Yi Yi

2000 drama

Rating: 16/20

Plot: I'd rather not get into it.

This is my last review.

Yi Yi is the kind of movie that really frustrates me. I've seen more movies than most people, and I've seen a wider variety of movies than most people. I even feel like I'm capable of appreciating a wider variety of movies than most people. I feel like I know movies! This is such a highly-regarded modern classic, and I just don't feel like I understand it the way I'm supposed to.

So I quit. I'm going to watch something really dumb tonight.

Sorcerer

1977 drama

Rating: 15/20

Plot: See The Wages of Fear. I mean, see the plot of The Wages of Fear.

The Wages of Fear is the superior telling of this mothertruckin' thriller, but this William Friedkin movie delivers the goods. It just takes a really long time to get going. We begin with four vignettes that give some background on the four characters who will eventually be hauling dangerous explosions through troublesome terrain in a pair of dilapidated trucks. One's a hitman, one's a guy who owes people money, one's a terrorist, and one's that guy who was in Jaws. It's an interesting approach to these characters, but if I didn't know what this story was or where they'd end up, it probably would have been fairly confusing. Eventually, they end up in the same location, a kind of dirty purgatory, and things pick up. Well, they don't exactly pick up. The characters are just kind of sitting around, stuck in a decrepit village, hopeless and sweaty and very likely contemplating the life decisions that pushed them into this little armpit of the world. For a cinephile like me--one easily amused by chickens or watching characters lusting over Coca Cola--it qualifies as picking up, however. Kudos to the location scouts who found this place and these extras and those chickens, and the cinematographers really know how to shoot these characters to capture their tough-guy hopelessness and the surrounding details that form a kind of wreath around that hopelessness.

They don't get in their trucks until after an hour of the movie has passed, and from that point on, this is as good as slow-motion action gets. You could have told me exactly what the fate of all four characters was before their journey began, and the way Friedkin tells their story still would have managed to be suspenseful. In fact, since I figured this ended pretty much the way The Wages of Fear ended, I felt like I already knew what was going to happen to the characters, but that didn't stop the tension from building each time the cameras shot these truck tires on a precipice or during a bridge scene. That bridge scene just seems impossible, both in the movie's reality with the characters trying to pull off something they doesn't seem possible and in the making of the scene.

Nothing paints a better picture of despair than Roy Scheider staring at the posterior of a lady on a Coca Cola advertisement.

Booksmart

2019 comedy

Rating: 11/20 (Jeremy: 9/20)

Plot: Two graduating friends, after realizing they've wasted their high school years by taking school way too seriously, try to find a party to experience to make up for it.

More than a few laughs in the directing debut of Olivia Wilde, great-granddaughter of Oscar Wilde. Unfortunately, it leans on the cliches of raunchy teen comedies and coming-of-age movies far too often and really goes off the rails in its final third. Beanie Feldstein (Jonah Hill's little sister) and Kaitlyn Dever have a nice rapport, but it's a predictable rapport. I also liked Billie Lourd's wacky character. Lourd played Carrie Fisher's doppelganger in those two Star Wars movies. This works when it's just silly and nearly plotless, even when the oppressive soundtrack blares.

The White Meadows

2009 Iranian movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A guy rows around and collects people's tears.

"It's no use! The only solution is monkey urine!"

With landscapes impossibly white and alien, this looks like it was filmed on another planet, maybe that salt planet in that really good Star Wars movie that everybody seems upset about. The meditative pace, folkloric allusions, and dream logic also give this Iranian film an otherworldly flavor that, despite the fact that I've seen well over 200 movies, made this a unique experience. Collecting tears to transform into pearls (I think?), whispered messages in jars to take to fairies in wells, the daughter of the Iranian Mark Twain marrying the sea, and a monkey as the man with 10,000 faces. It's a quietly wild trip, completely captivating and beautiful.

The Iranian government won't allow me to figure out which little person actor played Khotejish.

Recommended by Eric.

Burning

2018 South Korean movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A loner becomes obsessed with an old neighbor after a chance encounter, and problems occur when she comes back from a trip to Africa with a much cooler friend.

It's all about the finer details with this one, like the condoms within reach or that fading sunlight reflected from a tower. We all know what that tower represents, and that makes it odd when it's what our protagonist seems to use as spank fodder while pleasuring himself during a trip to feed his gal's cat. This was pre- sunset interpretative dance, of course, which I have to admit made me big hungry. Like eating an imaginary tangerine, it's all about thinking really hard about what you want until you realize that what you want is for a greenhouse not to be on fire because once it's ablaze, there's likely no turning back.

I imagine I no longer even need to see that Under the Silver Lake movie that nobody except some guy named Mark wants me to see.

Tag

2015 surrealistic movie

Rating: 11/20

Plot: A girl has a bad day.

The terrible special effects probably shouldn't bother me as much as they did, but they really bothered me. Of course, more realistic gore would have likely upset me even more, so maybe I shouldn't complain.

For a movie just over 80 minutes, this probably shouldn't seem as redundant as it does. The protagonist transforms into variations of herself and the violent tragedies she's at the center of shift just as much, but the tone never changes and half of the running time consists of shots of the main character running. And Sion Sono's apparently got himself access to a drone because there are far too many of these sweeping overhead shots.

One character repeats a line about how the world is surreal and something you just have to deal with, apparently one of the movie's themes. Drawing attention to how surreal everything felt juvenile to me, like a middle school student just added the word to her vernacular and wanted to show it off.

There's a feminist angle here, but it wasn't exactly clear what was going on there. Every single character--both the main ones and the peripheral ones--are female for about 3/4 of the movie. Once the males come along, themes start to emerge a little bit, but by that point, I was too tired to really care about what was going on, and the punchline offering an explanation to these shenanigans wasn't satisfying.

This is my least favorite Sion Sono movie.

Cold War

2018 Polish romantic drama

Rating: 15/20

Plot: While roaming about with a partner to put together a folk music troupe, Wiktor runs across a troubled singer named Zulu. They form an up-and-down relationship for the next decade or so.

Lovely black and white cinematography and more than a few shots of random animals--especially in the early going--are more captivating than the characters or their love affairs. Paweł Pawlikowski's film is easy on the eyes, and so are the leads played by Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot. I mean, I'd probably do either one of them. If possible, I'd make love to any number of these shots, Pawlikowski's cinematographer Łukasz Żal showcasing this ability to film space like it's time and time like it's space and people like they're people existing in a particular time and a particular space. As a person who enjoys silent movies, I appreciated the visual storytelling in this movie. The romance develops mostly through camera angles, lighting, and the use of space.

Vice

2018 political biopic

Rating: 13/20 (Jen: 10/20)

Plot: Details the rise of Dick Cheney, arguably the most dangerous vice president in American history.

Well, that wasn't exactly subtle. The irreverent spins and the catchy gimmicks could cause on to criticize this for having some tone issues. If you've ever imagined what it would be like if Michael Moore ever made a political biopic about somebody he doesn't respect, you've probably imagined something similar to this. Bouncing needlessly from the recent past when Cheney is the president of the United States to the more distant past and several spots in between, Vice really has some focusing issues, too. You feel like you're trying out lenses with an ophthalmologist, getting a fuzzy picture of who this guy was as well as the guys he was surrounding himself with but never seeing anything 100% clearly. I was so focused on the filmmaking and McKay's tricks that it really distracted me, and as a piece of satire or an examination of this period of recent American history and this guy at the center of it all, it felt like hundreds of tiny paper cuts instead of anything that really leaves a mark.

