In Which I Briefly Review Movies

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Master, 2022, Mariama Diallo, 6/10 - I'm sure not too many people have seen this so I'll keep free from spoilers. This is a movie that I liked even though I felt the ending left way too much in question. And by that I mean left almost everything in question. What's going on here? I don't have an actual answer. I knew the one professor was overcompensating but damn dude. This seems like it's supposed to be a horror movie but I would go so far as to say it really isn't one, and I'm not usually one of those people who tries to recategorize movies from one genre to another. I feel like the filmmakers definitely had a message here but I think in this case more explanation and handholding is needed.

One area in which I definitely understood what the message was supposed to be, was the use of diversity as a cudgel people use to make themselves look better than someone else. Unfortunately this movie is not entirely coherent.

 

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Everything Everywhere All at Once, 2022, Daniels, 9/10 - Look man. This movie is all over the place in a really delightful way that I cannot explain. The first and second act are truly batshit. It seems like the story never calms down as we move from one scene to another, but in the third act the film becomes much more centered into a conversation about depression and regret. Maybe that's what we need right now. It doesn't hurt that the film is really funny. It also doesn't hurt that this explores the numerous paths someone's life could have taken, something I've been thinking about a lot lately. A more intelligent person than myself could write about this film for ages before getting tired of doing so. As for myself, I can't think of ways to summarize my thoughts and would rather not fill that much space. You should watch the movie instead of counting on me.

 

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Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, 2022, Sam Raimi, 7/10 - I'm gonna try to avoid spoilers because I'm sure I'm one of the only people here who saw the movie this quickly. Anyway, I liked this but I thought I'd like it even more. I thought with the amount of surprises in this movie that I would come home and not be able to stop talking about it but that really isn't the case. I can't explain why. I will say that the first act rushes way too quickly into things and relies on the knowledge that people must have watched a TV show, and if they didn't then oh well. I think that's both good and bad. I do like the ending and mid-credits, I liked that they had Wanda go full heel, and that's about the extent to which I can post about this movie without spoiling it.

I also don't see them recasting a certain character who debuts as it is now well established that the same person exists in multiple different universes (unless apparently you're Loki), sooooo

 

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All the Old Knives, Janus Metz, 2022, 5.5/10 - I know there are some movies in theaters that I haven't seen but I've been really occupied in the last few weeks. I might have to wait for The Northman to get on Peacock or something. Anyway, this is a much shorter film that I didn't have to leave the house for. Henry (Chris Pine) and Celia (Thandiwe Newton) are a CIA agent and former agent respectively. 8 years previously, the two were stationed in Vienna. While there, the two fell in love. Also while there, a group of terrorists took over a plane and killed everyone inside said plane. Celia runs out of the station, and then we come forward to 2020. Henry is assigned by his station chief Vick (Laurence Fishburne) to interrogate and/or kill Celia if Henry doesn't like what he hears from her. They have dinner and it is then clear one of them will not be leaving the restaurant.

This is a movie that remained interesting enough to keep my attention, but for an assortment of reasons I don't think it's a very good movie. The thing that sticks out most is that the plane hijacking is not realistic anymore. Maybe before 9/11 it was, but now if a plane was being held hostage by four guys with pistols the passengers would go all out to put a stop to that shit. With that in mind it's hard to take the premise that seriously. Secondly I feel like this kind of investigation wouldn't be dragged out for eight years. One of the agents at a station immediately quit after a hijacking taking place near said station. Isn't that suspect? Anyways, interesting enough to pay attention to but not good enough to stand out in a genre full of these kinds of movies.

 

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I watched a bunch of movies while I had COVID and well these are the reviews you're gonna get.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent: 7/10. I thought this was funny but not to the extent it seems this movie's biggest fans did. It's really easy to like this movie even though the third act drags and doesn't sustain the momentum of the first and second. The references to Cage's other movies are nice as well.

Top Gun: 5.5/10. I'm sure the sequel is going to be better than this even though I understand why this movie has the reputation it does. Still, in the context of everything now I feel like this movie is really gay and I'm surprised that people in that era both did not see that and enjoyed the movie anyway. The fighter jet sequences are great but everything else is terrible.

