Quick Reviews (and other things): March

Thoughts on movies and books, plus some other things I’ve been up to.

April 03, 2023

Movies

  1. RRR — My only regret is that I waited so long to see this, and that I saw it in a theater of two mildly entertained middle aged white dudes, instead of in a theater full of people who would be vocal in their enjoyment of the spectacle. Listen, everything about this movie is wildly over the top but it is nonstop from the start to the end and the strangers-to-friends-to-enemies-to-friends-to-revolutionaries arc of Bheem and Ram is very well done. Every movie should have a friendship building montage with a song about how everything is going to inevitably go up in flames at some point.

  2. A Few Good Men — An Aaron Sorkin work before Aaron Sorkin’s entire thing became cliche. Very strong from start to finish, excellent performances. Jack Nicholson is truly terrifying as Col. Jessup. Interesting to watch now, 30 years after it’s made, with the knowledge that hazing, deaths on military bases, etc., still happen and still get covered up, and also that we’re still at Guantanamo, and also that sketchy shit still happens at Guantanamo.

  3. Heat — I was reading a Letterboxd review that basically said: if this movie were made today, it’s be a prestige TV drama. And that’s not wrong at all. Heat is a very good movie but there’s a lot of stuff that never gets fleshed out — any of the relationships with the wives, troubled teenage Natalie Portman, Waingro also being a serial killer, literally anything about why Eady would throw everything away for a guy she talked to literally once before hooking up with. If it weren’t for Pacino and De Niro, the flaws in this movie would be much more glaring, but their performances are so good that you can brush off a lot of other concerns.

  4. Black Bear — This movie tries to do a lot in blurring the lines between art and reality. Which of these storylines is actually happening to Aubrey Plaza’s character? Are any of them? Is it all what she’s imagining? I don’t know, but she is very good at her role, and that helped carry a movie that was otherwise maybe a bit too much.

  5. Elvis —Calling this movie Elvis but to then frame it around Tom Hanks In A Fat Suit was certainly a choice, and not one that particularly works — why are you trying to make viewers sympathize with the guy who took financial advantage of Elvis and possibly helped orchestrate pumping him through of drugs to keep him going? The movie wasn’t exactly good, but I’m curious to see more from Austin Butler in the future.

  6. Collateral — I appreciate that Tom Cruise wants to have his, like, inoffensive squeaky-clean good guy image but I simply think he should play more villains.

  7. The Secret Garden — On the one hand, the movie is gorgeous, with a creaky old manor and the moors and the growing garden. On the other, it’s just a cavalcade of colonialism and dated ideas about disability and Mary’s plot line serving mostly to bring Colin and his father back together. On the other other hand, John Lynch’s hair is amazing.

  8. Rodeo —A French film from debut filmmaker Lola Quivoron, who wrote and directed, about a young woman who joins a stunt-pulling dirt bike riding crew. It’s a pretty unflinching look at being a woman in a man’s world, who tries to keep you out, and what you do to survive. Seeing this the same day I finished reading Kate Beaton’s memoir, Ducks, made it all the more powerful. The lead, Julie Ledru, a first time actor who herself is part of the dirt bike scene in France. (Quivoron, who spent time in the scene while making this movie, found her on Instagram when looking for a female rider. The cast, as I understood from Quivoron’s talk in a Q&A after the film, are all actually bike riders.) I don’t pretend to know anything about film but I’m curious to see what Quivoron does next.

  9. Lions for Lambs — I don’t know how you make a film with this assembled cast and make it dull but this film sure managed it. It’s based off of a play, which is extremely evident by 2/3 of the plot being Two People Talking To Each Other In One Room, only no one manages to put any convincing emotion behind their performances. Andrew Garfield is fun as a disenchanted college student. Tom Cruise looks good in a three piece suit.

