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Wild Hogs (2007)

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bubulIn this movie, set in 2007, late in the second GWB term, which I watched at 1.25% speed in the bath, three craven, late-career, white leading men from 70s, 80s, or 90s Hollywood who really seem to need irl paychecks go on a movie motorcycle trip from Cleveland to Venice Beach with their mutual friend Martin Lawrence. They call their movie friend group, which finds its primary expression in weekend rides, “the Wild Hogs.”

Eventually the Hogs run into Ray Liotta in New Mexico. Ray Liotta is the leader of a “real” bike gang, the Del Fuegos, founded by his father, Henry Fonda (Boomer pausing the movie screen to gesticulate and exclaim: “it’s an Easy Rider reference!! I got the reference!!”). Liotta gets mad that the Wild Hogs are poseurs, and steals one of their motorcycles to “teach them a lesson,” which in turn leads to the destruction of his biker bar, creating beef. Then the Del Fuegos and the Wild Hogs spend acts two and three figuring out who’s actually authentic/who’s actually a man via bluster and violence in a town that’s having a chili competition. It blows over when Henry Fonda eventually shows up to chide Ray Liotta, telling him the bar was “a shithole” (Trump vox) and that he made a ton of money on insurance when it burned down. Ray Liotta says “Sorry pop,” and that’s it. The Wild Hogs prove they are the “real men” and finish the ride to Venice Beach, where Gen X and early Millenial women in bikinis smile at them and wave. Over the end credits, Ray Liotta’s bar is rebuilt by “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” into something that looks like a Guy Fierri restaurant or something.

…

The other Hogs are William H (“Hilliam”) Macy, John Travolta, and Tim Allen. Macy is sort of the central character; he plays “a computer programmer” who is “afraid to talk to women.” He is introduced in a cafe, where he is using a desktop implementation of Siri called “Mac,” via an open interface that looks something like Audacity. When he tries to seem like a cool computer guy, it misunderstands his command to “open Internet” and searches for “alternative sex,” immediately opening a million “popups” for things like “kinky granny” sites, which all play sound. As he struggles to close the popups, he spills coffee on his computer, which resembles a gray-bodied plastic 2003 HP Pavilion (not the aluminum-bodied Powerbook G4, and certainly not a 2007 white MacBook). The coffee spill causes his computer to spark and emit smoke; everyone in the cafe is disgusted at the display. Later, in his enthusiasm for the bike trip, he gets a bicep “tat” of the Apple rainbow logo. The joke is that Macy doesn’t understand that the rainbow is a symbol of gay pride, and that the Apple logo is not a tough enough tattoo for a biker to have; it’s that kind of movie. And the whole thing also just rings completely false because the rainbow logo was retired in 1998.

Macy’s character is portrayed as earnest, loving, and naive. He admires his male friends, and is on a quest for Maleness via getting laid not unlike Chris Elliot’s in Cabin Boy. (At the time I watched this, Macy was embroiled in the celebrity pay-to-play “college admissions scandal,” which felt cartoonishly appropriate to his presence in this movie.) Meanwhile, Travolta plays the group asshole, and goes all-in on straight-ahead, “no homo” bro masculinity, played with zero irony for laughs. Travolta repeatedly dismisses Macy’s naive comfort with his own body and earnest male admiration for his friends in homophobic terms. There’s even a lengthy interlude in Act 1 with a gay motorcycle cop (played by character actor John C. McGinley (Point Break)) who keeps trying to get the Hogs to have an orgy, and they have to figure out how to escape without appearing not-gay, so as not to rouse the ire of law enforcement and get a ticket. The whole thing is about as endless-feeling and lurid as Jack Nicholson in the dentist’s chair in the OG Little Shop of Horrors (1960).

…

That Ray Liotta’s bar is remodeled from “a shithole” into something completely plastic-looking by an HGTV show is weirdly descriptive of this entire movie’s thing: that artificial suburban consumer reality is ultimately the measure of what’s right, manly, and good. Ray Liotta reenters this reality and signals his true beta status by crying tears of joy; he and his criminal biker gang were cowardly lions after all. And the Wild Hogs were right to be prepared to stand up to them in violent conflict all along: that’s what “real men” do.

Is this convincing to anyone? Who does this fantasy belong to? Does anyone watching the movie actually think the bar is better off after this weird renovation? Do they believe that either model of “the biker” depicted here is somehow “authentic?” Do they believe that any of these men are “real men?”

…

The last thing I wanna say here is that Davey and I are originally acquainted from being “noise babies” in Philly who also played board games, but we got to know each other by doing a low-level east coast tour together. I had to get out of bed to check if that tour was in 2007, and whether we were plausibly on the road ourselves while the Wild Hogs were fighting Ray Liotta, but it was in 2008. Still, pretty tragic to think that this is the “road movie” we’re left with to describe this time.

harmsFour middle-aged friends hit the road on their motorcycles to rediscover themselves and maybe America.  This is the base outline for Wild Hogs a movie made in the waning years of the Bush administration, right before things got inconceivably weird for the baby boomers.  I’d heard Wild Hogs was something in the vein of Grown Ups 2, a film equal parts psychotically banal and malevolent. While it does share those qualities it doesn’t possess that film’s sheer volume of incoherent bad vibes, leaving it a mere pretender to the crown of that brand of psychedelically-bleak Americana.  So while I mentally group Grown Ups 2 in with Lars Von Trier and similar punishers, Wild Hogs I found more akin to something like Sixteen Candles; a middling comedy with toxic overtones that get more pronounced and poisonous over time. The movie’s only saving grace is to witness its obsessive focus, with every joke and plot development all stemming from the question of “How to be a Man.”

Wild Hogs believes men should be devoted to one another entirely, but express affection for each other sparingly. The two most common responses for those who break discipline and cross these boundaries is derision or violence.  The movie posits one other notable response, typified by its “gay biker cop.” This character’s sole function is to appear whenever our crew of “normal men” get anywhere close to being unguarded with one another. It’s one of Wild Hogs’s wilder fantasies, that a gay authority figure will show up and try to hang out with you and your friends whenever you stray the slightest amount from violently rigid heteronormativity. But there’s something there: the looks of disgust mixed with terror on our heroes faces really capture the white baby boomer fear of marginalized groups attaining authority over them.

I should note here that Martin Lawrence is also a Wild Hog, which to some folks might blow my white boomer thesis out of the water.  There is one reference in the film to him being black, which is William Macy’s character saying that the only thing he could think of was “black jokes” when he was trying to talk to a girl he had a crush on.  The point Wild Hogs makes here, about how racism can be fueled by male fragility, and how a veneer of equanimity will be suspended for any reason, is real insofar as this mindset goes. No one else calls Macy out when he says this, despite dogging him every chance they get for the rest of the movie.  So this isn’t really Lawrence’s movie, and although he’s a part of the gang, the fact that he’s black puts him socially below William Macy’s motorcycle-crashing, accidental-porn-watching fool in terms of worth to the group. 

