Delayed Reaction: In America

Premise: An Irish immigrant family moves to New York City and gets used to their new life there.

The thing about In America is that it's a sentimental movie and it has no interest in hiding it. It's a modest American Dream movie that is happy to stay uncomplicated. I get why some people have very strong feelings about it. The central family is well cast. I love whenever real siblings are used in a movie. It's hard to get authentic child performances, so Sarah and Emma Bolger being actual sisters is a nice cheat code of sorts.

 

It all does feel a little sanitized. The Irish immigrant experience isn't the one I'm worried about being perilous in 2000s America. Their apartment building of drug addicts feels surprisingly unthreatening. And Djimon Hounsou dips his toes into "magical negro" waters. There's room for criticism here, although I think the film isn't trying to disguise that it's opting for a rosier view of its story than it could.

 

I like that it's only 1h45m but feels longer in the good way. Like how Clueless or Ladybird are short but cover a lot. In America is almost episodic. Sarah Bogler's narration keeps pushing the story forward so it never gets too bogged down in the details. I just keep coming back to this is a pleasant movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Edge of Doom

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

 

Connection to Wonder Man: Both Edited by Daniel Mandell

 

Premise: After the death of his mother, a distraught man kills a priest then battles with his conscience about what to do next.

 

Sorry for the delay, but I'm back with this "Century in a Month" project, although it's looking more like two months at this point. I opted to use the film editor as the linking element with the last movie, however I forgot something. Bad editing jumps out at you. Good editing, to the non-professional, is practically invisible. So I can't point to much in terms of how Wonder Man and Edge of Doom are similar except that I didn't notice much about the editing for either. Oh well.

 

Taken on its own, Edge of Doom is a heavy-handed morality movie. Many films from this era you can feel actively pushing against what the Hays Code would allow. Edge of Doom on the other hand I can't imagine having much trouble at all. Then again, maybe the amount of religious discussion or the actual murder scene created problems. With the Hays Code, I never doubt any level of prudishness.

 

I do like the structure of this as a story a priest is telling another priest. Narration feels less intrusive when it's clear why there's a narrator, and you can always apply the extra level of analyzation to ask why he's telling this story and if he's trying to pull a different lesson out of it than someone else would. The film doesn't examine that, but it's implicit.

 

I don't know much about director Mark Robson, but I don't suspect that suspense is his forte. I never felt that nervous for Farley Granger's Martin, possibly because he actively annoyed me. This is based on a novel, and I can't help but wonder if Martin's motivations are a little clearer in the book. In the film, his break with the church is flimsy and his desperation to give his mother a big funeral feels forced. I did like that the police like him for a crime but it's the wrong crime. That's a nice twist. Ultimately, there's too much forced piousness in this for me to ever get completely on board.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Wonder Man

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to Foreign Correspondent: Both nominated for Special Effects Oscar

 

Premise: A comedian gets killed by a mob boss then appears as a ghost to his bookish twin brother to put his killers away.

 

Connecting Foreign Correspondent to Wonder Man with the Special Effects Oscar was arbitrary when I chose it, but it made for a fun way to watch Wonder Man. You see, these are very different special effects movies. Foreign Correspondent of more of a set piece movie. I’m sure it got its nomination for the plane crash sequence. That’s an intricate little piece of production design and coordination to simulate a crash. Wonder Man is on the other end of the spectrum. The effects were the selling point of the movie. Its Oscar nominations were all technical.

I definitely liked Wonder Man less. It’s tough for a movie that relies on effects to age well. A good performance is ageless. A good effect can be built upon. Many of the ghostly effects in Wonder Man look good for 1945. I’ve seen them all before though and they just aren’t that impressive. Like, there’s a scene where ghost Danny Kaye is clearly climbing up some stairs that are blurred out to make it look like he’s climbing in midair. The tricks that won it the Oscar that year are just a few in bag of tricks for lesser movies a few years later.

That means the rest of the movie is what needed to sell it to me. On a technical level, Danny Kaye is doing great work. He plays both brothers well and does some impressive physical work. He hits every beat hard. That’s also what wore on me fast. He’s a lot. There’s a type of actor who struggled to understand that they didn’t need to play for the back row anymore. It looks like he eventually moved to variety series for TV, and that makes a lot more sense for him. His Wonder Man character(s) was better for a 10-minute sketch than a 90-minute movie.

