That Obscure Object of Desire

1977 Altman movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A randy rich guy relates the story of how a woman won't sleep with him.

It's like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie but with fucking instead of food.

This is another I needed to rewatch before compiling that 1977 Best Films list that I know all of my friends are eagerly awaiting.

Told in flashback to passengers on a train who wanted Rey to explain why he dumped a bucket of water on a poor woman, this story of unfulfilled lust against a backdrop of terrorist bombings (including some from a group called the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus, a great band name) is darkly hilarious. Sometimes a train is just a train, but I'm not sure it is here. Why these particular passengers, by the way? There's a dwarfish psychology professor, a judge, and a mother and daughter. The latter is sent away when the story gets especially randy, and as viewers, we can be thankful that the youngster wasn't subjected to Fernando Rey's oppressive chest hair.

Two actresses play the love interest of Rey's character here, a perplexing choice by Bunuel but one that works. Rey doesn't seem to notice that she's two separate women. Or more accurately, his penis can't tell the difference. He's just concerned with getting in her pants. He first tries a move that seems like it should work every single time--aggressive hair fondling. Later, he uses money, gifts, inspiring persistence, the gal's mother, words that he thinks she probably wants to hear, rationalizing, exhibitions of his importance, and violence. At one point, he even goes full-Trump!

The power dynamics are a lot of fun here. Rey's got money and gender on his side but is helpless against the powers of the fairer gender and her chastity pants. This is a movie about those dynamics and one about how man views women, but mostly, it's just a funny comedy. The Bunuelean surreal side bars--a mouse, a fly in a martini, recurring shots of a guy with a sack, a pig baby--keep you on your toes, and just having this world where an act of terrorism that kills 290 people doesn't even make front page news makes me laugh.

Or maybe I didn't actually laugh. I don't even know what to type here anymore.

The funniest moment is when the flashback gets particularly sexual and is interrupted by a shot of the passengers on the train. There is, after all, a child listening to all this! With that shot, however, it's revealed that a second child has actually joined in to listen to this man's gaudy tale of lust and unrequited sex. Now that surely made me laugh!

Actually, I can't guarantee that made me laugh either.

Ok, I have to go make my 1977 list now. I apologize for writing several of these things that aren't worth anybody's time.

3 Women

1977 Altman film

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Shelley Duvall gets a new roommate.

Two perfect lead performances from Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, two of the titular three women, lots of yellows and pinks, loads of shots with mirrors, a fantastically ominous avant-garde score from Gerald Busby, recurring references to melts, a Sissy Spacek beer guzzle, dresses getting caught in car doors, apathetic twins, a haunting dream sequence, lots and lots of humor. Before making a final 1977 movie list, I wanted to watch this again, and I'm glad I did. I love it even more than I thought I did! I don't quite understand it, but I love it. It's enigmatic, a riddle that starts ominously enough with shots of old people in a pool and just keeps getting stranger and stranger and more and more perplexing. And more and more hilarious! This is a really funny movie, and it somehow gets even more comedic once Spacek's parents show up, odd since tragedy has struck at that point.

This movie is based on an Altman dream. I wish I had Altman dreams.

Great use of a fake baby in this one.

One Sings, the Other Doesn't

1977 Agnes Varda film

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Covers the years of a friendship between two women in France.

This is the most overtly feminist film I've seen from Agnes Varda. Marriage as prostitution, seemingly throwaway lines like "Men, don't come in so abruptly" during a singing rehearsal, Iranian veils, lots of abortion references, song lyrics about being a woman or being pregnant or being a pregnant woman, the recurring idea of a woman's body belonging to that woman and nobody else. Near the end, a narrator tells us that these women had "fought to gain the happiness of being a woman," a really sadly beautiful idea. At another point, free will is described as "philosophy in action," and part of what makes this so refreshing is how the titular duo--both really, but especially Pauline--make the decisions they want to make. Those decisions might not always lead to happiness, but it doesn't matter so much because the decisions are theirs.

This isn't overtly political exactly despite the feminist angle. Mostly, it's the story of the friendship, one that feels very organic. I love how Varda films these two when they're apart, but I really love what she does when they're together. When they are apart, they exchange postcards, a "bridge in the air" and a "dialogue in the imagination." It's a gimmick that's worked in other movies but really works here to connect these characters and show how they inspire each other. So much of this movie is about being part of a group and women supporting each other.

There are lots of songs in this because as the title says, one of these characters sings. The other doesn't. I thought the songs were quirky and fun, and some of the musical moments in this almost seemed like music videos.

