Tully (Jason Reitman, 2018) — A-
Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama, 2009) — B
10 Things I Hate About You (Gil Junger, 1999) — A+
The Wrong Missy (Tyler Spindel, 2020) — D
The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May, 1972) — A
Lucky Numbers (Nora Ephron, 2000) — C-
Buffaloed (Tanya Wexler, 2020) — A-
Spaceballs (Mel Gibson, 1987) — A+
The Long Riders (Walter Hill, 1980) — B
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Gore Verbinski, 2007) — D+
The Old Guard (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2020) — B+
6 Years (Hannah Fidell, 2015) — B
A Wrinkle in Time (Ava Duvernay, 2018) — C+
The Lovebirds (Michael Showalter, 2020) — B
The Return of Jafar (Toby Shelton, Tad Stones, Alan Zaslove, 1994) — C
It’s been really great to see Charlize Theron, one of the better actors of the post-millenium, also slowly turn herself into a true action star. It was kind of always there but the quality of those earlier action movies were spotty at best (Æon Flux, 2 Days in the Valley, and Hancock, which has some similarities to this movie), but in the last five years with her increased clout, she’s really stepped it up with Mad Max: Fury Road, Atomic Blonde, and now The Old Guard. There’s a few scenes in this movie, from director Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love and Basketball, The Secret Life of Bees) where Theron’s character is fighting multiple people solo, and it genuinely feels like a John Wick scene. Even right down to the way she disarms one enemy, holds them still, takes out a second charging combatant, and then returns to the original. Turns out, this movie’s stunt coordinator, Daniel Hernandez, did stunt work on the first John Wick and was the assistant coordinator on John Wick: Chapter 2. It shows and Charlize is a perfect choice for our female Keanu.
Based on Greg Rucka’s comic book of the same name and scripted by Rucka himself, The Old Guard is about a group of immortal beings who have no idea how or why they exist, but do their best to do good in the world while staying completely hidden from it. It does a surprisingly good job of organically introducing us to the entire world and concept through the eyes of the newly invincible Nile, played by KiKi Lane. It then takes a little break for a bunch of clunky exposition about 30 minutes in before jumping right back into all the exciting stuff. While it is technically based on an existing property, that property is an original sci-fi graphic novel, rather than any kind of sure-fire bankable IP, making The Old Guard feel like something original within an action movie landscape mostly populated by superhero movies and Fast and Furious/John Wick/Mission: Impossible sequels.
All of that on top of the fact that the movie is highly watchable and even when it’s not incredibly smart, it’s just a ton of fun. Despite the fact that some of the characters’ lifetimes stretch back hundreds of years, the scope of the film is refreshingly small and focused, and the journey that Theron’s Andy takes is simple and effective without feeling obvious from the beginning.
Hopefully, the success of The Old Guard (one of the 10 most watched Netflix originals, according to Netflix) can set up Prince-Bythewood up for a more prolific career. After working as a television writer for most of the ’90s, her directorial career has essentially spanned 20 years, but The Old Guard is only her fourth film. It’s exciting to imagine what she’ll do with any cache she’s earned from this movie, even if it’s just a sequel to this movie — which is set up fairly nicely by the end.
- I decided to fill in my own personal Diablo Cody gaps back-to-back — her second screenplay Jennifer’s Body and her most recent, Tully. Jennifer’s Body is an enjoyable watch, closer to the Juno end of the Cody spectrum with a dark comic/supernatural twist that is, unsurprisingly, strong to the core with its feminism. It’s about the double standards in the way young girls act, the way they are sexualized, and the way that society, men specifically, feel an entitlement to girls’ bodies. This is what all good horror/science fiction does: say something implicit about the world in which it was made through the world in which it is set.The cast, especially Megan Fox as Jennifer and Adam Brody as the lead singer of an up-and-coming indie rock band, all do good work even when Cody’s script veers a little too far into attempts at hip dialogue or made-up witticisms.
- Tully is on the complete opposite end of that spectrum; as a reunion of Cody, Jason Reitman as director, and Charlize Theron as star, it’s more similar to their first collaboration, Young Adult, which is to say it’s mature, a little raw, a little brutal, and very honest. Theron plays a mother of two, soon to be three, who is convinced by her brother to use a “night nurse,” who will sit with the baby through the night so the mother only needs to get up to feed. Enter Mackenzie Davis as Tully, who forms a quick friendship with Theron’s character. The movie touches on postpartum depression, motherhood, unfulfilled potential, and growing older all in the smallest scope of any of Cody’s scripts yet.
- 10 Things I Hate About You is a classic in our household. It’s my wife’s favorite movie. It’s literally the first movie that I’ve watched twice since 2020 started. It’s funny and sweet and good and all three of its teen leads broke out following it. There’s nothing more for me to say other than A+. Similarly, Spaceballs was one of maybe 10 movies that my family growing up watching over and over again. In my opinion, it’s the third best Mel Brooks movie (after Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles) and was unfairly maligned when it was released. I can’t tell you if these would be the two best movies I watched this week if this week was the first time I was watching them; it’s just how human nature works, I guess.
