Getting back to your somewhat regularly scheduled Movie Cramming Project, which does, alas, have an expiration date now — the 2020 baseball season is starting in the end, so my DVR on YouTubeTV will go poof when we switch to AT&T TV. We’re set to cut the cord on August 10.
That doesn’t mean I’ll have written and sent out all the reviews by then — I almost certainly will have plenty in the tank to keep the newsletter going for a while before I run out.
At that point, I will probably continue this newsletter with other movie content from other streaming platforms. Possibly also TV show reviews! Whole lot of possibilities.
But I still do have a whole bunch of batches of reviews that haven’t gone out yet, so let’s get to that:
THE MOVIES
Movie #42: Stand By Me (1986) | R
Well, this was a weird one. No one has ever told me what this movie is about, just that it's a classic and I should watch it. I think that's because while watching it, I couldn't even tell what the movie was about — it's meandering and tangential and unfocused. (Which is not inherently a bad thing, btw, just can make it difficult to get immersed and stop thinking 'nu, where is this going?')
I'd say that ultimately, at its core, it's about the friendship between two of the boys, Gordie and Chris, and their closeness and trust and the vulnerability they have with each other, which in our toxically masculine culture, is a rarity to see onscreen. The rest of the movie, including the entire plot, kinda just feels like an excuse to hang that on. There are a lot of other themes, like childhood and memory, etc, but themes are not a story, to me.
It makes sense knowing that this was based on a novella — it feels like a short story elongated into a feature film. Short, written fiction is often much heavier on themes than on story or plot.
(There were other problematic elements that bothered me in this one, eg, the intense fatphobia, but the Gordie-Chris friendship is what really got me and what I'll probably remember in the future.)
(I also have heard in recent years what a horrible experience making this movie was for Wil Wheaton, and how abusive his parents and sometimes even the director were to him in order to get an “authentic” performance, and that mostly colored my feelings of "for this? You hurt him for this? Why? Was that train scene really worth it?" etc.)
(And I didn’t actually know that Chris was played by River Phoenix until I was on IMDB afterward, and that adds a whole other layer of irony and tragedy to the ending.)
Movie #43: Spider-Man 3 (2007) | PG-13
I had to finally watch this one because it’s one of the few Spider-Mans I haven’t seen, and I needed to know if it’s truly as bad as everyone said.
And I don’t know that it’s that bad, but it’s not very good. The story just keeps going and going, introducing new elements all over the place and not really knowing what to do with them; the characters, especially Peter, make inexplicably stupid decisions even when not possessed by an unexplained alien symbiote; there’s a sorta kinda redemption-by-death for [NAME REDACTED FOR SPOILER] that only works if you’re willing to forget what an unmitigated asshole he’s been for this entire franchise, and overall, it’s just nowhere near as well-structured or thought-out as Spider-Man 2, or even Spider-Man 1.
I personally have always liked Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone much better than Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst in these movies, and I will confess that when the third Spider-Man reboot was announced with Tom Holland, I was deeply unenthused. But oh man, watching these movies just makes me so happy that we have Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, because he is PERFECT and makes everything better, and if the previous franchises had to screw up this badly in order to let us have him so that he could salvage this character — well, it was worth it.
In conclusion: Thank the movie gods for Tom Holland and Zendaya; they are the best.
Movie #44: Looper (2012) | R
This felt darker than Daybreakers (Batch #6) for me, because it doesn’t have the same kind of narrative momentum from the start — there’s a lot of time spent establishing the world and the character before any real story starts, and that part is just bleak as heck. We learn a little bit about the “present” (2044, I think?) and even less about the future (2074), and they both really suck. (But not in a vampire way.) Why have one dystopian future when you can have two?
But once the story gets going, it is a good one. It’s also a challenging story to tell visually without bogging viewers down with convoluted expository dialogue, and Rian Johnson does a very good job of not falling into the Inception trap of spending 50% of the movie explaining the rules. Even if his way around it is just “time travel is messy, ain’t nobody got time for explanations, just trust me,” it still works, whether or not it actually makes much sense.
The actors all bring their A-game, which definitely helps (even if Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks nothing like a past version of Bruce Willis), and for the most part, the characters feel multidimensional. Aside from, well, the purely plot-device love interest, and the most cartoonish of the villain squad. Emily Blunt does a pretty great American country-ish accent, and that kid, man. That kid was GREAT.
Movie #45: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) | R
A fun, silly spy/secret agent movie that unfortunately, in the tradition of spy movies, treats its female characters pretty terribly. At least there aren't a lot of them? No, that's worse. Or is it. I can never decide if sexist representation (victims, damsels, inexplicably offering sex to the first man who rescues them) is better than no representation.
But aside from that, fun movie. Eat the rich but also be the rich. It sorta tries for satire but rarely subverts any tropes, at best just lampshading them (“IT’S A SPY MOVIE TROPE! AND WE’RE DOING IT! EVEN THOUGH WE’RE TELLING YOU THIS AIN’T THAT KIND OF MOVIE!”) or just using the actual trope with no commentary whatsoever.
But if you wanna see Nick Fury play Thanos, here you go.
Movie #46: RBG (2018) | PG
This whole documentary is worth a watch — I enjoyed the way the editing and design choices made court cases compelling even without footage — but what's really priceless is getting the chance to see RBG react to Kate McKinnon's SNL impersonation of her. Amazing.
A nice companion movie to the biopic On the Basis of Sex, which I also recommend. And if anyone ever asks you what non-toxic masculinity looks like, direct them to real life Marty Ginsburg in this documentary, and Armie Hammer’s portrayal of him in OtBoS.
SM’s Movie Cramming Project is where I watch all the movies so that you don’t have to. Life is short and movies are long. Feel free to subscribe for more!