Have you seen Sorry, Baby yet? I’m not going to start every review or column (or whatever this is) that way, but please know that I will want to.
When not evangelizing for the year’s best film, I have been watching other movies that are not as good. To be clear, it’s not that they’re not good, it’s just that they’re not as good. But who among us hath not drank from Mr. Pibb for want of a Dr. Pepper, who hath not loved a GoBot in the absence of a Transformer, who hath not sought a Great Value or found refuge in Kirkland?
Here are five movies, four of which you can watch at home right now (after you watch Sorry, Baby, which is also available), that I either couldn’t, wouldn’t, or simply didn’t write a full review about. They are ranked, in reverse order, because life is about making lists and judging others.
5 – Drop
I am nothing if not a sucker for a closed room thriller with a goofy conceit. Drop follows a widowed mother (Meghann Fahy) during a first date at a ritzy restaurant, during which she is blackmailed and threatened via her smartphone by someone who wants her to murder her would-be lover. It gets some things right, like that it only needed to be about 90 minutes long. It gets a bit more wrong, in that it needed to be interesting and, you know, “good.” I can’t decide if I was offended by the film’s bookends or just unimpressed. But you can palpably feel the “this will be good enough to watch at home” smell wafting off of this one. That’s a good stank sometimes, honestly.
Grade = C+
4 – The Amateur
I am nothing if not a sucker for a generic action movie featuring actors who are way too good to be slumming it up in there. Academy Award winner Rami Malek plays a CIA nerd whose wife (played by the nuclear bomb of charisma that is Rachel Brosnahan) gets killed by baddies. He demands to be trained into a dorky James Bond to get justice, so they send him to Laurence Fishburne, who does what he can with what he has to work with. The baddest of bad guys is played by Michael Stuhlbarg, who you will see and go “Oh, I like that guy. That guy is really good in everything he’s in.” And he’s good here. Also, there’s a covert asset codenamed “The Bear,” and Jon Bernthal from The Bear shows up. See, lots of great actors! They all come together to deliver exactly (A) what you’d expect and (B) was shown in the trailers. Not so much disappointing as perfectly appointing.
Grade = C+
3 – KPop Demon Hunters
I am nothing if not a sucker for hype. The chatter around this one pulled me in despite my knowledge of KPop being limited to a general awareness that it is popular.Demons? Those I am much more familiar with, as they are seemingly everywhere these days. Truly, a big year for demons. Anyway, this is an animated flick crammed with impossibly catchy songs that are interrupted by glowing swords chopping hellbeasts in half. The story is…limited.
Certain music can keep demons contained. The current KPop girl group tasked with caging said demons find themselves up against a boy band made of demons. Gasp! And one of the girl group turns out to be part demon. Double gasp! Unlike the very best cartoon content, this doesn’t have a transcendent emotional message or irresistible humor. However, it is oddly hypnotizing, even beyond the music, which is almost dangerously hypnotizing. Those songs all remain in my head against my will after one listen. Enjoy?
Grade = B
2 – The Naked Gun
I am nothing if not a sucker for a guffaw and a patsy for a chortle. Being “the funniest movie of the year” used to actually mean something. Now it means you were the best of the two to three actual comedies released in a given calendar year. Good news: The Naked Gun would be the funniest movie even if you crumpled several years together. Liam Neeson steps in as the son of detective Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen), and everything is as perfect as that sentence would suggest.
What this reboot understands perfectly is that you can hit a quality “laughs per minute” ratio by simply making eleventy billion jokes. Everyone will have their own favorite “background” joke. Mine is the NPR logo included as a sponsor for a UFC fight. But everyone should have the same “set piece” joke, during which Pamela Anderson made me cackle like a jackass. Still doing it just thinking about it…
There’s no point to any of this, although one brilliant zinger gets close. That comes when Neeson talks about how the film’s events show old white dudes are still the best at everything. Sure, it’s funny when he says it but not when Tom Cruise runs that out there as the third act of every movie he’s in. This is the one movie on this list still in the theater. Please go watch it there or they won’t make another one.
Grade = A-
1 – Eddington
I am nothing if not a sucker for writer/director Ari Aster and his complicated, strange, easily mockable but genuinely brilliant films. If Drop and The Amateur are the movies I simply didn’t write about, and KPop Demon Hunters and The Naked Gun were the ones I couldn’t write about (because I didn’t have time), Eddington is the movie I wouldn’t write about. What as I actually mostly write around it here, because I feel like it is going to take me a few years and rewatches to really get my brain to understand how I feel about it.
If you don’t know, this is Aster taking aim at the pandemic and the subsequent/concurrent social media and smartphone–fueled insanity from which we still haven’t extricated ourselves. The less you know the better, but you can know that Joaquin Phoenix is the sheriff in a small Arizona town who decides to run against Pedro Pascal for mayor at the height of COVID. This is explicit satire and a parody of conspiracism and modern political orientation, which is impossible to do in a fully satisfying way because conspiracism and modern political orientation is a full-on parody of itself in real life.
As we were leaving the theater, a group of right-wing coded audience members who simply had to have been tricked into seeing this thing blasted it as “the worst movie they had ever seen.” Simultaneously, many progressively-inclined folks I’ve heard have lamented that this is a “both sides” condemnation, which it simply isn’t. Both sides-ism is when you suggest that the same condemnations apply equally to both parties. This doesn’t say that. It hyperbolically (but only slightly because that’s all the room that’s available) suggests that one side is a breath away from outright evil and the other side is maybe missing the forest for the trees.
Now, you can blast that as being an obvious observation all you want. But that’s not both-siding things. And honestly, it’s fine that it is an obvious observation because at some point we all collectively decided that we are unwilling to talk about and/or listen to how the pandemic and modern technology have driven us all wacky-cuckoo-bonkers.
Seriously, where is the great art about the world-realigning madness we’ve been going through for a half decade now? Maybe Eddington is the first entry in that, even if it is fairly simplistic (and expectedly, delightedly weird). It’s just standing there pointing at us and asking “Hey everybody, uh, what the hell?”
Good question, Ari!
Grade = A
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