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screenmaven · 2 years ago

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Films I’ve Loved This Year

I have already written reviews on some of them (not seen in this post), that you can already read here. So make sure to also do that.

I’m completely laid out in bed extremely sick, I thought between the delusional fevers, bomb exploding headaches, and literally feeling like I’m dying, I’d share the other films I’ve absolutely enjoyed watching this year.

I started up a separate account via Instagram to just post film, but having multiples is beginning to be too much, so from now on any other film content aside from the blog here will be on @ starrymayx.

So to start off the list here we go…

These 90s “Noir” films started my whole new movie Escapades, and I’m so glad they did -

Bad Influence, Guilty As Sin, Pacific Heights, Whispers in The Dark, Dream Lover, Untamed Heart, White Palace

Here are the others…

Thrashin - 1986

Starring: Josh Brolin, Pamela Gidley

Brooke McCarter (RIP homie), Sherilyn Fenn, Robert Rusler, & Josh Richman

Anthony Kiedis + RHCP

Tony Hawk, Kevin Staab, Mike McGill, Jimmy Star

What I liked: There was so much awesomeness in this film and a feel good story of triumph. Basically it’s about two skateboarding gangs, having beef, mix in lots of skating, graffiti, punk rock aesthetics, and a love story, and you have yourself a pretty badass film. Plus they overcome their rivalry in the LA Massacre challenge, and there’s even several rat tails. 🤣 Definitely worth a watch!

I really wish I could skateboard. I would have been so rad. To all my skater friends and Bo’s over the years, mad respect. 🤘🏻

The House on Sorority Row - 1983

Director: Mark Rosman

I swear Scream Queens was influenced by this film.

I really liked it. Loved the lighting, still had a seventies type feel, storyline was really good. Definitely a film to check out if you like really good horror, without all the super special effects.

*For any strobe light sensitive people* like myself out there, there is a scene where it’s wild,

Pump Up The Volume ✊🏻 1990

Director Allan Moyle

This movie is 🔥 Definitely a pioneer for all things talk radio but from a non-narrative perspective. Films like this and indie radio programs paved the way for our now podcasts. I loved the way it was written, the development of the characters personal selves, and breaking the rules.

I love me some Christian Slater 💓

The soundtrack is also amazing!

From Richard Hell, Leonard Cohen, Beastie Boys, Ice T, & more! I’ll link the soundtrack in my stories.

*trigger warning: there is a scene that deals with suicide and those scenes always get me. So I wanted to mention that.

Out of Bounds - 1986

Director- Richard Tuggle

Cinematography - Bruce Surtees

Starring: Anthony Michael Hall

Siouxsie and the Banshees 🤘🏻💓

& Meatloaf (in like 3 scenes)

What I liked: The cinematography of downtown LA & Venice Beach California, (actually the whole film is beautifully done). The 80’s colors, Dizz’s home, her style. The fact that Anthony Michael Hall was a badass hero, taking down a heroin drug man with his knife throwing skills. Really good film.

2 Days in The Valley - 1996

Written and Directed by: John Herzfeld.

Starring: James Spader, Eric Stolz & Charlize Theron

Synopsis: 48 hours of intersecting lives and crimes in The Valley of Los Angeles.

Why I liked it: Artsy Cinematography, James Spader obviously, and the correlation of numerous parties all being connected, going through individual stuff but being thrown into the mix of chaos. Plus sunglasses just seem to add viable cred to it. Why are sunglasses so cool yet mysterious?

Shampoo - 1975

Director: Hal Ashby

Starting Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, & Warren Beatty

I throughly enjoyed this film mainly due to the Jim Morrison/Sharon Tate style vibes it gave off throughout, and all the stylish decor/fashion. The Morrison looking guy played by (Warren Beatty) is basically a lover to many of his women hair clients (he does hair).

I really appreciate the 70’s swank and aesthetic appeal in this film. I’m also obsessed with Julie Christie’s glam Tate starlet look and I wish I could pull off bangs! Goldie Hawn is also in here and a younger Carrie Fisher.

