuses her, but she's totally into it, and as such, hey, here we've got a BDSM-positive movie that predated the Fifty Shades phenomenon by at least ten years. (James Spader's character's name here? I shit you not - it's Mr. Grey!) So yeah - all in all a much better movie than Fifty Shades of Grey, as these actors have chemistry and this narrative has stakes and the kinky scenes are - for the most part - sexy. However! I'd venture to say that this is a much more #problematic movie than Fifty Shades; that film makes a distinct effort to show us all the consent that's being given from the bottom to her top. And in that film, it's not an employer-employee relationship. In Secretary, on the other hand, there are no scenes where consent is given, where boundaries are defined, where safe words are laid out. And this is, again, a boss abusing his secretary. She enjoys their relationship, and it's clear she consents to everything he's doing, and the movie is probably better off for skipping all the legalese and paperwork in Fifty Shades. But still! Non-affirmative consent doesn't fly here in 2016, no sir!
The Neon Demon
Let's talk Nicolas Winding Refn. I absolutely loved Drive. It's one of my favorite movies of all time, and yes, that has more to do with its aesthetic and its vibe than with its actual story. Refn's follow-up, Only God Forgives, was poorly received and in my mind it lived down to the non-hype. Even with low expectations I couldn't muster a fuck to give; the movie just never grabbed me. So, fine - Refn's capable of making great movies and shit movies alike. Where would The Neon Demon fall on that spectrum? My answer is somewhere in the middle. This is a movie about young models in Los Angeles and what a vapid and cutthroat industry they work in. And it looks and feels like a great movie. The style here is just fantastic. The substance? Meh. Some too-obvious metaphors and a weird third act kind of left me wanting more. But, holy crap, this is a gorgeous movie. It isn't a good one, but damn is it pretty, and maybe even pretty enough to be worth seeing on that much alone.
Everybody Wants Some
Absolutely loved this so much more than I should have, except, hey, it's Linklater, maybe there's no reason not to love it. It's a two-hour movie about college baseball players just hanging out on the first weekend of school in 1980. That's it. It's been called a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused, and it is, but there's no arc here. There are no stakes. These are just a bunch of jocks shooting the shit and fucking around and getting competitive with each other and trying to have sex with women. There's seriously barely a plot, and there's no drama or conflict, but this was still one of the best movies I've seen this year. This is what more comedies should strive to be. Just giant hang out sessions. For real, I would watch a TV series about these guys. There are seven or eight "main" characters and a handful more of supporting guys and bit players, and with one lone exception - a black guy whose race is never even brought up - there's no diversity here whatsoever. Everyone is white and straight and a bit of a meathead, and it doesn't even get old or stale. The movie's just such a treat from start to finish. It'll never be as famous or well-known as Dazed and Confused but for my money it was even better. I can't gush enough here. See this! I found it at a Redbox - hopefully it's Netflix-bound soon.
Sausage Party
Marissa's pick! She heard it was funny. She ended up hating it. I can't blame her! This was bad. Not terrible, but about as funny as a latter day Family Guy episode and even more crude and offensive. There are moments where this felt like a decent satire on religion; people are gods, and all the food at the grocery store just wants to go out into the "great beyond" for eternal happiness, but eventually they begin to realize it's all a great big lie, and that all that waits for them through the supermarket exit is death (and lots of torture beforehand). But how sharp can your anti-religious takes be when your C-story involves a bagel and a lavash hashing out an Israel vs. Palestine dispute. ("It was our aisle first!" "Well where were we supposed to go after the sauerkraut kicked us out of our old aisle?") This isn't clever; it's dumb. But it's also pretty funny from time to time. When the food turns against the people, it escalates rather quickly - and ten minutes later the whole thing ends with the biggest orgy ever animated. I laughed!
Finding Dory
Back in 2003 I was a sophomore in high school and everybody was losing their shit over Finding Nemo and I just didn't get it. It was fine! Cute! A decent movie! But nothing about it blew me away and it just never clicked for me the way it seemed to click for so many of my peers. (Girls, mostly, but still.) Snap back to today and, yeah, that's kind of how I feel about its sequel - not that anyone I know is obsessed with this one. It was fine, and cute, and a decent movie, just like Finding Nemo was. At the very least it wasn't a bad or lazy sequel. Not the most ringing endorsement, I know, but what do you want? This is Pixar being Pixar - no better, and no worse.
