Still, I like both Florence Pugh and Olivia Wilde, and the film seemed intriguing — so I was determined to watch it. Having watched trailers for it about six million times, I felt compelled to do so. It starts off quite well — that mystery brewing amongst a stylized setting that works wonders — but the plot in the end turns out to be nothing but vapor. What story is there is not entirely clear, despite meek efforts to bandage things up hastily in the end.
What would be SO much better is going with the story you’ve set up, and figuring out where it goes. This whole winging-it plot style doesn’t suit me much. Because story matters. What we have instead is a cheap mop job borne out of lack of imagination. An insult of all the good effort you’ve put into the film.
The anemic conclusion combines with titles 100%, and very lazily, MIA for no good reason to yield a 5/10.
Cool poster though.
Comparison Notes: The Truman Show, The Cabin in the Woods, The Matrix, Vivarium, Gaslight (1944)— the movie, all other gaslighting movies, and the concept generally which is such an en vogue term nowadays.
I’m not an absolute die-hard David Bowie fan, but I am a big fan. He’s one of the greatest solo musical artists of all time, so I was keen to watch this “immersive” experience.
Or so Moonage Daydream is marketed, an opinion endorsed by the Times. (kudos to them, though, on this one — at least it is not a Critic’s Pick). I saw the film in IMAX, so it was immersive in a way, I suppose. In the way a big screen does that.
But if you’re looking for the next great immersive filmed David Bowie experience, this isn’t it. It’s kinda draggy, and a lot of music that shouldn’t have been left out was.
Appreciation goes to the amount of footage and interviews, etc. that I had not seen before. But if you’re not going on the pure musical approach, that is if you’re trying to put together a documentary, you still need to tell a story. Moonage Daydream fails at that.
* * *
I caught about the last half-hour of David Bowie: The Last Five Years on HBO, and, besides being about a lot more than his last five years, it was a lot better, more informative, and more profound than the lame Moonage Daydream.
EVEN BOWIE FANS WILL FIND IT A BORE
When I did my first post on Making a Murderer, I mentioned how well suited it was to Bowie’s last single, “Lazarus.” His final, gut-wrenching song is shamefully missing from Moonage Daydream.
Lastly, titles are MIA for no good reason. Moonage Daydream was a huge disappointment that even Bowie fans such as myself will find a bore. 4/10
I’ll hit on this in my review of Nope, which I saw last night, but Times movie critic A.O. Scott is a hack. He’s a great writer, which is par for the course with Times writers. But he seems to have great difficulty distinguishing good films from great ones, or good ones from not-good ones.
I pay for a Times subscription, so I earnestly wish that I could rely upon it for evaluation of films — but time and time(s) again, it fails me. So onward my blog marches, or slogs, as it were, ever so slowly…
* * *
I was very excited to see X, hoping to see some true innovation in the slasher genre. I suppose there was a little. It definitely hearkens back to those early slashers of the late seventies and eighties.
The movie features campy cheesy corn, just like good nachos. However, it is not completely self-aware to its own camp. X thinks more of itself than it deserves, and successfully bamboozled the critics as well. It strives to be creepy, and it was a little — maybe I’m jaded, but it just wasn’t that creepy.
And not really scary. There are a couple scary moments, but way too little. So you’re left with a campy horror movie that doesn’t know how to dive headlong into the cheesy corn, but that is also not scary. And titles are annoyingly MIA for no great reason — although at least the filmmaker thought there was, with the way to end the movie. But when given a strong genre theme, why not accentuate that right from the beginning with some strong titles?
It sounds like I hated X, but I did not — it was entertaining even with all its weakness.
* * *
Back to A.O. Scott. He called this movie “clever.” “Clever” is a powerful word, a strong word. A strong word to describe a movie, on that spectrum that leads up to “masterpiece” — which is also thrown around too often and too easily. Guessing here, as Scott lost me right at the outset with the “clever” demarcation, so I did not read the rest of his review, but I think Scott means it’s clever to combine the porn theme with the horror them. Yeah, no. There’s nothing clever about this thing. Just another hack statement by A.O. Scott.
