Alright, I'm starting to get back into the swing of things here. And I'm catching up on some films at a regular pace. I'm also watching more television that I've missed recently. I'm not having everything perfect, of course, but it's a hole and I've been down before and I do know the way out, it just takes time.
Anyway, I want movies that I saw that I have chosen not to review this week. I've been catching up on some Ozu; I finally got around to "Late Spring" as well as Wim Wenders's tribute to him, "Tokyo-Ga". Both of those are pretty great. I'm not the biggest Ozu guy personally, they all do feel a little too similar at some point, although "Floating Weeds" is usually my favorite, but "Late Spring" was good too. I finally got around to "Tig" the Netflix documentary about comedienne Tig Notaro; I actually read her autobiography and listened to her famous performance where she did stand-up shortly after finding out about her breast cancer diagnosis, so it was kinda unique see the behind-the-scenes of what was going on in her life at that point, and the events that happened after. I also loved her now-cancelled Amazon series, "One Mississippi", if you haven't seen that, check that out; it's really an underrated and amazing comedy series.
I also got around to the Georgian film "In Bloom"; solid film. Didn't love it, but I could admire it. I also finally watched Corneliu Porumboiu's "The Treasure". Porumboiu is the New Romanian Wave director of "Police, Adjective" and "12:08: East of Bucharest", I loved those movies in particular, "12:08...", but "The Treasure" I wasn't much forward to; it's not as blatantly satirical or political, but it was definitely funny and observant, and really a sharp little twist on a typical genre setup. Really enjoyed that movie.
Alright, let's get to the reviews!!!!
SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE (2018) Directors: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman
★★1/2
(Sigh)
I know I'm going to get shit for this from some people, but I'm-, I'm barely recommending this; I'm genuinely close to panning this movie outright. I can't quite get myself to that, but-eh, well, let me start the positive, 'cause there are some really cool wonderful things about this movie. For one, I like Spider-Man's parents, Jefferson Davis and Rio Morales (Brian Tyree Henry and Luna Lauren Velez), for one thing, they exist in this world! Seriously, it's a little odd that everything is based around his Aunt and Uncle, while there are some narratives that explain the parents' disappearance, I like this change. Another thing, I like that we get Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) as Spider-Man, a young, half-African-America, half-Latino intelligent but troubled young kid as the Spider-Man in this version. Peter Parker has always been mostly a blank to me, which he is versatile character I guess, but it sometimes makes him too versatile, and allows him to be able to do anything, when I like Spider-Man best is when he's limited not just in ability but as a character as well. So, I'm kinda glad there's no Peter Parker here. Well, except there is a Peter Parker (Chris Pine) and more importantly, a Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson) but, I'll get to that in a bit.
I also, love the animation. There are a few styles colliding upon themselves, and almost all of them look amazing and surprisingly, the collision and mixing of them actually does something that most comic book movies don't do particularly well, and that's have a movie that genuinely looks like a comic book. All this stuff, I find inspiring and kept giving me hope for this movie that something was gonna click and eventually I was gonna get into it.
Sadly, that- that just never was to be. Not fully anyway. I think part of it is probably a bit of my bias; I have made it no secret that I have never particularly found Spider-Man compelling, in any form really. Well-, that's not true entirely; I actually really like "Spider-Man: Homecoming" a lot, and I probably gave a pass to one of the "The Amazing Spider-Man" films along the way, but mostly I've been a bit at a loss at trying to understand the appeal of Spider-Man. However, after over a decade and a half of films that I've mostly hated, I'm starting to realize certain things I'm not big on him about. For instance, the-eh, "Great power comes great responsibility" tagline, that sounds like it should be from something better, it kinda sucks. And is total bullshit. I mean, hell, Spider-Man lives in a whole universe where there's several people with great powers and he seems to be the only one who ever gives half a shit about the responsibility of it all. (And I won't lie, with dipshit in the Oval Office right now, yeah, I can totally understand Peter B Parker's more nonchalant approach to being Spider-Man, as well as just a notion that, maybe it's not great to always use your powers, especially if they always end up backfiring on you and hurting someone you love.)
Mostly though, I think I just absolutely hate "Spider-Man"'s origin story. I mean, this is the fourth version of Spider-Man I've seen on the big screen in my lifetime, and the only one I really liked is the one that knew enough to skip over the damn origin. (Even if "...Homecoming" doesn't know that high school trivia teams can afford to buy buzzers and not have to rely on stupid bells!!!! Yes, that's the part of that movie I'm still pissed at.) I hate Superman's origin story more still, because Spider-Man's is kinda dumb in most versions as well. This one doesn't even bother contriving a way to get Peter into a science lab where he can get bit by the radioactive spider, he's just hanging out with his Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali) tagging one day, and then, a spider shows up and bites him, and now he has to save multiple universes. I don't like that about it either, that it's purely an accident of faith that somebody becomes Spider-Man, and now, we thrust upon them all this responsibility towards them. I mean, he's already an orphan-, okay, well, not in this version, and again that's an improvement, and he surely loses somebody, usually an Uncle, although in Gwen Stacy's (Hailee Steinfeld) case, a best friend, (Which was also improvement in her narrative) but like, come on? At least when Bruce Wayne loses his parents, he still grows and evolves into Batman; he doesn't have Batman thrust upon him!
So yeah, the fact that this is basically another origin story didn't help me, in fact it generally bored me. I could foresee a little more than I should've. I will say this, at least, the movie knew to avoid Spider-Man's cast of villains, most of whom suffered the same, get-bit-by-something-and-turn-evil Syndrome, with the exception of an admittedly cool use of Doc Ock (Kathryn Hahn) that I genuinely didn't see coming. Instead, our main villain is Kingpin, aka Wilson Fisk (Liev Schreiber), which I know stretches across a few superheroes, although I tend to think of him as being Daredevil's big villain, and a great villain in general. I mean, he was already the main villain in the seriously underrated "Daredevil" movie, and he makes sense here. Basically, he's opened a hole into a multi-verse portal, right as Miles gets bit by the spider and Peter Parker is killed in his failed attempt to close the portal. Peter B. Parker comes through and finds Miles first, and later, other Spider-Men, People- Heroes who've fallen through the portal, and now Miles has to save his universe as well as get all the other Spider-Characters home.
See, despite some of the inventiveness, this film is basically just another "Spider-Man" story, and frankly I've longago now felt like I've seen more-than-enough of them, and now it seems like I'm staring at all of them. And I know, there's several, several multi-verse Spider-Man's out there that are popular in the comic book world, I'm not big on the multiverse thing to begin with, and I know quantum theory's fascination with multiverses has made it popular, however, the way it's done here, is not that interesting. You see, the cool aspect of this narrative isn't the meeting of other people from other universes, it's when a character is placed into other universes and begins to observe and look around at all the differences and changes and try to make it in that world, or go through it as one searches for the way out. The movie is called "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", but oddly it actually, never goes into the Spider-Verse. We're always inside Miles Morales's universe and all these other Spider-Men, Spider-Women, and Spider-Ham, they could've just been other superheroes in this universe. In fact, that would make more sense, only one guy gets bit by a radioactive thing in this world, and all but one of them, one of them at a time, decides to be a superhero instead of a supervillain?! All these other Spider-Men, might as well just be other members of the Avengers, and nothing would change....
(Long deep pause, deep sighs. Deep breath.Changes 3 STARS to 2 1/2 STARS)
I'm sorry on this, but the more I think about it, the less I like it. I've gotta pan it outright, 'cause "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", could've been and should've been better than it was.
CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? (2018) Director: Marielle Heller
★★★★
I guess I never thought much about it before, but of all the kinds of authors there are in modern literature, biographer, is one of the strangest. You're not writing fiction, per se, you're actually doing a lot of research, supposedly, anyway and you're goal is get gain a grasp of the life of somebody else, often somebody who's either passed or has long-passed, or possibly through second or third-hand info and sources and evidence and eyewitness testimony. Sometimes they're documenting history; we often think autobiographies are the best first-hand knowledge of a person, but they're often just as unreliable as anything else and important biographies are really far more valuable, other times they might just be, some elaborate form of exploitation made by people about others who really can't always defend themselves. I guess there are still some famous biographers around, Doris Kearns Goodwin comes to mind, but I do think there was a bit of a trend towards famous biographies for awhile there. I guess the most interesting and infamous biographer in this era that I can think about it Kitty Kelley, who was kinda like the Harvey Levin of her day, I guess. I've read her unauthorized Frank Sinatra biography, which is generally regarded as the best and most "accurate" of her works, and-um, yeah, it's interesting, in a tabloid sorta way, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for research.
Still though, biographer also seems simultaneously like a fairly thankless author job. It certainly was for Lee Israel (Oscar-nominee Melissa McCarthy) who, for a time was a famous biographer, known for her works on Katharine Hepburn, Tallulah Bankhead, and coincidentally one of those weird celebrities who I actually have fascination with, Dorothy Kilgallen. Her "Kilgallen" biography made the bestseller's list, which is where I knew the name from. I haven't read the book, it's actually a little difficult to afford a copy since Israel's books were taken out of libraries and book stores for awhile. I've found people asking as much as $850.00 for the "Kilgallen" book on Amazon; the cheapest one at the moment is about $28 bucks, but even still, it's an obscure 40-year-old biography.... I'm sure she'd find that irony hilarious and frustrating if she were around today.