Christian Bale, with the help of make-up artists and a lot of cheeseburgers, transforms himself into this character. It's entirely possible to forget that this is Bale or any other actor and not Dick Cheney lampooning himself on the screen. Sure he leans heavily on a few quirks (don't play a drinking games with the "Umms" in this) and doesn't give the character much depth, but part of the point is that this guy is supposed to be a bit of a mystery. Sam Rockwell plays W., a kind of alternate-reality W. who fades into the background mostly. That's also part of the point. Steve Carell is Donald Rumsfeld, a guy I had nearly forgotten existed. I never did understand what that guy did, and Vice definitely clears that up. Oh, and Amy Adams is in this, too, probably because she has to be in everything that comes out. Anybody who lived during this time will recognize other faces from this, a really dark time in American history that isn't actually all that darker than most of the other times in American history.

I hope Adam McKay never makes a cheeky Holocaust movie.

The Goodbye Girl

1977 dramedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: When her boyfriend abandons her and sublets the apartment she lives with her daughter, a dancer has to learn to live with a struggling actor.

With music and a general aesthetic like a television movie, combined with terrible dvd cover art, I almost said goodbye movie to The Goodbye Girl within the first five minutes. Only the promise of Paul Benedict kept me in. By the time he arrives, I was already enjoying the movie because of Richard Dreyfuss's manic performance as this struggling actor. On the surface, this Neil Simon screenplay seems very written; however, the two leads (and even the daughter if you want to include her) have a way of making it all seem more natural than it should. Of course, almost any movie with a precocious little kid is going to have some irritating moments, but once the daughter's friend Cynthia comes in for her big moment, probably because she's the director's daughter or something, she makes Quinn Cummings look like Meryl Streep. Dana Laurita is Cynthia, and she was in another movie from 1977 that I'm supposed to watch--Demon Seed. I can't wait. I hope a demon gets her early in the proceedings.

New York, New York

1977 musical romance

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A horny saxophonist falls for a singer, and they have a troubled romance.

Begins and ends with a shot of Robert De Nero's shoes, that first shot preceding a remarkable crane shot over a large crowd and this neon arrow pointing right at our male lead with this ridiculous New York City Hawaiian shirt. Immediately, I love the way this thing looks, a great artificiality just like 40's movie musicals that I believe Scorsese is borrowing sets from. There's even a big stage number like in Minnelli's The Band Wagon. One early shot where De Niro is watching a dance, ghostly illuminated by a passing train, floored me. I also loved how the music was filmed, editing that reminded me of Damien Chazelle although that might be because these characters and their relationship forced me to think about La La Land.

De Niro and Liza Minneli are both great even when they're not playing characters who are very consistent or realistic. They're as artificial as characters in those artificial 40's movie musicals although it's the darker flipside of that artificiality. These are characters who fall in love like they might in a movie from that decade, but they also say really terrible things to each other and beat on each other. De Niro learned sax for this role and is convincing enough as a guy who is really good at playing a saxophone. He's more convincing as this guy who seems to be teetering on multiple edges at the same time. Minneli's eyes dominate the screen, and she gets plenty of opportunities to show off her vocal chops. That "World Goes Round" song? Man, she really belts that out!

Fun with Dick and Jane

1977 comedy

Rating: 13/20

Plot: At the most inopportune time (when they're putting a pool in), a guy loses his job, putting a family in a major financial bind. After trying to get some help in legal ways, they decide to turn to a life of crime to make ends meet.

Cynical almost to the point of being subversive, this late-70's comedy leaves a bad taste in the mouth more than it makes you laugh. Lines about imagination and ingenuity being what has made the American industry great or Segal's character having a previous job that put people on the moon describe American surface ideals that clash with the underbelly--the ideas that breaking rules is really what makes the country great or that people who do things "the straight way" are a minority group. Despite all the questionable ethics, I think I was supposed to root for Segal and Fonda's Dick and Jane characters here. I mean, the "victims" being robbed were bad people, like leaders of a church who treat religion like it's big business. However, they are so fixated on appearances and money and looking for shortcuts and refusing to compromise, that they really became completely unlikable.