I do miss the days when a movie that’s thin on plot would just throw a musical stage number in full for no reason.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Movie Reaction: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Formula: The Jerk * Grey Gardens

(Look, there's not a good formula for this. I tried. It's part documentary, part search for family movie, part comedy all in a weird package)

 

Sometimes a movie is as simple as "let creative people be creative". Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is Jenny Slate doing a funny voice. It's Slate riffing as this tiny shell character. It's the production team coming up with inventive ways that a 1-inch creature would survive around the house. This movie is nonsense, but it's nonsense with so much sincerity and ingenuity that it works.

 

As the title suggests, Marcel is a shell with shoes and an eye. He lives with his similarly structured grandmother at a house that has become an Airbnb. When an amateur filmmaker moves in and decides to make a documentary about Marcel, it becomes a story about how Marcel lost the rest of his family then a quest to find them. Largely, it's an authentic looking mockumentary that appears like the filmmaker started recording and hoped the story will find itself.

 

Perhaps my favorite thing about the movie is how clearly most of the time it's Jenny Slate trying to get director and costar Dean Fleischer-Camp to laugh. This is so clearly a project made by friends (and in Slate and Fleischer-Camp's case, ex-spouses who are on good terms). I know it's a proper movie by professionals who know how to give the appearance of spontaneity. I assume most of this is scripted, because with the animation and story, it has to be. But I can feel the writing sessions in the movie. This was an idea that grew naturally from a funny voice to a YouTube short to a film made outside the major studios. This movie didn't have to get made. It was a pleasure that they got to make it.

 

Slate's voice as Marcel is a masterstroke. She doesn't entirely disappear in it, which is why so much of her humor is still in it, but it's a voice that allows for so much vulnerability too. It's impossible not to love Marcel within a couple minutes. And getting Isabella Rossellini as Marcel's grandmother is great too. I always expect Rossellini to be a more serious performer than she really is. She's actually quite funny and her voice has a lot of warmth.

 

I'm a big fan of movies that try and take a bit too far only to discover that they have even more ideas than they can fit in it. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On should be a short film, a skit, or a few YouTube videos, but Slate, Fleischer-Camp, and company find a really lovely hook with Marcel's search for his family, never lose the thread of what makes this funny, and keep coming up with new ideas until the very end. It's a genuinely happy and good-spirited movie that leaves some room for introspection. I do think it hangs on a couple minutes too long at the end, but I understand why it does. And it's a self-selecting kind of movie. If you are someone who is watching this, you're probably someone who would really enjoy it.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Gray Man

Premise: A CIA assassin becomes the hunted when he gets ahold of some important intel that the agency doesn’t want him to have.

 

OK. This is a real movie.

 

That’s in contract to my constant complaint with Netflix movies. So many of them either seem like they were made by an algorithm or were clearly an idea that no one else wanted. Very rarely do I watch a Netflix movie and regret that I didn’t get to see it on the big screen. Nowhere has that been truer than their blockbuster offerings. The best-case scenario for their big action movies tends to be that they feel like action movies that bombed in theaters. For example, let’s take two Chris Hemsworth movies: Extraction and 12 Strong. One was an underwhelming theatrical release. The other was a massive hit for Netflix that broke records at the time. And there’s a good chance the average person couldn’t tell me which is which. I can more succinctly say it like this: How many Netflix movies would’ve made $100 million if they were properly released in theaters? I’d argue none, or maybe Red Notice barely.

 

While far from a perfect movie, The Gray Man feels like a proper action movie. Netflix reportedly spent $200 million to make it. They brought in Infinity War and Endgame directors the Russo Brothers and collected a group of stars and future stars for it. And I was genuinely disappointed that I couldn’t watch this on the big screen, in a dark theater, with overpriced concessions.

 

All that said, this does feel a lot more like The Tomorrow War (an aspiring blockbuster with a 9-digit budget that Paramount dumped to Amazon who released it exclusively on Prime) than a Fast and Furious or Mission: Impossible. Part of that is due to familiar IP driving the box office, but a lot of it is because The Gray Man lacks a clear hook. The Russos, while very good at blockbusters, aren’t a draw by themselves like a Christopher Nolan. The cast is pretty brilliant. A-listers like Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans. Breakout talents like Ana de Armas, Jessica Henwick, and Rege-Jean Page. Overqualified veterans like Billy Bob Thornton and Alfre Woodard. Hell, when they needed a kid for the movie, they got the little girl from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood who people wanted to get an Oscar nomination for (Julia Butters). In 1996, this is the formula for a Mission: Impossible-sized hit. Unfortunately, these days, a good cast is something audiences are happy about when they start watching but not the draw itself. Down to the name - The Gray Man - this movie does feel pretty anonymous. It’s a spy action movie about assassins. There are many, many movies like this. It’s hard to say how this is all that different from The 355 just this year.

 

I’m a bit torn on the cast. Technically, I like what everyone is doing. Ryan Gosling playing his Drive character by way of his The Nice Guys character is delightful. He’s a good movie star, but without anything intriguing about his character to play off, all he’s really left with is generic quipping here. Chris Evans is excellent as a cocky antagonist. That alone isn’t really enough though. He already had Knives Out to remind people that Captain America is actually at his best as an aggro jerk. “Chris Evans as villain” isn’t that intriguing on its own. I like Ana de Armas getting to follow up on the action-star tease we got in No Time to Die. She has a similarly generic spy character though.

 

Despite all my negativity so far, I really did enjoy this movie. I like the cast full of actors doing things they are good at. The Russos know how to use $200 million for an action movie. There are a variety of fun set pieces. It’s less reliant on CGI than their Marvel work, and I like the tactility of the punches and explosions. In terms of delivering an entertaining blockbuster movie, I think it’s a resounding success. The problem I have with it is that it’s so anonymous. This is the kind of movie I could watch a sequel of and not realize that it’s a sequel*.

 

*What’s the franchise? Gosling’s Six character? Hardly. Tell me one detail about him.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Where the Crawdads Sing

Formula: A Time to Kill / Primal Fear

 

I say this a lot, but it bears repeating. Novels and film are different media. There’s often a lot about them that overlap well, however that’s not a guarantee. Film has trouble with a first-person narration. Writing alone can’t convey physical images the same way as film. There is a long history of taking crime best sellers and turning them into films. John Grisham and others made a cottage industry of it in the 90s in particular, and it’s continued with the likes of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. Where the Crawdads Sing is the next in this lineage. A lot more gets lost in translation with this adaptation than this film can withstand though.

 

The film (and book) tells the story of Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones). She’s a little girl whose family lives isolated in the marsh near a small North Carolina town. Her father is an abusive alcoholic who drives everyone in the family away until it’s just Kya and him. He eventually leaves too, leaving Kya alone to fend for herself. She raises herself to adulthood, becoming a town outcast along the way. She does eventually bond with a local boy-then-man named Tate (Taylor John Smith) who teaches her to read before he disappears for college. Later, she becomes involved with the local quarterback (Harris Dickinson) whose mysterious murder she gets charged with. The film is actually set during the murder trial with flashbacks to her past mixed in.

 

Based on the movie alone, I have no idea why this book became such a sensation. I have guesses, but nothing that showed up in the movie. I imagine the language of the book is distinctive and poetic. The kind of language that reads well, but when said out loud by a human, sounds unnatural. There’s plenty of that in the movie. I suspect the romance is a selling point of the book. There’s a Nicholas Sparks feel to the setup of Kya’s pseudo-love triangle. The problem is that it’s pretty obvious which guy is right for Kya and which one will turn out to be a jerk. The biggest swing of the movie is how it structures everything around the trial. From what I’ve gathered, the book doesn’t do that, and that makes a lot of sense. The beats of the trial aren’t structured in a way that naturally invite flashbacks. I wasn’t watching the trial play out with the question of if Kya was responsible for the murder. The film makes it look like a town smear job the entire time, which telegraphs the plot twist that’s obviously coming. So, to recap, the dialogue is unnatural, there’s no mystery to the love triangle, and there’s no tension to the murder trial.

 

Something specific to this being a film is that it’s really hard to cast a character like Kya. In no world does Daisy Edgar-Jones look like someone who raised herself in the swamps. In the book, Kya’s attractiveness can be more abstract. She’s just pretty enough that a couple guys could like her but she’s wild enough to be a town reject. It’s harder in a film, because we they need to find someone hardened by years of scrapping in the marsh who is also a delicate romantic lead. Daisy Edgar-Jones much more describes the latter than the former. So, every time someone in the film talks about her like she’s Boo Radley, then I see a pretty woman in a sundress, it doesn’t compute. It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t bother me if the rest of the movie worked.

 

It’s a shame because I actually think Daisy Edgar-Jones is pretty good in this. She works really well as a romantic lead in something. Despite Taylor John Smith and Harris Dickinson being pretty anonymous love interests, she finds believable chemistry with them. She’s really likable throughout. Maybe too likable. Whenever they talk about her as the town outcast, I’d think “But she’s so pleasant to everyone”.

 

Where the Crawdads Sing is a frustrating movie. It’s not very good, however, it’s not all that far from being pretty good. Very little in the movie works, but those things don’t miss by much. If they would’ve done a slightly better job showing how she was an outcast, then her struggle in the trial makes more sense. If it was less clear who the good love interest was then the question of how the one died is much more compelling. In the same way that small errors compound into big ones, small improvements could’ve compounded into a good movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Girl in the Picture

Premise: An investigation into the death of a young woman uncovers many new truths about her and her father.

 

Netflix is getting really good at “Dateline Documentaries”. These are true crime documentaries that stay right around 90 minutes. There’s nothing particularly cinematic about them. They look much more like those 2-hour Dateline special investigations. On the one hand, I’m glad Netflix doesn’t force all these into multi-part documentary series. As a series The Girl in the Picture has several good revelations that could end an episode and make you move right to the next, but there isn’t that much content to fill out the rest of an episode. So a movie works much better. On the other hand, I do wish Netflix had more of a branding for these movies. Put them in a collection called “CrimeFlix” or something. They don’t need to be moved to episodes of a series like a Black Mirror. Just have a signifier to let me know The Girl in the Picture or The Tinder Swindler are more TV news magazine than documentary film.

 

Even though The Girl in the Picture isn’t theater quality, it’s a good story. There are a lot of twists. Even when I saw the twists coming, I was amazed that this was a true story and not a Law & Order episode. This story covers many decades. Unearthing the truth was as much about investigation as it was luck. It was interesting hearing all the ways the story branched out. It doesn’t matter all that much that the filmmaking is nothing special. Sometimes I love getting sucked into a random Dateline or 20/20. The same goes for a random Netflix crime doc.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Man from Toronto

Premise: Kevin Hart is a normal guy who gets mistaken for a notorious killer.

 

Kevin Hart isn’t my favorite comic actor out there, but I do respect that he’s found a formula that works for him and doesn’t want to rock the boat too much. The formula is “Hart + imposing actor = funny”. He’s done this several times with Dwayne Johnson. He made two Ride Alongs with Ice Cube. Naturally, it’s what he’s doing in The Man from Toronto with Woody Harrelson*.

 

*Interestingly, when Hart instead pairs with someone less imposing like Will Ferrell (Get Hard) or Josh Gad (The Wedding Ringer) the films haven’t done as well.

 

The Man from Toronto is a “Netflix churn” movie. It feels like a lot of other movies to the point where I wonder if an algorithm made it. I watched it as low-impact viewing on a Saturday morning that I could ignore, guilt-free, if I wanted. I got a couple small laughs out of it. Hart and Harrelson both know their personas well and how to get a laugh out of nothing with them. I know this sounds like damning with faint praise, but The Man from Toronto is a functional movie that looks like a movie. It cost $75 million and looks like it cost that much. There’s a strong “afternoon TBS watch” vibe to it. I’m glad my only option was to watch this on Netflix. On Netflix, it was fine. At a theater would’ve been underwhelming.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Movie Reaction: Thor: Love & Thunder

Formula: Thor: Ragnarök / Thor: The Dark World

 

There’s a thing about the MCU that we all intuitively know but forget whenever a new film comes out: the MCU is a series. We’ve never seen anything quite like it, so our attempts to make sense out of it really mucks up our ability to judge it. With most franchises, there’s a movie then a sequel. You judge the sequel by how it compares to the first movie and the success of the sequel tends to dictate if there will be another sequel. The MCU throws all those metrics off. What do I compare Thor: Love & Thunder to? You’d think it’s the last Thor movie but that came out 5 years ago with about a dozen MCU movies in between. In a normal franchise, I’d look to the last movie, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but that’s not exactly comparable. Or there’s the larger question of the phases. Should I rate a movie by how it sets up the conclusion of some phase? And that’s where I realize it might be best to look at MCU movies as episodes in a series.

