Asking the Wrong Questions

This will probably be the last recent movie roundup of 2019.  There are still several highly-lauded 2019 movies that I want to watch (and, of course, the looming giant that is Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker ), but between travel later this month and Israeli release schedules, I probably won't get to them until 2020.  The last bunch of 2019 movies is a mixture of highbrow, lowbrow, and stuff in between, of established directors and franchises and more experimental stuff.   I didn't love all of them--in fact, I disliked a few--but I'm glad that a year that had seemed rather barren, movie-wise, in the spring and summer has blossomed into an interesting stew of genres and modes towards its end. Terminator: Dark Fate - The latest film in the Terminator series--now with James Cameron back in a producer's capacity and with a story credit--isn't very good.  For a movie that works so hard to recall the first two, excellent films in this series (while also erasing it...

A few days ago, I reread my review of The Force Awakens , and found myself in the odd position of being completely unable to recognize myself in it.  It's not that I disagree with anything I wrote.  But only two years after the film's opening, it lingers with me so little that the strong feelings I had about its plot, themes, and approach to the broader Star Wars universe feel positively alien.  What has stuck with me are the characters--Rey and Finn and Poe and Kylo Ren--but even that has more to do with the actors' charm and charisma than with the rather underwritten roles the film gives them.  When The Force Awakens came out, there was a lot of conversation about its essentially being a work of fanfic, a fun, well-made rehash of A New Hope without much personality of its own.  Two years later, we're seeing the outcome of that, with the film existing more as a launching pad for the revamped, Disney-owned Star Wars universe than its own entity. The Last ...

I watched Looper two nights ago, and since coming out of the movie theater I've been trying to work out just why this film left me feeling so unimpressed.  It's not that there's anything wrong with Looper , which in fact wears the crown of intelligent, thought-provoking SF filmmaking better than almost any other claimant to that title in the last few years.  It's well-made, intelligent, and handles its time travel premise in brave and interesting ways.  But it's also an almost airless work, one whose pieces never managed to engage me enough to make me care about its whole. A lot of this comes down to the kind of filmmaker Rian Johnson is.  Johnson's breakout film Brick was a pastiche that drew its power from a gimmick--that its high school age characters spoke like characters out of classic noir--but it elevated itself above a mere mash-up through its dedication to its style, and with the help of a magnetic, soulful central performance by Joseph Gordon-Levit...

Isn't it just the way: months can go by without me seeing the inside of a movie theater, and then two films I want to see open on the same weekend. Here are my thoughts on both of them. Terminator Salvation : As everyone has said, this is better than Terminator 3 . It's not, however, so much better as to matter. Christian Bale is a plank of wood as John Connor, which allegedly shouldn't matter as he's not really the star of the film. That would be Sam Worthington (who is decent enough even if he can't seem to keep his Aussie accent in check) as Marcus, the secret Cylon, and of a secondary importance is Anton Yelchin (the best of the three, but also the one who's been given the worst lines) as Kyle Reese. The problem is that despite all the post-Judgement Day window dressing which suggests that Salvation is about the war with the machines, what the film actually does is regurgitate the previous two films' plots: a temporal threat to John Connor's ex...

So, here's the best compliment I can pay Rian Johnson's debut film, Brick: my friend Hagay and I drove to Jerusalem (an hour's drive), where the film was playing as part of the Jerusalem film festival , battled the city's unfamiliar streets and mid-day traffic, paid an exorbitant amount of money for a parking place that turned out to be a ten minute walk away from the cinematheque, and missed the film's first few minutes. And it was all worth it. Brick is smart, and exciting, and fantastically well-acted. It's also gimmicky, of course--high-school students whose lives are steeped in drugs and violence, who never see the inside of a classroom, whose parents are absent or downright insane, and who speak like characters out of a Dashiel Hammet novel. But the true marvel of the film is that it sustains this gimmick all the way to the finish line. Brick is a two hour long tightrope act, where any misstep would mean an immediate and irretrievable plunge into absurd...