13 Going on 30 (Gary Winick, 2004) — A+
Emma. (Autumn de Wilde, 2020) — A
Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg, 2015) — A+
The Half Of It (Alice Wu, 2020) — B+
The Snowman (Tomas Alfredson, 2017) — D-
The Greatest Showman (Michael Gracey, 2017) — D+
The Heartbreak Kid (Farrelly Brothers, 2007) — D
Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) — A-
Dave (Ivan Reitman, 1993) — A
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) — A+
Noah (Darren Aronofsky, 2014) — B-
Game Over, Man! (Kyle Newacheck, 2018) — C-
Another 48 Hrs. (Walter Hill, 1990) — C+
It’s very cool to tear into Forrest Gump nowadays — a backlash that probably started the moment it beat out Pulp Fiction and Shawshank Redemption for 1994’s Best Picture at the Oscars and hasn’t really let up since. Right out of the gate I’ll say: it is endlessly watchable. Made by a talented filmmaker at the height of his powers and popularity with a seemingly unlimited budget and very talented actors, the movie goes down real easy. It’s the shortest 2.5 hour movie ever. It’s quotable and eccentric in ways that make it feel accessible without being obvious.
The problem with the movie is that it walks this weird line between satirical and saccharine to the point where it can feel unclear just exactly what the movie is trying to say. When it’s sharp, it’s not sharp enough, not planting enough of a red flag to signal to viewers what it’s trying to say. I can say that I definitely picked up on a few anti-military notions that I missed watching this movie over and over again on cable growing up. I’m specifically thinking of the scenes where Forrest is excelling at training and following orders: he’s so simple-minded and easy to control that his sergeant is truly impressed with his performance, saying he must have a high IQ and pegging him for a future general. There are little barbs at America like this throughout the movie, but they’re often so subtle and small that they are near imperceptible. They don’t always land as well as those military jokes, or land at all, but that’s a different type of failing than being empty-headed and nonsensical.
The movie can’t quite bring itself to truly treat Forrest with any cruelty, the cruelty that a more out-and-out satire would direct at a simple man who stumbles higher and higher in all levels of society despite no real talent or intelligence. It’s here that I will actually come to the movie’s defense. It would seem near impossible to be both sweet and pointed, and it’s even unclear if Zemeckis and company are intentionally hiding their satire in a big budget crowd pleaser or if they simply can’t bring themselves to vilify Forrest’s unearned upwards mobility because of how much they love him. As we love him. I think to make the movie closer in tone to its original source material, you can’t do it with Tom Hanks as Forrest. He’s just too damn likable. Either way, I think that the final product successfully hides the medicine in the sweetness. The nihilism is hidden behind empty aphorisms that feel like they mean something, but they almost always amount to nothing more than “life is unfair and there’s no discernible reason for that.” We’re given a list of famous people who were shot for no clear reason.
Forrest never questions anything. He follows orders, does as he’s told, and he ends up with more money than he knows what to do with. Meanwhile, Jenny, molested as a child by her father, goes to peace marches and Black Panther rallies and does her best to upend the status quo of the society that she lives in because she’s seen the absolute worst of it, and in return she is beaten by every boyfriend she has, develops an addiction, and dies of AIDS. I don’t see this as the movie celebrating Forrest for falling in line and punishing Jenny for questioning authority; I see it as an indictment of an America that celebrates those who fall in line and punishes those who don’t. Forrest Gump isn’t treating its characters in the way that they deserve because its set in a very real America — something it makes very, very clear through its weaving in and out of historical events — that doesn’t treat people the way they deserve. This movie is patriotic in the best kind of way, which is to say that it’s deeply critical of its country and it hides that criticism behind something sweet and whimsical with a nostalgia-feeding classic rock soundtrack and a lovable doofus of a main character. Is this on purpose, or is it a case of a filmmaker adapting something that wasn’t suited for his sensibilities? That’s impossible to tell. But does it matter? I don’t think it does.
- I love 13 Going on 30 and have seen it many times. Caught it on TV this week and wound down from all the election coverage very nicely.
- I read Emma in college but have no real recollection of it, and I have not seen any previous adaptations (except for Clueless). I’ve seen a bunch of Anya Taylor-Joy, especially recently with the two Shyamalans, Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, and Thoroughbreds, and I think this is her best yet. She’s striking and playful and withering. I haven’t always been big into period costume movies, but when they’re as funny, colorful, and charming as Emma., it’s hard not to like.