Burden (2020): 5/10. I watched a similar movie recently called Skin, and I'm left with the same exact feelings about both of these. I am a completist but I do not like seeing movies that try to make you feel sorry for rehabilitated white supremacists. In the case of Burden the white supremacist is also not really rehabilitated at all. I don't care for it and I'm not going to feel sorry for these people, there's no reason to try to make me feel sorry for them, but filmmakers want to keep doing it and I just don't care.

Shoplifters: 8.5/10. The end of this movie almost rocked me. Two of the adults here are super scummy but I don't care. The third act here carries a lot of built up emotional weight from the events of the rest of the film, the director knows how to make you care, and then it all falls apart. If you didn't like this, something's wrong with you. It was also weird for me to go from watching a movie that could be classified as Southern poverty porn to subsequently watching this one.

The Batman: 8/10. I thought this was great but I have nothing original to offer here. This was the Batman portrayal I have long been waiting for.

Under the Silver Lake: 6.5/10. I'm not surprised this movie has a cult following, but I thought this was a lesser version of Inherent Vice and only kind of enjoyed it. This movie meanders in similar fashion but it is not exactly the same thing. Andrew Garfield's character here thinks that he's Doc Sportello, but the difference in this conspiracy is basically simply that the characters he runs into are just not interesting enough to pop off the screen. Garfield carries the movie as far as can possibly be done, but this isn't far enough off the rails to really be something worth remembering.

The Report: 7/10. This is the kind of movie that I seemingly like more than most. Even though it's a portrayal of someone compiling the report on the CIA's torture program, I'm into that kind of thing and I like seeing how the sausage gets made. What movies like this also remind me of is how pernicious and revolting some aspects of our media culture are. A decent amount of the CIA personnel depicted here were revered as ResistanceHeroes while Trump was in office, and I stopped watching CNN so maybe it's the case that some of them still are. It shouldn't be lost on anyone how easy it was for these evil people to get away with torture and/or covering it up. Anyways I thought the events portrayed here were distilled in a way that is easily understandable for everyone without seeming overly simplistic. The attempt to silence the report is also absolutely absurd, but that's what happened, and it was only released once the Democrats lost the Senate and had nothing to lose from releasing the report. The Obama Administration did not want the report released. They helped the CIA attempt to censor the report. They had John Kerry go to the Senate to try to keep the report quiet. Why would they do that? They signed executive orders banning torture, some would say. You can figure out why they tried to silence it for yourself I suppose.

FWIW the Obama Administration also hired Trump's guy (John Durham) to DOJ in 2009 as an investigator who quashed investigations into the CIA's use of torture. So it's not like these people are really of such different ideologies that they don't work together, they share most of the same stripes and we're people who don't really share those stripes, but they have all the power anyway and you can't do anything about it. It's also crazy that like, they paid two guys 81 million bucks (not a typo) to torture people, and they weren't punished nor were they ever forced to give any of that money back when it was proven torture methods don't work.

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

"They did wrong but they did it for the right reasons"

 

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The Goldfinch, 2019, John Crowley, 3.5/10 - Someone should have to explain why the book this movie is adapted from won a Pulitzer Prize. This seems like a terrible book but it's an even worse movie due to a horrendous screenplay. There are time jumps here, there's bad dialogue, bad characters, unexplained reasoning for Theo even keeping the painting, and one particularly horrendous thing related to said painting. Like you're telling me this guy hasn't looked at the painting in 10 years? Lmao. The characters here are also largely extremely dislikable even though one of them is the victim of a bombing and another is a child abuse victim. Even still, watch this movie and tell me that you didn't hate them too. Anyways in order to not draw things out, the best way to put things is that nobody here feels like a real person, they are a caricature of whatever they're supposed to be, and there's no reason to care about any of them. Also, like, how do you make a bad movie about someone stealing a famous painting after a bombing and well this movie answers that question.

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

looking at the wiki for the novel and apparently the reviews were "polarized" with "some of the severest pans in memory from the country's most important critics and sparked a full-on debate in which the naysayers believe that nothing less is at stake than the future of reading itself."