  10. John Wick — One hour and 41 minutes of Keanu Reeves being an incredible badass. Yes.

  11. John Wick: Chapter 2 — Two hours and two minutes of Keanu Reeves being an incredible badass. Yes.

  12. John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum — Two hours and 10 minutes of Keanu Reeves being an incredible badass. Yes.

  13. John Wick: Chapter 4 — Two hours and 49 minutes of Keanu Reeves being an incredible badass. Yes. (All things told, I think the second is my favorite of the series. I think I benefitted from having watched all of them within the span of like 2.5 days. I think I want to watch Keanu Reeves shooting things and punching things on repeat forever, thank you. I think I will never look at a staircase the same way again.)

Books

  1. Wow, No Thank You — Samantha Irby: If you’re an adult of a certain age who came up in the early 00s blog era, writing meandering, personal confessionals on Blogger or MySpace or LiveJournal, you will identify with at least something in Irby’s book. An essay on things you need to do as a homeowner had me absolutely on the floor, as I look at all the stuff in my home that needs fixed but that I don’t know how to do but feel too proud to pay someone else to do. Moments after I typed this, my toilet stopped flushing. Anyway, Irby is hilarious and brutally honest and not afraid to be, as someone put it in the book club I read this for, grotesque. We need more women who aren’t afraid to be grotesque.

  2. Akim Aliu: Dreamer — Akim Aliu, Greg Anderson Elysée, Karen De La Vega (illustrator), Marcus Williams (illustrator): If you’re a hockey person, you know Aliu’s story of the racism and abuse he faced from the very moment he first laced up. This graphic novel delves into Aliu’s early life in Ukraine, and all the sacrifices his family made to eventually get to Canada, before covering the more familiar story of juniors and professional hockey. There are some times where the narrative flashes forward for a page without any real indication that that’s what happened, which can be confusing. But the character design/artwork is cute (I’ll forgive them for not putting the face shields or visors on all of the players’ helmets) and I think the story is accessible to people outside of the hockey world.

  3. Hell Bound — Leigh Bardugo: OK, yes, definitely glad I re-read Ninth House before this, because there are some pretty immediate references to some bits I would not have remembered, had I not just done the re-read. Overall I loved this a tiny bet less than Ninth House but still very, very good. A big found family focus, and love seeing how Alex has grown into her role. Like I said after my re-read of Ninth House, Bardugo has the habit of throwing just one too many elements into her stories, and that holds true here, but the point that pushed me over the edge also provided one of the best, laugh out loud moments in the book, some very needed levity, so I guess it works out. I’m furious that I have to wait some unspecified amount of time for book three.

  4. This Book Is Literally Just Pictures of Cute Animals That Will Make You Feel Better — This only technically counts as “reading” a “book” as it’s just a collection of animal photos, but, listen, it’s probably the best book I’ll read all year. Perfect. No notes.

  5. Winter’s Orbit — Everina Maxwell: This is technically the first in the series which includes Ocean’s Echo, which I read back in January. I’m glad I read them out of order because ultimately Ocean’s Echo explains some worldbuilding stuff that had been left vague in Winter’s Orbit. Overall I preferred Ocean’s Echo; this book relies too heavily on the miscommunication/we don’t use our words trope between Kiem and Jainan. It’s easy to empathize with Janian, who has very solid reasons for his anxiety and reluctance to communicate, but it’s also emotionally exhausting to read.

  6. Spare — Prince Harry: This was like reading 400 pages of someone’s angsty LiveJournal as they process all of their feelings in real time, with absolutely no filter. As the saying goes, there’s three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth, and that’s all I could think of when reading this. It’s interesting, funny, frequently extraordinarily naïve, at times devastatingly sad. I was just starting high school when Princess Diana died (I remember watching the funeral on TV during an early Saturday morning marching band fundraiser) and to think he has lived his entire life until recently without ever being able to process that trauma is heartbreaking. This review, from the London Review of Books, says everything I’m thinking, only much smarter/funnier than I could say it.