Louder Than Bombs
This underwhelmed me slightly, in that I was expecting a 7 or 8 and got a 5 or 6 instead. It's a movie about a family moving on from their matriarch's untimely death and likely suicide. I don't really give everything I stream an equal opportunity, I'll admit, and sometimes I'm on my phone or my laptop for the majority of any given movie. This was one such movie. Still, something more compelling would have kept me more engaged, no?
Arrival
Mainstream hype, once again, is so dangerous. It's only November, and no one's even talking about Oscar contenders yet, but when a wide release science fiction movie with an original script and a reasonably big budget like this one pops up - and when it's led by Amy Adams - you almost can't help but preemptively judge it as an Oscar nominee rather than as, simply, a movie. (What, just me?) Lose the big names in this one and a few of the special effects, and it's an incredibly impressive independent film with an interesting twist and an important message. But somehow with bigger stars and a bigger budget, it feels less impressive. Does that make any sense? All of that said, this was a good movie. A solid 8, let's say, since apparently based on the last paragraph, I'm rating movies now. The twist was a little predictable - which is fine, and in some ways a credit to the movie's foreshadowing capabilities - but my issue with it was that it didn't seem to match the thematic content of the movie at all. For me to say anything else would flirt with spoiling something outright, so fuck it - just go see Arrival. I'll leave with a quick synopsis. Twelve massive UFOs have appeared all across the earth and Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner need to figure out a way to communicate with them before the Russian and Chinese militaries start firing nuclear weapons at them.
Hell or High Water
This was great. From a director I've never heard of (David Mackenzie) comes a neo-western bank heist movie for the Bernie Sanders era. Taking place in No Country For Old Men territory and exuding a similar vibe to that Coen brothers masterpiece - it's even got Jeff Bridges in the Tommy Lee Jones role of the grizzled lawman getting too old for this shit - Hell or High Water is a textbook example of keeping it simple. This is a simple story with simple characters who have simple motivations, and it all leads to a simple conclusion. And it's great! Just wonderful, really. Marissa thought it was a little too slow, but I disagree - it's got multiple action sequences and plenty of tension, especially as it builds to its climax, all in an hour and forty minutes. Besides, it's West Texas. What happens quickly in West Texas? (Disclaimer: I've never been to West Texas.)
Marathon: The Patriots Day Bombing
Jesus Christ. This HBO documentary was exhaustive in its coverage and exhausting from an emotional standpoint. The subject matter needs no introduction, particularly since I think everyone reading this either lives or has once lived within ten miles of both the finish line in Boston and the region of Watertown where the ensuing manhunt took place, but... fuck, man. Two hours in length, this thing pulls no punches in showing not just the explosions (waiting for those to go off made for the longest ten seconds or so of any movie I've seen all year) but also their harrowing aftermath. Not just the immediate aftermath - blood and severed limbs and arteries all over Boylston Street's sidewalks - but the ongoing aftermath for the survivors of the attacks. Three people died in the bombings and seventeen others lost legs, and this documentary spends a lot of its time on their stories of recovery and hardship. It's depressing, in many cases. Inspirational, sure - and I'll always tear up at the idea of the entire fucking region coming together in the days and weeks that followed to donate blood, money, time, and effort to the victims - but to the documentary's credit it's really never emotionally manipulative or melodramatic. It treats triumphs as triumphs, sure, but acknowledges and shows us all sorts of ongoing hardships associated with those triumphs. I'll have a significant bias toward any coverage or retelling of the Marathon bombing for the rest of my life - really dreading that schlocky-looking Mark Wahlberg movie, guys - but I found this to be such a powerful documentary. Not cathartic, thank God - no loved ones or limbs or loved ones' limbs lost for me - but gripping and informative and tragic in that too-close-to-home way. There's one pair of victims in particular - newlyweds, twenty-somethings, young professionals in the city - who filled me with that hokey self-tragic sense of "that could have been me and my wife." They each lost a leg after the bombing, and together they seem to span both ends of the recovery spectrum. He ran the Boston Marathon on his prosthetic leg just three years after the attack; she, waiting for him at the finish line, still can't walk comfortably. Oof. Seek this one out and see this. You'll immediately regret doing so, but I think it deserves a watch all the same.
Bring on December! Last year I watched close to 30 movies in December in order to hit 100 on the year. This year, I'm already at 145 heading into December. (Thanks, grad school.) That's double my pace from last year - can I also double last year's December, collect 60 movies in 31 days, and somehow hit 200 this year? Uh, fuck and no. But I'm sure I'll rack up plenty.
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