#2,197: Philomena
She's the One - ★☆☆☆☆
he first few minutes tease you with hints of things that look like they might happen at the beginning of an interesting movie, but this is the setup to a practical joke that She's the One is playing on you. The payoff, revealed sooner than you might expect, is that this movie is terrible.
The poor cast struggles through a pile of awful lines while the movie rebuffs any attempts the audience might make to find the story interesting through sheer force of will. If only this had the charm and polish of a student film.
The Brothers McMullen - ½☆☆☆☆
Follows that old screenwriting adage that a script should have an Amy Fisher joke every 15 pages.
Highlight: there was a really interesting few minutes in the middle where I watched a video on my phone of Johnny Carson pulling two audience members out of the crowd and ask them to play piano on the Tonight Show because his scheduled musical guest cancelled.
The Intern - ★★★★☆
Alright, listen up Ed Burns, now THIS is how you make a movie where nothing happens. I mean, sure, every now and then, something happens in the movie, but when it does, it's only to negate an earlier scene. This is a positive review.
The easiest way to take this movie is as a spiritual sequel to The Devil Wears Prada. and in that case, I hope there'll be a third in the non-series one day, where Anne Hathaway plays an old person.
Really though, I don't know what the last movie was that left me pondering over the world it contains for such a long time. I've spent days talking over hypothetical situations, wondering about how dropped plot threads must have resolved themselves, whether the obviously missing scenes were cut from the script or in the edit, and how unsuccessful Ben would have been as a young person.
Philomena - ★★★½☆
I kind of like when a director has ideas that haunt them, and I certainly liked this more than recent watch (and Frears' first) The Snapper. This movie is good at evoking that 'punching something' feeling that you get whenever you examine anything in the world.