"Can You Ever Forgive Me?" based on her best-selling memoir, is about her post-biographer career, which fell badly after some bad reviews of her Estee Lauder biography. She was a petulant misanthropic drunk who cared more about her cat than she did most humans, and she wasn't well-liked in the literary community either. After getting constantly berated by her agent Marjorie (Jane Curtin) for her upcoming Fanny Brice book that she explains accurately that, "Nobody wants," she ends up forging out a living as a letter forger.
She first stole and replaced some found letters from Fanny Brice and selling them to some local collectors and sellers, but then began replicating or flat out creating from thin air letters from Noel Coward, Dorothy Parker, several other famous people known for their wit and fame. She even gets her one drinking buddy/friend, an eccentric debonair gay drunk, Jack Hock (Oscar-nominee Richard E. Grant) to try to sell some of her forgeries at one point. Hock is interesting character; I like A.O. Scott's observation that if Israel is a modern Dorothy Parker, than Hock is her Oscar Wilde. He's hung around the intellectual literary elite, but he seems unimpressed by sophistication. He seems to be the one gay guy who doesn't know who Fanny Brice is, Israel observes at one point. I presume he mostly just goes from cocktail party to cocktail party for drugs and alcohol.
The performances by McCarthy and Grant are the centerpiece of this quirky little New York story. Social elites, the rejected downtrodden, drugs, alcohol, crime, and a lot of analysis about the art and whether the true artist is the one that matters. This is not surprising when you learn about the strangely weird and talented pedigree of the production of "Can You Ever Forgive Me?". The movie was co-written by Nicole Holofcener, one of the biggest and best female independent directors out there, and you can kinda tell. She's often compared to a female Woody Allen, and there's a lot of motifs and this film that are similar to, both some of her other themes, but also some of Allen's. She was supposed to originally direct and apparently started filming the movie with Julianne Moore in the lead role at one point. Moore was eventually fired for reasons that were never explained and eventually Holofcener gave up the directing job, and that went to another strangely interesting director strange, Marielle Heller, the woman behind one of the very best films in recent years, the criminally underappreciated, "The Diary of a Teenage Girl". It's a bit rare to see a film taken from one great female director and put into the hands of another great female director, and the same with the lead actress role as well, at least this publicly. I don't think we'll ever find out what happened, but as much as I love Moore, but McCarthy is the right choice for this role. As somebody who remember her from long before she was famous, they've known that she's very capable of a dramatic character like this; in fact she's probably better at it somewhat than she is at comedy, and she is great at comedy. There's some really good intricacies in her performance that, wouldn't simply be written on the page. And this is a film where if her performance isn't great, the whole movie would flops. She's an unlikable shrew of a character, but you run through a lot of emotions and struggles with her characters, and you feel all of them in every scene she's in.
A person who writes about others, finally finds her own story to tell, by writing and pretending to be those who she writes about. I don't know if Dorothy Parker would ever forgive her for being a better Dorothy Parker than her, but after the movie got me to forgive her for such a heinous sin.
SHOPLIFTERS (2018) Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
★★★★1/2
"Shoplifters" is one of those movies that I admit, that I wasn't always paying as close attention to as I should, on the original viewing. I thought perhaps if I rewinded and rewatched things carefully, I would probably catch more and realize what's going on, but in this case, I know now that, it wouldn't have helped, 'cause the movie has a really-, not a sly twist, or even a twist at all per se, but...- well, what eventually get revealed in "Shoplifters" is not the kind of thing that anybody looking casually or intently would notice on the surface. It's clearly intentional, partially because that's part of the film, but I don't think that's the only reason. I've only in recent years began to discover the works of Japan's great Hirokazu Koreeda, one of the best filmmakers alive today. He originally began his career as a documentarian, but his first feature film "Maborosi" broke him onto the world stage. My first real introduction to him, when his work first truly effected me was "Like Father, Like Son", a devastating but beautiful movie he made a couple years ago about two families who find out that their children were switched at birth and now must began a long, painful and distressing process of having their kids switch homes and families. It's a movie several times since my first viewing and it grows more and more each viewing. His most common comparison is Yasojiru Ozu and like him, he's got a very deliberate and almost zen-like quality to his films, but he also seems to make movies about families. Koreeda though, often questions and challenges what exactly a family is with his films that I've liked include "Our Little Sister" a sprawling family epic about three grown sisters who have to let into their life a 13-year-old stepsister after their father's passing, and "After the Storm" which is about a private detective who struggles to find his place in his kid's life after his divorce and his struggles to make child support through his work.
Family, and what it constitutes that word, is the major theme in all of his films. "Shoplifters", naturally fits right in; it's about a family of shoplifters. The opening sequence involves a father Osamu (Lily Franky) teaching his young son Shota (Jyo Kairi) to steal. It's a touching scene that suddenly interrupted on the way home by Juri (Miyu Sasaki) a five-year-old girl who's apparently been treated badly by her family. This is the second time they've seen her outside her home at night, and when they take her home, the matriarch of the family, Grandma Hatsue (Kirin Kiki) notices her scars and they decide to take her in as well. It's a bit awkward. For one thing, it's technically kidnapping in some respects, including the legal one, and after a few months when they realize that her disappearance is a news story, they wonder what to do, but they trust their instincts.
The family is a bit larger than this too, and just as eclectic. Basically, this family reminds me of a nicer version of the Gallaghers in "Shameless", only with a lot more love and care and a lot less, well, the other 99% of that show. There's some scenes of the eldest daughter Aki's (Mayu Matsuoka) work at a strange kind of sex shop where she basically performs behind a wall for unseen customers. I know it's tempting to think of those romanticized scenes from Wim Wenders's "Paris, Texas" here, but honestly, it seems even more tragic and senseless as the way they perform, you suspect the customer's would probably get just as much pleasure if they were at home watching some camgirl. (Yes, I know there's stricter porn laws in Japan that make that option less attainable in Japan, don't @ me on that one.) There's also a pension that Grandma Hatsue gets, as well as some other ways they make money that's somewhat vaguely explained.
Everything on the surface of "Shoplifters", seems normal to the Shibata family, despite their industry based on petty shoplifting as a way to make money. They were a loving family that lived in a room of an apartment that did all they could to hustle and survive. Then, for reasons that I won't explain, we start to grimmer and sadder look at them and the family's true origins. In hindsight, we see hints of what was coming, but-, you could hypothetically call this a cheat twist, 'cause even with the foreshadowing it's too elaborate to fully predict or grasp on initial viewing, but that's the point. The movie reveals how the family came together, and ultimately what eventually disintegrated them, but the movie about how loving the family is. It's about how they are, the fact that this is a loving, caring family, and ultimately how is all that matters. Even if they're a family of shoplifters, they are still a family and that doesn't change no matter what else is going on.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE--FALLOUT (2018) Director: Christopher McQuarrie
★★★
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I'm just bored with Tom Cruise now. I'm bored with this franchise too. I mean, it's a fine movie, I'm recommending, there's only been one, maybe two truly bad "Mission: Impossible" films, that was "Mission: Impossible II", and I was the one that didn't' love, "...Rogue Nation", but it's probably okay, but I'm still kinda confused why we're still making these franchises. Ironically, this is the first in a long while that genuinely reminded of an episode of the old television show that it's based on. Certainly in the credit sequences, the film reminded me of it. And there's some good action scenes, some that are just really outrageous like a climatic helicopter chase where Ethan Hunt (Cruise) has to throw his helicopter into another helicopter before either helicopter collides into a mountain. I prefer the image earlier of Hunt, in the middle of a long multi-vehicled chase, running opposite the traffic on the roundabout in front of the Arc De Triomphe. That was a really cool image.
Still though, this is a franchise that's gotten six movies? Really? Like why? Okay, I know why, but-, especially from Tom Cruise-, "Mission: Impossible" is not a franchise that's about a single character. There was only one actor who was in every episode of the original series and he wasn't the star of the series. The show is somewhat famous for it's revolving door cast, it wasn't about any one particular member of IMF, hell, the IMF's motives changed half-way through the damn series. That's actually why it's a perfect franchise to transfer to movies, 'cause it's not only naturally a cinematic plot that allows for a good amount of infinite possibilities, but also, you can bring in new members and take out old members of the cast, pretty easily and regularly, and it wouldn't effect the damn thing.
However, you wouldn't think that watching this franchise, and especially not after this film, which, at times seems to just be a giant blowjob to how great Ethan Hunt is. Seriously, the dialogue all seems to just be reaffirming to us constantly that yes, Ethan Hunt is still Ethan Hunt, and he's still capable of saving the world and this is his life! Here's all his old crew! Luther's (Ving Rhames) back. So is Benji (Simon Pegg) so is his newest love Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) also, his past love, Julia (Michelle Monaghan). God, if there was one movie franchise where I didn't think I'd have to pay close enough attention to the overarching backstory it would be this one. Even his old nemesis Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) along with a new villain, August Walker (Henry Cavill). Okay! Also, Alec Baldwin's here, so is Angela Bassett! Wes Bentley, were they in any of the previous films, I don't remember anymore. This franchise is six movies and a quarter-century old and now I'm supposed to pay attention to this?
I hate to make such insinuations that this franchise has basically just become a Tom Cruise vanity project now, but I don't know what else to think about it at this point. Even the Bourne franchise knew enough to have a movie without Jason Bourne. I'm not against more "Mission: Impossible" movies, but I definitely think I'm against more Tom Cruise ones. We should be getting "Mission: Impossible: The Next Generation" at this point. The fact that these movies are generally good and overall have improved from the confusing albeit interesting first movie, and the godawful pointless explosion-fest of the second, makes this confusing, but I'm just done.
It's not even that Cruise is currently not en vogue with the general public anymore, especially now that we're getting way more information about Scientology and just how corrupt and perverted a cult of a pyramid scheme of a religion it is, yet that basically he's become relegated to action movies now. I mean, he's still big enough that he can basically pick the best action movie that he could want to do. I mean, it wasn't that long ago he did that with "Edge of Tomorrow", but four of his next five projected projects are sequels to other action movies he's done, including two more "Mission: Impossible" movies coming, as well as a sequel to "Edge of Tomorrow", which I hope is just a rumor, and of course, the long awaited sequel to "Top Gun" that nobody wanted. (Sigh) I'm genuinely disappointed in him.
He put it off forever, but he's basically finally in the Burt Reynolds phase of his career. People forget this, but when Tom Cruise was coming up, Burt Reynolds was the biggest movie star in the world, and around that same time, the Tom Cruise Film Formula was just getting written and discussed. It's not entirely untrue or inaccurate, btw, but here's the big difference between Reynolds and Cruise. Cruise, genuinely sought out projects that challenged himself as an actor. He did this for a good solid twenty years or so, you'd be hard-pressed to find a "Cop & a Half" or a "Cannonball Run II" on Cruise's filmography, cause he never did forget that, it wasn't that people wanted to see Tom Cruise, it's that people want to see Tom Cruise acting, and dammit, we still do. When he is on, he is one of our best actors and has been for years. But I came out of "Mission: Impossible--Fallout" just feeling like this film was a total waste for him. We know he can and should be doing so much more, but he seems more intent on trying to prove, not that he's this actor, but that he's this physical marvel of a man, who can still do the greatest action scene, somehow always find a way to be the good guy, even when he's supposed to be the villain, and run across cities from rooftop to rooftop and perform superhuman stunts.
He's 57 years old and it's not like he was ever exclusively thought of as an action film star before; I certainly never thought of him in those terms. Maybe it's his own doing, and this is all he can get, but I think he can still be seeking out better, more interesting, more challenging roles and material if he wanted to. I hope he does, and I hope if there is two more "Mission: Impossible" films on the horizon, I hope he's not in them. I hope he lets them reboot this franchise, create new characters, find some new stories for a new IMF gang to do
THE PARTY (2018) Director: Sally Potter
★★
Sally Potter's one of the last filmmakers I would've thought would make a movie like "The Party". This movie belongs in that weird subgenre of indies I call the Hollywood Party movies. Now, this one takes place in London, but essentially this is the kind of movie that's basically just getting a bunch of close friends and actors together in a room or a house or a loft, and they act out a party scene of some kind. Sometimes it's literally just a movie about a party that seems to be able to pass as a party. Alan Cumming & Jennifer Jason Leigh's "The Anniversary Party", is probably one of the best of these, as well as one of the most insider of these. One of the few Joss Whedon's projects I actually like, his adaptation of "Much Ado About Nothing" feels quite like this as well. There's others, some are theatrical experiments, others are just some modern variant on "The Big Chill". Potter's "The Party", is basically an experiment, which is something I expect from Potter. My favorite film of hers is "Yes", a romance story where all the dialogue was spoken in Shakespearean rhyme and rhythm, so she's prone to an experiment or two, but I always gave her a little more credit than this.
"The Party" is a barely-70 minute long snore where a bunch of people gather for an event, there's a few revelations and a couple things happen. Now, in the right setting, this narrative can be amazing. Here, however,- well, it really is much ado about nothing.
There's talk of things, politics and life theories, political correctness, relationships all get mentioned and thrown around, but you never get the sense that there's any meaning behind these topics. Apparently, Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) has just been placed in some high political position, while Bill, she learns over the night, is dying. What political position? It's never specifically explained, although it seems like this is a left-wing collective group. We have a pregnant lesbian couple for instance, Jinny and Martha (Emily Mortimer and Cherry Jones) as well as an eccentric opposites attract couple with the philosophically extreme April and Gottfriend (Patricia Clarkson and Bruno Ganz), she's a left-wing radical totalitarian who criticizes everything and everyone, most especially her husband a flightly life coach who seems to think the right records can help bring people back to life. Then there's Tom (Cillian Murphy), the rich banker drug addict, who's high on coke the whole night, and causing his own mild chaos wherever he goes.
I don't know, like, I can see, maybe Richard Linklater taking similar characters and materials and making a compelling narrative out of this, but he's used to restrictive settings and he loves discussion of high-minded subjects from several different perspectives. Potter just seems annoyed by it, everything's vague and nothing matters here until Bill announces his upcoming death and even there, there's-, the movie begins and ends with a character, pointing a gun at us and shooting, just like the end of "The Great Train Robbery", there's no need for that gun or any gun to even be in this movie. This isn't a movie that needs that kind of Chekhovian planting and it doesn't even payoff at the end.
This movie gets worst the more I think about it, honestly. I can appreciate the attempt at doing something like this, by a natural experimental filmmaker, but this is so far away from Potter's strengths that I'm confused at why she was even trying to make this. There's not much else to say, this was a boring, uninteresting, bad barely a blip of a movie, and I'm shocked that somebody as great as Sally Potter made this.
BRAMPTON'S OWN (2018) Director: Michael Donager
1/2★
So, about halfway through "Brampton's Own" a Netflix movie that got a limited enough theatrical release apparently that it qualifies for a review from me, my friend who I was watching the movie with, and who coincidentally was the one who picked the movie out, stated that, "This is one of the ten worst baseball movies he's ever seen." This led into a thinking exercise as I tried to figure out what the worst baseball movie of all-time was. I'm not 100% knowing in this case, but I feel fairly safe in saying that there's gotta be a "Bad News Bears" sequel or two that's genuinely the worst of all-time. "Major League: Back to the Minors" would probably be the one I've seen to completion that I'd vote for, unless we're counting, "Angels in the Infield". No, not "...Outfield", "Infield". There's a little-remembered challenge for those Youtube critics, seek out the horrible TV/Straight-to-DVD (finger quotes) "sequels" to that thing.
I'm bringing this up because it's way more interesting than anything I can talk about with this movie. I struggle to put it on the aforementioned Worst Baseball Movie list, since I'm barely certain that it's even worth counting quite frankly. It's barely a baseball movie. It's barely a movie at times. I'm actually still watching it while I'm writing this review, 'cause it's just too painfully bad to actually sit down and let the movie play all the way through; I can only put up with the strange camera choices like the awkward panning between shots in one scene where a camera moves from one set of character to the other that's talking, instead of doing some kind of two-shot, or the weird OTS shot I'm looking at now of the lead actor talking to, I think it's his sister about his old high school girlfriend...- It's not even sure its either of those character's shoulders; it's like somebody shot a master from an OTS of the most annoying side character in the film, for no reason, and just kept it. I can't entirely blame the aimless directing, the confusing over-plotted script isn't helping. The actors are,- well, I guess Jean Smart can never do anything wrong, but they're not given the best to work with, although I'm hard-pressed to think of "Brampton's Own" as a well-cast film either. I mean, this movie couldn't even find a Major Legue ballplayer to play the Major League ballplayer for a cameo scene. Like, they didn't have to get Ichiro or anything, but you couldn't convince one Seattle Mariner to be in a scene? Like you don't have to get Felix Hernandez or anything, but I mean you couldn't convince Edwin Encarnacion to be to do a page of dialogue? I mean, the main character plays for the Tacoma Rainers, that's a real baseball team; they're the real Seattle Mariners' AAA affiliate! Like, c'mon here!
So, the guy who seems the most responsible for this is Michael Donager, he's a Writer/Director, this is his second feature directorial effort after something called "This Thing with Sarah" from seven years ago, however he seems to have gotten the most acclaim from co-writing and being a lead actor in a film called "The Escort" that actually didn't do horribly on the festival circuit. That movie had a different director though, a guy who has a lot more credits, mostly in television, but still, that's the first advice I'm giving this guy; he needs to put the camera down. There's a few scenes that are kinda well-written here, so I don't want to bash him too much. Although the use of the phrase, "I want to eat you like a watermelon", um...- yeah, oh boy, yeah, if that scene doesn't damn this movie to a future "MTS3K" episode.... I get it, we're all struggling filmmakers, it's a mini-miracle anything ever gets made and he's trying. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that this film probably was something that was supposed to be grander and more epic and austere than this, and for whatever reasons, budget, producers perhaps, it just ended up like this instead, but even then, this movie at best feels like a part of well-worn ideas from other movies. And not always better movies either.
You have the longtime Minor Leaguer, Dustin (Alex Russell) who's never made the Show, and instead of staying on, he's come home to the titular small town where he's still somewhat of a folk hero, but now, after twelve years, shockingly, everything's change! His mother, is engaged and moving in with a new boyfriend, Bart (John Getz, who's also decent in limited work here) and who has a son Dustin now befriends named Cody (Carter Hastings). There's the old high school girlfriend Rachel (Rose McIver) who's engaged to the town's new local dentist but might still feel for Dustin, but doesn't want him to keep chasing his dream of playing in the Majors...- Who still holds onto his past memories as a high school star...-. There's some other friends from his past...- there's a lot here, way too much.
There's a way to tell a story with these elements, even a way to make it new and fresh; "Brampton's Own" just trying to be a tire-old nostalgia-esque romance of Americana. Small town, baseball, apple pie, high school sweethearts,.... It's not adding anything new to this and it's not well-done enough to make the classic tolerable.
Anyway, I want movies that I saw that I have chosen not to review this week. I've been catching up on some Ozu; I finally got around to "Late Spring" as well as Wim Wenders's tribute to him, "Tokyo-Ga". Both of those are pretty great. I'm not the biggest Ozu guy personally, they all do feel a little too similar at some point, although "Floating Weeds" is usually my favorite, but "Late Spring" was good too. I finally got around to "Tig" the Netflix documentary about comedienne Tig Notaro; I actually read her autobiography and listened to her famous performance where she did stand-up shortly after finding out about her breast cancer diagnosis, so it was kinda unique see the behind-the-scenes of what was going on in her life at that point, and the events that happened after. I also loved her now-cancelled Amazon series, "One Mississippi", if you haven't seen that, check that out; it's really an underrated and amazing comedy series.
I also got around to the Georgian film "In Bloom"; solid film. Didn't love it, but I could admire it. I also finally watched Corneliu Porumboiu's "The Treasure". Porumboiu is the New Romanian Wave director of "Police, Adjective" and "12:08: East of Bucharest", I loved those movies in particular, "12:08...", but "The Treasure" I wasn't much forward to; it's not as blatantly satirical or political, but it was definitely funny and observant, and really a sharp little twist on a typical genre setup. Really enjoyed that movie.
Alright, let's get to the reviews!!!!
SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE (2018) Directors: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman
★★1/2
(Sigh)
I know I'm going to get shit for this from some people, but I'm-, I'm barely recommending this; I'm genuinely close to panning this movie outright. I can't quite get myself to that, but-eh, well, let me start the positive, 'cause there are some really cool wonderful things about this movie. For one, I like Spider-Man's parents, Jefferson Davis and Rio Morales (Brian Tyree Henry and Luna Lauren Velez), for one thing, they exist in this world! Seriously, it's a little odd that everything is based around his Aunt and Uncle, while there are some narratives that explain the parents' disappearance, I like this change. Another thing, I like that we get Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) as Spider-Man, a young, half-African-America, half-Latino intelligent but troubled young kid as the Spider-Man in this version. Peter Parker has always been mostly a blank to me, which he is versatile character I guess, but it sometimes makes him too versatile, and allows him to be able to do anything, when I like Spider-Man best is when he's limited not just in ability but as a character as well. So, I'm kinda glad there's no Peter Parker here. Well, except there is a Peter Parker (Chris Pine) and more importantly, a Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson) but, I'll get to that in a bit.
I also, love the animation. There are a few styles colliding upon themselves, and almost all of them look amazing and surprisingly, the collision and mixing of them actually does something that most comic book movies don't do particularly well, and that's have a movie that genuinely looks like a comic book. All this stuff, I find inspiring and kept giving me hope for this movie that something was gonna click and eventually I was gonna get into it.
Sadly, that- that just never was to be. Not fully anyway. I think part of it is probably a bit of my bias; I have made it no secret that I have never particularly found Spider-Man compelling, in any form really. Well-, that's not true entirely; I actually really like "Spider-Man: Homecoming" a lot, and I probably gave a pass to one of the "The Amazing Spider-Man" films along the way, but mostly I've been a bit at a loss at trying to understand the appeal of Spider-Man. However, after over a decade and a half of films that I've mostly hated, I'm starting to realize certain things I'm not big on him about. For instance, the-eh, "Great power comes great responsibility" tagline, that sounds like it should be from something better, it kinda sucks. And is total bullshit. I mean, hell, Spider-Man lives in a whole universe where there's several people with great powers and he seems to be the only one who ever gives half a shit about the responsibility of it all. (And I won't lie, with dipshit in the Oval Office right now, yeah, I can totally understand Peter B Parker's more nonchalant approach to being Spider-Man, as well as just a notion that, maybe it's not great to always use your powers, especially if they always end up backfiring on you and hurting someone you love.)
Mostly though, I think I just absolutely hate "Spider-Man"'s origin story. I mean, this is the fourth version of Spider-Man I've seen on the big screen in my lifetime, and the only one I really liked is the one that knew enough to skip over the damn origin. (Even if "...Homecoming" doesn't know that high school trivia teams can afford to buy buzzers and not have to rely on stupid bells!!!! Yes, that's the part of that movie I'm still pissed at.) I hate Superman's origin story more still, because Spider-Man's is kinda dumb in most versions as well. This one doesn't even bother contriving a way to get Peter into a science lab where he can get bit by the radioactive spider, he's just hanging out with his Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali) tagging one day, and then, a spider shows up and bites him, and now he has to save multiple universes. I don't like that about it either, that it's purely an accident of faith that somebody becomes Spider-Man, and now, we thrust upon them all this responsibility towards them. I mean, he's already an orphan-, okay, well, not in this version, and again that's an improvement, and he surely loses somebody, usually an Uncle, although in Gwen Stacy's (Hailee Steinfeld) case, a best friend, (Which was also improvement in her narrative) but like, come on? At least when Bruce Wayne loses his parents, he still grows and evolves into Batman; he doesn't have Batman thrust upon him!
So yeah, the fact that this is basically another origin story didn't help me, in fact it generally bored me. I could foresee a little more than I should've. I will say this, at least, the movie knew to avoid Spider-Man's cast of villains, most of whom suffered the same, get-bit-by-something-and-turn-evil Syndrome, with the exception of an admittedly cool use of Doc Ock (Kathryn Hahn) that I genuinely didn't see coming. Instead, our main villain is Kingpin, aka Wilson Fisk (Liev Schreiber), which I know stretches across a few superheroes, although I tend to think of him as being Daredevil's big villain, and a great villain in general. I mean, he was already the main villain in the seriously underrated "Daredevil" movie, and he makes sense here. Basically, he's opened a hole into a multi-verse portal, right as Miles gets bit by the spider and Peter Parker is killed in his failed attempt to close the portal. Peter B. Parker comes through and finds Miles first, and later, other Spider-
See, despite some of the inventiveness, this film is basically just another "Spider-Man" story, and frankly I've longago now felt like I've seen more-than-enough of them, and now it seems like I'm staring at all of them. And I know, there's several, several multi-verse Spider-Man's out there that are popular in the comic book world, I'm not big on the multiverse thing to begin with, and I know quantum theory's fascination with multiverses has made it popular, however, the way it's done here, is not that interesting. You see, the cool aspect of this narrative isn't the meeting of other people from other universes, it's when a character is placed into other universes and begins to observe and look around at all the differences and changes and try to make it in that world, or go through it as one searches for the way out. The movie is called "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", but oddly it actually, never goes into the Spider-Verse. We're always inside Miles Morales's universe and all these other Spider-Men, Spider-Women, and Spider-Ham, they could've just been other superheroes in this universe. In fact, that would make more sense, only one guy gets bit by a radioactive thing in this world, and all but one of them, one of them at a time, decides to be a superhero instead of a supervillain?! All these other Spider-Men, might as well just be other members of the Avengers, and nothing would change....
(Long deep pause, deep sighs. Deep breath.Changes 3 STARS to 2 1/2 STARS)
I'm sorry on this, but the more I think about it, the less I like it. I've gotta pan it outright, 'cause "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", could've been and should've been better than it was.
CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? (2018) Director: Marielle Heller
★★★★
I guess I never thought much about it before, but of all the kinds of authors there are in modern literature, biographer, is one of the strangest. You're not writing fiction, per se, you're actually doing a lot of research, supposedly, anyway and you're goal is get gain a grasp of the life of somebody else, often somebody who's either passed or has long-passed, or possibly through second or third-hand info and sources and evidence and eyewitness testimony. Sometimes they're documenting history; we often think autobiographies are the best first-hand knowledge of a person, but they're often just as unreliable as anything else and important biographies are really far more valuable, other times they might just be, some elaborate form of exploitation made by people about others who really can't always defend themselves. I guess there are still some famous biographers around, Doris Kearns Goodwin comes to mind, but I do think there was a bit of a trend towards famous biographies for awhile there. I guess the most interesting and infamous biographer in this era that I can think about it Kitty Kelley, who was kinda like the Harvey Levin of her day, I guess. I've read her unauthorized Frank Sinatra biography, which is generally regarded as the best and most "accurate" of her works, and-um, yeah, it's interesting, in a tabloid sorta way, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for research.
