Films that aren't Star Wars 15

Jesse Plemons kidnaps Emma Stone and demands that she take him on her spaceship to meet the Andromedan emperor, so that he can try to persuade the aliens to leave Earth and stop killing bees and humans. It’s gently amusing, and the two leads’ performances have an intensity that stands out in my memory and in comparison to almost everything else I’ve seen this year.

I haven’t seen Yorgos’s earlier work, which is apparently much weirder, but all the films in his Emma Stone era draw me in from the get-go; I watch with a compulsive curiosity.

It took me some reflection time to decide what I felt about the ending; it is functional.

The film has some good colours and a very narrow 1.5:1 aspect ratio.

The life of a logger in Idaho about a hundred years ago. Some events happen but they did not catch my interest; I was bored for most of the runtime. “A gorgeous meditation on America,” says Rotten Tomatoes, zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.

Paul Newman is sentenced to two years on a chain gang and does not appreciate the way prison life is run. There are a lot of great scenes in this, and it isn’t the film’s fault that part of the score was later repurposed as the Channel 9 news theme, which took me out of it for a bit.

Lovingly and beautifully made though it was – and the filmmakers made me feel dramatic tension during kabuki performances, which I would surely not watch in real life – I did not care enough about kabuki to enjoy this very long film (2h54m) about kabuki actors. I had already long started hoping that it would end soon when I heard an electronic voice from someone’s device say “sixteen thirty”, indicating that we still had another 40 minutes to go.

Most of the other people there seemed to like it though – the cinema was almost full and there was applause at the end.

I saw on Wikipedia that the new Knives Out film was a “standalone sequel”, so I saw it not having seen any of the others, and having no idea what to expect. It turns out, lots of over-the-top theatricality and twists, and some funny jokes. I don’t watch many mystery films, and I don’t know if there were clues I was supposed to pick up on, but I didn’t feel a sense of intellectual satisfaction at the detective work.

It’s a very Catholic-themed film, a liberal priest sent to work in a small-town church led by a fiery cult-leader-like right-wing priest. I was surprised by how long it took for the murder to happen.

Before watching it I wondered if Rian Johnson, director of the most entertaining Star Wars film, made entertaining non-Star-Wars films. Well this is no TLJ, but it’s a fun couple of hours.

Sydney Sweeney gets a job as a housekeeper in a fancy house where Amanda Seyfried behaves strangely. There is a good awkward tension as you wonder how it’s all going to explode. No spoilers! I feel that intellectually I should dislike the device of switching the perspective in the latter part of the film (it feels sort of cheating?), but it carried me along, the ending was satisfying, and the credits hit was great.

There’s so much more to Neil Diamond than ‘Sweet Caroline’!

A biopic about a Milwaukee-based Neil Diamond tribute act, based on an earlier documentary which shows they really did once get Eddie Vedder to sing a verse with them:

Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson play the duo. The first hour is pure feelgood schmaltz, and it’d probably be my favourite film of the year if they’d kept that up for a second hour, but instead lots of dramatic things happen. ☹️☹️☹️☹️ The timeline is very compressed compared to the real history.

You probably need to like listening to Neil Diamond.

An Oscar-y Norwegian film that would win a lot of Oscars if I were the Academy. Renate Reinsve (Best Actress) is a stage actor whose once-violent and now-old filmmaker father (Stellan Skarsgård), who had left the family home for Sweden during his daughters’ childhood, returns to Oslo in the hope of casting his daughter in a film inspired by his mother’s life. There are a lot more threads (the second daughter Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Best Supporting Actress); it is all well done. The only reason I didn’t give it an even higher rating is that I didn’t really feel the impact of a climactic script reading.

Much like Sentimental Value, Anaconda is a film about making a film.

An irrationality I have is that, compared to the reverse, I think I would feel greater regret at paying full price for a bad movie and a low price for a good movie, even though the total expenditure and experience are the same. So I watched Anaconda on cheap Tuesday; the film was even dumber and the snake was even bigger than I had expected, but it was also stupidly funny at times. I got my $10 worth.

Brendan Fraser is a American actor in Japan most famous for doing a toothpaste commercial several years earlier. He gets work at a rental family business, who provide an actor to play a role in various family- or friend-related situations: he starts by being a mourner at a fake funeral(??), then a groom at a sham wedding. Most of the movie centres around him briefly becoming a father to a young daughter whose single mother wants two parents present for a selective school interview, and being a journalist interviewing a very old actor. He grows more emotionally connected to his clients than is recommended.

It’s sometimes played as funny, sometimes as endearing, but there is often a lingering uneasiness about the deception involved. It’s tied up nicely, but ultimately I wasn’t overly interested in the premise.