Week 21: best cinematography winner
I’d never gotten to this one. And yeah, that was an Oscar well-won. Looks great but I felt the third act dragged more than I wanted it to. Also I’m struggling a little to think of other things to say so, you know, that’s not a great sign…
Rating: 3.5/5
Week 22: a musical
Okay, so, for Recovered, Keith and I were supposed to start our Kaiju Saga with a bunch of Godzilla movies, but much like previous mega-sagas, one of the co-hosts had been working through the playlist for weeks, and one of the co-hosts had planned to, I dunno, watch all of them the weekend before we recorded and ran out of time, so we needed to fire off a quick two-film episode. I suggested Road to Singapore and Road to El Dorado very, very quickly. Keith later asked if I was trying to punish him, and I could only say “Well it wasn’t not that.”
Anyway a lot of the humour no longer lands, they get nowhere near Singapore, and at one point they need to infiltrate a feast only for local Pacific islanders, and they do this exactly how you’re thinking they would and it’s every bit as uncomfortable as you’d expect, hated it. I guess I can see why they made like seven of these over the decades, but it did not inspire me to check out the others.
Rating: 2.5/5
Week 23: set pre-1900s
I’d been flailing a little to find something for this week, and the week was almost over, so I decided to finally check this one out. After all, I very much liked Seth McFarlane’s “I wanna do my own Star Trek” show The Orville, which evolved from a comedy show with some Star Trek stuff into a Star Trek show with some comedy pretty quickly, but Seth was not in that mindset yet. A big chunk of this movie is low-brow jokes that the Fox execs wouldn’t have let Family Guy get away with, and most of those didn’t land for me, not my brand. But the rest of the jokes could be quite clever, especially poking fun at how backwards the era could be. Such as McFarlane’s character not being able to get a song out of his head because “There are only three songs!” And he and Charlize Theron are a fun pairing. I’m, like, 60% glad to have watched it? Hence giving it the following…
Rating: 3/5
Week 24: new release
This was new in theatres that week. So I, like so very many people, went to see it. It’s pretty good, I’m gonna have to dig into it for Academy Vs Audience, but suffice to say, it all works but since a lot of it is hitting similar beats to the original, it works slightly less well. “One emotion cannot dominate, regardless of which” is a double beat but sure, fine.
Rating: 3.5/5
Week 25: 25th anniversary this year
I had… I had so many Godzilla movies to watch, chat, so many. Didn’t have extra time to throw on The Sixth Sense. Anyway, it’s a little all over the place, the human characters seem important but spend the climax just hanging out and watching, but Godzilla fights some giant aliens, that’s always a good time. We discussed at length here.
Rating: 3/5
Week 26: features an illness
Well now how hadn’t I seen this one. I love Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anna Kendrick, and Seth Rogen, Joseph is spectacular in it, and it’s both hilarious and at times sheerly gutting, as the story of a man fighting a particular nasty cancer while his best friend seems to be goofing around but is actually trying to keep his pal’s spirits up, while his girlfriend… goes another way. Kendrick plays to her strengths as a rookie counsellor trying to talk JGL through it all, I found it a delight and came close to sobbing when the struggle started to break our protagonist. Great watch.
Rating: 4.5/5
Week 27: strong female lead
I’d heard so many good things about this, so I was interested to check it out, and a lot does work. The cast is fun, the comedy lands, the heightened reality we’re presented lets them push the whole angle just that extra mile so that they can get absurd with the premise… I guess my personal issue is that I don’t always connect well to stories where bullies are revered as god-kings. So that was stressing me out. If you don’t have that issue, you’d like it more, probably.
Rating: 3.5/5
Week 28: set during the decade you were born
Call me out why don’t you, Letterboxd. Well, on the surface, this is my exact jam of a story: a hard-boiled detective mystery where the initial crime spirals into a larger conspiracy, then the key to that conspiracy comes back to that initial crime. LA Confidential, Watchmen, Maltese Falcon, I dig it almost every time. This one may have simply leaned too hard into the psychedelic, making it a little too hard to grasp what was happening or not happening.
Rating: 3.5/5
Week 29: based around a sport
Well this was a fun ride. My main nitpicks are that it felt like they spent a little too long in first gear even after getting all the pieces of the puzzle in place, and much like Bottoms my own idiosyncrasies got in the way. Simply put, while I understand that large swaths of the population finds Bad Boys inherently sexy just for being Bad Boys, I’ve just never been able to vibe with that as a concept. I get why Zendaya dates the bad boy tennis player first (Mike Faist is too timid to seal the deal before his pal does), but once he’s washed up, functionally homeless, and swiping through dating apps to find a place to sleep before the tournament, I do not see how he still has appeal. His bad boy charm is now even less hot than the Bad Boys of film, who are 50% Martin Lawrence and 100% cop and thus Not Sexy.
But I guess trying to be the arbiter of what’s sexy is why I keep ending up siding with Jack from Lost or Stefan from Vampire Diaries or even poor, simple Riley Finn from Buffy, yes I get that it’s just me. Anyway the tennis scenes get exhilarating, it’s tense and fun and good. Looks like it won’t get nominated for Best Picture but it’s better than at least one movie that will.
Rating: 4/5
Week 30: a remake
Oh come on I do a podcast about remakes and you think that the week I had to watch five Kong movies I was going to also watch a different remake? Recreationally? No, I used Peter Jackson’s King Kong, which I think is the best one but Keith thought had too much filmmaking and dropped a complaint that I respected so little it broke me. There’s more here.
Rating: 4/5
Next page: I try to engage with classics, and we hit the Spengler Saga
