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The Two Popes [2019] :

As a proud Catholic, as someone who loves the Church and who tries to follow the teachings of Christ, led on earth by Papa, I cannot express how pleased I was by the movie The Two Popes.

It is smart and funny and full of faith and heart. I loved all 2 hours.

As a movie critic, I give the movie an 8.5.
As a Catholic, a 10!

8.5/10

 
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Even though I missed about 10 minutes in the beginning of The Two Popes, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Who would have thought a conversation between two people can be so fascinating?
 
I watched 6 Underground with Ryan Reynolds on Netflix. I enjoyed it. Good fun. Yes it's a cheesy formulaic Michael Bay film but there are 3 good segments, the car chase scene at the beginning, the kidnap heist in the Hong Kong penthouse in the middle, and the attack on the dictator's yacht at the end; in between they have flashbacks on how they were recruited. The magnet weapon was innovative and good for a laugh. I found 6 Underground more easy to consume than Uncut Gems with Adam Sandler. While Uncut Gems might be a better film production, I found the first half exhausting to watch. The last half hour was great but the set-up for it was long. In many anti-hero films, you can still find something to empathize, but not here. Sandler's character is the architect of his own failures. Variation of a Cain and Abel story I suppose, although I didn't catch if Arno was his brother or brother in law, but in this version both are jerks. It's a well made project, but not relaxing to watch. Even the music score intentionally grates the nerves. Does Julia keep all the money? I guess we'll never know. At least I figure there won't be a sequel to all this angst-driven mayhem.
 
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Puck said:
Uncut Gems with Adam Sandler. While Uncut Gems might be a better film production, I found the first half exhausting to watch. The last half hour was great but the set-up for it was long. In many anti-hero films, you can still find something to empathize, but not here. Sandler's character is the architect of his own failures. Variation of a Cain and Abel story I suppose, although I didn't catch if Arno was his brother or brother in law, but in this version both are jerks. It's a well made project, but not relaxing to watch. Even the music score intentionally grates the nerves. Does Julia keep all the money? I guess we'll never know. At least I figure there won't be a sequel to all this angst-driven mayhem.
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Shocked you felt this way.

P.S. Brother-In-Law. :)
 
nameless1 said:
Even though I missed about 10 minutes in the beginning of The Two Popes, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Who would have thought a conversation between two people can be so fascinating?
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Yes!

I heard it was terrific but even I, someone who loves the Church, expected it to be slow and dry. It was anything but. So much fun.
 
kihei said:
But I left the theatre thinking that the film represents the best publicity the Church has received in a quarter of a century.
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Yes.

Pope Francis met with Hollywood people in the hope of changing the Church's image. It was a smart move and a step in the right direction.

Now, we just have to hope a lot of people see it.
 
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I saw The Rise of Skywalker. This was a weird one for me. First off I don't think it's nearly as bad as critics are making it out to be, but I also understand why people are so upset. There are a lot of major plot points that are just baffling to include in the movie, but they handle everything fairly well once you get past those plot points being there. Contrast that to The Last Jedi, where I actually loved a lot of the plot points they brought up, but did not like how those plot points were handled the rest of the movie.

I was honestly in disbelief at the opening crawl. I can't believe how a certain revelation was handled. They couldn't have done it in a worse way.

My main takeaway from the series as a whole was that I loved how Kylo Ren's character was handled pretty much the whole way through. Favorite Star Wars character for sure. It's a bit of a shame about almost everything else surrounding him in these movies because all of his stuff REALLY worked IMO. Everything else was completely disjointed movie to movie though.
 
I saw Cats last night. It lives up its particular hype. CGI looks either otherwordly(more alien-like than cat-like) or just unfinished, and the sense of scale changes multiple times even within single songs. Judi Dench in particular looked totally ridiculous, Ian McKellan looked pathetic meowing and licking a bowl at 80 years old, and the Idris Elba cat looked more human than the rest so it was like he was naked lol. Jennifer Hudson ugly cries through literally every single scene she is in, also looks bad.

