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Post by Jay on Jul 25, 2022 9:33:08 GMT -8
SUMMARY: I HOPE ONE DAY TO BE ABLE TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HOLLY HUNTER AND HELEN HUNT.
Fun fact, Helen Hunt's role in As Good as It Gets - for which she won an Oscar - was originally offered to Holly Hunter. I'm sure there are plenty of people who confuse the two. I also watched O Brother, Where Art Thou recently (have almost completed the Coens' filmography at this point) and liked it quite a bit, although I don't think it's one of their strongest efforts. Perhaps it would have helped had I read The Odyssey in high school or college, but most of my literature-heavy classes involved slightly more digestible fare, give or take the occasional Divine Comedy, so I probably missed a few of the references*. Great soundtrack, at any rate. *Very fitting that one of the Sirens was also the praying-mantis teacher from Buffy. (Yes, we're still making Buffy references on this forum, folks.) This trivia pleases me greatly. I'm also surprised you managed to get out of reading The Odyssey, since I had probably gone through it five times at least before graduating high school alone, but I understand there's considerable variability among curricula. I've never read The Grapes of Wrath or The Great Gatsby, a prof in my department had never read Moby-Dick before he got tenure in AMERICAN LITERATURE, and the recent head of my department (theatre scholar) had never touched the Iliad until she was nearly a full professor, and then threw it at the wall when she realized that Achilles and Agamemnon were fighting over a whore in the intro.
There really weren't that many references though, or the ones that were there beyond the obvious ones like Polyphemus and the Sirens and Poseidon, you'd really have to stretch for. I spent much of the film waiting for a Scylla and Charybdis that never manifested. You'd be hard pressed to claim Boy Hogwallop as Telemachus. The sirens were great though, all-star singers too, they got Allison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, and Gillian Welch in there, with a cameo by Welch as the woman trying to get the record in the store.
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Post by Jeremy on Jul 25, 2022 18:58:49 GMT -8
I picked up a fair deal of Odyssey knowledge through cultural osmosis, so some of the broader references were easy to discern. It's one of those books that I probably should read at some point (went through a phase in high school when I read a bunch of all-time literary classics, but few as old as Homer's work), particularly since it may no longer feel like homework.
The cast in OBWAT is a major selling point, particularly in the straitlaced manner they approach the most absurd of situations. The tussle between Clooney and Ray McKinnon (hilariously, the future creator of Rectify) is among the most memorably funny fistfights I've seen onscreen in years.
The Coens' strengths in casting and storytelling are evident even in their weaker efforts. I watched The Ladykillers today (generally considered their worst film), and while it definitely needed more of a weighty story to compensate for the overly broad comedy and awkward racial stereotypes, it's still an amusing film with a memorably off-the-path role for Tom Hanks (whose Southern accent in the film suggests a warm-up for his recent turn as Colonel Tom Parker), plus an underused part for JK Simmons, who is incapable of turning in a bad performance, even when his character is saddled with a tasteless recurring diarrhea joke.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jul 27, 2022 13:13:36 GMT -8
Curious how you all feel about Nope! I was, erm, less than enthused by it, less because I didn't get "what it means" (it's not exactly subtle what the movie is going for here, what with the... jeez... Bible quote... that opens the picture; anyway without going into spoilers the theme doesn't cohere at all, and yes I got what the monkey "represents") and more because I found the movie sort of languishing and not deserving a 130-minute runtime. And also the humor felt a little hackier than I'd expect from a master comic like Peele, particularly given that Get Out and Us were genuinely super funny in parts. Which is a shame because just on the level of imagery this movie is great! But this is the "eh" first draft of an all-time classic picture; I wish we had gotten the classic instead. Perversely I want to see that 4 hour original cut that allegedly exists of this movie. Shame there's no precedent for a self-indulgent four-hour director's cut of a not-so-good blockbuster being released on HBO Max! Maybe I should start a hashtag campaign for that.
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Post by ThirdMan on Jul 27, 2022 18:20:54 GMT -8
As I work a graveyard shift, I actually went to see Nope in IMAX on Friday after not having gone to bed. So, I think I may have fallen asleep for a few minutes at some point (the first time that's happened in a theater for me since seeing Rango, with Johnny Depp, many years ago). Also, my knee was cramping up, which was distracting me.
