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Filtering by Category: Movies

#2,427: Black Panther

Justice League vs. Teen Titans - ★★☆☆☆
Movie contains:
• 40% - punching
• 25% - plot
• 20% - oogling Starfire
• 10% - DDR
• 5% - Justice League

Fruitvale Station - ★★★☆☆
I think I liked everything about this movie but the movie. I loved the look, the acting is great, everyone did a good job. And while it's totally not the point of this movie, I can't help but watch through my fingers as we see this guy having a nigh-saintly last day when we know what's coming for him and start wondering about the real circumstances of his life.

This feels tricky. Is the movie less compelling if he's not such a nice guy, or an outright creep? Or if it changes so many details that the film might as well not even use the name of the real person? A couple scenes lay it on so thick that it felt like the movie might be insecure about whether or not I cared about Oscar.

Black Panther - ★★★½☆
This movie reminds me a little bit of when short-lived TV shows of the '70s would package two episodes together into a movie. I wish we could have seen the whole series so that there would be time to dig into the fridge logic stuff of how life inside Wakanda makes sense.

Plus, everyone would be happy to get to spend more time with Killmonger! He's the Boba Fett of the MCU!

#2,424: The Cloverfield Paradox

Ingrid Goes West - ★★★★☆
This is the most realistic depiction of living in Los Angeles I've ever seen.

It Might Get Loud - ★★☆☆☆
I would like to see more documentaries with such a narrow interest, preferably on subjects that I care about.  It’s fun that Jack White thinks he’s into minimalism.

Dealt - ★★★☆☆
Richard Turner is a man who spent his life wanting to be known as a card sharp first and as a blind guy not-at-all. So it seems almost cruel that the documentary about him is a movie about a blind guy who is blind and developed fantastic skills with cards and also he's blind.

Still, I love seeing people with that bit for obsession flipped.

The Cloverfield Paradox - ★★★☆☆
The Cloverfield movies are so loosely connected to one another that if not for their titles it would just be a fun fan theory. Watch them in any order.

Appearing out of nowhere was a delightful trick. More than either of the others this movie is a mixed bag, but I still had a big smile on my face all through the first half. The B-plot is super thin. The effects are solid. Good actors smooth over some rough lines. It's better than a Syfy original or the typical Netflix sci-fi feature. This movie is like if one of those movies' uncle died and left it some real money.

#2,420: The Shape of Water

The New 8-bit Heroes - ★½☆☆☆
I stumbled a kickstarter campaign for a software toolkit for creating NES games. The creators said they came up with it in the making of their own game, and this movie is the story of how that went. Like most video game documentaries, it's deeply unsatisfying.

I think this movie is badly written, too long, and jammed too far up the director/producer/writer/star’s dream of being a reality tv star to focus on the interesting parts of his own story, but by the end of it I guess I can kind of admire his grit.

I, Tonya - ★★☆☆☆
I can respect the craftsmanship on display in this movie, but it is simply not for me. Give Allison Janney her prize, keep working on the computers to do that creepy face swap thing, throw in all of the cues to being a piece of scrappy, down-in-the-dirt filmmaking (with huge name actors and award season aspirations) you want.

I'm not saying you shouldn't see this, I'm saying I shouldn't.

The Shape of Water - ★★★★★
Do you want deep one hybrids? Because this is how you get deep one hybrids.

The Shape of Water is this year’s La La Land insomuch as all of the hype made going to see it feel like homework. Even more so because I don’t think of myself as being a fan of Guillermo Del Toro (or any movie Sally Hawkins has ever made), but he deserves that Golden Globe for directing and any other prize he can win. I liked The Post just fine, mostly because it looks like a Spielberg movie, but the shape of water looks like cinema. It’s a beautifully done adventure. And it had more in common with La La Land than I was expecting!

Octavia Spencer is getting to be as typecast as Jessica Chastain or Matthew Goode, but maybe not in as fun of a role. I guess if you have the opportunity to be in a good movie you take it, even if you have already played that character a few times. In fact, maybe she’s exactly the same character she is in Hidden Figures, just 10 years earlier. If that’s the case then it’s great to know everything works out for her. Maybe she receives a nice settlement so she doesn't tell everyone about her creepy boss and it puts her on the career path to middle management.

#2,417: All the Money in the World

The Post - ★★★☆☆
You know how in between Avengers movies, Joss Whedon ran off and made a little movie in his backyard? He got his friends together and they shot a Shakespeare play? This is that movie for Steven Spielberg. It’s timely, and interesting, and still looks for all the world like a Steven Spielberg movie, but it’s one he bashed out with his friends in between their day jobs of making huge blockbusters. You know, to relax.

All the President's Men - ★★★☆☆
The Post is like the Rogue One of Washington Post movies. So naturally we had to go home and put this on. Ed Bradlee really aged in those couple of years.

All the Money in the World - ★★★☆☆
I am wrong all the time about what movies awards show voters like, but I think I’d give this a nomination for cinematography in addition to the spite-noms for Christopher Plummer.

It would be so interesting for the original version of the movie to leak one day and do some comparisons.