There isn't much of a discernible plot. Its kind of like "The Lottery" but with cats, and the winning cat flys off in a balloon at the end, but even more barebones. Generally goes: new cat shows up, they sing a song about themselves. Repeat for the first hour. There is a sort of subplot with the Idris Elba cat kidnapping(catnapping?) the other cats so it can win the contest, but it was just weird and nonsensical. He'd lure away a cat that had been singing and say "magic!" and they'd both disappear in a flash to some barge in the river. Every scene there, by the way, was like some nightmare version of the Wizard of Oz. The cats are called 'the Jellicles', and the Judi Dench cat decides the winner. At one point she declares to the evil Idris Elba cat "You'll never be my Jellicle choice!" and my theatre started laughing.

The whole movie was pretty f***ing weird to be honest with you. Like the opening scene is pretty odd, but then it slides into the Rebel Wilson scene in which the weirdness is scaled up big time. Her song begins with her scratching her crotch vigorously while making noises, then there are some strange mouse-children that are bizarre, followed by a conga line of singing cockroaches with the Rebel Wilson cat variously singing and eating the cockroaches. This song is then followed by a song from a cat who sings about being fat and eat garbage, the song ending with the cat rolling in garbage in a dump, eating it. There is also a song about a cat whose distinguishing feature was living in a railyard I think, or on a train or something. That scene was weird and bad, the CGI was super low quality, and they were all tap dancing for some reason. The movie concluded with them singing a song about how to address your cat, including a Judi Dench monologue on doing so. Add to all of this, every single scene, a ton of gyrating hips and latent horniness too.
 
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Cats (2019) Directed by Tom Hooper 4B

I had momentarily considered smoking a joint before going to this film, and maybe I should have. I'm not here to pile on; this is not the worst movie ever made or anything close to it (my afternoon audience in a theatre about three quarters full clapped happily at the end of the movie). However the experience of watching it is definitely on the unsettling side. While I thought that my well-trained suspension of disbelief would kick in eventually, it never did. The cats started out looking weird, and they stayed looking weird. Some of the costumes looked practically painted on, so that the slimmer cats like newcomer Francesca Hayward and Taylor Swift look quite dishy, but their being cats and all, dishy cats seems kind of a perverse combination. Then there is the movement--sometimes the cats move on all fours; at other times they stand up like no cat in history. The close ups continue the weirdness--Judy Dench looks like Bert Lahr in The Wizard of Ox in drag, a resemblance that is aided by the strange fact that she is wearing a big fur coat over her fur. To think of these odd inconsistencies began to hurt my head. The bad cat is of course black, giving the movie an odd racist feel that I am sure was not intentional, but what are you going to do? It's another unsettling point. I might have survived this stuff, though, but Cats has two shortcomings that seem to have been magnified by transferring the stage musical to the screen. There is no story to speak of--just a lot of cats getting to do their bit to show off their individuality. An even worse problem is that there is only one memorable melody in the entire movie, provided by the song Memory, which is a shlockmeister's wet dream but hummable. Of course, Jennifer Hudson gets to sing it because Hollywood has reserved her almost exclusively for the purpose of belting out Broadway show-stoppers. Every other song is instantly forgettable. In the end, Cats did not quite leave me catatonic. I didn't think it was a catastrophe, but I certainly didn't find the tunes catchy. Perhaps they just did not cater to my taste. Nor did the movie catapult me into a fantastic realm. I certainly wouldn't categorize the film as cathartic on any level, though I wouldn't categorically dismiss the film as my audience found Cats very much to their liking. I may have missed fifteen minutes or so having a catnap.
 
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The Wolf Of Wall Street [2013] :

"If I win the lottery, I'm going to spend half the money on booze and strippers, and blow the other half." - Origin of quote unknown.

