52 Films I Will Watch in 2022: #17
As a devout Oliver Stone hater, I can’t lie: the son of a bitch got me with this one. Reminded me of Uncut Gems — not just the Bogosian of it all (but truly, wish that man was a prominent figure in more films), but the unfettered, constantly escalating, can’t take a fucking breath energy of this thing. The film is essentially split in three acts, with the first and third being…
52 Films I Will Watch In 2022: #14
Dealing with some difficult personal stuff that’s going to cause me to be isolating for the next ten days or so and I’m going to try and distract myself from the stress/capitalize on the time by hopefully making a dent in this list of 52 films I want to make sure I watch this year.
And what a way to cap off this time period! This movie fucking grooves. Don’t think I’ve…
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…
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…
