Venom: Let There Be Carnage | No Time to Die | Respect | | The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love | Flee | The Worst Person in the World | Encanto | The Power of the Dog | Passing | Simple as Water | The Eyes of Tammy Faye | The Lost Daughter | Procession | Don't Look Up | Faya Dayi | Being the Ricardos | tick, tick...BOOM! | Swan Song | 892 AKA Breaking
Venom: Let There Be Carnage, 09 January 2021, Blu-ray via Redbox
H-how does this exist in the same timeline as Spider-man: No Way Home? (Because, in case you didn't see that film, the crossovers are just beginning.) Because these two films have such different feels--the outsized violence and vulgarity of Venom just, like, does not exist in the MCU. It doesn't. EXCEPT NOW IT DOES.
Anyway. Color me extremely bored of serial killer origin stories. On the other hand, there's something weirdly charming about Venom being the more competent half of this particular version of The Odd Couple. He investigates! He paints! He cooks! Eddie Brock, how did you EVER succeed on a professional level? (Yes, I remember the Eddie from the first movie, prior to his career nosedive. Venom is right, in that he pulled Eddie out of that tailspin. But what next?)
Also, Anne. Anne, girl, what are you doing with your life? (Aside from letting your personal life coalesce into some fraught polyamory, don't even @ me, guys, it's happening.) I don't know what it says about her that her healthiest relationship is neither with Eddie nor Doctor Dan, but with the cannibal alien symbiote.
Okay, Venom at the rave was pretty great.
I'm glad they played up how Venom being a symbiote means that he needs Eddie to survive. That scene when he stumbled into Mrs Chen's store begging for chocolate? I love that Mrs Chen, despite her sass, genuinely cares about Eddie AND Venom.
But also, the scene with Mrs-Chen-and-Venom and Anne is possibly the best thing in this entire franchise.
As for the Cletus stuff, well. I think there could have been a genuine and interesting story in there? Like, again, the serial killer origin story is played out, so boo hoo, Cletus. Then again, the Shriek storyline (Cletus's beloved Frances) could have been a fun one. Psychopaths getting married! Frances being experimented in some Weapon X facility! The genuine conflict of Carnage--who enables Cletus to stay free and lethal--being absolutely vulnerable to Frances's powers! And the reunion scene is pretty dang choice, y'all.
They needed to do a whooooooole lot more about Cletus not being symbiotic with Carnage, though, as well as why Venom was so convinced Carnage would kill them. But I guess they wanted more scenes of comedic chomping? If they had cut down the rapid action scenes by, like, 35%--or, egads, made the movie 15 minutes longer--this could have been a compelling, or at least coherent, storyline? So much potential, my dudes.
No Time to Die, 13 January 2022, Blu-ray via Redbox
We open with a straight-up horror movie sequence.Then we transition directly into Bond telling his girlfriend, "We have all the time in the world," like, even with his overabundance of experience, he never learned the power of jinx. Dumbass.
Some Spectre agents attack James when on vacation and he reacts badly. I mean, TO BE FAIR, the agents are trying pretty hard to point him towards Madeleine as the culprit, but seriously, throwing her onto the bed and then rage-driving her across a small European town? And then you just put her on a train and tell her she'll never see him again? Dude's an abusive asshole. ROT IN HELL, BOND.
There's some folderol about a biological weapon and folks try to bring James back into the fold and it turns out he's been replaced by someone named Nomi and the world is probably better off. Except, it turns out, MI6 is on the other side of this--there's a race to kidnap a little Russian bio-weapons dude.
Bond's ol' CIA buddy Felix hooks him up with an agent who's only been trained for three weeks and wow, Paloma, way to leverage your gender against a dude that suffers from the most intense Madonna/whore complex ever to exist.
I recognize one or both of these women could be dead by the end of the movie, but someone send me allll the Nomi/Paloma, okay?
NO NOT FELIX YOU MONSTERS
I would 100% watch a series about the bureaucratic adventures of Moneypenny and Q.
Madeleine repeatedly insisting to James, "She's not yours," was kind of hilarious, given that nobody believed her.
I would 100% live next to Safin's Poison Garden. Also: "We want to be told how to live and then die when we are not looking." Oh, my dude. You have been reading too much Nietzsche.
I actually did not expect that ending! Too bad Nomi killed the little Russian scientist--I imagine he could have deprogrammed Bond's anti-Madeleine nanobots. I mean, maybe somebody else could have? Eventually? Q's whole, Oh this science lasts forever is nonsense. Let's pretend James survived the gigantic explosion.
Respect, 16 January 2022, DVD via Redbox
We're all watching this one for the music, I hope, because it doesn't do very much else that you couldn't predict. Music biopics, right? The movie doesn't do anything different except when we get a glimpse of Aretha with her sisters, and because of the patriarchy for some reason the film focuses on her relationships with men instead. (Don't even get me started on her grandma and her kids, who barely exist in the story.) The traditional trials and tribulations of a music biopic are supposed to give us a glimpse into the star's inner life, but we never get that sense of interiority here.
Anyway.
Spencer, 17 January 2022, DVD via Redbox
It's pretty weird to watch this after The Crown Season 4, which featured Emma Corrin as a pretty excellent Diana. But in contrast with The Crown's landscape view, this film zooms to focus on three specific days.
Kristin Stewart is demonstrably not Kristin Stewart, playing Diana at a staccato, which is mesmerizing. And the director puts the emphasis on this by oscillating between long, long views and disconcerting shakycam close-ups. Everything's set up for beats of maximum claustrophobia.
"Beauty is useless. Beauty is clothing." Beauty is a cage and all are her keepers. No matter what she does and who she tries to befriend, the only people who welcome her authenticity are her two sons. (And William's on the cusp of recognizing the exact weight of the family's contempt.) "You understand, my dear, that all you are is currency."
I wish Hollywood, and directors specifically, would stop being so fascinated by the constancy of Diana's self-harm.
The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, 19 January 2022, screening via the Sundance Film Festival
I cannot emphasize enough how this film hits my My So-Called Life buttons. Is it because most romantic encounters happen in the bathroom? (I mean, I say "romantic" in scare quotes because we open on one of our teenage protags, Randi, hooking up with a grown-ass woman in a gas station bathroom.) Also, voiceovers GALORE.
Randi on the left, Evie on the right.
This film is blandly paint by the numbers. Randi's failing out of school and Evie is ~*~discovering herself~*~ so I'd wager you know everything else that happens. The story's more about the awkwardness than anything else. These two are pretty cute together, at least.
Flee, 19 January 2022, screening via the Museum of Tolerance
So this is an animated documentary and it's pretty cool. It's one man telling his story, reaching back into his childhood as a refugee of Afghanistan. Based on the structure of it, he's speaking to a documentarian--those portions are animated, as well--and it transitions seamlessly back and forth with flashbacks as he recalls his past. Much of the audio is very clearly the original recorded interview audio, which is a neat contrast to the dialogue in the flashbacks.
At one point, the documentarian asks if he's told this story to his fiance, Kasper. He hasn't. (The interview parts sometimes take place in Amin and Kasper's apartment, so you get glimpses of their life, as well.) Imagine keeping all that inside, though. From Afghanistan to Russia to Estonia to Turkey to Denmark to America? And in order to gain asylum, Amin had to tell everybody his entire family had died. (Most of them eventually ended up in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe, thankfully, but god. Except they still don't know what happened to their father.) And, like, humans, as an institution? Are awful. Just fucking awful.
In an extremely generous grace note, when Amin finally comes out to his family, his brother takes him to a gay club, gives him some cash, and tells him they always knew.
The Worst Person in the World, 20 January 2022, streamed via the Sundance Film Festival
- Prologue: Remember that time in college when you knew that if you could, like, find exactly the right path and maybe a person to match, you could solve all the world's problems? Imagine watching all that happen at a hyperspeed dwindle.
- Chapter 1: The Others: It's easy to fall in love with the sophisticated older dude who tells you that you deserve better than him. Then you meet his sophisticated older friends and you get that whisper-soft feeling of, like, oh nooooooo.
- Chapter 2: Cheating: Like, sure, you're happy he's so successful--he's brilliant and he works hard. But do you have to wait fifteen years until you're the successful one? Is this supposed to happen in turns? Maybe it's time to crash a wedding and find yourself some strange.
- Chapter 3: Oral Sex in the Age of #MeToo:
(Listen, I'm not the one who named these chapters, okay? Geez.)
- Chapter 4: Our Own Family: It's hard to have faith in your future happiness when you can see how your parents ended up. And it's not clear they care about your present happiness, either.
- Chapter 5: Bad Timing: Isn't it awkward when that guy you did not, absolutely not, hook up with at that wedding shows up randomly at your workplace? Or…is it a sign?
- Chapter 6: Finnmark Highlands: If you go camping in the wilderness with your boyfriend, who will not, absolutely will not, hook up with someone else at a wedding, and you happen upon a reindeer at dawn, your relationship is probably over.
- Chapter 7: A New Chapter: You did not, absolutely did not, hook up at a wedding, but you're 100% making up for it now.
- Chapter 8: Julie's Narcissistic Circus: Your new boyfriend keeps magic mushrooms in the linen closet. Your subconscious has some serious shit to work out, you discover.
- Chapter 9: Bobcat Wrecks XMas: It's hard to escape your ex when his misogynistic intellectual property has been made into an extremely controversial animated movie. But man oh man, do things seem a lot clearer now.
- Chapter 10: First Person Singular: Or maybe it turns out your ex is dying of pancreatic cancer. Are you the asshole? Have you made a horrible mistake?
- Chapter 11: Positive: Your concerns about having kids are, alarmingly, no longer hypothetical. You need some comforting familiarity, a confidante who knows how you think. And your ex…he needs the same.
- Chapter 12: Everything Comes to an End
- Epilogue: You lose all those things, but you'll be okay.
Encanto, 22 January 2022, streamed via Disney+
The narrative legit starts with a patriarch being killed while fleeing some raiders, dang. And then we get an entire town of being dicks to the one girl in the Madrigal family who doesn't have a visible superpower. And her family ain't too supportive, either. (Being patronizing is a more benign form of dickery, but still.) ALSO, wtf, town, you can't base your entire economy on one family's ability to churn out kids with unpredictable powers.
I hate everybody except Mirabel and Antonio. Why is this happening, Abuela? Maybe because you keep GASLIGHTING your family!
Okay, I love Luisa, too. She's like a seriously insecure Toph Beifong.
Yeah, yeah, the whole movie is about how everybody gets all twisted up inside so much they don't notice anybody else. (Tia Pepa's always two centimeters away from a nervous breakdown, for example.) Yeah, yeah, "We Don't Talk About Bruno" is speTACular.
BRUNO. IS IN. THE WALLS. WTF.
I was sobbing by the end, though. POSSIBLY this film hit kind of close to home?
The Power of the Dog, 23 January 2022, streamed via Netflix
All the reviews I read of this film threw the phrase "toxic masculinity" around like confetti, so you can imagine how reluctant I was to watch this. But it's at the top of all the Oscars predictions, so HERE I AM, DEVOTED TO MY CRAFT.To be fair, it's a gorgeous film and the acting is superb, though that isn't surprising given the cast. It's just…not something I really care about? But if you're into seeing multiple scenes of naked Cumberbatch, hey.
I really would have preferred the love story of Rose and George, but I GUESS NOT.
Yadda yadda gay cowboy, yadda yadda Chekov's anthrax.
Passing, 23 January 2022, streamed via Netflix
Full disclosure:
- I was never going to not watch a film starring Tessa Thompson, and
- I already read the book by Nella Larsen because it was the first pick for the Starbucks/Netflix book club. Knowing what happens already--the film is pretty faithful to the text--takes a bit of the punch out of the experience.
The overall conceit is an interesting one--by chance Irene runs into her childhood friend Clare at a restaurant. While both of them grew up together--in a Black community--both are also light-skinned enough to pass for white.
It turns out Clare has gone full in on the persona--she's married a white man who has no idea--and they have a daughter. Meanwhile, Irene is married with two kids and is deeply embedded in her Harlem community. (Her husband is super-classist, though, and a paragon of Nice Guy Toxic Masculinity.)
The two women have a complicated relationship--they don't seem to like each other, but they can't stay away from each other.
But the more time they spend together--in their respective neighborhoods, as well as in some liminal spaces--the more fraught and, for Clare, dangerous things become. (Like, Clare's husband, John, literally uses the N-word as an "affectionate" nickname, which both on the page and the screen evoke an extreme yiiiiiiiiiiiikes.)
Something's got to give. This movie is gorgeous but so stressful.
Simple as Water, 24 January 2022, streamed via HBO Max
This documentary tracks a handful of families over the years--but very specifically, displaced Syrian families. It is heart-wrenching but also, like, kind of predictable? (I only say this as someone who's watched a fair number of documentaries in this vein over the past few years. They're always beautifully shot, the story is always heartbreaking, and the kids are always adorable.)
THAT SAID, this film stands out largely because the families being filmed are in five different countries, which provides a good slice of what the refugee parenting experience is across the globe. In Greece, a mother and her four kids live in a tent by the shore, while her husband strives to earn family reunification papers in Germany. In Turkey, a mother considers leaving her kids in an orphanage because their quality of life could be so much better; the segment ends with her oldest kid, maybe 10 or eleven, arguing with her about what's best for the younger kids. In the US, a young man tries to act as a parent to his teenage brother, but isn't granted asylum. In Syria, a mother is trying to find her disappeared son.
Ooooooof.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021), 24 January 2021, streamed via HBO Max
I never watched the 2000 documentary of the same name, but I remember hearing about it a lot. Was it good enough to merit a fictionalized version twenty years later, though?
Why this? Why now? Like, Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield give it their excellent all as usual, but to what purpose? (Though, knowing how the, UGH, Gospel of Prosperity proliferated, and that Jerry Falwell replaced, supplanted, and condemned the Bakkers, we could perhaps infer some statements. Lordy, Falwell was a piece of shit.) Though, I must confess, I did actually watch their three-scene #meetcute more than once. They start as such gee, willikers dorks, y'all. It's pretty cute.
The Lost Daughter, 25 January 2022, streamed via Netflix
I know Elena Ferrante's novels are great, but I think I've only read the, uh, third book in the Neopolitan series? The works are, to my recollection, all about complicated female relationships, which is awesome but also pretty painful at times. This particular one has our protag reflecting on her time as a young mother when she meets a young mother that reminds her of herself. It weaves backward and forward and it's unsettling bc, my god, Leda, WTF is going on with you?
The film--Maggie Gyllenhaal's directorial debut--is gorgeous and Colman and Buckley kick ass as our protag at two different ages (as does Johnson as the woman our protag gets obsessed about), but I spent most of the movie being like, But you stole that doll from that kid, though. (It's possible that the traditional Oscar nominated genre is starting to lose its impact on me.) Anyway, it turns out being a working mother is hard, guys.
Procession, 25 January 2022, screening via the Museum of Tolerance
This is a rough watch. It focuses on six men in their 50s and 60s who were molested by Catholic priests when they were children. The film itself is, in some way, part of their recovery process--a slight alteration of legit trauma therapy through theatre. In addition to the more traditional aspects of documentary work, the film includes "fictionalized reenactments" of what happened to them. It's…pretty awful, honestly. In an emotional way, that is--the point of the project is that these men are acting out their nightmares in order to make them less potent. (The actual skits they create aren't polished, but they're intensely eerie.)
Slight logistical note, but this particular screening sent me to a video watermarked with my email address, which made me feel like a for-real professional cultural critic.
Don't Look Up, 26 January 2022, streamed via Netflix
This is the most I've liked DiCaprio, possibly ever. And Jennifer Lawrence and Rob Morgan are great as the only sane people in the entire narrative..jpg)
Do I believe news of catastrophe would receive a resounding eh from the world at large? I don't know, why don't we TAKE A LOOK AROUND. It is, uh, it is tough to have an honest laugh at this, guys. On the other hand, WOW, it is hard to enjoy a "comedy" that's so acidically cynical.
On the other other hand, can now confirm I'd pay cash money to watch Jennifer Lawrence and Chalamet in a romantic action movie. ("Doctor Mindy, can I be vulnerable in your car?" I died, y'all. Between that, "I fucking LOVE fingerling potatoes," and introducing himself with his Twitch handle, it's possible I'm into Chalamet again.) Also, I legit dig Ariana Grande's song.