Dated humor involving transvestites, immigration, and a character in brown face during an opera are bad enough, but you've also got very few black faces in this who aren't there just to be bad guys. That didn't sit right either.

The robberies themselves are entertaining, that gun as a symbol of what guns normally represent, and Fonda and Segal both have a few good lines. There's also another Nilsson-esque song over the opening credits, something by a group called The Movies, a band that I've given up trying to find information on because they named themselves The Movies. What am I even supposed to search for? Anyway, Nilsson-esque songs must have been all the rage in 1977.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

1923 silent adaptation

Rating: 15/20 (Shelby: 13/20; Christian: 17/20; Maylin: 2/20; Ryan: 8/20; Kayla: 1/20; Jackie: 1.5/20; Ashlyn: 5/20; Kearsten: 4/20; Skyrece: 1/20; Angeles: 1/20; Ashley: 2/20; Eduardo: 3/20; Antifath: 1/20; Lyllie: 10/20; Carlos: 15/20; Jahmir: 15/20; Eric: 2/20)

Plot: The titular hunchback gets entangled in a love triangle, the kind of thing that could really interfere with a dude's bell ringing.

Jackanapes! There's a word that I need to incorporate into my vocabulary. It's ironic that I learn more words from silent movies than from movies in which you can hear the characters speak.

Speaking of speaking, my 8th grade students didn't seem to enjoy this silent movie. We've had testing, and I didn't want this one class I had to get ahead of the others, so we watched this 1923 movie over two days. I picked it because it's something I decided that I wanted to see. Screw them.

Lon Cheney, under pounds of make-up, brings his usual physicality to this performance. He does so much with his legs and tongue here. After seeing lots of Cheney from the silent era, I'm suspecting that these are the sorts of things that were his choices more than the directors he worked with. His Quasimodo is very human instead of the sideshow freak he could have easily been in a 1920's drama, and it's all because of what Cheney brings to the table. Or the bell tower.

Long Shot

2019 romantic comedy

Rating: 11/20

Plot: I don't want to discuss it.

Charlize Theron is absolutely stunning here. Though this movie is too long, I really don't want to complain about the movie being too long because it gave me two hours to look at Charlize Theron being stunning. Unfortunately, her character doesn't always make complete sense and doesn't really have an arc. Seth Rogan is also stunning though it's in a flatlining performance that has maybe 1 1/2 notes. He gets exasperated sometimes. The two have a surprising chemistry, so it's a shame that they have to exist in a scrip that goes through the motions and gives the characters very little to work with. The movie wasn't very funny--I didn't laugh a single time--and while this occasionally tosses in some political bits, nothing really takes hold. The screenwriters were apparently too busy shoveling in references to Game of Thrones instead.

Hey, that was Andy Serkis! I think he should actually play a character in every single movie that comes out so that people can play the "Hey, that was Andy Serkis!" game. It would be a sensation!

Oh, boy!

The American Friend

1977 Wenders movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A guy who frames paintings makes friends with Dennis Hopper, probably not the kind of thing that's ever a good idea.

Dennis Hopper as a corrupting influence, and you have to assume Wenders is saying something about America's influence on the rest of the world. I think this is an anti-American film, and I probably should be offended, but it's really difficult to defend this country. It’s difficult enough historically, sure.  But right now?

So Hopper is a manipulator, he holds petty grudges, he's violent and incites violence, he's crazed, he's a braggart. He fucks everything up and still can look the rest of the world in its eye across an ocean and say, "We did it!" at the end. And he plays pool like he invented the game! He's an infection!

Bruno Ganz plays this so subtly as the noirish protagonist who has let American Dennis Hopper into his blood stream. Each of his pauses tells its own story, and the couple of moments where he laughs joyfully would make Mephistophilis stroke a goatee.

Wenders doesn't mess around when he's completely messing around during an extended train sequence. There's a sly humor to that and to this whole thing that gives this an unexpected seasoning.

Creed II

2018 sequel to a spin-off with a lot of sequels...that, or it's the 18th film in a boxing movie franchise

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Creed, following the events of the last movie, becomes the champion. That puts him on the radar of an old Rocky foe who still holds a grudge and who happens to have a son who punches other guys really really hard. Cue the montage scene music!

Why did we just completely skip over Mr. T's son in these?

This starts out fine, cool theme music during a pre-title-screen fight. Actually, we get a pair of matches before the title appears triumphantly on the screen. Soon after, Rocky gives the advice, "Why don't you just turn off your brain?" and although he wasn't talking directly to the audience, he might have been talking directly to the audience. It's not that this is dumb. At least, it's not nearly as dumb as the Rocky movie with Ivan Drago or most of the other Rocky movies. It's more to do with how predictable the whole thing is. It's the kind of predictability that goes down easy, character development and back-and-forth in-the-ring action that crowd-pleases. It's the type of movie where it seems like you're actually writing the movie as you're watching.

Themes are slathered on. This has things to say about fathers with a trio of father/son relationships. It also throws in themes about legacy, the choices we make, why human beings fight, and what's valuable. Stallone delivers a metaphor about a light ("What goods a light that don't light? Adrian!") like it's an uppercut to the jaw. I'm actually shocked he didn't look directly in the camera and tell us viewers that we're supposed to connect that light to boxers having things broken in them after certain fights that can't be fixed.

I really like Michael B. Jordan, and I'm not just talking about the plethora of scenes that show him doing various things without a shirt.

Avengers: Endgame

2019 blockbuster

Rating: 14/20 (Dylan: 14/20; Abbey: 12/20)

Plot: The superheroes still around after the last blockbuster try to undo the last blockbuster by finding Thanos and his bejeweled glove and engaging in space magic.

Space magic. I think that's the exact words one of the characters uses to help explain something that happens in this movie. I'm often made fun of by my son for not understanding superhero movies, but I think that's because I try to piece everything together in logical ways, the kind of thing a fuddy duddy would do. If I were more willing to shrug and accept the space magic, it's possible that I would like these more than I do. I did feel a little better watching one scene in this when Thor is explaining the entire plot of one of his movies--one I definitely didn't understand--and the characters listening to him seemed as confused as I did.

This pulls twenty-one films together, blends humor and drama, and gives big character moments time to breathe much more effectively than its predecessor. Three hours seems long for a superhero movie. I mean, just ask my ass! But kudos to the Marvel team for allowing for some time for both the characters and audience to reflect. The individual character arcs almost work because there's space.

Are there some really clumsy moments and large chunks of plot that don't work if you put any thought into what's happening at all? Well, yes. With the type of plan the heroes come up with to try to save their pals and the world, there's bound to be some issues with logic. My comic aficionado friend assures me that it makes more sense than I think it does; nevertheless, he was unable to answer a couple of questions that I had. While almost all of the humor worked--Rudd was funny, and if you know anything about me at all, you know I loved what they did with Thor's character in this--and a lot of the drama and emotion worked, very little of the action sequences did. A final showdown is completely ludicrous and, at least for an old guy like me, nearly impossible to follow. A scene with Hawkeye doesn't really fit stylistically with the rest of these movies but was aesthetically pleasing, and I almost liked a brief action scene early in the proceedings. The film's self-referential to the point where it's almost masturbatory, but aside from the times when it kind of spills all over itself, it's very entertaining and fairly emotional.

The theater, of course, was packed, and watching this with people who are bigger fans than me was part of the fun. There were two characters in particular who got loud cheers, and one big heroic moment that made people jump out of their chairs. I think a guy a few seats down from me even took off his pants.

I did get a dirty look when I snickered at a line of dialogue about cheeseburgers. I'm fairly positive I wasn't able to identify an allusion to a line or scene in an earlier movie or something.