Yes, that's our wiggly wiggly.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery — 3.5/5

These movies keep getting better while continuing to be not as good as they should be. But this one has Josh O'Connor! Great actor, and great comedic actor. He's got a strong moral compass, and he understands his body and the directions in which to move it. Part of me wonders if the movie was better just being him as suspect and detective? The detective priest, rooting out the moral decay. The Culprit at the Pulpit: A Jud Duplenticy Mystery. But no, we still have Benoit Blanc, who is fun but also little more than an accent, and who is surrounded by famous actors who aren't given very much to play with, or who don't know how to play up what they have. But beyond that, a bit of an epiphany for me. The mystery is fine enough, and I've often claimed that a great mystery is a movie that you could have figured out, but didn't, 'Dial M for Murder' being my high expectation that no one else can meet. But the other aspect of detective things — and the latest season of 'White Lotus' fell into this as well — is that I can't fully lose my self-awareness if I'm focused on figuring it out before it plays itself out. I'm hyper-aware of clues and false leads, both a feeling of wanting to feel smart and wanting to not feel dumb. I keep trying to figure out the magic trick. I can't fully escape the box. So, y'know, I'll take personal responsibility for that bit.

They were stupid, stupid idiots.

Cocaine Quarterback — 2/5

In terms of the right things in the right place, this would have been a great article. And someone would have tried to turn it into a movie, and it would have been more entertaining but also less interesting. But instead they turned it into a three-episode docu-series instead of a full-length documentary because that form softens the edges of this thing which is already pretty soft around the edges. Told pretty straightforwardly, with interesting characters appearing here and there, a ridiculous amount of money passed back and forth by some idiots. It's fun enough! I don't know why I'm rating decently fine things so poorly lately! It's either because I have seen the mountaintops and all pale in its shadow, or that I just increasingly place value on my time, and whether or not it's being wasted. 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

It's actually a pretty cool lifestyle.

The Final Girls — 2/5

It has a CollegeHumor sheen to it. 

I didn't think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.

Brief Encounter — 3.5/5

I think for me, there's a thought that if this were Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, I would probably be taken by it more; the natural charm, two people bigger than whatever current relationship they're in who find each other, but bound all the same by a pre-existing contract with a lesser being who isn't bad, simply nice enough. But I think the beauty of this movie is how normal Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard are. "Do you realize, Sir, that if Celia Johnson could contemplate being unfaithful to her husband, my wife could contemplate being unfaithful to me?" is the truth of it. I appreciate from there the leanness of the movie; a grand romance told in 86 minutes and just a few weeks of knowing each other. There's an undeniable beauty here and I, like Alec, fall in love with Laura with her big eyes and pursed lips. Middle-class as they are, they both, bathed in the light of love, become more attractive as the film goes on. Though I think then, my ultimate disconnect is that I don't fall in love with Alec. He seems too forceful, too sure, the romance seeming less like an accident, a giant hole that they just happened to step into. She fell; he leaped. 

Things that are true

do not have to continue being true.

It may be that home has no room for you.

Caught Stealing — 2/5

I'm looking to figure out where Aronofsky is in this, and I simply could not tell you. Put any number of generic directors at the front of this and I'd believe more easily it came from them. What's up with all these famous intellectual directors out here making Steven Soderbergh jaunts? Are they trying to prove they can have fun? Fucking stop it, you're not fun, it's not what you do. This movie, at its best, is trying to be some take on 'Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels,' fun smaller characters caught up in a bigger world, but neither side of the equation is all that interesting. I didn't know this going in but I should have been made wary by this movie being based on "the first in the [person] series of novels." When has that ever worked out? Movies keep trying to make these 70s-adjacent character-centric novels into bigger things, and Jack Ryan's been the closest to success, and even his movies are all pretty blah. What is it that keeps those novels from working at movies? Austin Butler is certainly fine here, but his Hank Thompson is not some Fletch-level of character where you can see where people might want to follow him further. The casting here is left and right; Regina King is woefully miscast, Zoe Kravitz continues to play herself, the Facebook version of cool, and I'm surprised that the generic AI-generated phone voice we heard throughout the movie belonged to Laura Dern, and then Liev Schreiber, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Matt Smith all think they're in 'Snatch,' which, good on them for thinking they're in a better movie. They're broad sketches of characters in a movie that's focused on little details that don't matter. What's it matter that Hank don't drive, that he has an alcohol problem, that he likes the Giants? Ah, so the finale is in a Mets stadium? Oh, no, they're just passing through? Nvm. It's just notes on a character, fleshed out but with no blood pumping through their veins.

You're stuck on a certain story.

