Dick Johnson is Dead (Kirsten Johnson, 2020) — A+
Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985) — A+
The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967) — A+
X2 (Bryan Singer, 2003) — B+
But I’m A Cheerleader (Jamie Babbitt, 1999) — B
Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007) — C+
Bloodshot (David S.F. Wilson, 2020) — C-
The Way Back (Gavin O’Connor, 2020) — B+
Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World (Tom Ellery, Bradley Ramond, 1998) — D+
Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960) — A-
The Visit (M. Night Shyamalan, 2015) — C-
Munich (Steven Spielbrg, 2005) — B+
I would not call Dick Johnson is Dead an ‘Alzheimer’s Movie,’ but I would mention it as more of a trigger warning, in that, if you’ve known someone who has dealt with Alzheimer’s or dementia, this movie will hit you.
I would instead maybe call Dick Johnson is Dead a celebratory film — almost in that cheesy way that people are like “this isn’t a funeral, it’s a celebration of life.” Feeling dismayed that she barely has footage of her mother and sensing the beginning of the end for her father, director and documentarian Kirsten Johnson documents her father’s retirement from his psychology practice and move into her apartment and uses stuntmen to film different versions of his own death. Kirsten delves into his life up to this point, the family and home he has built, and the people he has loved. Even though we get the sense that he isn’t exactly who he was for all of that, we as viewers are able to celebrate Dick’s life alongside his daughter.
Or maybe I would call it a family movie. Not a family movie in that you can watch it with your kids, but a movie about family. Over the course of at least two years, we get to see intimate details of Dick and Kirsten’s relationship. They are best of friends with a loving rapport despite the early signs of Alzheimer’s beginning to set in. They share jokes and reminisce and hang out together. Kirsten is unafraid to tell him when he’s making a mistake or has done something wrong, and finds the perfect like to walk — not scolding, not embarrassing, but still firm. Dick, in turn, takes everything with as much dignity as he possibly can.
But if I had to pick, I think maybe I’d call this an end-of-life movie. It’s not necessarily as much about death as it is about the end of life. The difference is in the grace that we have to face it with, or lack thereof; it’s in the deterioration of everything that we once knew; and in the people who we leave behind. Dick Johnson is Dead is an end-of-life movie because it’s not just about someone who is going to die, but it’s entirely from the perspective of that specific person’s daughter, friend, and confidante. It’s an incredibly person film with a very sharp point of view, but its about the one thing that every human has in common, and so, even if you don’t know someone who has suffered from Alzheimer’s, or if no one you know has ever even died, this film will still find a way to reach into your chest and give your heart a few extra-firm pumps that will manifest in laughter, tears, celebration, an existential dread, and the fortitude to shake it off.
- Back to the Future is perfect. Throughout all of Zemeckis’ comedies so far the one thing he’s done incredibly well is create these puzzles of a screenplay where everything is set up and knocked down with exacting precision without ever making me realize what a puzzle it truly is, at least not while I’m watching it. Back to the Future is basically the ultimate example of that.
- The Young Girls of Rochefort is almost worth watching just for the set design. The colors of every single detail of this movie are vibrant and wonderfully reflect the inherent artificiality of a movie-musical. Somehow, despite all the faux-shallowness, Demy manages to make this movie about malaise.
- I think I liked X2 more than its predecessor. It really jumps right in and starts deepening some of these characters and really delves into the mutant issues in a much subtler way than the first movie did. I’m pretty sure this also set the record for most times the word “spillway” has ever been said in a movie.
- There’s something about the energy of But I’m A Cheerleader that’s just wrong enough to throw the balance of the movie off. It elicits quite a few laughs and even when the set design is cheap-looking its very striking and funny on its own. Natasha Lyonne is a cheerleader who is the last person in her life to realize she’s gay. Her parents ship her off to a conversion therapy camp and the movie takes off into a heightened comedy but even at its best doesn’t quite nail the tone.