Still though, biographer also seems simultaneously like a fairly thankless author job. It certainly was for Lee Israel (Oscar-nominee Melissa McCarthy) who, for a time was a famous biographer, known for her works on Katharine Hepburn, Tallulah Bankhead, and coincidentally one of those weird celebrities who I actually have fascination with, Dorothy Kilgallen. Her "Kilgallen" biography made the bestseller's list, which is where I knew the name from. I haven't read the book, it's actually a little difficult to afford a copy since Israel's books were taken out of libraries and book stores for awhile. I've found people asking as much as $850.00 for the "Kilgallen" book on Amazon; the cheapest one at the moment is about $28 bucks, but even still, it's an obscure 40-year-old biography.... I'm sure she'd find that irony hilarious and frustrating if she were around today.
"Can You Ever Forgive Me?" based on her best-selling memoir, is about her post-biographer career, which fell badly after some bad reviews of her Estee Lauder biography. She was a petulant misanthropic drunk who cared more about her cat than she did most humans, and she wasn't well-liked in the literary community either. After getting constantly berated by her agent Marjorie (Jane Curtin) for her upcoming Fanny Brice book that she explains accurately that, "Nobody wants," she ends up forging out a living as a letter forger.
She first stole and replaced some found letters from Fanny Brice and selling them to some local collectors and sellers, but then began replicating or flat out creating from thin air letters from Noel Coward, Dorothy Parker, several other famous people known for their wit and fame. She even gets her one drinking buddy/friend, an eccentric debonair gay drunk, Jack Hock (Oscar-nominee Richard E. Grant) to try to sell some of her forgeries at one point. Hock is interesting character; I like A.O. Scott's observation that if Israel is a modern Dorothy Parker, than Hock is her Oscar Wilde. He's hung around the intellectual literary elite, but he seems unimpressed by sophistication. He seems to be the one gay guy who doesn't know who Fanny Brice is, Israel observes at one point. I presume he mostly just goes from cocktail party to cocktail party for drugs and alcohol.
The performances by McCarthy and Grant are the centerpiece of this quirky little New York story. Social elites, the rejected downtrodden, drugs, alcohol, crime, and a lot of analysis about the art and whether the true artist is the one that matters. This is not surprising when you learn about the strangely weird and talented pedigree of the production of "Can You Ever Forgive Me?". The movie was co-written by Nicole Holofcener, one of the biggest and best female independent directors out there, and you can kinda tell. She's often compared to a female Woody Allen, and there's a lot of motifs and this film that are similar to, both some of her other themes, but also some of Allen's. She was supposed to originally direct and apparently started filming the movie with Julianne Moore in the lead role at one point. Moore was eventually fired for reasons that were never explained and eventually Holofcener gave up the directing job, and that went to another strangely interesting director strange, Marielle Heller, the woman behind one of the very best films in recent years, the criminally underappreciated, "The Diary of a Teenage Girl". It's a bit rare to see a film taken from one great female director and put into the hands of another great female director, and the same with the lead actress role as well, at least this publicly. I don't think we'll ever find out what happened, but as much as I love Moore, but McCarthy is the right choice for this role. As somebody who remember her from long before she was famous, they've known that she's very capable of a dramatic character like this; in fact she's probably better at it somewhat than she is at comedy, and she is great at comedy. There's some really good intricacies in her performance that, wouldn't simply be written on the page. And this is a film where if her performance isn't great, the whole movie would flops. She's an unlikable shrew of a character, but you run through a lot of emotions and struggles with her characters, and you feel all of them in every scene she's in.
A person who writes about others, finally finds her own story to tell, by writing and pretending to be those who she writes about. I don't know if Dorothy Parker would ever forgive her for being a better Dorothy Parker than her, but after the movie got me to forgive her for such a heinous sin.
SHOPLIFTERS (2018) Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
★★★★1/2
"Shoplifters" is one of those movies that I admit, that I wasn't always paying as close attention to as I should, on the original viewing. I thought perhaps if I rewinded and rewatched things carefully, I would probably catch more and realize what's going on, but in this case, I know now that, it wouldn't have helped, 'cause the movie has a really-, not a sly twist, or even a twist at all per se, but...- well, what eventually get revealed in "Shoplifters" is not the kind of thing that anybody looking casually or intently would notice on the surface. It's clearly intentional, partially because that's part of the film, but I don't think that's the only reason. I've only in recent years began to discover the works of Japan's great Hirokazu Koreeda, one of the best filmmakers alive today. He originally began his career as a documentarian, but his first feature film "Maborosi" broke him onto the world stage. My first real introduction to him, when his work first truly effected me was "Like Father, Like Son", a devastating but beautiful movie he made a couple years ago about two families who find out that their children were switched at birth and now must began a long, painful and distressing process of having their kids switch homes and families. It's a movie several times since my first viewing and it grows more and more each viewing. His most common comparison is Yasojiru Ozu and like him, he's got a very deliberate and almost zen-like quality to his films, but he also seems to make movies about families. Koreeda though, often questions and challenges what exactly a family is with his films that I've liked include "Our Little Sister" a sprawling family epic about three grown sisters who have to let into their life a 13-year-old stepsister after their father's passing, and "After the Storm" which is about a private detective who struggles to find his place in his kid's life after his divorce and his struggles to make child support through his work.
Family, and what it constitutes that word, is the major theme in all of his films. "Shoplifters", naturally fits right in; it's about a family of shoplifters. The opening sequence involves a father Osamu (Lily Franky) teaching his young son Shota (Jyo Kairi) to steal. It's a touching scene that suddenly interrupted on the way home by Juri (Miyu Sasaki) a five-year-old girl who's apparently been treated badly by her family. This is the second time they've seen her outside her home at night, and when they take her home, the matriarch of the family, Grandma Hatsue (Kirin Kiki) notices her scars and they decide to take her in as well. It's a bit awkward. For one thing, it's technically kidnapping in some respects, including the legal one, and after a few months when they realize that her disappearance is a news story, they wonder what to do, but they trust their instincts.
The family is a bit larger than this too, and just as eclectic. Basically, this family reminds me of a nicer version of the Gallaghers in "Shameless", only with a lot more love and care and a lot less, well, the other 99% of that show. There's some scenes of the eldest daughter Aki's (Mayu Matsuoka) work at a strange kind of sex shop where she basically performs behind a wall for unseen customers. I know it's tempting to think of those romanticized scenes from Wim Wenders's "Paris, Texas" here, but honestly, it seems even more tragic and senseless as the way they perform, you suspect the customer's would probably get just as much pleasure if they were at home watching some camgirl. (Yes, I know there's stricter porn laws in Japan that make that option less attainable in Japan, don't @ me on that one.) There's also a pension that Grandma Hatsue gets, as well as some other ways they make money that's somewhat vaguely explained.
Everything on the surface of "Shoplifters", seems normal to the Shibata family, despite their industry based on petty shoplifting as a way to make money. They were a loving family that lived in a room of an apartment that did all they could to hustle and survive. Then, for reasons that I won't explain, we start to grimmer and sadder look at them and the family's true origins. In hindsight, we see hints of what was coming, but-, you could hypothetically call this a cheat twist, 'cause even with the foreshadowing it's too elaborate to fully predict or grasp on initial viewing, but that's the point. The movie reveals how the family came together, and ultimately what eventually disintegrated them, but the movie about how loving the family is. It's about how they are, the fact that this is a loving, caring family, and ultimately how is all that matters. Even if they're a family of shoplifters, they are still a family and that doesn't change no matter what else is going on.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE--FALLOUT (2018) Director: Christopher McQuarrie
★★★
I'm just bored with Tom Cruise now. I'm bored with this franchise too. I mean, it's a fine movie, I'm recommending, there's only been one, maybe two truly bad "Mission: Impossible" films, that was "Mission: Impossible II", and I was the one that didn't' love, "...Rogue Nation", but it's probably okay, but I'm still kinda confused why we're still making these franchises. Ironically, this is the first in a long while that genuinely reminded of an episode of the old television show that it's based on. Certainly in the credit sequences, the film reminded me of it. And there's some good action scenes, some that are just really outrageous like a climatic helicopter chase where Ethan Hunt (Cruise) has to throw his helicopter into another helicopter before either helicopter collides into a mountain. I prefer the image earlier of Hunt, in the middle of a long multi-vehicled chase, running opposite the traffic on the roundabout in front of the Arc De Triomphe. That was a really cool image.
