Potty training the son this weekend. So much pee.
Movies
Very solid premise (woman wakes up with no memories in an airtight cryogenic chamber, has to find out what's going on/escape before her air runs out) executed tightly. As with director Alexandre Aja's previous feature, Crawl, this movie knows exactly what it is and executes that to perfection, but unlike Crawl, what this is doesn't truly reveal itself until about halfway through, resulting in a movie that's not nearly as tight (not to say that it's slack, which it isn't) but is also a lot more thoughtful than the killer gators movie. It's also basically a one-woman show, and the one woman, Mélanie Laurent, is excellent. It's not going to blow your mind, as even with its several left turns it still stays pretty comfortably within the confines of the kind of Netflix genre thriller that it is. But as Netflix genre thrillers go, this is one of the better ones. Grade: B+
I'm surprised that more people aren't commenting on the religious nature of this movie. Genuinely shocked to find out that this is structurally an inspirational faith-based movie? Those of you who have read my reviews for a while might assume I mean that as a pejorative, but I don't in this case, because Minari is a good movie. But the presence of a lot of Evangelical media tropes are striking. I mean, we have:
-A patriarch who upends his family's life by taking a "leap of faith" that may or may not be compromised by financial motives
-Rural vs. urban tension
-A "back to the land" romanticism
-Marital tension surrounding said leap of faith wherein the matriarch is inevitably the naysayer
-A sick child whose family prays for him and who is healed (or healing) by the end
-Folksy wisdom delivered by a pious and wholesome (albeit quirky) outsider
-A climactic, possibly divinely ordained loss that simultaneously purifies the motives of the patriarch while also resolving said marital tensions while preserving the premise of the leap of faith
What sets Minari from the absolute garbage produced by the Evangelical media industry (besides the fact that its filmmakers understand, like, basic filmmaking craft—shockingly not a given among Evangelical filmmakers) is that its characters respond like real human beings to these tropes. The leap of faith is realistically (and depressingly) tempered by the patriarch and matriarch continuing to work in a factory as a safety net; the marital tensions feel genuine, with the threat of large quantities of money borrowed from banks hanging over their heads; the climactic loss is legitimately a debilitating loss, not merely a plot contrivance; the pious (if quirky) outsider is treated with ambivalence and appropriate suspicion that he might be a conman; the church environment of the film is less wholesome than it is vaguely off-putting and hokey, and the parents decide they would rather work in the factory than go there; the sick child does dip and tricks his grandmother into drinking his pee; the characters swear. All of this and the fact that the film comes from an Asian-American and immigrant perspective, which of course changes everything and allows this to be a lot more implicitly and even openly critical of white American Christianity (and white American capitalism) than your typical Evangelical movie about some generic white Christian jerks. As much as I'm loath to admit it, a movie as good as Minari does suggest that the narrative ideas of faith-based inspirational filmmaking can be successfully decoupled from the dopey fundamentalism and racist Christian nationalism that undergirds that scene. Which is honestly disappointing to me on a certain level—would have liked to see both go down with the ship. But at least Minari is very good. Grade: B+
A bleak, astonishing, rattle-me-to-my-bones movie. It's a truly visionary treatise about the role of shared digital media and online forums on the adolescent male psyche, made at the near-dawn of that era, told by way of an extremely patient, slow-cinema-adjacent pacing and intentionally ugly digital footage juxtaposed with intentionally incompetently framed film footage—a description that I'm sure sounds insufferable to many people, and to be sure, this is definitely Not For Everyone. But I found this incredible and nearly one-of-a-kind. Slow cinema seems so perfect for exploring the tedium and repetition of school that I'm surprised more people haven't done it, and as far as its exploration of online video sharing and social media on the adolescent sense of self and relation to others, I feel like the only other movies I can think of that have taken that seriously are Unfriended and Eighth Grade, both far different movies from this one, which is as much informed by the darkly empathic visions of teenagerhood of novelist Robert Cormier as it is with the contemporary YA media that clearly influenced both of those other movies. As such, it feels like the specific layers of humanity this movie peels back remain mostly untouched in the larger context of cinema. Would actually love to see a 2021 update/spiritual successor of this movie with smartphones and Snapchat and stuff—this movie is a fascinating time capsule of the like 3-4 years between the popularizing of YouTube/social media and the permanent fusing of those things to our hips via the mass adoption of the iPhone, and I also think there is a rich, rich vein to be tapped by this movie's approach applied to our contemporary digitally augmented life. Grade: A
I was completely onboard with this movie for the first 20 minutes or so when it was basically a single-location escape room/point-and-click adventure game with two potentially unreliable blank-slate characters. The more flashbacks and exposition the movie added, though, the dumber it got, without ever being quite dumb enough to ascend to an entertainingly dumb movie, so I fell off by the end. I guess I either want that lean single-location film or a borderline-cartoonish movie full of ludicrously elaborate traps and double-crosses and sadistic games—no in-between. That said, director James Wan sells this probably better than most would, and his technique is a beautiful aesthetic snapshot of a different era: a fun reminder that for a few years there at the beginning of the new millennium, seeing people writhe around in fast-motion was supposed to be the scariest thing ever. Grade: C
There's a lot of fun to be had in this Robert Zemeckis/Bob Gale comedy, from Kurt Russell's deliriously sleazy performance as the central used car salesman to the intricately structured jokes to the pitch-black cynicism. But somewhere along the line, that cynicism curdles into the distasteful and sometimes chauvinist spite that often animates the '80s/'90s (particularly the '80s) generation of American comedies. A lot of these early Robert Zemeckis movies are thrilling in the way that they seem to be weaponizing Boomer culture against itself (in the case of Used Cars, the particular kind of capitalism and local politics being built by the then newly emergent adult Boomer middle class) and thereby presenting a critique of the soon-to-be ruling class, but something like Used Cars ultimately reveals the limitations of the Zemeckis/Gale approach. In their comedies, and a lot of the comedies inspired in their wake (e.g. Caddyshack), there's this pervasive understanding that the world as presented by the well-mannered establishment is a steaming pile of bullshit but with a perspective so myopic and self-centered that it is unable to see the systemic forces that have shat that steaming pile and are forcing us all to stand waist-deep in it—instead, this perspective usually just finds a rather thin idea of The Man (or often The Woman, though less so here than in other comedies of the era, despite the really awful bit of forced female nudity here) warmed over from whatever hungover memories of '60s radicalism that white people in the '80s liked to recite to themselves as a way to justify voting for Ronald Reagan in a way that didn't openly admit to their own reactionary impulses. Anyway, it might be unfair to load all this baggage on a silly, often pretty entertaining movie like Used Cars except that Used Cars does seem to want to make some sort of statement about America, a statement that's halfway good but, like the movie itself, has a hard time sustaining itself as it's forced to explain itself over the course of nearly two hours. Grade: B-
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