Mini-Reviews for February 26 - March 4, 2018

It's that time of the month, where Netflix movies start expiring. So expect eclecticity.

Movies

The Square (2017)

It's easy to go all "snake eating its own tail" here—a satire about the hypocrisies of the art world that itself seems to be guilty of the critiques it makes, etc. It's also easy to kick the movie for its exorbitant 150-minute runtime, because come on, dude, that's too long for most movies, to say nothing of self-serious satire. But I dunno; I liked it anyway. There are several setpieces (including a scene that involves a performance artist acting like a monkey and another that culminates in an absurd debate over censorship) that, as self-serious as they are, feel absolutely right, and are poking at just how willing we (talking about myself and other "dudes consuming the arts") are to throw around words like "subversive" and "transgressive" until they're actually upending our own paradigm of privilege and comfort, at which point we balk. Grade: B

I, Daniel Blake (2016)

This movie is borderline agitprop, but it's so unapologetically, unpretentiously good at being just that that it doesn't even really matter that the film ends basically with a leftist speech right at the audience—in fact, the movie is better for it. It doesn't hurt that I think the movie is essentially correct. This movie should be required viewing for small-government nuts; anyone who thought that loading down the welfare state with a litany of safeguards and stipulations was somehow supposed to pare down government excess and stop fraud and bloat and malpractice within the state needs to spend some time lost in the bureaucratic nightmare suffered by our tenderly rendered protagonist. Grade: B

Monsters (2010)

It's rare that the best shots in a movie with a budget this small (only $500,000, which is a miracle) are the effects-driven ones, but that's certainly the case here. Every single moment with the gigantic alien creatures that terrorize the human characters is huge and majestic and wonderful in ways that movies that spend millions of dollars on CG with their effects setpieces could be, and I'd bet it's these moments that got Gareth Edwards his plum Godzilla and Star Wars gigs. Gracious, though, I hope it wasn't for anything else in the movie, though, which is, apart from the aforementioned monster scenes, so drab and unremarkable that I'm also a little shocked this wasn't a one-off from Edwards. The monster stuff is so good, though. Grade: C+

Chloe (2009)

This is not very good—the plot is lopsidedly structured, the cinematography is boringly lurid rather than Hitchcockianly so—but it's very easy to see how it could have been. There's a trio of great characters at the heart of this film, or at least potentially great ones, provided the screenplay were a bit sharper, and the premise (woman uses a call girl to catch her husband cheating, begins to connect to her husband only through this call girl) is gold. A weirdly dull and disappointing missed opportunity. Grade: C+

Jackass: The Movie (2002)

A+ for commitment to a premise. One whole additional letter grade alone for that x-ray technician's face when she sees the toy car in the rectum. Minus three letters for the stars of this movie being, uh, jackasses. When you start to feel sorry for all the bystanders of their pranks, you know this movie just isn't for you. Grade: C

Jaws 2 (1978)

I've been told that this is the best of the Jaws sequels, but that is demonstrably false. Does this movie's shark roar like a lion? Does it have hilariously awful 3D effects? Is it SeaWorld propaganda cum anti-SeaWorld propaganda? No, readers, it does not. It is merely a boring retread of everything the first Jaws movie did, only executed much, much worse. The perfect example of that black hole of mediocrity that's neither good enough to be good nor bad enough to be interesting. Plus, given how rubbery and silly this movie's mechanical shark prop looks, you'd have thought director Jeannot Szwarc would have had the good sense to play coy with its appearances, instead of throwing the whole thing in our faces every time John Williams's "duh-DUM" musical sting cues. Grade: C-

Jaws 3-D (1983)

This shark roars like a lion while terrorizing SeaWorld's amazing facilities with teeth and really, really awful-looking 3D effects, none so awful as the gloriously kitsch, how-did-this-make-it-into-a-studio-film-even-in-the-'80s final shot. Now that's more like it. It's still not good, of course, but what right have we to expect a movie called Jaws 3-D to be good? Will the real best Jaws sequel please stand up? Grade: C