current and classic film reviews for all of those wonderful people out there in the dark
With great power comes great entertainment.
Sony’s awkwardly titled Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is just fantastic superhero entertainment. The characters pop, the animation is original, the character designs are interesting. The whole thing is a win.
A couple parts do maybe look a little cheap. I’m sure the inevitable sequels win correct that, since this one did great box office and won an Oscar.
I can’t wait.
Susan Hayward won an Oscar for her oddly compelling performance in this noir procedural.
Not going to lie – I love a title with punctuation.
And I love Susan Hayward’s awkward, jerky, brittle portrayal of Barbara Graham, a desperate woman headed for the gas chamber. She’s weird and stagey, and it works perfectly against the droll, deadpan world of the film. You don’t exactly like her, but you root for her anyways because she seems more alive than her surroundings. Virginia Vincent shines as the friend who unexpectedly stands by her.
A great movie might have more deeply questioned the role the press has not just in her vilification, but also in her would-be redemption. It seems unlikely that the newsman pressing for her release genuinely believes in her innocence.
The great final sequence is still powerful in its simple mechanics, in spite of the corny elements Robert Wise uses to generate empathy.
Underrated and worth a look.
…Assholes.
Look, I’m sorry. This review isn’t going to be empathetic or sensitive to the feelings of its subject or makers. Because I think they’re a bunch of assholes.
Alex Honnold, with his Jedi warrior masturbatory bullshit, is an asshole. His foundation sounds cool, but this movie isn’t about that – because he probably won’t die funding it. The filmmakers, who are clearly more interested in filming an aberrant personality possibly falling to his death than celebrating an athletic feat, are bigger assholes. Acknowledging (or faking in clearly staged conversations) their feelings about that makes them worse, not better. Alex playing to the camera during his climb is creepy, not cool.
I’ll leave the girlfriend out of my judgemental name-calling because she’s only hurting herself by pretending his (barely maintained) simulation of feeling is the same as caring. We’ve all made bad choices.
(Tommy Caldwell comes off okay as a supportive friend.)
But is it art? No.
Back in the 90’s there was a brief but serious art world crush on Henry Darger, a mild-mannered custodian who obsessively painted and wrote about a tribe of heroic little Morton Salt girls. Straight up creepy and crazy to me, but marketed as crazy brilliance and deemed museum-worthy by an art world desperate for a new visionary.
Velvet Buzzsaw takes that idea to its logical horror movie final destination. It’s not particularly scary or insightful, but a ridiculously top shelf cast makes the movie way more entertaining than it should be.
Jake Gyllenhaal’s mostly naked body is cute af, but I have mixed feelings about his freaky recent performances. It’s nice to see him having fun but he’s heading into Depp territory, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Rene Russo is an actor that I have never really seen the appeal of, but she’s brilliant here. Billy Magnussen kills it again. I know he’s been around for a minute, but ever since I saw him in Ingrid Goes West, he’s consistently surprised me with standout work. Zawe Ashton is perfectly cast – she reminded me of a young Jaye Davidson, and I do mean that in a good way.
All their work isn’t exactly gilding a turd, but close enough for the metaphor to be relevant, given the subject matter.
Amazing cinematography raises this simple slice of life drama above the ordinary.
I want to love Roma more than I do. Alfonso Cuarón is one of the most talented directors currently working anywhere in the world, and the cinematography here is breathtaking. There’s just something about a carefully composed black and white image that resonates in my soul, maybe because the first best films I ever saw were oldies on TV.
And Roma is very beautiful. The suspenseful scenes are gripping. The actors are solid. But there’s a distance.
It seems to me that there is something fundamentally unknowable about Cleo – in fact that may be the point, that she can’t be put into a box and labeled simply one thing or another. But it also seemed like the movie itself was holding me at arms length, when I wanted to get all up in there with my emotions.
An early-18th-century All About Eve. There’s no substitute for Bette Davis, but the three modern heavy hitters do slay.
Not as thematically ambitious or overall successful as Yorgos Lanthimos last picture, Killing of a Sacred Deer, a whole lot of The Favourite seems half baked.
