Question about Leave the World Behind. I watched 10 minutes and got a misanthropic vibe I just don’t need right now. Is that the overall mood of the film or does it get better? I don’t need to see another Don’t Look Up.
The Holdovers (2023). Stars Paul Giamatti, DaVine Joy Randolph, and young newcomer Dominic Sessa. Directed by Alexander Payne. A curmudgeonly professor of history at an upscale prep school is stuck with a handful of students who have nowhere to go for the Christmas break. Later on all but one are whisked away to a skiing vacation in one of the rich parent’s helicopters, leaving just the professor, the one bright but troubled student, and the cook, and that’s when the story really starts to develop.
This movie was mentioned earlier but no one commented on its merits. I’ve just seen it and was pretty darn impressed. It’s billed as a comedy/drama but the “comedy” aspect is vanishingly subtle. It’s a powerful, bittersweet drama.
In trying to assess my reaction to it, what comes to mind is a string of adjectives: it’s mostly very low-key, melancholy, even depressing at times, bittersweet, but slowly develops a powerful story. It’s set in 1970, which introduces elements of nostalgia for some of us (helped along by the music styles) and also makes the draft and the Vietnam war an unspoken threat to kids of that age It’s extremely well acted by all three lead actors. The film has already won a ton of awards, many of them for Giamatti’s and Randolph’s performances.
Very highly recommended but possibly not for everyone. It’s in no way an action movie or any kind of uproarious comedy, I think it would be greatly enjoyed by those who’d appreciate a sensitive, dialog-focused movie exuding excellence in all respects.
Mayhem (2017)
Not recommended.
Boring and surprisingly calm for a movie called Mayhem. Skip it.
The Final Wish
Not recommended.
Terrible. Uncreative, boring. Laughably bad, but not really fun.
“Which one of these pictures makes me look more like a doctor? The one where I’m playing the saxophone? Or the one where I’m listening to the saxophone?”
Bless you Chris H. Yeah, yeah, he’s cute and all that, but he’s one hell of a comedic talent.
Team America: World Police
Recommended.
I have a list of movies I never got around to seeing and this was on it. Not incredibly hilarious, but I did laugh a few times and that is not an easy thing for any comedy to make happen. It was fun and technically quite impressive.
I like the “Pearl Harbor sucked and I need you,” song quite a bit.
Bad Santa
Recommended.
Yep, another one I just hadn’t seen. Very funny, not on my top comedy list, but a quite amusing movie and I found myself laughing more than I had expected. Billy Bob Thornton is great in this movie and all the supporting cast is terrific as well. A nice, fairly short movie that gets right to the good stuff and does not overstay its welcome. Very fun.
Passengers. It was okay. I particularly enjoyed Michael Sheen’s turn in it. And Pratt and Lawrence are both very pretty to look at.
Three documentaries: Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, Trees, and Other Entanglements, and David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived.
All three excellent. Brooks made me LOL many times. Trees was moving and intriguing and beautiful to look at it. Holmes was gut wrenching , but ultimately uplifting.
Highly recommend all three. All are on HBO.
Monster - A Rashomon-like nesting doll narrative drives this film, with three characters revealing their truth during three “acts” and and ultimately reveailing a truth. I hadn’t realized this film was by the director/writer of Shoplifters and Broker (Hirokazu Kore-eda), which are on my list of the best films of the past 5 years. This one isn’t quite at the level of Shoplifters (a film with an ending that quietly devastates the audience), but it is still in my top five for this year. Be prepared for an ending that is up to the audience to interpret.
Violent Night
Recommended.
Second time seeing this movie and I liked it even more this time. A really fun Christmas movie. I’m glad they went all in on Santa killing people and didn’t wimp out or make a PG-13 movie. It’s a lot of fun.
We went to the recent NYTimes article on the best Christmas movies, and chose this. To call it a xmas movie is an enormous stretch and the Times should be ashamed. 
The connection consists of: a jazzy version of Sleigh Ride appearing once on the soundtrack, and Michelle Monaghan wears a skimpy Santa outfit at one point.
But we liked it. The narration, breaking the 4th wall, was great – especially when he talks about bringing characters back from the dead, and all the dead characters walk in including Elvis and Abraham Lincoln.
We then turned to Christmas in Connecticut (1945). Barbara Stanwyck as a magazine columnist who presents as someone with cooking skills, living with husband and baby on a farm in Connecticut. None of which are true, but for … reasons … she has to fake it. Charming and funny in a door-slamming farce kind of way. Also with Sidney Greenstreet and S.Z. Sakall, co-stars in Casablanca.
Just watched His Girl Friday for, oh, about the fourth time. Love that movie. Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell were the perfect match. Yeah, there are a couple of uncool small bits that would not pass muster today, but they don’t spoil what is an epitome of screwball comedy. I’ve seen two versions of The Front Page that were true to the original play (the leads were both men), but this version (with Russell playing a woman reporter) is so much better, funnier, and deeper.
With a Sunday afternoon to kill while traveling for work, I saw that the theater down the street was showing Die Hard for the 35th anniversary. I couldn’t resist.
So much fun to see it on a big screen with big sound. It’s still great, as exciting as seeing it for the first time.
The Taste of Things - A beautifully shot, perfectly acted celebration of food and the artists that created haute cuisine. Juliette Binoche is perfect, as usual, as the supremely talented cook and mistress to a famed tournament chef (“the Napoleon of cuisine”) around the turn of the century. The film details their daily lives, their lives within their community and friends, and the meals they cook. Said cooking is the centerpiece of the movie, starting with a long sequence of preparation of a feast for friends (the intricate choreography of the kitchen is a wonder). Because of the cinematography and the editing, I’d recommend seeing this on as large a screen as you can. I’m not sure how wide its release will be, right now it may only be on the screen I saw in on in Los Angeles, but I expect it to be among the nominees for an Oscar, so maybe a wider release later next year.
Soft & Quiet
Recommended…maybe.
A bunch of white, racist ladies who meet at a church(think “small group”) go out and act out their racism in the local community. It goes far. Very far. Like, the movie gets traumatically dark at some points. It wasn’t the movie I expected it be and a lot of the intensity came out of left field for me.
It is a fake one-shot movie, though the movie doesn’t pretend to be really shot in one take. It is real time, though, and I heard they acted out the movie four times to get enough usable footage.
It was well made, well acted, but a very bizarre experience.
Just watched this. To your question, yes that misanthropic vibe is one aspect of the movie. It’s one of those movies about how different people would react to events - less about the events themselves. It’s like the classic 12 Angry Men, which is far less about whether the kid on trial is guilty or not. But rather how the jurors interact and deal with their situation.
On the “human response” level, Leave the World Behind does okay, and is somewhat believable. What kind of takes away from that is the weird stuff that makes it feel like a Twilight Zone episode or maybe there’s some supernatural stuff going on.
From this description it kind of sounds like a prequel to Babette’s Feast. Does it play like that?
It’s its own thing. It shares a general time period and perhaps a bit of mise-en-scène, but the narrative is generally less plot driven and more character driven.
Thank you. I wrote that before I learned it was written by the Obamas. Misanthropic or not I am definitely watching it.
Correction: It wasn’t written by the Obama’s. They produced it (or executive produced it)