The obvious comparison is to Searching for Bobby Fischer*. Except it’s jigsaw puzzles instead of chess. And it’s a housewife with 2 grown kids instead of a kid. And instead of Ben Kingsley (who won an Oscar playing an Indian) as the guru there’s an actual Indian.
Or … not that much alike.
So Kelly Macdonald finds out she likes doing jigsaw puzzles and is really good at it. Finds a puzzles partner played by Irrfan Khan who wants to play in a puzzle tournament together. Movie ensues.
Pretty good. The portrayal of her home life vs. her aspirations is the key to the whole thing. Has a good finish.
Her
Joaquin Phoenix plays a near-future lonely guy who falls in love with an AI, voiced extraordinarily well by Scarlett Johansson. A parable of computers and connectedness, love and loneliness. Recommended.
Iron Man 3
Funny and exciting high-tech superhero film. The terrorist-attack scenes on (and off) Air Force One are particularly good.
About a Boy
A London cad, played very well by Hugh Grant, gets reconnected to humanity as a reluctant father figure to a geeky teenage boy. A charming movie with lots of laughs.
The Disaster Artist
James Franco capably directs and stars in this film about a film, a behind-the-scenes look at the making of “the Citizen Kane of bad movies,” Tommy Wiseau’s so-awful-it’s-funny The Room. A cringeworthy but engaging tale about struggling to make it big in Hollywood.
Inherent Vice
A pot-smoking hippie private eye (Joaquin Phoenix again, in a very different role) in 1970 Los Angeles tries to find a missing real estate tycoon and avoid lots of people trying to either frame or kill him. Vaguely reminiscent of The Big Lebowski, but stands on its own. Josh Brolin shamelessly steals every scene he’s in as a troubled, blustering John Wayne wannabe on the LAPD.
I went to see Bohemian Rhapsody yesterday. I’m conflicted. I really enjoyed the performances and the live scenes were top-notch; the final Live Aid performance was an amazing piece of (mostly digital) film making. However, there are major problems with history in this film that I’m having trouble letting slide. I can forgive them making up how Freddie joined the group, for the sake of brevity, but things like how the band broke up and didn’t play or talk to each other for two years until right before Live Aid, when the truth is they had just finished up their The Works Tour just two months before Live Aid. It makes for a great story, but it stretches the truth pretty hard. And there was a stylistic choice early on that just didn’t make any sense - when they get their first American tour, there is a montage of road scenes and concert performances over which plays, Fat Bottom Girls, which didn’t come out until Jazz in '78, their seventh album.
My other complaint is that it is rated PG-13. How do you tell a decent rock-n-roll story PG-13? You don’t, that’s how. They should have gone fore a little more grit and realism. There’s one obligatory F-bomb, and beyond that, you’ll be able to watch it on ABC’s movie of the week with no edits.
It’s from 2017, but I recently watched Geostorm on a plane. Man, what a colossal piece of shit that was. Fucking hilarious, but it’s not at all a comedy. I swear, absolutely no one who had anything to do with this movie ever even looked up the words “science,” “weather,” or “physics” in the dictionary, let alone understood a single thing about any of them. I was laughing so hard a flight attendant eventually came over to check on me.
On the way back I watched Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri which was much better.
Cho’s daughter goes missing and he hits the Interwebs to find out an amazing amount about the secret life she led on-line.
Cho plays the stoic type yet again like in Columbus. (Which I’m fairly tired of, Harold.) But this works well for his character this time.
A lot of the film consists of screen shots while he types away … searching. Often these types of things are difficult to follow but I was okay with it. Of course I’m a computer geek. Mrs. FtG, not so much.
Debra Messing does a surprisingly good job (by her standards) as the detective on the case. But …
A Simple Plan - Rating 7. Great premise ruined by dumb characters doing dumb things.
