Welcome to the newly-rebooted Worrying About Film! I may not have been posting, but I’m watching more movies than ever before and want to start talking about them.
The format is going to be a little different going forward, as I’m going to be using this page in addition to my Letterboxd page to keep track of my ambitious (and very silly) goal of watching 500 movies in 2019. These aren’t really going to be reviews and I’m not aiming for a deep level of critical analysis, there just isn’t time. Consider this more my public-facing film journal, at least for now.
A note on film selection: if I don’t go to the theater, the vast majority of the movies I’m watching come from my burgeoning Blu-ray collection. I use a 1080p projector, and at large screen sizes the difference in quality between streaming and disc is much more obvious than on, say, a 50-inch TV. There are some downsides to this, including that for those following along at home, any streaming availability of many of these titles is purely coincidental. Also, due to the sheer volume of titles I want to watch, I do a lot of my movie shopping at big-box stores and I always check bargain bins and look for sales which ends up steering my selection of titles mainly towards American studio movies. And yes, I know my taste in movies is boy-ish. I get it.
JAN. 1
AQUAMAN (2018)
IMAX with Laser, 2D
This was a rewatch, largely out of curiosity to see what this crazy-ass movie looked like in the tallest open-matte format possible. When I saw a flurry of stories in late November of last year that the vast majority of Aquaman would be shown in “full-screen IMAX,” I was skeptical at best. Warner Bros. and the DC comics movies do have a history of tinkering with the format, but the film was not shot with 15/70 IMAX film cameras. I was initially disappointed when the IMAX countdown was shown in 1.90:1, the standard IMAX Digital aspect ratio, and then the first 15-20 minutes were in scope. When the frame finally opened up, I was intrigued by what I saw: the IMAX with Laser version is definitely taller than 1.90:1, but it doesn’t quite fill the screen. This is a sneaky-cool large format event that’s not getting enough attention.
As for the movie, it’s still ridiculously entertaining a second time even as the seams become more obvious. It’s balls-ass crazy from start to finish, and I go to sleep feeling better knowing that something this gleefully unrestrained was given big studio money. Jason Momoa’s character was one of the few beacons of hope in last year’s soulless, depressing Justice League and this time around he loses none of his appeal without having to say “my man!” once. This is a movie that features an army of fish people riding laser sharks fights an army of anthropomorphized crab people. And there’s an octopus playing drums. And a character who calls himself OCEAN MASTER.
The script is broad enough to appeal to international audiences, with a startling amount of screen time dedicated to characters spouting some very detailed exposition and an overall sense of levity that doesn’t translate to the film being all that funny, at least in the text. This film also possibly invents its own trope, with no less than four separate conversations being interrupted by explosions. It would be easy to call this a bad movie, but what would the fun in that be?
JAN. 2
A SIMPLE FAVOR (2018)
Blu-ray
One of my favorite little surprises of 2018 doesn’t hold up quite as well on a repeat viewing a few months later (for spoilery reasons, mostly involving Anna Kendrick’s character), but it was still pleasure to revisit. A Simple Favor is weird mish-mash of tones and veers between broad, adult-ish comedy and dark crime drama, mostly settling on the former. This was marketed as something different from Paul Feig, and I guess it is, but it’s still aimed at the same audience. The easiest thing to say is that this movie is an awful lot of fun to watch, especially with the right company.
CASINO ROYALE (2006)
Blu-ray
I got the complete James Bond Blu-ray box set a few months ago, and I’ve been slowly working my way through it since, watching many of the 007 movies for the first time. The 007 series never really entered my home as a child, and Casino Royale was the first Bond film in which I took an active interest and the first I saw in a theater. It blew me away then, and it’s even better now.
Casino Royale introduces a new Bond in Daniel Craig along with a darker tone and it reboots the series chronology, but on watching it after going through the entire 007 series, I was struck by how much it is still very much a classically-structured Bond film with so many of the familiar beats where you’d expect them, like the cold open, Bond girl, opening credits, M, various chases, etc., but are transformed when given a certain amount of weight and seriousness.
Also, Daniel Craig may be the best Bond but Jeffrey Wright is definitely the best Felix.
JAN. 3
GOOD TIME (2017)
Blu-ray
There were films I liked more in 2017, but few memories of my movie watching that year have stuck with me more than watching Good Time. This is a 100-minute panic attack of a movie that never lets up and never allows the viewer any distance from the action. This film was released around the same time as Darren Aronofsky’s mother! and while both films are extremely different they share a similar aura of dread and claustrophobia. Good Time may not display the same level of strict discipline when it comes to camera placement as Aronofsky’s film, but it spends just as much time in close-up right in the main character’s face and leaves the audience just as little room to wriggle away from the deeply unsettling shit happening on-screen.
In this film Robert Pattinson is an absolute terror, a toxic void of a character who displays a remarkable lack of empathy, hurting anyone he gets close to and moving on too quickly to give it another thought. As he rushes to scrounge for bail money after leaving his mentally disabled brother behind during a bank robbery gone bad, we watch his character seize and exploit every drop of human kindness he can find and turn it into something awful. The experience of watching Good Time is stressful and deeply uncomfortable, but also intensely powerful and impossible to forget. Props must also go to the thrilling and sometimes, intentionally overpowering synth score from Oneohtrix Point Never that both totally rocks on its own and seriously amps up the panic. A great watch next time you’re feeling adventurous.
