An American Pickle (Brandon Trost, 2020) — B
The Long Dumb Road (Hannah Fidell, 2018) — B+
The Kissing Booth 2 (Vince Marcello, 2020) — D+
The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960) — A+
The Change-Up (David Dobkin, 2011) — F
Paddington (Paul King, 2014) — A
Enter Laughing (Carl Reiner, 1967) — B
Witness for the Prosecution (Billy Wilder, 1957) — A
Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017) — A-
Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas (Andy Knight, 1997) — C-
Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959) — B+
Love and Basketball (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2000) — A
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Robert Marshall, 2011) — C
An American Pickle kinda feels like it could’ve been Seth Rogen’s Elf — a strange character displaced and plopped down in the real world, pulling laughs from his misunderstandings and pathos from his sweet naïveté. In this case, it’s a 1920s Ashkenazi Jew who emigrates to America and is accidentally preserved in pickle brine for 100 years. After an Up-like opening featuring Rogen’s Herschel Greenbaum and his wife, played by Sarah Snook, we jump relatively quickly into the present day.
As both Herschel and his only living relative, great-grandson Ben, Rogen is playing a little more of a character than he usually is, which is exciting to see; although, oddly enough, he feels more natural and at-home playing the old-world pickle-maker than he does the modern day hipster app developer. Herschel also has all the best comedic moments while Ben is a little more of a straight-man, naturally. The film truly does have a decent amount of laugh-out-loud jokes, but isn’t an out-and-out comedy in the way that most of the Rogen and Evan Goldberg-produced movies are — or even in the way that Elf is.
The movie expertly hand waves off any concerns about the set-up by making Herschel’s story public immediately and turning a blind eye to any kind of rational explanation, the perfect set-up for a contained, fish-out-of-water, inter-personal story that examines the differences in culture over 100 years.
Unfortunately, that’s not quite exactly what we get. The movie establishes Herschel’s place in the modern world and the way that the world has accepted him, but then instead of moving on quickly, it delves deeper into that relationship with inconsistent rules. For instance, there’s an entire news conference when he is found, and a story like that feels like it would create immediate world-wide celebrity. But then later in the movie, he’s under threat of deportation because he has no paperwork, something that feels like it would’ve been cleared up when he was first found. People constantly react to him without the knowledge of who he is, as the movie attempts to draw humor out of the notion of a man-out-of-time without acknowledging that it’s already a phenomenon. Basically, it didn’t speed through the introductory explanations to get them out of the way and delve into something else entirely, it did so because it couldn’t be bothered to put in the work. Instead of any kind of inter-personal exploration, we suddenly get health department inspections, a dive into cancel culture, and a 25-minute detour into a Trump analogue, all of which feel like they break the rules of this universe that the film rushed through to get there.
I shouldn’t say that it entirely eschews any kind of inter-personal exploration, just that when it does turn to it, it feels forced. The movie wants to be about religion and faith and family, so it kind of drops us in on that every so often. It also seems to want to be an immigrant story, but doesn’t have much to say there, either. The movie seems to bite off more than it can handle, but not in a way that makes it feel over-stuffed or even too ambitious. It’s not messy in a way that makes you feel impressed just to see it try, more like messy in a way that simply feels unfocused. Simon Rich, the original novella author and screenwriter, is an incredibly intelligent and accomplished writer — his prose writing is excellent and has been published across many major literary magazines and he’s written for both Saturday Night Live and Pixar and he’s created two wonderful shows for FX — but this is his first true foray into the film world. Here’s hoping that he gets another chance and next time it’s more in line with the quality we’ve come to know from him.
- The Long Dumb Road is Hannah Fidell’s best movie yet and her biggest production by far, though still pretty lo-fi (the budget isn’t available but it only took in around $5,000). Tony Revolori and Jason Mantzoukis star as a young man driving across the country to his art school and the recently unemployed drifter/mechanic that he picks up along the way. The central performances are excellent and the major themes are well-examined even as the plot of the movie doesn’t go anywhere.
- I’m pretty sure The Kissing Booth 2 set the record in our household for most times we had to pause the movie and discuss what was happening on screen. The word around the internet seemed to be that this movie was better than the first one, and I guess that’s kind of true, but it’s by such a marginal amount and it’s TWO HOURS AND TWELVE MINUTES LONG that it feels like a total wash. It is set in an alternate universe where everyone speaks just slightly off and nothing really works the exact way that they actually do in our own universe.
- The Apartment: charming, romantic, some light 1960s-style workplace harassment. This is exactly what I expected from a rom-com as highly touted as Billy Wilder’s Best Picture winner starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. What I was not expecting was a surprisingly sharp take on toxic corporate culture and class conflicts that still feel relevant. CC Baxter’s work is that of a mindless corporate drone; he’s willing to be manipulated by those in power in hopes that he’ll someday be one of them. Fran Kubalik is an elevator operator with no upward mobility who hides her tumultuous inner life with a cheery disposition. Apart and together they have to deal with the powers-that-be at their shared workplace.
