Movie Reviews March 2018
Casino– Since I watched Goodfellas I wanted to watch Casino again. Gotta get more violent Joe Pesci. I’d only seen it once before. After seeing this twice and Goodfellas countless times, I have to say that Goodfellas is way better. You’re not entertained, it’s hard to find a time to take a pee break. Sorry to compare but how can you not. This movie is fine, but 3 hours long. Has some really great scenes but it still feels like a 3-hour movie. Sharon Stone’s character reminded me so much of my mom it felt really weird.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall- After seeing Metropolis and Casino, I needed a break from the 3-hour epics and watched this. I’d always meant to see it as I love people that write their own stuff and Apatow made sure everyone he ever cast started doing this. I didn’t really like it. I know big surprise. Wasn’t funny, and was way too built on circumstances beyond the randomness of both staying at the same resort. The lead character never tried to change, just great things happened to him. Hot girl breaks up with him, so takes a break from his high paying easy job, get’s to stay in the nicest resort in Hawaii for basically free, another super hot girl wants to date him despite him not working on himself and just crying and moping around. He even fucks around on her. I appreciate that they worked in his real-life passion project with the puppets but I thought it was stupid and unfunny. Whatever, I think it was meant to be a Russell Brand vehicle and lighthearted fun for the masses. Obviously not meant for me.
I Love You Man- Saw this in theatres and remembered it being funny. Watched it by myself and never laughed at all and thought it was kind of corny. I know comedies are always funnier with people but I still laugh by myself if it’s funny enough. I’ll give credit to Jason Seagal for playing such a different character than the Sarah Marshall movie, and I think Paul Rudd is great as the dorky straight man, Rashida Jones played a fun girlfriend that seemed like she’d be a great wife, and Jon Favreau played a great asshole. It’s an okay movie, a little too cute though.
Moonlight– Typical academy award winning movie. Beautiful, artful, serious theme, but also slow, a little boring, and don’t feel I ever need to watch it again. They portrayed bullying, poverty, and crack head moms very well. I know from experience. He had it way worse than me, the director and writer definitely lived that life. Worth watching once. Director did a great SXSW keynote speech.
Annihilation- Disappointed in this one. Expected much more. I only actually enjoyed 2 scenes. Both creative and creepy. Very slow, tedious, no likable characters, some stuff I thought was laughable. An alligator crossed with a shark for an extra row of teeth… so that makes it way more dangerous? “Oh shit, a scorpion with two tails!” Wanted to like this much more since it’s from the same director/writer of Ex Machina, and also the writer of Dread. The ending looks like it’s going for something it didn’t deserve as well.
Michael Clayton– Loved this movie, I already want to watch it again. I saw it back when it first came on DVD and just now am watching it over 10 years later. Love that low key style of cinematography, I love the way they did the credit scene, and there’s one scene, in particular, that’s chilling by how devoid of emotion it is and the fact you know that’s happening somewhere. This guy’s life is falling apart professionally, personally, and entrepreneurially. Great pacing, tone, everything.
Burn after Reading– Great to watch this right after Michael Clayton. George Clooney and Tilda Swinton do a complete 180. All the actors did a great job, I know most of these people they were playing, unfortunately. They also nailed the corporate gym business. So much that actual people tried to get memberships at the fake gym made for the movie.
Revolutionary Road– A beautiful, depressing movie about the suburbs. Sam Mendes loves this stuff. Worth watching once. Don’t think I’d want to watch it again. Sound like Academy Award type of material. She’s a dreamer and he’s a simple-minded practical guy. You just want to scream get a divorce already! This movie would be harder to make or justify him not being completely in the wrong in today’s world. Mansplaining, sexual harassment, were in full any feminist blog writers looking for ammunition. I just don’t understand her. She had one lousy community theatre production and just gave up on acting. She was kind of a loony dreamer, so they’re both pretty annoying.
While We’re Young– This was pretty decent. I felt let down by the ending but I guess it made its point that that’s how the world works. Some of the humor was played straight and some so over the top it was hard to pinpoint how serious to take the movie. I didn’t find either funny but I could tell it was supposed to be. Adam Driver did a great job as a hipster director, and I love Ben Stiller as the straight man, that’s where I think he does best. Definitely worth seeing, just to see Ad Rock acting in a movie! I had no idea that was him until I went to IMDb afterward. He was great. Also, worth seeing a Charles Grodin emergence as well. An overall good movie that accurately portrays aging and opportunities slipping by.
Meyerowitz Stories New and Selected– Couldn’t get through this. It felt like that scene from Family Guy where Peter talks about Godfather insisting upon itself.
Isle of Dogs– This was really good. I could watch it over and over. Actually funny, visually unique and stunning, great story and characters. Never really seen anything I can compare it too. Not even a Wes Anderson movie.
The Godfather– Second time seeing this. Pretty good. Still don’t get how it’s the 2nd best movie ever made. Maybe at the time, it was more groundbreaking and people still live with that nostalgia. So many cartoons and show I watched as a kid parodied the fuck out of this movie that a lot of it was well-trodden material to me. But still a good movie, a long movie, but a good movie.
The Godfather Part II– Same thing goes for what I said above. Both are really good, not sure which I like better. I’m trying to watch Part III for the first time, and man, I know I gave up on that forcing myself to watch a movie thing, but I really want to get through it to make fun of it, it will be hard. It shows me how good the first 2 were.
3 Billboards- I thought it was based off a real story so it made me think it was being inaccurate to the source material. “There’s no way all that shit happened.” Turns out all they stole from real life was the billboard thing. I may have enjoyed it more had I known that. They played the whole thing kind of like a comedy, since a movie about using billboards to find the guy that raped and killed your daughter is a pretty heavy topic. The humor felt too forced to me. Things that also annoyed me about it were how nobody respected the police and called them racists… I’m from the south, that doesn’t happen. White people respect and fear the cops in the country. Second of all the lighting was weird, it’s like none of the places had electricity. The ending didn’t make sense to me as well. I can’t go into without spoilers, and also don’t care enough to research a reddit forum for an analysis. And lastly, I thought Frances McDormand’s character was built to win awards by being some bad ass tough woman mascot. It was way too over the top.
WW1 in Color- This was great. I think I enjoyed it more than WW2 in color because I knew basically nothing of WW1. No wonder everyone was so reluctant to engage in a second war. Good god. Stories of the air force were probably the show stealer to me. Again, history is written by the victors so who knows how everything really went down but it was very interesting to hear about Russia, trench warfare, and how different the world was around 100 years ago. In fact, it’s almost exactly 100 years since it ended as I write this.