 

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looking at the wiki for the novel and apparently the reviews were "polarized" with "some of the severest pans in memory from the country's most important critics and sparked a full-on debate in which the naysayers believe that nothing less is at stake than the future of reading itself."

I can see why because this is emotionally manipulative fantasy written by a woman with strange ideas on what makes someone a good person masquerading as serious material.

 

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The Burnt Orange Heresy, 2020, Giuseppe Capotondi, 5.5/10 - I thought I should watch another movie about art theft after the last one, except what we have here is a movie about...signature theft. This movie is also leaving Starz shortly. Unfortunately it isn't that good either. This is a movie that drags thirty minutes of material into a ninety minute film, which means that what's ordinarily short for a movie is in this case far too long. I would say though that the thirty minutes of material here would make a really good short. James (Claes Bang) is an art critic who lives in Milan. Berenice is a woman on vacation who comes into his lecture and the long and short of it is that they eventually fuck. James is then contact by an art dealer named Joseph (Mick Jagger) and asked to come to Joseph's compound. James brings Berenice with him. The reason? James once made the mistake of endorsing a forgery, maybe he needed money and maybe it wasn't a mistake. Joseph has a famous old artist staying on his land, guy is named Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland). Joseph really needs Debney to paint something for him because it would be Debney's sole lasting work, and he wants James to procure the painting somehow. James needs to interview Debney, because as already started, guy needs money. You see where this is going? I'm giving the movie an average rating so I see no need to conceal information, the thing is that Debney hasn't painted anything and has decided instead that it's funny to sign the back of a blank canvas, and he thinks that at his age he's going to go soon anyway, so it would be fucking funny.

See, there's enough material here for a short, but not even close to enough for a movie and that's where I'm at with this material. The Mick Jagger stunt casting is very amusing, this movie should be good given the setting and material, but it's just not. It's slow, the second act doesn't really matter, and it's kind of a bummer.

 

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The Tale, 2018, Jennifer Fox, 7.5/10 - I've almost entirely finished up 2018. This is a good way to do so even though this movie is really heavy and not for the faint hearted. The short version of our plot is that Jennifer (Laura Dern) receives some letters from her mom (Ellen Burstyn). Jennifer had written these letters a really long time ago, and they're about a relationship she had with a 40 year old man...when she was 13. I don't expect that everyone would understand a movie like this but when something really bad happens to you as a kid, you bury it under layers of shit...and if you start peeling away at those layers, your memory of the situation is going to become right when it was previously wrong. The scenes when Jennifer is a child are haunting though, almost too much so, there is no way to enjoy a film like this and this is something to be endured instead.

 

[Brooklyn Zoo]

The Tale, 2018, Jennifer Fox, 7.5/10 - I've almost entirely finished up 2018. This is a good way to do so even though this movie is really heavy and not for the faint hearted. The short version of our plot is that Jennifer (Laura Dern) receives some letters from her mom (Ellen Burstyn). Jennifer had written these letters a really long time ago, and they're about a relationship she had with a 40 year old man...when she was 13. I don't expect that everyone would understand a movie like this but when something really bad happens to you as a kid, you bury it under layers of shit...and if you start peeling away at those layers, your memory of the situation is going to become right when it was previously wrong. The scenes when Jennifer is a child are haunting though, almost too much so, there is no way to enjoy a film like this and this is something to be endured instead.

This was almost John Heard’s last role

 

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This was almost John Heard’s last role

I loved when he got confronted at the end. He played that perfectly. Unfortunately, that is not what usually happens and you just gotta live with that shit forever

 

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Operation Mincemeat, 2022, John Madden (lol), 6/10 - For whatever reason I have a fascination with these kinds of movies that show how the sausage gets made, even though as a genre they are usually quite dull and the films are never spectacular. In this case I would say I was entertained enough even given the fact there wasn't a lot of tension. The filmmakers are in this case incapable of bringing tension into a movie that could desperately need it, so we are left to get our entertainment from the facts as they existed. For me the facts are entertaining, I found it comical that they had to find a dead guy they put on ice for three months, I was surprised the Germans would fall for deceptions that were so plainly obvious. But then again, think of all the other shit people get caught falling for.