Faya Dayi, 26 January 2022, screening via Museum of Tolerance
Ethiopia's most lucrative cash crop is khat, a leaf that can be chewed during religious meditations, and that's sort of the frame of this--how the harvest and the preparation and distribution and consumption of khat shape the rhythms of a community. What it also reveals, though, is how it drains the community--particularly families filled with strife when one is addicted to khat, and how fraught the young people's attempts to extricate themselves from the endless cycle are.
At several points, a woman's singing accompanies the film as it moves from scene to scene. "The doctor has no cure. There is no remedy for love."
Being the Ricardos, 28 January 2022, streamed via Prime Video
God, the acting in this film is so good but I couldn't look at it straight on sometimes because Kidman-as-Lucy and Bardem-as-Desi were a flavor of uncanny valley that I wasn't expecting. (Lucy seducing Desi, and then he calls her "kinetically gifted," and then she breaks up with her fiance the next morning over the phone--it's just a chef's kiss of craft.)
"I'm Lucille Ball--when I'm being funny you'll know it." I haven't been paying attention to various controversies, and I wouldn't say I'm very familiar with the actual history, but the film itself is a fun ride.
tick, tick…BOOM!, 28 January 2022, streamed via Netflix
So just a bit ago, I watched RENT on its 25th anniversary farewell tour, so my brain was kind of primed for this. And hey, Lin-Manuel Miranda directed! I was always going to love this, is what I'm saying.
Between this, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and Spider-Man: No Way Home, I'm getting a lot of Andrew Garfield, and I'm down with it, guys.
And DEAR GOD, LMM packed this with enough cameos to slay a theatre kid.
Alexandra Shipp is lovely as Larson's girlfriend, Susan, though her most interesting scene is actually the one where a fight she's having with Larson is transmuted into a quirky song performed by Karessa (aka Vanessa Hudgens).
But honestly? I have no idea how hard this story would hit if you didn't know beforehand that Jonathan Larson died the night before RENT premiered.
Swan Song, 29 January 2022, screening via Museum of Tolerance
This screener came with watermarks and an un-downloadable copy of the script! I'm living the dream. Anyway, Mahershala Ali is so goddamn charming in this film, my god. Like, every flashback scene of his meetcute with Poppy (Naomie Harris) and pretty much anything where he's with his family, oof.
The story is set in the future--it looks mostly like now, except all cars are self-driving and there are cameras in contact lenses, that kind of thing. Also, Cameron (Ali) is dying and he's trying to decide if he wants to clone himself so his family won't be without him. (Years ago, in a hypothetical conversation, his wife had said she'd absolutely take a clone of her late mother, if the clone was fully indistinguishable.) The cloning folks assure him that once the "swap" has happened, they can wipe the memories of the cloning process from his replacement's mind. His family never has to know. He hasn't told them he's dying. She's pregnant with their second kid.
Awkwafina plays one of said unknowing pairs, Kate, and Cameron meets the clone and the original, trying to gauge the realness of the process. (He'd only be the third of the kind.) Some of the toughest scenes are when Cameron and the original Kate are hanging out, musing about what their clones are doing, how they'll be on the island dying even while they'll be replaced.
If you start thinking about this as an ethical dilemma, you will never emerge from it.
892, 30 January 2022, streamed via the Sundance Film Festival
I legit didn't even recognize John Boyega when I took a gander at the promotional material for this film! This is based on a true story--Boyega plays Easley, an army veteran who takes his accumulation of frustration and rage at his life and takes a bank hostage.
Selinis Leyva and Nicole Beharie play the bank employees, Rosa and Estel, who get entangled in the situation, and Easley is so extremely polite to them that it's almost comedic. Except that, of course, he's telling them he's got a bomb in his backpack. (While he's waiting for the negotiator, Easley tries to make small talk. When she mentions she likes Jean Grey of the X-Men, he murmurs, "That's random. That's random.") At one point, he takes a message from someone who wants to talk about their 401K.
Michael K Williams--in the last film he did before his death--plays the hostage negotiator who struggles to slow down the multipart, multiagency attack, which was put in place before anybody even talked to Easley. We also have Connie Britton as a producer from WSB-TV, who just happened to pick up the phone when Easley was trying to get his message out. All he wanted was the $892 disability check the VA misdirected and, failing that, he wanted everyone to know how completely the VA screwed him.
A sniper killed Easley. He didn't have a bomb.
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