The Long Marathon

My COVID-19 movie reviews, ordered as-watched, from March 17, 2020 until….

Seattle’s COVID-19 lockdown started in mid-March, 2020. I began working from home on March 17th. Bars, restaurants, gyms, and theaters were closed that weekend. So I started watching more movies.

March

Knives Out (2019)
not as “political’’ as the reviews make it seem, it’s a lightweight blast, a cartoon of a murder mystery thriller with great over-the-top performances all around. Solid effort from Rian Johnson, not as good as Looper his best or Brick, but loads better than Brothers Bloom, and let’s not speak of that other one).

Toy Story 4 (2019)
Totally unnecessary sequel nonetheless does the Pixar thing, is emotionally resonant even if it’s themes are well-worn. Looks amazing, especially some apparently-new rain and dust effects. ­Surprising development for several characters mix things up a bit.

TRON Legacy (2010)
looks great even ten years later (especially in 3D on your VR headset). Killer soundtrack, obviously. Plot is simplistic and dialog could have been written by a child. Olivia Wilde’s character a problematic exemplar of the ‘’born sexy yesterday’’ trope (see also: The 5th Element), but overall a fun, dumb ride.

April

The Island (2005)
Two movies in one! Clean plague-bottle-dystopia turns gritty clones-on-the-run. Both halves work, inasmuch as Michael Bay movies ever have, as fun sci-f action. Ewan McGregor has an amusing dual role, but Scarlet Johansson is completely wasted, and has a bad case of porn-face throughout. One might say this is a transitional movie for Bay, moving from the legible and relatively nuanced The Rock to misogynistic digital nonsense of Transformers.

Yesterday (2019)
Wow. This insane concept might have worked in some universe, but here it most definitely does not. The movie leans heavily on decent Beatles cover versions, and you may find yourself thinking you’re enjoying it, but don’t be fooled! The central conceit demands that you totally ignore that the Beatles’ astronomical success depended on historical context, production, and personality in addition to the raw strength of the songs, and nothing we see of the passive central character indicates that this music would, in his hands, in 2019, lead to the massive success the movie depicts. The romance subplot is underdeveloped, though both actors do their best with weak material. Kate McKinnon shows up for some reason, and derails every scene she’s in. Better idea: just listen to the Beatles for 2 hours.

Long Shot (2019)
00s Apatow shlubby-guy/hot-girl rom-com grafted onto a Veep storyline. Totally shouldn’t work, but skates along on cartoon energy, great one-liners and committed comedic performances from Seth Rogan and Charlize Theron (and a great Bob Odenkirk cameo). Dig a little deeper and there’s some cutting commentary on the toxic/symbiotic relationship between politicians and media. Resolves a little too cleanly with a typical America-be-true-to-yourself message, but hey fish don’t know they’re in water.

Serenity (2019)
Bad movie! Don’t bother! Not even worth explaining why.

The End Of The Tour (2015)
Essentially a two-hour conversation about loneliness and the barriers to human connection, thematically enhanced with numerous shots framed through dirty car windshields, through veils of cigarette smoke, or against washed out Midwest winter landscapes… Segal gives a grounded and authentic performance, while Eisesnberg seems always at a remove, which I suspect is a choice, emphasizing the degree to which each character lives an authentic life. Your enjoyment may depend on your tolerance of David Foster Wallace, obviously.

Prisoners (2013)
Working through the Denis Villaneuve catalog a bit, this is up there with Sicario, at least: a stylish philosophical take on a standard genre that doesn’t quite transcend. Here, it’s Lifetime movie stuff: two little girls are abducted, then Dad and Cop have let’s say a disagreement in how to handle the situation.
What results from this lame premise, however, is a gripping character study of the two men and their opposing concepts of justice and morality, played out not in monologue but through action and expression. Career best performances from Gyllenhaal and especially Jackman, whose pre-MAGA prepper Dad could have easily been a red state cartoon, but is instead given life, understandable motivations, and our sympathies even when events drive him to extremes.
Highly recommended.

Bad Education (2019)
I feel like there’s an interesting story here: student newspaper uncovers massive embezzlement scandal, but the filmmakers are too enamored with Hugh Jackman’s face to follow the young reporter character who should be at the center of this story. Instead we get a demonstration of Jackman’s masterful control of his lower eyelid muscles.
None of the characters here have much in the way of motivation, their deeds are something that happened to them. This passivity leads to a fairly lifeless drama.
Skip it.

May

Logan Lucky (2017)
Redneck Oceans 11 never really more than mildly amusing,a lightweight heist movie with no real stakes or payoff, and a lot of cynical jokes at the expense of West Virginia’s NASCAR loving citizens.

Fighting with My Family (2019)
Do you miss flying? Tape your phone to the back of a chair and load this up! A perfectly acceptable 90s-style coming-of-age biopic comedy that only mostly feels like an ad for WWE wrestling. Pretty ok punk-girl central performance, and some funny moments from the eponymous family. Apparently written by Stephen Merchant, though it feels like it could have been written by a dartboard. Don’t waste your time, unless you have time to look for some reason, then why not!

Used Cars (1980)
Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale a few years before Back to the Future. Strange mix of slapstick and satire with a deeply cynical view of American capitalism and politics on the cusp of the Reagan era, yet still feels somehow fresh, at times. Maybe because: Kurt Russell plays a sleazy car salesman with political ambitions, raising cash to openly buy a state Senate seat. A career in politics is nothing but self-serving graft, unapologetically so. Very dated, probably deserves a trigger warning for what today reads as racist characteture and several instances of sexual assault, but also features a few laugh-out-loud hilarious scenes and plenty of quippy lines, directorial choices and plot devices that fit with Zemeckis’ other work.
Weird movie, interesting time capsule.

Escape from New York (1981)
How have I never seen this?
Fun garbage-fire dystopia that you should definitely have playing on your projector for your next house party. Soundtrack never quite coheres, but there are some good synth sounds here that might be even better w/o the visuals. Some weak political commentary, but nah not really.
Come for the burning trash and the fun adventure of just getting across the city …. So: a pretty accurate NYC?

Spaceship Earth (2020)
Certainly interesting circumstances to watch a documentary about people isolated for two years in a closed-system environmental experiment.
The first hour or so is fascinating stuff, focused on the crazy hippies who came up with the idea over two decades, building geodesic domes and a functional seafaring boat(!) along the way. The drama of the experiment itself is less interesting than everything before and after, serving as a hinge between the idealism of the 60s and the naked corporate cynicism of the 90s and beyond — — including not for nothing some Steve Bannon backstory.
I wish there was more here, like some grand theory of what it all means, but nope, it’s pretty focused for good or ill, and worthwhile if you’re at all interested in the Biosphere 2 project.

Roadhouse (1989)
Am I running out of new releases to watch under lockdown? Maybe. Would I be watching 80s classics anyway? Also maybe. Did I enjoy Swayze as a calm but ass-kicking philosophy-major bar bouncer up against a smarmy corporate villain and his generic henchmen? Absolutely. Would I rather be in a bar fight while the band plays 50s rock covers, than stuck in my apartment? Hand me that chair, so I can break it over your face.

Source Code (2011)
Short and sweet, twisty sci-fi action that ping-pongs between the two main settings with efficiency and verve, pacing the various reveals perfectly to keep the train chugging along. Nothing mind-blowing here, just a fun, smart-enough thriller with a dash of philosophy.

Edge of Tomorrow/Live Die Repeat(2014)
Another time loop sci-fi flick, nowhere near as good as Source Code, but entertaining nonetheless. You won’t buy either Tom Cruise as demoted army guy who learns to fight, or Emily Blunt as badass supersoldier but whatever, they’re having fun! The movie is almost a tongue-in-cheek dark comedy at times, and I wonder what someone like Edgar Wright — or in another era, Paul Veerhoven — might have done with the premise, but eventually it just turns into a muddled CGI slugfest and wraps up a little too neatly.
Hard to recommend too highly but as brainless pulp, why not?

Ford vs Ferrari (2019)
Starring Christian Bale as a cheeky leprechaun and Matt Damon as a pimento loaf ham sandwich, this feel- good underdog tale is immensely enjoyable, with a classic American narrative about being true to yourself /your vision, and rejecting the wrongheaded demands of your corporate overlords.
Our heroes are fighting a two-front war here: against the foreign enemy, compared to WW2 on several occasions, and against Ford’s image/branding throughout. They win one of these battles, but are vindicated in both by the end credits text …
So there are layers, but don’t think too hard and it’s a fun, fast paced, well made film.

The History of Time Travel (2014)
Fake documentary with some fun moments playing around with the story changing behind the framing interviews. Neat gimmick, but it doesn’t add up to much.

True Grit (2010)
Just a solid Coen Bros western with chewy dialog, and stunning cinematography. It’s amazing how effortless and classic even lesser Coen Bros movies feel. This one mostly dispenses with subtext, in favor of a dead simple revenge tale well told.

The Hunt (2020)
That ‘controversial’ movie where a cabal of ‘elites’ kill ‘real americans’ for sport. Over-the-top cartoon violence and a splatter of jokes that land, at the expense of both groups. It reminds me of the best South Park episodes in both the absurdity of the premise and the anti-message message, which mostly amounts to: calm the fuck down, the country is polarized, yes, but retreating into internet echo chambers only exacerbates the problem. It’s a riot!

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)
John Slattery and a team of fedora’d screenwriters race against time to prevent Matt Damon and Emily Blunt from turning ‘’The Adjustment Bureau’’ into a romantic comedy.
The movie careens wildly from political procedural to meet-cute rom-com to angels-are-aliens-sci-fi to heist flick to… well it’s a mixed bag if you couldn’t tell.
All the actors are game for ridiculous material, and though it’s a Philip K Dick concept, it’s no Blade Runner, it’s no Total Recall, it’s no Minority Report, you get the picture.
And then: the conclusion. Damon and Blunt are now saddled with gaslit ‘’come with me if you want to live’’ dialog and action, while simultaneously providing the most exciting scenes in the movie where the various genres all fall away in service of fucking action!

The Hustle (2019}
Why did I watch this?
It’s exactly as bad as you think it is.

Birds of Prey (2020)
Would you like to see Margot Robbie on roller skates smashing heads in with a giant mallet? Then you will enjoy this movie. It’s all candy violence, legible choreography, some self-aware winks, and it all mostly works. If they tweaked this a little more towards comedy, they’d almost have the tone and aesthetic for a 60s Batman reboot, which seems like a good idea to me.

Stargate (1994)
Am I running out of interesting new things to watch? Maybe. Is this this most 90s sci-fi and the most ‘ancient aliens’ movie ever? Probably.
This has not aged well. There’s a strain of colonialist white-savior myth running through, and of course the whole ‘aliens kick-started ancient egypt’ thing has troubling euro-centric vibes today, and probably did already in 94.
I can see why this spawned a half dozen TV series though: the idea of the portal and the general hightech/ancient ruins aesthetic begs further elaboration.

Ghost in the Shell (2017)
This is the rare movie that demands to be seen in 3D, so if you have the technology… as a visual effects showcase, this is flawless filmmaking, when the plot lags or the dialog flops there’s guaranteed another candyneon Hong Kong composite skyline shot just a minute away.
More on 3D: many of the shots in the film seem composed with 3D in mind — the scenes are environments, well detailed and brought into context through cinematography that really uses depth to effect. This puts it in a class with Gravity, Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, and (I’d argue) Blade Runner 2049.
The film treads lightly on the big philosophical questions around identity implied by the central premise of a human brain in a robot body, but I think it’s handled smartly and better than the controversy over casting would have you believe.

Meru (2015)
It’s a key, unlocking Free Solo backstory. It’s also a solid documentary on its own, revealing the inner lives of people crazy enough to climb mountains, including the director. Watch.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (2019)
I’m a big fan of Lord & Miller, who return here as screenwriters and producers, bringing the same mix of open-hearted humor and wacky action adventure that characterized the first Lego Movie (and most of their other work).
The 3D Lego effects are visually stunning, though of course plastics are a pretty mundane rendering task these days — more impressive is the physics of the virtual bricks, and how everything is animated in a way that looks plausible, with no bending of the rules.
Lots of pop-culture crossovers, but these are brief and never detract from the story or lean too heavily on references for gags, as there are plenty of character-based jokes and visual gags that land.
The musical numbers are mostly forgettable until you get to the self-referential credits song, the clear winner, plus a decent new Superorganism song!
Kids movie, sure, but plenty here for all ages.

Everest (2015)
This is the same story as ‘’Into Thin Air’’ — great book if you haven’t read it — and while there’s some mild controversy over the details in both that book and this movie, the facts are pretty clear: bunch of people went up Everest, and a handful never came down.
This is worth watching in 3D if you have the means, the shots where the mountain looms over the various camps, or when we get aerial shots of a thin string of climbers against vast snow fields really help sell the man-against-nature thing. And the mix of CGI and real footage is pretty seamless.
Plays like a disaster movie, which of course it is, with a slow build rife with obvious foreshadowing and an engrossing climax where (spoiler alert) most of the lead characters die.
Definitely entertaining, though a bit long and could have used more detail on the technical aspects of the climb, which were mostly glossed over.

San Andreas (2015)
Against a backdrop of unthinkable tragedy, an estranged husband and wife reconcile by finally discussing the shared trauma that caused a rift in their marriage, in this intimate drama that examines faults both literal and metaphorical.
Just kidding, it’s an earthquake disaster movie with The Rock!

Rise of the Synths (2020)
Mediocre documentary on synthwave that tries hard to convince you it’s a global phenomenon. Hilariously features some talking heads who outright reject the label or muse on camera about why the documentary is even being made. No matter, keep it in the edit!
The music is great throughout, and seems to be a decent overview of the artists working in this subgenre at least as far as I can tell , and does trace influences back to the 70s, but stops short of investigating the genesis of electronic music synthesis or sequencing. Oh well.

Horse Girl (2020)
Takes the ‘horse girls are crazy’ trope literally and lets Alison Brie do what she does best: play slightly unhinged. The movie never quite decides if it’s going to take mental illness seriously or play it for laughs, and the ending doesn’t really sell the ambiguity i think they were going for. But it has moments, and fits nicely in the weird micro-genre the Duplass Brothers have staked out see also: “safety not guaranteed” and “the one I love” — both far superior films

Cop Car (2015)
Two annoying kids steal a police cruiser and get chased by psycho cop Mustache Kevin Bacon. Bacon has fun here but the rest of the movie is kind of a drag, and I didn’t really need a murderous cop movie when the real deal is in the news daily.

June

Event Horizon (1997)
Space madness!!!! B-movie nonsense of the “astronauts driven insane by a portal to hell” variety. Featuring a psychotic post-Jurassic Park Sam Neil and Pre-Matrix Laurence Fishburn, good bloody fun is had by all, there are some inventive designs and cool practical FX, and each character gets exactly one piece of backstory, specifically so they can be tortured with it by the mysterious unseen space demons. There are clear hints that the director wanted this to be The Shining In Space, but it lands pretty far off target.