This idea of openness and comfort being the enemy of discipline which in turn would disrupt a rigid hierarchy enforced by derision and violence is Wild Hogs and the at-large baby boomer take on masculinity in a nutshell. While you can‘t entirely blame an entire generation raised by soldiers (many of whom fought in a war themselves) for feeling that being a man means being a part of an army engaged in an endless war against everything else, it is possible to reject this idea… and many have. However Wild Hogs emphatically does not.  

Luckily we don’t have to subsist on a world filled with Wild Hogs insights alone. While arguably every year in film can be looked at in terms of how it represents a shift in the contours of masculinity, 2007 has it very much on its mind.  There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men both come out, and both interrogate the consequences of this mindset of endless war to different ends. 2007 was also the year that Superbad was released, written by two millennial men, and ending with the two male leads gazing into each others eyes in bed and telling each other that they love each other. At the end of Wild Hogs the gang regained their manhood, but outside the film, what that meant became less valuable and more unrelatable and pointless with every passing year since.

Loving Vincent (2017)

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Loving Vincent is a hand-painted, animated movie about Vincent Van Gogh. It’s at times quite beautiful, but I found myself more often taken aback by the amount of work it must have taken than by the actual results, several times thinking, “There had to be a better way.” There’s much to be said for using unproven, arduous, and unconventional tools to try and expand what a medium can be capable of. But here, tethering an unlikely tool to a well-established, heavily-worked art style limits the film’s ability to explore the new possibilities the unconventional tooling might afford. Meanwhile, the style is hampered by a lack of commitment to the bit, with much of the film taking place in flashbacks that shift from impressionism to a kind of soft-focus black and white that looks more like old film, or less charitably, a novelty wedding photographer. These scenes, of which there are many, are nowhere near as striking as the rest of the film, but in total the movie’s not a completely failed experiment. A lot of the wider shots bring on a deep, quiet reverence and I never got tired of seeing the brush strokes moving across the scene, a reminder of the invisible human hand absent in most animated works these days. Visually there is something to recommend here.

The story’s appeal, on the other hand, is a bit more elusive. Loving Vincent is about a guy who’s trying to deliver a letter to Vincent’s brother after Vincent’s death. After learning that the brother is dead too, the guy pinballs between different people who were familiar with Vincent in the last days of his life. These interactions all play out in the same way. He says hello, then maybe asks a vague question, and the interviewee launches into an uninterrupted flashback-assisted monologue. The minimal lead in to these flashbacks reminded me of the end-of-season “flashback episode” format on sitcoms, or a video game where idly clicking a prompt would lead to a long un-skippable cutscene.

Through fits and starts the film slowly turns from being a portrait of Vincent’s last days into something of a Marlowe-themed investigation into whether he killed himself or was shot, complete with unnecessary foot chases and three-on-one fist fights. Most of the later scenes consist of the lead character grilling people as to whether Vincent was really unhappy in the last days of his life or if something more nefarious was afoot. The evidence for his mood improving was, he was doing lots of painting and his paintings were taking on a sunnier disposition. The evidence against (barely advocated in the film), was that he was obviously mentally ill, broke, and seemingly refused medical treatment while he slowly died for two days. A criminal investigation into whether working hard on your craft is enough to make yourself happy would be an excellent question for someone working on an animated film where every frame is painstakingly hand-painted. A movie where the main character pointedly grills acquaintances and friends of someone who just died directly or indirectly by their own hand is extremely tacky.

Loving Vincent doesn’t work as movie, sort of works as an accidental documentation of it’s own creation, and definitely doesn’t work as a portrait of Van Gogh (who from the film I gathered to be some kind of painting goblin). The animation can be extremely beautiful but is as often wildly ugly, with the worst character design inexplicably belonging to the character we spend the most time with. However it’s an undeniably unique film, so I really don’t think I can knock it too severely. It’s a slog, but there’s something there.

1. Typical rant about my usual topics

Over the last 15,000 years or so, countless artists have lived difficult, thankless lives all over this planet. Many of them made work that was good, some even eternity-level. Almost all of that’s all gone forever now, mostly without any possibility of “rediscovery;” nobody will ever know who those artists were, or what they did. But that’s fine, that’s everyone and everything else too. Look at literally anything in the built material world and you can see somebody’s worked hour. But whose?

Wouldn’t it be nice if it turned out that all of our little projects nobody believed in or cared about came to be beloved by millions of people, and worth tons of money, guaranteeing our vicarious presence in culture for hundreds or even thousands of years after our small deaths? For this fantasy we have canonical artists, whose lives and work fold together to present an afterlife (“I won’t be forgotten”) that’s also a kind of revenge (“I’m dead, but I was right, and now everyone will have to look at my stuff forever”). The wish for this fantasy to come true is expressed by rubbing the Buddha’s belly of Famous Artworks, by for instance taking a photograph of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” at MoMA. Meanwhile the planet continues to seethe with new activity, new stuff, and new artists living new insane lives, all of whom could use the resources and the attention.

I get that even despite everything wrong with how they’ve historically been defined, canons are meant to serve as some kind of helpful entree to some aesthetic form. My problem with this is that no matter what they consist of, they mainly serve to withhold permission to figure out what forms could be for yourself, by claiming to conclusively pre-define them. As they are, western art canons also tend to reinforce this idea that “The [Insane] [Under-appreciated] [Etc.] Creative Genius” is some kind of rare figure who occasionally occurs in history, and is the kind of person that Great Art Comes From. Both of these ideas are categorically untrue: Geniuses are common, and great artworks are commonly produced when communities of geniuses are given space and resources to congregate. The idea that artwork “only” comes from lonely genius at war with the world, and in spite of the world, denies the world the extreme possibilities it could be enjoying if it were to simply value artists and permit them to freely work without constant concern for, say, being broke, mentally ill, freezing cold, or in need of medical attention.

And art itself’s never been “about” Geniuses, or about revering some specific individual or instance of a form as being “the best.” That’s just boring connoisseurship. What art IS about is openness to an extreme plurality, about being granted something unknown but recognizable about being from the alien creativity that lives behind everyone’s minds. It’s produced at a high cost to do something beyond the boundaries of this world or the basic stuff that’s already constantly swarming around in it. It’s exactly as valuable, and as transferrable to market terms, as looking at a distant horizon.