Monkey Business: The Adventures of Curious George’s Creators - Rating 7.5. Documentary with an improbable and interesting story. Great animations. It doesn’t help that the subjects were long dead when the film was made and one of them was kind of abrasive.
Crazy Rich Asians - Rating 7. An empty, hollow spectacle. Entertaining if you disengage your brain.
Hard Times: Lost On Long Island - Rating 8. Engaging documentary about people coping with being out of work after the 2008 crash.
Joaquin Phoenix as the real life John Callahan who was a cartoonist for the Portland paper The Willamette Weekly (and beyond).
Plays a raging alcoholic who gets into a car wreck and is seriously paralyzed. To draw he did a clumsy thing using both hands.
After a long time (and I mean a long time) to get sober. Usual 12 step crap with Johan Hill (in long blond hair and beard) as his sponsor.
Rooney Mara plays The Magical Woman. Really amazing but not a believable role.
Movie is almost two hours long. Too much. And in particular the pre-sobriety part is far too long. We get it. He’s a drunken jerk. Move on. So the controversial cartoonist part is barely a secondary storyline.
(Plus all the usual “Don’t bother getting the facts straight despite no reason to be wrong.” E.g., his sobering up came after dropping a bottle of Valium on the floor, not a wine bottle.)
Not really enough Portland stuff. No Tom Peterson commercial even though it is set in that era. (If Gus can put a Tom Peterson commercial in a movie set in New Hampshire, why can’t he put one here?) OTOH, it does have Carrie Brownstein.
There’s a credit for a skateboard kid named “Leo Phoenix”. Hmmm.
Disappointing at times. Give it 2 bottles of Thunderbird.
I just watched Rampage, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a helicopter rated, ex-army ranger, who can survive bullets in his guts like he just got hit by a water balloon, who is now a primatologist who has taught an albino gorilla sign language. Now you would think by that description alone that this movie might be a ridiculous attempt at extrapolating a third rate video game into some sort of outlandish story to provide a vehicle for the CGI destruction of Chicago complete with gigantic explosions, caused by gigantic, over the top, monsters with a handy Deus Ex Machina ending with what might be the stupidest final line in any movie ever … and you would be correct on all counts.
Well, I guess I’ll just cross it off my list, then. Thanks for the warning, JB.
My latest five:
Limitless
Rewatched this Bradley Cooper/Robert De Niro technothriller and enjoyed it all over again. Smart, well-acted, engaging, suspenseful and with some subtle but very effective sfx. One of my favorite movies of this century.
Hello, Dolly!
Having just seen a touring company of the show, I decided to check out the movie. A bit stale but fun. Barbra Streisand carries the film and sings her heart out; Walter Matthau is his usual imperious, grumpy self.
Needful Things
So-so adaptation of the Stephen King book, about an evil, scheming shopkeeper who turns the people of a small, quiet Maine town murderously against each other.
The Nice Guys
Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling are pretty good as a pair of mismatched private eyes in Seventies L.A., looking for the missing daughter of a top Justice Department official (Kim Basinger). Could’ve been better, but worth a look.
Deadpool
Rewatched this ultraviolent, very funny, super raunchy, fourth-wall-breaking anti-superhero action movie. Really good stuff.
I just watched Smallfoot, the animated movie where the “Zendaya Is Meechee” meme stemmed from. It’s got some heavy themes that maybe are a bit too large for a silly movie about snow monsters to really cope with, all about questioning authority, blindly following rules, and the administration of propaganda. Also, James Corden is really annoying.
I liked it okay. It has a couple of good songs in it, especially the one by Common.
I saw Ralph Breaks the Internet. It was good but not as good as Wreck-It Ralph. The plot was basically a retelling of Toy Story 3 but a childhood toy having to accept a child growing older was a better fit than one videogame character having to accept another videogame character moving on. The former has a realistic inevitability to it while the latter is essentially just an invented conflict.