Chloe (2009)
I forgot this genre existed: erotic psychological thriller! Julianne Moore hires prostitute Amanda Seyfried to seduce husband Liam Neeson, what follows is an over-the-top melodrama with literally unbelievable twists and turns, a completely bonkers ending, and soft-focus sex scenes that feel lifted from 90s Cinemax. All the actors play this nonsense straight, and the movie is better for it. Cult classic?

Walk Hard (2007)
Biopic parody, that feels closer to an SNL spinoff movie than the typical dirty-heartwarming Apatow comedies of the 2000s. Some excellent spastic slapstick and visual gags, including a winking performance from Jenna Fisher that makes me wonder why she wasn’t a bigger star. The songs are not all overtly comical, several are played straight while absurdity unfolds around the performance. Others like ‘’Let’s Duet’’ and a surrealist Bob Dylan parody are just great novelty tunes, and all are elevated by John C. Riley’s surprising vocal range and stylistic adaptability. Some dated racial humor hasn’t aged well, and lots of jokes don’t land, but there’s still plenty to enjoy here.

Selma (2014)
Hard to criticize, given the obvious parallels with current events — and there are several brutal scenes that felt very current — but the movie as a whole is kind of undercooked, and fails to put the events depicted in context. John Lewis’s ‘’The March’’ graphic novel does much better in this regard, depicting the same events with a lot more detail and power. The central performances are good, but again it’s a surface level treatment and we don’t get much in the way of backstory, personal conflict, drive, or character development, which would have added more human drama. Ultimately depressing how relevant this remains today.

You Were Never Really Here (2017)
Beautiful visual storytelling, beyond just great cinematography, the plot and character unfold onscreen in a way that immerses you in the fractured mental state of the unstable protagonist, a proto-Joker Joaquin Phoenix hard to say if this or Joker had more Taxi Driver rips. High tension, moral ambiguity, and a great score, well worth checking out.

Sicario (2015)
Most of my capsule reviews have been for things I’ve never seen before … This is an exception, which I’ve watched a few times and never really tire of it. Denis Villaneuve’s big break, I’d say: a methodical, arty drug­war drama that is perfectly paced, revealing new bits of the story to the audience (and Emily Blunt’s idealistic FBI agent) at the exact right moments to pay off earlier setups to maximum effect. There’s no real twist, exactly, just revelations that add shades of meaning to each character as their backstories are unveiled, and tied to the global politics at play.
But the movie is at it’s best when interrogating the border: cinematography that lingers on alien landscapes, then shows the people who attempt to traverse it, or the camera holds on the fence, dipping and rising, immune to topography, or when long drones-eye shots contrast subdivisions and slums.
Probably one of the best movies of the 2010s.

Venom (2018)
A ‘’gritty’’ Spider-Man villain origin story with no engaging characters, bad CGI, and a plot that unfolds like a wet shit. A tech entrepreneur has gotten hold of an alien ‘’symbiote’’ that can only survive with a human host, which it envelopes like silly putty on a GI Joe action figure, then proceeds to bounce around random bits of city in dark and unintelligible action scenes. Tom Hardy mumbles lines throughout, looking incredibly bored, the symbiote has jokey voiceover written like rejected one-liners from a 90s Jim Carrey flick.
Avoid.

Attack the Block (2011)
An early example of the 2010s 80s revival? Not in terms of throwback style or aesthetic, but in character and plot, this is pretty close in spirit to the Spielberg/ John Hughes mashup Stranger Things perfected a few years later.
Essentially: ensemble cast of kids/teens fights off an alien invasion while lobbing softball quips at each other, left to their own wits, absent parents or other authority figures.
Might be unfair to writer-director Joe Cornish to call this a lesser Edgar Wright movie (Wright only produces here) but that’s what this feels like: Hot Fuzz or World’s End minus the reflective character growth and stylish visual gags. But a lot of shared DNA, and highly entertaining.
There’s race and class commentary just under the surface here, but whenever the script attempts to dive deeper, it’s interrupted by a monster attack, and I’m not willing to find deeper meaning there. The film seems content to be a fleet and stylish teens fight aliens movie, sometimes that’s all you need.

Midsommar (2019)
The kind of movie where you’ll be dozing off, than jerk awake when someone’s head gets bashed in with a comically large mallet. But this ain’t Looney Tunes, rather a ponderous cult abduction flick that it’s nowhere near as deep or interesting as it wishes to be. There’s great cinematography throughout, an immersive, hovering camera style (lots of drone work) that fits the narrative as things spin out of control. Characters are no more developed than your average slasher B-movie horror film, and I found it hard to care when they start getting picked off. Florence Pugh as the lead gets the best arc, and the movie is much improved when the cast is whittled down for the final act, when our hero is — spoiler alert! — finally and tragically seduced by the cult. Worth checking out, but about 45 minutes too long, tonally uneven, and too convinced of it’s own brilliance.

You Don’t Nomi (2020)
Documentary on Showgirls elevation to cult classic, makes a case for the film as a ‘masterpiece of shit’ — it’s both a so-bad-it’s-good melodrama, and a satire of the same so perfect that it became its target. The argument for SG as a brilliant satire of the American Dream mythos never quite convinces, but neither does the case for it as inept f1lmmaking — there’s too much that seems intentionally over the top — the absurdist dialog
(‘’you have nice tits’’/ ‘’I like having nice tits’’), explosive line readings — and too much genuinely competent technical work (the musical numbers) for it to be simply a failure.

The documentary really shines when it lingers on the career of Paul Veerhoven, whose best movies show a director who uses the techniques of the Hollywood blockbuster to critique American consumerism and appetite for commodif1ed violence (RoboCop, Starship Troopers). Whether Showgirls views sex work and the rising star narrative through that same satiric lens is left to the audience to decide.

Train to Busan (2016)
Zombies on a train!! What more do you need to now?

Hereditary (2018)
Ari Aster’s debut and wow: Midsommar (2019) is a masterpiece compared to this garbage.

With a title like this and opening scenes hinting at psychological horror as metaphor for epigenetic trauma or mental illness, it starts off strong. But then someone’s head gets bopped off, and Toni Collette screams for the next hour and a half while the other actors stare blankly into the distance. Eventually there’s a seance and a haunted house and any subtle study of trauma, grief, etc is out the window.

Despite all the excitement towards the conclusion, I found it hard to care about any of it — a guy burns to death, and I’m wondering when the furniture was rearranged from the previous scene. The dollhouse stuff goes nowhere.
Both films I’ve seen from this director are throttled by their own self-seriousness and pretension, and could have been much improved with a little meta-commentary on how ridiculous it all is. Pass.

Out of Sight (1998)
It’s an Elmore Leonard novel! So: chewy dialog, instant characters, and ( eventually) a heist! A maybe-underappreciated 90s neo-noir faceoff between Sexy Bank Robber George Clooney at his charming Clooneyest and Sexy FBI Agent Jennifer Lopez who must choose between aforementioned Sexy Bank Robber and doing right by the law.

So while it’s no Get Shorty or Jackie Brown it’s a great caper with compelling performances and great pithy scenes that let the actors bounce off each other, obviously having a lot of fun here. Don Cheadle is particularly great as Clooney’s criminal partner and foil, manipulating every situation to his advantage.

The Thing (1984)
A classic I’ve never seen before: and it’s fantastic! Gotta love the spare setup: isolated Antarctic researchers get killed off one by one by the mysterious alien. And Kurt Russell with a flame thrower and a bottle of whiskey never far from hand.

The cinematography is better than I expected from a creature flick, veering between wide open vistas of mountains and ice fields, and the cramped interiors of the base. The best shots come near the climax, when the base is washed in blue emergency lights as the remaining crew wander the exterior with bright flares, compositions in blue, red, and black.

The creature effects are phenomenal: all practical of course, and a mix of puppets, miniatures, and stop-motion, it all works together, perhaps, because every creature is slimed with the same mix of blood and viscera, and the warped body parts still disgusting enough to convince in 2020.

Thelma & Louise (1991)
Another classic I somehow missed, this is a remarkable film. I can’t think of any other movie that commits so hard to constant escalation, or that allows it’s characters to change so dramatically when a grave mistake ( or is it?) puts them on the wrong side of the law. This is all carried on Geena Davis’ / Thelma’s weirdo energy: early on she comes across as immature and maybe unhinged, but as the movie progresses, she finally gets to ‘’express herself’ finding a calling in the escalating crime spree, while Susan Sarandon’s buttoned-up Louise finds her plans inadequate and eventually embraces uncertainty and improvisation.

Both characters draw energy from their transgressions of the law, and in the famous ending refuse even the premise of the choice they are given by the men hunting them down, choosing death as freedom rather than face the consequences in a system that had oppressed them. This awakening narrative has some LGBTQ subtext (happy Pride!), but I think it speaks to broader constituencies of anyone who feels locked in position in society and yearns to break out of that routine.

There is something almost mythological about the trials T&L face (and there’s much to unpack about the individual men they defeat along the way, each representing a different type of evil), which makes this read like a fable, and a good one.

Equilibrium (2002)
Huh. It’s a dystopian action flick, Amazon Prime Video grab-bag style, never heard of it. A post-christian fascist regime has taken over the country, and maybe the Earth, imposing peace through a military police force of ‘’clerics’’ and mandatory emotion-suppression drugs. Would be of no interest whatever if not for a pre-Batman Christian Bale doing the conflicted action star thing, and excellent stunt choreography that’s like an evolutionary step between The Matrix and John Wick.

Architecture nerds might recognize several shooting locations at Rome’s EUR district, an appropriate fascist-neo-classicism backdrop. Art nerds will recognize the Mona Lisa, burned by flamethrower in the first five minutes of the movie, and that should tell you all you need to know about this film’s sophisticated social commentary.

Equals (2015)
Another emotion-suppressing drug dystopia, and a central couple trying to break free of the system. It all feels really familiar, and the intentionally emotionless performances don’t help the movie stay engaging. A melancholy twist at the end would have landed better if we had reason to care for these characters and their goals.

Like all A24 films, it’s shot beautifully, with interesting compositions, camera work etc. The architecture of the film — mostly Tadao Ando and Singapore apartment towers — provides a coldly futuristic setting, and the future tech especially the sound design of the notifications falls just short of satire. Overall, the movie takes itself too seriously, and could have used some levity. But then, why not just watch The Island again?

July

Elysium (2013)
File under: solving inequality with sci-fi. The elite have decamped to a space station, in this case a lovingly-rendered Stanford Torus (complete with Cali vibes), while the rest live in Los Angeles, deteriorated. The Torus folks, embodied by a transparently-evil Jodi Foster, enforce strict immigration controls, refer to Earthers as ‘illegals’ and refuse to send any of their magic medical pods down.

Thus, it’s revolution time as Matt Damon gets wrapped up in a convoluted plot where his desire to cure his own radiation poisoning leads to a heist, then a kidnapping, and finally a plan to reboot the Torus and give everyone citizenship and free medical care.

This is all good fun, and there’s enough humor in the writing and a few visual gags to indicate the movie knows it’s a little ridiculous. I kept thinking Matt Damon was miscast, as his character could have used a sharper edge; the corny villains are good as is. The themes get a little lost in the climax, which feels like 90s sci-fi action, wraps a little too quickly, and ends on a sentiment that doesn’t feel quite yet earned. I liked it.

Twilight (2008)
Totally disjointed and tonally inconsistent vampire romance in the Anne Rice tradition, with a fucking weird central performance from Robert Pattinson, whose aloof creep DeNiro affect actually carries the movie while his character Edward gaslights Kristen Stewart’s Bella so offensively that you wonder what century this is from. (It’s going to be interesting to see these two reunite in a future film. What’s the The Lake House to Twilight’s Speed?)

The central romance is just totally unbelievable from the start, as Bella never seems any less than instantly brainwashed and controlled by Edward. This is commented on in the text, in the script. The power differential is insane and Bella is literally trapped in this relationship, on risk of death.
The intro highschool teen stuff works fairly well. The vampire factions and big climax, boring as hell. The ‘’Indians knew about vampires and also Indians are werewolves’’ thing, just no.

It is interesting to see how Forks is portrayed, and there are some nice regional touches (Rainier beer product placement). Some great PNW backdrops.

Hamilton (2020)
The most interesting thing about theater as an art form is that it’s dynamic, there’s no definitive version, just performances, interpretations. So while this will likely become the most-seen version of Hamilton, it exists in a constellation of Hamiltons from the early White House performance to the demos and cut songs that make it to VouTube, the original cast recording, and of course the Broadway and other live shows, when they resume.
So part of the fun here is ‘’spot the difference’’ and what the free-floating camera does best is capture the actors’ smaller scale gestures and expressions, which go a long way towards humanizing and expanding the characters beyond their already complicated and sympathetic arcs in the text. Jefferson and Burr benefit the most from this, Hamilton suffers as this reveals Miranda’s limits as a performer. The only downside to leaving a fixed seat is that the genius of the central turntable is somewhat lost. That it sounds like a rough cut of the cast album brings out the same feeling as finding old Radiohead demos, like a peek into the process.

The Hamilton of it all comes across beautifully. As a work of art, it’s incredibly dense/layered work, which I’m not going to get into here, but it also works fantastically on the surface level, and now that we can REWIND REWIND I think a lot more people will be digging into the multiple layers of meaning and cultural impact.

Dirty Dancing (1987)
Featherweight love story in which bored teen Jennifer Grey falls for shirtless dance instructor Patrick Swayze during a three week family vacation at a lakeside resort.

Shockingly, the plot hinges on Johnny’s dance partner’s abortion — illegal at the time? — that can only be scheduled at the same time as a crucial gig, so Baby becomes a professional dancer in a week to fill in. The soundtrack is split evenly between excellent pre-Beatles rock & roll, and contemporary 80s garbage like ‘’Time of Your Life’’ — every song of the latter type featuring cheesy synths and lotsa Late Night Sax.

The movie works great when it’s physical, focusing on Baby’s training and a handful of nicely choreographed performances. Both leads do their sweaty best in these scenes, and when the camera lingers on their taut bodies, the movie is at it’s dirtiest. The rest kinda falls apart. There’s an income inequality subplot that goes nowhere, and the idea that Swayze could inject some fresh ideas into the resort’s tired entertainment, but the movie ends before Swayze gets that validation.

Being There (1979)
Peter Sellers is a mentally-handicapped gardener who rises rapidly through society’s hierarchy to become an advisor to the president, despite having no qualifications ( or even proof of identity!) and speaking only in gardening terms. Everyone around him treats him as an oracle, reading their own metaphors into his pronouncements.

Thesis statement at 1 hr23m: ‘’all you gotta be is white in America, to get whatever you want’’ — in this case including accidentally bluffing one’s way into political power.

The core message is sadly still relevant, but the film leans so hard on this one point that it leaves little room for anything else. It’s a slow burn, and Sellers’ monotone performance doesn’t help the dry satire land, though things loosen up a bit towards the end through Shirley Maclaine’s attempts to save the movie by pushing it towards farce, but a few hilarious. seduction scenes don’t make this a must-see.

