First, several quick reviews of various series:
- The Witcher, Season 2 (Netflix):
Great. Totally worth your time. An improvement on the first season in every way, anchored by Henry Cavill, who, apart from being a really flexible actor, in no way hurts the show by being one of the most handsome men currently alive on planet Earth.
- Wheel of Time, Season 1 (Amazon Prime):
What I liked most is the dense lore, not the production itself. The costuming is clearly going for the “medieval clothing through a futuristic lens” thing, which basically means that there are a lot of polyester-looking coats without lapels, like Star Trek. (If you’ve seen AMC’s The Badlands, you know what I mean.) Acting-wise, Rosamund Pike blows almost everyone out of the water, with the possible exceptions of Daniel Henney and Zoe Robbins. Hopefully the second season will be able to distinguish itself. I think Joshua Stradowski is about as bland as leading men come.
- The Expanse, Season 6:
This show has always been an acquired taste, more about the world-building, political negotiations, and uneasy alliances than about universe-changing impacts. In the first three seasons, main characters died all the time; you could never feel comfortable, and it felt like each political horse-trade had potentially lethal stakes. But the seasons on Amazon have flipped that script — they’ve killed off most of the tertiary characters and centered everything on four central, nearly-invincible people who bounce between universal calamities. (Minus one main character, who needed to be written out after the actor was #metoo’d.) The show has always been about how inconsequential any one person is to the grand scheme of the universe — that political machinations and in-fighting merely undermine the human species. But it feels like the show has slowly lost that insight, and I’m not sure if it’ll be able to pull back.
- MacGruber, Pilot (Peacock Plus):
Who subscribes to fucking Peacock Plus? I’m strongly considering it after the pilot, which nails almost every joke.
December Movie List
Heat (2h50)
The Fly (Hulu, 1h37)
Gremlins (HBO MAX)
Hunt for Red October (Prime, 2h14)
Rain Man (Netflix 2h13)
A Star is Born (HBO MAX, 2h16)
Jungle Cruise (Disney+, 2h7)
Beverly Hills Cop (HBO 1h45)
The Proposal (Prime, 1h48)
The Professor and the Madman (Netflix, 2h4)
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (HBO Max, 1h47)
Jupiter Ascending (Hulu, 2h7)
Johnny Mnemonic ( Netflix, 1h36)
We're The Millers (HBO Max 1h58)
The Matrix: Resurrections (HBO MAX, 2h28)
We Need to Do Something (Hulu, 1h37)
Grown Ups (Netflix, 1h42)
Best Movie: The Fly (1986)
Runners Up: Heat, Gremlins
Heat pairs a weird Pacino performance (kind of terrible, in retrospect) with a subdued and riveting DeNiro performance. Gritty, epic, morally-gray. It's probably the best “Film” of the bunch — it's just not my favorite.
That honor goes to The Fly. When John Carpenter's The Thing premiered in 1982, audiences hated it. They thought it was nihilistic and gross. Then David Cronenberg's The Fly saunters onto the scene in 1986 and says, confidently, “Hold my beer.” Is it a metaphor about cocaine addiction? Is it about the hubris of procreation? Equal parts ghastly and hilarious. Easily Jeff Goldblum's best performance.
I've of course seen Gremlins before, but it's quickly become a Christmas classic in this household. The script is incredibly fucking tight. I think it's easy to misread it as anti-communist: there's a lot of talk of American-made items being replaced by foreign components; a scene where Billy has “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” playing in the background; and of course there are probably a lot of graduate-level theses about how the Gremlins themselves are Chinese caricatures. But a Gremlin's primary attribute—insatiable consumption—is firmly American. Textually, the Gremlins are merely corruptions of a good-natured Chinese spirit by American ignorance. The real villains are the money-worshiping Americans: the bank owner who ruins her neighbors' lives and threatens (several times) to kill Billy's dog; and Billy's bumbling, failed entrepreneur father who peddles shoddy (American-made) products. Christmas, instead of being a time of love and giving, is a time of financial anxiety, The commercialization of Christmas even has a literal body count, as revealed in a late-movie monologue where a character's father has died trying to surprise the family with presents. I don't mind saying that Gremlins is a brilliant screenplay, and the only reason it's not number one on this month's list is because I think The Fly is funnier and more artful.
