Mission: Impossible — Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018) — B+
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (Gore Verbinski, 2006) — B-
Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976) — A+
Julie & Julia (Nora Ephron, 2009) — B+
Demolition Man (Marco Bramilia, 1993) — B
American Animals (Bart Layton, 2018) — A-
Avatar: The Last Airbender (M. Night Shyamalan, 2010) — C
The Goonies (Richard Donner, 1985) — A
Artemis Fowl (Kenneth Branagh, 2020) — D+
Extraction (Sam Hargrave, 2020) — D
Mixed Nuts (Nora Ephron, 1994) — C+
The Tamarind Seed (Blake Edwards, 1974) — A
The BFG (Steven Spielberg, 2016) — C+
Can You Keep A Secret? (Elise Duran, 2019) — D
The best movie I watched this week was Sidney Lumet’s Network. I was at my parents house for a night and they left it up to me. My mom always wants to watch old classics and nobody wants to watch them with her because I’m never there, so I decided to try and split things down the middle: Network is from 1976, so not quite in the Casablanca or Philadelphia Story range of old classics that she likes, but old and classic nonetheless, while also feeling relatively modern and even relevant.
It’s somewhat of an outlier in Lumet’s long and prolific directing career. A large majority of his 46 feature films are in some way about the law, whether it focuses on criminals, cops, or lawyers. From the very beginning, with his 1957 adaptation of a Reginald Rose teleplay locked inside a jury room, 12 Angry Men, through great movies like The Fugitive Kind, The Offence, Serpico, Murder on the Orient Express, Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, Night Falls on Manhattan, and right up until the end, his final film about two men who decide to rob a jewelry store, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Lumet worked best when he was commenting on the criminal justice system, all of its flaws, and the people trapped inside it. There were some other outliers, of course, notably Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Group, and The Wiz, but none were as successful as Network.
Network was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning four. Both Peter Finch and William Holden were nominated for Best Actor — something that has only been done 12 times throughout history — with Finch winning posthumously. Faye Dunaway won Best Actress, Beatrice Straight’s five minutes of screen time became the shortest ever for an Academy Award winning performance, and Paddy Chayefsky won Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.
The movie is gripping from the very beginning: watching a professional news anchor in a professional news setting on a television say anything other than the news can feel that way, and the movie really leans into that. The script starts with the question, “What would happen if an anchor had an on-air breakdown?” and follows that question to a logical conclusion — a conclusion that would seem true even if it happened today in 2020. The movie takes on capitalism, entertainment, the idea of information as a business, and more very deftly and successfully.
- I finally watched The Goonies after all these years. I think part of the procrastination was knowing that it’s too late for me to ever fully enjoy this movie the way that I would’ve if I had watched it when I was 10 years old. But it was quite enjoyable, nonetheless; truly a defining aspect of what we picture Amblin movies to be, what with the kids on bikes and Rube Goldberg machines and the us-against-the-world attitude. I do wish that the map and the clues had been articulated clearer. We barely see the map that they’re following on-screen and have to rely on Sean Astin’s Mikey and his interpretation of it.
- Mission: Impossible — Fallout was good, though I do kind of wish they had kept going with a different director for every single entry. Having now finished watching the entire series for the first time, I think my favorite was McQuarrie’s first, Rogue Nation, followed by Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol.
- With that franchise finished I decided to jump right into another with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which I think I’ve seen before but didn’t really remember. I loved the first movie in the series — it was one that my family had on DVD and we used to watch it a lot, including in the car on road trips. Dead Man’s Chest is kind of fun and really ups the ante on wacky stunt hijinks. It’ll be interesting to continue watching and see if I agree with the lackluster critical reaction to the later movies.
- American Animals definitely finds a unique way to tell its art heist, I’m just not sure if I liked all the little “true story” touches thrown in — the tricks got a little too cute for me. The movie includes interviews and footage of the real-life figures woven into the fictionalized portrayal of the story, often cutting between the two or overlapping in clever ways that are on occasion too clever for its own good. Almost like the movie doesn’t think it has an interesting enough story to stand by itself, but I don’t think that’s true. I’m always down for a well-done heist movie, and this story is riveting enough when it’s that.
- I watched Demolition Man in a Zoom party and it’s the perfect kind of movie for a Zoom party — lots of action, not a ton of important dialogue, goofy, rife with mockable moments, and plenty of fun, including a really hammy performance from Wesley Snipes as a 1996 criminal unfrozen in 2032 and a typical Stallone performance from Sylvester as the ’96 cop they bring in to catch him. That is, it’s fun if you don’t think about how the movie is essentially saying that peaceful policing won’t work and advocating for the outside-the-rules, instinct-based style of law enforcement that Stallone’s John Spartan lives and works by.
- Julie & Julia is great, of course, though it’s sad that it’s Nora Ephron’s last film. You should probably read this great piece on it by my friend Chris in Entropy magazine. Meryl doing the Julia Child voice goes a little bit over the top for me, but how can you not love Amy Adams and everything she does?
- Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen the TV show at all and therefore have nothing to compare it to, but I didn’t think The Last Airbender was as much of a disaster as it’s been made out to be. The performances were mostly pretty bad, but halfway through our Shyamalan marathon, I think it’s better than Lady in the Water and The Happening.
- I read the Artemis Fowl books when I was younger, but honestly have only the slightest recollection of them. Because I knew the movie’s gotten criticism for being unintelligible and confusing, I tried really hard to sit and watch it closely. Instead, I fell asleep halfway through. I picked it up again in the morning, but honestly, it all just goes in one ear and right out the other. Kenneth Branagh’s directorial career sure has taken a strange turn over the last decade.
- I didn’t like Extraction very much. Watching it in such close proximity to Demolition Man made me realize that we don’t really get many of those schlocky good-bad action movies anymore, they’re mostly just way too serious and bad! Happy to report that Chris Hemsworth is still very handsome, though.
- Nora Ephron followed her most successful movie — Sleepless in Seattle — with a bizarre Christmas movie starring Steve Martin, Rita Wilson, Madeline Kahn, Anthony LaPaglia, Juliette Lewis, Liev Schrieber, and a pre-SNL departure Adam Sandler. It’d be hard to make a truly disastrous film with a comedic cast like that, and it’s mostly the cast (with small parts for Garry Shandling, Parker Posey, Jon Stewart, and Rob Reiner) that keeps Mixed Nuts afloat. The film never really nails its tone: wacky sometimes, dark without any sort of acknowledgement, rarely laugh-out-loud funny.
- Smack in the middle of a prolific, distinguished, and sometimes-spotty comedy career, Blake Edwards made a rare dramatic film with The Tamarind Seed, with his wife, Julie Andrews, and Egyptian legend Omar Sharif at the center of a globetrotting romance between two citizens of the world — she a British civil servant and he a Soviet attache — during the Cold War. Edwards’ script, adapted from a novel by Evelyn Anthony, builds a strong enough foundational relationship between its central figures to last the movie’s two-hour runtime and provide something genuine enough for us to believe in.
- Spielberg doing Roald Dahl seems like a match made in heaven, and there’s a lot that works: the childlike wonder, the visualization of the BFG and the way he moves, both the central performances. But it turns out there’s not much that happens in The BFG, and the movies plot-less narrative comes to an end eventually.
- It’s not all that often that I won’t finish a movie that I’ve started. I did actually finish Can You Keep A Secret? but there was a moment with about ten minutes left that I seriously contemplated turning it off. Only ten minutes left! I was hoping for a stupid, charming rom-com and got tedious, stupid rom-com. The “thing that breaks them up” is just nonsense and I couldn’t’ve cared any less about what they were fighting about.