The Vast of Night (2020)
Alien invasion radio drama disguised as a movie, heavy focus on dialog over action or visuals — the picture is often so dark it’s hard to tell what’s going on ( on several occasions I had to check my screen to see if there was a problem with the video feed -nope, just black screen). Our 50s teen protagonists are Alpha Dweeb radio DJ and Submissive Switchboard Operator, who hear a mYSterloUs slgNal and go to investigate, via a couple interviews/monologues, that serve as a welcome break from the leads’ bickering.

When we finally see the alien ship (spoiler alert) three minutes before the end of the movie, it’s impossible to care how any of this resolves.

Atomic Blonde (2017)
Directed by one of the John Wick guys, imagine if you took that movie, swapped Keanu for Charlize and The Continental mythology for a twisty Cold War spy thriller against the backdrop of 1989 Berlin and well, we have a winner. Leans hard on 80s vibe aesthetic and soundtrack and why the hell not? It’s all great fun, with beautiful and brutal fight choreography, great color and shot composition throughout, just over the top COOL.

Skyscraper (2018)
A serviceable big dumb disaster movie with our most reliable action hero Dwayne Johnson. Lacks the character nuance of San Andreas (yes really) and the winking humor and batshitness of Fast Five (through F8).

The eponymous building is believable enough that they must have had an architect on staff for at least a day, and rest assured each innovative design feature gets an action setpiece. This leads to some great cheesy CGI, and Johnson always gets some wrestling choreography, but watching this immediately after Atomic Blonde (w/DJ’s F8 costar Charlize) the action all feels flat safe and artificial.

Ready or Not (2019)
Highly entertaining B-movie where anxiety over marriage is translated into a horror comedy where the bride is chased down by her new in-laws. Would pair well with The Hunt — similar tone and action beats, but swap the political commentary for a vague eat-the-rich vibe. Samara Weaving is the standout of a great ensemble cast, her acting becoming more unhinged and feral as her wedding dress gets more ripped, stained, and eventually
blood-soaked.

Guns Akimbo (2019)
Direct-to-video garbage movie, but with enough cartoon gore to keep you entertained for a thankfully brief 90 minutes. What more could you expect from a movie where the premise is: guy has guns bolted to his hands and is forced to participate in a Twitch-stream deathmatch?

Daniel Radcliff seems closer to the end of his career than the beginning, failing to convince he’s more than Harry Potter, Samara Weaving is one-note as a killer here, can’t seem to land a consistent accent, and generally has less to do than in Ready or Not — a masterpiece in comparison. Pass.

Blindspotting (2018)
Written by, produced by, and starring Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, this has the verve and energy of a once-in-a-decade debut film, obviously a labor of love from the Hamilton star and his collaborator.

The plot echos Good Will Hunting — another breakout film for its co-writers and stars — in the central relationship: Diggs’ Collin trying to better himself and get ahead in life while Casal’s Miles holds him back. Blindspotting also shares some of the class criticism of GWH, here though the setting in gentrifying Oakland, 2018, with white hipsters as the butt of the joke through the more comedic first half.

But the heart of the film is Diggs’ character’s growing realization that he lives in a barely-disguised white supremacist police state, and coming to terms with how little control he has over society’s perception of him. Even after a cathartic climax, nothing has changed.

Color Out of Space (2019)
The Annihilation aliens are at it again! But now with 100% more Nick Cage. I’m not familiar with the HP Lovecraft source, but regardless an alien that manipulates matter and time is still a great idea, married here to a haunted house family drama. The child actors are above average and there’s even a little local corruption subplot/framing device, like it’s a real movie!

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Haven’t watched this straight through in probably 20 years? Today, it feels ancient and timeless, like unearthed treasure. What I appreciated most this time was the comic-book framing of shot after shot after shot: you could watch this on mute and still get 90% of the story and much of the humor. Of course then you’d miss the John Williams score which elevates the pulp to high art. The central romance is fleshed out and believable despite unfolding over only a few scenes, helped by efficient dialog that collapse decades of history for these characters into seconds of screen time. One might take issue today with Indy’s colonialist adventures in general, but 80s blockbuster filmmaking never got any better — a career best for both Spielberg and Lucas. A godamned classic.

Cloud Atlas (2012)
Six mediocre movies shuffled together with some hand-waving about reincarnation and human connection, etc. (We live in a society!) None of the individual parts are much good, and it adds up to less than the sum.
I keep imagining what this could have been — a fine art supercut that tracked the ‘’monomyth’’ by compiling scenes from other films and revealing their shared structure? (Like a ‘’typical Hollywood screenplay’’ version of Christian Marclay’s The Clock — a 24 hour splice of scenes featuring the current time) -­or a re-separated version where each plot formed an episode, and the ties between would be revealed on second viewing. It already feels like an anthology show. Instead we get… this. Oh well.

I Am Trying To Break Your Heart (2002)
Chill documentary about the recording and release of Wilco’s ‘’Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’’ is at it’s best when it simply lets the songs play out, especially the early scenes with the band trying out different arrangements in their epic loft / recording studio.

The drama around Jay Bennett and Jeff Tweedy’s disagreements and Bennett’s departure gets only a few minutes of screen time, and I believe Jim O’rourke appears exactly once: fans will glean more from a listen to the bootleg Bennet mixes and a casual comparison to the released album than they will here -raw wounds I guess, since the film came out shortly after the album.

The film drags in the second half, when it shifts to record company shenanigans, but is still worth watching for fans of the band.

The Director And The Jedi (2018)
This earnest behind the scenes documentary follows the production of The Last Jedi and (inadvertently?) reveals how blindspots and lapses in judgement in writing and plotting are amplified by the inertia and tight schedule of a multi-million dollar franchise sequel. Everyone involved seems to act in good faith, but there’s a sense of tragedy when we see elaborate sets constructed in service of throwaway scenes, or see the intensity of activity in creature design and practical effect work, in service of a movie that will turn out to be such a creative misfire.

Mark Hamill is the only one here who seems to sense that things have gone off the rails, complaining about his character’s arc, and recognizing that what really made the original trilogy great was the character work and relationships, not the battle scenes, creatures, or mythology.

Ex Machina (2015)
Another one I’ll never mind rewatching: it’s close to perfect: script, casting, tone, themes, cinematography. Philosophic posturing always cut off with moments of levity, before it gets too ponderous. CGI used sparingly, to great effect. Horror and thriller elements sprinkled in at the exact right moments, when a sense of unease is required.

Beyond the Al consciousness stuff, this is ultimately a little locked-room play, with the 3 (or 4) main (and only) characters subtly jostling for power, status, and control, with the least expected player coming out on top, and we the audience leave the theater (*) questioning who we were really rooting for, and why. One of the best films of the 2010s, one of my all-time favorites.

The Notebook (2004)
By request! Soapy melodrama romance that’s as old-fashioned as its 1940s setting. If you don’t immediately recognize the mystery couple in the framing device as our younger protagonists, I don’t know what to tell you — the obvious narrative switching between the two timelines never pays off as much as the film hopes it will, and when the film jettisons Gosling and McAdams for the 20 minute conclusion with the older actors, it totally loses any momentum it had built up.

The main story gives Gosling and McAdams ample time to flirt, fight, and fuck, most of which is entertaining enough, though it’s very clear who’s going to become a star and whose career will languish after this.
Nothing particularly interesting in the technical aspects of the film, except maybe the period costuming and sets. Faint praise, you bet!

Anaconda (1997)
Documentary crew goes up the river to find a rare indigenous tribe, and finds more than they bargained for!

Ice Cube’s first line: ‘’Today is gonna be a good day’’ Jennifer Lopez: pensive, suspicious, often wearing a wet T-shirt. Owen Wilson: also here. But the prize goes to Jon Voight, doing a Tommy Wiseau accent, and delivering lines like ‘’never look in the eyes of those you kill, they will haunt you forever. I know:• before eventually fighting a cartoon/puppet snake, and actually winking at J.Lo after he gets regurgitated, before he gets re-swallowed. (Spoiler alert!)
Apparently there’s a lukewarm cult following, which is about what it deserves.

Zodiac (2007)
David Fincher will never beat ‘’Seven’’ but on an off day he’s still pretty good, and this movie just radiates adequacy. It’s a serviceable cop & newspaper procedural that skips along despite the 2h40m runtime (watch it in 40 minute chunks!), credit mostly to the acting: Robert Downey Jr as a flamboyant alcoholic reporter, Mark Ruffalo as Detective Sideburns, and especially Jake Gyllenhaal, as cartoonist turned investigative journalist, who gets the movie to himself for the final hour, and mostly makes it work.
It’s fine! It’s a movie!

August

The Lake House (2006)
The magic mailbox movie! Just as delightfully bad as I remembered.

Here’s an idea: reunite the charismatic leads from Speed for a paranormal romance, but give them exactly two scenes together, add a time-loop mechanic that no one questions (family and co-workers: oh, did you get another letter from your temporally-displaced lover? No big deal.) and throw in a pointless architect-with-daddy-issues subplot, and what do you get? A god-dammned masterpiece, that’s what. All credit due to Sandra Bullock who keeps things grounded and is as charming as ever (Keanu Reeves mostly treads water). Just roll with it.

The Invitation (2015)
When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory? Extremely slow-build
locked-door thriller, the movie got me on its side by the end, with a nice little sidebar on grief and by landing the ending with a surprise escalation.
Don’t lose YOUR invitation, to this film!

Inception (2010)
Almost forgot how great Christopher Nolan is at the thinky action thriller: just enough philosophy to flatter the audience. This is as great as it ever was (the rotating and zero-g hallway scenes still kill) and as convoluted. The basic rules and levels still feel ripped from a video game, and I think this would make a fantastic series of comics, but here the text is somewhat lost in subtext on a rewatch ten years later. The movie is about movies, see? Those things where you can indulge in fantasy, live out a lifetime in two hours? Those things you should avoid believing are real?

The only thing that bugged me this time was the suicide-is-sexy trope around Mal. Her first line, in a flirty trench accent: ‘’if I jumped, would I survive?’’

There Will Be Blood (2007)
And they say horror movies don’t win awards! Everything here is glossed-up
B-movie horror, from the cinematography,
the excellent anxiety-inducing score, down to Daniel Day-Lewis’s not-so-conflicted psychopath anti-hero oil man, often lit in washes of red, the devil incarnate; the scenes of California’s oil boom play out like a sinister force unleashed.

The Core (2003)
The Earth’s core has stopped spinning and the magnetic field is going to collapse, ending all life on Earth, etc etc. Thus, a crew of astronauts and scientists ( astronauts are not scientists in this movie) team up to journey to the center of the Earth in a magic submarine that dives through solid rock with trippy Windows-screen-saver-quality CGI effects. Not bad enough to be good, it’s just an overlong Armageddon rip-off, without the Aerosmith.

Hunt For The Wilderpeople (2016)
Maybe there’s no whimsy in my soul, or maybe I’m just not a huge Taika Waititi fan* when he’s working outside his Disney franchises. I turned this off about half way through, neither of the two characters clicking for me, and the kid actively annoying with his limited emotive range and awkward line readings. There’s much to be said of course for awkward line readings in a New Zealand accent, but here it just doesn’t gel into much of anything.
(Tell me if I should give this another shot; I loved What We Do In The Shadows and Thor: Ragnarok but found JoJo Rabbit uncomfortable and tonally inconsistent/jarring.)

Julie & Julia (2009)
Rom-com legend Nora Ephon’s final film, with a weird structure: a split narrative that follows Meryl Streep’s Julia Child in the 50s, writing her first cookbook in France, while in 2002 New York, Amy Adams’ Julie Powell biogs every recipie from that book. The two character arcs parallel each other, of course, and both are given about equal screentime, and by the end the structure made thematic sense as both women find success writing and working on their passion, making themselves a career, strong independent women with loving, supportive husbands who mostly get out of the way. Plus there’s a bit about a person’s relationship to a work of art, which was nice.
But, Streep’s performance is a one-note impression, and she faces zero impactful setbacks in her story, there’s no drama. The Julia Child voice is best in small doses. Amy Adams gets much more to do, as she works through her various generational anxieties.

Though based on a true story, this is a fairy tale, and exists outside of context. For example: Julie works as a receptionist for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and spends all day at work answering calls from 9/11 victims families. Then, cooks and blogs. Just another day at the office, wow you shoulda heard this guy go on about his dead wife. Blah blah blah, let’s eat!, No analysis here, of this obvious coping mechanism.

The Wicker Man (1973)
Another horror flick I’ve never seen, pretty tame and simplistic by today’s standards: Jesus Cop finds a Pagan cult while investigating a missing girl on an isolated island. There’s really none of the psychological subtext or social commentary you see in true classics of the genre, but it moves along quickly, has a handful of memorable scenes and top-notch creepy animal masks. One of those not-great films with a solid premise that make for the best remakes.

The Wicker Man (2006)
Marginal improvements on the 1978 original ? all around, notably Nic Cage’s incredulous performance that reads as critique of the earlier film. The cop character gets a little more backstory that connects him to the island society more directly, which ups the stakes, and in general character motivation is clearer here. The Pagan cult has been replaced with a matriarchal “colony” and the bee theme ties everything together nicely.

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016)
A very good, maybe even great music mockumentary written by and starring Andy Samberg/The Lonely Island and possibly the funniest film I’ve seen in years (though it’s been slim pickings in comedy). The songs are the weakest part, very much Lonely Island songs in that they’re usually one joke, with absurdist escalation. A lot of scenes follow that same template, but work better because they don’t wear out their welcome, they draw on the talents of a cast of comedy legends, they tie directly to the narrative, and they showcase some great comedic writing and joke construction. The celebrity-musician talking head cutaways are used well, and the band-break-up-and-reunion plot (spoiler alert?) is a functional thing to hang the jokes on, exactly what it needs to be.

Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)
Made by a creative team that was basically never heard from again, and apparently misrepresented in marketing and reviews, this feels like it deserves to be a cult classic. It’s a mockumentary about a small town high school beauty pageant, and sticks very close to the Christopher Guest playbook, focused on outlandish characters that send up the obsessions of ‘’real America’’ — I was reminded of the Talking Heads ‘’True Stories’’ as well — but compared to those precedents this has real bile in store for its less sympathetic characters, especially corrupt pageant organizer Kristie Allie and her daughter/ contest winner Denise Richards, who seems to have learned a bit about satire from her time on Starship Troopers a few years earlier.
The second half of the movie is taken up by the contest itself, with some funny bits but nothing that stings as much as the character introduction scenes, and the ending is a bit of a let down, even as we see those who corrupted the process of the contest with their wealth and power finally brought to justice.

Marriage Story (2019)
Get ready folks, it’s a talkie! Enough dialog for four movies, and most of it delivered in stilted, evenly-spaced line readings from these normally-naturalistic actors. The best bits occur in the rare pauses, when the steady camera lingers on a shared smile between the two would-be divorcees, giving Scarlet Johanssen and Adam Driver a moment to catch their breath and hint, wordlessly, at the intimacy they’ve lost. But these moments are rare, and the custody battle between two showbiz types feels algorithmically-generated ‘’for your consideration.”