- I can’t believe when Bridge of Spies came out I thought it was just another Spielberg staid Oscar drama in the vein of Lincoln and War Horse, and I can’t believe I haven’t heard anything about it in the interim. I think this movie — about mutual respect between men of honor on opposites sides of a conflict, among other things — is easily in Spielberg’s top ten, and is possibly even one of his five best movies. It’s definitely his best film of the 2010s. Tom Hanks plays a prominent lawyer that the American government wrangles into representing a captured Soviet spy — Mark Rylance in an Oscar winning performance — and eventually into negotiating a hostage exchange in Berlin. It sort of kicks off the run of Tom Hanks being an honorable, charming, and meticulously competent man in a high-profile position that is basically still being added to (Sully, Inferno, The Post, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and Greyhound), and it truly sets the template for that. Hanks’ James Donovan is a principled man in a murky gray world, but not in any obvious, Norman Rockwell’s Free Speech kind of way; the movie has a pretty light touch, so its central tenet is subtle but unmistakable: everyone is someone.
- The Half of It is a cute queer coming-of-age dramedy with a few welcome twists, though I found the performances lacking and much of the visuals bland. The set-up — the essay-for-hire girl is hired by a football player to write love letters from him to the girl they both have a crush on — is perfect for this genre and even if it feels like you can see exactly where it’s going all along, it’s enjoyable watching it fulfill that and even throws in a handful of little surprises, too.
- The Snowman felt completely incomprehensible. It’s never good when a movie reveals its twist and I don’t really know why.
- I realize that the songs are the most popular aspect of The Greatest Showman, and that makes sense, because the songs are pretty good. But their incorporation into the movie? The rest of the movie itself? The stories relationship to reality? I don’t know. I didn’t find it compelling because it mostly felt like a bunch of maxims and pithy sayings about perseverance and outsiders — even though Barnum himself isn’t even an outsider.
- Ben Stiller as the Eddie Cantrow role in a remake of The Heartbreak Kid seems like perfect casting, and I suppose it works out fairly well in that respect. But the rest of the movie in no way lives up to the original. It finds a ton of humor in gay panic and misogynist tropes — to be expected from the Farrelly brothers. The movie’s plot seems to affirm the same credos as Elaine May’s 1972 version, but all the moments in between those important plot points make it seem like the movie doesn’t understand those credos.
- In Dave, the White House secretly finds and employs a presidential lookalike for a photo-op, but when the real president suffers a stroke and ends up in a coma, the stand-in becomes the real thing. It sounds like a farce and ripe for satire, but its actually much more pleasant and hopeful than I expected. Kevin Kline (in a dual role) is just a delight, playing presidential, bumbling, principled, goofy, cold, and warm without any sign of an effort.
- Citizen Kane looms like some kind of mandatory, essential homework viewing. But it’s no slog. In fact, it feels bold and modern and vital. It’s not “good for its time”; in fact, it’d be good if it was made today.
- I get what Aronofsky was going for with Noah and it’s an admirable try. It’s a Bible adaptation with a huge budget that plays everything completely literally and with brutal, harsh portrayals. I respect the ballsiness of the movie and love some of the huge, montaged visuals, but the human aspects sometimes feel at odds with both what we expect in an allegorical setting like this and what we know of humans in our world.
- Game Over, Man! is an action comedy from (and starring) the Workaholics guys that fails to live up to even the worst moments of that show. I was never a huge fan of the show, but I’ve found both DeVine and Anderson likable in various film and TV roles since. This movie, directed by Workaholics co-creator Kyle Newacheck, is mostly unfunny and nonsensical and can’t even be bothered to whole-ass the emotional aspects between the three leads.
- Another 48 Hrs. actually finds a pretty organic and believable way to bring back Nick Nolte’s detective and Eddie Murphy’s criminal as partners. Murphy is funnier than he is in the original — likely given more slack and more room to shine considering his meteoric rise in the intervening years since his debut and this sequel — and the movie walks a good line between hard-nosed and comedic, Hill’s sensibilities always pulling it more towards the former, but can feel kind of disjointed at times. The plot doesn’t feel as tight as it should and the reveal doesn’t feel as surprising as it could.