Also, the movie sells itself short with that weird last chunk pasted in from a Taken movie.

#2,415: Downsizing

Downsizing - ★★½☆☆
Boy, Matt Damon’s having a hard time lately. As soon as Suburbicon came down from that billboard by LACMA that movies only get when they know they’re in trouble, Downsizing went up in its place. And the sheer volume of trailer plays this thing got. Yeesh. I was willing to go see it from the beginning, and then it felt like the studio spent two months trying to talk me out of it with all their terrible ads.

Speaking of, I think this is the big trend in movie trailers this season: making a selling point out of a moment that the script totally thought was going to be a big reveal. It’s like if the trailer for Psycho wasn’t tracking well and then the whole marketing campaign shifted to be focused on the shower scene. Thor: Ragnarok doesn’t lay any hints that the Hulk is coming, because they thought you were going to be so pumped to see him, and Downsizing was planning on surprising you with the fact that Kristin Wiig isn’t going to be in this movie, which is in fact a shaggy dog story about Matt Damon learning that he needed to step away from his old life of taking care of his loved ones and struggling to make ends meet in his career where he improves his clients’ quality of life, so that he can, um, worry about money and help people, but in a way that requires less specialized knowledge? I don’t know. I had fun in the last act of the movie trying to imagine what the actual scale of everything we were seeing would have been.

Molly's Game - ★★★★☆
I was on board just to go see a couple hours of Sorkin dialogue, and of course Jessica Chastain as The Competent Woman. I think it's neat that the movie is in some ways a sequel to the book. I hope they get an Oscar nod for editing, as well as the inevitable screenplay nomination.

As soon as I heard there would be a movie I was wondering how they were going to depict Tobey Macguire.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - ★★★★☆
Well, first things first, having seen this twice in very different theaters, I’ve come to a conclusion: I think the first reel is out of sync. Like the whole scene with Hux on the bridge / space battle thing. Just a frame or two or three.

Other stuff: (Caution: extensive nerdery ensues)

- I’m surprised at all the ire. It’s a fun cynical thing to say that of course the internet hates things, but I don’t really understand it. It’s everything everyone said they wished The Force Awakens had been.
- I’m so happy about Rey. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become a weird kind of Star Wars elitist about what was intended in the original movie and so I like the Force being for everyone. I’ve read posts from goofs about how Luke already represented the random anykid using the force, which is true, but that was before 30 years of waxy lore buildup.
- You can draw a parallel between the practical necessity of scrubbing the EU and the line about burning down the past, sure, but that’s not what Ren is talking about. Your Star Wars isn’t gone. You’re not actually meant to destroy the past. Why? Well, there’s this little trick that people who have seen a movie before might be able to pass on, which is that the villain is often wrong. Sometimes art is used to explore a wrongheaded idea or philosophy by putting it in the mouth of antagonistic characters.
- I should probably emphasize that this is mainly in reference to ideas, and not like, every word out of the villain’s mouth. (Although, Iago.) There’s a thing about Empire where supposedly younger children were more likely to think Vader was lying to Luke. I know I was in that camp myself. I’m not sure what it says that it’s apparently such a popular opinion that Rey and Ren were lying about her parents. (That said, if any writer was going ever going to try to pull a reversal here, it would be JJ.)
- Canto Bight. Sure, with the hindsight that the plan didn’t work, you can say they might as well not have tried, but the rebellion is all about making these million-to-one shots. They can’t all pay off. Besides which, embodying the theme of the movie is a worthwhile thing to do in a movie. Do people not like Finn? Isn’t ‘seeing what adventures the characters are having’ another part of what folks want from Star Wars stories?
- On the other hand, the ‘how did Finn learn to fly since yesterday’ criticism is probably a valid one. We’re used to a gap of years between movies, but I think we’re only getting days this time.
- If I were snipping a plot thread out of this movie, it would be Captain Phasma. Is she a popular character? It feels like the Disneyiest, merch departmentiest fingerprint on these movies.
- Luke’s apparition. I wanted to say that it was how Luke thinks of himself, but I think the lightsaber is how we know it was meant to freak out Ben. The only reason I can think of for using the blue saber (besides giving the audience a clue) is that Luke is showing he’s met with Rey. The implication that Threepio can see the projection is really something. That means Luke is doing something to (at least) light on another planet, not just influencing the minds of the people there.
- Force ghost Luke! Luke’s hand should have clattered to the ground. Will the ghost have a robot hand? Real hand? No hand? Why isn’t anyone talking about the real issues?
- I would say that Luke did give Rey the most important training he could have. It’s not like he’s going to be drilling her on EU lightsaber forms. He probably doesn’t even know that kind of Republic era Jedi Academy stuff. Like Luke in Empire, what Rey learns in that dark side cave directly informs her approach to the force and evil and the rest of the movie.
- I wonder if audiences would gasp at Leia getting spaced if Carrie Fisher were alive. Maybe since they know the actress is gone, they’re just waiting for Leia to go somehow. I definitely thought it was possible her shuttle would be shot down until Poe boarded the same one.
- You just know they’re going to jam those dice into SOLO.
- I still like this movie. I liked it more this time.