All this brings me to Loving Vincent, a work of canon-worship focused on “the artist who cut off his ear,” Vincent Van Gogh. I’m not hating on Van Gogh’s paintings here – many have interesting or instructive color ideas, some have great compositional ones, and as an admirer of hand styles, I gotta say much respect. But there’s a lot more going on out there right now – literally right now – that’s more specifically interesting and useful to me, and honestly I suspect to everyone, than yet another feature-length pause to once again consider Van Gogh.

2. Loving Vincent

Loving Vincent‘s conceit is that it sets most of its action “inside” of Van Gogh’s paintings, with that action physically repainted frame by frame into reproductions of those works. Sometimes liberties are taken with the source material, for example to accommodate the scene’s time of day, or to keep the movie’s aspect ratio consistent. Formally, if nothing else, I think this makes the movie one of the most costly and excruciatingly-produced pieces of fan art ever made.

125 painters painted 65,000 cells for the movie, at 12 frames per second; the process involved scraping away parts of each painting between each cell, so few of these individual paintings survived. These painters weren’t animators, and the producers weren’t trying to make a cartoon per se – there are very few sequences of true full-frame full-color animation in the movie. When these appear, in strange, short bursts – such as in a scene where the main character runs to catch a train – visual logic drops to zero with the “falling in sleep” feeling and the movie blooms like a corpse flower, extravagantly and briefly. But otherwise, as animation, it’s a gimmicky and frequently drab movie. The characters depicted in the paintings are moving – gotcha.

I like the idea that movies could be storyboarded entirely using existing paintings – either all from one artist’s oeuvre or not – and I think it would be fun to see this done well. But this movie doesn’t even accomplish that; it interpolates black and white scenes in flashback that do not use Van Gogh paintings as source material. These scenes account for about half of the movie’s runtime and are super dull compared to the ones that take place in paintings. Yet for some reason they were hand-painted too.

In a Facebook post (of course), the producers write:

For some scenes in the film, like Vincent’s early life, there obviously weren’t any paintings of his we could draw from. So we decided to paint these flashbacks in black and white, in the style of photographs from the era.

But… why paint “in the style” of imagined old photographs? Why not use actual old photography techniques, if process is so important? Or why not write a more clever script that’s able to take place fully within the paintings?

And why did all of those artists have to do any of this painting at all? Thru its conceit, the movie shows a deep misunderstanding of the meaning and purpose of labor as it relates to the creation of artwork. 125 painters producing 65,000 Van Gogh-esque reproductions to make a not-great animation is proximate to abuse, and certainly bad process. I don’t make oil paintings because of some attachment to “the idea of painting,” I make them because oil paint applied in layers to a support does optically crazy things when light shines thru it and bounces back that no other image-making media can touch. It’s this unrivaled potential for surface qualities like depth and movement that keeps people working with oil paint. If these qualities didn’t matter to me – or if I cared about them less than the extent to which working with oil paint presents significant logistical challenges – I’d just be working digitally. Paintings aren’t “better” than digital images because they’re more laborious to make, they merely have additional qualities that can only be beheld irl. Movies don’t have a surface or fixed object presence. So why didn’t the filmmakers just work digitally?

At one point the movie itself comes close enough to all of this to embarrass itself: a character describes another character holing up trying to copy finished Van Goghs, because he knew the Van Goghs were “great” even at their most throwaway, and that his duplicates were not. Well, yeah. That very same energy of tryhard, unoriginal emulation permeates the entire movie.

3. Some stragglers

– Why does the movie force itself to pretend that the story it’s telling by coopting the paintings has some valid or necessary relationship to their painter, by making the story about him? Why not invent a more interesting fiction to place inside of these images? This is what we do in the 21st century, after all, we sample. This would have also made it easier to write an accommodating script.

– I know we’re constantly talking about script declamation choices on this blog, but I expected “the world’s first fully-painted feature film!” to have… painterly attention to its production details in total. The last one I’ll rag on here is, the movie takes place in France, yet it’s an English language script, delivered mainly by British actors.

– I’m taking huge liberties with how far over wordcount I’m going here (and with how long it took to get this post up) because I was triggered by this movie so hard, but I’ll add that for “death meditations and the canon” in feature films, I like Gus Van Sant’s Last Days (2005). For a positive example of “hero worship and the canon,” consider Bach authority Teri Towe handling a Bach manuscript, conjecturing about “Bach the person” and crying (Towe rules). And for movies that take place inside of a Van Gogh painting, Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990) has a sequence that does this that’s better than Loving Vincent.

Apocalypto (2006)

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Apocalypto starts with an indigenous tribe being enslaved by Mayans. Their village is destroyed, and they’re dragged in bonds to the city, passing sights of mining, deforestation, and open sewage. They’re taken up to the highest point of the city where a member of the tribe, Jaguar Paw, gets free; then he runs down the mountain back to the jungle chased by his captors.  Speckled throughout is a wild tableau of extreme violence and emotionally visceral moments. Fans of heads getting caved in, heads getting chomped by jaguars, heads getting rolled down stairs, or heads sitting silently impaled atop spikes should know that there are few films that deliver head destruction with such gusto.

All of this is portrayed in an unsettlingly bloodthirsty manner while still feeling painful to the viewer, something of a trademark in Mel Gibson’s films. Much like in The Passion of the Christ (2004) you get the sense that Mel strongly believes in both meting out and receiving punishment. Unlike Passion which is fairly static in terms of movement (Christ walks slowly up a hill while getting torn to pieces for an hour), Apocalypto uses the framework of an action movie to make a film about societal and personal inertia that through the presence of its movements and themes, becomes an almost beautiful statement composed of transcendental brutality.

Apocalypto bakes its theme and movement into its structure, a rare thing in action movies, but another strong contemporary example is Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).  I like to think of Fury Road‘s structure as a rubber band – Furiosa pulling against societal restraints with such accelerating power that her whole world has to stretch with her. Once she realizes that she can’t break free, the tension on the rubber band is let loose and she snaps back towards the society that formed her with all the force built by her journey remaking it completely.

Though Apocalypto also embeds large portions of its meaning in it’s movement and structure, it possesses a much more cynical take on civilization and the fruits of exertion. Here the family is sacred, but beyond that, people are only capable of consuming one another. So while Jaguar Paw does move and pull the world with him, first dragged in chains up towards civilization then running free towards the jungle and the civilization’s eventual destruction, he isn’t able to change anything.  He regains his family, and gains insight into what civilization can be based on his experience traveling through the Mayan city. This gives him the wisdom to avoid what the film shows in its final moments.

I strongly disagree with Gibson’s central premise here, of an endless cycle of linear decline and destructive consumption, and subscribe more to Fury Road’s elastic view of history. I also recognize there isn’t a great deal of separation between Gibson’s personal life and his art, both chock full of abuse and anti-semitism (no opportunities for anti-semitism in this one, though it generally seems impossible for him to make a film without long stretches of insane levels of suffering and violence). Apocalypto‘s intensely surreal focus on its central premise and undeniable driving force make it a film I just can’t shake though, and to say otherwise would be dishonest. When I found out we were going to review this movie I realized that I’ve been slowly picking away at it in my head over the years since I first watched and that most of the review was more or less written.  There’s not many movies I can say that about, but for better or worse Apocalypto is one of them.