Last couple of movies I watched - semi-oldies, but goodies:
Get Him to the Greek (2010) - Russell Brand, Jonah Hill. Hilarious rock-life debauchery with a heart-touching message at the end (aaaaaww). “The Jeffrey” scene cracks me up every single time. Stroke the furry wall!
Apollo 13 (1995) - Star-studded neo-classic, I daresay. The last time I watched it was on TNT or something, where it was edited. Granted, it was just a few “shits” here and there, but I need my “shits.” I’ve seen it probably a dozen times by now and it was as fantastic as ever, “shits” and all.
It’s funny that I have a copy of the director’s cut of Get Him to the Greek that’s been sitting in my collection for a few years now but it took it coming out on HBO Now for me to actually watch it. Still, great movie.
I was trying to figure out why watching Apollo 13 a) seemed like the thing to do and 2) why I had such a feeling of deja vu while watching it. Then I remembered that last week I watched this great documentary on Netflix entitled Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo, not just about Apollo 13 but the entire program, however, they do lean pretty hard into the 13 story.
A Simple Favor. Anna Kendrick is a vlogger whose new, immediate, “best friend” (played by Blake Lively) goes missing.
It’s fun.
It’s stupid.
It’s stupid fun.
Chinatown this isn’t. But for the most part it works.
Kendrick is quite good (glad to see her in a good movie that got attention). Lively doesn’t really bring anything to the table. Her husband is played by Henry Golding who does a much better job than in Crazy Rich Asians. Day vs. Night there.
While I’m frequently amazed here by the abilities of child actors, the ones here are just capable, no wowwing.
There’s a “Greek chorus” group of 3 people who add to the fun. One of them is Betty-Anne from Letterkenny! But without the chirping with Mary-Anne it doesn’t feel right. Go Shamrockettes.
Sure, there’s a ton of implausible stuff. E.g., you can do a certain thing with phones. They even show a character doing a certain thing once. But none of these people think to do that at all the key times?
Just watched the kid’s movie The House With A Clock In Its Walls. It was okay, but lacked development. A lot of interesting ideas set up, but not properly explored or even had any impact on the final plot. I have no idea what the villain’s motivations were, that was very muddled. But it was pretty, had some great characters and performances, and the special effects were pretty decent.
Movies like this, adapted from books, often have to suffer from compromise while still trying to touch on all the key elements that fans of the book want to see, and this is a typical example of it, which is to say one that doesn’t quite work.
I guess kids will like it, but then they watch Disney Channel shite and play Fortnite all day, so they’re not exactly discerning consumers.
I re-watched The Black Panther last night and I enjoyed a lot more than I did when I saw it at the movies. I don’t think I really paid the requisite attention on the first viewing, to the point where it was almost a new movie for me. This time around I follow all the plot points right down the line. It’s possible since that I knew what I was in for this time around, I could enjoy it for what it was - last time around I was expecting a more Avengers-y / global catastrophe type of thing.
We watched **“The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society,”**after having it on our Netflix queue for weeks. (This 2018 film was released theatrically in Europe but purchased by Netflix for American viewing.) It’s a period piece, taking place in 1946 and during WWII in flashback, about a group of friends on the island of Guernsey who, to save their lives and their sanity, began a book discussion group. (Guernsey was one of two British islands in the English Channel that were occupied by the Germans during the war.) There’s more to the story than that, however. It’s also a mystery involving a missing member of the group and what happened to her. It’s well-acted, well-told, has humor as well as pathos. The cast is solid all the way around, and it’s great to see Tom Courtenay is still kicking. I’ve been a fan of his since the 1960s. I said to my wife, “That was a nice movie.” If that sounds like something you might like, we recommend it.
We also watched an early Coen Bros film, "Miller’s Crossing, made in 1990. Wasn’t too impressed with it then, and having since become a Coen afficianado, thought we would give it another try. 28 years later, it still didn’t do anything for me. I just couldn’t care about any of the characters or what they were doing, or feel any connection to them.
