Delayed Reaction: Diner

Premise: A bunch of college-aged friends in 1959 hang out and stuff.

There are a lot of way to think of this movie. It's the first of Barry Levinson's "Baltimore Films". You can maybe look at this as the next step in boomer-malaise that was crystalized in The Big Chill and later thirtysomething. But, I find it easiest to look at this as American Graffiti with fewer cars. It's a lot of the same ideas. Giant cast of people you can still recognize nearly 40 years later. Episodic plot that's never in a hurry. Same era, different coast. I like all those things about it, especially the cast. It's nice to see Steve Guttenberg and Daniel Stern looking so young. It's unsettling to compare Micky Rourke then and now.

The movie has aged in some unfortunate ways. The "popcorn scene" obviously doesn't look great under a modern lens, especially since Rourke is practically rewarded for it. Stern yelling at his wife about his record collection was deeply unpleasant. The football quiz as well. There was something about this group of guys that made me not enjoy following them around. I'm not sure exactly what it was about them. On paper, are they really that different than the American Graffiti crowd or the baseball team from Everybody Wants Some!!? Perhaps it's the Barry Levinson of it all. Other than his back-to-back of Good Morning, Vietnam and Rain Man, I've been pretty cold on almost all of his movies. And even those two were more about great performances than anything in the direction or screenplays.

I get why this is a well-regarded movie though. It captures a time and a feeling well, even if that time and feeling was "1982 at the movies". All it takes is a fondness for Steven Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Tim Daly, or Paul Reiser to have an in with this movie. None of those guys hit my sweet spot though.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Her Smell

Premise: Becky Something is a hard-living punk-rocker who battles sobriety while trying to recapture the inspiration that rose her to fame.

My god, this movie was exhausting. Elisabeth Moss is a whirlwind. She tears through every scene and line with more gusto than most performers give in an entire movie. So much so, that later on, when she actually is quiet, the movie is still tense from wondering if it can last. Moss is absolutely great in this movie. It deserves to be rated among the best performances of 2019, although it was never going to get a nomination. This movie is deeply unpleasant by design. The first 90 minutes are about how miserable Becky can make everyone around her. The score is kind of amazing, because it just keeps throwing in sounds that made me think something awful was about to happen. I spent most of the movie waiting for this to lose all sense of reality and turn into The Neon Demon.

This is all paid off with the ending. At that point, we know how bad Becky can get. A relapse feels like it's just around the corner. Then she disappears briefly, and the movie has foregrounded why that's such a cause for concern. I love they it doesn't definitively say what happens. It almost doesn't matter if she's using again or not, because I'm just in favor of whatever allows her to give that closing performance.

This is absolutely Elisabeth Moss' movie, but Her Smell is overflowing with good supporting performances. Becky's bandmates (Gayle Rankin, Agyness Deyn) have the exact personalities of people you'd think could put up with Becky for so long. I really liked the younger female band with Cara Delevingne, Ashley Benson, and Dylan Gelula. They do a great job showing their unease with Becky in their first scene and irritation with her in their second scene. In general, the movie does a good job not letting Becky off the hook with the "troubled genius" label. She goes too far.

The length of the movie did lose me. I felt beat up by the end. Most acts, especially the one at the recording studio, crossed a point of diminishing returns. They were turning the screws just to see how much they could turn them. I imagine it was hard to cut out any amount of Moss' performance, but by the 2-hour mark, I was looking forward to the end in a way that I wasn't 90 minutes in.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Helvetica

Premise: A documentary about the overwhelming success of the Helvetica font.

The bar is set pretty low for this movie. It's about a font. There is no reason to expect this to be very good. I mean, it's. About. A. Font. The font that's literally used to look the least remarkable. The realistic expectation should be that if this doesn't put people to sleep, then it's a tremendous success.

Naturally, the most impressive thing about Helvetica is that it held my attention the entire time. It's a dry documentary. That's to be expected. It's a lot of experts attempting to dumb things down as much as they can, talking about font. What makes that especially tough is that a font is a supporting player. A font is supposed to call attention to what's being said, not to the font it's typed in. Think of it like this. If someone asked you what your favorite thing about a book you read is and the first thing you say is "I really liked the font", that speaks poorly of the book (for not being interesting) and the font (for distracting from the text).

I sure did come away from this with a greater appreciation of Helvetica though. I never thought about how omni-present it is. It's kind of like when some first tells to that YKK makes all the zippers on your clothes. I can't unsee it now.

The coolest moment is when they show the change in magazine advertisements before and after Helvetica. It's pretty amazing how quickly it exploded. It's also fascinating to see the small structural changes that are crucial in creating a font. They're all still the same letters after all. How different can the fonts really be? Answer: Very.

The documentary does sort of flail at the end. They try to get into the rebellion against Helvetica that followed, but it feels pretty rushed. Like they couldn't figure out if they needed to do another hour on the topic or cut it out completely.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Wild Rose

Premise: A Scottish woman, just released from prison, pursues her dream of becoming a Country singer.

I'm not a fan of this kind of movie. A self-sabotaging person relies on the patience and kindness of those around her to slowly reach some personal growth. I just don't have much sympathy for those characters. I rarely find them as likable or compelling as the filmmakers do. Sherrybaby is another example of this. Half Nelson too, although the part of that movie about Ryan Gosling's student did soften my stance on that movie overall. I remember being more favorable about Smashed, but that mainly had to do with Mary Elizabeth Winstead's performance. So, Wild Rose came in with a lot working against it in my eyes.

Wild Rose isn't the first movie to win me over with a song. Don't get me wrong. I liked other things about it. This is a nice breakout role for Jessie Buckley, who is already on her way to becoming a star. The film is thoughtful and small in a lot of good ways. But, really, it's the climactic song - "Glasgow (No Place Like Home)" - that made it all worth it. That's a great song for that movie. It fits perfectly and retroactively makes more of the movie worth it.

A small side rant: The Oscars need to find a way to make sure that songs like this get nominated. This year's actual Original Song nominees were pretty pitiful. The Harriet song only worked because Cynthia Erivo sang it. It's a joke that it got to a point where they were nominating the forgettable songs from Toy Story 4 and Breakthrough. The song from Rocketman was pretty unremarkable too. Only Frozen II's "Into the Unknown" had any significance to the movie it was in. I know that the Academy's rules can make it hard to find eligible songs sometimes, but "Glasgow (No Place Like Home)" was eligible. The category is fundamentally broken if more songs like it can't sneak into the nominee list.

As I began this post saying though, I wasn't a huge fan of the movie overall. Buckley's character spends most of the movie disappointed that she's being held responsible for past mistakes. Then, the world starts bowing to her wishes. As a mediocre maid, she stumbles onto an employer who gets invested in her country singing dream. When that falls apart, her mother just has a bag of money to hand over so she can leave her kids again and go to Nashville. I guess it's nice that she decides to come back at the end, but I really wasn't even rooting for her until there were about 10 minutes left in the movie.

This all is my way of saying that Wild Rose is a pretty good movie that personally didn't work for me...except for the song. That's a banger.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend