Movie Reviews

First Cow - In 1800s Oregon, a skilled cook (John Magaro) travels with some fur trappers and then leaves them to join forces with a Chinese immigrant (Orion Lee). Together they live off the land, and then they steal some milk from a cow and make fried items for a local camp.

This movie won a lot of awards and received good reviews, but I found it to be plodding and predictable. I couldn't find any important messages or meanings, and I can't recall any significant dialog. The acting and set design was nice, but that's about it. I only made it about 3/4 of the way through. Skip.

Five Feet Apart - Teenagers Haley Lu Richardson and Cole Sprouse play cystic fibrosis patients who need to stay 6 feet apart from other people in order to stay healthy. This came out in 2019, shortly before coronavirus. In 2019, the audience was supposed to find the concept of enforced distancing unique, strange, and sympathetic. After corona, the movie loses a lot of its impact, to say the least, when all of us have had to live 6 feet apart and wear masks for a year or more.

It's the standard illness-of-the-week teenager movie. It loses something by not following its own rules (they shorten the distance to 5 feet apart, for one), but it is coherent enough and the story and acting are fine. It's not groundbreaking, but it is pleasant (in that teen peppy/tragic sort of way).

If I Stay - This is the standard accident-of-the-week teen movie. Chloë Grace Moretz plays cellist Mia, interested in Juliard, and Jamie Blackley plays Adam, a rock and roller who is unhappy that Mia might leave him to go to Juliard. Adam breaks up with Mia and then Mia and her entire family get into a car accident and ghost Mia must decided if life is worth living or whether to move on.

I suppose that I had hope for a little more bravery from the script, since it genuinely seemed that Mia's decision was a tough one. However, like Five Feet Apart, the story is coherent, the acting is sympathetic, and it is all okay. An enjoyable, if not memorable, movie for an adult like me (a little better than Five Feet Apart), probably the movie is more enjoyable for a teenager.

Judy - Renée Zellweger joins the list of talented performers dutifully method playing eccentric celebrities in wholly unimportant movies (Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, Natalie Portman in Jackie, ...). Judy had a hard life: too early celebrity in a cruel fame system, introduction to drugs, a series of husbands and forced separation from her children, and several breakdowns. It's a biopic on Judy Garland that should have been a documentary.

Zellweger, like Streep and Portman before her, plays her character so loudly, demands so much screen real estate, and captures so much focus, that the air is sucked out of everything that could have made this a good movie. Yes, good job, but the movie is just not fun to watch. Admittedly, Judy Garland was a loud kind of performer, and was also not much fun to watch. Skip.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always - Yet another teen movie, this one is powerful and unusual. A teen girl in a town in rural Pennsylvania that does not provide abortions travels with her cousin to New York City to get one. Very simple, except for everything. She doesn't know what she wants and she is fed lies by organizations and adults that work to thwart her. She and her cousin are subjected to the constant low-to-mid-level harassment and abuse that so many girls encounter from creeps, and even average guys, on a near constant basis. And she is just a kid; really, she might be the most kid-like kid I have ever seen in a teen movie: no witty insights, no outbursts, no dramatic stands, just quiet suffering and questioning in an attempt to get where she thinks she needs to get to.

It's engaging, brutal, realistic, and captivating. Talia Ryder (Skylar, the cousin) and Sidney Flanigan (Autumn) play the girls to perfection. The scene from which this movie gets its name - an unpitying camera shot of Autumn as an abortion counselor asks her questions about her life and unspoken events play out over Autumn's face - is one of the best scenes I have seen in a movie for quite a while. Very moving, unforgettable, and an articulate challenge to the way our world treats women and girls. A must see.

Raya and the Last Dragon - Another good movie from Disney. Incredible animation, beautiful visuals, talented vocals, some interesting characters. It's the first southeast Asian Disney princess ... and first pillbug sidekick.

A long time ago, Kumandra was united and peaceful and had dragons. But some smoke monsters attacked the land and the dragons sacrificed themselves to protect it, leaving behind a gem and a divided kingdom. One of the five communities held the gem until Raya (Kelly Marie Tran), the princess, trusted someone who tricked her. In the resulting scramble to take the gem, it broke into five convenient pieces, each one of which was taken by one community. The monsters are back, gem pieces are the only things that can be used to ward off the monsters, and Raya tries to find the sassy last dragon (Akwafina) and the other gem pieces to reunite them and drive off the monsters permanently. Some people in the other kingdoms stand in her way; some lost souls join in her quest.

The message of the story is to learn to trust people who have shown themselves to be entirely and repeatedly untrustworthy. This makes no sense, but such is the way of those who think that age old religious conflicts can be resolved by everyone just being nice and vulnerable. Sigh. This is getting rather tiring (see The Last Jedi, Wonder Woman 1984, etc...).

I'm fine with the idea that everyone has different motivations and there are no real bad guys, and with the complete absence of a love interest for our princess. I'm a bleeding heart liberal, too, but I'm also not an idiot. The message has to at least make some sense.

If you ignore this, which I mostly can (I could not in Wonder Woman 1984), it's great fun. There are new and (for me) unusual elements of mythology and practice that I presume derive from or imitate southeast Asian culture. For example, the dragons' relationship to water and way that they "fly" is quite interesting. Worth watching.

Shiva Baby - A nice idea with some good parts but disappointing execution. Danielle (Rachel Sennott) is a Jewish college student taking money from an older man (Danny Deferrari) for sex. She has an ex-lover Maya (Molly Gordon). Her parents (Fred Melamed and Polly Draper) make her come to a shiva (which is like - but not like - a Jewish wake) for someone she barely knew, and she runs into both sugar daddy and ex-lover. A lot of painful, cringey moments ensue.

Everyone performs well, and there are numerous moments of comedy and real tension. It should have been enjoyable, and it was, for long stretches. But too many of the director's / writer's (Emma Seligmen) choices were not good. First off, there are tight face shots nearly every moment. While some of these made sense - to indicate feelings of claustrophobia - they went on for so long and were so ubiquitous that they ended up more dizzying and annoying than atmospheric. Second, there are babbling scenes of old Jewish people talking across Danielle as she grows gradually more uncomfortable and looks more trapped; again, these go on for too long and are used too often.

I've been to many shivas. I don't know what kinds of shivas Emma has been to, but this shiva is run like The Exterminating Angel: people come at the beginning and don't seem to be able to leave until the very end. If I had been in Danielle's place, I would have a) punched a few people, and b) left after 20 minutes. The conversations, most of which felt natural, slowly began to take on dreamlike / nightmarish qualities. I don't know if this was intentional; it didn't appear to be so. It was distracting and eventually uncomfortable.

This felt like a good first effort (she has done only a short film before this), and it had a lot of good parts. But it needed some rewriting and some editing. I would like to see her next effort.

Stargirl - Another movie that inspired me to read the book. This is a story of a small town school where the arrival of a manic pixie dream girl Stargirl (Grace VanderWaal) and her ukulele shakes everybody up, especially a boy who lost his father named Leo (Graham Verchere). MPDG arrives in school, is ridiculed, then she inspires everyone, then she is nice to the school's athletic competitors and is ridiculed again, then she comes to prom and inspires Leo to break out of his shell, and then she disappears.

Like MPDGs, she seems to be created just to make Leo's life better and has no sensible motivations of her own other than being original and kooky. Acting and directing is fine. I would have sworn that this movie was written for Grace, who is a famous ukulele player, but the book is actually 20 years old and it actually features a girl with a ukulele, so there you go. Unfortunately, like movies with MPDGs, it suffers from giving the girl no real character other than kooky and therefore making no real sense. It's pleasant but empty.

Which is a shame, since I read the book after seeing the movie and the book is really, really good. In the book, Stargirl is way more manic and kooky, but she does it for herself, not for Leo. Her association with Leo happens, but she is wild and crazy to everyone, before knowing Leo, while knowing Leo, and after ditching Leo. We learn more about her, so she is more inspirational, as a result. (I also read the sequel, which is written from her voice). What a pity that this movie didn't have the bravery to make a movie about the book's version of Stargirl, instead of about Leo, who is far less interesting.

Tina - A biography about Tina Turner. Slightly more interesting than similar ones I have recently seen, as it covers the difficult relationship Tina had with Ike.

Wolfwalkers - I was not expecting much, having watched the beautiful but disappointing Song of the Sea (which, together with The Secret of the Kells and this movie, form a trilogy) and similar movies, but this one did not disappoint.

In a time of superstition and fear about nature in general, and wolves in particular, a young girl Robyn (Honor Kneafsey) grows up with her father (Sean Bean) who is a wolf-hunter. But one day, she meets a girl Mebh (Eva Whittaker) in the forest who is a wolf-walker, and her loyalties are put into question. Will the village's angry Lord Protector succeed in eliminating the wolves?

The story is not particularly surprising, but it is classic, sweet, and suspenseful. It features gorgeous flat, textured animation, rather than the hyper-realistic animation now used by Disney and Pixar. There is lovely music and songs, and nice voices. Worth watching.