Watching Movies 1/4

Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner) gets the band back together to play some old tunes and make some new friends with predictable but nostalgically satisfying results. It should have happened 20 years ago (imagine a Spinal Tap/Tenacious D mash up instead of the lousy Pick of Destiny) but I'm glad it finally happened.

Clearly inspired by Fargo and No Country for Old Men, this is Ari Aster's attempt at the Coen brothers, and it's good enough to pass as one of their films. It perfectly captures the confusing world in the moment of COVID, which makes it feel like a period film even though it was only 5 years ago. My perception of time is all messed up.

A nostalgic tribute to something I have no nostalgia for, but it evokes a past that has vanished and does it with charm and a little help from Mel Brooks. If a single Automat still existed in New York I would definitely go check it out.

Mark Ruffalo's an angry gay man that yells so much about AIDS this his friends can no longer stand to be around him. It's an important story and there are many moving and tender moments, but I'll admit I got tired of all the yelling too. 

Leonardo DiCaprio discovers a hidden island paradise, and while it has an intriguing and exotic premise, the story is so focused on Leo that you never get much of a grasp on the other characters. The dynamics of the group, which is the most compelling aspect of the story, is barely explored or explained. For instance, how there are all these beautiful people in their 20s and 30s living together for six years and there's not a single child in sight. Like every utopia, there's a dark side that's only hinted at, and instead we get a distracting drug gang subplot and Leo suddenly going insane for no reason. It's just a messy story, but it's scenic and dynamically told by Danny Boyle. 

It took Rob Reiner's death to get me to finally watch this. Sorkin's script is smart with all the courtroom twists and there's a lot of big, showy speeches for the actors to chew on, but the characters, esp. Demi Moore's stickler lawyer, are sorely underdeveloped. Jack Nicholson is barely in the movie and just goes big with every scene. Ultimately, how much you enjoy this depends on how much you like watching Tom Cruise try to act, which is why I've never seen the film. Even in 1992 I was tired of his cocky asshole characters, and his performance here is weak. 

This decidedly strange and juvenile variation on Alice in Wonderland is like an MTV  movie before MTV even existed, or a new wave prog rock album come to life. It's the creation of the surrealistic theatre troupe The Mystic Knights of Oingo Boingo, and is decidedly a homemade effort (the band Oingo Boingo launched out of this). While it's never very good, it is consistently... interesting? I'm not sure what to call it, but it's the definition of a cult movie and I probably would have loved it as a teenager.

Four neighbors in white flight suburbia deal with a litany of first world problems including alcoholism, financial woes, rape, racism, and PTSD. They're all anxious about what the future holds and it's an early look at the dark side of the post-war American dream. Unfortunately, their problems are neatly resolved at the end with minimal effort, and the multi-threaded story takes a long time to rev up. I only watched it to see Joanne Woodward, and she's the best thing in it, although Tony Randall offers a nice dramatic turn. According to IMDB, this is Woodward's favorite role.