Super Mario Brothers-Chris Pratt,
Charlie Day, Anya Taylor-Joy, Seth Rogen, Jack Black
This animated movie isn’t just a filmic homage to the Super
Mario Brothers game you grew up with as a kid; it’s hodgepodge of every video
game with the Super Mario label. Kind of like Ready Player One except there’s
thematic consistency. And that nostalgia factor lights a bulb in your brain.
And talk about that score! It’s almost worth the price of admission to see the
most memorable tunes of the early 90s outside of the Billboard top 40, to be
put to orchestration. As for the story, it’s pretty typical but not lazy enough
(from an adult perspective) to have made a negative viewing experience for me.
Air-Matt Damon, Ben
Affleck, Viola Davis, Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker, Chris Messina, dir. Ben
Affleck
In the mold of films like Syriana, Moneyball, and Ben
Affleck’s own Argo, this latest edition of Ben Affleck is simply about a man (or
group of men) and his goals. It’s in the tradition of 70s anti-hero films like
French Connection, Marathon Man, China Syndrome, and especially All the
President’s Men where character development is secondary to action. And Air is
definitely worthy of all its predecessors: It’s paced very well and the stakes
are high. Sonny Vaccaro is a fascinating rogue of a character who plays a hell
of a game of speed chess against bigger companies to land the greatest player
of all time. Ironically, for a film that lionizes athleticism vis-a-vis Michael
Jordan -- Vaccaro’s big speech is about how no one really matters in that room
but Michael Jordan, how much of that entitlement has produced college athletes
who skip classes and add to rape culture?—Jordan himself wasn’t evolved. I
couldn’t help but feel the film was too afraid to touch a societal golden cow.
Beau is Afraid-Joaquin
Phoenix, Patti LuPonte, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zoe
Lister, Parker Posey-Jones, dir. Ari Aster
Not a fan but it wasn’t that far away from working. The film’s
marketing describes the movie as about a lonely man’s odyssey home, and the
director described it as a “nightmare comedy” on press tours. I would classify
it as the kind of ride that amusement park’s convert into a haunt-fest for
Halloween. Only it lasts three hours, and it was seemingly co-written by Carl
Jung and Franz Kafka for maximum symbolism. Joaquin Phoenix plays a lonely man
who’s ill-at-ease with the world. It’s kind of justified, however, because, he
seems to live among the worst possible humans alive and Murphy’s Law appears to
be in hyper-drive around him. It isn’t
all miserable; he’s saved from near-death on a couple occasions and finds the
occasional moment of love from a stranger.
The best I can say about It, is
that at three hours, it doesn’t feel that long. I was genuinely on the edge of
my seat trying to work out where things would go. But at the end of a day, I’m
usually not satisfied with the genre of reality-bending films. Perhaps, it was
one twist too many.
Tetris-Taron Egerton, Anthony Boyle,
Neketa Efremov, Oleg Stefan, Sofya Lebedeva, Tobey Jones –
Without overthinking it, I’d say this is the best film of the year so far. It’s
hard to understate how impressive it is to take a subject that bores me to
tears and make it a gripping thriller. Of course, it helps that the real-life
story is equally mind-boggling: In order to acquire the rights for Tetris, Henk
Williams mortgaged his house, risked trouble with the KGB, and was initially dependent
on a company that was actively trying to screw him. When he finally broke free
and secured the rights with the Nintendo company, he realized he didn’t have the
rights because he was lied to. Although it’s easy to root for him in
retrospect, movies like these often overlook that these bold risk takers simply
can’t be classified as responsible adults. I’d love to see a deleted scene
between Henk and his financial advisor. Throughout the film, Hank is in a
bidding war with two other parties and the film makes great use of dramatic
irony: The narration is omniscient enough to let us know what’s happening with
all three parties, but the POV is tilted towards the hero and away from the
villain (Anthony Boyle) as he generally knows the least of the three. My only problem was why that I spent much of
the film wondering why cast Taron Egerton when Shia LaBeouf is still alive? Egerton’s
makeover here feels like he’s entering a Shia LaBeouf look-alike contest, and
who needs him when this is the kind of part LaBeouf would kill?
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