Charlie's Angels (2019)

  I don't know about you guys but I'm having a rough couple of weeks.  See, Tyler and I decided to buy a house in the middle of a pandemic and between the virus, the house, and the worldwide protests about injustice, I don't have the bandwidth to do anything.  So I took a break from watching my very regimented list of films that I have to pay attention to in order to critique to watch Charlie's Angels.

Elena (Naomi Scott) works for a tech startup looking at the next new thing in clean, renewable energy.  Unfortunately, there is a software bug that would allow it to be hacked and produce a short-range burst that fries people's brains.  Elena dutifully filed a report only to have her boss (Nat Faxon) bury it.  So she turned to the Townsend Agency.  What should have been a simple transfer turns deadly when an assassin (Jonathan Tucker) is sent to kill Elena and the veteran Angels, Sabina (Kristen Stewart) and Jane (Ella Balinska), protecting her.  Their Bosley (Elizabeth Banks) suspects a mole within the organization and tasks the three women with recovering the deadly prototypes before they can be sold on the open market.

Overall, this is a fun popcorn movie.  The action sequences are good, the settings, the costumes, the soundtrack all work.  The characterization of Jane felt very rushed and hit a lot of familiar beats while Sabina was essentially a caricature.  Also the dialogue felt forced in places.  I honestly think the elements the didn't succeed were because it didn't lean hard enough into the camp aspect the way the 2000 iteration did.  It tried too hard to be serious instead.  Still, it's fun enough for a summer night when the world is literally and figuratively on fire.

Repulsion (1965)

  You can see why that tagline is the worst, right?  I don't have to explain it?  Cool.

Carol (Catherine Deneuve) is a shy young woman living with her sister, Helen (Yvonne Furneaux), in London.  Where Helen finds it easy to go out and date, Carol actively avoids engaging with other people, especially men.  She becomes more and more withdrawn after Helen goes on vacation, isolating herself in the apartment, wracked with nightmares about the walls cracking and intruders, leading to murderous results.

This is one of those "classic" films that I would actually like to see updated and remade.  There is a great story to be told of a woman stifled by the toxic men around her, wrapped into her fears so tightly it chokes her, but without the gross fetishization of rape fantasy.  Give me Repulsion without Polanski, is what I'm saying.

Kate and Leopold (2001)

  God, what a horrible movie.  This took me all goddamn day to watch and was supposed to go up yesterday.

Leopold (Hugh Jackman) is a penniless 19th century aristocrat forced to choose a wife by his overbearing uncle (Paxton Whitehead).  Instead, Leopold ends up following a strange man named Stuart (Liev Schreiber) off the Brooklyn Bridge.  Stuart is from the future and Leopold is now a man out of time.  Stuart knows that if Leopold doesn't get back and invent the elevator, the entire space-time continuum could be at stake.  Unfortunately, Stuart falls down a fucking elevator shaft and breaks his leg, then rants about time travelers so much he's involuntarily committed, leaving Leopold to navigate 21st century New York City with Stuart's downstairs neighbor/ex-girlfriend, Kate (Meg Ryan), an ambitious marketing executive gunning for a big promotion.

Have you filled your BINGO card yet?

Everything about this is horribly cliche.  Ryan was the queen of rom-coms in the 90s but this movie surgically removes all her charm for a shrill Diane Keaton-wannabe act while Jackman wanders around with his mouth open like he's just had a head injury.  It's currently on Netflix but you should skip it and watch Blast from the Past instead.

Patton Oswalt: I Love Everything (2020)

This is not going to be a typical post.  My allergies are killing me, I have a monster headache, and I just didn't have the bandwidth to watch a movie today.  So I watched a comedy special on Netflix.

Patton Oswalt is one of my favorite comedians.  I have enjoyed every single one of his stand up shows and I love seeing him in cameos in movies and TV shows.  I just really like that dude.

This special was filmed in 2019, before all this craziness happened.  He talks about buying a house, getting remarried, turning 50, and the dark immutability of Denny's.  It's an hour and six minutes of cynicism-touched happiness and it's totally worth it.

It also leads into a second comedy special by somebody named Bob Rubin, who I have never heard of but who is apparently a well-regarded figure by Oswalt and other comedians.  I didn't (again) have the bandwidth for anyone or anything longer than 66 minutes so I didn't watch it.  Maybe I will later, I don't know.  Today was not the day.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)

  I don't know if I've ever mentioned it, but I'm originally from Alabama, albeit a different county than in this documentary.  It's still very similar and monumentally depressing to think that nothing has changed in the nearly three decades since I grew up there.

RaMell Ross is a photographer and basketball coach who spends five years filming the lives of contemporary African Americans in the deep South.  He specifically follows Daniel, a young man looking to a basketball scholarship to escape from poverty, and Quincy, a young father worried about making enough money to feed and raise his children.