- Death Proof is fun even though it kind of forgets about its b-movie aesthetic about halfway through and becomes much more of a typical Tarantino movie. The big action setpiece at the end is awesome, and I love that its performed by a stunt woman playing herself, for once really giving a stuntperson a chance to both shine and get credit for the work they do, but I feel like it takes a long time to get there because Tarantino becomes so obsessed with his own dialogue.
- I think Bloodshot actually hurts itself when it tries to become something more than just a dumb-fun Vin Diesel action movie. It’s a superhero origin story based on a comic book — something that we only get nowadays from Marvel or DC movies, or things commenting on or making fun of Marvel or DC movies — that is intended to begin a franchise, but it tries to get a little meta in regards to dumb-fun Vin Diesel action movies. It’s a smart and entertaining twist, but once you start taking the movie a little more serious, it becomes a lot more confounding. It goes for something more than what we initially think it’s going to be, so its respectable in that light, but it’s still not very good.
- On its face, The Way Back looks like a pretty conventional sports drama — a divorced alcoholic finds redemption coaching a high school basketball team — and in a lot of ways, it does borrow much of those conventions. But it does give it enough depth and tweak enough from what we expect to really make it a worthwhile entry into the genre.
- It’s feeling a little like a refrain with all the straight-to-video Disney sequels, but Pocahontas II is a shorter, worse version of its original with forgettable songs and shoddy animation. I guess it’s just as racist as the first one, so that’s new. Pocahontas goes to England and has to start conforming to their society and John Smith is dead so she’s with John Rolfe now who looks exactly like John Smith except his hair is a different color and he doesn’t sound like Mel Gibson.
- For some reason, while I was watching Shoot the Piano Player, I couldn’t get Greta Gerwig’s Little Women out of my head. Both Truffaut and Gerwig debuted as directors with incredibly personal coming-of-age films about a young student serving as a self-surrogate dealing with antagonistic or indifferent relationships both at home and at school and yearning to break free. They then both immediately followed that debut with an adaptation of a novel that is on its face, entirely different from the respective director’s own life, but is still imbued with much of the same themes that their previous work hit upon. It’s almost like working your entire life to make your first piece of public art is incredibly difficult, but you also had your entire life up to that point to work on it, and instead of telling a second, entirely new story, both directors wanted to find something established and put their stamp on it. Shoot the Piano Player, about a former star pianist who is laying low as the entertainment in a Parisian dive before his small-time crook of a brother involves him in some shit, isn’t as good as The 400 Blows, but what is? Either way, I’m really looking forward to Greta Gerwig’s Jules and Jim.
- I was really looking forward to The Visit in our Shyamalan-a-thon, because it was supposed to be a port in the storm — a return to form after a run of really bad movies, complete with a simplistic psychological thriller set-up and a Shyamalan plot twist. And the twist is fun (even if it occurred to me a little earlier than I think the movie wanted it to and the way it is introduced is pretty clunky) but it doesn’t re-jigger everything that precedes it in as unsettling a manner as it should and can’t really make up for the awful dialogue and the unnatural feeling of the two central performances. It really strains against its found footage constraints, with Shyamalan basically telling the story that he wants to tell in a specific form rather than taking an approach that would marry form and function greater by creating a story that is best told via found footage. By far the best part of this movie was Deanna Dunagan as the grandmother and all the weird shit she does. It is legitimately funny at times, in a way that I completely believe it is supposed to be.
- I’m a goy with relatively little understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it’s long history, so my perspective on Spielberg’s often-overlooked 2005 film Munich is that of an outsider, or at least, a novice and should be considered as much, but, I found Munich to be a long, languid indictment of both sides of the issue, documenting a thirst for revenge and exploring the many definitions of the idea of home. This period in Spielberg’s career is possibly his most interesting; in the post-9/11 decade, he cranked out interesting, politically relevant movies at an incredible pace. In the four years between 2001 and 2005, he made AI Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, War of the Worlds, and capped it all off with Munich. It’s a violent film with a lot to say that really takes its time saying it and makes you work to understand it, but it may just be the most underrated movie of Spielberg’s long and storied career.