I saw a lot of movies this
year. Not all of them got full reviews. Here’s some stuff I missed.
Serenity
At first I thought nothing of
this movie, assuming it would be just another mediocre potboiler quietly dumped
into January that its stars probably only took so they can decompress from a
previously challenging role and get paid to chill on a tropical island, but
when whispers of this being some compellingly bad trainwreck in the vein of The
Book of Henry started to circulate, my
curiosity got the best of me. And boy, was the hype real! The basic concept is
that Matthew McConaughey plays an Iraq war vet who’s now a fisherman on an
island village obsessed with catching a giant tuna called “Justice.” One day
he’s visited by his ex-wife (Anne Hathaway) with an offer he can’t refuse: kill
her abusive husband (Jason Clarke) by taking him out on his boat, getting him
drunk and feeding him to the sharks, and he’ll give him ten million dollars and
shared custody of their son. Sounds like your typical neo noir thriller, but
what makes this take a hard left turn into crazy town is a plot twist in the
middle that wasn’t even hinted at in the trailers and comes completely out of
nowhere, and yet the movie keeps going as if this is what the audience signed
up for all along. I won’t spoil it here since half the fun is having the rug
pulled from under you, plus you wouldn’t believe me if I did. Aside from the
twist, we also have Matthew McConaughey sucking on a woman’s chin, Anne
Hathaway doing her best Laruen Bacall impression, Jason Clarke doing God knows
what kind of accent, an hour and 45 minute runtime that feels like two and a
half, and a couple turns that make you want to check up on the director and ask
if he’s doing okay. Is it good? No. Does it work? Not really. Is it worth
checking out? Absolutely. It’s easily one of the most fascinatingly bad movies I’ve
seen since The Book of Henry. Just make sure you have some friends and
booze on standby.
3/10
How to
Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
I don’t think I’m alone when I
say that the How to Train Your Dragon series is probably DreamWorks Animation’s
crowning achievement. (Although it’s a pretty close call between this and The
Prince of Egypt.) It’s been a pretty solid and reliable fantasy adventure
series that never reached the levels of popularity of Shrek, Frozen,
or anything by Pixar, but it has a devoted fanbase and everyone seems happy
whenever we get another one. The first two movies are great, but there was
always a sense that the series was running out of gas, and this final
installment seems like an effort to wrap everything up before it flames out. Hiccup
(Jay Baruchel) is trying to keep up his dream of leading a community where Vikings
and dragons coexist, but that becomes more and more difficult as bigger
responsibilities pile up. Berk has become overpopulated, he’s pressured by everyone
to tie the knot with his long-time girlfriend Astrid (America Ferrera), a notorious
dragon hunter (F. Murray Abraham) has discovered their location, forcing everyone
to abandon Berk and relocate, Toothless finds and becomes enamored with a
female night fury, and they discover an entire underground society of dragons
that he feels more at home in, forcing Hiccup to confront the fact that maybe
it’s time to finally let go. It’s when the movie dealing with those themes, showing
off its magnificent animation, creature design and camera work during flight
scenes, that it’s at its best. But the wind gets taken out of its sails
whenever the generic villains show up to create some forced tension, especially
when they kidnap one of the annoying sidekicks, whose schtick actively makes
things worse for the good guys. Aside from that, it doesn’t go anywhere you
don’t expect it to go, but the ending is still very emotionally effective,
especially for those who grew up with this franchise and stuck with it for all
those years. And if you are one of those people who have a strong sentimental
attachment to it, make sure you have some tissues handy for that ending.
8/10
High
Life
Every once in a blue moon, a
filmmaker will take a stab at making an artistically shot, meticulously paced
space drama in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey or Solaris. This
year we got two: Ad Astra, which
I’ve already reviewed, and High Life, the English language
debut of French auteur Claire Denis. I’ve seen many a critic praise this movie
to high heaven, and God bless them for it because I for the life of me can’t
see what they see. This is one of the most boring movies I ever saw in theaters,
and I shouldn’t have to say that about a movie where a bunch of death row inmates
are being sent to the edge of space to harness energy from a black hole,
everyone gets addicted to a sex machine that extracts your semen, and they’re
also being used for artificial insemination experiments. Yeah, you read that
right. To its credit, there is a lot to admire. The cinematography is
beautiful, it has a nice score, we get some decent performances from Robert
Pattinson and Juliette Binoche (which speaks to their prowess as actors since
the script doesn’t give them a lot to work with), and it plays around with some
interesting ideas. The seeds of a good movie are there, but it’s weighed down
by some crippling direction. The characters are flat, everyone but the two leads
are on auto-pilot, the special effects are laughable (the spaceship looks like
a giant file cabinet and there’s a shot where we see an object in zero gravity but
it looks like it’s dangling from a fishing hook), the pace goes at a snail’s
crawl, characters actions are given no drive, and the plot is vague and
meandering to the point of incomprehensibility. Maybe you’ll get a kick out of
this if you ever watched Solaris or Interstellar and thought “You
know what this movie could use? More semen.” As for me, if I ever catch someone
watching this, I’ll just close the door and slowly back away.