It doesn’t really matter though, because The Favourite is actually just a vehicle for its stars. And they’re great across the board. Olivia Colman is the big winner, but Emma Stone is a whole lot of fun as – arguably – the actor playing most against type.
It is also worth noting that the women of The Favourite get to be ugly hearted and unsympathetic in ways that women are rarely allowed in Hollywood movies. Which is cool, kind of.
This movie, with its anachronistic (but not inaccurate) approach to a historical rivalry reminded me most of Amadeus. I’m glad to see such an odd film get some acclaim, but I wish it had been more focused.
Superficial but affecting.
Critically, I’m not sure where to start. I could bemoan the fact that the survivors of Queen have clearly had their hands in writing this version of history. I could point out the inherent dangers in crafting a biopic of someone who to modern eyes seems like – looks like – a queer icon, but who really wasn’t at the time. Who didn’t want to be, at the time. Who surely faced homophobia in both the industry and the rock audience that is completely ignored by the film. I especially could roll my eyes over this movie’s Sad Freddie, who never seems to actually enjoy the fame and the drugs and the fucking.
Those criticisms, and many others, are valid.
But here’s the thing. I liked Bohemian Rhapsody. Sort of a lot. I liked the whole cast. Rami Malek, certainly, but Ben Hardy (who I’ve liked since Eastenders) does an awful lot with what he’s given. I even, to a degree, enjoyed the superficiality, the gloss, which was certainly no worse than that of A Star is Born. I liked that it ended on a high note, even if it had to cut the story quite short to do so.
After so many years of awful queer films, I still haven’t gotten used to this recent explosion of queer films of quality. We’ll have to wait and see where Bohemian Rhapsody ends up on that list, but I have a feeling it will be higher than the skeptics today think.
Why?
Why did Luca Guadagnino make this film, when he clearly has no fondness for the original? He doesn’t include any of the qualities that made the original special.
Why does Tilda Swinton play three roles? She’s only really good in one of them.
Why does the climax look so cheesy? I assume it looks the way they wanted it to look. Why did they want it to look dumb?
What’s with the M.C. Escher vagina? Is that a joke?
Mia Goth is good; she’s very beautiful, too. Jessica Harper, whose beauty added a magical fairytale element to the original, gets a lovely little cameo. She’s still beautiful. But I think Suspiria, this Suspiria, is a shitty trainwreck. And boring.
A lot has been made about the silly choice to cast Swinton in a male role. The filmmakers explain this as a desire to not have the male gaze in the film. But the director and screenwriter are men. So… umm… what?
I could rant more, list all the bad choices, debate whether Dakota Johnson is really just… meh… or if she gets a pass for doing okay with an impossible, poorly defined role, and so on and so on and etc.
But I’ve already given this mess too much time in my mind.
*Interestingly, my friend Dominick really liked this Suspiria. I love Dominick, he’s smart and he’s a horror fan. But jeezum crow, I think he’s wrong about this one.
Clever cardboard box effects on a generic bag cereal budget.
I’ll overlook the amateurish acting, as that can be part of the fun with microbudget features like this, but I wish as much thought had been put into the plot and dialogue as the amusing cardboard effects.
DMaM isn’t a great movie by any stretch, in fact it’s barely a good one, but I would unconditionally recommend it to any viewer who misses the “let’s put on a show” quality of the 90’s indies.
Strongly acted but lacking in wit.
Just watch Spy again – you don’t have to feel guilty about it.
Did you ever spend time drinking in dive-y gay bars with shady characters? I have, kind of a lot. It’s sort of fun. More fun than Can You Ever Forgive Me? would have you believe.
Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a good movie, but it plods through its paces with a monotony that keeps it from rising above a certain level. Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant are great. They’re pretty much always great. Well, at least he is. But they’re both bona fide scene stealing stars with proven track records. Maybe people are surprised that she can actually act, but they shouldn’t be.
There’s no shortage of empathy in Can You Ever Forgive Me? for the oddball losers they’re playing, which is nice, but I wonder whether the real people involved in the story would have appreciated the pity the film encourages. I don’t think they would. I think maybe they’d tell Academy Award nominated screenwriter Nicole Holofcener to go fuck herself, and gigglesnort until they fell off their bar stools.
in the dark 