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Daddio (2023)
A microscope reveals any flaws
Except for two lines at the airport, there are two actors on screen for the entire film, mostly in close-up, just talking. They begin as strangers and must develop a realistic connection through dialogue alone. In extreme close-up. The camera's intense focus would reveal any flaws in script or performance, and there are none. Both Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson deliver award-winning performances here, but I think the real winner is the screenwriter, Christy Hall, who has the most penetrating insight into two characters I've seen since Marriage Story. It's supremely difficult to have such an extended interaction without a single moment that rings false, but this film does it. I won't say I particularly like or dislike either character, but they are real people who somehow draw out what's best in each other from a standing start. I have to give 10 in 10 because I found no flaws, none at all.
Star Trek: The Way to Eden (1969)
Yes, even worse than they say
It's not totally without redeeming features. Scotty gets to be a generation-gap grump, Spock gets to play the only song he seems to know, and Chekhov apparently reached puberty as we meet an ex-girlfriend who let's just say didn't attend the Academy. Otherwise, this episode aged terribly. It was out of date by the time it hit summer reruns, and now it's just embarrassing that the same people who gave us Tribbles and Hortas generated this. It doesn't provide any insight into the era, either; it might provide a hint of insight into the jaundiced view of the WWII generation, but for that to help you'd have to know the 60's in which case what's the point.
That said, one bit of trivia is actually sort of cool. Charles Napier, who plays Adam, later reappears on Deep Space 9 as a military officer who rapidly tires of the Ferengi way of business. It's a contrast that almost makes it worth watching this episode. Almost.
Dying Is Easy (2021)
If Alan Moore were a film director
This is a film short without the massive budget needed to make a film feel like a comic book, and yet it does as good a job of capturing the essence of the Dark Knight myth as the original Batman (with Michael Keaton). The Batman looks like a vigilante, not like a film star, as should be, and conveys a genuine sense of menace. The depiction of the Joker is the best ever caught on film. The voice is reminiscent of Mark Hamill's without the cartoonish exaggeration; more of a snake's hiss, while the movements make the voice almost unnecessary. The facial expression, though, is the only one I've seen to capture the lunacy originally inspired by The Man Who Laughed. I very much hope Warner picks up the director going forward with Batman.
Barton Fink (1991)
Powerful mixed feelings
To be helpful, I will say that if you enjoy dreamlike movies with dreamlike plots, you'll love this one. It has scenes of such total brilliance that they create doubts about other filmmakers wasting their time all these years.
On the other hand, if you get your dreams for free at night and that's about all you need, you may not like this. It has some brilliant scenes, but no plot, nothing resembling a plot, tension as the eponymous Fink (why that name, you will wonder) struggles to fulfill his Hollywood assignment but the plot was axed by the movie executive in favor of what is, after all, a Dadaist wrestling movie. You'll understand that comment after the movie.
If you enjoy a tightly plotted film in which template characters pursue a goal (e.g., the Mission Impossible films), and you just want a story, without an admixture of meaning, you will probably hate this film. The brilliant scenes -- most of them involving John Goodman -- are character pieces, not plot devices. They advance nothing but themselves. Because there's no plot, remember.
I could appreciate several great scenes, including the conversations between Barton Fink and his neighbor, the overbearing film director, and the two caricatured police detectives, but frankly the Mulholland Drive -- like nonplot drove me nuts. Because I get my dreams for free at night; when I buy entertainment, I prefer a plot as well as surreal imagery and character scenes, however well done.
Call it a 5.
Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)
Star Wars, by Philip Glass
So you make three movies and a billion dollars or so re-telling the classic Hero Journey, then you make three prequels that were apparently scripted by channel-flipping between Ring of Honor Wrestling and CSpan. So you're out of ideas and sell the franchise to Disney for more billions. What do they do, the great Dream Factory of the world?
What they did was chop the original triptych into bite-sized plot nuggets, change some names, genders, and species, and stitch them together into a sequel. You know, like Dr. Frankenstein, stitching together bits of various people to make a single new person. Too bad he picked the brain of a murderer.
Even worse: Disney picked Rain Man's brain for this movie. I can hear Rain Man now, chanting "Hero lives on desert planet. Droid finds hero. Bad guys can't shoot. Narrow escape is narrow. Old man puts hero on path." Every. Single. Plot point. Recycled.
If you've seen the first trilogy, you've seen this one too. As Philip Glass might say, there is nothing new. There is nothing new. There is nothing new. There is nothing new. There is nothing new. There is nothing new. There is nothing new. There is nothing new.
So don't get your hopes up. Go, if you must, you probably won't drive into a bridge abutment on the way home. But don't get your hopes up.
Aloha (2015)
A mess holding gems, as pearls in cow flop
I sat stunned as the credits began to roll. "What the bleep WAS that?" I asked my wife. "What just happened?" She shrugged and smiled. I took that to mean she didn't know, either.
Nor was our confusion unfounded. The filmmakers threw into "Aloha" just about every plot device they could find, hoping at least one of them would work, and in one or two cases they succeeded, but my God, at what terrible price?
Forget Emma Stone not being Hawaiian, although that actually did start to bug me. Far more important is that for the first third of the film, she played her part as if she had just shot meth. Many lines were delivered so rapidly (and perkily) that neither my wife nor I could understand what she had said. Body language, gestures, even breathing all way too fast. Creepy and unsettling. And she was all over Brad Cooper in a way that makes "cartoonish" seem somehow inadequate as a description.
But of course, she's part-Hawaiian, possibly from the Scandinavian portion of the Big Island, so of course she saves the big deal with the native Hawaiians to enable the building of the new industrial plants for the not-Space-X CEO, played by a Bill Murray whose face seemed permanently caught in a Vise Grip, possibly because he was as inappropriately cast as if he had been tapped to play Queen Elizabeth. And of course he's decided to conceal inside his new South Pacific satellite a single nuclear warhead, because I guess that would be a big win. And Stone has warned Cooper (who acts as if "corporate tool" is tattooed on his forehead) that Bill Murray is weaponizing space just as the wise yet simple island natives feared, so when he grunts and twitches his eyebrows to indicate his intent to Do His Job she dumps him, in a scene that screams "you're way better off without her."
So we have the wise-primitives-trying-to-stop-evil-modernity-from- ruining-our-planet plot, and the will-they-or-won't-they plot, and Rachel McAdams as the One He Left Behind plot, but now things get really confusing. Because Cooper suddenly turns into James Bond, wiping out the Chinese attempt to hack the satellite (which they do because, uh...) and then he and his fat buddy (because fat guys and computer guys are the same thing in Hollywood) hack the satellite themselves and stop Bill Murray from taking over the world with his single nuclear warhead by essentially distributing plutonium dust over half the planet. Thereby killing millions of people. But we don't get to see that part; that's the hook for the sequel.
But we're not done yet! We have to throw in the general-blowing-his- stack plot, and the "you mean I'm a father?" plot, and oh Lord I'm sure I forgot a plot or two. I had to go home and hide. What a mess! It was like the execrable "Cannonball Run" with Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise, except those guys actually hired James Bond (Roger Moore), they didn't have one guy play his part and all the others to boot.
In the midst of this polymelic chopped salad of a movie, three things stood out as actual redeeming features. First, Rachel McAdams plays her character perfectly, and it's a well-drawn character. Second, her husband, played by John Krasinski, was equally excellent in a very understated part that got the only intentional laughs of the film. And finally, their daughter, played by Danielle Rose Russell, showed an emoting capacity which, at her age, portends an excellent future. Those things worked, and could have been the whole plot line of a much better movie.
The rest stunk.