Still though, this is a franchise that's gotten six movies? Really? Like why? Okay, I know why, but-, especially from Tom Cruise-, "Mission: Impossible" is not a franchise that's about a single character. There was only one actor who was in every episode of the original series and he wasn't the star of the series. The show is somewhat famous for it's revolving door cast, it wasn't about any one particular member of IMF, hell, the IMF's motives changed half-way through the damn series. That's actually why it's a perfect franchise to transfer to movies, 'cause it's not only naturally a cinematic plot that allows for a good amount of infinite possibilities, but also, you can bring in new members and take out old members of the cast, pretty easily and regularly, and it wouldn't effect the damn thing.
However, you wouldn't think that watching this franchise, and especially not after this film, which, at times seems to just be a giant blowjob to how great Ethan Hunt is. Seriously, the dialogue all seems to just be reaffirming to us constantly that yes, Ethan Hunt is still Ethan Hunt, and he's still capable of saving the world and this is his life! Here's all his old crew! Luther's (Ving Rhames) back. So is Benji (Simon Pegg) so is his newest love Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) also, his past love, Julia (Michelle Monaghan). God, if there was one movie franchise where I didn't think I'd have to pay close enough attention to the overarching backstory it would be this one. Even his old nemesis Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) along with a new villain, August Walker (Henry Cavill). Okay! Also, Alec Baldwin's here, so is Angela Bassett! Wes Bentley, were they in any of the previous films, I don't remember anymore. This franchise is six movies and a quarter-century old and now I'm supposed to pay attention to this?
I hate to make such insinuations that this franchise has basically just become a Tom Cruise vanity project now, but I don't know what else to think about it at this point. Even the Bourne franchise knew enough to have a movie without Jason Bourne. I'm not against more "Mission: Impossible" movies, but I definitely think I'm against more Tom Cruise ones. We should be getting "Mission: Impossible: The Next Generation" at this point. The fact that these movies are generally good and overall have improved from the confusing albeit interesting first movie, and the godawful pointless explosion-fest of the second, makes this confusing, but I'm just done.
It's not even that Cruise is currently not en vogue with the general public anymore, especially now that we're getting way more information about Scientology and just how corrupt and perverted a cult of a pyramid scheme of a religion it is, yet that basically he's become relegated to action movies now. I mean, he's still big enough that he can basically pick the best action movie that he could want to do. I mean, it wasn't that long ago he did that with "Edge of Tomorrow", but four of his next five projected projects are sequels to other action movies he's done, including two more "Mission: Impossible" movies coming, as well as a sequel to "Edge of Tomorrow", which I hope is just a rumor, and of course, the long awaited sequel to "Top Gun" that nobody wanted. (Sigh) I'm genuinely disappointed in him.
He put it off forever, but he's basically finally in the Burt Reynolds phase of his career. People forget this, but when Tom Cruise was coming up, Burt Reynolds was the biggest movie star in the world, and around that same time, the Tom Cruise Film Formula was just getting written and discussed. It's not entirely untrue or inaccurate, btw, but here's the big difference between Reynolds and Cruise. Cruise, genuinely sought out projects that challenged himself as an actor. He did this for a good solid twenty years or so, you'd be hard-pressed to find a "Cop & a Half" or a "Cannonball Run II" on Cruise's filmography, cause he never did forget that, it wasn't that people wanted to see Tom Cruise, it's that people want to see Tom Cruise acting, and dammit, we still do. When he is on, he is one of our best actors and has been for years. But I came out of "Mission: Impossible--Fallout" just feeling like this film was a total waste for him. We know he can and should be doing so much more, but he seems more intent on trying to prove, not that he's this actor, but that he's this physical marvel of a man, who can still do the greatest action scene, somehow always find a way to be the good guy, even when he's supposed to be the villain, and run across cities from rooftop to rooftop and perform superhuman stunts.
He's 57 years old and it's not like he was ever exclusively thought of as an action film star before; I certainly never thought of him in those terms. Maybe it's his own doing, and this is all he can get, but I think he can still be seeking out better, more interesting, more challenging roles and material if he wanted to. I hope he does, and I hope if there is two more "Mission: Impossible" films on the horizon, I hope he's not in them. I hope he lets them reboot this franchise, create new characters, find some new stories for a new IMF gang to do
THE PARTY (2018) Director: Sally Potter
★★
Sally Potter's one of the last filmmakers I would've thought would make a movie like "The Party". This movie belongs in that weird subgenre of indies I call the Hollywood Party movies. Now, this one takes place in London, but essentially this is the kind of movie that's basically just getting a bunch of close friends and actors together in a room or a house or a loft, and they act out a party scene of some kind. Sometimes it's literally just a movie about a party that seems to be able to pass as a party. Alan Cumming & Jennifer Jason Leigh's "The Anniversary Party", is probably one of the best of these, as well as one of the most insider of these. One of the few Joss Whedon's projects I actually like, his adaptation of "Much Ado About Nothing" feels quite like this as well. There's others, some are theatrical experiments, others are just some modern variant on "The Big Chill". Potter's "The Party", is basically an experiment, which is something I expect from Potter. My favorite film of hers is "Yes", a romance story where all the dialogue was spoken in Shakespearean rhyme and rhythm, so she's prone to an experiment or two, but I always gave her a little more credit than this.
"The Party" is a barely-70 minute long snore where a bunch of people gather for an event, there's a few revelations and a couple things happen. Now, in the right setting, this narrative can be amazing. Here, however,- well, it really is much ado about nothing.
There's talk of things, politics and life theories, political correctness, relationships all get mentioned and thrown around, but you never get the sense that there's any meaning behind these topics. Apparently, Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) has just been placed in some high political position, while Bill, she learns over the night, is dying. What political position? It's never specifically explained, although it seems like this is a left-wing collective group. We have a pregnant lesbian couple for instance, Jinny and Martha (Emily Mortimer and Cherry Jones) as well as an eccentric opposites attract couple with the philosophically extreme April and Gottfriend (Patricia Clarkson and Bruno Ganz), she's a left-wing radical totalitarian who criticizes everything and everyone, most especially her husband a flightly life coach who seems to think the right records can help bring people back to life. Then there's Tom (Cillian Murphy), the rich banker drug addict, who's high on coke the whole night, and causing his own mild chaos wherever he goes.
I don't know, like, I can see, maybe Richard Linklater taking similar characters and materials and making a compelling narrative out of this, but he's used to restrictive settings and he loves discussion of high-minded subjects from several different perspectives. Potter just seems annoyed by it, everything's vague and nothing matters here until Bill announces his upcoming death and even there, there's-, the movie begins and ends with a character, pointing a gun at us and shooting, just like the end of "The Great Train Robbery", there's no need for that gun or any gun to even be in this movie. This isn't a movie that needs that kind of Chekhovian planting and it doesn't even payoff at the end.
This movie gets worst the more I think about it, honestly. I can appreciate the attempt at doing something like this, by a natural experimental filmmaker, but this is so far away from Potter's strengths that I'm confused at why she was even trying to make this. There's not much else to say, this was a boring, uninteresting, bad barely a blip of a movie, and I'm shocked that somebody as great as Sally Potter made this.
BRAMPTON'S OWN (2018) Director: Michael Donager
1/2★
So, about halfway through "Brampton's Own" a Netflix movie that got a limited enough theatrical release apparently that it qualifies for a review from me, my friend who I was watching the movie with, and who coincidentally was the one who picked the movie out, stated that, "This is one of the ten worst baseball movies he's ever seen." This led into a thinking exercise as I tried to figure out what the worst baseball movie of all-time was. I'm not 100% knowing in this case, but I feel fairly safe in saying that there's gotta be a "Bad News Bears" sequel or two that's genuinely the worst of all-time. "Major League: Back to the Minors" would probably be the one I've seen to completion that I'd vote for, unless we're counting, "Angels in the Infield". No, not "...Outfield", "Infield". There's a little-remembered challenge for those Youtube critics, seek out the horrible TV/Straight-to-DVD (finger quotes) "sequels" to that thing.
I'm bringing this up because it's way more interesting than anything I can talk about with this movie. I struggle to put it on the aforementioned Worst Baseball Movie list, since I'm barely certain that it's even worth counting quite frankly. It's barely a baseball movie. It's barely a movie at times. I'm actually still watching it while I'm writing this review, 'cause it's just too painfully bad to actually sit down and let the movie play all the way through; I can only put up with the strange camera choices like the awkward panning between shots in one scene where a camera moves from one set of character to the other that's talking, instead of doing some kind of two-shot, or the weird OTS shot I'm looking at now of the lead actor talking to, I think it's his sister about his old high school girlfriend...- It's not even sure its either of those character's shoulders; it's like somebody shot a master from an OTS of the most annoying side character in the film, for no reason, and just kept it. I can't entirely blame the aimless directing, the confusing over-plotted script isn't helping. The actors are,- well, I guess Jean Smart can never do anything wrong, but they're not given the best to work with, although I'm hard-pressed to think of "Brampton's Own" as a well-cast film either. I mean, this movie couldn't even find a Major Legue ballplayer to play the Major League ballplayer for a cameo scene. Like, they didn't have to get Ichiro or anything, but you couldn't convince one Seattle Mariner to be in a scene? Like you don't have to get Felix Hernandez or anything, but I mean you couldn't convince Edwin Encarnacion to be to do a page of dialogue? I mean, the main character plays for the Tacoma Rainers, that's a real baseball team; they're the real Seattle Mariners' AAA affiliate! Like, c'mon here!