It reminded me a lot of Terence Malick's Tree of Life, by which I mean I fucking hated watching it.  There are long stretches of background conversation over montages of the night sky, the morning sky, smoke in sunlight.  Very poetic.  I fast forwarded through a lot of it.  I don't like poetry.  Otherwise, it's pretty much the same as every other documentary about poverty.  Look, maybe Southern Tragedy Tone Poems are your thing.  If so, it's currently streaming on Amazon Prime.  It was not mine.

Kirikou and the Sorceress (1998)

  This is a beautiful animated film based on West African folk tales, if you're tired of seeing the same old Brothers Grimm adaptations.

Kirikou (Theo Sibeko) is barely born before finding his way into trouble.  His village has been held in terror by an evil sorceress, Karaba (Antoinette Kellermann), who has dried their local spring and eaten all the men who tried to fight her.  Kirikou foils the witch time and again, but is frustrated that no one will tell him how Karaba came to be so evil.  Finally, he embarks on a dangerous quest around the forbidden mountain to seek a Holy Man (Mabutho Kid Sithole) to answer his questions.

I really liked both the traditional folklore aspects and the more modern truth-seeking (Karaba is evil because of a reason/trauma, not just because evil is evil).  It added a lot more nuance to what could have been a very simple story.  I do feel like it's important to point out that this is not an African film, but a French-Belgian co-production with voice acting provided by West African schoolchildren for the French version and South African actors for the English dub.

Also, this film has quite a bit of animated nudity.  Nearly every female character is topless and there are several scenes with fully nude children.  Not sure if being animated makes it better or worse, but that is possibly a concern for people who think animated = for children.  Your mileage may vary depending on what you allow your kids to watch.  It's currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Pulse (2001)

  Okay, so when I added this movie, I was expecting ghost horror not existential horror.  Which is on me.  It's always better not to bias yourself going in with too many expectations.  And this turned into kind of the perfect quarantine movie.

A handful of teenagers become convinced that the recent spate of suicides among their peers is caused by a mysterious website.  Then doors sealed with red tape start appearing as the angry spirits are pushed out into our world.  Michi (Kumiko Aso) and Kawashima (Haruhiko Kato) try to survive as their city and then the world is affected by this phenomenon.

Oh, 2001.  Remember when we thought the Internet was going to kill us?  Like I said, this isn't really about the ghosts.  It's about the isolation people feared the Internet and then social media was going to exacerbate until everyone was stuck inside staring at screens, unable to form human attachments.  Research has tended to show that social media and too much screen time is especially detrimental to young children, but this movie plays it as hysteria, responsible for all the ills of the world.  The scenes of the two main characters navigating the empty streets of Tokyo, one of the busiest cities in the world, is astonishingly prescient, however.  It's currently streaming on Tubi.

Content Warning:  multiple suicides by various methods.

The Pawnbroker (1964)

  I don't know why I keep doing this to myself.  Quarantine is no place for heavy Holocaust-survivor drama.  And yet, here I am.

Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger) is a survivor only in name.  He sleepwalks through his life, filled with bitterness and guilt for living when so many others had died in unimaginable conditions.  Still, his business does well in 1960s Harlem, well enough that he can afford an assistant, the ebullient ambitious Jesus Ortiz (Jaime Sanchez).  Ortiz is trying to climb his way out of poverty but Nazerman's relentless misery wears at him.  Nazerman's destructive spiral increases as more and more of his trauma comes to the surface, leading to a terrible showdown.

I remember adding this to my queue because it features the first appearance of one Morgan Freeman as an unnamed bystander and I wanted to point out what a baby he was.  Readers, I will confess, I fully forgot to be looking for him while I was watching this and totally missed it.  And I'm not watching it again.  It is fully traumatizing.

Content Warning:  concentration camps, the Holocaust, the emotional toll of human misery

The lone silver lining is that this is a rare example of a mainstream film by a prominent director to feature a predominantly POC cast.  In particular, Thelma Oliver (now Krishna Kaur Khalsa) was a breathtaking actress who deserved better than being credited as "Jesus's Girl".  In a just world, she would have been an A-lister, but she's apparently gone on to be a very well-respected yoga instructor so that's good.  Also, Brock Peters doesn't get enough mention as an incredible actor.

Force Majeure (2014)

  You've probably heard of this movie if you followed any of the Oscar/critical recommendations of the last few years.  It was so successful it even got an American remake as Downhill, starring Will Farrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.  So if you saw that movie, you basically saw this one.  I assume.

Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and their two children are on holiday at a fancy French ski resort.  The resort uses controlled blasts to keep snow from building up to deadly avalanches.  One occurs very close to where our vacationing family is eating lunch.  As everyone panics, Ebba grabs the kids.  Tomas...grabs his phone.  Shaken by the encounter, Ebba desperately wants to make sense of how she's feeling, only for Tomas to deny the entire affair.  What follows are two hours of excruciatingly awkward public discussions as Ebba ropes everyone they know into weighing in on the conflict for the next three days of their vacation.

They called this a dark comedy and hoo boy.  It is a lot.  If you think toxic masculinity and gaslighting are funny, this'll be a riot.  If you think being forced to listen to a couple fighting is hilarious, you will love this, you ghoul.  It's currently streaming on Hulu.

For Sama (2019)

  Another day, another depressing ass documentary about Syria.  Jesus Christ.

Waad al-Kataeb is a journalist who documented the siege of Aleppo from inside.  Her husband, Hamza, is one of the last dozen doctors remaining in the city, and she chronicles the struggles of life every day under the constant bombardment by Russian jets on behalf of the Syrian dictatorship.  Hundreds of wounded are brought to the makeshift hospital every day, the hospital itself is bombed, and through it all, Waad and Hamza try to make things safe for their infant daughter, Sama.

Content Warning:  dead children, dead bodies, blood, war trauma

This documentary takes pains to show the cost of war in terms of human lives, especially children.  It's a hard watch.  I don't even like children but holy shit.  The majority of filming takes place in 2016 with flashbacks to the beginning of the revolution.  At this point, you could absolutely watch the entire civil war in film, between this, The White Helmets, The Cave, and Last Men in Aleppo.  I'm not saying you should, mind you, just that you can.

It's currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)

  It's Wednesday, I know.  Whatever.  Days aren't real.

Fiona (Jeri Courtney) is sent to live with her grandparents on the coast of Ireland after her widowed father takes to the drink.  There she learns that they used to live on an island called Roan Inish, famed for legends of selkies, seals that shed their skin and become beautiful women.  Fiona becomes convinced that the seals that still live there have been raising her baby brother, Jamie (Cillian Byrne), who was lost at sea when they moved from the island.

Most of this movie is just people telling folk stories and it's still fucking magical because of their accents.  Honestly, this is like aural Xanax.  Just fucking soothing on the ears.  And it's a kids movie, so you can throw it on and just kind of sit back.

I've had this on my TBW list for something like eight years because it's so hard to find and then Amazon dropped it on Prime this month.  Who the hell knows how long it's going to be there, so I'd watch it soon-ish if you've got a mind to.

W.E. (2011)

  I hate character dramas.  I hate romantic dramas even more.  There was nothing I liked about this story.  I have never given a shit about Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII and I was never the waiting-for-Prince-Charming kind of girl.

Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish) pines away in the 1998 Sotheby's exhibit of paraphernalia relating to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as an escape from her unhappy marriage.  She imagines what life was like for Wallis (Andrea Riseborough) and David (James D'Arcy) in their courtship, scandal, and exile following the latter's abdication.

I thought this was just going to be a biopic and I wasn't prepared for the framing narrative.  '98 seems like such an oddly specific year.  I can only assume that's when the actual auction was?  If there was such a thing.  I don't feel like looking it up.

This was directed by Madonna (yes, actually Madonna) and that's fine.  It's competent without being show-offy, which is more than I can say for Guy Ritchie.  The costumes and cinematography are top-notch.  I just found the entire thing baffling and monumentally depressing.  It's currently streaming on Netflix.

Content Warning:  domestic violence, miscarriage

The Adventures of Milo and Otis (1986)

The world kind of sucks right now.  Everyone is stuck at home, idiots are threatening the lives of the vulnerable in the name of getting a haircut, my grandma died, and everything is just exhausting all of the time.  So why not watch a movie about a kitten and a puppy who are best friends and go on adventures?  I've only ever seen the English version, not the original Japanese, so I might be missing out but I think this is a damn near perfect comfort movie.  Dudley Moore absolutely nails the narration.  If you need to turn your brain off for a little while because it keeps trying to kill you, this is a great way to get some peace.  Originally posted 25 Nov 2012.    I used to watch this movie all the time when I was a kid.  I finally got rid of the VHS tape it was on and upgraded to a DVD last year I think.  I've been waiting until I got back to the A's to watch it.  Part of me wondered if I had grown too cynical to enjoy the adventures of an orange tabby kitten and his pug friend, as narrated by Dudley Moore.  I worried that the weight of my adult life had finally quashed my ability to feel that sense of wonder and OMG LOOK AT THE SNUGGLEBUNNIES!!!!! 

SQUEEEE!!!!  THEY'RE SO CUTE AND FLUFFY!!!!!

And that was pretty much the end of that.