Laura Dern as a high-energy no-shit-takin’ lawyer lights up every one of her scenes, signs of life in a movie that’s otherwise kind of a drag.

Crazy Rich Asians (2018)
One of those ‘’help! My boyfriend’s a secret millionaire!’’ movies, a blandly amiable rom-com, notable for it’s all-asian lead cast but otherwise forgettable. At times it feels like a tourism ad for Singapore, and the architecture and landscapes of the island city-state do indeed inspire travel planning.
More problematic: the central narrative deals with a massive wealth disparity between the central couple, but generally celebrates the inherited dynastic fortune as well-earned and admirable. The film never threatens satire or critique, and resolves in favor of the wealthy suitor. The jazzy soundtrack reinforces the idea that this is a tale of a new gilded age, Singapore the new heart of global capital, a success in part due to long-standing traditions of filial piety. But it’s all pleasant enough.

Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Another classic and award-winning film I somehow missed, today it plays as a pretty straightforward cop procedural, with Jodie Foster’s Clarice striving to solve her case, in spite of the roadblocks thrown up by the disrespectful men in her department. Anthony Hopkins’ anti-hero Hannibal Lector (an all-time classic character name, the cannibal psychopath whose superpower is speech) is the only person in the film who shows Clarice respect, and their scenes together are magnetic. The rest, doesn’t quite stand the test of time.

Hot Rod (2007)
Andy Samberg as a wannabe stuntman/Evel Knievel character, in a paint-by-numbers Lorne Michaels production — lots of SNL DNA, for better or worse.
I had high hopes after enjoying Popstar but it’s clear that Samberg advanced significantly as an actor in the decade between the two movies (yes, really) and benefits from more creative control. Here, he mostly mugs to the camera, and attempts to sell lines with goofy expressions, and it only occasionally works. Amusing, but never laugh out loud funny, and feels way too long at 87 minutes.

Read the cast list and you might be compelled to check this out, but rest assured this is not a career high point for anyone involved, and you’re not missing much by skipping it.

Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Spoiler alert: nobody puts baby in a corner! An underdog-going-for-the-championship sports flick that — no shit — swerves into a third act gut-punch endorsement of assisted suicide.

A lot to love here, from the ponderous/profound Morgan Freeman narration that’ll have you looking over your shoulder for Andy Dufrene, to the sweet
substitute-father/daughter thing that develops between Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank (much improved from her days in The Core). But with the big twist, all the subtext is suddenly out in the open air: Clint may as well be her long-lost daddy, and the substitution of suicide for that championship belt never feels like a win, no matter how many times the script tells you to believe it.

Eastwood’s range as an actor is let’s say limited, but his direction here is fine, especially during the fight scenes and after-hours gym scenes that use *chiaroscuro* to great effect: isolating and bodies in space, letting the void between individuals stand for the missing connections in their lives.

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
Add this to your quarantine watchlist immediately: a bunker-lockdown thriller with smart writing (great setups and payoffs throughout) a handful of
laugh-out-loud gags, simple and effective action sequences and a concluding twist that I didn’t see coming, but enjoyed, though I found everything up to that point much more interesting. John Goodman is great as the maybe-psychotic bunker owner, but Mary Elizabeth Winstead really shines as the captive under mysterious circumstances testing various means of escape. Nothing too deep here, just a well made low-budget genre flick, entertaining as hell.

Yes, God, Yes (2020)
Barely a movie at 77 minutes with credits, it’s a featherweight horny-teen-at-Jesus-camp plot, with some light critique of Catholic repression. This is primarily of interest as a showcase for Natalia Dyer (the sister in Stranger Things), a wonderfully expressive young actor, and not much beyond that. Short and sweet.

I Used To Go Here (2020)
A wistful mid-30s-crisis story that highlights the appeal and hazards of nostalgia. Gillian Jacobs plays a published author who returns to her college town for a reading, falls into some college hijinks, and grows a little on the way, Jermaine Clement plays the perfect creep-professor who invited her. Well-paced and interesting, it really nails that feeling of mid-career ennui; that even when you’ve had success you may feel unfulfilled, and long for the days before your choices had sent you down a path. Funny and touching, and just a little weird.

Basic Instinct (1992)
Paul Verhoeven is a genius satirist and this is probably the closest he ever got to becoming the lowest-common-denominator director he parodied so well; here, a neo-noir erotic thriller that veers close to softcore porn.
Or could you call the film a commentary on media influence, where the main characters push and pull at how narratives shape reality and vice versa.
Either way, it’s a sexy melodrama and should be part of your Verhoeven watch list.

Sputnik (2020)
Nothing to do with the famous satellite; I’ve read that the title means passenger or companion, and that’s about all you’ll want to know going into this tense first-contact film set primarily in a Soviet bunker.
A lot of this will be very familiar for sci-fi fans, including a subplot about tension between the military and scientists, and the limits strict hierarchies place on researchers. But the plot goes to some unexpected places, and it’s engaging throughout.

Pacific Rim (2013)
There’s something admirable about the desire to make the best damn giant robots vs monsters movie possible, and it almost works here with decent Mecha and Kaiju designs and legible candy-neon fight sequences. However, the characters and plot are paper thin and predictable, and at over two hours it’s a slog. Big and dumb, but not big or dumb enough, and too earnest to poke fun at the obvious ridiculousness of it all.

Colossal (2017)
Oh, this could have been good. Anne Hathaway (after a breakup, because when else can women have character growth?) moves home to Small Town, USA, discovers that under certain circumstances her actions control a Kaiju monster wreaking havoc on Seoul. The first half of the movie sets this up as a neat metaphor where the monster = her alcoholism, but then plot complications muddy the metaphor and by the end we’re supposed to embrace the monster as a means of escape from a toxic relationship. The ending is superficially satisfying, but if you’re gonna build your movie on a sci-fi metaphor, you should aim for consistency in it’s definition.

The Game (1997)
David Fincher, between Seven and Fight Club, and similar to both in it’s stance on how one’s perception of reality can be altered by context, personal relationships, and who you choose to trust. A great psychological melodrama, anchored by a maybe-going-crazy Michael Douglas (the best kind of Michael Douglas).
I still have Verhoeven on the brain, and it’s hard not to see parallels here with both Total Recall (the central plot involving an exciting reality-bending service performed for a successful but complacent protagonist) and Basic Instinct (protagonist caught up in events that may or may not be performative, to manipulate his behavior), both of which pre-date this. But Fincher plays it straight and we get a tense drama whose ridiculous plot points are believable because it’s established early on that money is no object for our main characters: elites whose every whim can be entertained, for a price.

Falling Down (1993)
A remarkable film, and pretty uncomfortable to watch in 2020 as it deals with the toxicity of nostalgia, and how barely-concealed rage at the loss of status can turn to violence at the slightest provocation. Michael Douglas’s character is unhinged from the beginning, and his escalating madness is so entertaining that you root for him despite yourself, even when none of his actions can be reasonably justified. The film offers him no reception, offers no solution to society’s ills, and stops just short of condemning the audience’s complicity in this celebration of violence, making it hard to pin down.

Altered States (1980)
A professor seeks to understand the secrets of the universe through isolation-tank and drug-induced hallucinations, ends up as a monkey man instead. Fast-paced and entertaining with some unexpected twists, but the best parts are the hallucination special effects sequences, which make great use of green screen compositing and other pre-digital video effects, culminating in a ‘’satanic rave’’ aesthetic that feels fresh after years of glossy CGI.

Blue Ruin (2013)
Neat and nasty little indie revenge parable, too violent and humorless to qualify as a caper, but with similar attention paid to the elements of a plan coming together or falling apart.

The Stepford Wives (1975)
In today’s genre terms, it’s a good-maybe-great social-thriller with some mild folk-horror elements, and holds up very well indeed in 2020, still a biting satire of patriarchy and the toxicity of revanchist nostalgia.

Spoilers for a 45 year old movie: the film does great work early on setting up a few red herrings for the mechanism of the stepfordization — we know the root cause when the Men’s Association security guard explains that their purpose is ‘’to restore what’s ruined’’ in supposed regard to their dilapidated HQ. When it’s revealed that the transformed women are advanced Disneyland automata it’s a bit of a swerve when drugs/something-in-the-water would have worked just as fine as the reveal.

September

Super 8 (2011)
Emotionally-manipulative 80s Spielberg rip-off from JJ Abrams. Attempts ET / Close Encounters-style wonder, mixed with suburban-kids-on-bikes adventure, a monster/ military plot that’s tonally inconsistent with the rest, and not one but two (count em!) missing-mom characters who reconcile with their fathers thanks to this alien-nonsense adversity.
Bad CGI, action scenes totally out of scale with an otherwise low-stakes story, dim and ugly color grading, distracting anamorphic lens flare. This is not a good looking movie.

The good: kids actors not totally annoying. I liked the little cubes that could assemble into a spaceship, needed more of that. Oh, spoilers! I liked the magnetized water-tower scene, until the main kid let go of his dead mom’s locket so the alien can finish it’s spaceship. Character growth! Pffffft.

Contagion (2011)
The feel-good story of a global pandemic brought under control by effective political leadership and hard-working scientists. So, a fantasy!
I think the movie wants us to believe 25 million people die, but the audience only bids goodbye to two of the three female leads, and the scale of the tragedy is never really felt. The movie skips around to a bunch of different characters, only tangentially related storylines, and feels choppy and episodic. The best parts are completely wordless and anonymous, with mostly background actors performing the tasks of quarantine or research — or simply touching surfaces — in montage with a great tense e-drum heavy soundtrack.

The Dead Zone (1983)
David Cronenberg does Stephen King, with a zany young Christopher Walken as the schoolteacher who wakes up from a coma with physic abilities.
The film breaks down into three clear-cut segments, the first two much better than the last. First, we see Walken’s work and home life, the crash that puts him down, and his recovery — this is all great stuff as we’re on edge wondering whether the ability will lead to madness or make this guy a hero. That tension pays off in the second act when the movie briefly turns into a psychic cop procedural — which is lots of fun, with Walken in a trench coat solving crimes. Then, the final act takes another turn towards a ‘’would you kill Hitler’’ scenario, which just seems tacked on after a decent conclusion.

Fatal Attraction (1987)
The definitive erotic thriller? I found it preachy and moralistic even before Michael Douglas starts carrying a white rabbit around. Douglas is a city lawyer moving to an idyllic country home with his wife and kid, Glenn Close lives in the hog carcass & open fires district. Their weekend affair leads to harassment as increasingly devilish Close tortures Douglas. Get it?
The movie lets Close make some good points in dialog, but everything else in the filmmaking casts her as the villain. But hey, tortured Michael Douglas is good Michael Douglas. Mostly leaves the Catholic shit behind for the bonkers final act, but still: MD confesses and is forgiven.

Armageddon (1998)
King of shit mountain, the last big disaster movie before the 9/11 moratorium, it’s pop garbage of the highest calibre. An asteroid is heading to Earth, and only one rag-tag team of oil drillers can stop it.
It’s Michael Bay, so women are either bitches or decoration, Liv Taylor the latter, mostly wet-crying, and minorites are mostly here for dated and offensive stereotype comic relief.

There’s the bare nationalism: a militarized NASA might as well be Space Force, the US president addresses the entire world to mark the crisis, flags are deployed unsparingly. The orchestral soundtrack interweaves the melodies of Aerosmith’s ‘’Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’’ with the Star Spangled Banner.
The generic father-daughter-boyfriend stuff doesn’t bother me, and gives Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck some scenes to try acting, Steve Buscemi is here as a genius maybe-pedophile for laffs.

The rest is all action, baby! Shit blows up good, with practical model effects and judicious use of CGI, and the action generally exciting and well-staged.
But still, bad movie.

Jawbreaker (1999)
Apparently a cult classic, dark comedy in which a high school clique of popular girls accidentally kill their friend, and a little morality play ensues. Rose McGowan gets a few good witchy monologues, which work well with the overall campy tone, and Judy Greer gets an instant nerd-to-popular makeover as part of the cover-up …. for reasons? Pam Grier as the investigating cop and Carole Kane as the school principal are both mostly wasted.

The script feels like a draft, there’s a narrative arc here but none of the plot points land with any impact, there’s only sketches of character development, most of this occurring when the rest of the clique finally turns on Rose McGowan, whose hubris and sense of superiority contribute to her downfall.

I’m Thinking Of Ending Things (2020)
Charlie Kaufman, a writer always better tempered by a co-equal director, here takes both roles, and while we’re watching, the entirety of the universe may as well only exist in the dude’s head.

This is a movie packed with ideas, too many. Is language what enables humans to perceive time (a description of an event is by nature displaced in time from the event) and is this what gives us the ability to conceptualize our own mortality? Is objective reality a thing, or is the world/universe constructed through relations of independent, interior subjectivities? (I.e. intersubjective reality, my favorite kind). Similarly, can a text or work of any media exist in isolation, without reference to other work? As in Kaufman’s other work, we get a meditation on the role of the artist, on how work changes in translation, how experience colors perception, etc etc etc, and more. It’s a lot to take in.

The best bits are the dialogs between the central couple, formed mostly of reviews of books, poetry, and movies, in a very real early-relationship exchange of opinions on media that ties nicely to the stuff I mentioned above.
But the whole movie is so disjointed, scattered, unfocused, and the characters identities so destabilized that it becomes hard to care about their trials. This might be the point: the ending seems to suggest that only in seeking and receiving acknowledgement and validation can we become fully human. In other words: it’s a love story!

The Social Dilemma (2020)
Well, it’s a not-very-good documentary about the threat Facebook and other social media companies pose to global democracy. And a little bit of critique of capitalism as seeing perverse and self-destructive incentives for society.
I’m certainly not immune to the manipulations of FB etc but I do think that anyone who’s learned basic critical thinking should be able to recognize when they’re being fed a lie. Maybe I’m naive: obviously people are increasingly polarized and social media is certainly to blame. Certainly bad actors have found ways to use these platforms to advance their own agendas. And the issues with the tech industry outlined here are certainly big big problems.
But as a MOVIE it doesn’t really click. It’s appropriately alarmist, but it’s too broad in scope to dig into the root causes of the problem it can barely name, and doesn’t offer any solutions to the problem of social media, when solutions definitely exist.

Sphere (1998)
It’s a Michael Crichton story, and who doesn’t love those? Hastily-sketched but still-compelling characters, a hooky premise (alien ship at the bottom of the sea, let’s investigate!), and a nice gloss of questionable science, all wrapped in lite sci-fi horror tropes. Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Samuel L Jackson hold it down, and while it does get pretty goofy (name another movie with a jellyfish attack sequence!) there’s plenty to love: cool underwater scenes, a claustrophobic submarine-habitat falling apart, 90s CGI that’s mostly ok, hidden in a wash of murky water.

Wall Street (1987)
A fine film, with some nice points about income inequality and democracy that still feel pretty relevant in 2020. The big draw is Michael Douglas’ iconic role as stock asshole Gordon Gekko, who through sharp writing and manic performance becomes a perfect-cynic truth-teller: the guy who recognizes the economy for the gambling scam that it is, and simply plays the game for fun and profit. Charlie Sheen as the young stockbroker trying to learn the game is fine as the blank audience surrogate who gets chewed up and spit out.

Deep Blue Sea (1999)
A recommendation off ‘’Sphere’’ for the sea-base falling apart setting and the light sci-fi premise. Here shark DNA can cure alzheimer’s (yes, really), but we had to make big brain sharks to do it. And everyone knows: the bigger the brain, the smarter the shark. That’s science. Samuel L Jackson is well on his way from ‘’Jurassic Park’’ to ‘’Snakes On A Plane’’ but has a great death scene here. Feels like a paycheck. The other actors are mostly unknown to me and unremarkable. Not great, and not truly terrible, it’s a sci-fi monster movie in the post-Jurassic-Park era, can’t compete. But amazing real water effects, in flooded sets, supposedly in the Titanic pools. So there’s that!

Panic Room 2002
A David Fincher movie! Pleasantly surprised by this director’s less-acclaimed work, like this unpretentious home-invasion thriller. At best it’s a *spatial thriller* with the characters battling for territory in a complex three-dimensional space, battle lines established through great CGI transitions that let the camera section through the NYC brownstone like it’s a doll house. At worst it’s a cheesy horror film, elevated by sharp direction and a great cast featuring Jodie Foster and tween Kristen Stewart as mom and kid, and a sympathetic villain in Forest Whitaker.

Zathura (2005)
Jon Favreau’s third (?) as director, right before ‘’Iron Man’’ and his subsequent merge with the Disney Marvel Star Wars machine. It’s Jumanji in space!
Early scenes are promising, capturing a bit of that 80s Spielberg and John Hughes magic (including a pretty obvious Home Alone reference!), but once the game starts manifesting robots and aliens it devolves into scenes of high-pitched bickering and dated CGI. Nice use of a Greene and Greene craftsman house as the main setting, though! Might appeal to parents as a safe action adventure tale for the pre-tween crowd. I couldn’t finish it.

Hollow Man (2000)
Paul Veerhoven’s final Hollywood movie, a fine sci-f1 thriller but missing the acid wit of his best work. An invisible man story is chock-full of potential for the destabilized-identity-and-role-of-narrative-in-self­perception stuff found in Total Recall, Basic Instinct, and Showgirls, but here it’s mostly absent, aside from the line about mirrors and what you can do when you don’t have to look at yourself. There are moments when the camera switches to handheld, voyeuristic shots, and it’s a disappointment that Verhoeven holds back on the sex and violence in these moments, when it would be so easy to amp it up and implicate the audience in the perpetuation of an amoral and violent culture, as in RoboCop or Starship Troopers. But still. Solid and entertaining, with appropriate levels of cheese from Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth Shue, and Josh Brolin, and dated but neat special effects. The title makes the theme obvious: when one can act with impunity, whence morals? Etc.

First Cow (2019)
At best, it’s a well-crafted frontier parable about the temptations and perils of greed. At worst, an overlong mood piece with a thin plot that relies heavily on nice compositions, natural scenery, and rustic sets to carry it along.
This frontier narrative just feels out-of-date; several characters remark that they’ve arrived in this territory ‘’before history’’ — totally discounting the native people who are here, unnamed, as fur traders and set dressing. There are spare hints of a metaphor — the central couple seeks their fortune through theft first of all — but links between their story and the colonization of the Oregon Territory are left unconnected.

This would have made a fantastic 50 minute short, with tighter editing, and ditch the prologue. With the decline in theaters and rise of streaming, does every ‘’movie’’ need to be 2 hours long?

October

Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2015)
A solid action thriller / modern western set on the US-Mexico border, with Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro reprising their roles from the excellent Sicario but no Emily Blunt, a different director, and lacking most of what made the original so great: the characters’ shifting loyalties and moral ambiguities that served as a critique of US-Mexico policy and imperial war-making in general. Still lots to enjoy here, though it is a much simpler movie.

Gone Girl (2014)
Not David Fincher’s best, a rambling missing person procedural that turns into a campy erotic thriller for the final act, with many twists and turns along the way. A lot of this is great: especially the first hour, where Ben Affleck’s character is under increasingly scrutiny for his wife’s disappearance and we get flashbacks of their deteriorating relationship. When it switches gears to Rosamund Pike’s perspective it gets a little loopy, and doesn’t work as well. Overall, it’s a bit of a shambling mess but worth watching for the highlights, like the now-classic ‘’cool girl’’ monologue and a late murdersex scene straight outta Basic Instinct.

Predestination (2015)
A time-travel paradox flick as convoluted as the song that pops up in the background: ‘’I’m My Own Grandpa:’ That may already be too much of a spoiler, but the concluding twist will be obvious early to anyone paying attention. Still, fun to see this unfold. The twisty plot, mysterious government agency, and midcentury sets and costumes all remind me of The Adjustment Bureau; a much better and broader movie in the same vein.

Bound (1996)
Cultural impact of The Matrix aside, The Wachowskis aren’t particularly good filmmakers, so if I say this might be their best movie, well... It’s really two movies in one: an entertaining lesbian affair storyline serves as an extended intro — Gina Gershon and Jenifer Tilly are both great in these scenes — then it abruptly switches to a Mafia deal gone wrong plot populated by generic wiseguys, with the two women almost totally sidelined, despite being the instigators of the mob drama, stealing a suitcase full of cash. There’s some interesting and flashy camera work, and some tense moments, but overall not much to see here.

The Fly (1986)
A goddamn masterpiece of B-movie schlock, with a good hour of delightful Jeff Goldblum mad-scientist rants to a bemused-to-terrified Geena Davis before a single gloppy prosthetic is to be seen. Then, as Goldblum turns more monstrous in appearance and action, the best blood-and-pus-slathered, vomitaceous, fingernail-peeling practical creature effects since ‘’The Thing’’ culminating in a skin-shedding showdown with some surprising emotional stakes. It’s great!

Green Room (2015)
From the director of ‘’Blue Ruin’’ (and I hope there’ll be a red to make a trilogy)- a simple and tight indie thriller where a punk band tries to escape from a Nazi punk club. It’s plotted like a video game, complete with weapons upgrades and increasingly difficult enemies, but it’s all good antifascist fun, and shot and directed artfully and earnestly (though there are a few good situational laffs ). My only complaint is that Patrick Stewart seems a little stunt-cast, this would have worked better with an unknown actor as the main villain.

Jaws (1975)
Revisiting this after years/decades, I was expecting to love it. And the first half is incredible, showing that Spielberg’s core strength has always been the construction of compelling characters through the pure language of cinema, including: perfect casting, an efficient script, and especially Spielberg’s composition and camera work that mirrors the emotional tenor of each scene.

The political battle with the Mayor who wants to reopen the beach still feels incredibly fresh in 2020, obviously, and provides a more compelling conflict than the more famous shark stuff of the second half. The movie kinda falls apart with the shift to pure action, in part because the rubber shark, when it finally does appear, looks really, really bad, but mainly because all the churning and chomping takes focus away from the characters and theirr ideological struggles, the narrative stripped down to survival and the wider political ramifications left unresolved.

Into The Night (1985)
Bizarre, unfunny John Landis movie (same year as Spies Like Us — a year before Three Amigos) that follows Jeff Goldblum’s sad-sack engineer on an overnight adventure with Michelle Pfeiffer’s mysterious criminal sexpot.
Swings wildly in tone from straight action crime thriller to goofy slapstick (Goldblum’s pratfalls are excellent), and never really settles on what kind of movie it wants to be. Pfieffer is the standout here, and her character drives the action. Goldblum’s character is along for the ride, mostly passive until the ending, and he gets too few chances for the halting monologues that give him such weirdo appeal.

The Invisible Man (2020)
Good-not-great #believewomen twist on the classic monster movie. Elizabeth Moss, great throughout, starts off by literally escaping an abusive relationship; when her ex turns up dead by apparent suicide, she is haunted by his memory and the mental scars of some serious gaslighting. Stop there, and this could have been fantastic, using horror tropes to explore psychic trauma. But no, a few floating knives and flops on the floor later it’s clear we have a literal invisible man situation, and we’re back in slasher territory. It’s all a little goofy, but some good scares, decent action, and stylish set design and camerawork elevate it.

Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm (2020)
Well. What is Borat in 2020? This style of Candid-Camera cringe comedy feels incredibly dated. The big stunts are mostly uncomfortable body-function juvenalia and gross-out scenes meant to elicit offense from unsuspecting normies. The fish-outta-water Kazakhstan stuff mixes anti-patriarchy satire (good!) with down-punching ‘’shithole country’’ gags that reek of first-world privilege (bad!). But then there are the quiet moments, when in-character Borat and daughter elicit complacently racist, xenophobic, misogynist, and authoritarian responses to their leading questions, revealing how easily ‘’real Americans’’ will abandon the ideals of equality and justice to appease a customer or reinforce in-group solidarity. The Giuliani scene: nothing we didn’t already know, the guy is a horny creep, and incredibly susceptible to manipulation. If Borat could catfish him, what could the GRU do?

The Abyss (1989)
Underappreciated early/mid-career James Cameron movie, and the best underwater-aliens flick by a long shot. It’s great!

I’d forgotten that the alien stuff is only a minor element in what’s really a tense locked-room thriller with a rag-tag crew forced to deal with compounding disasters on their sea-bed drilling station. The drama comes from these characters under (literal, ha ha) pressure, not from the
(benign!) aliens or any other external threat. Maintains a balance between the claustrophobic pipe-filled hallways of the rig, and blue-and-flares underwater scenes — great use of color in these. (Reminds me of ‘’The Thing’’ in cinematography, extreme setting, and basic plot.) The effects mostly hold up, aside from a few obvious green screen shots.

Alien (1979)
Believe it or not, folks, I’ve never seen this or any of the Alien sequels! This is great: a concise sci-fi horror flick, with an amusing ensemble cast that gets picked off one by one by the seldom-seen alien. A perfect movie, in that it knows exactly what it is and executes that vision precisely. The world-building and production design leaves you wanting more, and Weaver as Ripley is an unforgettable action hero, once she’s called on to act.

Aliens (1986)
Take the setting and protagonist from the first movie, tweak the genre from survival horror to tower defense, and layer on a parenting theme to raise the survival stakes to generational, oh and have a perfect sequel title, representing the expanding threat but also implying reproduction, a theme relevant to both the plot of the movie and the meta-narrative of sequel-making.

Not as good as Alien which was so pure in intent and execution, and too long by half an hour, it’s still cracking blockbuster cinema with impeccable sets and effects, and great characters with clear and justified motivations — especially again Ripley, who must now balance foster-parenting with her defacto leadership position. And definitely more here for fans of flamethowers and explosions! Would be interesting to compare to Terminator 2, another James Cameron sci-fi parenting metaphor.

November

Doctor Sleep (2019)
Really two movies in one: an interesting campy witch/vampire tale coupled with a ‘’The Shining’’ nostalgia trip focused on generational trauma and alcoholism. These don’t always mesh, but the result is fun and entertaining regardless.

It’s all much goofier than The Shining and leaves behind most of that movie’s deeper themes, so don’t expect Kubrick. But the villains are a pretty unique take on the gothic vampire thing, and the homage/revisit of the Overlook hotel is impressive extreme fan service.

Host (2020)
Found footage pandemic zoom call seance-gone-wrong horror short. It’s perfect, in that it delivers exactly what it promises, makes great use of an obviously limited budget, small cast, constrained setting, and 40 minute run time. Covid-19 precautions are mostly respected but also played for laffs one elbow bump in particular and it all feels very 2020 real. Classic horror tropes help nail the landing: blink and you’ll miss some haunted house vignettes, and the rare effects shots are … effective.

The American President (1995)
A strange thing: a wholesome Rob Reiner rom-com and Aaron Sorkin political drama mashup with Michael Douglas as a charming widowed POTUS and Annette Benning as his passionate lobbyist girlfriend. From today’s vantage the idea of a single President dating during an election year isn’t quite as ludicrous as the idea of a functional and well-intentioned White House. It’s all so disconnected from 2020 reality that it feels like a portal into another dimension. The Sorkin dialog is chewy as ever, with a few great walk-n-talks and one barnburner patriotic monologue, and hearing these lines delivered by Douglas and Benning (and Martin Sheen! Michael J. Fox! Richard Dreyfuss!) is a real pleasure. Beyond that, it’s all a little too pleasant, lacks any satiric edge.

Motherless Brooklyn (2019)
From one of my favorite sub-sub-genres, ‘’infrastructure noir;’ it’s a essentially detective story around the capital projects of Robert Moses’s New York, and take-down of a slightly fictional Moses and men like him who would sacrifice others in pursuit of power. The only connection to the Lethem book seems to be the title character, transposed from the novel’s present to the 50s. Ed Norton as the gumshoe with Turretts’ uses the vocal outbursts to punctuate scenes and it’s treated mostly respectfully but there is one scene where he scats along to a jazz band that seems incredibly insensitive to folks with this disorder, if not patronizing (it’s like a gift!). Two all-time-great Alec Baldwin monologues, one Fountainhead-visionary and slightly menacing, about the pursuit of power and the intoxicating desire to leave a legacy — And one unhinged, about how power sustains impunity and vice-versa. And a great cast all around. Jazzy soundtrack with a bonus Thom Yorke song. Sweet period sets. Social commentary! Goons! So many goons. One goon gets a flowerpot dropped on his head. So, it’s got some issues, gets a little goofy, but I loved ‘it and want to see Ed Norton write & direct more things.

In Time (2011)
You may have heard the expression ‘’time is money’’ -now imagine a world where that is true, LITERALLY. Once that concept is explained we get to the real — ­TIME IS OUR CURRENCY. IF YOU RUN OUT YOU DIE. After the basic premise is established we have a — ­IT’S LIKE THE REAL WORLD WHERE INEQUALITY IS A BIG PROBLEM. Eventually it settles in to a fun Bonnie & Clyde heist movie groove with Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried both doing their best with the dumb material — — IT’S A COMMENT ON SOCIETY. THE TIME THING. IT’S SIMILAR TO OUR WORLD, WHERE PEOPLE DIE IF THEY DON’T HAVE MONEY. Beyond the over-explained metaphor, it’s an enjoyably dumb sci-fi chase movie, think the last half of ‘’The Island;’ with some mild revolution. TIME.

The Hunt for Red October (1990)
Adapted from the novel by CIA propagandist Tom Clancy, it’s a quintessential Cold War thriller. In its best moments, it shows how minor tactical adjustments serve as a means of subtle communication between adversaries in a tense situation.

At its most ham-fisted, it attempts to make the case for gut-check judgement as superior to heirarchical decision-making, in a simultaneous critique of USSR and USA military power structures and implicit celebration of good-ol American individualism.

What I did not expect: restrained acting from both Sean Connery (rip) as the russian sub captain and Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan, CIA analyst thrust into an action situation. These characters could be cartoonish but are well played.
Worth checking out, especially if you want to talk to your dad about submarines.