 

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Crimes of the Future, 2022, David Cronenberg, 7/10 - I've seen a lot of reactions to this but the best I can do is try not to copy any of those. I saw people say this movie wasn't gross enough and I felt like anyone who says that has something wrong with their brain. This movie is really gross, but it's also not one with the most coherent plot. Crimes of the Future is a movie where people spend time talking about evolution, the human body, ethical concerns pertaining to our future, and then at the end of the movie you see someone reluctantly jumping head first into that future. I thought the film was gross and I liked it, but more of Lea Seydoux with no clothes on would have been cool. You know what cracks me up though? I swear I knew nothing about the plot and I was thinking about microplastics in our blood stream just the other day. What happens if we have too much microplastics in our blood? Anyways, there's a lot here that doesn't make any sense if you think about it too much. Like the two assassins for one thing. My advice is that you just don't think.

 

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Men, 2022, Alex Garland, 4.5/10 - I don't know where to start, but I thought this was a movie with a strong 70 minutes and unfortunately things went off a cliff after that. Garland's 95 minute film can't stick the landing because the only rational way to resolve his scenario is taken off the board so that he could put together gruesome VFX shots. They were very gruesome and they were the one thing I'll remember from this film, which is too bad given that there was good content here. The short version of the plot is that a woman (Jessie Buckley) retreats to the countryside after her husband kills himself. While there, she begins to be stalked, and everyone in the town she's traveled to looks the same. They may or may not be real to some extent, but we do know that she is real. The ending is too far gone here and I don't know how to describe it even if I was in the habit of posting spoilers. I think the one interpretation that makes sense also sounds like unintentional misogyny. So yeah.

 

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The Survivor, 2022, Barry Levinson, 6.5/10 - I have to point out firstly that this movie feels every bit of 128 minutes and that's the reason for my lower score despite what I may say in praise. The Survivor is the story of Harry Haft (Ben Foster), a pro boxer in the 1940s. Why is Harry Haft relevant? Well, Harry Haft is a guy who had to fight his way through Auschwitz. His recollection is that he fought 76 fights in concentration camps, all of which ended with the loser dying. This is heavy material carried by a great actor, the movie is best when it focuses on Harry's time in the camps. Otherwise, we are treated to preparation for a fight with Rocky Marciano, treated to a reenactment of said fight, and shown Harry's growth towards having a family. He was not the nicest guy though. Despite getting married, he harbored old love towards Leah (Dar Zuzovsky), a girl he knew before the camps who was taken away and long separated from him.

Like I said, I think this is a good movie but it's too long to a point it starts to hurt. This movie also does not show all the bad things Harry had to do even though many of them are displayed. For example there was an old couple he thought would snitch on him when he escaped the camp, and he murdered them. I'm not saying this as like a judgmental thing because I don't care that he killed them, but it isn't in the film. A lot of fights are shown though. Anyways, I think this would have been a better film if they showed more of his escape, and as such would support the long time I had to sit in this chair watching the movie. Great story though.

 

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The Adam Project, 2022, Shawn Levy, 5/10 - I knew this was going to be just another generic Netflix movie, but I still had to watch it because not doing so was not an option. The way I flaked out in 2020 is not going to remain to be the case. This movie is what happens when producers see everyone in the context of their greater roles as Marvel franchise actors and just wants to fill their movie with as many of them as possible. I really don't like these characters. There are some surprisingly heartfelt moments here but I've had a lot of personal problems of late so maybe that's why those moments felt heartfelt. I don't really know. The ending is also exactly what you'd expect from this kind of movie rather than being provocative. At least Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes really went for it at the end even though it was a shitty movie. The only standout thing here is the VFX, but a lot of movies have that, and this is just one more on the pile.

 

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The Bubble, 2022, Judd Apatow, 3/10 - This is easily Apatow's worst movie. It's bad enough to the point I don't want to say very much, there's very few movies similar to that. If something's really bad, usually I want to waste my time explaining why and in this case I do not. The premise here is that people who don't like each other very much come together during the pandemic to film the sixth movie in a bad movie franchise. This being the pandemic and all, the studio decides that everyone needs to bubble up. It's fair to say that the actors here didn't turn in strong performances. Everything here is really pointless from scene to scene, the story feels like it's spinning wheels without going anywhere, it's a bad movie and not one worth dedicating my time to. I shouldn't have wasted my time even writing this.