 

Think of a show like Community. Some episodes stand on their own. Others link different episodes to another. Parts of each lead to pay off in later episodes. When I think of Community, I think of it in terms of seasons or the entire series, not individual episodes. I remember watching Community week-to-week. Some episodes I wouldn’t like as much and I’d pick at the individual episode for a week because that was the new content I had to look at. However, when I go back and watch the show now, it’s just a single episode. I barely even think of it on its own anymore. It has little impact on my overall feelings of the series. Sometimes, that episode I didn’t care for even gets better when I look at the season as a whole, because I can appreciate it as a touch of variety.

 

Thor: Love & Thunder appeals to me more as the movie between Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever than as a film taken on its own. I largely stay out of the “Is the MCU cinema?” discussion. First, because it’s a tedious, underdefined question. Second, because when I say that I look at it much more like a multi-billion-dollar TV series, I don’t mean that in any way as a bad thing. This post is a reaction of Love & Thunder though, so I should talk about it some specifically.

 

Love & Thunder is one of the best 29^th installments of a movie series you will find.

 

I’m being glib of course, but it’s also a nice reminder of what we are talking about. It’s the 2^nd Taika Waititi movie. It’s the 4^th Thor movie. It’s the 8 credited time Chris Hemsworth has appeared as Thor. Saying Love & Thunder is a little stale is like criticizing a James Bond movie for being formulaic (which I’ve done): true but not insightful. With Waititi at the helm, the Thor movies have moved into a less serious place in the MCU. I disagree with calling this an outright comedy due to several plot points, but Waititi has always been about puncturing a story structure without abandoning it. What We Do in the Shadows has fun with vampire stories without ever feeling like he dislikes them. Jojo Rabbit is about rejecting the Nazi ideology while recognizing their destructiveness. One can certainly argue about his effectiveness at doing this. He does the same thing with the Thor movies. He attempts to laugh at the premise of the movie while serious things are happening*.

 

*Little side rant here: All MCU movies are jokey, but the Waititi style isn’t the dominant style. It’s mostly him and James Gunn choosing this method. The rest of the MCU movies are more about the characters having fun for jokes. When the Avengers joke, it’s because they aren’t taking a particular mission or moment seriously. With Waititi and Gunn, they tend to poke fun at the entire concept of the movie. That’s playing with dynamite, because it risks negating the entire movie.

 

This movie picks up a while after Endgame. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) gets back in shape and works with the Guardians of the Galaxy for a while. Thor is getting bored of the god life, as there’s little challenge and it’s quite lonely. Eventually he leaves the Guardians to check on New Asgard, which is run by King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), who is similarly bored by her administrative duties. The one person having a good time, it turns out, is Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). She actually has Thor powers now due to flimsy but plausible within the MCU reasons, although this new role is masking severe personal problems in her life. It turns out the trouble in New Asgard is tied to a guy called Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale) who has come to kill Thor because, well, as the name implies, Gorr kills gods. There’s some further mythology that leads them to meet some other gods, including Zeus (Russell Crowe), but ultimately it’s about Thor, Valkyrie, and Jane (aka The Mighty Thor) killing Gorr, who has taken Asgardian children as hostages.

 

I understand that Ragnarök has been a bigger critical and audience hit so far. It’s a more successful funny movie. It had more characters with history like Loki and Hulk who could be mined for jokes and had Jeff Goldblum, who simply is funny. I’m among the many who preferred Ragnarök, because it didn’t try to take on too much. Love & Thunder has higher ambitions yet it’s not as successful. Simply put, the jokes have more trouble landing. If you aren’t a big fan of Taika Waititi’s Korg, then his narration can get tedious. Thor, Valkyrie, and Jane are the other main returning characters and it’s harder to mine jokes out of their dynamic. Thor needs more of a straight man to play off. Unfortunately, he’s friends with Valkyrie now who is used to him and Jane is jokier than he is. It’s a weird balance, even though I do like seeing Natalie Portman in a more playful mood than I normally get to see her. Love & Thunder touches on more topics of death and loss this time. It makes sense, given Waititi’s success with Jojo Rabbit, but I didn’t find the mix of the comedy and serious that successful. Instead of complimenting each other, they tended to step on each other.