That aside, the film has some really compelling imagery, but I would tend to agree that its themes don't seem to cohere, or at the very least, aren't fully worked-through. But I kind of want to see it again, because of the scene(s?) I missed, and to fully process the arresting imagery. And the flashback scenes on the sitcom set, with the chimpanzee, were genuinely chilling, at least in a vacuum.
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Post by Jay on Jul 28, 2022 10:07:11 GMT -8
Elvis (2022) (as told by Col. Tom Parker via Baz Luhrmann)
I figured someone else would have weighed in by now but all we've got is Quiara making a reference to "Goblin Tom Hanks" which I will yoink and use for my own purposes.
To stage some of this, my ma is a diehard Elvis fan, as much as a Boomer can latch onto a musician of their era, and when it came to her own tastes they drifted more blues than the pop of the Beatles. I offered to see it with her knowing that it would probably please her and the content would be whitewashed in its way and made to have Elvis as a hero of limited ambiguity and absolutely no commentary on some of his more unsavory comments on race. To my own surprise, I warmed up to the movie early on. Part of that was in that I feel like I've watched a lot of media lately with bland, perfunctory cinematography and direction and Baz Luhrmann is not going to give you that. You're going to get kaleidoscopic visuals and creative takes on the montage (including the sort of checkerboard pattern of seeing multiple shots in a single frame, I am fumbling for a technical term here). I find Luhrmann's whole thing a bit excessive, but it matches the material in this case and it felt refreshing to see someone consider what film as a medium can do that other media can't as easily.
The storytelling is a little strange in that from the opening sequence, you get Goblin Tom Hanks as the narrator trying to correct? the record on himself despite openly admitting to being a "snowman" or the type of con who wants people to empty their wallets in front of him. So you get bits and pieces of his childhood (he was a comic book fan! NEAT), but it mostly enters at him performing and under his first contract while Goblin Hanks is busy promoting a bland country singer. This is probably the space in which the film "feels" most real as you get to see the man making his way about Memphis, frequenting the clubs, entranced by the style (Big Mama Thornton is there, but only really as a singing presence, ditto Little Richard later, but you also find out about his friendship with B.B. King, which I also didn't know about). And then Elvis' wild gyrations end segregation.
The second act... well, it's hard to really claim it as an act, it's more of an intermission in which Elvis is conscripted (his hips were a threat to national security) and he goes into movies for a bit and we gloss over something like ten years because who cares about film anyway? Time for the music, time for the comeback special, time for political commentary and Goblin Hanks getting mad about dirty hippies and longhairs influencing his boy and his attempt to get his boy to do a Christmas special against his will when he really wants to do music, gospel, and a protest song that will heal the nation (I literally never heard of this song before yesterday). The third act follows his increasingly tense Las Vegas residency where the macguffin of Goblin Hanks having no passport and thus no way to follow his cash cow on a global tour is revealed as the reason for so much of the behind-the-scenes drama, which returns us to the opening frame of Elvis being dunked in ice water and told to get his flabby ass on the stage.
As a sum, you learn some things probably, but are also presented a view of the singer in which he has almost no agency and his close friends and family are effectively furniture for much of the film. They're always there, but rarely are their relationships explored because the movie is fundamentally about Goblin Hanks' view of his cash cow. And Goblin Hanks is honest about his conman tendencies, but "to what end" is only vaguely answered with mention of his gambling debts. That's about where his characterization ends. Elvis meanwhile is passively pushed into one thing or another at Goblin Hanks' behest, talked into it by the silver tongue, and forgoes other personal dreams such as traveling the world, all in the name of becoming this idolized empty vessel which pours himself out daily on a stage in Vegas. Even the drug addictions seem like something that is forced onto him, and the weight (NOT A SINGLE PEANUT BUTTER AND BANANA SANDWICH IN THE ENTIRE TWO-AND-A-HALF HOURS) is only referenced at the end, which spares Austin Butler the fat suit. One awkward fat suit in the movie is probably enough.
It's an odd spectacle (another weird choice is to have a lot of hip-hop on the early part of the soundtrack, which seems out of place), but watchable nonetheless, albeit without much other than surface depth. In other words, a Baz Luhrmann film. I expected my ma to gush about this or that, but instead she was preoccupied with technical details being wrong. But it was a strange experience to have Elvis come across as flatly heroic and self-sacrificing, while also being someone who didn't really make his own decisions and just got pushed into stuff, such that at moments it's hard to imagine him as an actual songwriter with an interior life. The film itself is a snowjob, trying to get you to buy in on this phenomenon of Elvis, but as biopics go, the end product is a portrait less of a man and more a phenomenon which made Goblin Hanks briefly absurdly rich though not in a way that satisfied anything in him.
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Post by otherscott on Jul 28, 2022 11:56:01 GMT -8
Nope was really good! I thought it functioned well as an action movie and I thought the coherance of trying to use the silliness of trying to use spectacle of the wild to further your own ends in some way was pretty consistent and well done. I thought the monkey section that was almost entirely unrelated to the plot was a little bit self indulgent (basically a writer's lazy way of saying "this movie is about theme") but I fully enjoyed it while watching even if it took me a while afterwards to wrap my head around what it was exactly trying to say.
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 12, 2022 14:58:58 GMT -8
Some new releases I've glazed my eyeballs with:
Prey - Not much of an expert on the Predator franchise (I've only seen the first film, which was a solid '80s thriller with some palpable horror vibes), but I thought this was good popcorn entertainment with a nicely realized early 18th-century Comanche setting. The first half suffers from some iffy special effects and retro messaging (she's a girl, but she wants to hunt like the boys, see?), and the Predator himself is all too often cloaked in his signature blurry camouflage. But once the action picks up, it delivers the goods, building in intensity to a rough-and-tumble climax. Amber Midthunder (whom people may remember as Bill Irwin's "other half" on Legion) acquits herself nicely in the central role, and seems to be carving out a good niche for herself in action movies. I watched the English version of this, although there is a dubbed version that's entirely in Comanche, which is both completely unnecessary and completely awesome.
Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe - A retread of the 1996 movie - and, by extension, the broader B&B franchise - with a modern setting and a sci-fi tinge. The characters of Beavis and Butt-Head remain timeless in their signature grossness and unapologetic stupidity, and the film does an admirable job introducing them to modern concepts like smartphones and (in a scene that may be the greatest political Rorschach test of the year) white privilege. Goes a bit overboard in the end when it tries to play up the action and acknowledge the main characters' in-universe deficiencies, but I still laughed quite a lot.
The Bob's Burgers Movie - Been a few years since I regularly watched the show, but I gave the film a whirl once it dropped on streaming. While it still has some of the same issues as the series (mainly the fact that a lot of the jokes are punchlines in search of setups), it was a fun time once it shook off the feel of "extended TV episode" in its first thirty minutes. I will say, however, that I don't think the show's character designs translate well to the textured, cel-shaded look that defines 2D feature animation. The dancing during the musical sequences looks awkward and unconvincing, and a lot of the characters' movements are overly loose and almost rubbery. But the songs were catchy and there were enough funny moments to make it a pleasant-enough 90 minutes.
Have not been to the theater in about a month, but I'm picking up a few DVDs of some recent A24 releases, so I'll share thoughts on those after watching. I'll also probably upgrade to the paid tier of Peacock soon (and it better be soon, because based on recent earnings reports, that service may not survive another year), so that I can watch The Northman and The Bad Guys, plus maybe They/Them if I'm feeling adventurous.
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 30, 2022 17:29:01 GMT -8
Catching up on the last coupla weeks (you may notice I've been on another horror kick):
Bodies Bodies Bodies - I went to the theater last night with the intent of seeing the low-attention Breaking, but a large group of nudniks in the otherwise empty theater were making noises and jumping in the aisles, so I decamped across the hall for A24's latest horror flick, screening in a completely empty theater. It was a blast! This film is a dark but often scathingly funny whodunit, with a lot of sly social commentary on Gen Z, dating in the smartphone era, and online woke culture. Functioning as both horror film and comic farce, it delivers humor and discomfort in equal measure, and all in the space of 90 minutes. One of the year's more entertaining surprises.
Samaritan - At age 76, Sly Stallone still commits to his action star persona, but his latest film is a tired slog with a lot of undercooked ideas in need of a better script. Intended as a subversive superhero film (because we don't have enough of those), the film cribs elements from Unbreakable and The Dark Knight Rises (the villain literally gives a "back to the people" speech), but doesn't establish much of an identity of its own, and builds to a nonsensical finale. Still almost worth it for the Stallone factor.
X - Despite featuring a good cast, this film wastes a lot of its early goodwill with padded dialogue and gratuitous nudity. But once the horror element kicks in, it's an entertaining watch, with some good scares along the way. it ultimately wants to pay homage to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and does so a lot better than Netflix's recent sequel to that endless franchise), but there isn't nearly enough oxygen to sustain 106 minutes of runtime.
Men - I have no idea if I liked this film or not. It's easily my least favorite of Alex Garland's directorial works so far, and the abundant symbolism feels like he simply punched the words "elevated horror film" into a computer program and let 'er rip. And any messaging about gender roles and sexism gets buried under the last 20 minutes of ludicrous visual insanity. On the other hand, it's incredibly well shot and gorgeous to look at, even on my computer screen, and hats off to Rory Kinnear's excellent performance(s). Like I said, no idea how to feel about this.
The Black Phone - This film tries to check a lot of boxes - horror, sci-fi, exploitation thriller - and they don't all fit together. But it's watchable enough, thanks to Ethan Hawke's disarmingly creepy performance (it's one of the few roles I've seen him in where he really appears committed to the material, though sadly he does not get down on all fours while naked and start barking like in The Northman). Nearly undone by a pointless subplot involving the main character's sister.
They/Them - Yeah, the plot of "Friday the 13th at a conversion therapy camp" was too dumb to resist. Unfortunately, this film is too dull to be unintentionally funny - it's extremely toothless in its political commentary, and very little happens until the final 20 minutes. And what was up with that cheesy Pink sing-along number? Only positive is Carrie Preston's performance as a creepy camp therapist. A surprisingly weak directorial debut for acclaimed screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator, Skyfall, Rango, and a lot of other films that will terminate fewer brain cells than this one).
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Post by Jeremy on Sept 23, 2022 13:45:28 GMT -8
Some quick hits as we approach the weekend:
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent - The premise of this film seems to misunderstand the appeal of Nicholas Cage, which is that while he may not be a character actor, he is most certainly a Character actor. His appeal is centered on the barrier he creates between himself and his onscreen persona - we never know how much Cage we're watching is the real man vs. the performance. But in this film, Cage plays himself as an entirely ironic character; there's none of the trademark mystery, and thus much less to get invested in. But even leaving that aside, this film is just a big dumb action comedy with precious few laughs, and runs out of gas rather early. Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz don't do much of interest; they were both used far better in The Afterparty.
The Bad Guys - I watched this one a while ago, but forgot to log it. Script-wise, it's nothing special, with characters who change motivation as the needs of the script require. But the animation is a blast, with a loose, cel-shaded 3D style that makes even the more expository scenes fun to watch. DreamWorks seems to be putting more innovation into their visual style, which is great - the new Puss in Boots also looks pretty slick, which may be enough to forgive the bizarre decision to revive a Shrek spinoff character who's lain dormant for over a decade. Anyway, The Bad Guys is good fun, just don't expect a lot of story logic.
Pinocchio - The latest live-action remake off the Disney conveyer belt fails to bring its wooden script to life, with a dull story, hokey special effects, and awful attempts at modern humor (Chris Pine, haha...). The plot is needlessly stretched out to 110 minutes, padded with useless elements like a puppet love interest, plus a scene where Pinocchio bends down on the sidewalk and smells a large pile of horse manure. (The magic of Disney, everyone!) Tom Hanks' attempted Italian accent is painful*, and while Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a decent Jiminy Cricket, his character mostly got on my nerves. I was vaguely amused by some of the cross-promotional cameos among the cuckoo clocks in Geppetto's store, including by the quick cameo from Jessica and Roger Rabbit - it was nice to be reminded of one of Robert Zemeckis' best films while watching one of his worst.
*On the subject of Hanks and terrible accents, I was only able to get about halfway through Elvis. Baz Luhrmann's hyper-stylized editing is fun for a while, but nothing about the character or story struck me as particularly compelling. I think I'm pretty much over musical biopics at this point; Walk Hard seems to have damaged the genre irreperably.
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Post by Jay on Oct 4, 2022 12:35:59 GMT -8
Ladies, gentlemen... It's Spooky Month.
Evil Dead (2013)
Army of Darkness was a sort of gateway drug for me circa middle school where I went back and got the rest of the Evil Dead franchise on VHS (no, I haven't watched all of the TV series... yet). I also made the questionable choice of getting the PSX game, but that's for another time. The point generally is that I have a background investment with the series and remained curious about the Fede Alvarez "reboot" (can it be called that if it didn't go anywhere?), which I had previously only seen muted in a specialty beer bar.
There were things that I thought were compelling about it. Using "demonic possession" as an intertext with "drug addiction" was something I hadn't seen much of outside of the incredibly awful late Return of the Living Dead sequels. The larger budget also meant more investment in a setting beyond "cabin and woods." I discovered that it was filmed in New Zealand instead of Michigan, which was odd, but nothing damning. In any case, it LOOKED good, misty with gnarled trees, and that benefited the atmosphere.
As negatives go, I felt at moments it was adhering a bit closely to the original even as it switched up some of the character roles. It's hard not to, as the original was a low-budget landmark, but you have to give the audience something to keep them off-balance and I'm not sure if a few twists towards the end were it. A secondary point of frustration, probably for me more than anyone else, is that it gestured towards more lore than it ended up having. You never end up being fully clued in on what the introductory scene means and its impact on the plot ends up being close to nothing. There was also the seed planted early on that what was possessing the cabin's visitors were avatars that came with certain recognizable features, but after the second one that just dropped off (also the book looked like it was written in colored pencil). However, weirdly, the major point of disappointment for me was that in the first film in the franchise, and to a lesser extent throughout, the demons were weird. Some of them were violent and sadistic. Others were just plain jazzed to be corporeal after millennia of screaming through the woods. In this one, they were pretty explicitly violent and not much else. I get it because they shoehorned in an explanation of five sacrifices or whatever, but it took some of the uncanny elements out for me, which had supplied the intrigue.
I still think that it was pretty good by remake standards, but adhering to that very narrow criterion, a good remake can add commentary that wasn't present in the original whereas a lesser one just attempts to recreate what's already there. This landed between those two poles in its payoff.
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Post by Jay on Oct 16, 2022 12:44:05 GMT -8
Spooky month continues.
The Frighteners (1996) It's been a long time since I knocked another movie off the queue in Peter Jackson's pre-LotR horror phase, but then this one wasn't free on streaming for quite some time. The plot isn't quite Ghostbusters, nor is it Flatliners, nor is it Beetlejuice, but lands somewhere between all three as its own thing starring a weirdly nihilistic Michael J. Fox. The plot follows him in the not-quite-a-charlatan role as he enlists the help of oddball ghosts to pull one over on his town's living populace, in a frequently stated attempt to "make a living." However, he ends up running afoul of a local and deceased serial killer played by Jake Busey because his dad was too old at the time I guess. What's curious about the film is its R-rating, not the result of language, but slapstick gore, which in turn is almost exclusive to practical effects tinged in the blue ghostly color shared by the ghosts (there's also CGI, which has not aged as well). That is, the violence to humans is pretty minimal (the serial killer stops their hearts), but the violence to ghosts is plenty and graphic. It's an odd little number, but I'd happily watch it again. Summary: JOHN ASTIN? JEFFREY COMBS? TROY EVANS? CHI MCBRIDE? R. LEE ERMEY? IS THIS CHARACTER ACTOR HEAVEN?
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Post by Jay on Oct 22, 2022 16:48:56 GMT -8
Spooky Month has brought various South Korean horror films to Peacock, I presume (cynically) because the rights were easier to pick up. So I watched Park Chan-wook's Thirst (2009), which I saw billed as an adaptation of Zola's Thérèse Raquin except in Seoul instead of Paris and with vampires and Catholic overtones. It was exactly that.
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Post by Jeremy on Oct 25, 2022 5:36:18 GMT -8
Watched Halloween Ends a few nights back (on streaming, as it wasn't the type of film I was eager to see in theaters). The polarizing reaction to this film - as well as the new trilogy as a whole - intrigued me, and I wanted to see if I would join the angered masses or find merit within this strange and subversive final* chapter.
All in all, there are absolutely some interesting ideas at play, but as with Halloween Kills, many of them are bungled by limp and confused execution. The weak word-of-mouth is easily explained - this does not feel like a true Halloween film, with Michael Myers absent for long stretches of the picture. But I can respect the subversive tactics if it still yields an entertaining movie, and this is just... kind of a mess. It wants to grapple with profound messages about the inherent nature of good and evil, but metaphorical morality questions don't feel too complex in a series that has for over 40 years centered on and exploited the heck out of a masked, merciless killing machine.
