meatballvision

[meatballvision]

Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood (2019)

Oh hey! I can still write reviews!

Leave it to Tarantino to bring back the desire to put my thoughts back out on the internet with his latest (almost) masterpiece.

So here we go with the plot, though I’ll say without meaning it negatively that there ain’t much of one in the traditional sense, at least for a while. It starts off as a more of a series of vignettes set in the Los Angeles of 1969, where Rick Dalton (Leo, somehow doing better work than ever here) is feeling blue. He was a big deal in the late 50s on a successful western show but never could quite get a foothold in film, and is now relegated to playing badguys on other up-and-coming stars’ shows. Fortunately for him, he has the emotional support of his sometimes stunt double and alltimes bestie, Cliff Booth (Bradboi, also doing his best work in years as somehow both a badass and complete goofball). Running parallel to these two storylines is the tale of rising star Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), who isn’t given much in the way of verbosity but serves a very important role in the story. The way Robbie portrays her as a star on the rise is super effective, particularly in a scene where she goes into a theatre just to watch her own movie and is delighted by the audience reaction to her character. Like so much of this film, it had me grinning like a goof.

Let’s get the negative out of the way. It dragged a little bit about an hour and a half or so through. That’s it.

Anyway, obviously from the title and the director you can tell this movie is gonna fall all over itself with love for old school LA and moviemaking, and I did enjoy that aspect of it, but my real love for this movie came from the characterizations.

Rick and Cliff are, at heart, adorable goofballs, despite the former being a surprisingly great actor and the latter being a supercool tough guy, because Brad Pitt. They are so different from and yet completely compatible with one another that I couldn’t help but smile every time they were on screen together.

And that’s not to say their scenes separately aren’t winners either, particularly when Rick retreats to his trailer to berate himself over forgetting his lines (I seriously laughed myself into a coughing fit during this scene), or when Cliff beats the hell out of Bruce Lee(!) just for the fun of it, or when Rick acts so well in a guest spot on a show starring Jim Stacy (Timothy Olyphant, heyyyy) that I wanted to actually see that show, or when Cliff [accidentally] infiltrates the Manson compound at Spahn Ranch or...anyway.

Then there’s the ending, which is yet another Tarantino gutpunch. All I can say (and this is kinda spoilery so stop now if you wanna go in totally blind) is that it takes everything we’ve learned and connected to with Cliff, Rick and Sharon over the last 2 hours, as well as everything you may know about the Manson Family murders and...oh hell, let’s just invent a new word, Tarantinerizes it.

Go see this movie. It’s phenomenal.

-Jeff C

[meatballvision]

The Greatest Showman (2017)

Me personally: A++

Me as a critic: I dunno, who cares

Let’s go ahead and get the negatives out of the way. As a movie, the pacing of the plot is pretty terrible. The editing leaves a lot to be desired (He went to work for the railroad and then…turned into Hugh Jackman?). Some of the choreography is pretty goofy (lookin at you, Zac Efron’s tapdancing). The dubbing on the little guy is ridiculous. But seriously, those songs though.

Michael Gracey’s directorial debut after working in commercials in Australia is a damn masterpiece. Stars Hugh Jackman and Zac Efron (helping me feel better about being a super gay straight person) kill it, and I kinda want to write-in vote for Zendaya for president of the world. The songs in this movie completely make it. If you can make it through a day without rewatching any part of this after seeing it for the first time, you’re probably Donald Trump.

From the opening number, The Greatest Show, it grabbed me. Jackman is a treasure, and shows his gifts throughout. He continues inducing goosebumps all the way into the Gloria Estefan/gospel-inspired Come Alive, proving he has more than just Adamantium claws to draw an audience.

And then there’s the Disney Channel kids. The barroom duet between Efron and Wolverine is a masterclass in sound design, with the percussion mainly coming from shotglasses and hands clacking on the bartop. I’ve rewatched it like 10 times, and it’s not even the best number in the film.

What to say about Rewrite the Stars. The love song between the guy from High School Musical and the tour de force that is Zendaya both draws from and is better than anything in my previous favorite musical, Moulin Rouge!. I read that they used doubles as little as possible making it, and the harmonizing in the (yeah I know, prerecorded) vocals combined with Efron trying to constantly climb the stands to keep up with Zendaya’s high-flying trapeze artistry made this one of my favorite scenes…maybe ever.

This Is Me was also amazing but I had already heard it like a zillion times before seeing the actual film, so I’ll leave that there.

In conclusion…yeah, I really liked this movie.

-Jeff Culpepper

[meatballvision]

The Big Sick (2017)

Rating: A

Genre labels are funny. Maybe it’s because the last movie I saw that I really loved was Bong Joon-Ho’s “Okja,” one of the most genre-defying films…ever, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Director Michael Showalter’s(!) The Big Sick is being promoted in ads as “The best romantic comedy ever,” and that is unfortunate both because that label tends to turn potential viewers off and this film is waaay more than that. Written by Kumail Nanjiani (HBO’s Silicon Valley) and his wife Emily Gordon and based on their actual experiences when they first met, the film tells the story of “Kumail” (played by Nanjiani), an aspiring Chicago standup comedian and son of Pakistani immigrants who spends most nights either on stage or having dinner with his family. His mother and father (Zenobia Shroff and Bollywood icon Anupam Kher) still strictly adhere to the tenets of Islam, including arranged marriage, so these dinners are often interrupted by the “surprise” arrival of a series of lovely young Pakistani women who not-so-surprisingly seem to know all about Kumail. After being gently heckled one night by a doe-eyed audience member named Emily (Zoe Kazan), they flirt after the show and eventually begin dating. They fall hard for each other, but when she finds out about his reluctance to tell his parents about her because she’s white, as well as the whole arranged marriage thing, he confesses that he doesn’t see much of a future for them due to the culture clash. She takes that about as well as you’d think. Then Emily gets sick. Real sick. Big Sick(sorry). So sick she has to be put in a medically-induced coma while the doctors figure out what’s wrong with her. Faced with the prospect of losing her forever, Kumail realizes he really screwed up and stays by her side until things get complicated when her parents (Ray Romano and Holly Hunter) arrive and not-so-politely tell him they’ve been told how he treated their daughter and he can be on his way. Does that sound like something in the same category as “27 Dresses” or “Failure to Launch” to you? Me neither. Nanjiani has never been better than he is here. I mostly know him from Silicon Valley, where he plays loveable asshole Dinesh, and he breaks from that admirably as a man who is proud of his Pakistani roots and loves his family so much that the thought of them ever knowing he’s begun to question his Muslim faith terrifies him. His interactions at the dinner table with Shroff and Kher (as well as his already arranged-married brother Naveed, a very funny Adeel Akhtar) are both sweet and hilarious while doing an amazing job of making the life of an immigrant Pakistani Muslim family relatable to any viewer. Even though she’s unconscious for most of the film’s runtime, Kazan deserves notice for her ability to both be sweetly charming in early scenes and heartbreaking in her disappointment and anger at Kumail later on. And then there’s my personal favorite aspect of the movie, Holly Hunter and a completely surprising Ray Romano as Emily’s distraught parents. Their growing relationship with Kumail makes up the bulk of the movie, and I couldn’t get enough of these three together. Hunter’s Beth is the tough one of the two (because of course), and watching her early efforts to get this guy who hurt her daughter just to go away soften into curiosity about him and finally affection is a delight, if not a surprise because it’s friggin’ Holly Hunter. But Romano’s Terry, holy moly. If you had asked me a week ago to make a list of actors capable of stealing a scene from the powerhouse that Hunter has always been, the guy from “Welcome to Mooseport” would not have made the cut. He plays Terry as a withdrawn, somewhat broken-down man, terrified of his wife because of something he did years prior that she has every right to be angry about and hasn’t quite forgiven him for. He also convincingly conveys both his love for his daughter and quiet anger at how her being in this condition is excruciating for him because of it. He and Kumail’s connection over them both knowing they were jerks to the women they love but not knowing how to fix it shines in their scenes together. So yeah, The Big Sick is an extremely funny movie with a romance in it, but it’s also about culture clashes, growing friendships, family dynamics, marital difficulties and the question of whether or not “The X-Files” is actually a good show. It’s also one of the best movies of the year.

-Jeff C