- I shudder to think what I would think about Wedding Crashers if I watched it for the first time today. Since that breakthrough hit, David Dobkin has directed Fred Claus (which is fine), The Judge (which sucks) and The Change-Up, which I watched for the first time this week. And it is trash. Every one of the movie’s comedic instincts is some sort of gross bodily function. It’s a body-swap movie that swaps two actors who are both similar-looking and even pretty similar in their temperament. Ryan Reynolds is a little more manic and jokey while Jason Bateman is more straight-man and cutting, but if you’re going to switch bodies, they need to be doing impressions of each other. This does not happen in the movie, in part because their personalities aren’t distinct enough to truly do it, but also because maybe nobody thought to suggest it? I don’t know, fuck this movie.
- Paddington tells an immigrant story as well as any film featuring Nicole Kidman as an evil taxidermist can. The movie’s plot is as follows: Paddington leaves Peru in search of a home in London, Paddington eats a lot of marmalade, I laugh and cry at the same time multiple times, Paddington finds a home, the end. That’s making it sound simpler than it is, but, I don’t know, just watch it, it’s beautiful.
- Carl Reiner’s debut is based on his own semi-autobiographical novel — which is a long way of saying it’s based on him. Jose Ferrer plays a young, Jewish man who is an aspiring-ish actor and is horny as hell. The movie is funny when it wants to be, which is not all that often considering Reiner’s background and future. Elaine May and her impeccable comedic timing and line readings are easily the best part of the movie.
- A man accused of murder stands trial and thanks to a legal loophole, the main witness for the prosecution is his wife. Witness for the Prosecution felt like it was headed straight for B/B+ territory for most of the movie’s runtime. As a Billy Wilder movie based on an Agatha Christie story, it is of course incredibly well-made, well-plotted, and well-acted. The movie seems to be barreling towards a very questionable end until a very well-executed twist in the last ten minutes that really turned the entire thing on its head and helped redeem it for me. I should’ve never doubted the talent behind the movie or its lasting reputation. Thanks, Richard Kind in The Sack Lunch Bunch, for the recommendation!
- Daniel-Day Lewis and Vicky Krieps put on an acting tour de force at the center of Phantom Thread, he a controlling dressmaker who you’re just dying to tell to shut the fuck up, she a waitress turned love interest. Paul Thomas Anderson has yet to make a less-than-excellent film.
- How can you make a second Beauty and the Beast animated film? It can’t be set after the original because almost all of the characters look completely different than they do in the original. And it can’t be a prequel because Belle and the Beast wouldn’t’ve met at that point. The real answer is: you don’t, but Disney’s answer was: set it in between the beginning and the end of the first movie. The entire timeline and emotional arc make almost no sense when you think about it in relation to the first movie. Here, Belle likes the Beast but she, of course, doesn’t love him yet. The entire cast returns and adds Tim Curry as a villainous organ who is inexplicably computer-generated in a 2D-animated movie, Paul Reubens as his piccolo sidekick, and Bernadette Peters as a Christmas ornament. There are some truly baffling choices, none of it looks great, and not even Tim Curry and his surprisingly decent villain song can save it.
- A lot of the mainstream movies about race from the same era as Shadows handle its central topic in a very surface-level, gloves-on way. Movies like To Kill A Mockingbird, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, or The Defiant Ones — movies that I love, mind you — can feel kind of toothless when their take on racism essentially amounts to just: “it’s bad.” So I wasn’t quite prepared for John Cassavetes’ independent debut, Shadows, to be as subtle as it was and as progressive as it was; it makes sense that this movie was basically funded outside the studio system. Cassavetes uses student actors and the editing and cinematography feel of-their-time for low-budget productions, but the performances are good, the lives of the characters feel fleshed out and the movie has a lot to say even in its subtlety.
- Love and Basketball is just a perfect romantic film. A lot of romance feel like they try to balance the relationship with other parts of their lives outside the relationship, but really good ones like Love and Basketball intertwine those two parts so well to the point that they drive each other, rather than serve as runtime filler. The love props up the basketball and the basketball props up the love — both in the script and in the characters’ lives. The movie is sexy, has a killer soundtrack, and for the most part doesn’t entirely screw up the basketball scenes.
- I feel like the rub on the Pirates movies are that the Gore Verbinski-directed original trilogy are good and the next two are questionable, but I found the third movie to be such a mess mythology-wise and character-wise and almost preferred On Strangers Tides. It’s basically a soft reboot of the franchise, with only Jack Sparrow, Captain Barbosa, and a few minor characters carrying over and Penelope Cruz, Ian McShane, and Sam Claflin joining as new characters and I think it serves the franchise well. It’s such a rich world that it feels like there are stories aplenty, even as the action set pieces are nowhere near what they are in the first three and even as it doesn’t really take that opportunity to tell a better, cleaner story. The idea behind the staging usually seems to just be “Jack finds something to swing from.” P.S. Johnny Depp is an asshole and just because somebody has been abused doesn’t clear them of being an abuser.