Couples Therapy S4 — 5/5

Re-reading my review of the last season, I feel like I've probably said all I need to say about this show. Each episode is a universe and it always takes me way too long to finish each season because each episode is both very heavy, and very filling. If any new realizations this season, maybe the ways in which Orna is increasingly challenged by people she does not know and whose lives she cannot know, and so the tools she has to help may not be the right tools for them.

There's only one plot: nothing is as it seems.

The Lowdown — 3/5

As much as I wanted this to be a pseudo-sequel to 'Reservation Dogs', it's really more an Ethan Hawke piece than Sterlin Harjo's. The edges of this world retain a faint outline of the exceptional casting and chemistry of that earlier show, but as the show reaches its conclusion, it's clear that those edges never really mattered; hamstrung by being a show rather than a movie, needing to fill out whole episodes with new characters and side-steps. At its core, it's a mystery, and only a mildly compelling one. In the conclusion, Hawke's character lays it all out in a long monologue, which is helpful, because the show didn't really help piece it together. It's a bunch of snacks calling itself a meal. But anyway, lately I am interested in figuring out the core of actors and directors—definitions—and this show helps me piece together Ethan Hawke: he's a dirtbag boyfriend! He cares more about being right than being good. "I'm just being honest" as a 5'10" male, unafraid to hurt your feelings because he's being pure to himself, self-righteous in pursuit of a greater ideal which will lose him friends and leave him lonely but at least he's able to sleep at night (alone in his bed). Too handsome to be incel, but an early precursor to the podcast males who have opinions. Draw a straight line from him here to him in 'Reality Bites.' Though the last two or three episodes of this series really did not work for me, the last 10 minutes provoked an emotional response as he, a "truthstorian," has to swallow the truth (the right, honest thing) in trade for doing something good, and you can see how much it sticks in his throat. It is a version of growth, but growth which at first hurts, bones pushing upwards, skin stretching to hold it; it feels tumorous. Is it growth if it destroys what made you interesting? Is it worth being right if you only end up hurting people? So feels like a good ending for the particular character that he embodies. 

I am a much better human being than you.

Eddington — 3/5

Ah, we are in the age of the apolitical political thrillers. "Both sides are a little stupid," says our centrist artist leaders, Ari Aster, Emerald Fennell, Paul Thomas Anderson. They're not wrong, they're just not helpful. I think this movie is both better and worse than 'One Battle After Another.' Better in that it's a more compelling build-up of interconnected parts, worse in that I can't really rationalize what it's building up to. Easily the best "Covid-era" movie made thus far (that I've seen), a clear signpost that "post-Covid" is our new "post-9/11" traumatic time-based movie marker. One united us against a theoretical and fictional common enemy to turn our hate towards, while this one just shows us how much we hate each other. And no matter what you do, it's wrong. I don't know what to do with that. Again, it's not helpful. 

If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.

Frankenstein (Del Toro) — 2/5

I had given up on Del Toro, mostly because I only like one of his movies, despite the critical acclaim he gets for more than just that one of his movies. But my wife wanted to watch it, and who am I to deny the love of my life, my sweetie, my darling, my friend. Watching it, at least, helps me to define some things I don't like about his style. It's obvious that he's an aesthetically-driven director, but I don't like his aesthetic. I find that his choice of colors are at odds with the movies he's making. I think his movies want to feel like films, but everything looks so digital. Despite everything he does having this aura of horror, everything looks so pristine, so calculated. That thing behind the curtain has been carefully placed. Every scene is a painting, but lacks the loose expressionism of painting, and of dread. His overuse of blue and green tones creates not this aura of strangeness, but of fakeness. It's taking those hues of colored versions of those early Whaley monster movies, multiplied by the neon spray of Spencer Gifts darklight posters. It has a Pottery Barn-level of patina to make it look old, even though new, but just makes it look stuck in the late 90s. Is Guillermo even seen as a horror director? Is that just my perception of other people's perception of him? I'd classify him more as a maker of gothic melodramas. Base level romances or father-son catastrophes, but with a weird monster-who-isn't-a-monster. It's the aesthetic appearances of horror in name only. Man's the real horror, yeah, sure, okay. Anyway, this movie: Jacob Elordi's Frankenstein is compelling until he tells his own story and has this weird awkward way-too-heartfelt smile. Oscar Isaac as father turns from joy to contemptuousness too quickly, and the eventual forgiveness comes too easily. I think there's probably an interesting story about how fathers have no patience for their children, how they can create them but can only mold them so far. But that exists only on the edge of this movie. These Netflix movies just give big names a lot of money, when what they really need to give them is an editor for their ideas. I feel like the Netflix experience is on the other side of history to the studio system. It's an argument against free reign.