The Stuff I Watched 1.10
Here are some of the movies that I wasn't able to review earlier. It's kinda like doing some housekeeping at the end of the year. I think that's a good analogy?
Howdy!
I hope you guys enjoyed my end-of-year rankings. I always love doing lists like that.
This post is a way to review all the movies I couldn’t earlier. After Spielberg Week, I decided that for the sake of list-making and my own convenience, I won’t do every post in order. So these films are some I watched earlier in December, and others I watched near the end of the year.
I hope yinz enjoy them! Here’s some of the stuff I watched this past month:
Alien 3 (1992)
Director: David Fincher
D+
Welp. At least I finished David Fincher’s filmography. To be fair, he disowns Alien 3 because of interference from 20th Century Fox and deadlines. It also didn’t help matters that there were like 40 different scripts. While I am hyperbolizing, the lack of a definitive script certainly doesn’t help when you’re trying to make a movie.
Allow me to get to the actual film. Admittedly, there are some pretty cool shots in the film, but that does not make up for the absolutely boring nature of the picture. Alien was a sci-fi horror film that leaned heavily on horror. The sequel Aliens had some horror, but it definitely leaned into action. Both were revolutionary and ground-breaking for their respective genres.
Alien 3 does not have this. I was never scared and the action sequences were quite dull. It’s your typical story of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) taking on a Xenomorph. There’s nothing new or innovative about the film, except for the fact that the Xenomorph in question looks so fake. Like how do movies from 1979 and 1986 look better technologically speaking than a movie from 1992? What a joke.
Interstellar (2014)
Director: Christopher Nolan
B
For my previous thoughts on the film, click here.
Damn. I REALLY want to like this movie more than I do. Each time I watch the film, the more I love it. The little details that end up forming the magnificent and beautiful empty void of space catch my eye and fill me with wonder. It shows that a group of people can come together and create something beautiful. That’s the impact of cinema and Christopher Nolan knows that.
But it’s the theme of love that still bothers me. When Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway) starts to describe how love transcends space and time, the film loses me. Love barely appears in the rest of the movie until Cooper has to pull something out of his ass when he falls into a black hole. He communicated with his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn) through love. It’s super convoluted and drags the picture on for way too long. It just makes me sad because this honestly could’ve been the best movie of the decade.
Donnie Brasco (1997)
Director: Mike Newell
B+
So you’re telling me it’s fugazi? Sorry, I had to make a fugazi joke. For being about an FBI guy (Johnny Depp as Donnie Brasco) infiltrating the mob, I wasn’t particularly interested about the mob. I was only interested in mob member Lefty (Al Pacino).
We are fully in Al Pacino’s screaming era by this point, but I still love him. While he has to be the one to explain all the mob exposition, Pacino is still bringing his fastball that made his resurgence in the 1990s. As for Depp, I really didn’t care for his performance all that much. He was fine, but nothing out of this world.
The true story is super fascinating and the movie is by no means bad. Maybe I’m just spoiled because Martin Scorsese made two of his finest crime stories in that decade (Goodfellas and Casino).
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022)
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
C+
If you couldn’t tell, this didn’t make the cut for the Best Films of 2022. Iñárritu has become a mixed figure amongst critics, and this semi-autobiographical film certainly doesn’t help bring detractors to his corner.
Visually, the film might be his best. Cinematographer Darius Khondji has some wonderful single takes and adds a magnificent amount of color and movement. But we have to talk about that story.
Iñárritu certainly veers into the pretentious1 category, with tons of themes happening all at once. Whether it be about the insecurity of his own identity or the loss of a child, the life of journalist-turned-filmmaker Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is full of regret and bizarre hallucinations.
Aside from being clear metaphors, the hallucinations are really unknown until the ending twist. For relying on such highbrow cinema, Iñárritu resorts to one of the laziest plot twists imaginable — it was all a dream. I don’t care bout spoiling because the reveal that Silverio is in a coma isn’t all that original as Iñárritu leans into floating above the rest of us. Literally and figuratively.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)
Director: Rian Johnson
A-
OK, I won’t make the same crappy joke I just made with Bardo. I also won’t spoil the movie, because it’s a murder mystery. Rian Johnson’s follow-up to his 2019 smash hit may repeat the same formula as before, but it tweaks certain things about the original to become a solid film on its own. The biggest example of my argument is through the character of Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig).
Blanc seems like an absolute buffoon like he kinda was in the original. But the twists of the film reveal his true character and make him seem like a genius, pointing to the pure idiocy of billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton).
Sure, the twists are force-fed to us and the themes of the film are basically spelled out to the viewer. However, that doesn’t take away from the power of the movie’s messages. The super convoluted murder plot is meant to be enjoyed and the titular Glass Onion shows that sometimes, people are quite frankly morons. There’s not much more to it than that2.
Babylon (2022)
Director: Damien Chazelle
B
If anyone couldn’t tell, Damien Chazelle likes movies. We’ve been seeing these “power of cinema” movies over and over and over again as many cinephiles feel that the cinematic experience is being threatened3.