Both the book and movie are long and unpleasant. However, the movie does have the breathtaking Margot Robbie.

3/10

 
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Three Days of the Condor (Pollack - 1975) - Didn't age that well. Dunaway's sudden Stockholm syndrome, kind of misogynistic. Redford's implying that the Black folks must know how to break into a car, kind of racist. I thought it would be meh but I'd have some fun, not that much. 3/10
 
Saw a group of Christmas films.

White Men Can't Jump (1992) by Ron Shelton – 7/10

God how I love Rosie Perez in this film. She's worth the price of admission all by herself. The rest of the film is okay but kinda moves from nowhere to nowhere. Without Rosie it's probably a 5/10 instead.

Trading Places (1983) by John Landis – 7/10

It's easy to see some of Eddie Murphy's skills here is in youthful exuberance. He moves lightly, executes jokes lightly, smiles lightly, et cetera. Pretty funny movie. Probably couldn't be made today because of subject matter/use of particular words, et cetera.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) by John Frankenheimer – 6.5/10

I (kinda) missed the first 10 minutes, then I saw the trailer and it says "if you miss the first 5 minutes of this film you wont understand what it's all about!". I still understood what it was about, I think, but I didn't understand why Janet Leigh was in the movie. Perhaps I should watch it with better focus. It was good looking though.
 
Star Wars 2019. 1/4 stars.

I was surprised at the degree of poor quality, but I expected it to be bad so it was not a huge shock.
 
Bridge of Spies (2015), 7.5/10

The sequence of Powers being hit by the Russian SAM and thrown out of the cockpit was so historically inaccurate I just just had to roll my eyes.
 
Merry Christmas to all my fellow movie nuts...

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I enjoy your reviews, even when you don't know your <bleep> from a hole in the ground. ;)
 
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The Joker is definitely an interesting experience, because I found myself split on it. The filmmakers are clearly familiar with The Killing Joke, the definite Joker origin story nowadays, but they are merely inspired by it, and used the source material liberally. In fact, there is only one detail it kept, and they made up the rest. Thus, for those who prefer the original source, like myself, this rendition can be a rather shallow disappointment. On the other hand, for those who went into the theatre with a clean slate, this is pretty entertaining, and it gives a plausible explanation to how The Joker comes to be.

That said, Todd Philips is definitely not the man for the job, because his explanation for how the Joker came to be is way too simple and too convenient. Quite frankly, this character is way too complex for him to handle, and he was lucky to have Joaquin Phoenix play the titular role. Without the lead's immense talent and dedication that allowed him to craft a mesmerizing and fascinating performance, this movie would not have worked, because the plot is rather weak, with some critical plotholes.
Even though the filmmakers are able to demonstrate the strange charisma of The Joker, because he thrives on chaos, and that can be seen as quite liberating, it still does not fully explain how he became a criminal mastermind that can even best the greatest minds in the world from a simpleton who is not that intelligent to begin with. To be fair, the comic never fully explains it either, but I guess the adage about how it is a thin line between genius and insanity can be applied here.

That said, I did enjoy one change.
In most publications, Bruce Wayne's parents were killed by gangsters, but in this movie, the Joker became the inadvertent cause of their deaths. That is actually a great way to explain the unbreakable link between the two iconic characters.

Honestly, the pros and cons are about as evenly split as possible, but at the end of the day, I am still rather entertained, so I will give it a 6/10. It is not great, but there is no regret either.
 
The Two Popes is great script-writing. Best dialogue in a movie in long time. Won't win Best Picture but kudos to the writers. Loved The Aeronauts. Did not like The Joker personally but brilliant interpretation by Joaquin Phoenix. The Joker is classic great interpretation material for an actor it seems (almost Shakespearean in heights), but I'm ready to give it a rest now (Nicholson, Ledger, Leto, Phoenix). The character is now a legendary pop arch-nemesis, more than Darth Vader. We get it, move on, please.
 
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