 

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Emergency, 2022, Carey Williams, 8/10 - I thought this movie was more than just a movie about racism or whatever box someone would like to take this movie and stick it in. Emergency was a Sundance favorite for a good reason. The film is funny even when it's not outright trying to be, the dialogue is very true to life, and well, I saw every side of the three guys perspective here and why they wouldn't want to call the PD. Even though there's three guys, the relationship that matters here is the two, Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) and Sean (RJ Cyler). The two black students have a bond and they know how fucked up this situation is. They want to deal with it differently, ultimately it leads to them splitting up before the situation is resolved. When it is resolved, it is done in very fucked up fashion and not done in some kind of sanitized way. I appreciated this movie, nothing about it is subtle, and sometimes that's warranted (especially in this case). Actually I'd go so far as to say this is one of the best movies I've seen this year.

 

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Top Gun: Maverick, 2022, Joseph Kosinski, 7.5/10 - Alright, so the only thing I really want to talk about here is whether or not this movie is propaganda. I land on the side of no even though I can see where everyone is coming from, I can see that things in the script were changed and who everyone got cooperation from, I can see all of that. But in this movie what I see is a very realistic seeming portrayal of what it would be like to carry out an attack such as this one. I also see that there was great care taken to not imply which country it was that was enriching uranium and being attacked by us in response to that. I thought this was a cool movie. Now see the first Top Gun is a totally different story and was intended to be propaganda, and well, it plays off as propaganda too. Again though you see military recruiters salivate over movies like this and they certainly think said movies are propaganda. In any case you can decide that shit for yourself. It's not nearly as black and white as the first film was, sometimes movies don't actually have greater meaning. What I saw was a movie where a couple people got in planes and did a lot of really stupid stunts, the plot besides that holds the movie up pretty well, and I have few complaints.

 

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Hustle, 2022, Jeremiah Zagar, 7/10 - You could call this a movie where Juancho Hernangomez makes the NBA, but it is a little bit more than that due to some nice touches and cameos. The short version of the story here is that Adam Sandler's character is a scout with the Philadelphia 76ers. He doesn't want to scout anymore but after the owner dies, he is made to do it once again. Sandler's character then goes to Spain and finds Bo Cruz (Juancho) playing street ball. It is then his mission to get this kid to the NBA. It doesn't hurt that everyone in this film is really likable, so the more ridiculous twists and turns don't negatively impact the film very much. I should also point out this is not a generic Adam Sandler movie with better window dressing. It's not trying to be funny at all. Even though Bo gets way too many chances to make it, I liked this.

 

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Marriage Story, 2019, Noah Baumbach, 10/10 - Yea I gave this the rare 10. Watch the movie if you don't agree with me. I could give you a long list of reasons why, but this movie is old enough that I don't need to do that. The performances here are all spectacular, the scenes carry emotional weight and some hit really hard, there's not any moment here that I would say is less than very good. I did also find it impossible for me to not pick sides on a scene to scene basis even though I thought they were both wrong. This is why you communicate with your partner. I also loved how this ended in a way befitting of life. Maybe people ain't always gonna be happy and shit, life is not a Hollywood story even though this movie is one.
Great story.

 

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Spiderhead, 2022, Joseph Kosinski, 5/10 - Bit strange for this director to have two movies released so quickly. At least in doing so the difference in quality is far more stark and I feel assured of my feelings on his film. This movie is really weird, very small in scope, and feels like it was poorly miscast as well. I also feel like even given the subject material that this plays it too safe. The premise here is that Steve (Chris Hemsworth) is in charge of a science project at a prison. He's testing experimental drugs on inmates and most of the inmates are cool with it because there are only one or two drugs that give adverse reactions, and the amount of freedom they get otherwise compared to being in another prison is worth it to them. What this movie effectively turns into is Chris Hemsworth persuading people to take medication and I don't find that very interesting. The conspiracy here isn't compelling enough, neither is the concept, and this is a misfire.