I appreciate the parallels to the original Halloween films - the David Gordon Green trilogy tries, to varying degrees of success, to emulate the first three movies in the franchise (Season of the Witch included), and the brief homages and in-jokes are fun to spot. But it's a strange new trilogy that is undoubtedly going to leave franchise fans unsatisfied and leave more discerning viewers wanting more.
*To the movie's credit, it does function as a true ending to the Halloween saga, and doesn't feature any cheap cliffhanger. Whether Universal and Blumhouse will still be committed to its finale five or ten years down the line remains to be seen.
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Post by Jeremy on Oct 28, 2022 13:26:08 GMT -8
Barbarian is probably a film that works best when viewed in a packed theater, but I still had a great time with it as home viewing. It's a very wild and freaky ride, and up there with Bodies Bodies Bodies as one of my favorite horror films of the year.
It's also one of those films that is best to go into while knowing as little as possible. (This was not helped by one of the promotional trailers, which spoiled a key reveal from halfway through the film.) So I won't discuss any major plot points or twists just yet. But I will express my admiration for the way this film manages to take firm command of its tone, switching from horror to comedy and back without missing a beat. Impressive directorial debut for Zach Cregger (whom you will of course remember from the beloved gender-progressive sitcom Guys with Kids). Highly recommended if you like your horror with a side of crazy.
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Post by Jeremy on Nov 15, 2022 15:29:49 GMT -8
And now the latest...
See How They Run - A light, easygoing Agatha Christie spoof that's fun to watch but unfortunately not as clever as it yearns to be. Some witty dialogue, delivered by a capable cast (with Saoirse Ronan the standout as a constable who earnestly play by the book), but the central mystery never quite comes alive. The film ultimately yearns to be the next Knives Out, but lacks the tonal balance needed to hit its comedic highs. The flavorfully narrated opening sequence works best.
Wendell and Wild - The latest stop-motion horror film from Henry Selick (of Coraline and Nightmare Before Christmas fame), produced by Jordan Peele, has a lot on its mind - zombies, demons, religion, adolescence, and systemic injustice - and unfortunately not enough time or focus to balance it all. Eye-popping animation, threaded with a macabre sense of visual humor, make it fun for a while, but the story starts to wither as the film rushes to say as much as it can in the time its allotted. Also, a weird miscalculation to have the two title characters look so eerily similar to an animated Key and Peele (who provide their voices); we never fully believe we're watching the characters as much as the actors voicing them. (Otherwise known as the Shark Tale problem.)
Confess, Fletch - I had no prior familiarity with either the Fletch novels or the Chevy Chase films beforehand, but I decided to check this film out, if only for the Don Draper-Roger Sterling reunion. It's fine as a lazy afternoon feature, but pretty forgettable, with the central mystery almost treated as an afterthought. This is also one of the first films I've seen - certainly among theatrical releases - that directly references the pandemic. Curious if this will be a trend in other contemporary releases; it's not the easiest thing to incorporate into a story, particularly a light comedy, without it coming off as distracting.
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story - Despite the obvious low budget at work here (what would you expect from a film literally modeled after a 2013 Funny or Die sketch?), I had a really good time with this one. It plays like a slightly more upbeat, offbeat Walk Hard, with Daniel Radcliffe in amusing form as a young Weird Al, singing the parodist's greatest hits. (Al himself rerecorded a lot of his golden oldies, from "My Bologna" to "I Love Rocky Road," for this release, with Radcliffe lip-syncing along, and I found myself chuckling at each new needle drop.) Runs a bit long, and not every foray into absurdism lands right, but everyone involved clearly had a great time making this one, and the positivity radiates off the screen, right up through the hilarious end credits.
Don't Worry Darling - A beautifully shot but largely disappointing psychological thriller from Olivia Wilde, taking a dark left turn from Booksmart into the Good Old Days of men with suitcases and the wives who pamper them. The messaging is pretty obvious, and the twist isn't difficult to suss out, but the film's main failing is its missed opportunities - there's a good cast at work (though Harry Styles is a weak link), but many of their characters' foibles are never properly explored, and the film leaves us with more questions than answers. (A development near the end of the film suggests that at least one character's arc was left on the cutting room floor.) Some interesting ideas at play, hurt by faulty execution.
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