La La Land (2016)
First, the good: Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone have chemistry and charisma to spare. This movie is a mess. It’s a musical without a single memorable melody or lyric. It’s a tale of struggling artists whose failure to land gigs has no material consequence. It’s a love story that amounts to the couple dating for a year, then choosing their careers instead, with great success. It’s relatively grounded, except when it breaks into pure fantasy. It’s certainly a disappointment from Damien Chazelle, whose ‘’Whiplash’’ was genius.
There are hints of theme here and there — the idea of the entertainment industry as a delusional fantasy gloss on reality; some thoughts about compromising artistic integrity to find success; how innovation drives the arts — but those get a few lines each. Mostly, this is cotton candy, and too much of it.

Prometheus (2012)
Ridley Scott takes one mysterious set from Alien and expands it into a full prequel-reboot that follows the structure and general vibe of the first Alien pretty closely, i.e. rag-tag space crew encounters various creatures, die off one by one. There’s enough new to keep things fresh, beautiful sets and great creatures. Michael Fassbender is appropriately creepy as the android with unclear motivations, but Noomi Rapace is the standout, getting most of the best action scenes and emotional moments. Nothing deep here, just entertaining sci-f1 action.

Alien: Covenant (2017)
Disappointing follow-up to ‘’Prometheus’’ — while that movie had some ties to the Alien series, this is fully back in that world, with tired retreads of all manner of Xenomorph-inflicted death.

And, it doesn’t even look all that great, relying on too much CGI and often using shakey-cam and a weird jittery frame rate effect that just detracts from the action.

The final battle sequences just drag on and on, but the concluding twist is satisfying even if you guess it a half hour early.
And I think that concludes my run of the Alien series, since the rest are surely even worse than this…

Nocturnal Animals (2016)
Simple Jake Gyllenhaal revenge thriller (say, 80% of movie), intercut with scenes of Amy Adams reading that story, sitting by the fireplace, looking pensive, or in bed, looking perturbed, or SUDDENLY! dropping the manuscript when something SHOCKS her.

There’s some backstory between the author of the manuscript and Adams’ character, but it amounts to maybe three scenes and only the lightest pencil sketches of the characters, good luck caring about this framing device.
The revenge stuff is better, but there’s not enough there to flesh out a full movie, which is perhaps why it gets cut with filler, and slathered with a melodrama-strimgs soundtrack so you know when there’s DRAMA HAPPENING. Pbbbbbtthht!

The Soul of America (2020)
Almost-feature-length documentary. A pre-election appeal to trumpies, it puts today’s political divisions in historical context, with brief reviews of women’s suffrage, the KKK, civil rights, etc. There’s not much new information here and the brain-worm MAGA crowd won’t watch this extended TED talk, but maybe it inspired some old school Republicans to muster up some real patriotism. Well-produced I guess, but a little scattered in it’s subject matter and too short for a deep dive, there are certainly better ways to review this material.

Prospect (2018)
It’s a space-western! It’s great!

Anon (2018)
From the writer/director of Gattaca, but nowhere near that classic’s quality, it’s a simple sci-f1 noir detective story with Clive Owen chasing down Amanda Seyfried’s hacker who lives outside the bounds of a pervasive augmented-reality surveillance state.
Dumb-as-rocks dialog and plotting but decent performances and a cool blue monochrome aesthetic, with a fun interpretation of always-on AR info layers (via unexplained tech that also records everything everyone sees)
Philip K Dick rip-off, or mediocre Black Mirror episode, might be worth watching if that’s your niche.

Knock Knock (2015)
Shitty sexy-home-invasion thriller with zero thrills. Not bad enough to be good, despite some broad acting and some attempts at deliberate camp. Just tedious and annoying.

The Witch (2015)
Artsy folk-horror/western (w/r/t frontier narrative) with a lot of ponderous, lingering cinematography, a great creepy-ambient soundtrack, strong performance from a teen Anya Taylor-Joy, some chewy period dialog and •.. well, that’s about it. There’s not much of a plot, really, just some heavy-handed themes around the dangers of leaning on superstition/religion as an explanatory worldview. Points, I guess, for keeping things grounded — the horror is all psychological — but in the end it’s mostly a bore, better appreciated than enjoyed.

Cats (2019)
Tried. Couldn’t.

The Ides of March (2011)
Written/Directed by George Clooney, a decent pre-trump presidential primary campaign drama that follows Ryan Gosling’s hotshot political operative as he moves from idealism to transactional cynicism while he deals with a potential scandal. It plays lighter than it should, maybe because the first half is almost a romantic comedy, and the implications of the darker plot points are not allowed to play out in the story. I’m a fan of concise movies, but this felt cut short. Engaging characters and performances though, from Clooney (and his policy proposals), Gosling, Evan Rachel Wood, Paul Giamatti, and Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his last few roles.

The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974)
What’s simultaneously better/worse than the MTA? So extensive, so run-down; ubiquitous but shitty. I’m only an occasional New York tourist, but I know transit systems, and it’s somehow still plausible that a gang of mustachioed villains could hijack a NYC subway car, and engage in hostage negotiations with Walter Matthau. Was ‘’real-time thriller’’ a genre in 197 4? This scenario plays out over a tight 1 hr40m and the events don’t take much longer. I hope the remake has a ticking clock in the corner. Eventually the film settles into a nice rhythm between intercom hostage negotes and action scenes, and wraps up nice with the bad guys hoisted by their own petards.
At least do this: listen to the opening credits music and imagine 1970s New York.

Bombshell (2019)
A tightrope walk: we’re supposed to empathize with these women who’ve been harassed while advancing at Fox News, where they’re clearly complicit in the dumbing-down and fear-mongering of the electorate that’s turned half our country into blathering idiots. Hmm.

Yet, the movie is a well-made scandal-drama and Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, and Margot Robbie sell it. We rejoice when John Lithgow as a melting Roger Ailes is finally removed. But the movie is too hesitant to condemn the whole of Fox, and seems to be pulling punches for wider appeal.

All The President’s Men (1976)
Dramatization of Woodward & Bernstein’s Watergate reporting, with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the reporters. It must be difficult to turn a lot of phone calls, typing, and listing of names into a political thriller but here we are: but the end of the film we’ve got a portrait of two men doggedly pursuing the truth while nefarious forces attempt to corrupt the US government from within.

It was only a few years after the fact, and the movie assumes some familiarity with the men of the title, and never quite maps out the conspiracy for the audience. Despite the 2h1 Sm length it ends rather abruptly, concluding with a sequence of typed headlines covering the period between Nixon’s second inauguration and his resignation, events that should be the filmed payoff, if ya ask me.

Frost / Nixon (2008)
Pleasantly mediocre in typical Ron Howard style, never quite becomes the critique of media-and-politics that it could have been, it’s instead a boxing movie with the combative interview as the sport. Frank Langella and Michael Sheen play off each other well, but they and the rest of the cast, and the script, lack nuance.

The Handmaiden (2016)
Twisty 90s-style erotic thriller/ crime caper (pair with Bound, seriously) on a classy 1930s Korea backdrop, with great cinematography and set design, layered performances, and a few stand-out scenes. It’s a little goofy, and not at all as artsy­pretentious as the marketing makes it seem, a good thing.
The ending is satisfying, and the arcs overall make sense for the characters, but I thought everything was tied up too neatly in the end, with character motivations a bit unfocused. But moment to moment it’s always engaging.

December

The Death of Stalin (2018)
Should be a slam dunk: political jockeying by mediocre men in a power vacuum, from the creator of Veep.

And yet.

The good: basic concept, immaculate set design, Steve Buschemi. The bad: none of the characters feel real -there is practically zero backstory for any of them, and I don’t think that’s to honor the dead. The shaky camera work doesn’t fit — does someone have a Handy-Cam in 50s Moscow? Where do you buy your DV tapes? But most offensive, the jokes don’t really land, and Veep’s signature baroque-absurdist insults are totally missing.
Glad I saw it, but it doesn’t add up to much.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)
The reviews didn’t say it was a comedy! Aaron Sorkin often structures his dialog like jokes setup, punchline but this is chock-full of genuine laugh lines and characters who are tweaked just shy of cartoonish. The government versus protestors courtroom drama certainly feels relevant, but the most compelling stuff comes in flashback, as we see different groups’ approach to protest idealogy and practice.

A Few Good Men (1992)
Damn near perfect. Aaron Sorkin’s first produced screenplay, with more natural dialog than his later work, sharply drawn characters, and a lean structure that builds to a truly epic climax.

I had forgotten how little screentime Jack Nicholson actually gets, given how central his performance is to the film. This is mostly the Tom Cruise show, and he’s plenty convincing as he grows from a kinda slacker bro into a powerhouse trial lawyer who does his dead dad proud.

Sorkin is a patriot, and gives us a morality tale that exhalts the rule of law, posits that justice respects no heirarchies, but also demands that individuals maintain a personal code of ethics to guide their actions if and when they are met with questionable demands. We are also presented with an alternative worldview that glorifies power and entitlement. That corrupt ideology is dragged kicking and screaming offstage.

The Thing (2011)
Mediocre remake/prequel of John Carpenter’s masterpiece, lacking most of what made that a perfect movie. Not terrible, just a predictable monster movie.

There are a few scenes that convey a sense of claustrophobic paranoia, but mostly we get Mary Elizabeth Winstead standing around with her mouth open and shiny CGI creatures crashing through walls. Nothing notable about the soundtrack or cinematography, two key strengths of the original. Lots of plot and logic whiffs, near-total lack of character backstory or development.
So, I lied. Pretty bad.

2012 (2009)
Big dumb disaster movie in which the site of destruction is the entire world. A talented ensemble cast is mostly wasted, so don’t expect any character work. There is plenty of nonsense movie science in service of the elaborate and mostly good-looking CGI setpieces, which include: Washington Monument falls over, White House gets crushed by aircraft carrier, Los Angeles cracks apart into tilted plates that slide into the sea, Mt Everest flooded somehow.
Eventually, the plot turns to a race to get on a handful of sci-fi cruise ship arks hidden in the Himalayas (scientist man knew sea level would rise to 30,000 ft I guess). After briefly noting the inequalities of such a scheme, we get back to action, crash around a bit, and end with a sunset over a tectonically transformed Earth and some hundred thousand survivors. So, some fun effects shots but overall a waste of time, not really even notable within it’s genre.

Avatar (2009)
It’s just so much. It’s an anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist pro-environment fable from one of the most financially successful directors of all time, which raked in billions of dollars. It’s a white-savior narrative, where dude infiltrates a native community, learns their hierarchies, then impersonates their long-awaited prophet. It’s a charming fish-out-of-water romance. It’s the best movie about CGI cat people.

The themes are spelled out so clearly in plain dialog, that you don’t realize at first how the plot undercuts the message. We end the movie with an invader taking control of the native society, supposedly changed enough to become one of them. How is this better than military conquest? The big tree is still rubble.

There is good stuff here. The Na’vi society and their Gaia-mycelial network is a well-thought-out advancement on the consciousness-projecting ‘Avatar Program’ the humans implement, suggesting that empathy gained through projection can evolve into collective consciousness and collective action.

The special effects still look great, the imagined world of Pandora is like a 70s prog-rock album cover come to life.
But it’s all such an effort-full undertaking, all so calculated and cloying it’s hard to love.

‘’Avatar’’ questions:
If Jake and the crew came to Pandora in cryosleep, that’s a long journey. Where and when did they get the genetic samples to create the avatars they grew in fluid during the journey? What did first contact look like? The Na’vi must have met a human or machine first, then an avatar- body later. They make a big deal about Jake getting into the village, but Grace had already been there and helped build a school? What? Na’vi mind transfer can move a human consciousness to a Na’vi body. Whose body? We see a burial ritual, are some brain-dead Na’vi bodies held in reserve for the rare mind-transfer event? Do the humans understand the biological mechanism for this? Did they use that knowledge to create the avatar body interface? Why is there no youtube supercut of only Michelle Rodriguez’s scenes, focused on her badass helicopter pilot’s defection arc?

Hail, Caesar! (2016)
One of the Coen Bros’ best comedies. It’s mostly a languorous and seemingly slapdash collection of enjoyable scenes from old Hollywood, including: Scarlett Johanson as a synchronized-swimmer/mermaid, a lightly homoerotic sailors’ dance number with Channing Tatum, and plenty of George Clooney mugging so hard he might break his face.
But underneath it all, and made explicit in the communist kidnapping subplot, is the idea that the movies were love are a new form of religion, and are the real “opiate of the masses” despite how commie writers sneak in their messages of equality. Indeed, perhaps those messages in film are what placate the public and thus preclude revolution.
Fitting then, that all offers of change presented to the characters are rejected, and we end back where we started, status quo restored.
It’s kind of genius.

Molly’s Game (2017)
Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut, and full of Sorkin’s usual ping-pong dialog. Jessica Chastain does well in this mode, especially in the few scenes where she gets to be more expressive, but mostly she’s the calm center of the storm, reacting to the increasingly-ridiculous characters who join her poker game.
A lot of this is entertaining in the moment, but doesn’t add up to much. The true story is a one-liner (ex-olympic skier runs a high-stakes poker game) that never really gets fleshed out, even with some addiction and estranged-father subplots.

Ava (2020)
Jessica Chastain as an assassin for hire. It’s a generic shoot-em-up with a barely-there plot and improbable fight scenes sprinkled with cartoon sound effects. Watch Atomic Blonde instead.

The Lighthouse (2019)
An instant classic, a best-in-class psychological horror film that begs for interpretation and deals with isolation, addiction, self-destruction, generational succession, insanity, faith, duty, and the nature of reality.
I wasn’t blown away by Robert Eggers’ The Witch, but this takes everything that worked about that film — slow-build tension, period dialog, a hint of the supernatural — and amps it up while also ratcheting it down, confining the players to a clausterphobic setting and frame.
The squarish aspect ratio and black & white film stock are used to great effect. Excellent composition throughout, including that trick of using negative space to subdivide the frame to draw the viewer’s focus or establish power relationships between the characters. I wish I had seen this in a theater, the projected images shining through real celluloid.
Defoe and Pattinson play the hell out of their unraveling characters, coming very close to parody (as one meta line points out), but in my opinion they were tuned just right, each finding a balance between realism and absurdity.
Will need to revisit this one.

TENET (2020)
‘’Don’t try to understand it; feel it’’ — actual line from TENET, and good advice for enjoying this on the first run-through. Still, by the end, most of the machinations make sense -or at least enough sense that you’re convinced the logic could be sussed out with a big enough whiteboard and a few hours of focused study. But I don’t need to disassemble my watch to know it works, and TENET mostly delivers that classic Christopher Nolan smarty-pants action, which succeeds by complimenting the audience on their intelligence before showing a bunch of vehicles exploding. It’s a convoluted mess. It will surely be more enjoyable on a second viewing. It’s Nolan’s worst since Dark Knight Rises. It would work better as a series. It’s a lot of fun. Your milage may vary.

