Bad Teacher. An Education. Bad Education. Bad Santa. Like with a human being, one might say there is nothing more personable to a person than their name. However, it can become lost in the weeds when a movie doesn’t have a title that can quickly be associated with it. Furthermore, if the film isn’t memorable and has no recognizable title, it’s likely to get even further caught in the weeds. Such could have been, and likely was to many, Cory Finley’s (Thoroughbreds) Bad Education.
Category Archives: Comedy
Licorice Pizza (2021)
Say what you will about Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Magnolia). Whether you are a fan of his directing or not, his movies feel like they are so much longer than they need to be. Painfully so, sometimes. He hooks you with his rich characters (often played by some of the finest actors in the industry) and what feels like is going to be a soft, gentle story. But then his movies tend to drift aimlessly, going down so many different wormholes before finally arriving at an unsatisfying conclusion. Such is the case with Licorice Pizza, a boy meets girl, coming-of-age story that is likely to earn some Oscar nominations despite its waning story and crawl to the finish line.
Another Round (2020)
Thomas Vinterberg (The Hunt, The Command) turned heads when he received his first Best Director Academy Award nomination for the little-known but well-received Another Round, the 2020 Best International Feature Film winner. There were some excellent candidates for Best Director in 2015, but Vinterberg wasn’t necessarily in that discussion.
I had this movie at the top of my queue to watch for more than six months before I finally watched it on a recent plane ride. It’s a Denmark movie, and I haven’t been doing great in recent years with subtitled films, especially when watching at home. A long plane ride was the perfect opportunity to focus on my laptop with some headphones on. The movie earned 92% critics and 90% audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes. Those scores were both pretty high. Another Round, while original, was nothing special. It wasn’t so much that it was uninteresting. It just wasn’t memorable at all. It also had numerous things that could have been improved, including plenty of continuity questions. I don’t doubt that there were many international films from 2020 and that this one received much of its acclaim and fanfare because of its director and lead actor.
Palm Springs (2020)
Palm Springs, the Andy Samberg (NBC’s Brooklyn 99, Saturday Night Live) and Cristin Milioti (The Wolf of Wall Street, It Had to Be You) led comedy, was exactly the movie we needed during the summer of 2020. In a year with very few comedies (Borat Subsequent Movie will likely be the most memorable), this was a fun, unique movie that I’m sure would have broken up a dreadful summer. The problem was that theaters were mostly closed when this movie was released.
American Psycho (2000)
My recent apparent 2020 trend of alternating between Christian Bale, Denzel Washington, and Russell Crowe movies continues with my review of Mary Harron 2000’s cult classic American Psycho. In his first lead role, this film introduced an experienced but still grossly undiscovered Bale (The Fighter, Ford v Ferrari) to the screen.
American Psycho seems like a movie that most people have seen. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve at least heard of it. I’ve seen it three or four times, and each time, I think I will end up liking it more than the time before. And that’s not saying a lot because I wouldn’t say I liked it the first time I saw it and got upset with myself for watching it every four or five years. I want it to be good. It’s just not. The main reason is that it is too obscure. I’m not too fond of zany or batty. I also sometimes like everything laid out before me, so I don’t have to think. American Psycho makes you think, but you have to think too hard, and then you wonder if what you thought was correct or wasn’t anywhere close to being what Harron intended.