A pretty enjoyable stupid movie about star personas, old Hollywood (1997 if you’re 16-years old), and generational divides. It’s an inherently funny joke making Nic Cage into a dumb dad who the movie keeps cutting off mid-sentence. The overarching plot about Cage becoming an agent for the CIA doesn’t work, mainly because there’s no real traction to it, but it’s a serviceable idea for transporting the other, gently reflexive movie star and industry commentary. And this is coming from someone who didn’t like Paddington 2 or Mandy. But I do think Face/Off is a masterpiece.
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Bad Company 2002
Joel Schumacher is pretty good when he’s dumb. This is an obvious rehash of The Rock (cute that it stars Chris Rock) in tone, watered down to a PG-13 and absolutely moronic, but not without its pleasures. It looks good. The silly story about DJ Rock replacing CIA Rock is precisely that: a high-concept ploy that makes no sense, especially 20 years removed from the ass-end of high-concept dominance, but it’s perfectly adequate for sustaining a daft spy plot that…
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La La Land 2016
Please allow the candor of my passions a forum without preemptive judgment.
The “post-racial mystique”, as Catherine Squires calls it, need not be found in cases where racial recognition unexpectedly springs to the surface. On the contrary, the very concept of being “post-racial” means that race does not factor into discussions regarding politics or the polity, because the urgency of those conversations have been lessened or even permanently quelled. Accordingly, depictions of history, especially those guided by nostalgia and longing…
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Shiva Baby 2020
When I interviewed John Waters in 2016, he said "I want to be an insider now that everyone wants to be an outsider." With the latter point, he might as well have been describing the tone of Shiva Baby, a movie so certain of its edgy, outsider status that we can rather easily dismiss it as an attempt to place itself on the inside. That's what Waters was getting at: self-describing as quirky, weird, unconventional, etc. has become a navigable…