  7. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands — Kate Beaton: Phenomenal. Beaton, known for her funny comics that took off on LiveJournal many years ago, writes the memoir of her time working in the oil sands in Alberta, a rough life but one that would pay off her student loans quickly so she could start her life. The book is about the devastation of capitalism, industry, the environment, misogyny, and it is not always easy to read. I want to gift copies to all of my colleagues in HR who struggle to understand why employees don’t report bad things that happen to them. (Content warning: this book deals with sexual assault, sexual harassment, and substance use/abuse.)

  8. A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe — Mark Dawidziak: Can get a bit repetitive at times, and I don’t know that I love the fact that the book bounced back and forth in time between Poe’s general life/timeline and the time immediately surrounding his death. At the end of the day the ultimate questions posed by this book have no real answers. But I learned a lot more about Poe than I knew previously, and learned that a lot of what I thought I knew was actually false/misleading/not wholly correct. So, mission accomplished.

  9. Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America’s Modern Militias — Kevin Cook: SHOCKING NEWS: the bad reviews of this on Goodreads are from people mad about the fact that the author directly connects Waco with the events of January 6. Listen, when there’s a cameo in here about a teenaged Alex Jones being radicalized by the events, I don’t know how you don’t make that connection. I was 10 at the time that Waco happened, and thus had a pretty surface-level understanding of what happened, but as the book points out — too often, one story gets pushed in the media and the subsequent retractions/corrections are never publicized quite the same way. I learned a lot from this that supplemented my young recollections of watching the compound burn on CNN, including facts that were touted as true at the time but never widely corrected. The book does a great job at reconstructing an event where we will never totally know 100% of the truth, but sheds as much light as possible on what happened. To borrow a Reddit-style judgement, everyone sucks here.

Other Things

I bought this chair that my cat thinks belongs to him. Yes this is just an excuse to make people look at pictures of my cat.

  • I watched The Offer, a Paramount+ streaming show starring Miles Teller, Matthew Goode, that lady who plays Keeley on Ted Lasso, and others, about the making of The Godfather. Absolutely worth your time, even if you, like me, have been pretending your whole life that you’ve actually seen The Godfather but definitely have not. The performances are great, Matthew Goode is completely unhinged, and you spend every episode wondering exactly how the hell the movie got made, with all the obstacles they faced. I wish this was on a platform where it could get more attention because everything about this was very entertaining.

  • I watched season two of The Legend of Vox Machina, which was enjoyable. I didn’t like it quite as much as season one, probably because much of the plot focused on characters I’m mostly meh about, but still, distilling the entirety of Critical Role down into 24-minute cartoons is the only way I’ll ever get around to absorbing all of that content. I can make time for my four-hour D&D campaign sessions but I don’t have time to watch someone else’s.

  • Spent a couple of days in Knoxville at the Big Ears music festival, which is now how I want all music festivals to be: primarily inside and often seated. Big Ears essentially takes over all of the music venues in the city and has all day music. Great for just wandering in and out of sets if you want and overall very chill. This is the second time I’ve been to Knoxville and I still haven’t had much time to explore, but the downtown area is very cute. I’d love to go back sometime and actually get to spend time there.

Next Month

  • Michael Mann collaborated on writing Heat 2, which serves both as a prequel and sequel to Heat. He knew he wouldn’t be able to film it, so wrote it as a book instead, which at least one person I know called it the best movie-that’s-not-a-movie from last year.

  • The Chris Pine Dungeons & Dragons movie is finally coming out… unless, you know, there’s a last minute cancellation or someone’s stuck in traffic or oops we got the calendar wrong we’re actually busy the next three weeks. Anyway, I will be seeing this at least once. Depends on people’s schedules.

  • I just started reading a book about Satanism! And my library hold on Trust by Hernan Diaz came in. So that’s all happening.

What about you? What are you watching/reading/listening to/etc.?