Apocalypto‘s a jungle exploitation action movie with nonstop bizarre, lurid violence made by a notorious Hollywood racist, but it’s also chock full of beautiful cinematography, and rides on one of the tightest, most kinetic narratives I’ve seen in a movie in a while… despite a bad script. The Amazon in hyper-saturated digital green looks great – the slow zooms into the understory make similar images on film in better movies look positively funereal by comparison. Yet they’re nonetheless the better movies.

Consider the script, deployed in Mayan, in service to surface-level verisimilitude that’s supposed to be “awesome” but that you’re definitely not supposed to look at too closely. I appreciate and endorse the idea that spoken language itself can and should be used to advance a film’s overall style agenda – that the affect of the sound of words can be more important overall to the world of a movie than “understanding what the characters are saying” (cf. Chewbacca). But you still need a good script if you’re trying to tell a story with language, and Apocalypto‘s is such that I had the feeling that the movie would be better with subtitles off. Compare with The Duellists, where Harvey Keitel’s bizarro Brooklyn accent positively rings out in uncaring conflict with the end of the 18th century – the disjunction fares better there because the script is actually pretty good. When I showed this text to Davey, he said his favorite line in the movie happens when a tree almost falls near a Mayan, and the Mayan yells, in Mayan Pacino-mode, “I’m walkin’ here!”

The narrative, on the other hand, is a there-and-back-again where the main guy gets dragged to the top of a ziggurat, gets saved by a deus ex machina, and then runs the whole way back. Structurally it’s super effective – the whole front half is like a spring tensing, setting up references and signposts, and then the back half is explosive movement back past a distorted version of everything that came before. I found it amazing and disorienting that this aspect of the movie was so well-constructed while the script itself was so throwaway.

In total I file this under “I don’t recommend it but I’m glad I watched it.” If you want “native man in a native-language-only mythical running movie,” Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) is a way, way better Inuit take on this model; for “power/violence/desecration in a hell reality” you might as well go all the way to Salo (1975); for Amazon mindmelts, I still like Embrace of the Serpent (2016). But if you feel this ButRic video (which remixes the movie’s best scene) as much as I do, and can stomach a gnarly curiosity, you might want to follow the feeling.

Recent bubul movies part 1

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We decided we’re gonna do periodic recaps of the movies we’ve been watching, so here’s everything I saw since my movies 2018 post; Davey’s list in a separate post shortly.

Recommended

Burning (2018) – tonally on-point Korean adaptation of a Murakami short story, about typical Murakami male-oriented takes on topics like cooking dinner, sitting in silence, being isolated but horny, and “the unknowable.” basically a slob gets a crush on a girl, who ends up with a snob, then disappears. every single scene has a twist or flourish of some kind, and the movie has a twist halfway through, giving it a micro/macro wriggling quality which I felt was formally impressive and satisfying in a way that the story itself maybe isn’t. I don’t like Murakami’s writing very much but did feel that it was majorly elevated by such an aggressively stylized but faithful rendition in movie format. Shoutout Pat for recommending!

Phantom Thread (2017) – I loved this one, a Daniel Day Lewis “never stop working and never leave the house” movie with an amazing script that’s cozy and jammed with detail. Recommended.

Roar (1981) – mindblowing; we wrote about this

The Rules of the Game (1939) – incredible OG that def doesn’t need my endorsement. Robert Altman said “I learned the rules of the game from The Rules of the Game.”

Tommy tricker & the stamp traveller (1988) – watched this twice this week, expect more about it

Worth watching

A Scanner Darkly (2006) – we wrote about this last week

A Simple Favor (2018) – Davey and I had a long email exchange abt this one that maybe we should distill and post – a highly plastic and absolutely demented Paul Feig suburban thriller, recommended to anyone who likes mutant “wtf even is this” movies that are way too broken for their genres, in the vein of Grown Ups 2 (2013). Recommended(???????).

The Duelists (1977) – we wrote about this one. Bumped to “Recommended” as a double feature following Barry Lyndon.

The old man and the gun (2018) – Robert Redford ruled (RIP) and he’s well-deployed here; Casey Affleck is as good as ever at being listless and depressed (cf. Manchester by the Sea (2016)). this movie’s slightly overcooked and high-budget in a way that feels “awards”-oriented to me, but is still fun and cute. with Tom Waits, who seems to be riffing off-script, Danny Glover, yet again in old-timer mode, and a regal Sissy Spacek as “the girlfriend.”

Support the girls (2018) – fun new Andrew Bujalski restaurant movie with a strong ensemble centered on Regina Hall. recommended, tho not as good as his best-of-decade last one, Computer Chess (2013).

Everything else

Adjustment Bureau (2011) – Matt Damon is trying to run for office and also kiss some lady he met in a bathroom; the angels-as-bureaucrats insist he choose one. plays like a less visually interesting, less dangerous Dark City (1998). a PKD adaptation; it’s bad.

Black Rain (1989) – ugly Ridley Scott movie with Michael Douglas as a racist asshole cop in Osaka. Not recommended.

(Cock) Blockers (2018) – I didn’t realize that John Cena and Channing Tatum were different people until Davey corrected me, which explained why this was not as good as I expected it to be

Crooked House (2017) – not great, not terrible Julian Fellowes murder mystery with a legitimately bonkers ending. unlike his best stuff (Gosford Park (2001)) it’s a bit bleak and not very fun.

Deliverance (1972) – we wrote abt this

The Duchess (2008) – Kiera Knightley gets into a bad 18th century marriage with Ralph Fiennes and has to figure out ways to persevere. Featuring tons of huge wigs, and at least a couple shots of carriages rolling up to mansions.

Good Manners (2017) – Brazilian “newborn baby werewolf” movie in the same pocket as Let the right one in (2008), but a little more twee and a little less goth

The favourite (2018) – I liked it and it’s a great period movie with the always-killer Rachel Weiss pitching a perfect game, but it’s got a “Lanthimos in Hollywood” feel that I found a little sad, it’s not his best one. Hopefully there’s a resurgent interest in Hot Fuzz (2007) now that everyone in America knows who Olivia Colman is, and in Dogtooth (2009) now that everyone knows who Lanthimos is.

Galaxy Guardians 2 (2017) – pretty boring Chris Pratt daddy issues movie. I didn’t realize Chris Pratt was different from Ryan Reynolds until Davey told me, when he read this post’s draft.