Interstellar (2014)
Best to think of it as Christopher Nolan’s version of Armageddon or The Core — a cheesy global-disaster movie with some neat ideas about spacetime. The emotional through-line works better than I remember, and the earthbound plot feels more relevant on rewatch. Also incredibly fun to watch after TENET — the time dilation stuff feels almost quaint, and I laughed at a line about time only moving forward. I’m feeling generous, so what the hell: maybe love does tie the universe together.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Probably the worst Christopher Nolan movie, and it’s still pretty entertaining with a handful of great action setpieces and enough character drama to cap the trilogy effectively even as it mostly works as a standalone piece. The politics and message of the movie are totally muddled, and Bane Voice is never not funny, but it’s solid overall. On re-watch the catwoman subplot was a lot more fun than I remembered, with Anne Hathaway playing up the camp about as far as it could go in a Nolan movie.

Underwater (2020)
More like underwhelming am I right? Cookie-cutter Alien rip-off with Kristen Stewart, not much improved from her Twilight days, and a cast of character actors who get picked off one by one by some mysterious beast while their seafloor drilling rig collapses. Does include one of my favorite bad movie tropes, however: glass that cracks like fresh ice on a New England creek.

About Time (2013)
Time-loop rom-com that is mostly a charming look at missed opportunities and how our choices affect our relationships. But then it starts to drag in the second half, giving us time to question the central mechanic and wonder about the ethics of keeping your wife in the dark about your time travel powers, while you manipulate her life.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)
Lots to like here, particularly in the more character-driven early scenes, but eventually it turns into a Saturday morning cartoon with the plot driven by some frankly unbelievable magic. A more lighthearted, campy tone could work wonders for these DC characters, but they haven’t quite shed the layers of grime that’s defined the franchise recently, and here the final battle is, again, a dim, boring CGI punch-out. Too long, but otherwise inoffensive with some good moments. In other words, a perfect selection for a lazy Xmas day afternoon.

Soul (2020)
They got me. Again. The Pixar emotional manipulation machine is still firing on all cylinders, folks. Their best since Coco or Inside Out, and fits well in the subset of adult/emotionally-satisfying Pixar movies. And coming at the end of 2020, during the socially-distanced holidays? It wrecked me.

It’s a little scattered/inconsistent, breaks down into a few different modes, and fails to reach the top tier of pixar masterpieces {Inside Out being the best), but it’s still very very good, a technical marvel, beautiful to behold, funny, etc etc.

In a sense it’s formulaic, if creating believable characters with clear but evolving goals who you come to care about and root for despite their flaws, and layering on some light comedy (situational, character-based, referential, and slapstick varieties) while also pushing the technical envelope in animation and featuring a great soundtrack could be considered a formula.
It’s a salve for 2020. Highly highly recommended.

Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987)
Are you a responsible person avoiding travel during the worst month of the pandemic? This will remind you what you’re missing, perhaps the most psychically-accurate portrayal of nightmare holiday travel put on film. It’s all mildly amusing, and the comedy is grounded by believable characters, but with Steve Martin and John Candy I was expecting something crazier, and ended up bored.

Speed (1994)
An all-time classic of the popcorn action genre, and maybe the best hostages-on-public-transit movie since The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974). This time around I noticed how well-crafted everything is, from the propulsive script to the way Dennis Hopper’s backstory is revealed gradually, giving him some depth when he could have been a cackling madman. I also totally forgot Jeff Daniels was in this as Desk Cop doing the legwork while Keanu and Sandra flirt through their bus situation. A perfect role for Keanu Reeves’ limited abilities, but I wish Sandra Bullock got more varied material to play beyond being freaked out. The movie could have been tightened up — the opening
sequences ( elevator, subway) feel tacked-on so it’s not just ‘’that bus movie.” But overall it holds up pretty well, with some great action sequences and a satisfying conclusion.

Scoop (2006)
Pointless, meandering, and unfunny ‘’murder mystery’’ that never quite justifies it’s existence. If you like Woody Allen’s stammering schtick, you might enjoy this. If you would like to see Scarlett Johannson in a swimsuit, or smooching Hugh Jackman, well who wouldn’t? It’s a shame, knowing these actors are capable of so much more with decent material, it’s clear there’s wasted talent throughout this barely-there picture. But then again: Ian MacShane as a ghost!

Match Point (2005)
Let’s not get into the Woody Allen of the thing: this is a solid drama with
well-written characters who demonstrate their personalities and motivations through efficient dialog and revealing actions. You know, like it’s a movie! Beyond the text, it’s got some themes: our protagonist must eventually choose between cliche true love and advancing in a feudal-capitalist caste system where he’s barely grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder. The ending, in this interpretation, is acid-cynical black comedy.

Last Christmas (2019)
Director Paul Fieg has reached a new career low with this bonkers Christmas rom-com, but go in with zero expectations and you’ll get a few laughs from both genuine jokes and so-bad-it’s-good holiday-magic scenarios.
The title is almost a spoiler, but I was still pleasantly surprised by the concluding twist which pushes the movie into absurdist territory as the reality of the world is overtaken by George Michael lyrics.

January, 2021

Sound Of Metal (2019)
Solid character study of a man coming to terms with a life he doesn’t quite realize has already changed. In it’s best moments, it sends a powerful message about acceptance, and shows how preconceived notions of normative human ability limit our capacity for interpersonal connection and community-belonging. Check it out with a good sounds system and subtitles on.

Blow the Man Down (2019)
Slow-burn/no-burn murder mystery ‘’thriller’’ about as dull and dreary as its tiny harbor town setting. Flat stock characters all around (salty fishermen, brothel madame, disaffected college-bound teen, etc). Feels much longer than the 90 minute run time, as nothing much happens to propel the plot forward, and the cinematography and editing do nothing to otherwise hold interest. Too bad, because it starts off promising with a rousing sea shanty and a murder by harpoon.

Archive (2020)
One of those man-tries-to-resurrect­-his-dead-wife-via-increasingly-complex­and-sexy-robot-doubles-of-said-wife movies. It’s a shame it doesn’t have a better story or script because the craft on display is great: cinematography, color grading (green-grey), set design (90s cyberpunk/outrun aesthetic), and music ( excellent use of orchestral drone plus band-pass filter). But ultimately the plot doesn’t really resolve so much as end, with a twist that doesn’t make much sense and isn’t deep enough to bother thinking about.

Black Bear (2020)
Do you like puzzles? Here’s one for you, a thorny and darkly comic ‘’erotic thriller’’ with some structural choices that will have you questioning how a work of art is influenced by it’s author and vice-versa, and marveling at the way social hierarchies are reinforced through interpersonal cycles of abuse.
I’ve tried not to say anything about the plot, as watching it unfold is half the fun. The other half being the growing realization that Aubrey Plaza has become an incredible actor. The kind of movie we’d debate on the way home from the theater, or at the bar afterwards.

Ingrid Goes West (2017)
Not much of anything, besides a resume-builder for Aubrey Plaza, who hints at the range she’d show in Black Bear, 3 years later … It’s just wildly inconsistent in tone, veering from hangout comedy (with one-liner hipster archetype side characters) to almost-crime-thriller, but lacks a clear through-line or theme beyond light critique of instagram ‘’influencer’’ culture.
But I enjoyed it, and I appreciate any movie with the decency to clock in under an hour and a half.

Torque (2004)
Obvious rip-off and sometimes-parody of The Fast and The Furious, but with bikes, and some truly awesome bad CGI and absurd setpieces (that are really closer in spirit to Fast & Furious — the 4th one -than the comparatively grounded first fast and furious franchise film). That is too say, it’s a dumb-as-rocks motorcycle crime gang flick starring some floppy-hair white guy as the rakish lead, Ice Cube as the butch rival whose grudging respect dude will win, and a handful of other characters who can best be described as ‘’goth chick with switchblade,” “blonde girlfriend,” or “Adam Scott.” Plot? Characters? Who cares! If you like garbage movies as much as I do, you should enjoy this.
Drink Pepsi.

Iron Man 3 (2013)
Iron Man throws a piano at a helicopter.

Hard Eight (1996)
Tried watching Phantom Thread, nearly fell asleep watching the subtle washes of emotion flit across Daniel Day Lewis’ face. Gave up and instead watched dir. PT Anderson’s debut, a 90s neo-noir centered around a mysterious gambler seeking some kind of redemption, starring: Philip Baker Hall, John C Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L. Jackson. Plus! jazzy soundtrack co-written by Jon Brion! a craps scene w/ Philip Seymour Hoffman! Not the best work from anyone listed here, except maybe Hall, who carries the movie. Interesting mainly for comparison to other, better films from the same folks, but an enjoyable way to spend 1 hr40m.

Next (2007)
Dumb sci-fi action starring Nie Cage as a Vegas magician who can see two minutes into the future, but would rather try to get laid than help the FBI with their case. Eventually, he’s on the run with Jessica Biel, whose only character trait is that she teaches at an indigenous school at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Otherwise, she’s a trophy, who Nic Cage tricks into a relationship by using his time-loop premonition powers to manipulate her. Julianne Moore is a tough-as-nails FBI agent who is not here to be your friend ( she’s here to save American lives). It’s a Philip K. Dick story, so I guess the women don’t get character arcs, are either a hard-nosed bitch or a squeaking damsel. It does feature a few laughable Cage line readings, and keeps up a rapid pace of increasingly-bonkers plot developments, but it’s hard to recommend on those alone.

Chinatown (1974)
The ultimate ‘’infrastructure noir’’ — in which our flawed hero uncovers the imbrications of personal and political motives in a corrupt city government, while the audience gets a guided tour of LA’s reservoirs, rivers, and culverts.
It’s unapologetic about its genre tropes; once these are established we can focus on Jack Nicholson’s nuanced performance (w/ great line readings like ‘’you’re as dumb as you think I think you are’’) and the meticulous filmmaking. Plenty of foreshadowing with satisfying payoffs (Jake wincing at the apparent sound of a gunshot), nice specificity in the details, like Jake reviewing photo prints wet from the bath, indicating his impatience and command over his team. Faye Dunaway makes the most of her limited screen time, and her character is more complex than you’d think at first, driving the plot in ways that are only slowly revealed.

Moog (2004)
Documentary comprised of revealing but fragmentary interviews with the analogue synthesizer inventor Robert Moog, cut with performance footage of musicians playing his instruments inconcert context. Moog positions himself as an electronics guy, happy to leave the music to musicians, and willing to adapt his intentions to suit popular tastes (for example: including a piano keyboard at all, when creating music by tuning circuits is perhaps the more authentic way to play an electronic instrument). But he also advocates for the synthesizer as equal to any traditional instrument, in that those too are fundamentally oscillators — it’s all vibrations, man! Wear headphones.

Misery (1990)
What could have been a gripping psychological drama, or nuanced examination of the relationship between artist and audience instead boils down to a cheesy abduction and torment tale. The Kathy Bates character is pretty one-note-crazy from the outset, shown as competent but unhinged, an obsessed fan insisting her favorite writer adjust his new novel to her whims.
The movie is very clearly on the side of the author, and for good reason: he’s the one being held hostage, but by dismissing the obsessive fan as totally off her rocker elides the question of if creatives should be influenced by fan reception. The film is clear on this: creators have no obligation to their fans. In 2021 this feels naive if we realize that creators will always be influenced by fan reaction, whether they acknowledge it or not.

Dreamland (2019)
Does what it says on the tin: dust bowl bank robber romance starring Margot Robbie! Robbie is now predictably great, dialing in for a subtle and precise performance, continuing her trend of really interesting roles (and with a producer credit here, selecting good material). The rest of the movie is pretty predictable as well, with a simple plot and few overarching themes, not helped by flat dialog. But it does manage to surprise moment to moment with more than a handful of artful compositions, nice scenes and edits, and by the end even approaches something mythic.

The Big Short (2015)
The movie is kind of a rambling mess that never commits to a consistent tone or style, occasionally turning documentary style, or relying on cutaway gags, but it works! Steve Carrell is outside his range and drags down his scenes, but everyone else is great, Ryan Gosling and Christian Bale in particular giving amusing slightly unhinged performances. The financial explainer bits are a little too dumbed-down, but it’s a fine way to deal with such a dry subject.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
One of Scorsese’s best, treating stock brokers as obvious criminals, and wringing tons of black comedy from the premise. This might be Dicaprio’s finest work, he inhabits Belfort with gusto, and demonstrates a surprising knack for physical comedy. Good thing, because this is Leo’s movie — despite great work all around. Does the movie celebrate Belfort? Yes. Does it condemn him? Yes. The movie luxuriates in gratuitous displays of wealth wasted on hedonism: nearly three hours for the audience to decide if we envy the caged monkeys of the trading floor, or if we pity them. If we are jealous of Belf ort’s success, what are our values?

Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004)
Instant-classic documentary that tells the urban history of Los Angeles (don’t call it LA!) through movie clips and smart narration, covering everything from the city’s polycentric form, to ifs foundational myths, infrastructure development, political scandals, demographics, and the blurred lines between reality and fiction, all viewed, literally, through a Hollywood lens.

February, 2021

Inherent Vice (2014)
This could have been great. Early scenes promise a wry comedic take on the neo-noir mystery, with Joaquin Phoenix as a perpetually-stoned PI. But after nearly three hours of compounding plot complications and interesting characters who pop up for a scene then vanish, and you may need a white board to keep up, an audience effort totally at odds with the laid-back vibe.
PT Anderson is a meticulous filmmaker, and I’m sure some folks will find satisfaction in unpacking the plot, but I don’t have the patience, and was left clueless by the end, with very little desire to try to unpack it all. Viewed this way, it’s little more than a collection of amusing scenes with great 70s set design. But maybe that’s the point: don’t we all go through life moment to moment, never quite knowing if we’ve solved life’s mysteries?

The Fog (1980)
John Carpenter’s take on a small town assaulted by a supernatural presence, a pretty formulaic genre horror flick that never quite transcends.

The good: John Carpenter synth soundtrack and delightfully-obnoxious sound effects hot in the mix. Adrienne Barbeau as one protagonist of the ensemble, and my dream girl: single-mom owner-operator and night shift DJ of an independent radio station housed in a decommissioned lighthouse on the California coast, has regrets about “Chicago.” Jamie Lee Curtis as a hitchhiking drifter en route to Vancouver, but sticks around for the ghost-sailor fun.

The rest never really gels, the threat is somehow inconsistent yet predictable, the monster effects are used very sparingly and the budget shows. The cinematography is nothing special.

Sea shanty count: 0

X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019)
On par with the other X-Men films, which are always a mixed bag, mostly ridiculous nonsense occasionally elevated by a good performance or three, at their best when focused on the Professor X/Magneto dynamic and differing philosophies, which we do get a welcome bit of here. But oh boy the Jean Grey stuff is a boring slog, not helped at all by Sophie Turner’s negligible acting skills, or by the muddled script which tries to find her heel-turn motivation in a childhood betrayal, but also zaps her with evil space goo to raise the stakes unnecessarily. Jennifer Lawrence drags down every scene she’s in, she’s so obviously bored with the material, so her character’s death comes as a relief, and gives us a classic X-Men “stand around a fresh grave in the rain” scene. I laughed. It will be interesting to see what Marvel will do with these characters, as the current iteration of the franchise feels increasingly like a dead end. But for popcorn nonsense you could do worse.

X-Men: First Class (2011)
Probably the best of all X-Men movies, anchored by the strong central relationship between Professor X and Magneto, McAvoy and Fassbender both doing their damnedest to bring real emotion to these characters in friendship and in rivalry, demonstrating that old archetypal split: idealist vs cynic, mediator vs revolutionary, etc. Fassbender in particular is excellent and his character gets a sympathetic arc, even as he emerges as the villain.
Jennifer Lawrence and McAvoy play a nuanced sibling dynamic, where her character finds the flaws in his worldview as she develops her own. When she leaves him in the end it feels justified and bittersweet, and Lawrence turns in a great performance in and out of the blue prosthetics. Some of it gets silly, of course. Kevin Bacon as a Nazi scientist never quite works, and January Jones is perhaps too icy as Emma Frost, but it’s mostly great, a standout example of superhero cinema done right.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
Set ten years after First Class, and skipping over some consequential events, it made me wish we’d gotten another round with the reboot versions of these characters before bringing in Hugh Jackman and others, but oh well. The time loop nonsense that gets Wolverine into the story is handled well, and once the stakes are laid out we get a crackerjack action movie with enough character work to stay invested, even when it veers briefly into CGI monster battles.
The core, again, is the internal struggle over how mutants will find their place in the world, competing views espoused by McAvoy as Charles and Fassbender as Eric, both great as usual, with Jennifer Lawrence as Raven in the balance, essentially the antagonist this time around. And hey, it’s Peter Dinklage! But his villain takes a backseat to the internal struggles of the mutants.

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)
Easily the worst of this batch, losing any semblance of character development or theme in favor of a goofy villain and the type of impossible world-ending stakes that sap any tension from the story. And it’s just boring. There are a handful of cool scenes and decent special effects, but it mostly fails to justify it’s existence. Better luck next time.

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (2018)
Pleasant but shallow bio-documentary of the late great author, like a quick run-down of her bibliography from Wikipedia, without really drawing connecting lines through her career as a whole. The interviews with the author herself will please all fans, but I wish the filmmakers had gone a little deeper into themes. The best parts occur relatively early on when subtle connections are made between her world-building and her longtime home in the landscapes of Oregon, but this passes quickly. Another segment touches on how naming — of people, places, and things — suggests a power dynamic/ heirarchy — to make these assignments is to exercise that power, and in a sense to call these things into being. It’s a shame the film moves on quickly from this idea as well. Overall, it’s a good introduction to or reminder of Le Guin’s work, and worth a watch.

folklore: the long pond studio sessions (2020)
Taylor Swift is a genius, and maybe an all-time pop songwriter, and unique technical singer, on par with Joni Mitchell or Stevie Nicks. It’s such a comforting pandemic movie, soothing. It gives a mostly sunny look at work from home for a popstar, with only the first minutes evincing a hint of struggle. But what the hell, the flannel cabin vibe is just what I needed, and Swift has mastered the art of transforming the country story-song into a indie pop hit, maybe by way of a Springsteen suburb. But her voice! She’s a musician at the height of her skill, using her instrument and pushing its limits. It’s a perfect concert film for 2020: intimate, isolated, and cautiously reassuring.

Always Be My Maybe (2019)
Pleasant and funny but formulaic rom-com, with a mild 90s-SNL-movie hangout vibe. Unfortunately not as sharp as Ali Wong’s stand-up, but there are a handful of great jokes, and Randall Park’s masterful deadpan. It’s nearly but not quite saved by the performances. Almost gets run off the road by Celebrity Guest, but course-corrects in time for a predictable ending.

I Care a Lot (2020)
Brisk, twisty, and improbable crime drama, almost an Elmore Leonard story, similar vibe. It’s all a little goofy, and wobbles a bit on tone, but worth a watch for Rosamund Pike and Peter Dinklage in battle, and a concluding message condemning capitalism and the American dream.

The Dig (2021)
Slow and ponderous look at a couple of emotionally-repressed Brits who learn to relate to each other over an archaeological find, plus a bonus throwaway love triangle subplot that should have been lost in the edit. It’s all nicely shot, and the performances are good, but it never really grabbed me.

Miss Americana (2020)
A disappointing companion piece to the excellent “folklore” documentary/performance film. This suffers mainly from a lack of focus. There are several competing narratives that could have been merged thematically to better effect: the coming-of-age story of a global superstar; the political awakening of a global superstar, and most interesting: the maturation of an artist who is self-aware enough to know that career reinvention may be necessary to survive as an former teen idol. The best scene almost manages to weave this all together, as Swift and a collaborator write and perform “Only the Young” which is simultaneously a call to political action and a melancholy lament on aging. But those three minutes don’t save the movie.

Face/Off (1997)
Peak 90s action garbage that holds up surprisingly well, thanks mostly to Nicholas Cage trying out every emotion and facial expression, and John Travolta doing a decent Nicholas Cage impression. Plus! Many well-staged action setpieces! Nice practical effects and scale model work, often augmented by fireworks! Gina Gershon for a few scenes! It drags on half an hour too long (they could have cut any two of the three “final” confrontations), and the women get very little to work with, but overall it’s probably the best bad-guy-and-cop-switch-faces movie you’re ever gonna get.

March, 2021

A View to A Kill (1985)
So, there’s a lot to unpack, this being Roger Moore’s last Bond movie, including the mismatch between the actor and what the character is called on to do, namely seducing stylish babes half his age. This and the throwback 60s misogyny make Bond feel like a man out of time, even more than usual (he was always a nostalgic character). But Bond’s treatment of women is set against even more despicable treatment from minor characters who pop in and out, an attempt to give him a pass that comes off as a screenwriters trick to indulge in misogyny and racism. Speaking of racism, Grace Jones’s character is treated as an alien devil, so out of place in the setting’s posh whiteness. She’s often introduced with “jungle” cues on the soundtrack and shot as a foreign body, objectified in dialog and given little dialog of her own. She tries to bring a bit of self-aware Josephine Baker to the character but is hemmed in by the script. Christopher Walken is here but largely wasted. Then there’s the goofy shit, which is almost self-aware in its absurdity, like the opening ski stunts or the red-scare “microchips” plotline. The pre-cgi action set-pieces and Moore’s tired delivery of the one-liners may be enough to justify watching, but the formula is definitely showing it’s age.

Kedi (2016)
No, you’re crying at this unbearably sweet documentary on the cats of Istanbul. Part urban wildlife show, part anonymous personal reflections on the meaningful relationships between humans and other animals, wrapped around a portrait of a top-ten world city facing the challenges of late stage global capitalism. Just excellent, an example of how a one-line topic can, in the right hands, through fllm, speak to deep wells of human experience and existence.

Late Night (2019)
Mildly amusing workplace comedy that starts out strong with some “Devil Wears Prada” vibes in the central relationship between the plucky new employee and the icy media mogul. Unfortunately that promising beginning quickly fizzles as the story turns out to focus on the aging late night host’s potential cancellation and the career reinvention that helps her avoid that fate.
The messaging about representation never feels forced, and there are a handful of good jokes around race and gender but ultimately it’s just not that funny and none of the character growth feels earned.

Frank (2014)
So frustrating to see a film like this that’s so close to being great but just can’t stick the landing. The best parts are where it goes medium-sincere, treating the guy in the fake head as a mild kook who should be able to live his life and rock out with his awesome band, who I would go see any night of the week.
It’s less successful when the movie treats Frank’s mask as a pathology and mental illness to be solved, while simultaneously suggesting that artistic genius requires trauma, a wrong and outdated trope. I appreciate the desire to go deep with the psychology, but rather than empathize with Frank the film just reinforces neurotypical norms, so… At least we get Maggie Gyllenhaal saying “stay away from my fucking theremin.”

Training Day (2001)
If you can get past the pro-cop message (spoiler alert: the corrupt one dies) and some racial stereotyping, what you have is a strong entry in modern mythology, with our naiive hero entering a mysterious world where he will be tempted by Evil and need to overcome a series of challenges. Ethan Hawk is convincing as the protagonist in this, but it’s really Denzel Washington’s movie, playing an over-the-top villain, eventually cackling like he’s poisoned Gotham’s water supply. It works best in the mythic mode, and I wish it had stayed more abstract and philosophical, like in the several scenes where characters discuss story-as-a-concept, with subtext that the stories we tell create our reality. But these musings are mostly lost by the time Denzel and Ethan need to have a one-on-one brawl with patio furniture.

The Terminal (2004)
What a mess. Tom Hanks plays a traveler stuck in airport limbo when his fictional eastern european home country suspends flights after a military coup. Hanks’ accent and broken English is vaguely offensive, but the limited dialog seems to have inspired some silent-movie antics, with Hanks doing slapstick physical comedy, which Spielberg frames like Looney Tunes. These are the best parts of the movie: Hanks alone, Cast Away style, adapting to a difficult environment. But then there’s Stanley Tucci’s cartoonish villain airport administrator, and the completely unbelievable romantic subplot with Catherine Zeta Jones. But worst of all the movie never really reckons with the true horror of being stuck in limbo due to an oversight in international law, with no authority to petition. What could have been a Kafkaesque nightmare is watered down to a kid-friendly fantasy.

Man of Steel (2013)
Justice League homework. Exceeded my low expectations, but probably not worth your time unless you’re a DC completist. Standard-issue Superman origin story in the first half, followed by a low-stakes CGI battle that nonetheless destroys both Smallville and Metropolis, setting the bar for ridiculous sequels. Zack Snyder’s gloomy aesthetic could have worked for a more self-aware Superman character, struggling to rein in his powers, or dealing with the trauma of losing Krypton. But no, S-man here is a relatively well-adjusted dudebro with good intentions and a strong moral compass (achieved despite his adoptive father’s repeated advice to let people die instead of revealing his powers). The contrast never stops being weird.
Some good actors are held back by the lame script, and it’s visually sometimes hard to watch, with shakey-cam everything and bizarre color grading.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Ultimate Edition (2016)
Ultimately… Worth watching? Better than Man of Steel. Brings up some interesting questions about what the existence of a demi-god would mean for society. Tosses that all to the curb when it needs to have a CGI monster fight to close things out. Sets up franchise easter eggs effectively without distracting. Often visually stunning. Actors mostly doing their best with bad dialog and great physical choreography. I think the politics of these movies are pretty transparent. Zack Snyder is an unapologetic Ayn Rand fanboy (his production company named after Atlas Shrugged, his desire to adapt The Fountainhead), and the superhero savior narrative tracks with Rand’s asshole individualism “philosophy.” Bats and Supe both seem pulled to heroism only under duress, reluctant to help anyone not gifted with super strength or an unlimited budget. Their conflict is never really clearly defined, but we see how both are sad, isolated, elite, but this is treated as a burden for theses men, superior to any of the anonymous masses with outstretched hands. A review of Snyder’s full filmography would reinforce this Randian impulse, I think, and maybe include a handful of fascist dog-whistles. But if we’re taking fascism and superheroes, that’s a deeper dive than my lnstagram posts can handle.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)
Well: it’s fine. It’s probably the least ‘’problematic” of Snyder’s movies, by virtue of having very little in terms of theme or philosophy. Instead, we get a series of action tableaus interspersed with backstory for the less-known characters. Best viewed as episodic, Saturday-morning cartoon nonsense.
The movie works best in this mode, and in the 3rd hour there are a few scenes that suggest a long-running TV show with this Justice League going on weekly adventures, but it all starts to drag again as it comes to a boss fight conclusion, followed by a pointless epilogue. It’s all surface, no substance, but there are plenty of parts that are stylish as hell, a few moments of decent comedy, and a handful of impressive action sequences. I don’t regret watching it!

Coherence (2014)
Tense and grippy locked door dinner party thriller with a sci-fi twist. It’s great! Excellent ensemble cast and sharp writing really bring the characters to life, especially when we see how they react to the escalating craziness of their situation. Avoid spoilers if you can, since it’s so fun to watch it play out, and the movie definitely knows how to play against expectations in rewarding ways. I could see this standing up to repeat viewings for a deeper dive, but the character work is strong enough that untwisting it all seems unnecessary.

Aquaman (2018)
Well holy shit, it can’t be good? Pleasantly surprised here, despite the generic hero’s journey / true king plot, it’s a well-done kid-friendly action-adventure fantasy full of joyous performances, delightful spacey sci-fi set design, end endearing nautical dad-joke comedy.
The tone wobbles a bit, and it’s too long, but I would rank it in the top 3 of the current DC batch, with Joker and Birds of Prey.

Joe Versus The Volcano (1990)
Cult classic, but I’m not drinking the kool-aid. There are a handful of quotable lines, and Tom Hanks shows his talent as a physical performer, but his character is such a dope that you never believe the romance. Meg Ryan is charming as ever, but the chemistry isn’t really there for the central couple.
There are questionable choices throughout that make this feel ancient: the kindly black driver who advises Joe during his shopping spree; the island society being a mixed Jewish and indigenous culture with an obsession with orange soda, etc. The whole mysterious island trope is an obvious pulp throwback without much commentary. And what’s up with the dystopian intro, a totally different tone than the rest of the movie? Am I missing something?

April, 2021

The Long Kiss Goodnight ( 1996)
An amnesiac suburban housewife discovers she’s actually an action hero spy, then must reconcile the two aspects of her character whilst doing car chases, shooting dudes, getting tortured on an old-timey waterwheel, etc. In short: one of the 90’s best action-comedies with a bonkers lead performance from Geena Davis and support from Samuel L Jackson. It’s a little long (ha) and could have cut the homophobic jokes, but holds up surprisingly well with great pacing, excellent comic and action beat timing, obvious but fun practical special effects, and more real character development than you might expect.

A League of Their Own (1992)
First: it’s hilarious. Tom Hanks as a cartoon drunk and Geena Davis as the wry eye of the storm. Packed with snappy retorts and more slapstick than you’d expect. Could do without the present-day bookends entirely. The gender politics are harder to unpack. The movie drips 1940s trad-fam americana nostalgia, which the 90s “girl-power” framing never overcomes. So we have our strongest lead protagonist reluctantly do baseball while she waits for her man to return from war, meanwhile nurturing her kid sis and giving her down-n-out coach the kick-in-the-dick he needs to reboot his life. That Davis’s character shows more natural aptitude for coaching than Hanks’s is examined for a few scenes then discarded: there’s no way for her to break through patriarchy to become the coach by merit. So as badass as these women are shown to be, the narrative keeps them subservient and oppressed, pacified by minor (league) wins.

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Best-Best movies: Blindspotting, Thelma & Louise, There Will Be Blood, The Lighthouse, Soul

Best Worst movies: Anaconda, The Lake House, Last Christmas

Worst Worst movies: Yesterday, Knock Knock