From the 70s eye shadow, purple outfit I want, the main girls style, glamorous hair, river grotto, la house party with body paint and strobe lights (which that part I had to turn away - sensitive), it still rocked.

Based in the LA canyon/hills it’s definitely worth a watch to see the web of desire and aesthetic unfold. Keep your eye out for the creepy art in one of the scenes that just didn’t quite belong. 😳

Additionally there was some dialogue between two parties in the kitchen about questioning the lead male’s (hairstylist) orientation, and the f word was used a couple times. Didn’t like that part.

Really glad we’ve evolved on how we should identify people and what’s right to say and not to. A person can be gay or even not, but using derogatory terminology to hurt them is very low par. If you still do that. Stop.

Chopping Mall - 1986

Director: Jim Wynorski

Mall Location: Sherman Oaks Galleria

I loved this film. For reals.

Nothing better than a mall unleashing new technology security robots, only to go horribly wrong. Which I already knew where it was going as soon as it started 😂

Anyways a group of mall employee friends and two others throw a party in a bedding home store and get freaky - typical 80s horror, which I love. Then basically the robots go crazy and savage, hunting down all of them in a terminator/stranger things vibe kind of way. The aesthetic, 80s style, and scenery are very appealing, all the way down to even the playboy underwear from Miss Virgina Slims herself. Camel ciggs just won’t cut it. 😂

Lots of greats here, and I hope you check them out if you haven’t seen them.

Happy Filming 😘

#movies #reviews #70s #80s #90s #films #screen maven #cinema

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disappointingyet · 6 months ago

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The big 2024 round-up: More or less mainstream

This is one of three parts of my look back at this year in movies, alongside The big 2024 round-up: Arthouse and documentary and my Films of the year.

Dune Part 2

I was surprised how much I liked the first instalment of the Lawrence Of Arabia-inspired space epic – with the effect that I approached Part 2 with much higher expectations. Which in many ways it met. My main issues: the way this very long film suddenly starts rushing towards the end, and I wasn’t sold on Austin Butler as the new bad guy. But in pretty much every other way, Denis Villeneuve, cast and crew have made exactly the movie they set out to make, and it’s impressive and sometimes thrilling.

More thoughts here

The Wild Robot

I'm strongly of the view that the machines are not our friends. This very pretty computer-animated movie argues maybe they could feel love, given the chance? It's the story of Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong'o), an advanced domestic robot who is shipwrecked on an island with no people but plenty of animals. After a lot of misunderstanding with the inhabitants, she befriends an unpopular fox and has to adopt a gosling she's accidentally orphaned. As I feel I say often these days, the first half of the film is much better than the second, but it's sweet and looks great and is pretty endearing.

Challengers

I enjoyed Luca Guadagnino’s tennis movie – and it is a actual sports pic rather than the steamy drama that just happened to be set on the ATP circuit that many had assumed – while being fully conscious of its flaws. Zendaya, blonde bloke (Mike Faist) and bloke who looks like Jonathan Richman (Josh O’Connor) are tennis prodigies who fancy each other – but more than sex, this is about ambition and using other people as pawns to outwit fate. The bits where characters talk worked better for me than the ones where they don’t. One of several movies this year that really hinge on whether you like the ending.

Full review here

The Bikeriders

Who do you get to play strongly accented, authentic working-class Chicagoans? Why, south-west London child of privilege Tom Hardy and Liverpool’s Jodie Comer, of course. In fairness, I think Comer is excellent in this GoodFellas-esque tale of 1960s motorcycle club who kind of accidentally turn into a bike gang. For the first 20 minutes or so, it’s one of the best films of the year. As the story gets grimmer, it loses some momentum. Well worth seeing, though.

Full review here

Monkey Man

In which Dev Patel boldly reinvents himself as an action movie writer-star-director, in a film in which he both repeatedly gets the shit kicked out of him and kicks the shit out of a lot of other people. It’s set in India (although filmed in Indonesia), there’s some good atmosphere stuff and a couple of great action set pieces. Unfortunately, it also seems to want to say SOME BIG IMPORTANT STUFF about India and religion and politics and corruption and marginalised communities that Patel (who, it should be noted, comes from Harrow) is completely out of his depth with.