4/10
Under the
Silver Lake
Funny story: I first heard
about Under the Silver Lake in late 2017 when it was scheduled to be
released in June the next year, and I was pretty excited since it was from the
director of It Follows. I was a little disappointed when it got pushed back
to December, but I made the naïve assumption that A24 did it because they
thought they had an Oscar contender on their hands. But then they pushed it
back even further, and that’s when I got worried. Then I finally saw it on
Amazon Prime, and I immediately understood what went wrong. Andrew Garfield
plays a creepy loser who becomes obsessed with his next-door neighbor (Riley
Keough), but when she mysteriously disappears, he sets out to find her,
thinking she’s left a bunch of clues for him, eventually uncovering an
elaborate conspiracy. Along the way he meets an underground network of homeless
people, a crazy old man who claims he wrote every popular song in the past 100
years, a treasure map hidden in the back of a cereal box, and a serial dog
murderer. What do any of these things have to do with each other? The hell if I
know! It desperately wants to be this scathing dissection of LA culture, but the
framing is so on the nose, contradictory and high on itself. It wants to say
something about the objectification of women in the entertainment industry, and
yet it’s the most male-gaze-y movie I’ve seen that isn’t a straight-up porno.
It wants to say something about pop culture, conspiracy theories and those who obsess
over them, but it’s so paranoid that I was half-expecting a cameo from Alex
Jones. It strives to be Mulholland Drive, but it ends up more like a
pretentious Paper Towns. Completely bloated, completely incomprehensible,
and completely full of itself. I will say this, though: it’s never boring. If
you need some batshit pretentiousness for your bad movie night and wore out your
copy of Southland Tales, then do I have the movie for you.
5/10
Booksmart
And now we move from two big
disappointments to something that actually lives up to the hype. I first heard
about this movie when every celebrity under the sun was hyping it up on Twitter,
and sort of wrote it off as just them supporting their friend Olivia Wilde, as
this is her directorial debut. I missed the boat to catch it in theaters, and
upon finally seeing it, that became one of my biggest regrets of the year. Two straight
A high school seniors named Molly and Amy (Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever) realize
they’ve spent their formative years studying for their SATs and applying to
colleges at the expense of all fun and socialization. When Molly finds out
their peers are also getting into good schools but still found time to party, she
and Amy set out to make up for lost time by crashing the biggest graduation party
in town. Their quest leads them on a bizarre odyssey involving the world’s
saddest yacht party, awkward run-ins with their principal, a suspiciously
responsible pizza deliverer, a strung-out party animal who magically shows up at
every location, and a drug sequence that you just have to see for yourself. Booksmart
has often been described as a feminist Superbad, since they have a
similar plot and emotional trajectory, and because one of the leads is played
by Jonah Hill’s little sister. But what makes Booksmart so special from it
and other films of its stripe isn’t their desire to get drunk or laid, but to
show they’re not the grades-obsessed prudes they’ve been type-casted as. In
fact, the movie’s whole MO seems to be upending expectations set upon people
based on the archaic hierarchy of which high school lunch table they sat at. Beanie
Feldstein is a comedic force of nature on par with her brother as the most
dominant and controlling of the pair, an extreme type A personality with
ridiculously high goals and standards for herself and everyone around her (think
Tracy Flick from Election on crack), while Kaitlyn Dever is shyer and
more complicit with letting her bestie make all the decisions, but still gets
plenty of moments. Olivia Wilde’s background as an actress allows her to wring
the most potential from our leads, helped tremendously by a rogue’s gallery of
scene stealers including Jason Sudeikis, Jessica Williams and Billie Lourd (Holy
shit, Billie Lourd in this movie is everything!), and an endlessly quotable
script. Heartfelt, horny and whip-smart, this one of this year’s best.