 

While I thought the movie had issues on a story and interpersonal dynamics level, I have few complaints about the cast individually. Hemsworth has really mastered the himbo appeal of Thor. Tessa Thompson is a walking sight gag as a peace-time leader. Natalie Portman, as I said, is a lot of fun as the Mighty Thor. I don’t know the truth to if there was any drama between her and the MCU before this, but I get why she would return for this movie. She gets a fun hero role and doesn’t have to show up in more if she doesn’t want to. I love “experimental prestige cinema Natalie”, but it’s nice to have “blockbuster Natalie” back for a minute. Bale’s Gorr is a villain who works best leaving you wanting more. Similar to Blanchett’s character in Ragnarök, he looks really cool in his few scenes but doesn’t really have the depth to show up much more than he does. He’s better than the role needs, and I’m happy that they didn’t get fooled into thinking that meant the movie needed more of him.

 

As I ranted about in the beginning though, more than anything, Thor: Love & Thunder feels like a MCU installment. It takes a stab at evolving the longest tenured Avenger. It took some swings with how it mixed the light and the dark elements of the story. It didn’t totally work for me, but it wasn’t an egregious failure. From a larger series perspective, I appreciated the step away from multiverses after the last two films leaned heavily on them. Perhaps the reason why I’ve been seeing people push to call this a comedy movie first is because Waititi isn’t the best director of action sequences out there, so don’t expect Russo Brothers quality there. Given that this is one of four MCU movies that will come out in a 12-month span, Love and Thunder is a fine holdover until I get my next fix.

 

Side Rant: OK, this may be very specific to my Twitter feed, but what’s up with this mini-social media trend of attacking how bad Thor: Love & Thunder looks? It’s not the most gorgeous movie I’ve ever seen, but it looks fine. I really don’t get people comparing budgets and quality with RRR. I liked RRR, but the CGI is not what you should be pointing to as the selling point on that one. Besides, CGI quality isn’t linear. You can get 90% of the way there a lot cheaper than that last 10%. That said, VFX crews all around have to work under crazy conditions (pay cuts and arbitrary time constraints), so I’m normally happy as long as any film looks better than The Mummy Returns.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: 25th Hour

Premise: A man make the rounds 24 hours before beginning a 7-year prison sentence for dealing drugs.

 

I have a lot of movie obsessions like “quantifying what makes a favorite movie” or “rhetorically disproving the existence of guilty pleasure”. A newer one I’ve found is when tuning out during a movie is on me vs. when it’s on the movie. Not every movie deserves 100% attention. Some don’t even work best with 100% attention. I would’ve liked Jackass Forever a lot less in a theater. When a bit has gone on too long or is too severe, I need to be able to check out for a moment to not spoil the mood. I watch most movies from home, and I’m also often dicking around on my computer or phone at the same time. This is fine with me because good movies will draw me in. For bad movies, the option to turn my attention away is often why I can finish them. There are some casualties in this. The Power of the Dog didn’t make a huge impact for me the first time I saw it. I had a nagging feeling about it, decided to rewatch, and loved it. But mostly this system works for me.

 

This brings me back to my original point though. How can I determine where the fault lies when a movie does little for me? I didn’t dislike 25^th Hour. It’s not one of the Spike Lee modes that I find exhausting by the end. It’s clearly a Spike Lee joint but it doesn’t beat me over the head to remind me that he made it. I like the performances. I like when Ed Norton goes skuzzy without going full American History X. And it’s another Philip Seymour Hoffman role to check off the list. The movie never did suck me in though. Well, not until the end. That Brian Cox monologue at the end, outlining a fictional future for Norton’s character is pretty great. It’s the kind of high note that makes me think I was missing something the first 2 hours. A great ending can gaslight even the most vigilant movie fan. In this case, I think it does crystalize a lot of the film’s mission statement. If nothing else, it pushed it into that ever-growing category of “films I didn’t like enough to want to watch them again but if I ever did find myself rewatching it, I’m sure I’d like it more”.

So, I don’t know what to do with 25^th hour. I was hoping to like it much more. I’m glad I did watch it though. Perhaps I may even rewatch someday if I commit to the Spike Lee filmography more. But, at the end of the day, it was a movie that I kept finding myself tuning out. Is that my fault for not giving it enough attention or the movie’s fault for not drawing me in better? 

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend