Letterboxd — Your life in film

oh sure, pretty standard sports biopic, kinda boring stuff...wait. is that...is that Leni Riefenstahl?

(reviewed at The Atlantic)

remember Anchorman 2? yeah. (reviewed at The Atlantic).

peak Shyamalan, really--this film is well-acted and touching and lovely, there's not one line of dialogue that feels remotely natural, and the ending is goofy as shit

(discussed on this episode of Blank Check!)

A putrid affair, although it's juuuuust crisply made enough that it elicits some chuckles. Snotty, obnoxious, juvenile in the extreme, but then uses meta humor as much as it can to cover its tracks. But that doesn't help when the movie tries to get serious (ugh) or grimly violent. Some sequences look alright, but the finale is cheap, fuzzy shit. Bad, no good, no thank you.

My first viewing in 3D; my last viewing (of any film) at the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan, sob. 3D is good, though, to my utter shock--gives the action scenes some pop, gives the Star Destroyers some phallic reach off the screen, otherwise keeps to itself.

Oh, and so is Star Wars. Star Wars is good.

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

Bay is less fun when he's boring, even though this movie is not the trainwreck I had expected.

edited to add my full review on The Atlantic:

www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/13-hours-michael-bay-benghazi-review/424299/

when I came out of the screening room, having sat in the front row, I realized my belt was somehow undone and basically hanging off of me.

i am convinced i am cursed. the woods take me.

(reviewed at The Atlantic)

my god this is flooring. its framing device should be so stilted--here's a movie consisting of random flashbacks to a woman's life at age 10! but it feels so seamless and true to life. who among us doesn't randomly fixate on the small injustices done to us as children, or, more importantly, our own awkward mistakes and their imagined reverberations?

eating the pineapple! the conversation about cloudy days! and then THAT ENDING. I feel very lucky to have seen this!!!

Watched for my upcoming M. Night Shyamalan podcast. NOBODY TOLD ME THIS HAS A TWIST ENDING. I AM NOT KIDDING.

(discussed on this episode of Blank Check!)

THE GREAT WORK BEGINS.

(discussed on this episode of Blank Check!)

First--credit to Lawrence. She's adequate in the film considering how horribly, abhorrently miscast she is. This feels like a standard biopic script that got re-written in more ambitious terms, but the rewrite was never even close to finished. Russell just had some ideas about soap operas and strong women and a grandmother narrating from beyond the grave. Maybe?

What on earth happened here? I bet there's a story and I bet it's an interesting one. The only 2015 film that felt more screwed-with was Fantastic Four. The QVC section in the middle worked like gangbusters, everything else was baffling.

anyway, still better than American Hustle.