9/10
Yesterday
A struggling singer/songwriter
named Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) is hit by a bus during a worldwide blackout
that only lasts a few moments. When he comes to, he finds that the Beatles have
been completely erased from history and that he’s the only one who remembers
them or their music. When he starts passing off their vast song catalogue as
his own, he’s immediately propelled to superstardom, causing a rift between his
best friend, manager and #1 fan Ellie (Lily James), the only one who believed in
him from the beginning. Sounds like a convoluted setup for a romantic dramedy,
but it’s less surprising when you find out it’s from the writer of high-concept
romances like Love, Actually and About Time. But those had pretty
straightforward premises, whereas Yesterday is an exercise in suspension
of disbelief. Erasing the Beatles from history would mean having to rewrite the
last 60 years of popular music, and one of the most common criticisms of this
movie is that it doesn’t fully explore the ramifications of its own premise. I
certainly found myself asking a ton of questions (Did the British Invasion never
happen? Is Sharon Tate still alive? How do Coldplay and Ed Sheeran still exist
in this universe?) but I realize that this wasn’t what the movie is about. The
true crux of the story is Jack dealing with the moral dilemma of passing these
songs off as his own, the ensuing imposter syndrome, and the effect the lie has
on his relationship with Ellie. On that front, it’s kind of a mixed bag. There
are some pretty clever jokes about how these songs would translate if presented
as new today, observations about other things that were erased by the blackout,
Jack’s turmoil over his conundrum is brilliantly directed, and there’s an
alt-history payoff that’ll bring a tear to many a Beatles fan’s eye. On the
other hand, it’s all a front for a fairly basic romance. The music business
subplot follows the same trajectory as nearly every other music biopic, the constant
back and forth over whether Jack and Ellie will admit their feelings for each
other is incredibly schmaltzy at times, and at its worst moments the fetishization
of the Beatles’ music comes off as stroking the egos of baby boomers (and Ed
Sheeran). Where you land on the spectrum will probably depend on your tolerance
for weird premises and cheesy romance. I think it’s charming enough despite its
shortcomings.
6/10
The
Dead Don’t Die
Jim Jarmusch is known mostly for
dry witted films grounded in realism, but I always thought he was at his best
when he dabbled with genre. Dead Man is my all-time favorite Western, Ghost
Dog: The Way of The Samurai is a perfect marriage of gangster films,
samurai films and 90’s hip-hop culture, and Only Lovers Left Alive…
okay, that was kind of boring. Naturally I was pretty excited when I found out
he was making a zombie flick, but in hindsight I think his handling of vampires
should’ve been an omen of things to come. The cards are all set up: A small
town is overrun with armies of the dead, with the perspective shifting between different
characters, including a pair of cops (Bill Murray and Adam Driver), a racist
farmer (Steve Buscemi), a crazy hobo (Tom Waits), a group of hipsters from the
city, and a katana wielding mortician (Tilda Swinton). This is a movie clearly
made because the director has a lot on his mind pertaining to the end of the
world and where humanity is headed. Considering where we are at this point in
history, I don’t blame him, but the way it’s handled feels like he’s beating a
dead horse. The cause of this zombie apocalypse is the Earth being thrown off its
axis by polar fracking, and when these shambling ghouls rise from their grave,
they gravitate towards whatever made them happy in life. It was funny watching
an undead Carol Kane lurch out of the drunk tank while groaning “chardonnay”,
but I rolled my eyes at the hordes of zombies flocking toward the pharmacy and
electronics store while moaning “valium” and “iPhone”. Not all satire has to be
subtle, but the zombie as metaphor for consumer culture was played out when
Zack Snyder remade Dawn of the Dead. There are a couple funny moments,
though, even if the movie’s humor is wildly inconsistent. RZA from the Wu Tang
Clan makes a cameo that ultimately builds up to a dad pun, Tilda Swinton’s
character turns out to be an alien for some reason, and Adam Driver is aware
that he’s in a movie and knows what happens because he read the script ahead of
time, but it hardly ever comes into play. It’s a deeply cynical movie that isn’t
as smart as it thinks it is, one I think you’d have to be in a very specific
mood to vibe with. Beyond that, not one of Jarmusch’s best.
5/10
Scary
Stories to Tell in The Dark
Scary Stories to Tell in The
Dark
was a collection of short stories infamous for its incredibly detailed and
disturbing illustrations, giving it this reputation as these ultra-taboo horror
books for kids who were too old for Goosebumps but not old enough for
Stephen King. By its nature as a series of short stories that work specifically
within that medium, adapting into a movie would be an interesting endeavor to
say the least. The most obvious path would be to make it an anthology film, but
this movie takes a different approach. While hiding from some bullies in an abandoned
mansion, a group of kids stumble across the titular book, and as they read it,
the monsters appear from the pages and come for those around them, all under the
command of the vengeful spirit of its dead author. In order to lift the curse,
they must solve the mystery of what happened to her and put her spirit at rest.
We’ve seen this song and dance before. It’s basically the Goosebumps
movie but darker, less funny, and with a healthy dose of Stephen King pastiche.