To counter this, Chazelle has gone about telling us a three hour tale of folks who take part in the film industry in the 1920s and earl 1930s. Silent film stars Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), film assistant Manny (Diego Calva) and jazz trumpet player Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) all must make the transition from silent to sound.
There have been plenty films that have touched on this subject before, like Singin’ in the Rain, which Babylon is heavily influenced by. Just imagine Chazelle’s latest picture as Singin’ in the Rain from hell. It’s a massive juggling act as he tries to (at varying degrees of success) balance the four main characters’ stories4.
Babylon is frenetic and chaotic for both good and bad. And while Brad Pitt has had better performances5 and the loveletter to cinema ending drags on for way too long, the movie is undoubtedly an experience.
Good Will Hunting (1997)
Director: Gus van Sant
B+
Damn, who knew Ben Affleck was capable of writing? Well at least according to Family Guy, not at all, but I digress.
The script from Affleck and Matt Damon paints a beautiful and emotional story of Will’s (Damon) life. The boy genius, who comes from the rough parts of Boston and a hard family life, gets found professor Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård) and eventually, Dr. Sean Maguire (Robin Williams).
I can’t really say much that’s already been said about some of the iconic moments like “It’s not your fault” or “How do you like them apples?” The acting and writing are amazing. But I will give some props to director Gus Van Sant. In those specific scenes, Van Sant knows exactly when to cut and when to stay onto a character. The script just needed a professional who knew how to translate these thoughts and emotions on screen. And Van Sant does that brilliantly.
White Noise (2022)
Director: Noah Baumbach
B+
Trigger warning for all my thanatophobes out there. Actually maybe you might feel connected to husband and wife Jack and Babette Gladney (Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig). The couple with their vast array of children from different marriages stick together through a toxic airborne event
Based off of Don DeLillo’s classic 1985 absurdist novel, Noah Baumbach’s latest features is an up-and-down meditation on capitalism, death and family. The absurdism Baumbach attempts to portray on screen works for me at times and diasppoints me at times. I read a bit of the book and was a little disappointed by the film’s lack of focus on the Gladney children, who were some of the most interesting characters in the novel.
Look, there’s no easy task in adapting this novel. It’s been called “unfilmmable” for a reason. The dialogue doesn’t lend itself to something relatable to most audiences and you’re never going to be able to get into every detail. Baumbach impresses his enough with his unique style, overwhelming us with supermarkets and a sheer sense of uncomfortability. Oh well, I’m excited to see what Baumbach and Gerwig do for Barbie.
This word is one I usually don’t like to use lightly because I feel “pretentious” gets thrown around way too goddamn often. A lot of times, I think people just miss the point. Maybe that makes a pretentious prick. Who knows.
I generally describe a film being pretentious as one that is full of big grand ideas but does little to back them up. Usually films will bring up philosophy or overuse a ton of the other compositional elements to make up for shitty writing.
I’ll give you an example from Bardo. Iñárritu clearly makes it known that his main character (an extension of himself) is insecure of his Mexican identity as he has become a mainstream filmmaker in the United States. Much of the film focuses on this early on, but does nothing to back it up later in the story. His guilt feels nonexistent as Iñárritu tries to cram in three different themes at the same time. Maybe the film’s problem was just the sheer amount of stuff Iñárritu wanted in his film.
I’ve seen some massive nincompoops try to nitpick this film to no end online, bemoaning about how there are an infinite amount of plot holes in a murder mystery. The extreme idiocy of some of these characters is supposed to point to how those with obscene amounts of money, power or influence aren’t actually the smartest people around. In fact they can be fools.
Furthermore, just look up what Glass Onion means on Urban Dictionary. Please, I beg you.
Martin Scorsese has touched on this plenty before with his opinion pieces on why Marvel movies aren’t cinema. But what he really is getting at is the art form that he grew up loving and eventually revolutionized is being reduced to content to be watched from home.
To him, cinema is not just a filmmaker crafting a story with a message through the use of established film language, but also something that is meant to be seen in a theater. It’s supposed to be an art that challenges us, not just a cold, corporate product that is sold to a viewer that is treated as mere a consumer. Holy smokes, I’m acting high and mighty on this post.
If any of you are still somehow interested, then please read Scorsese’s essay from 2021 on legendary Italian director, Federico Fellini.
About that. Sidney Palmer is barely in this three-hour movie, and he’s supposed to be one of the main characters. For the length that it is and the lack of amount of time he is in it, he should’ve just not been in the movie. Don’t get me wrong his story was interesting, but it honestly could’ve been his own his film.
Pitt starts strong but really starts to peeter out kinda like his character. You might be saying, “Henry, you’re an idiot. Of course he’s not as prominent later on, his character’s popularity fades away.” Well to that mean response I would say I wasn’t all that impressed when Pitt was ranting to Katherine Waterston about movies being high art. I’m kinda concerned because Pitt has been in some big stuff since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and none of it has been that good.