I watched 6 movies last week:
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- A music biopic where the band members play themselves sounds a little dodgy on paper, but the members of Kneecap acquit themselves well. The movie is goofy and pointed and entertaining.
- There’s something of a critical consensus that the first Venom movie is kind of lousy and the second one, while not necessarily great, is easily a step up. I would one hundred percent reverse that—I did not enjoy Let There Be Carnage even a little—but I would definitely agree with corresponding consensus that Venom: The Last Dance is the worst of the three movie. It’s full of callbacks to plots and characters I remember not at all from the first two installments, back-stories for new characters who otherwise get no development, whiplash shifts in tone, unexciting CGI, and a metric ton of attempted world-building. Tom Hardy sometimes seems like he’s having fun, but that’s about all I can say for it.
- There’s a lot to admire in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, not least of all Richard Pryor’s bravery in making it, his sincere willingness to examine his own self-destructive behaviors. The movie is often audacious and imaginative, and if it has a fault, it’s that you often want it to go even deeper.
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- The Outrun doesn’t have anything novel to say about addiction, but I’m not sure that anything novel needs to be said. Sometimes all you need are the quiet truths like “It never gets easy, it just gets less hard.” Saoirse Ronan is as good as she’s ever been, as a young woman struggling to find happiness somewhere other than the places that also bring her misery, and the movie never feels anywhere close to trite or cliche.
- Hi, Mom! is interesting—it’s one of Brian De Palma earliest films, and one of Robert De Niro’s earliest performances—but it’s difficult to say what most, if any, of it is in service to.
- The second, visually more audacious half of The Congress is a lot more interesting than the first—especially now that the idea of replacing actors with digital copies seems less prescient and just something studios are actively trying to do—but I’m also not sure it all coalesces or connects in a fully satisfying way. The movie plays certainly with a lot of interesting ideas, though.
I also rewatched the pretty terrific Amadeus.