52 Films I Will Watch in 2022: #29
On first glance, Mishima might seem like a departure for Paul Schrader. But when you think about how the film interrogates living in a world as an artist and experiencing this conflict between feeling like words aren’t able to have enough of an immediate impact (if any at all) and direct action feels like its impact is too fleeting, you can easily see how this is a film getting right at the…
Where has this movie been hiding all my life? If there’s a more adorable screen couple than Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep in this I don’t think I’ve met them yet. De Niro is so soft, so charming here, and Streep is perfectly balanced against him. It’s remarkable to have two of the most celebrated American actors in cinema history paired together arguably at the peak of their careers in a pretty small romance and have them calibrate their…
A little frustrating to watch a movie where the vigilantes are going after the criminals who are also, ultimately, victims of the system instead of spending more of their energy going after the system itself, but I don’t know if the politics are really the main reason to dig this one. It’s the genre thrills, of which it has plenty. A movie that isn’t afraid to shotgun blast a toddler in the first 15 minutes is a sight to behold.
The Other Guys is a sharper, more well-rounded satire than any of McKay’s last three movies. Can’t believe the man who created one of the true comedic masterpieces of the 21st century would turn into maybe the most annoying filmmaker working today. Felt actively angry the entire two and a half hours of this, and certainly not in the way McKay wants you to be. It reeks with that smug "I'm so much smarter than everyone" humor of Vice, similarly…
The "I love my dead gay son!" scene in Heathers turned into an unironic, maudlin, deeply insulting story of how a gay teen's suicide became the tragic backstory for his shitty father's redemption story. This is a movie that genuinely uses the memory of the teen (a real person) to say that he forgives his father for neglecting him and not doing anything to protect him from the extreme abuse that was being inflicted upon him.
And, of course, that…
