FILM RANK '23 - The Pre-Summer Edition

RECOMMENDED

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse - I’m not sure it made any sense but the animation was dazzling and it was the most fun I’ve had in a movie theater in a long time.
Past Lives - A sloooow but very effective love story and immigrant story that features some of the best on-screen chemistry in recent memory. This should be a breakout performance for Greta Lee.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves: The Chris Pine of movies. Entertaining but more good than great. Appealing but not inspiring. Fun but not entirely memorable. Like Pine, it lives either at the bottom of the A-list or the top of the B-list. But to be fair, when put up against other modern big budget films, it’s a revelation and one of the better mainstream flicks of the last ten years.

GOOD

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 - For some reason, I just never got fully bought into this one. It felt like another case of Marvel having a good idea and then shoving too many storylines/characters into it. I would have Adam Warlock out of it entirely. Still, it’s a quality flick, and I wouldn’t argue with anyone who loved it, but I just didn’t get there.

GOOD TO MEH

Blackberry - The tech-biopic is an ever-expanding genre, and this one rides the lines between drama and comedy. At times, I wish it had just gone for full-fledged comedy since it never really delves deeply into any of the three main characters and is a fairly superficial version of what happened. (Also, the storyline about the Pittsburgh Penguins might confuse some people who don’t already know what happened.) Still, I enjoyed it and think this is a film that will find some fans when it hits a streaming service. (Or is broken into 86 pieces on Tik Tok.)
M3GAN - You can definitely feel the studio’s hand forcing this to be PG-13 instead of R. It’s still a fun, goofy film but it feels like it could have been more over-the-top.
Ant-Man & Wasp: Quantumania - Nothing in the film was necessarily bad, but nothing really worked either.
Air - The film is entertaining enough, but I’m not sure it is a story that needed a narrative film retelling. There’s gotta be better Triumph of the Middle-Aged White Guys stories out there for Matt Damon and Ben Affleck to work on.
Paint - Honestly, this probably should be lower on the list, but I saw it at a screening where the director gave a speech about how long he worked on it and shouted out all of the people involved (most of whom were at the screening), so I was really rooting for it. It feels like it lives in between a Will Ferrell movie (minus all of the improv that elevates his movies) and a Wes Anderson film (but not as clever or whimsical.) This is the kind of film that should be remade because it’s a funny premise, but they didn’t stick the landing.

MEH TO NOT GOOD

Knock at the Cabin - This felt like a forgettable, overlong episode of The Twilight Zone.
Fast X - The joy is gone from the Fast franchise. The ending did get closer to the gloriously stupid tone that the movies need to be so bad, they’re good, but, alas, this one was just bad.
Scream VI - This is the film where the Scream franchise finally became the exact type of movie that the original Scream movie satirized.

NOT FOR ME

You Hurt My Feelings - If you like laughing at white people struggling to deal with white people problems, this movie is for you.
Sharper - This is a generic con movie that is more about people getting conned, which isn’t as interesting as watching people trying to pull off the con.
Ghosted - An embarrassing misstep for almost everyone involved.
Hypnotic - This is bad, even for a Ben Affleck movie.
When You Finish Saving the World - Unlikeable.
Skinamarink - This experimental film is supposed to feel like a nightmare, and I guess it succeeds on that front, but good lord, it was a struggle to get through.

"Feelings", Marlou, King Pleasure

New Thing #49 - “You Hurt My Feelings” - The latest from Nicole Holofcener is another slice-of-life piece of white people problems and this might be the simplest, tackling the issue of little white lies that we tell each other to show support. It’s the kind of film that film critics love and most people will find immediately forgettable if not downright boring. And I get it, if you’re a critic and stuck, week after week, watching childish dreck or violent fantasies, something like this feels like a breath of fresh air. But if you’re an everyday person and taking time out of your busy schedule, this isn’t likely to feel like it was worth it. Honestly, even if it was on streaming, you’d probably think “That’s nice” and wish you had chosen something else. This film is basically the follies of the mediocre and that’s probably a good way to describe the film as well.

