A sucker for genre trash.
Watchlist is just my Netflix DVD queue.
#horror
For the first 15 minutes I was resisting this. As Mei-Mei turned to the camera to address the audience to discuss the cultural forces that inform her character and do early 2000s boy band dances with her friends, everything felt so painfully on-the-nose and instructive about Turning Red's setting, that I felt legit second-hand embarrassment. But that 4th wall breaking conceit is dropped and the era-specific references move to the background and Sandra Oh's incredible vocal performance becomes more of…
As much as I enjoyed the feel of this, there's a point where something can be so easygoing and matter-of-fact that it feels slight. This isn't quite a character study, nor a crime drama (would have really loved to see the old man crew of Robert Redford, Tom Waits, and Danny Glover get shit done). The Old Man & the Gun is nice to look at and ultimately as pleasant as the bank employees' description of the jovial thief played by…
Every character in this movie is insufferable in a way that's nearly impossible to empathize with. It's wild. Our window into this dysfunctional family is a painfully awkward and self-centered girlfriend interloper played by Sarah Jessica Parker, yet the family is so aggressively hateful to her that we start to find ourselves in her corner... until she proves to suck even worse than we thought possible? Nothing makes sense.
When she first meets her soon-to-be in-laws, she's painfully timid; with…
If nothing else, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is successful in delivering a raucous adventure by letting the actors hold the awe and excitement of the iconic franchise on their faces. Daisy Ridley, especially, has this wide-eyed wonder that shows she's not just someone caught up in an epic hero's journey, but someone who knows the characters of the original trilogy and loves them. It is a clear meta-homage, but doesn't feel like fan fiction the way lesser reboots often…