Calling X clever is an insult to No Country for Old Men. An insult to Criminal Lovers. An insult to Django Unchained. And where on earth does it leave Mulholland Drive or that much better “X” movie, Ex Machina? I looked up the filmography of X’s maker Ti West, and it’s just a string of horror movies — conventional horror movies. Now I haven’t seen them, so maybe they’re filled with cleverness, but somehow I doubt it.
One last comparison – as far as the early porn industry, compared to the great masterpiece Boogie Nights, X is just pathetic. Did I mention I still liked it? The performances I did like, especially from the enigmatic star Mia Goth. Certainly a case of the star saving a weak plot. On the low side of 7/10
Sundown’s sociopathic Tim Roth is pointedly detached, but the movie is not. Also starring Charlotte Gainsbourg from Lars von Trier movies, Sundown is thoroughly compelling, venturing into unexpected, unpredictable spaces. I applaud novelty.
But titles are MIA, and I don’t appreciate the deceit at the outset, positing this couple as husband and wife — a deceit that lasts way too long and for no good reason. 7/10
You know when you’re watching a movie that’s slow to start moving (i.e., the worst kind of movie), and, then, just when you think it’s about to start picking up, it just continues to peter out instead? Think Tom Papa: I have.
I had my reservations when I saw the trailer and I was like, well, the Green Knight character is some sort of Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy rip-off, but hey, it’s getting good reviews, so I’ll give it a shot. The Times was absolutely in love with Dev Patel’s exceptionally monotonic and uninspired performance, which is, admittedly, well suited to this uninspired film.
I’ve said more than I wanted to about this one. 3/10
Comparison Notes: Mother!, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Princess Bride, Noah, The Revenant
Gaia cross-checked elements seen in The Ruins, Antichrist, Annihilation, Jaws, and The Lighthouse. I’m not sure how, but that’s what I wrote the night I saw it, so I’ll stick to it. Remembering it now, I reckon it steals from a couple hundred dozen other movies. What I also wrote contemporaneously:
It’s a little repetitive. When it ran out of new ideas it relied on tried-and-true visual flash — where substance runs thin, add style. What’s my motto? Story matters.
But style can go a long way. 6/10
Comparison Notes: see above. The great Criminal Lovers also pops to mind.
Hustlers is like a very boring version of Goodfellas. There are good, even great performances, but there’s little to the “true story.” Look to Comparison Notes below to understand that despite the positives, there’s no way I could recommend Hustlers.
Those performances are among Hustlers’ redeeming attributes, but is it a good time at the movies? Not quite. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus:
Led by a career-best performance from Jennifer Lopez, Hustlers is a uniquely empowering heist drama with depth and intelligence to match its striking visual appeal.
Sometimes I wonder if the critics are watching the same movie. No, it’s not uniquely empowering, there is some depth and intelligence, but not much, and nothing at all striking visually. It’s not even a heist drama, per se. There is something to the relationship building that critics are nuts about, but it’s not enough to overcome a bland, so-what plot. And one more thing — I’ve been reflecting on this Titles MIA thing. Titles here would have told me that the filmmaker understands when her story is underway. 5/10
Ultimately, as much as I may analyze a movie and deconstruct its various elements, the numerical evaluation I reach is achieved by nothing more than how it hits me on an emotional level. It’s a gut-reaction meter to how I felt walking out of the movie theater and driving home. With Honeyland, I walked out feeling it’s a solid 7, good but somehow not great.
Later that evening, my thoughts on the film prevented me from sleeping. I thought about how extraordinary it was to have this documentary play like a nondocumentary. That a narrative without narration could be so convincing. I had read somewhere before seeing Honeyland that it was a documentary, but other than being very authentic, it plays like a normal feature film. It’s remarkable how all the plot elements were so perfectly captured without actors and a storyboard. Or at least I assume it was all real and not produced ‘reality TV’ style. So refreshing compared to the last documentary I saw, the dismal Marianne & Leonard.
EXTRAORDINARY NARRATIVE WITHOUT NARRATION
Whenever a film keeps me tossing and turning at night, its number goes up the next morning.
Now a big negative that I’m sure no one else cares about: No beginning titles whatsoever is more than irksome. It’s like you’re trying to insult my intelligence. Do you think I don’t know the title of the movie? That it’s some great revelation at the end when you bestow the title upon us, the humble moviegoers? Just put the title up front, a-hole!
Apologize for losing it there a moment. One more thing: there’s a sense the film takes place in a far-flung, western-Asian place like Georgia, or Uzbekistan, or Afghanistan — but no. This is Europe. It turns out the decidedly Asian language is Turkish — though I did not recognize it as such. But the Asian part I got right. Throwing me off too was the equally Asian vastness of the landscape, which in fact belongs to Europe. I can safely aver that this is the first, and most likely last film I have ever seen made in North Macedonia. I didn’t even know there was a country called North Macedonia. And I definitely learned a thing or two about bees.
One scary story to tell in the dark would be pure awesomeness, more even better. But there’s nothing particularly scary here. In other words, yawn. I understand this may be directed towards yungin’s, but that doesn’t mean it has to be such a boring rehash.
What is with no starting titles? Are you so ashamed of your lead actors? Of the movie title? 2/10
First a note on the film’s title. Wikipedia incorrectly lists it without the ellipsis, the marketing materials have the ellipsis after the “in” and the film itself displays the title as I have above — ultimately, the correct version. I think. The New York Times briefly addressed this issue, but one thing not mentioned is the space before the ellipsis, a grammatical error. But the space and the placement as I’ve shown seems to be the consensus.
That title is not shown until the end of the movie, though the rest of the standard intro titles are included in the correct location. Followers of my blog know that omitting for no good reason a film’s intro titles annoys the heck out of me — so a partial titles MIA annoyance here. Especially given how much Tarantino loves titles.
All these title issues serve as a signpost which hearkens the weakest Tarantino feature since Reservoir Dogs. It is quite clear that Tarantino had a clear vision in mind for this film, and executed that vision. The problem is it’s not a very good vision. An elongated story about an aging actor looking at the demise of his career is not exactly groundbreaking, especially not the way it’s portrayed here. The whole ode-to-Hollywood component, ever-present in Time … in, only half-works. And then there’s the Manson story.
Tarantino proved himself an absolute master with fictionalized history in the brilliant Inglourious Basterds; Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight showed he knows how to optimize a period setting. Others have written more about this (e.g. this other Times article), so I’ll just agree that it only half-works here. The grand vision that Tarantino had feels a lot smaller on screen. And, as with Lincoln, there’s an opportunity that was missed. Tarantino didn’t want to make a movie about the Manson murders, but rather a semi washed-up actor and the Hollywood scene of 1969. That’s fine, but a missed opportunity and something very diminutive, even petty compared to the scale I was expecting.
And … the Manson murders still have not had their proper due on film.
* * *
I’ve always said that I welcome filmmakers to take their own, original directions. But this wasn’t that original, or particularly great. There are parts of it that are borderline cheeseville. The scene where he’s kicking himself for missing a line is real amateur-hour, even as the whole acting sequence that precedes it flows with art. On the other-other hand, the movie-within-a-movie has no connection to anything else. So not exactly Hamlet, despite the references to it.
There’s enough genuinely entertaining parts of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, including the mild arc of story presented, that I still offer a recommendation full of the normal caveats. A missed opportunity, yes. But there’s fun to be had — probably all Tarantino is going for, and it didn’t drag too much even with the nearly 3-hour running time. Unlike Lincoln, Good Times in Hollywood earns a pass. I just hope this doesn’t mark the beginning of a latter Oliver Stone era in which Tarantino can no longer figure out how to make good movies.
6/10
Comparison Notes: Hail, Caesar! (a much better take on Hollywood’s past, and a vastly more entertaining film), Lincoln, Café Society
UPDATE: It took one more night’s sleep to crank it up a notch; now 7/10.
movies remark 