#50 - Marlou DTLA - I ordered the garlic noodles and made the mistake of adding shrimp for $11 (The dish itself was $19.) The noodles were quite tasty but $11 for five fairly generically seasoned shrimp pushed the dish to an unnecessarily expensive level. The dish and a Diet Coke ran around $45 after tax and tip. And it’s not like you’re paying for the ambiance. Marlou DTLA is a nice but unspectacular hotel restaurant in the O Hotel. Marlou - helmed by former Below Deck chef Marcos - started as a food truck, which feels about right. Maybe the other dishes are better but I can’t say that I’m likely to go back to find out. Marlou wasn’t bad but it failed to make The List.

#51: King Pleasure - Basquiat Exhibit - Maybe the bar was raised too high by the 2pac exhibit but King Pleasure just felt underwhelming to me. At the beginning, it seems like you might get some real insight into Basquiat the person as the first rooms cover his childhood, family, and upbringing but that approach disappears after the opening rooms and after that, it’s pretty much just an exhibit of Basquiat’s work which I must confess doesn’t speak to me. The only insights you really get after that were a map of where he liked to hang out in Los Angeles - mostly bougie spots - and a video of a mentor telling him to invest in himself and always keep one painting from each set he did for himself. I was hoping I might find a new appreciation for the artist but it feels like an exhibit that will interest only those already interested.

Haring, Burger She Wrote, Past Lives

I’m restarting the blog but not going to write a big post about it because a) who cares? and b) who knows if I’ll just abandon this like every other thing I start but I’m not going to restart my quest for 230 new things in 2023 but I’ll double back later to cover the new things that happened before today.

#46 - Keith Haring Exhibit @ The Broad: Is Keith Haring an appropriator? That’s the thought that kept going through my head as I walked through the new Haring exhibit at The Broad. He moved to NY, embraced the rising hip-hop and graffiti scene, and it inspired his art and made him famous. Is it not appropriating culture if you use it to fight The Man? I don’t know and I’m not sure that I care. Ultimately, Haring just isn’t really for me. I don’t dislike it but I didn’t feel the need to spend much time looking at his works.

#47 - Burger She Wrote: A great name for a burger spot. I got the Oklahoma Burger with onions and fries. It was good but I can’t say it stood out from other burgers that I’ve had. Off the top of my head, Burgers Never Say Die might be my favorite spot but I’ve only been there a couple of times. Anyway, the fries at Burger She Wrote were tasty but were overcut for my liking; they were a bunch of tiny pieces.

“Past Lives”: This is a quality indie film. The pacing is slooooooow so you have to be prepared for that but it’s a great, simple love story and immigrant story. The writing presents the story as honest, realistic, and unspectacular but still riveting. Greta Lee and Teo Yoo are tremendous while John Magaro hits the right notes in his performance as well. I really can’t say enough about Lee and Yoo; some of the best on-screen chemistry in years. A fantastic debut by writer-director Celine Song.

NEW SCRIPT IDEA: As I was walking around, I had a random thought, has anyone made a movie about a fictional aging gay rock/pop icon? I started imagining the opening scene of a film called “Bitter Queen”. It wouldn’t be about an Elton John-level guy; maybe someone more along the lines of a smaller celeb, one who has had to deal with a Rick Astley-like scenario of his song becoming a meme. I’m just not sure where it would go. Just a character study. Maybe a rom-com with him finally settling down with his best friend/confidant.
But then I switched the idea a bit and thought about a story of a Kurt Cobain-type icon who killed himself but uttered the last words, “Y’know, he wasn’t wrong.” 20 years later, a young writer tries to uncover what he meant in a kind of Citizen Kane rip-off. It’s probably too dark but my thinking was the final reveal is that the star had inappropriate relations with a kid, who spoke out to people close to the singer who tried to cover it up or told him and his family to be quiet. In a last sordid power move, the singer bequeathed the rights to his biggest album to the kid, putting the kid and his family in a predicament - do they go public with what happened and kill the guy’s reputation and knock his songs out of rotation or do they keep quiet and reap the royalties.