Originality is obviously not this movie’s strong suit, but this setup gives
ample room to insert some of the book’s most infamous characters like Harold
the Scarecrow, the zombie with the missing toe, the Jangly Man and whatever the hell
this is, which are all impressively creepy recreations of the
illustrations. But there’s a lot of plot and buildup for a PG-13 horror movie
whose plot can be summed up with the two words “scary book”, inserting some background
allusions to late 60’s politics like the Nixon election and the Vietnam War to
give it some extra weight in case the main plot wasn’t weighty enough. And for
a movie this convoluted, the end was pretty easy to figure out. But then again,
this isn’t Gone Girl, it’s a PG-13 horror film based on a bunch of campfire
stories, one that manages to get some really solid performances from its young
actors and squeeze an impressive amount of gore out of the limits of its own
rating. For what it is, it’s solid enough. But if you’re looking for something
a bit meatier, you’re better off looking elsewhere.
6/10
Hustlers
If you told me ten years ago that
a stripper movie starring Jennifer Lopez would be one of 2019’s best, I’d
probably have a hard time processing it. But stranger things have happened and
great movies have been made from more inconceivable material. Based on a viral
New York Magazine article by Jessica Pressler, Constance Wu plays Destiny, an
exotic dancer struggling to make ends meet after her business, like everyone
else at the time, was hit hard by the 2008 financial crisis. When she reunites
with her old mentor Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), she gets sucked into her side hustle:
seducing Wall Street brokers and investment bankers, drugging them, taking them
out for a night on the town and maxing out their credit cards, the idea being
that their clients will assume they spent all their money partying or be too
embarrassed to report it for that very reason. Hustlers has often been
paraded as a girl power riff on films like Goodfellas, The Wolf of
Wall Street and The Big Short, detailing how a group of ambitious nobodies
got rich on an elaborate scam narrated after said scam completely fell apart. It
also follows plenty of the same story beats, with montages of our protagonists
glamming it up in the lap of luxury, detailed breakdowns of how the scam worked
and how they got away with it, and appropriately timed record scratches to
signify everything crashing down around them, ending with our protagonists more
or less left to recuperate and resign themselves to a life of normalcy. While the
Scorsese similarities are pretty hard to miss, I think a more appropriate
comparison would be Magic Mike, specifically in its humanization of sex
workers and its emphasis on how economic hardships can drive even the most honest
person to desperate measures. Hats off to the actresses for driving that point
home, especially Jennifer Lopez for giving her best performances in ages and
possibly her whole career, and Constance Wu showing us why she’s a movie star
in the making. It’s not the most enlightening film out there, and it doesn’t
really have anything new to say about the 2008 financial crisis. The closest we
get is them justifying their actions by claiming their marks already ruined the
economy and never got the proper punishment. Nevertheless, it’s still a slick,
sexy, stylish, bittersweet crime caper, and one that I regret not catching
sooner.
8/10
El
Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
This epilogue to one of the
most lauded shows of the last 15 years isn’t so much a movie as it is a feature
length TV episode. That’s not a knock against it. The same could be said about Serenity
(the Firefly movie, not that disaster I reviewed nine movies ago), Downton
Abbey, most of the Star Trek movies, even those Rocko’s Modern
Life and Invader Zim specials that everyone loved so much, and most
of those work fine on their own. But it feels especially unnecessary when you
consider that Breaking Bad’s finale was damn near perfect. Luckily,
Vince Gilligan justifies this movie’s existence by focusing on the finale’s one
hanging thread. Quick recap: Breaking Bad was about a chemist named Walter
White who started cooking high-grade crystal meth after he was diagnosed with
cancer, eventually building a drug empire and destroying the lives of everyone
around him. In the season finale (SPOILERS), he sold out his assistant Jesse Pinkman
(Aaron Paul) to a group of neo Nazis who made him their meth cooking slave for
a year. After Walt comes back and kills everyone, taking a stray bullet in the
process, Jesse leaves him to die, steals an El Camino and drives off to an
unknown future. El Camino picks up immediately after as Jesse sets in
motion an escape plan he’s been hatching for a year. Now, was this film
completely necessary? No. The first act feels like it’s playing catch-up for
those who probably haven’t seen the show since it ended six years ago, and the
rest is all build-up to a payoff. But boy, what a payoff. The film is
essentially a race to grab some cash so he can pay a one man witness protection
program to take him off the grid, and the search for the money helps fill in
the gaps of what Jesse went through in his time, with flashbacks to the one day
of his enslavement where he was treated like a human being. Over the course of
the film, Jesse gradually reconstructs his old self, transforming from the
beaten dog of the finale back into the quick-thinking punk we all know and love
but with more confidence and a greater sense of purpose. The number of
recurring characters is relatively small. Badger and Skinny Pete give him shelter
and get the cops off his trail, Todd shows up in flashbacks to remind us just
how hateable he truly is, and there’s one final cameo in the last scene that’s
guaranteed to bring a tear to every Breaking Bad fan’s eye. As a movie,
it features all the same technical chops that set the show above its competition,
but as an epilogue to the show, it checks out.
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment