I used to be a brother.

The Iron Claw — 2.5/5

There are two scenes at the end of the movie that work tremendously well—so well that I wish more of the movie was built around them. The first, Jeremy Allen White's final journey down the river—though it doesn't work as well as it could have, because his role felt tucked in the background. For all the heat he's gotten these past two years, you'd expect his role to be bigger—and it should be, because he's probably the most interesting brother, the one most attuned to the family curse. Olympics hopes dashed, brothers lost, oppressive father, foot taken, playing through it, going unappreciated by a larger wrestling world, and eventual suicide. The other scene, the final scene, is Zac Efron saying he misses his brothers. It's beautifully done, and Zac Efron—as he has throughout the movie—carried the weight of his brothers. But it can't just be all sad. There has to be joy to create a pillow for sadness.  Everything that works in this movie is built on those brothers, who seem to genuinely like and care for each other. When they're together, there's a spark. There's a joy to wrestling and a joy to being together. But so much of the movie separates them, focusing on Zac's story. The other brothers' stories are more tragic, but Zac's performance wants to claim the sadness trophy. As in the story they tell on screen, he wants to be the star—but he's not as interesting as they are. There's a great movie in here; I just think they chose the wrong brother to focus on. 

Also, Maura Tierney's weird lips perfectly match Zac Efron's weird lips, perfect casting as mother-son, A+.

Huh?

Shoresy S1 — 3.5/5

Jared Keeso and Jacob Tierney have figured out a formula that I really enjoy—at least at the outset. They fill the parts with essentially one note characters, but what really elevates it is this very simple, very beautiful cinematic language that knows how to make the most out of stiff actors and small plotlines. So many episodes are filled with slow pans and zooms while a banger plays in the background, giving everything an emotional weight that makes the one notes echo and—fuck it, man, it works. At least at the outset. I loved the first season or two of Letterkenny before those one notes really wore out their welcome, through repetition becoming t-shirt catchphrase machines. 

We don't have that in the fridge.

The Creator — 2/5

It's hard to call something lazy when clearly so much work has been put into it. It's beautifully rendered. It's amazing what they pulled off for the budget, truly, and in that way, it might be a landmark movie that shows us how to do VFX better. So much work has been put into every aspect of this—except the script. This movie did not meet an idea it did not want to explicitly spell out. It's a generic, cliched, dead girlfriend montage of a movie, graduate of the Zack Snyder "To Be Cinematic Is To Be Serious" school of thought. It touches on humor—successfully!—a couple of times, but nobody seeing that saw it as a nice way to build interest in characters. It would rather be an important movie, it wants desperately to feel like an important movie, but it thinks importance is in how you tell the story, Radiohead playing over air raids, not what the story is. A great movie can be made in the how, I don't mean to denigrate that aspect—but an important movie has to actually say something worthwhile. 

To be a moral human being is to pay,

be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.

— Susan Sontag

Jackie Chan, you're a jerk!

Drunken Master — 3.5/5

I have a deep love for Drunken Master II, and here I am realizing that I've never seen the first one. It's interesting to see Jackie Chan make a name for himself as an asshole version of the self we later knew. We Americans mostly only saw the smiling face against the impossible circumstances, the nice guy, and here he is being largely responsible for his own troubles. He's a stinker. It's fun to see him at the start, but I do think I prefer the later character he grew into, when he used primarily his innocence as his offensive weapon.

It's all a great mystery.

The Little Prince (book) — 3.5/5

I have had this in the back of my head forever to read because "you are responsible for the things you have tamed" has been in my head since college, delivered by an unknown source and cemented there without me fulling knowing its meaning. It's a great thought. I don't know if the book ladders up to that thought so much as just presents it to you, another in a series of thoughts presented throughout the book. Here's a thought, and here's another thought. They're good thoughts. It's a book on philosophy not for children, but for adults to remind them how to be children, and our inevitable entanglements that cause us to grow up. 

Some wild magic.

Wolfwalkers — 4/5

Genuinely exciting. There were sequences where I truly wasn't sure how things would go, which puts this children's movie up there with the best action movies in terms of tension. Not showy, like Spider-Verse, but it camouflages some really beautiful graphic design and really clever artistic ideas (namely in regards to perspective) that feels like a step forward for animation, almost hidden behind a simple animation style. 

Everyone failed.

Mommy Dead and Dearest — 1/5

Watching me reminds me I hate this true crime crap. The story is absolutely compelling, but the victim cannot have a say, and the criminals and everyone around them get cast in suspicion beyond the facts of the case. This shit is made for people on Facebook to say "the father should have done something" or "she's got the sociopathic tendencies of her mother." It's a genre that exists for you to debate the merits of people, to cast suspicion on everyone that touches the story. The cops, the doctors, the neighbors. Watching 'May December' recently reinforces my thoughts here—it's all just other people we get to talk about. It's socially acceptable gossip. 

This guy does not want to talk to us.