The Iron Claw

Brutally depressing based-on-a-true-story wrestling drama. Basically, a classic horrible ex-wrestlers bullies his sons into attempting to do whatever it was that he never managed to do (it's a lot like the story of the Beach Boys, only with people chucking each out of a ring). It goes well occasionally, but he’s a monster and they all suffer and eventually… yeah. Means something to wrestling folk, I guess. People were impressed by how Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White and Harris Dickinson managed to turn themselves into reasonable approximations of 1970s grapplers. It’s all competently made and acted and so on, but I don’t get the point of this kind of sadistic misery fest.

Snack Shack

This starts off as a hyperactive retro teen comedy – it’s hard to follow what the characters are gabbling about in the first few scenes – but eventually switches gears, how successfully I’m not so sure. Our protagonists are a pair of super-precocious, entrepreneurial 14-year-olds looking for lucrative ways to spend the summer before high school. They end up in charge of the snack kiosk at the local pool and meanwhile, they’re both drawn to the slightly older army-brat girl who is only in town for a couple of months. The year, by the way, is a thankfully pre-web pre-mobile 1991.

I’d heard really good things about this one, and it nails the vibe of the time and place, and the three leads (Conor Sherry, Gabriel LaBelle, Mika Abdalla) are well cast. But I didn’t like the two dudes much and I think we’re meant to be somewhat rooting for them. And it kept reminding me of far, far better movies: Dazed And Confused, The Myth Of The American Sleepover, Licorice Pizza…

The Fall Guy

Did I enjoy this? I certainly did. Am I aware of its flaws? I undoubtedly am. Quite why it needed to use a title and some character names from the early 1980 Lee Majors TV show that only a few of us remember is somewhat inexplicable. They could have simply started from scratch with the idea of a stunt man who investigates a crime. I think Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling are charming together, vital in a film that’s as much romcom as action movie if not more. I was less sold on it as a showcase for the art of stunts – it’s not well-shot enough to convey what we’re meant to be seeing. And the plot is super-flimsy. But the funny bits, for me, outweigh the ropier stuff.

Twisters

Idealistic grad student Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) goes storm chasing with experimental tornado-busting chemicals, it goes horribly wrong, cut to a few years later and one of her old chums (Anthony Ramos) tempts her back into the game. On the tornado circuit (which is a thing, this film would have you believe), they clash with a group of noisy YouTubers led by Tyler (Glen Powell). With the characters, we drive trucks into the path of various tornadoes, we’re asked to rethink Kate’s/our first impressions of some of the characters and it’s all leading up to a mega-storm climax. I think that’s about it?

Twisters is a film that knows exactly what it is and delivers pretty solidly. Somewhat depends on just how charming you find Powell, meanwhile I found Edgar-Jones a lot more tolerable than I expected.

Le Comte De Monte Cristo

The folks who brought us the recent two-part Three Musketeers are back with Dumas’ other most famous work. It has similar features: they’re taking it seriously, using tangibly there historical buildings, it’s in French… I’m instinctively treating these as assets for the movie and yet I fell in love with the story as a kid watching the 1934 Hollywood version.

As with Les Trois Mousquetaires, French + location shooting doesn’t mean more faithful adaptation of the book. The emphasis here is on how cruel the drive for vengeance makes Edmond Dantes, something occasionally overstressed in the dialogue here when it is already clear from the action.

Still, there’s a good reason this has been endlessly adapted – it almost always works (although I advise avoiding the 1975 Richard Chamberlain one), and this is more than decent.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice A.D. 2024

Tim Burton’s very belated sequel is a movie of excellent bits and dud spaces in between. The biggest nostalgia hit for me was actually the opening credits, triggering not just memories of the original but a whole comedy-horror era including other Burton films alongside Men In Black, Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners….

Anyway, Winona Ryder’s Lydia is now a telly medium, her daughter (Jenna Ortega, very much the Ryder/Ricci heir) doesn’t like her and her boyfriend is her dodgy producer (Justin Theroux). With her stepmom (Catherine O’Hara), they all end up back at the house from the original movie and there inevitably summon Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton.)

The better parts of the movie happen in the place where the newly dead are being processed – the design is great and reminiscent of early Burton films.

The consensus – which I agree with – is that the movie is overstuffed with characters and inconsequential story. Plus, I think it suffers from the lack of less-eccentric characters along the lines of the ones played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin in the original. (I also find Ryder’s brittleness hard work.)

But if you liked Burton and have understandably stepped away, this is worth nipping back for as long as you have modest expectations.

Heretic

Imagine Aaron Sorkin wrote a horror movie – it wouldn’t exactly like this but it might be similar. The set-up: two young women (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) doing their Mormon missionary duties arrive at a rather Grimm’s Fairytales-like isolated cottage and are welcomed in from the storm by the owner (Hugh Grant), who is suspiciously eager to discuss questions of faith. Run! Run! But, of course, they don’t.

This is a very, very talky film. Grant’s character is one of those guys (yes, I relate) with too much time to ferment his theories, now seizing his chance to inflict them on an initially willing audience.

That will be maybe an overdose of words for many horror heads. And then when the film does switch in thrills-and-scares mode, it feels a bit second-hand and underwhelming.

But if you do like horror with a theological slant and/or are enjoying Hugh Grant’s bad guy years, there’s fun to be had.

The Substance

First, a fair question various people have asked in response to critics blithely referring to this as ‘body horror’ – what do they mean? Like The Fly, is probably the simplest answer. This has no jump scares and the violence happens in one relatively short burst but there’s lots and lots of gross stuff happening to human bodies, including deformities and entrails. Hope that clarifies things.

The Substance has a point it wants to make about the entertainment industry’s disgust at aging female bodies. It has a distinct look, with lots of strong colours, sometimes contrasting with very white rooms, long corridors… The vibe feels 1970s although it is set now. And it has Demi Moore, in the What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? and Sunset Boulevard tradition of once-huge stars making films about women showbiz no longer has a place for.

If you’re the kind of person who likes a film that is focused on its theme, then you might dig The Substance. I liked the design but that was about it. The film is an unjustifiable 2 hours 20 – it’s said most of what it’s usefully going to say in the first 40. It’s a satire but it’s not funny. I guess Moore is fine but it’s a big waste of Margaret Qualley and the only other actor with anything to do is Dennis Quaid, basically as the evils of TV personified. Not keen. (MUBI)

Inside Out 2

The biggest hit of the year – and yet somehow a bit under the radar? The follow-up to many mental health professionals’ favourite Pixar movie picks up with Riley hitting puberty and some new emotions staging a coup in her control room. The awkward business of romance is avoided (this is still a kids pic) – instead the external part of the plot hinges on (ice) hockey camp and the potential to climb the teenage social ladder by dumping your old friends for potential cooler ones. Meanwhile the internal plot has Joy, Anger etc as exiles in the far reaches of Riley’s mind. Almost inevitably not as good as the original but still quite traumatising at moments.

(Disney+)

Anyone But You

This is technically a 2023 release but snuck out right at the end of the year. It was initially thought of as a flop but then did the now-rare thing of picking up steam at the box office as the weeks went by, and I became a bit fascinated with it as passed $50 million… $100 million… $200 million! on a $25 million budget, prompting thinkpieces about whether the romcom was back and whether Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney were now A-list stars.

Through all of this, I hadn’t actually seen the movie. I was just enjoying it as a business story. Then eventually I saw it and… yeah, it’s not very good. The plot is Shakespeare-derived and maybe that’s part of the problem, it’s got that exhausting romcom thing of characters doing a bunch of random stuff because the film can’t have them get together yet. There’s also a tiresome raunchiness that feels forced.

Maxxxine

I did something maybe a little odd, seeing this without having watched the two previous director Ti West + star Mia Goth horror movies – X, to which this is a direct sequel, and Pearl, a 60-years-earlier prequel. But neither of those seemed that appealing, while Maxxxine’s promise of a recreation of scuzzy ‘80s LA plus some Hollywood satire seemed more my bag.

And the look, the apartments, and particularly the video store, deliver. The soundtrack goes a bit too obvious. There are scenery-chewing opportunities gleefully seized by Kevin Bacon, Giancarlo Esposito and Bobby Carnevale. Elizabeth Debicki also gets some speeches about the horror-director-as-artist that you could maybe take as satire but I suspect are West’s own views.

Pretty cool.

Conclave

Handsomely mounted – so much scarlet! – political almost thriller. The pope has died and Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is in charge of the election of his successor. He’s in a unique position: he’s in charge of procedure but also a voter and an active member of one of the factions, the cardinals are sequestered and he alone gets news from the outside world. So he’s our point-of-view character.

The early front runners are a charming American liberal (Stanley Tucci), a charismatic Nigerian representing the less developed world (Lucian Msamati), an outspoken Italian reactionary (a barnstorming Sergio Castellitto) and a smarmy American centrist (John Lithgow), but we know from real life that papal elections can have twists.

By nature of the story, we’re mostly spending time with a bunch of not-young men. The film, adapted from a novel by Robert Harris, puts us in the liberal camp and seems pretty undisguised in its sympathies. Stylistically, the film harks back to a time when guys-in-a-room talking equalled mainstream entertainment – Twelve Angry Men but slightly more recently the John Grisham era of 1990s – but it’s careful to be current with its ideas.

A film made in Italy by German director Edward Berger with an international cast could seem a bit worrying but Conclave is what it promises: a well-crafted, well-acted middlebrow movie.

Juror #2

So I’d mentioned Twelve Angry Men and John Grisham in my Conclave mini-review and then I saw Clint Eastwood’s new film, which for stretches is fully in tribute mode to Sidney Lumet’s classic while being set, Grisham-like, in the south. There’s something satisfyingly familiar about so much of this film, with the hook being that Juror #2 (Nicholas Hoult) realises he was present in the build up to the crime… and maybe more than that? You get Toni Collette as the politically ambitious prosecutor and JK Simmons as a retired cop who has somehow snuck onto the jury. It’s a solid piece of work from 94(!)-year-old Clint, only slightly weakened by the miscasting of Hoult as a journalist working hard to stay sober.

Emilia Perez

This is a film in which there is a scene that contains a character doing the Carrie Bradshaw thing of narrating what she’s typing while the camera zooms in on the words – and, at the same time, there’s Les Mis-flavour singing -on-the-march going on. This is a film that would like you to think it has something to say about Mexico’s troubles that was filmed in Paris, written and directed by French people and whose third lead (playing a Mexican) is an American pop star whose Spanish is audibly non-native. In other words, sometimes a film is just so far from what you like, it feels unfair to judge it.

In case you don’t know. Emilia Perez is a a musical directed by Jacques Audiard about a Mexican cartel boss (Karla Sofía Gascón) who transitions to a woman and maybe a better person. Gascón is good in places, people have raved about Zoe Saldaña in this film but I don’t get it and I don’t blame Selena Gomez, I blame the people who cast her. (Netflix)

Bad Boys: Ride Or Die

I was very pleasantly wrongfooted by 2020’s Bad Boys For Life, which was way better than a legacy sequel to a pair of noisy ‘90s action comedies should be. The downside of that is I approached this one with unreasonable expectations.

The attempt at freshening things up is that Will Smith’s Mike, usually the cocky one, is now anxious, while Martin Lawrence’s Marcus feels invincible after a near-death experience, so the balance of their partnership/friendship is flipped, or at least that’s the idea.

If you’ve seen any of the previous films, you know what to expect. There are gags, explosions, fast cars etc. it’s fine but it’s absolutely never surprising.

#2024 at the movies

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