IJ raiders of lost ark (1981) – the best part of this is the Karen Allen bar scene, it’s otherwise pretty much a montage of typical Spielberg obstacle courses, chases, spills, and mini-games. Imo this whole franchise is “just okay”.

Minority Report (2002) – stars a supercomputer you control by dancing around with a nintendo powerglove, that reads data off of glass floppy disks, and is operated by cornball later-era Tom Cruise, completely misreading the movie and trying to make every scene Mission Impossible-style urgent and physical. a PKD adaptation; it’s bad.

Murder on the Orient Express (2017) – absolute waste of time Agatha Christie adaptation, directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, in what Jeff calls the “what a cast!” genre. nobody is good in it. for “train book made into a weird dumb movie,” “take” The Polar Express (2004).

Night Moves (1975) – I watched this after we watched Roar to get a better sense of what Melanie Griffith’s life on film had been like so far, and… she’s kinda in an exploitation role in this one too. Night Moves is a bleak Gene Hackman noir, but not as bleak as Chinatown (1974), not as noir as The Long Goodbye (1973), and not as Gene Hackman as The Conversation (1974), but is still pretty good.

Paddington 2 (2018) – the best Wes Anderson movie in ages

Skate Kitchen (2018) – nice relaxing movie about teenage girls skating the lower east side and being young, for some reason featuring Jaden Smith. shoutout Bennett for recommending!

Smuggler (2011) – a Katsuhito Ishii (Redline, Taste of Tea) movie. it’s got some good stuff in it but is overall a bit like an unfun, unpleasant side story in the John Wick universe.

Spiderman spiderverse (2018) – I had fun watching this but don’t remember a single goddamn thing about it

Taj mahal travellers on tour (1973) – watched this at Spectacle, tho it’s widely available (ubuweb; youtube). a painter’s-eye camera follows Japan’s OG delay jammers on european/asian tour, fully 30 years before Double Leopards et al popularized touring USA basements with this style during the Bush era. untranslated, and with a Don Cherry sequence where his interview is completely obfuscated by a Japanese overdub, it’s pure image and sound with occasional English stage-setting placards. super beautiful and dialed-in in the mode of Crystal Voyager (1973), and in a “languid, abstract images foregrounding jams” mode not unlike Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda (1968); strongly recommended if you like that stuff, guaranteed extremely boring otherwise.

subUrbia (1996) – watched this to accompany A Scanner Darkly; it appears to be the “forgotten” Linklater movie or at least the only “100% definitely bad” one. Giovanni Ribisi is an angsty “writer” teen who’s friends with racist assholes and, somehow also, a riot grrl; they hang out together drinking behind a Texas gas station until Parker Posey shows up in a limo with their old high school classmate. It’s like a worse Mallrats (1995), is not to be confused with Penelope Spheeris’s excellent Suburbia (1983), and is not recommended.

Vanity fair (2004) – we wrote about this

Velvet Buzzsaw (2019) – typically bad & plastic Netflix-produced movie, this time abt haunted art that attacks art world stereotypes. aptly starring Jake Gylenhaal, the least-organic screen presence in movies.

Venom (2018) – love Tom Hardy and will watch him in anything but I didn’t like this as much as everyone on the TL; it seemed like an absolutely normal superhero movie to me.

Cabin Boy (1994) – we wrote abt this.

The Duellists (1977)

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Ridley Scott’s first film The Duellists is a deep dive into the dueling subculture prominent in the French military of the early 1800s.  It’s almost entirely about two guys: Armand (Keith Carradine) is pretty ambivalent about the whole dueling thing but continues to participate because it’s more or less the thing you did back then. Carradine brings a really nice laid back vibe to proceedings, complete with California accent and something of a light Wiley Wiggins vibe.  The other guy, Gabriel (Harvey Keitel) brings a heavy Harvey Keitel vibe and Brooklyn accent, which gives the film a real nice “East coast vs. West coast” feel. There’s lots of great early 1800s fashion, a fact underlined when the sparse narration refers to “the passing of 5 years and a change in military fashion,” after which cute braids are replaced by large hats.  Which is to say, the film is both very concerned with period trappings and not taking itself too seriously.

After the initial duel is kicked off, we follow both men through the years as Gabriel continually looks for new opportunities to get into duels with Armand.  According to military rules they can only duel when they aren’t actually actively at war, and are the same rank. This leads to a beautiful recurring gag: we see Armand at ease, learn his rank, see him have a conversation where someone mentions that Gabriel was recently promoted to the same rank, see Armand find out Gabriel’s in town, and then see him get roped into a duel.  And the duels are great, escalating in weaponry and danger, and full of good duel jokes, a style of humor I was barely aware of before this film, but of which I now crave more.

In between the many duels are portraits of the life of a French soldier in the early 1800s, snapshots which run the gamut from having a pipe with your buds, talking about how cool it is that you’re going to war (so you don’t have to fight a duel with Gabriel), to freezing to death in Russia.  There’s a kind of underlying madness to all of them, which helps make Armand’s obligation to keep dueling even though he’s just not that into it plausible. This is a world where there are rules to be followed that are designed to stave off the world’s brutality and chaos, even if those same aspects are the byproducts of the rules themselves. This is perfectly illustrated in a moment where Gabriel is told to walk west at the beginning of a duel and he quickly scans the sky just to make sure he knows exactly where due west is before heading out, neatly saying everything the film is telling you about its “rules over life” mentality in a wordless moment.

In terms of films about two dudes, one who can’t get enough of dueling the other, and another who is just not that into it anymore, The Duellists delivers big time.  It’s got a pretty strong “one or no duels is probably enough” message which we could all use, but more importantly it’s a super funny weird-ass period piece that features Harvey Keitel wearing cute braids.  Great film for those of you consumed with vengeance or deeply exasperated by the people seeking it.

Sometimes someone makes something that too closely and uncritically borrows or even openly steals from someone else’s idea. This is “bad” in two ways – it’s bad for the original, which the derivative cheapens thru lesser repetition, and it’s bad for the derivative, because strongly-foregrounded influence obscures whatever unique material might actually be hiding in there. Ridley Scott has made 25 movies, but his first one here is stone-cold Barry Lyndon (1975) worship straight off the rip. Made just two years before, that movie’s influence is absolutely present and unsynthesized here, in a manner that in painting, comics, or fiction, would read as hackish and embarrassing in the worst and most obvious way.

I happily found the results much more complicated here. Barry Lyndon is an optically mind-blowing but dramatically unconcerned piece of source material, and Ridley Scott is a decent stylist who tries to make popular movies with oomf and pizazz. So on one hand, The Duellists is super interesting and strange when viewed with its relationship to its inspiration directly in mind: The zoom-outs, the narrator, the Nora Brady appearance, the occurrence of the word “chevalier,” the lighting, cinematography, and even character voicing are all at least a full grade below, but the sum it manages is “bizarro remix,” not “wack bite;” it’s definitely “in conversation,” an uncanny illumination of what sets Barry Lyndon apart from pretty much everything. And on the other hand, The Duellists is a period story with oomf and pizazz that’s fun and funny and not like Barry Lyndon at all.

In that movie, we have an absolutely opaque Harvey Keitel (inexplicably in full Brooklyn mode, though in Napoleon’s army in the late 18th/early 19th century) picking a fight with Keith Carradine over some bullshit, and insisting on resolving it with a duel. The duel keeps getting interrupted and punted to a later date because one or the other guy keeps getting too injured to continue dueling, but without dying completely enough for the fight to be resolved. Carradine understandably gets super bummed every time Keitel pops back up to finish the engagement, and man does he keep popping back up over the course of changing circumstance and rank. The duel goes on for 16 years. No lessons are learned and nothing changes.

My favorite part was how nice the the sword-fighting felt. The sabres have a danger and weight that feels unusually rare, to the point of making me feel alert to how choreographed and risk-free sword-fighting usually looks on screen. There’s a part where a chunk of Carradine’s shoulder is hanging off, and another part where he nervously sneezes; both great. There’s also a gruesome “winter hellzone Russia death march” scene that’s got a Dreams (1990) / Marketa Lazarova (1967) vibe, with everyone staggering around wrapped in burlap and clutching themselves, which I always love to see.

I tried to get a better, non-Lyndon-oriented feel for this one on a by watching Black Rain (1989), Scott’s “Michael Douglas as a complete asshole NYC bad-boy cop in Osaka” movie (extremely bad), and The Duchess (2008), an unrelated 18th century peerage movie with an emphasis on gorgeous wigs where Kiera Knightley gets into a bad marriage with Ralph Fiennes (who I love and am probably about to watch in Wuthering Heights (1992)) (not bad but not great). But I’m already over word count here so I’ll abruptly conclude with the basic verdict that The Duellists is a relatively very good period movie (though it’s not the best one as much as it tries), as well as a relatively very good Ridley Scott movie, and that I would like to see a supercut of all period drama scenes where “a carriage rolls up to a manor house, and someone gets out of it while the servants watch expectantly.”

Roar (1981)

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Most writing online abt Roar is largely “what a crazy production”-focused. The movie is “about” Dad writing/directing/starring in & forcing his family to be in a movie abt how living with big cats is beautiful & chill, when the irl fact is that it is not, as evidenced by the numerous, frequently gruesome injuries sustained by cast and crew. The banner factoid is that Speed (1994) director Jan de Bont needed 120 stitches after he was “scalped” by a lion working as cinematographer on this one. So on one level the movie is a lurid curiosity – a manipulatively-edited but absolutely transparent document of an abusive, violent, lived bad idea. This is clearly manifested on screen by everyone except Dad being constantly “not acting” terrified of the mortal danger they’re clearly in, as the jaunty soundtrack plays on. I don’t put on movies just to watch fucked up documents of irl suffering, so if it feels like that’s the unavoidable way you’d end up viewing this one, probably pass.

But if you can get past that, there’s a hugely hypnotic dreamtime energy very much on deck here. The movie’s central predicament is more harrowing and strange than any “animal threat” movie I can think of – a family find themselves stranded at Dad’s river research treehouse (because Dad forgot when they get to the airport), and they are somehow 100% unprepared for the realization that the treehouse is dripping with lions – which is presented as a fun misunderstanding? In terms of non-stop alien habitat and stalking threat, there’s more wild stuff here than any animal doc I’ve seen, including Grizzly Man (2005), but none of it is grounded by anything like a plot or character development. Instead you get two classic nightmares paired and stretched to feature-length: Dad trying to get home on time but making impossibly slow progress, the family endlessly running away inside a house but never getting anywhere. There’s also a “Dad’s best friend” character who repeatedly, disbelievingly tells Dad he’s crazy and the situation is way too dangerous (the only relatable perspective in the movie, presented as demented comic relief), and a barely-there subplot about poachers (a lion kills them).

The “plot” at the treehouse is looping, edge-of-sleep horror presented as straight-up family fun comedy, where the family members repeatedly hide, run away, endlessly lose track of and find each other, fall asleep, wake up surrounded by lions, run away, fall asleep again… now it’s day, now night, now day… they run up to the roof, fall off into the water, are inexplicably dry again in some new room, then back up on the roof falling in, then running up, again, and again, and again… as lions are continuously surging through all openings, pressed tightly together as they trample thru the treehouse’s small rooms, destroying furniture, smashing down doors, hanging from rafters, swatting and sniffing, and every vehicle is meeting its doom – at least three boats and a motorcycle get sunk, tigers playfully knock over cyclists, the car catches a flat – and anything humans get inside of, such as a barrel, icebox, cabinet, or locker, is knocked over and smashed by lions, all proceeding as if it’s totally normal hijinks, a comedic misunderstanding that “the lions are actually our friends,” with a jutting, unexpectedly beautiful, distant shot of Dad riding his bike across the plains at sunset and singing to himself, Fitzcarraldo-level demonic in his lack of concern or actual urgency around his family’s obvious mortal danger. When he gets home, everyone’s fine, and the movie pretty much just ends. Forget fakes like Mandy (2018) or whatever; this is the true bonkers psychedelic reality-melter material, what my own actual anxiety dreams are in fact regularly like. And I do for sure put on movies that go to that space and  strongly recommend this one to anyone else who does too.

Roar is perfect.  The story of a man late to pick up his estranged family from the airport quickly spirals into the fun zone when they show up at his home to find him gone, and replaced with 50-60 or so untrained lions, tigers and jaguars.  Over the course of the next 90 or so minutes we get to experience a cool world where large cats party in houses, on boats, on skateboards, and in the wild, while humans bide their time hiding in refrigerators and running for their lives. The film also stars a cool elephant who acts as something of a boss character for the family each time they try to make a break for it.  While this scene is playing out, the father, portrayed as something of a way less competent Grizzly Man for big cats, goes to the airport, realizes his family is not there, then makes his way back to house.

Though it can seem like the set up for a horror movie on paper, Roar is aimed at the family – boasting a PG rating, inappropriately uplifting music playing while the family is being hunted, and adorable baby lion footage to shore up its bonafides.  Contrasting this happy go lucky vibe with the near constant mauling of everyone on screen creates an incredibly deep reality chasm, a delightful zone where we as the viewer can let go of everything we think we know about human behavior.

This kind of unreality gives a nice texture to the near-constant violence hoisted on the cast by the gaggle of playful lions.  Roar has the reputation of being the most dangerous movie ever made, with something like 70-100 injuries incurred over the course of its 11 year production.  It’s all on the screen as well, bringing a visceral realness that contrasts powerfully with the actors’ performances, not so much remarkable for the believability they bring to their roles, but that they are able to believably affect artificiality in the midst of footage that otherwise can feel very dangerous and very real at all.

This purity of vision lifts Roar above being just a particularly rowdy nature documentary or pseudo-snuff curiosity.  A large part of the joy it creates was feeling the waves rippling through the film made by the rapid oscillation between “this is a movie” to “these animals do not care that this is supposed to be a movie.”  Intended or not, this deeply bakes the themes of nature versus man’s ambition into the film, and intended or not, Roar makes a very compelling case for man’s overall helplessness and folly. The end result is one of the funniest, most insane movies I’ve seen in a long time, and everyone should see it.

Cabin Boy (1992)

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We watched this one via @walnutbatard , who also provided this introduction. 

Cabin Boy stands out as a movie that often requires a good amount of credit extended towards its creators, faith that there’s something covert or even diabolical about all of it despite every reason to believe that isn’t the case. This is of course a lot for a movie to ask, particularly in 1994, and may explain its quantum state as both one of the most derided and appreciated comedies by the few Boomers and Gen-Xers (respectively) who remember it. Its fans were invariably familiar with Elliot & Resnick’s chocolatey fingerprint on the Letterman Show (1982-1989) as well as their own network TV show “Get A Life” (1990-1992), which was somehow well-regarded but of course doomed from the start. Its detractors many and merciless, almost certainly including the guy credited for the “Fantastic Fun!” byline on the The Mask poster, which came out a few months later.

The appeal of Chris Elliott to me, and to a slightly lesser extent Cabin Boy, is that i just can’t pin him down. Despite everything I have seen (or possibly because) I still do not have the faintest idea what this person’s actual personality is like, when he’s trying to be funny, trying to be annoying, or just kinda let go of the wheel. That mystery is pretty rare, and to me, that’s the good stuff. Even when it’s the bad stuff.

Cabin Boy is about a fancy lad who prays to not break a sweat. Trained in the ways of polite society, he tries to take a trip to Hawaii, but is tricked by David Letterman and gets on the wrong boat. Once out to sea he accidentally kills the previous Cabin Boy, whose place he is forced to take, and sets the ship on a course for the Devil’s Triangle, where heavy shenanigans await. The ship is manned by an extremely sick crew of cool fisherman, who take every chance they get to humiliate/maroon/attempt to murder the Cabin Boy.  There’s also a cool cross-pacific swimmer collected from the sea, who sadly morphs into an uncool love interest. Most of the film is pretty funny stuff, with many scenes currently mulling like a fine wine in my mind-bottle (giant getting choked to death with his own belt… *kisses fingers* ; tobacco-spitting cupcake… bravissimo!). These moments of deep weirdness are the best parts of the movie; every scene bears a bountiful capacity for surprise.

However, at a certain point someone decides that Cabin Boy should start to resemble something of a normal movie, and that ends up as a tale of how a Cabin Boy becomes a Cabin Man.  Once the transition to manhood happens, the movie trades in many of its good jokes for jokes about how Cabin Boy is suddenly a man with respect and admiration, which overall are not as funny. This is also where the movie introduces the gag where he stands on his love interest’s back while she swims him places, which made me extremely bummed, and that I probably could have overlooked, except for the fact that it’s repeated for the movie’s last shot. So while there’s lots to recommend in this story, and it’s an undeniably important missing link in the evolution of comedy between 90s dumb man style and 2000s Adult Swim “dumb man” absurd style, it leaves something of a bad aftertaste.

Respect must be given to the wild trick this movie plays: I found the Cabin Boy delightful at the beginning of the film, where he’s deservedly hated by all, then disliked him in equal proportion to the increasing respect he gains as the story progresses. Was the darkness I felt at the ending born of having exposed myself as a bloodthirsty ghoul who hates Cabin Men everywhere, and wishes they would stay in a state of arrested development?  Or did this feeling come from the fear of one day being forced to become a Cabin Man myself? Am I a Cabin Man already, who the world loves but I despise? Did I just not like the ending of the movie because it seemed flimsy and rushed? Do humans have the capacity for change on a meaningful level, or do our experiences only affect the world’s perception of us, while we are trapped as fundamentally unchanging persons? Ultimately these big questions the film poses were inconsequential for me, since I was there for the yuks, and they’re where the yuks dropped off.  But if you’re up to the task, take a ride on this wrong boat, as there are wondrous sites to see.

Compared to Blockers (2018), which I also watched the other night, Cabin Boy had more jokes per minute, and more of them were funny. But unlike Blockers, which is still relatively fresh except for the already-anachronistic “butt chugging” part, chunks of Cabin Boy are past the expiration date. It features no women other than Ann Magnuson, an island goddess who Chris Elliott has sex with to become a man (until which point he is dismissed as a girl, a woman, a sissy, etc.), and Melora Walters, a swimmer whose back Chris Elliott stands on to get around. If the hypothetical reader is interested in separating rotten pieces from parts that’re totally still good, like mold from a dumpstered Trader Joe’s cheese, there’s a lot left over to get a lil stupid and enjoy here. But if you’re not interested in dumpstered cheeses I 100% get that.

Ann Magnuson has an erotic scene with David Bowie in major “billowing curtains” movie The Hunger (1983). I spent a while thinking about what it would be like to follow that eleven years later with an erotic scene with Chris Elliott, and realized this isn’t unrelated to the 2009/2019 pics I’ve lately seen ppl training the surveillance algorithms with in my social feeds – like, everyone I know is doing the transition from “I was young and kissed Bowie” to “haha I guess I’m still out here kissing Chris Elliott” in their own way right now. While this transition out of hot youth into whatever’s next has a tragic quality, I like that it’s also basically comedic and unknowably confusing. “It me” : A grinning six-armed god (age 35) on a magic island (no roommates other than my partner) married to a giant (having a full time day job) and seducing Chris Elliott for fun (doing a movie blog). That’s you too, when you think abt it.

That’s my review of “aging,” what else about Cabin Boy? Four of the five main characters are grizzled old fishermen led by Brian Doyle-Murray, and the ship most of the action takes place on is a chaos zone. The basic unromantic unpleasantness of the set and supporting cast have a fun tension with the naive staginess of Chris Elliott and the overall production design, especially e.g. the extremely fake ocean. There’s little to no action of consequence – it’s just a mixed bag of scenarios at sea, ranging from the typical (sailor songs; getting hammered below deck) to the slightly weird (fat-cheeked angry-blowing Harryhausen clouds; Dr. Jacoby as a merman) to the Mel Brooks-ian (Mike Starr as a giant… salesman?! A mafioso style… limo driver?!) to the befuddling (glacier monster fought with a coffee urn; heatstroke tobacco cupcake). In total it reads as “weird trip,” a movie feeling I love, but it def suffers from the matter of Chris Elliott’s manly education causing the best jokes to get front-loaded and the least funny, most bleak stuff to end up in act three. So if you do eat this cheese be warned that the last bites are where most of the mold is.