- I watched two 2020 Netflix comedies this week, The Wrong Missy and The Lovebirds. The latter was significantly better, and it’s strange because on the surface it seems like a clear case of putting funny people at the center of your movie making it funny. Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani are very funny, charming comedic actors and The Lovebirds floats entirely on their backs. It’s an enjoyable domino-effect comedy where the hapless protagonists are flying by the seat of their pants into dangerous and weird situations. The Wrong Missy stars David Spade and Lauren Lapkus. Lapkus is a very funny comedian who is even fairly well-cast in this role, but the character is just too much. I typically hate when a character is simply chaos-incarnate with motivation-less actions, and even putting a performer I like in that role doesn’t save it. It also doesn’t help that David Spade is sleepwalking next to her.
- Writer/director and improv comedy pioneer Elaine May’s second directorial feature, The Heartbreak Kid, is the perfect companion piece to The Graduate, the second feature directed by her longtime partner-in-comedy, Mike Nichols. Whereas Nichols’ film explores an inappropriate relationship where an older woman pursues her daughter’s boyfriend, The Heartbreak Kid stars Charles Grodin as a newlywed pursuing a young girl on his honeymoon. The movie started and I wondered if there’d ever been a time where I wasn’t completely put-off by a Charles Grodin character, and now I question whether that’s because he’s so off-putting in this, one of his breakthrough roles. It works here better than any other time I can think of, as his Lenny is placed in the naturally sympathetic position at the center of the movie and the movie itself slowly unravels it.
- I don’t hate the script for Lucky Numbers but for a few major plot points and I don’t even hate most of the performances but for the main one. I don’t even think John Travolta is miscast as a local-famous celebrity weatherman — the type of snake oil salesman created by local television — but he’s just so bad in it. It’s the second time Travolta worked with Nora Ephron following Michael in 1996 and I honestly think both of these movies are her two worst movies.
- Buffaloed has a lot of what Lucky Numbers was going for and just pulls it off so much better. A sleazy, in-debt, get-rich-quick wannabe at its center who dives into the world of crime and is suddenly piloting a plane they’ve never even been on before. Zoey Deutch absolutely nails the role, believably playing someone who is great at smooth-talking even when she’s in over her head. Both movies also have a strong sense of place, but whereas Lucky Numbers‘ Harrisburg mostly serves as middle-American mid-sized city where weathermen can become famous and it usually snows, Buffalo is fully baked into every aspect of Buffaloed, from the Bills to the debt collecting to the wings, and including every possible version of the word buffalo.
- Do you like it when real-life siblings play siblings in movies? If so, I’ve got a movie for you. The Long Riders is a 1980 Western starring James and Stacey Keach as Jesse and Frank James; David, Keith, and Robert Carradine as Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger; Randy and Dennis Quaid as Clell and Ed Miller; and Christopher and Nicholas Guest as Charley and Robert Ford. It feels kind of gimmicky, but the movie — director Walter Hill’s fourth feature and the direct follow-up to The Warriors — justifies its own existence with contemplative moments and staccato punctuating moments of action throughout. There are definitely moments of lag and even boredom, but it’s a well-enough made modern Western and it’s fun to track which of each group of brothers had more success going in and then following.
- I finished watching the Mission:Impossible movies and decided to start a new franchise, watching the first two Pirates of the Caribbean movies in quick succession. But it really stalled at the third installment, At World’s End, because every time I’d go to start it I’d see that it was almost three hours long and just balked. Well, I finally watched it (across two sittings), and it’s…fine. About halfway through I started to feel like it felt like the movie started cosplaying as itself. It’s a real mess and the universe suddenly feels just insanely weird instead of smart and surreal like the first two, and the characters are basically just caricatures at this point, but honestly the length is the biggest knock on this movie. Checking the time and seeing I had watched two hours of it and still have 50+ minutes left was the worst moment of my week that didn’t involve reading the news or watching the “president” speak. It’s too late to turn back now, here I come Pirates 4 and 5.
- I think that 6 Years is a step-up from A Teacher for writer-director Hannah Fidell. The movie, a lo-fi production in the vein of Joe Swanberg or Andrew Bujalski, tracks the dissolution of a six-year relationship between two college students. Almost like a small-budget, early-20s version of Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, the movie places no real blame on either character. Those looking to choose a side will be doing so based on their own perceptions and unconscious biases rather than anything the script does to push them in either direction. I’m excited to watch Fidell’s next (and most recent) movie, The Long Dumb Road because I think 6 Years proved an upward trajectory and I’d like to see what she can do with Jason Mantzoukis, who is a genius improviser.
- I remember reading A Wrinkle in Time as a kid and I remember loving it, but beyond that, I don’t remember much of what the book was about. So I can’t quite speak to Ava Duvernay’s film as an adaptation, but as a film I found it rather disappointing. It’s a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo and it’s unclear exactly how it correlates to the emotional arc of the movie before a surprisingly flat climax. I’ll at least give it that it felt short, but I think that’s only because I kept expecting more to happen.
- I have Disney+ and in a stupid attempt to get my money’s worth out of it, I decided I should watch all of the direct-to-video sequels to popular Disney animated movies, starting with the very first, The Return of Jafar, the first of two sequels to the 1992 hit Aladdin. It’s not as good as the original, obviously, but it’s fine. There’s some songs, Dan Castellenata voices the Genie, so it sounds like Homer Simpson doing a Robin Williams impression, and then after 65 minutes it’s over.