Worst Movie: Grown Ups
Runner Up: None
The more I think about this movie, the more I hate it. The elevator pitch: Adam Sandler and a bunch of his shitty friends hang out and make fun of everyone who steps into their field of vision. Misogynistic, fat-phobic, and a little racist too. Completely lacking in self-awareness. A movie by Gen Xers who stupidly think they’ve transcended Boomer bullshit, but have clearly bought into every bit of it.
Most Surprising: A Star is Born
Runner Up: Jungle Cruise
It took me a while to admit that Bradley Cooper is sort of a generation-defining talent. On paper, I hate A Star is Born — doomed love set to pop country and dance pop? No thank you. And it does in fact tread a lot of familiar beats that threaten to drag it down. But Cooper's direction defies the obvious plotting by holding on his main actors, who are all magnetic. (Cooper himself, with nothing more than a beard, a mop of hair, and a Kris Kristofferson impression, is completely unrecognizable.) My qualms? Dave Chappelle's character comes late into the game, and I think is only there to assure the audience that this Country Star definitely isn't racist; and, once again, although this is a portrait of addiction, there's no portrayal of withdrawal — a critical part of addiction that, for some reason, very few movies bother to portray.
Jungle Cruise is the best example of a movie made by committee since the original Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s chaotic and doesn’t make a lot of sense — why would The Rock’s character have an American accent if he’s never left the Amazon River basin? Why is he so poor if he’s had a few hundred years to make interest on investments? — but it’s charming. I could watch Jessie Plemons be a German sociopath all day.
Most Disappointing: The Matrix: Resurrections
Runner Up: We Need to Do Something
The appeal of the original The Matrix—cool fights set to pumping music—is so obvious that it would seem almost impossible to make a sequel that doesn't hit the mark at least some of the time, and yet Lana Wachowski has managed to whiff it THREE TIMES.
I am not surprised by how bad The Matrix: Resurrections is, but I still can't help but be disappointed. It's a swirl of half-baked ideas; Wachowski apparently either doesn't believe in subtext, or doesn't trust her audience, or doesn't care. The writing is so lazy that at one point Jada Pinkett-Smith admonishes a character, saying, “Don't rob her of her agency!”—a silly line better suited to the comments on a Facebook post in 2021 than from the mouth of an aging General in a post-apocalyptic underground city. There's been some discussion on whether Wachowski meant for it to be this bad, that she did it on purpose. Indeed, the movie itself makes it clear that this is some kind of Fuck You to Warner Bros. — tonally, it’s reminiscent of Gremlins 2. But it's obvious that there's a lot of hard work from so much of the cast and production that it's a difficult theory to buy into completely. Instead, I see a group of dedicated professionals who trusted their director's art, and that director instead mocked the entire enterprise.
We Need to Do Something is a wonderfully-shot, horror-driven chamber piece featuring three incredibly good lead actors — including Sierra McCormick, who is going places — that ultimately is about nothing and goes nowhere.
Movie Most Deserving of a Remake: Johnny Mnemonic
Like the data that the protagonist is smuggling in his brain, Johnny Mnemonic's ideas are too big to be contained in a 90-ish-minute runtime. The democratization of information and healthcare; class-struggle; religious zealots who work in tandem with corporate interests; the worship of seemingly-omnipresent CEO's; the fetishization of Japanese culture; capitalist comfort vs. humanist obligation. In a lot of ways, these are all the places where The Matrix franchise should have gone. I really hope this IP doesn't pop up as a half-assed netflix series, and instead gets the Epic Trilogy treatment it deserves.
Coming Soon: 2021 Year End Break Down