There are lots of references to photography in this, including opening credits which show a series of photographs. A lot of them are sad women, women who have been posed in specific ways or asked to look a certain way. I have a favorite photograph, but I'm not going to talk about which one that is.

One bit of humor I really liked: Pauline is rehearsing this weird skit/song where she's topless and sitting on the shoulders of another person who is hidden beneath a long skirt. Rehearsal time ends, and she slips on a t-shirt to cover her exposed breasts. On the t-shirt? Exposed breasts. I loved that bit of visual humor, but it might have something to do with me liking breasts a lot.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

2019 sequel

Rating: 12/20 (Jen: 16/20; Buster: 19/20)

Plot: Emmet has to enlist the help of Rex Dangervest to save his friends from aliens who kidnapped them so that a shape-shifting menace can marry Batman.

The cheeky closing credits with the song from Beck and The Lonely Island was better than the actual movie.

I'd probably have to watch the first one of these again to figure out if I even liked it. This seems like more of the same, but the theme at the heart of it doesn't quite sneak up on you the way the other did. Once I knew what this was all about--and that was early--you kind of see how much work they have to put into the whole thing to get there. Along with a twist that didn't really seem like a twist because of [omitted] and probably [omitted], it just didn't work for me. The first movie surprised me and slipped in cameos and allusions that were pretty clever. With this second part, a lot of stuff feels shoehorned in.

That includes a character named Larry Poppins although I think I might have loved him.

The China Syndrome

1979 thriller

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A journalist uncovers a potential cover-up at a nuclear power plant.

"Get in tight on the navel." Belly dancing right at the beginning of this. And Jane Fonda? Oh, mercy!

Jane Fonda's character becomes infinitely more interesting in this once it's revealed that she's got a turtle and a tacky goose lamp. Initially, she's overshadowed by what Michael Douglas is doing. What I like best about this is the clash between how Fonda's character wants to be seen or what her career aspirations might be and how others are seeing her as nothing but a soft and beautiful female who should be doing stories on tiger's birthdays, the migration of gray whales, and singing telegrams. And those belly dancers. Oh, mercy!

Hey, there's a game show shown in this that involves a giant pinball machine. Is that real? Why haven't I seen reruns of that on the Game Show Network?

Teen Wolf's dad is in this, and even though his character is trying to explain all this nuclear energy stuff with graphics and everything, I'm still not smart enough to get it. What's easy to understand--and especially relevant in today's world where big corporations are sacrificing our futures and the lives of our offspring because of their own greed--is how people in these positions might cover up something in order to save themselves a buck. Or a million or so bucks. There's a clever moment in this where you hear this Taco Bell commercial, one where the voice over is talking about how fresh and healthy the Taco Bell food is. There's a parallel between the voice making promises in that commercial and the spokespeople for this nuclear power company, isn't there?

Actually, that's probably not a clever moment at all. It's probably just product placement. And now, even though I'm gluten free and never eat Taco Bell food, I have a hankering for a chalupa. A chalupa filled with radiation! Oh, mercy!

Charlie Chaplin makes a sneaky appearance in this movie.

Seriously, somebody find out about that giant pinball machine game show. I'm too busy to look that up.

The Tree of Wooden Clogs

1978 farming movie

Rating: 18/20

Plot: People live on a farm.

This movie taught me what chilblains are.

"Paradise beings with the love we show each other on earth."

Two movies in a row where the idea of paradise comes up. There's a whole lot more God in this one, however, and the faith that comes with there being a whole lot of God in a place like this. What else do these characters have to do but worship something? Tell stories, I guess.

The idea of community comes up a lot in this. This involves four (I think?) families working on somebody else's farm. Maybe it's Maggie's farm, but it's clear they're not like Dylan. They want to be there. It's the place for them. And a big part of that place is the other people who are there. And part of what makes it all work is how they co-exist and help each other. At one point, a character seems confused by a proffered thank you, saying, "Thank us for what? If we don't help each other. . ." and later, a nun brings up the idea yet again, claiming, "We must help each other in this world." Along with the above quote and many moments, some very quiet and inconspicuous, where characters have each other's back, pray for each other, and watch over each other, that theme is very clear.

This movie is long and almost entirely plotless, just slices of the lives of these people who work and work and work. Small victories seem momentous. Witness the grandfather character and his tomatoes, a subplot that is sprinkled in here and there throughout this. We see the guy sneaking around at night with a bucket of chicken shit, we see him talking with his granddaughter about his intentions, and then we see the emotional payoff of all that. It's a hushed firecracker of a moment, and I can see a lot of people watching this and being bored and frustrated, but if you're engaged, you'll pick up on lots of those kinds of moments.

Clogs, by the way, don't factor into this whole thing until around the hour-and-five-minute mark and then dropped again until almost the very end of the movie. It's just one short story of many in this, one tragedy that surely isn't the first and won't be the last because life for these people is all about embracing the routine and, whenever tragedy does arrive like a sinister visitor, figure out a way to move on. Most of those ways, of course, have to do with God or working with others.

There are moments of levity. A carnival rolls into town, giving these people an opportunity to break that routine in non-tragic ways. You know, the typical eating thirty-six eggs and drinking ten literal bootfuls of wine or having dangerous-looking pole-climbing competitions or riding a carousel in the vicinity of clowns or listening to a guy talk about his arthritis ointments. Most of their lives, however, there's a music that always seems just out of reach of these people. When nuns enter the picture later on, one talks about how the nuns are singing because the world needs to be beautiful. These characters live in a beautiful place, but it's not an easy life. It's the kind of life where you have to decapitate geese which might bite or listen to those horrifying pig screams before those piggish intestines spill out. These characters hear music, but it's always out of reach.

Of course, one of them does this peasant freestyle rap which is something else. Rap music was invented in late-19th Century Italy apparently.

One other stand-out scene involves newlyweds on a lengthy boat trip. Director Olmi really takes his time with this, but he then skips the sex scene. I have to admit that I was a little disappointed.

Oh, one other moment that stands out and nearly made me tear up is a decision by an oldest sibling when his mother suggests they get rid of a brother and sister. That touched me.

This apparently one of Al Pacino's favorite movies.

Falling Down

1993 dramedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A guy with anger issues has an interesting day as he tries to make it to his daughter's birthday party.

When I saw this in '93, I loved it. I'm pretty sure I thought it was pretty deep. Seeing it in 2019 as a middle-aged liberal, it's a much different experience. I remembered the opening with the traffic jam, the scene with the gang members, and the scene in the military surplus store for some reason. And of course, I remembered the ending, one that I remember thinking was nearly as moving and shocking as the ending of Vertigo, my personal favorite at the time.

I didn't remember how awesomely heavy-handed this thing is. Hell hath no fury like an angry white man scorned. It's never really clear whether we're supposed to identify with this Michael Douglas character because his viewpoints are wildly inconsistent. There are times when he's a little like Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm character, griping about the ills of a world he's having trouble fitting into, maybe even legitimately raising issues about society in the early-90s. Most of the time, he's just a very angry white man, the kind of guy you figure would even wear a MAGA hat around. It's really hard to see what Joel Schumacher is trying to do with this character or with Duvall's more cartoonish version of Tommy Lee Jones' cop in No Country for Old Men.

The whole thing's really thematically muddy, but that makes it a fascinating document from a very muddy decade. This is a very 90's film. Douglas's character is searching for a home. He's lost a literal home and family, and it's clear that his character doesn't recognize the America he's walking through in his efforts to get back to his literal home. "Everybody has their own ideas about what paradise is." The corrupted imagery of urban Americana in this movie is almost a failed Garden of Eden, America some sort of failed attempt at a kind of paradise.

Part of that failed attempt has to do with America as this utopian melting pot. The most obvious statement is the African American man protesting that he's been considered "not economically viable" and winding up arrested, but there are other people who aren't angry white men who Douglas's character runs into or interacts with. The gang members he encounters are Hispanic. The guy who tries to overcharge him for a Coke is Korean. There's a Japanese cop. There's a Middle Eastern guy who sells him a unicorn snow globe. What isn't represented much at all here along his journey through hellish Los Angeles is women. There's a female cop, and his ex-wife and daughter surely factor into the story, but there aren't many female characters he interacts with while trying to find a home.

Lots of American iconography litters the screen. It starts right away with the great opening extended shot showing Douglas in that traffic jam, a scene that plays a lot like a horror film. Early on, you see Garfield, a Big Boy advertisement, American flags, and religious and pessimistic bumper stickers. Later, there's the Coca Cola, a broken jar of American flags, a mural with Native Americans, greedy banks, military surplus stores, homophobia, racism, moon mission failures, pollution, anti-Communist rants, and people golfing in goofy hats. It's a nauseating glimpse at America Douglas journeys through, and there's seemingly no place for him anymore as he fulminates giving money to Korea (though he's unsure about that whole thing), his rights as a consumer, fast food menu accuracy, freedom of speech and the right to disagree, and anything else that seems to bug him on this stressful morning of his. Meanwhile, he keeps upgrading his weapons. He starts with a wildly-swung briefcase before inheriting a bat, trading that in for a knife, and eventually getting his hands on a bag of guns.

What's it all mean? Again, I'm not so sure.

Falling Down anticipates a decade that just kept getting angrier and more angst-ridden, and though it's unclear to me what its intentions might be, it remains a really fascinating document of troubled times in a troubled place and one lost soul trying to navigate it all.

Kramer vs. Kramer

1979 drama

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A father is forced to juggle parenthood and his work after his wife abruptly leaves him. Then, she comes back and wants custody. Women!

What a terrible ending!

Lots of pissing in this movie, and there's some Tab product placement. My favorite part of the entire movie might be at the very beginning when a character passes street musicians rocking a mandolin and a guitar and playing that Vivaldi concerto used for the opening credits. It led me to believe that this would be a little more playful than it ended up being.

I liked the rapport between Dustin Hoffman and the kid (Justin Henry), but every time I see Meryl Streep on the screen, it seems like she's acting. Her performance kind of clashes with Hoffman's more natural one here, but maybe that's part of the point.

Land without Bread

1933 Spanish documentary

Rating: too short for a rating

Plot: Bunuel looks at an isolated region of Spain and the people there.

"Nothing keeps you awake better than always thinking about death."

I had to wait on the Bunuel movie that I needed to rewatch and watched this instead. I couldn't shake how much it reminds me of the kinds of documentaries Werner Herzog would make 40 years later. The narrated bit about how the crew is there for months or whatever and "never heard a song" sounded especially Herzogian. Bunuel's a trickster, contrasting the matter-of-fact (maybe even bored) narration with these stark images of the suffering people of Las Hurdes and staging sequences with a falling goat and probably a donkey that dies when it's attacked by bees. This should not be shown to animal rights activists although I'm not sure they'd care all that much about a movie that is almost 90 years old. One senses that there's a lot staged or manufactured in this. There's a harrowing moment where the camera examines a little girl's mouth while the narrator informs us that the character dies a few days after the footage was shot. Anybody just taking Bunuel at his word with stuff like that is probably gullible. From what I've read, this is a parody of ethnographic studies or anthropological excursions that Bunuel apparently believed were similarly exaggerated for effect.

A humorous moment is a sequence where Bunuel is showing dwarves and "cretins" who are in charge of looking after goats. The footage keeps shifting to a new figure, and the narrator announces "another cretin" several times. I also liked the matter-of-fact "After two months in this country, we leave" followed by a jarring "FIN." That was so perfect.

Divorce Italian Style

1961 dark comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A guy wants his wife gone so that he can marry a first-cousin.

Marcello Mastroianni plays charming villain so well in this breezy dark comedy that would probably double-feature well with my favorite Sturges' movie, Unfaithfully Yours. Mastroianni plays the character so straight, enabling those fantasy death sequences to be grounded and somehow making the whole scenario even funnier. There's this fragile coolness to the character, and watching him try to keep it all together when he's at his most flustered is delightful. I thought his facial tic, a kind of exaggerated twitch that I kept trying to replicate, would grow tiresome, but it never did, even when I could predict exactly when it would happen.

Shame on Pietro Germi for making us side with this villain, a man who wants one human being dead so that he can sleep with the much-younger first-cousin he's desperately in lust with. As a superficial male, I felt tricked into siding with the husband over the wife mostly because she's got a unibrow and a hint of a mustache. So shame on you, Germi!

I really enjoyed this one, my favorite scenes being the ones where the protagonist (and others) are leering at the cousin, those fantasy death scenarios, and a lawyer's closing arguments.

Bad Movie Club: Twisted Pair

2018 sci-fi wackiness

Bad Movie Rating: 5/5 (J.D.: 5/5; Fred: 4/5; Josh: 5/5; Tami: 5/5)

Rating: 2/20

Plot: I'm not the best person to answer this question.

This is completely incomprehensible, but thankfully, it seems like Neil Breen's still got that magic touch. I worry that the Las Vegas real estate agent will become more self-aware and start to make bad movies on purpose, but that doesn't seem to be the case. With Twisted Pair, his fifth "movie," Breen's lack of self-awareness once again combines forces with his self-importance to create something that I'm wondering if he even understands. He's got his usual targets (corporate greed) and some of his usual vices (I don't remember any fancy cars in this one though), but with this one, he's got more special effects at his disposal. He had promised a "bigger" movie with more of a budget. He'd know, but the explosions, the bloody wounds, and the flight or super-jump movement that one of his characters does repeatedly don't succeed in making this seem like a movie with a bigger budget. Or a budget. The jumping thing reminded me of when Blue from Blue's Clues skiddoos into pictures except Neil Breen doesn't rotate. Still, he's come a long way from that monster mask in I Am Here. . . .Now.

