I put this on because it was father’s day and someone said this was one of the great dad movies. Ehhh, not really. Better to describe it as a great American dad movie. Full of heroic martyrs and grizzled men weepily saluting the American flag and a logic that doesn’t bear any kind of scrutiny (first time I’ve ever seen a Trebuchet Ex Machina). Gandolfini’s delightfully scummy performance injects a bit of fun and saves it from being a complete boot-licking hagiography of Redford’s dickhead manipulative General Irwin.
I’m halfway through The Pitt and it’s a contender for show of the year for me. A little overwrought but extremely well done.
Finished Dept Q last night and it was pretty good? I mean, it’s extremely watchable in the moment but if you give it even the slightest bit of thought, you can kind of see the guff? Also, it’s an American showrunner adapting a Danish book into a Scottish setting so it’s all a bit of a mix but can we please not use the phrase “I could care less”? Thanks!
What I’m Playing
My Switch 2 arrived and it’s been great! Except it only really has one game released so far, Mario Kart World, and the high-level play on this has already left me behind, so I’m going through old Switch games I missed first time around. Right now, I’m playing Jenny LeClue, a lovely fun cozy mystery.
What I’m Making
I recently upgraded my pizza oven into one with a much more spacious opening, so I’ve been trying to up my pizza game. As I type this, I’ve got 8 dough balls in the fridge on a 72 hour ferment. The last batch I made came out great, except note to self: the opening of the oven remains suuuuper hot even after the heat has been off for a while. Gave myself a pretty solid second-degree burn the last time I made pizza.
Faye Wong is easily in the running for top 10 most adorable characters of the 1990s but even by rom-com standards, her behaviour here is absolutely unhinged. Love how well the film comes together in the last 10 minutes.
Visually, this is gorgeous and the action/fight sequences are thrilling and visceral and I think Dan Trachtenberg is doing great things with this franchise. But can we just talk about the split-brain aspect that I think affects a lot of these Western grown-up animations? This has some of the most gruesome deaths I’ve seen in the Predator franchise but, at times, it’s also got some of the most childish storytelling that feels barely one step beyond “now THIS is pod racing”. Like, it’s a film that is apparently targeting hardcore gore-hounds and 12 year old boys. Weird!
Two full minutes of this film’s run-time are just shots of Edward Woodward opening his seatbelt - this film plumbs new depths of slow horror. But the mundanity of English suburban family life are cut with an air of supernatural, almost cosmic menace and an implication of something deeply nasty beneath the surface (incest?). There were two things I really loved about this film. First was the disappearance effect at the beginning, which was stunning and instantly made me sit up and take notice. Second was how excellently the film builds on itself. The film revisits things from earlier but with additional context, we see new, more sinister meanings. This is the kind of thing David Lynch did so well in Twin Peaks. The Appointment did this constantly and I loved it every time.
It loses steam about halfway through and takes a wild and unexpected pivot to squeeze just a little more life from the story. In the end though, it’s not interesting enough, and the satire isn’t biting enough. It’s got plenty of the classic Jesse Armstrong lines that will have people golf-clapping at the screen and the performances are terrific (especially Cory Michael Smith who is magnetic in every scene) and those are just about enough to carry the film but I was hoping for something a lot sharper.
I’ve enjoyed Dan Sinker’s series on each year in the making of Punk Planet and this last entry, about the end, is particularly lovely. And what a great conclusion.
My 9 year old daughter nope’d out after about an hour of this. My 7 year old son stuck with it and the ending had him leaping out of his seat, feeling some big emotions that he couldn’t articulate. He loved it. And I loved that he loved it.
There’s a lot of shite you have to wade through (e.g. the entire Daniel/Ali relationship which is shambolic and makes no sense) but if it works for you, this is still a magical film.
Red might be my favourite of the Three Colours trilogy. It feels like a magic trick. Kieślowski make us care about a misanthropic asshole while weaving together a wider story about companionship and serendipity without making it too mawkish. Tremendous. The final coda, tying the whole trilogy together in a glorious semi-mystical way is superb.
johnke.me