So, the guy who seems the most responsible for this is Michael Donager, he's a Writer/Director, this is his second feature directorial effort after something called "This Thing with Sarah" from seven years ago, however he seems to have gotten the most acclaim from co-writing and being a lead actor in a film called "The Escort" that actually didn't do horribly on the festival circuit. That movie had a different director though, a guy who has a lot more credits, mostly in television, but still, that's the first advice I'm giving this guy; he needs to put the camera down. There's a few scenes that are kinda well-written here, so I don't want to bash him too much. Although the use of the phrase, "I want to eat you like a watermelon", um...- yeah, oh boy, yeah, if that scene doesn't damn this movie to a future "MTS3K" episode.... I get it, we're all struggling filmmakers, it's a mini-miracle anything ever gets made and he's trying. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that this film probably was something that was supposed to be grander and more epic and austere than this, and for whatever reasons, budget, producers perhaps, it just ended up like this instead, but even then, this movie at best feels like a part of well-worn ideas from other movies. And not always better movies either.
You have the longtime Minor Leaguer, Dustin (Alex Russell) who's never made the Show, and instead of staying on, he's come home to the titular small town where he's still somewhat of a folk hero, but now, after twelve years, shockingly, everything's change! His mother, is engaged and moving in with a new boyfriend, Bart (John Getz, who's also decent in limited work here) and who has a son Dustin now befriends named Cody (Carter Hastings). There's the old high school girlfriend Rachel (Rose McIver) who's engaged to the town's new local dentist but might still feel for Dustin, but doesn't want him to keep chasing his dream of playing in the Majors...- Who still holds onto his past memories as a high school star...-. There's some other friends from his past...- there's a lot here, way too much.
There's a way to tell a story with these elements, even a way to make it new and fresh; "Brampton's Own" just trying to be a tire-old nostalgia-esque romance of Americana. Small town, baseball, apple pie, high school sweethearts,.... It's not adding anything new to this and it's not well-done enough to make the classic tolerable.
I'm- I've been talking about this movie way more than it really deserved to be talked about. I don't want to be so blunt and I don't want to be this mean to this movie, there are far egregious and worst wastes of celluloid I can think of, but there's absolutely nothing here worth discussing. I'll give the movie some credit for not having the cliche happy romantic ending, but it didn't established well enough to care why it deserves to have the ending it ultimately had either.
ETHEL & ERNEST (2017) Director: Roger Mainwood
★★★★
Okay, so there's a famous British cartoon called "The Snowman". I think I've seen it once or twice, it's not particularly memorable to me, but it's apparently a major Christmas tradition in the UK, the same way that say, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" or "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas". Anyway, the author of the original children's book "The Snowman" is based on is named Raymond Briggs and he's the author also of the graphic book "Ethel & Ernest" that this movie is based on. It's also directed by one of the animators of "The Snowman", so that's gonna be the starting point for a lot of people when considering the film.
As for me, I just think it's a wonderful piece of animation about a lovely couple, which is all Briggs really intended. "Ethel & Ernest" follow it's title characters from their youth to their old age. Ethel (Brenda Blethyn) is a young maid who's smitten by a tall lanky milkman, Ernest (Jim Broadbent), and that's it. We see them grow up, and raise their son Raymond (Luke Treadaway) eventually meeting his future wife Jean (Karyn Claydon). They're fairly ordinary as a typical loving British couple and parents, and that's basically the point. We occasionally hear radio reports and eventually TV reports about the events in history they lived through and how they observed through it, mostly it's just for observation. We get a sense of these two, how they change, how they see the world, the things they decide to talk about and obsess over.
That's all "Ethel & Ernest" is, and it's wonderful. The beautiful hand-drawn animation takes this material that could easily be banal and makes it extraordinary. There's a care and sentiment to the film that most pieces of animation couldn't have. It's simple, it's lovely, it's very British, but it's universal as well. A loving tribute to a one's parents.
AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL: TRUTH TO POWER (2017) Directors: Bonni Cohen & Jon Shenk
★★★★
When Hurricane Sandy pummeled it's way into New York City back in 2012, and I saw the images of New York City being overrun with rapid waters, including the World Trade Center Memorial Site, that was still under construction, I couldn't help but think about "An Inconvenient Truth". I'm actually surprised more people didn't because Gore's prediction that that would happen was pretty startling, and frightening at the time. The original film was billed as the scariest film ever, and it lived up to it's billing. All it basically was, was a brief look at Al Gore's post-Political life as an environmental activist, and his slideshow that he still routinely tours the world with, adding and adjusting and altering as new information, good and bad, is found. I think most people have forgotten the film nowadays as many seem to do with certain documentaries that are relevant mainly in terms of the zeitgeist in which they're made, but I certainly didn't. In fact, I still had it on my Top Ten films of 2007 list, years afterwards. Admittedly, it's hard to recall and remember it's power since we've been inundated with a saturation of environmental documentaries since, but than only underlines how "An Inconvenient Truth"'s importance has been.
And let's be clear before we go any further, anybody who doesn't (finger quotes) "believe", in climate change, their ignorant assholes who aren't just voluntarily misinformed, they're trolling, and they're dangerous assholes, some of the worst out there. There might not be anything worst to the world right now, then those, especially those in power, who refuse to believe what Mother Nature is trying to tell us. "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power" is a strange mix in hindsight. It does show us more of the slideshow, but it mostly shows Gore traveling the world and meeting with leaders, including before and at the Paris Accords in 2015. Gore was in the middle of a 24-hour broadcast promoting the event when the Paris Attacks happened, forcing the broadcast to cancel.
That's one drawback, and it's easy to see the several, several drawbacks that the modern environmental movement has had to suffer through. The movie was mostly inspiration and hopeful when it was originally screened at Sundance in 2016, until Trump won the election and he proceeded to back out of the agreement. The recklessness and ruthlessness Trump seems to be willing to pollute the nation is basically just trolling. Once-a-week, I still see that news item about him letting companies pollute rivers again, and frankly I should because it is such a wrong-headed and outright stupid position that only people who would financially benefit and have the coldest and most callous of hearts could possibly think it's a good idea.
We are getting better with alternative energy fuels and sources, things will be better in the near future, and things are getting better everyday. We see that, but we also are show footage of new weather disasters, much of the time, we see Gore traveling to downtown Miami during high tide when parts of the town is now flooded and there's a huge effort being made to elevate the roads a few feet to combat the tides. There's a huge reconstruction the state of Florida's doing to combat the effects of global warming and yet, the state's Governor continues to deny climate change's effects on the world.
Syria's drought btw, might've helped lead to their current situation as well, as prior to the Arab Spring Revolution and the current Syrian Civil War, 80% of the nation's farmers went under in the few years prior. It's strange to see a world coming together to actually combat climate change and put money and funding towards it, universally agreed upon that, "Hey, these glaciers and islands are falling into the sea, let's do something!" and to see alternative energy sources becoming cheaper and more widespread and just when it looks like we're turning a corner, we go back ten steps and the fight continues.
"An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power" isn't as good as the first film, but it's just as important, in fact, I hope there's another movie in ten years. The documenting of our current state of the climate change and the state of our drastically changing planet is something worth documenting and through the eyes of the most high-profile and major advocate is probably one of the clearest-eyed perspectives we can have, and looking back on his effects and the continued journey is one we're taking anyway, and it's worth documenting, no matter how it ends up going. Hopefully these movies get more happy and ecstatic and less scary and frightening as they go on, but if they don't I want to see that too, and we'll know for certain how foreboding Gore's predictions were.
THE MIDWIFE (2017) Director: Martin Provost
★★★★
I've had some experience with Martin Provost's work in the past. I've seen his biopic "Seraphine" about the famous French painter Seraphine de Senlis, and "Violette" about the author Violette Ludec. Based on these two projects, I mostly saw Provost as a director/filmmaker who makes films about other artists. This wasn't true of course, but to be honest, I didn't get much else from his work. He isn't particularly flashy or stylish or unique, he's pretty basic as a director, gets the few shots or angles he needs and lets his actors work. This makes sense since Provost started out as an actor.
"The Midwife" marks the first film pairing of France's two great Catherines, Frot and Deneuve. Frot plays the titular midwife Claire. She lives a fairly quiet life on the surface, a stark contrast to her worklife where she's a calming and emotionally-charged nurse that helps mothers with their children getting born. This sounds like a cool job, but the movie never shies away from the several struggles that such a job entails. It's actually kinda startling how many babies they must've had to get on set come to think about it...
Anyway, one day, Deneuve's Beatrice comes back into her life after, around thirty or so years. She's a bit like Richard E. Grant's nomadic character, only mostly going from guy-to-guy or place-to-place, in an effort to enjoy life. The free spirit's return to Paris and her reconnection with Claire coincides with her health problems, as she's suffering from a brain tumor. Claire's reluctant to reconnect is due to Beatrice's leaving her father, after her father and mother broke up when she was a teenager, soonafter leading to her father's suicide. This explains a lot about Claire, although it also leaves a bit of a mystery to her.
Claire does have a son, Simon (Quentin Dolmaire) a young medical student who's engaged to his pregnant girlfriend Lucie (Pauline Parigot) and desires to quit school to become a midwife himself, or a "Birth Technician" as it probably more proper. Claire explains that she raised Simon on his own, and hasn't shared or revealed much about her past with him. Basically, the movie is about how Beatrice's arrival opens her up from her closed-off self. She starts to have a little more fun, drink a little bit occasionally, even starts dating her neighbor a nice truck driver named Paul (Olivier Gourmet).
It's honestly not the most unusual or unique plot, but they make the details matter and that's because the acting is great. The movie is at it's best when it's just Frot and Deneuve in a battle of acting. The story seems less and less interesting upon reflection, but it worked for me at the time. Of course, I'd probably recommend anything with these two in the lead. I'm still unsure of what to make of Provost as a director. I guess I'm still waiting to be blown away by him. "The Midwife" is probably the best and most memorable film of his I've seen so far though, and Deneuve and Frot are more than worth it.
ETHEL & ERNEST (2017) Director: Roger Mainwood
★★★★
Okay, so there's a famous British cartoon called "The Snowman". I think I've seen it once or twice, it's not particularly memorable to me, but it's apparently a major Christmas tradition in the UK, the same way that say, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" or "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas". Anyway, the author of the original children's book "The Snowman" is based on is named Raymond Briggs and he's the author also of the graphic book "Ethel & Ernest" that this movie is based on. It's also directed by one of the animators of "The Snowman", so that's gonna be the starting point for a lot of people when considering the film.
As for me, I just think it's a wonderful piece of animation about a lovely couple, which is all Briggs really intended. "Ethel & Ernest" follow it's title characters from their youth to their old age. Ethel (Brenda Blethyn) is a young maid who's smitten by a tall lanky milkman, Ernest (Jim Broadbent), and that's it. We see them grow up, and raise their son Raymond (Luke Treadaway) eventually meeting his future wife Jean (Karyn Claydon). They're fairly ordinary as a typical loving British couple and parents, and that's basically the point. We occasionally hear radio reports and eventually TV reports about the events in history they lived through and how they observed through it, mostly it's just for observation. We get a sense of these two, how they change, how they see the world, the things they decide to talk about and obsess over.
That's all "Ethel & Ernest" is, and it's wonderful. The beautiful hand-drawn animation takes this material that could easily be banal and makes it extraordinary. There's a care and sentiment to the film that most pieces of animation couldn't have. It's simple, it's lovely, it's very British, but it's universal as well. A loving tribute to a one's parents.
AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL: TRUTH TO POWER (2017) Directors: Bonni Cohen & Jon Shenk
★★★★
When Hurricane Sandy pummeled it's way into New York City back in 2012, and I saw the images of New York City being overrun with rapid waters, including the World Trade Center Memorial Site, that was still under construction, I couldn't help but think about "An Inconvenient Truth". I'm actually surprised more people didn't because Gore's prediction that that would happen was pretty startling, and frightening at the time. The original film was billed as the scariest film ever, and it lived up to it's billing. All it basically was, was a brief look at Al Gore's post-Political life as an environmental activist, and his slideshow that he still routinely tours the world with, adding and adjusting and altering as new information, good and bad, is found. I think most people have forgotten the film nowadays as many seem to do with certain documentaries that are relevant mainly in terms of the zeitgeist in which they're made, but I certainly didn't. In fact, I still had it on my Top Ten films of 2007 list, years afterwards. Admittedly, it's hard to recall and remember it's power since we've been inundated with a saturation of environmental documentaries since, but than only underlines how "An Inconvenient Truth"'s importance has been.
And let's be clear before we go any further, anybody who doesn't (finger quotes) "believe", in climate change, their ignorant assholes who aren't just voluntarily misinformed, they're trolling, and they're dangerous assholes, some of the worst out there. There might not be anything worst to the world right now, then those, especially those in power, who refuse to believe what Mother Nature is trying to tell us. "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power" is a strange mix in hindsight. It does show us more of the slideshow, but it mostly shows Gore traveling the world and meeting with leaders, including before and at the Paris Accords in 2015. Gore was in the middle of a 24-hour broadcast promoting the event when the Paris Attacks happened, forcing the broadcast to cancel.
That's one drawback, and it's easy to see the several, several drawbacks that the modern environmental movement has had to suffer through. The movie was mostly inspiration and hopeful when it was originally screened at Sundance in 2016, until Trump won the election and he proceeded to back out of the agreement. The recklessness and ruthlessness Trump seems to be willing to pollute the nation is basically just trolling. Once-a-week, I still see that news item about him letting companies pollute rivers again, and frankly I should because it is such a wrong-headed and outright stupid position that only people who would financially benefit and have the coldest and most callous of hearts could possibly think it's a good idea.
We are getting better with alternative energy fuels and sources, things will be better in the near future, and things are getting better everyday. We see that, but we also are show footage of new weather disasters, much of the time, we see Gore traveling to downtown Miami during high tide when parts of the town is now flooded and there's a huge effort being made to elevate the roads a few feet to combat the tides. There's a huge reconstruction the state of Florida's doing to combat the effects of global warming and yet, the state's Governor continues to deny climate change's effects on the world.
Syria's drought btw, might've helped lead to their current situation as well, as prior to the Arab Spring Revolution and the current Syrian Civil War, 80% of the nation's farmers went under in the few years prior. It's strange to see a world coming together to actually combat climate change and put money and funding towards it, universally agreed upon that, "Hey, these glaciers and islands are falling into the sea, let's do something!" and to see alternative energy sources becoming cheaper and more widespread and just when it looks like we're turning a corner, we go back ten steps and the fight continues.
"An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power" isn't as good as the first film, but it's just as important, in fact, I hope there's another movie in ten years. The documenting of our current state of the climate change and the state of our drastically changing planet is something worth documenting and through the eyes of the most high-profile and major advocate is probably one of the clearest-eyed perspectives we can have, and looking back on his effects and the continued journey is one we're taking anyway, and it's worth documenting, no matter how it ends up going. Hopefully these movies get more happy and ecstatic and less scary and frightening as they go on, but if they don't I want to see that too, and we'll know for certain how foreboding Gore's predictions were.
THE MIDWIFE (2017) Director: Martin Provost
★★★★
I've had some experience with Martin Provost's work in the past. I've seen his biopic "Seraphine" about the famous French painter Seraphine de Senlis, and "Violette" about the author Violette Ludec. Based on these two projects, I mostly saw Provost as a director/filmmaker who makes films about other artists. This wasn't true of course, but to be honest, I didn't get much else from his work. He isn't particularly flashy or stylish or unique, he's pretty basic as a director, gets the few shots or angles he needs and lets his actors work. This makes sense since Provost started out as an actor.
"The Midwife" marks the first film pairing of France's two great Catherines, Frot and Deneuve. Frot plays the titular midwife Claire. She lives a fairly quiet life on the surface, a stark contrast to her worklife where she's a calming and emotionally-charged nurse that helps mothers with their children getting born. This sounds like a cool job, but the movie never shies away from the several struggles that such a job entails. It's actually kinda startling how many babies they must've had to get on set come to think about it...
Anyway, one day, Deneuve's Beatrice comes back into her life after, around thirty or so years. She's a bit like Richard E. Grant's nomadic character, only mostly going from guy-to-guy or place-to-place, in an effort to enjoy life. The free spirit's return to Paris and her reconnection with Claire coincides with her health problems, as she's suffering from a brain tumor. Claire's reluctant to reconnect is due to Beatrice's leaving her father, after her father and mother broke up when she was a teenager, soonafter leading to her father's suicide. This explains a lot about Claire, although it also leaves a bit of a mystery to her.
Claire does have a son, Simon (Quentin Dolmaire) a young medical student who's engaged to his pregnant girlfriend Lucie (Pauline Parigot) and desires to quit school to become a midwife himself, or a "Birth Technician" as it probably more proper. Claire explains that she raised Simon on his own, and hasn't shared or revealed much about her past with him. Basically, the movie is about how Beatrice's arrival opens her up from her closed-off self. She starts to have a little more fun, drink a little bit occasionally, even starts dating her neighbor a nice truck driver named Paul (Olivier Gourmet).
It's honestly not the most unusual or unique plot, but they make the details matter and that's because the acting is great. The movie is at it's best when it's just Frot and Deneuve in a battle of acting. The story seems less and less interesting upon reflection, but it worked for me at the time. Of course, I'd probably recommend anything with these two in the lead. I'm still unsure of what to make of Provost as a director. I guess I'm still waiting to be blown away by him. "The Midwife" is probably the best and most memorable film of his I've seen so far though, and Deneuve and Frot are more than worth it.
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