What am I saying? No, he hasn't.

You might notice that I typed "one of his characters" up there. That's right, Breen plays doppelgangers in this one. It's not as confusing as it could have been because one of the titular pair has the worst fake beard I believe I've ever seen in a movie. Ok, scratch that. It's still pretty confusing. Along with the fake beard, you also get these decorative cats that keep moving for some reason, a fairy girl muse with spiky shoes, gratuitous partial nudity (one of those aforementioned vices), fake mice, lots of guns, slowed-down garbled voices. Breen must have been watching Twin Peaks: The Return. Breen's convoluted story involves space travel, superhuman powers, Artificial Intelligence, terrorism, and romance. It's a glorious Breenian mess of what I imagine Neil Breen loves and what he can afford to buy from dollar stores.

Breen plays both of the characters in his usual unnatural way he plays all of his characters, the kind where you wonder how he's a real estate agent because he doesn't seem to have any idea how human interaction works. Here, he's playing "hybrid A.I." characters (whatever the hell that means), so the unnatural cadence and inability to interact naturally almost fits in that Arnold Terminator kind of way. The other bad-acting stand-out is Denise Bellini who plays the agency director. But to be honest, it's really hard for bad acting to stand out in a movie like this.

My favorite shot is the one where one of the Breens gets to hang out with an eagle.

Breen spelled "detective" wrong in the closing credits. Twice.

Toy Story 4

2019 fourth movie in the trilogy

Rating: 16/20 (Jen: 18/20; Dylan: 17/20; Abbey: 19/20; Buster: 20/20)

Plot: Bonnie, nervous about starting kindergarten, makes a new toy friend out of a plastic spork to help her deal with the change. When the family goes on a vacation

Things I've learned about the Toy Story franchise in the last week: Andy doesn't have a dad because of budget issues. Pixar couldn't afford to create a father for Andy. Something similar happened with Toy Story 2 actually. I always figured the inclusion of that weird old man who plays chess against himself in the Pixar short into the Toy Story world was a choice, an Easter egg like putting that Pizza Planet truck in every movie. Apparently, it was also because they couldn't afford to make a new character and decided just to reuse that guy.

Something else I realized after watching this and thinking about all four movies: These series of films has a lot in common with Bergman's "silence of God" trilogy. Maybe it's just because those are fresh on my mind, but if you take the idea of Woody's kids being god figures, it's hard not to see the connection.

I've gone three of these movies thinking they're about the relationship between children and their toys or maybe the relationships within this gang of toys. When this fourth installment was announced, I wasn't sure it was a story that needed continuing. That third movie ended things tidily enough.

But this isn't Toys Story, is it? It's Toy Story--as in the story or journey of a single toy. And that toy is Woody. This isn't a story about the relationship between toys and kids or the collective journey of a clan of kids. These are stories about Woody's growth and development as this sentient toy, a journey filled with existential crises, doubts about his gods or his role as a toy, and his discovery of his identity. Yes, the movies all have arcs for other characters. Buzz gets his in the first movie. Jessie gets hers in the second. But these are Woody's movies.

In the first movie, Woody understands his role but not in mature ways. His spirituality is a selfish one, childish with room for jealousy as soon as there's a situation that threatens his place in his universe. He learns about friendship most obviously, the power of congregation. In the second movie, his own egotism is his antagonist to the point where he doubts his God. He's agnostic Woody, ready to leave Andy's room behind and live in a Godless world. In the third movie, he faces false gods, temptations, and eventually death before converting at the end in a kind of spiritual rebirth.

I have no idea what I'm talking about in the above paragraph, but I wish I did. I feel like I could win a Pulitzer or something.

So what's going on with Woody here? He's the guy at the end of the third movie, focused on keeping his kid happy no matter what his role might be in the room. And it's good for our cowboy hero that that's the case because Bonnie barely pays any attention to him at all. Bonnie is a Bergmanian God, so what's Woody going to do when his God has abandoned him? What's that snake in his boot going to tell him to do?

I don't want to get into this anymore because I don't know what I'm talking about. There goes my Pulitzer! Also--spoilers. Maybe we can talk about it in the comments?

The first Toy Story looks so cheap in comparison, and if you watch it 150 times, you'll notice the continuity errors. There's beauty in individual shots, but seeing some of the shots in this make that movie look like crap. Or like a Dreamworks joint. The amount of details in the antique shop where a lot of the action takes place is staggering. Amusement park lights are nearly as beautiful as the myriad of colors displayed in Coco. A cold open that details a rescue mission and the loss of a character showcases a neighborhood and rainy streets that just don't look like they're animated.

The voice work, as expected, is great. The old favorites are all here, even Don Rickles who apparently is doing voice work from the afterlife. Rex's dinosaur girlfriend might have the funniest lines, at least near the end. I really loved what they did with Bo Peep, a great female character after having next-to-nothing to do in those first two movies.

A lot of the old characters don't have a whole lot to do, but it doesn't take much time to fall in love with the new characters. Keanu Reeves' Duke Kaboom even gets a fun and slightly touching story arc of his own, and I thought the villain, voiced by Christina Hendricks, is a lot more nuanced than the bear in the third movie. And she's got a trio of ventriloquist dummies as henchman, and if you know anything at all about me, you know I love ventriloquist dummies. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele always threaten to annoy, but they were my daughter's favorite characters, so I can't complain. And hey, Bonnie's got a dad! And as a dad myself, I found that character a little too easy to identify with. And Tony Hale as Forky? There's enough depth and existential angst in Forky's story to make a fourth Toy Story work, and he's just around to get the plot going.

It's hard to think of what doesn't work in this movie. The humor works. The action sequences work. The characters and their relationships work. The themes work. After Toy Story 3 came out, I was ready to declare the three movies one of the best trilogies ever made. Though I had doubts with this fourth one, it completely delivers. This is the best quadrilogy ever made.

The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting

1978 painting movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A collector of paintings takes the viewer on a tour of six works of Fredéric Tonnerre and speculates on what a missing painting might have looked like.

Part-mystery and part-parody, this spell-binding French pseudo-documentary isn't quite like anything else I've ever seen before. Dueling narrators, at least one who you might say is unreliable, take the audience on a tour of this guy's three-dimensional recreations (tableaux vivants) of these six paintings, speculating on how they're connected and what their hidden meanings might be. I'm not totally sure it's presciently poking fun at Internet obsessives picking apart every last detail of a work in order to find hidden meanings that likely aren't there, but it certainly seems that way. As a bonus, this looks as good as you'd expect something from cinematographer Sacha Vierny to look. Likely, this movie being filmed in black and white is some sort of joke.

Fighting with My Family

2019 wrastlin' movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Coming from a wrestling family, both Paige and her brother have dreams of joining the WWF or WWE or whatever it's called. Paige's dream comes true when she's selected to train in Florida. But can she overcome obstacles and character flaws to actually make it big?

I had no idea that I had any interest in a true-life story of professional wrastler Paige, but this surprised me with a lot of humor and heart. Likely, I only watched this because of The Rock's involvement to help me get through the last month and a half before the next Fast and Furious installment, but he was mostly a distraction from what I really liked about the movie--the family dynamics and Paige's plucky rise to wrestling stardom. The Rock's reaction to a recurring "Dick me dead, bury me pregnant" line--that trademark eyebrow thing he does--was good though.

That rise to wrestling stardom didn't shy away from cliches with your typical training montages and the exact story arcs you might expect even if you've never heard of Paige. It's kind of a shame because there's a freshness to the opening half hour or so with this with all the family stuff. The four have a great rapport and their lines, filled with a special brand of English wit, sound natural even when you know there's nothing natural about it. That is until the end when, surprise, you see the real characters this is all based on because that's something that all of these movies are apparently required to do. And then, Nick Frost and Leana Headey's performances and exchanges seem pretty spot on. Jack Lowden, playing Paige's brother, is also good, but it's Florence Pugh who really excels here. I'm not sure how much of the physical performance is hers and how much is editing and stand-ins, but I was impressed. Vince Vaughn's also in this, and although he's as grating as he usually is, this is a character he wears pretty well.

Some great one-liners throughout, and the themes about perseverance, family, and teamwork are rewarding even if they're pretty typical. Fighting with My Family was a pleasant surprise.

Hotel Mumbai

2019 action movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Details a terrorist attack at the Taj Mahal Palace Motel in India in 2008.

That's two movies in a row that are based on a documentary.

I really don't have much to say about this one. Sorry for the inconvenience.