Telemarketers — 4/5

Early on, Patrick J Pespas is introduced and captioned as "Telemarketing legend" and talk about calling your shot. Fuck yeah, Patrick J Pespas. The documentary is this Vice-ass documentary style, reveling in showing people snorting heroine and fuck-ups fucking up (and could easily have been reduced to a movie vs three episodes) but—as with Jury Duty—the person at the center elevates everything around the joke.  Patrick may be an addict, but maybe you need the spirit of a fuck-up to be willing to fuck shit up. And despite some of the arrangements and framings, it's not just done for fun; honestly there's a sense of love in there beside. There's a scene in the last episode which makes my heart grow three sizes because it's such a simple display of two people loving each other. I've heard it said that the only way out of addiction is finding something greater to believe in and so, for a time, Patrick found a bigger purpose. He earned his caption. 

I prefer kicking people.

Shaolin Soccer (Dubbed) — 3.5/5

It's silly!

We keep inventing hope.

White Noise (book) + White Noise (movie) — 3/5

I think I could convince myself that the book was great. Not the movie. The movie wasn't great. But the book, maybe if I had better reading comprehension ability, better attention span, or maybe if the book was better, it might be great. I think it's the thing we all go through, the thing we're all heading towards. The dawning realizations. Whether or not this world is ending, your world is ending, and that's such a big idea. It's a notion you cannot prevail against. It's unwinnable. It defeats you. You make sense of all the white noise, trying to rise above the numbing joys, seeing patterns in the fuzz onscreen, only to recede back into its numbing comfort because—what other choice is there? It's that or suicide. Maybe because I'm reading it as I turn 40, it feels like 'ah, this is just the cycle that everyone goes through': surrounded on all sides by serious events, all the ceaseless chattering and nattering. In the book, it's just chatter; in the movie, it's sub-Robert Altman noise. I understand the intention ("white noise" lol): distracting ourselves from the thought of death, between now and then talking in circles, hoping we'll accident into doing something important. I think I can convince myself this was great. It's 1984 except Big Brother is just a feeling in the air of impending doom, and the final act of loving Big Brother becomes the latest in the series of lies we tell to comfort ourselves. We are powerless against the impending... whatever. The end just keeps coming, in different eras, in different forms. And you've got no choice but to let it pass over and through you. It's not just submission, but no choice but to submit. The idea is too powerful, the events too great, everything beyond your ability to comprehend it. It's the inevitability that comes with middle age, of knowing there's really no way to fight the world's innate desire to destroy itself, but to give in is to then destroy yourself—but you've got no other choice than to give in. So you are destroyed, yet you keep going, a walking dead man running laps in a cul de sac. 'White Noise' isn't a 1984-esque vision of the future, it's the encapsulation of an ever-present now. Big Brother isn't outside of us, it's the thing we created to comfort us. He's a smiling, anthromorphic tiger staring back at us from the ceral box as we stuff down the stuff we know will kill us, and returning a smile right back at him. "But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

As for the movie, it's stilted and artificial and Adam Driver plays into it well but most no one else does. The final scene in the grocery store is nice and I think finally hits the right mix of playful artifice that the movie had been aiming for throughout but only just then got it. 

But say it like you mean it

with your fists for once.

— Ethel Cain, American Teenager

I know exactly who you are.

Maestro – 2/5 

I didn't care about Leonard Bernstein going in and this movie didn't raise my temperature on this notion. He's not that interesting except for how long his Wikipedia is. He did a lot? I wouldn't know from the movie, which is stuck on a not particularly compelling relationship. Famous man a jerk, more at 11. Bradley Cooper is capital-A Acting, he's an Act-or, he is acting, my dear boy, and he may or may not be a good mimic, how the fuck would I know, but even if he got him perfect, it still comes across as corny. He's playing the truth when he's supposed to be playing along with the music. It's got to all fit together. He's not conducting an orchestra; he's solo-ing. It's a movie built for acting awards. Look at him, look at how he lights up a room. But he does look good. We are in a golden age of on-screen old-age makeup. 

Sing along with the common people.

Saltburn – 3.5/5

With Saltburn, I think I get Emerald Fennell's whole thing. She makes movies that almost feel like "hey, all right, this fits in with my communist sensibilities" until she 180s it. It feels like a stab in the back. "Were you not comrade?" In Promising Young Woman, it's oh cool, a woman getting revenge on shitty men, until it's oh god, is this the logical result of that train of thought?, does shitty men include every variable of shittiness?, I'm not sure I can follow the rails all the way to its end. And here, in Saltburn, it's oh cool, the rich eat you up, and then oh god. We want it to be this tale about the rich sucking. about how you can't be friends with someone who controls the faucet, who determines if you get access to water or electricity. Instead we get a story about how the lower classes don't want to eat the rich: they want to become them. She's not wrong. We eat them. They eat us. And on and on, the snake eating its own tail. We'll glady take the scraps from their table, trickle down economics, but bitter about it as though we, with their money, would pretend to do something different with it. She's not wrong—it's just that her movies feel like they could be more satisfying to the current cultural climate, only she'd rather upend it. She makes movies that make you mad because they're not what you want them to be. We want the perfect victim, or the perfect enemy, and she—correctly, but disappointedly—says hey, not so fast. But between the lines, between the sensationalist images thrown around to grab attention, I can't tell—honestly—whether she does it on purpose. She's deceptive. She's contrarian. We keep looking for a leftist in a centrist's body of work. 

The form

is forgiving.