 

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A Hidden Life, 2019, Terrence Malick, 6.5/10 - This isn't a bad movie but I like this less than some of Malick's other efforts. A Hidden Life is the story of Franz Jagerstatter (August Diehl), an immensely frustrating Austrian peasant farmer who decides he'd rather leave his family and die than swear an oath to Hitler and serve in the German military. Film aside, this is a really difficult subject for me. I find this man very odd and even though I can say from here that he did the right thing, I don't know how I feel about this. His motivations are largely religious, but he's from a village and said village is absolutely nothing in the grander scheme of Europe or the war. It feels like scraping the bottom of the barrel to drag these people into a fight that doesn't really have anything to do with them. Anyway, Malick's way of telling this story is to do what he does. He switches back and forth between Franz and Franz's wife Frani (Valerie Pachner), showing what they do and deal with on a day to day basis while separated even though there are few dramatic plot points to move the story forward. Again, this is a Malick movie. The cinematography is great but I thought the movie was so long that the countless scenes of Frani farming became way too much. It's like the sweeping scene in Twin Peaks, but it's on repeat over and over again and before you know it you sat down watching this movie for 3 hours. I understand the point here is to ask the viewer what they would do in similar situations but there's a better way to go about this.

 

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The New Mutants, 2020, Josh Boone, 4/10 - I can see why it was decided to keep delaying this as much as possible. There's nothing here that leads to an interesting or entertaining movie. The concept here is too simple. These five pictured mutants are brought to a facility where they are being studied and led to believe that they may potentially become X-Men. That is not actually the case. Instead they're being studied for reasons that aren't revealed until way too late in the movie, so The New Mutants feels as aimless as it is boring. I'm not sure what edits they threw out to settle on this one, but this is very dull and inoffensive. Other than Magik this is all the way bad.

 

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Deep Water, 2022, Adrian Lyne, 5/10 - You know, I have some mixed feelings here. There's things that I really liked in this movie (some were unintentionally funny moments), and there's things I really hated due to how dull the events were as they played out. I'll start with the good first and I'm just gonna say that a movie with Ana de Armas nude in it this much can't be all that bad. It's just not possible. The bike-car chase is also one of my favorite scenes ever, in any movie. This dude doesn't even have to be driving fast and he kills himself cause he wants to drive like a maniac while talking to himself and texting while driving. Ultimately though, the first 90 minutes outweighed the last 30 and this movie is kinda wack. There's only so much one woman's rarely naked body can cover up the STENCH of bad filmmaking. Affleck's character is deliberately wooden so I'm not talking about that. There's also scenes with snails that may have been intended to serve as a metaphor, but there isn't one and trying to find one would be making shit up.

 

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Gretel and Hansel, 2020, Oz Perkins, 6/10 - I didn't know how I'd like this and that's why I didn't watch the film back in 2020 before movie theaters shut down. This is an extremely slow film, but it's short and I think that I liked it in the end. Everyone's familiar with the fairy tale, or maybe you aren't and you need to look it up, but that's what the movie is based on. I thought Perkins was really effective with his visuals and in setting the mood here. There's not a ton of substance here, there's just the fairy tale, so I think the movie was better seen at home instead of spending time going outside and figuring out a way to see it. I also thought there were quite gross scenes considering this was rated PG-13.

 

[SFH]

Gretel and Hansel, 2020, Oz Perkins, 6/10 - I didn't know how I'd like this and that's why I didn't watch the film back in 2020 before movie theaters shut down. This is an extremely slow film, but it's short and I think that I liked it in the end. Everyone's familiar with the fairy tale, or maybe you aren't and you need to look it up, but that's what the movie is based on. I thought Perkins was really effective with his visuals and in setting the mood here. There's not a ton of substance here, there's just the fairy tale, so I think the movie was better seen at home instead of spending time going outside and figuring out a way to see it. I also thought there were quite gross scenes considering this was rated PG-13.

Would you qualify this as horror? In my personal life I do horror reviews most Octobers on my social media and I might seek this out this year.

 

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Would you qualify this as horror? In my personal life I do horror reviews most Octobers on my social media and I might seek this out this year.

Critical consensus says yes, but if you're looking for scary moments or violent scenes I would say no.