No Other Choice is a tale of two movies. I enjoyed the satire and slapstick-filled first half, less so its cold and didactic second half. Overall, the movie’s dizzying style and committed performances won me over. Recommended. Continue reading No Other Choice (South Korea, Park Chan-wook)
If you talk to anyone who’s eighty years-old or older, I bet they’d have an interesting story to tell. That person would have met some interesting people, seen and done things that few others had, witnessed great change over time and experienced every emotion under the sun, only to admit they have more questions than answers. That’s Train Dreams in a nutshell, a tale of an unremarkable man who built railroads and bridges to support his family, only to find everything that mattered to him gone in an instant. While his story is uniquely his, he’s also an everyman who forces us to reckon with life as we know it.
Continue reading “Train Dreams (Netflix)”
In The Choral, a small British town struggles to put on their annual choral program as WW1 steadily depletes their ranks. The theme of an unlikely bunch of characters overcoming adversity to accomplish something amazing is both conventional and familiar, and given the context, you would expect this movie to be very respectful and sentimental. Well, not entirely. On the one hand, what the movie says about the importance of music during dark times is very thoughtful and touching. On the other hand, the movie delivers that message in a very unexpected way. While there is no doubt the British had sex during WW1, the movie goes out of its way to show that the British were quite randy back then. In fact, the only time they’re not thinking about sex is when they’re singing.
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I like to think I’m a funny guy. That being said, I’ve never once considered going on stage on open mic night. Not only do you need to be fearless, you have to get total strangers to laugh at your jokes while they’re busy getting drunk. Maybe this is why the movie has a character everyone refers to as “Balls”. You gotta have balls to be a performer, figuratively for ladies, of course. And while the amateur stand-up comedian at the center of Is This Thing On? is both funny and ballsy, the movie isn’t the story of him becoming famous. It’s about what drove him to write his name on the call sheet to begin with.
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What do you do when your friend asks you for a favor above and beyond what you would normally do for them? For example, “Would you look after my dog after I’ve checked out?” That kind of request can affect your life dramatically, especially when that dog is a Great Dane, you live in a small studio apartment and the building has a no pets policy. How do you turn down your friend’s dying request? And more importantly, what does the dog think about this arrangement?
Continue reading “The Friend”
In the old days, people who sought out back-alley bargains knew what they were getting. In the era of digital commerce, however, buyers only know a seller’s user name and can’t tell whether what’s for sale is legitimate or not until a package arrives. Conversely, sellers don’t know who they’re scamming or how their victims will react to being swindled. Cloud takes a harsh look at the perils of ecommerce in the cloud era, where new-fangled criminality hides behind anonymity and revenge is sought through on-line doxxing forums. It’s a canny, secretive film that progressively builds towards a shocking climax.
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If you enjoy watching well-made movies about beautiful people doing all the wrong things, The Housemaid is for you. The trio of Amanda Seyfried, Sydney Sweeney and Brandon Sklenar make this trashy psychosexual thriller a blast. Recommended. Continue reading The Housemaid
“What inspired William Shakespeare to write Hamlet?” is the sort of question that propels historical fiction, a genre that reflections the modern mind’s insistence on understanding everything. The origins of a consequential work of art simply can’t remain a mystery after so much time has passed. With that mindset, if we take the clues (a.k.a. historical facts) and align them with the play, an answer will surely reveal itself. Superficially, putting the puzzle pieces of history together is what Hamnet is about. However, the movie is much more than that; it’s also a thoughtful discussion about art, life and how both affect us in distinctly different ways. As such, Hamnet is part literary detective work, part metaphysical curiosity, and the results are spellbinding.
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A lot has changed since Zootopia was released in 2016. For starters, the buddy cop movie is practically nonexistent. Decades ago, these movies regularly appeared in theaters in the form of action-comedies (Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour), spoofs (21 Jump Street), satires (The Other Guys) or fresh takes on the genre (The Nice Guys). Besides the evergreen Bad Boys franchise, I’m hard-pressed to recall a notable buddy cop movie from the past ten years besides the one starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling. If sneaking the genre into a family film helps keep the genre alive, I’m all for it. I wish the filmmakers had given their animal detectives a better case to crack than the one in Zootopia 2. Ah well, perhaps they’ll get one in the next sequel, which is hinted at in a credit cookie.
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If grief appeared before me as a gangly, foul-mouthed, eight-foot tall crow who spewed insults, I’d assume I was done for. Which is what makes The Thing With Feathers so oddly compelling. The crow doesn’t appear before the Sad Dad in this film (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) to harm him, but help him. The crow wants to shock him out of his grief so that an even worse creature doesn’t do him in, Despair. As far as therapy options go, this one beats Yoga and keeping an “emotion journal”, either of which would push me off the deep end.
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Detroit Cineaste 