QUANTUM OF SOLACE (2008)
Blu-ray
Quantum of Solace is a thoroughly strange beast. For one thing, it’s the first Bond film to be a direct sequel and takes place immediately after the events of Casino Royale. It’s also a part of that peculiar class of films and TV shows compromised beyond repair by the 2007-08 writer’s strike; Quantum shot without a finished script. The consequences are clear: this film is 45 minutes shorter than Casino Royale and must have twice as much action, and almost every second of screen time that isn’t action feels like an afterthought at best. In a similarly anomalous twist, the action cinematography is shaky, zoomed-in and cut up within an inch of its life in a fashion similar to the then-popular Bourne series and can border on nonsensical at worst.
That being said, this is a vicious, snarling monster of an action movie that almost never lets up from the first scene onward. Few movies have started faster or louder. For what it lacks in on-screen blood, it compensates for with aggressive camera work and a booming, brutal sound mix that might make this release worth it for budding home theater enthusiasts like myself strictly on the technical merits. Quantum of Solace might not have shaken my soul, but it definitely shook the house.
JAN. 4
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON (2010)
Blu-ray 3D
Like many folks I wrote off How to Train Your Dragon before it came out, mostly on account of its dumb-ass title and the (what I still consider to be) bizarre casting of Jay Baruchel in the lead part. How wrong I felt when I finally discovered it a few years later, and it’s still a joy to revisit before the trilogy-capper comes out in a few months. While the plot and characters of this film may not be the most memorable or distinctive on their own, this is a thoroughly entertaining effort that is solid in almost every respect.
JAN. 5
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT (2018)
Blu-ray
I’m not afraid to say the newest Mission Impossible was one of my absolute favorite films of 2018. When you stop and think about it, in today’s climate we see very few truly high-performing action movies that aren’t green-screen CGI spectacles with little grounding in reality. I can’t think of another film this year that really applies (with the exception of The Night Comes For Us, which was a Netflix release), and the only films I can think of that qualify from 2017 were John Wick Chapter 2 and Baby Driver, neither of which are really competing at this level. Of course there’s a ton of CG and visual-effects trickery happening in Fallout, but a sense of real weight and a grounding in reality achieved by doing real location shooting and stunt work (personally performed by Tom Cruise) elevate the whole affair to a level that it really demands to be taken seriously alongside other prestige fare that is less steeped in genre.
DREDD (2012)
Blu-ray 3D
In a lot of ways, action movies don’t get a lot purer than Dredd (okay, maybe Aquaman). It’s a unique kind of comic book adaptation that dispenses with any kind of origin story or really almost anything in the way of plot or character development. It feels like a single issue in the middle of a run: the characters and the world are established, and the viewer is dropped into what feels like just another story among many. The waters are almost never muddied with any kind of nuance, and there are no significant revelations. However, Judge Dredd kills a lot of people in interesting ways, has some killer one-liners and everyone has a good time.
It’s also worth noting that this is one of my favorite 3D discs. Dredd was shot natively in 3D and is obviously designed around the format with demo-worthy shots abounding. Movies like this are a big reason I invested in a projector.
JAN. 6
SKYFALL (2012)
Blu-ray
When I first saw Skyfall, my exposure to James Bond was mostly via the previous two Daniel Craig films. Walking out of the theater, of course I was first overwhelmed by how good it was, and I had a hard time believing that many of the other Bond movies could possibly operate at that high level of filmmaking proficiency. Having seen all the Bonds recently, I can confirm that even (and especially) among its peers, Skyfall is exceptional. Perhaps most immediately obvious is the film’s look; Roger Deakins shoots the film like a prestige picture and the results are jaw-dropping (I’m sad that I’ll never get to see the IMAX 1.90:1 version again). We probably won’t see the likes of the bold, stripped-down third act again. and while not every beat in the conclusion lands perfectly it certainly is the most substantial single act in any 007 film. When he’s on-screen Javier Bardem instantly cements himself as one of the most captivating Bond villains. I love Skyfall, and it’s one of the few Bond films I’d be tempted to revisit out of continuity.
JAN. 7
SPECTRE (2015)
Blu-ray
I normally hold a soft spot for movies that swing for the fences only to to fall over spectacularly, but Spectre mostly makes me sad. Things start off well enough with a fairly impressive opening setpiece in Mexico City that always tricks me into thinking the movie will be better next time, but by the end I’m left feeling hollow and disappointed. The swing Spectre takes is a big one, as it attempts to connect all the Daniel Craig-era 007 films together with the big shocking twist of bringing back the original 007 Big Bad, Blofeld. Sort of like Star Trek Into Darkness, it doesn’t really work on audience members who are familiar with the original material and makes no sense in the context of the movie. The best twists reframe and inform what came before, the reveal in Spectre adds nothing to the overall series. The thing I felt most sure of by the end is that Bond is eventually going to have to reboot itself again as the new continuity staggers under its own weight. You can only break a character so many times.
Worrying About Film 