2018 Roundup Post (2018)

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Davey is on vacation in the Azores(??) but didn’t want to break our “new format” weekly content flow, so he thoughtfully put together this “end of year roundup” post. I already did one of these off-blog and will leave it at that, except to add that the modes of our disagreement on a few of these is about as good a description for why I’m excited abt working on this blog as there could be. Happy New Year / Please post recommendations in the comments / Thanks to the original uploader.

The Best

Annihilation

Saw this movie with a bunch of people who all liked, and it really resonated with me, but then I ended up at bat defending it against people who hated it for the rest of the year. Incredible film about confronting powerful destructive environmental/emotional forces that are indifferent to you. Does a really good job illustrating the different ways people deal with and can be destroyed by immense psychic trauma.  Incredible psychedelic ending that’s both very trippy and successful at tying the themes of the film together.

Hereditary

My pick for best movie of the year.  Highly intentional,  deep examination of how grief can tear apart a family, told to fresh effect by tapping into a reservoir of horror film language, and successful at being really scary. Important story to tell, enhanced by its use of genre.

Eighth Grade

This felt heartbreaking in a manageable and good way.  Extremely good film about adolescence that feels real but also isn’t afraid of betraying its realism when it should in service of “being a good movie.” Incredible lead performance by Elsie Fisher.

Mission Impossible Fallout

Best action movie of the year, with solidly consistent characterization, comparable to Mad Max: Fury Road but in the way it uses very clean lines of cause and effect to move the action and plot forward. Always nice to see Tom Cruise put himself in mortal peril as well, which he does scores of times in this film.  

Paddington 2

Great movie about a bear helping enact prison reform so he can get a present for his aunt.  It’s possible that the amount of joy I get from these films is directly related to how fucked the world outside them is but there’s no denying their wonderful craft and characterization.  A close second to Mission Impossible in terms of cause and effect filmmaking, with the whole movie unfurling organically from a seed that’s planted in the first five minutes.

Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse

One of the best superhero movies of all time.  Extremely fun and funny film that is a direct ode to the breadth of expression you can accomplish in comic books.  Incredible visuals unlike any other animated movie coupled with a character-driven story that’s both extremely focused and dense. The most exhilarating moviegoing experience I had this year.

Widows

Great heist movie that felt like it was constantly reinventing itself while you were watching.  Contains probably my favorite shot from any movie this year, one that’s both extremely simple but still manages to convey a ton of information, that both plays with your expectations and lets your mind wander.

Others

Black Panther

Didn’t really connect with me that much, I think due to unrealistic expectations based on how much I liked Creed.  Watched it again recently, and realized that it was due to almost every  character’s way of readings their lines; they all had something to them that made me feel like I was watching a movie.  Besides that, very good, and the only Marvel movie that I would say is actually essential.

Game Night

Clever but not super funny, wish it had gone way further in any direction.

A wrinkle in time

Couldn’t hold onto anything this movie was giving me.  Lots of bad performances and writing that was more interested in outcomes and moving things forward than character. Made me feel drunk in a bad way.

Isle of Dogs

Weird to make a movie about dogs that’s so cold.  Spent my time wondering why they made certain aesthetic decisions instead of trying to relate to what watching the film would be like.  

Avenger Infinity War

I thought the biggest issue here would be making a coherent movie, but that didn’t end up being a problem, which was kind of incredible. Still, the strategy of loading all the reasons I should care about what happens to the characters in this movie into 10+ years of preceding movies didn’t work for me. Also suffers from being part one of a two part movie.

Deadpool 2

Saw with a friend who hated the first one but loved this one and was incredulous when I told him they were basically the exact same thing.  Very funny good movie, the only place in superhero cinema where they play with superhero narrative conventions instead of following them. Has a nice scene where Deadpool gets little baby legs.  

Solo: A Star Wars story

Horrifically shitty example of a movie reverse engineered from concept, where the inevitability of the need to make the movie overrode the total lack of a compelling story.  

Won’t you be my neighbor

A very good, uplifting doc about someone who is basically completely unknowable.  The phrase “good person porn” crosses the mind, although that’s definitely reductive and sells the film short.  Has exactly one moment that’s so mind bogglingly strange it popped me right out of reality.

Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Suffers from not having an impartial viewpoint to interrogate the movie’s moral reality, a la Emily Blunt from the first one, and ends up just being about government spooks going to Mexico to fuck shit up. Which, without the necessary context, in my book ends up being basically immoral.  It needed to decide if it was going to try and really think about the war on drugs, the border, US/Mexico relations or be an action movie, but instead it decided not to do any of these, making it way less than the sum of its parts. Has a mind-bogglingly stupid final line with echoes of Finding Forrester. “You’re the Sicario now, dawg!”

Sorry to bother you

Shaggy unevenly executed movie with a ton of good ideas.  Reminded me of low budget 80s Larry Cohen oddities. Raw, weird auterism seems to be extra rare these days, so it was a breath of fresh air even if I didn’t think the movie worked as well as it could have.

Mamma Mia… Here we go again!?!?

Had a wonderful time at the theatre feeling pleasantly confused and detached while two heavy duty Mamma Mia heads hysterically laugh-cried through the last 20 minutes of the movie.  I hear the academy is creating a new category “best diabolically emotional twist” just so they can give it to this one.

Crazy rich Asians

Had a tough time with the “Rich” part of the movie but definitely thought the “Crazy” and “Asian” portions were refreshing and well done.   

The Predator

First two thirds are really funny and entertaining, but it completely collapses in a third act where instead of the Predator dispatching soldiers in cool chilling ways, the soldiers are basically stepping on a rake that hits them in the face over and over.  Has a great/very bad final moment that I interpreted as the studio demanding it be set up for a sequel, and the filmmaker acquiescing, but in a way where the only possible sequel made would have to be the dumbest thing on the face of the planet.

Venom

Beautiful film about a mush-mouthed “reporter” and the alien goo that loves him.  I guess in China they played up the romantic comedy aspects to the point where it’s on the posters?  Loved it.

Halloween

Unbearably pointless dreck, doesn’t work as a horror movie, a comedy, or a drama. Less essential than basically any other movie in the franchise.

Suspiria

Super interesting take on horror that doesn’t use the agreed-upon language for how to make a horror film.  Great performances and really interesting directing coupled with some insane imagery. A little overstuffed particularly with the political subplots, but the things that work in this movie are remarkable, and most of it works.