The Robert Rodriguez kiddie digital filmmaking experience remains a half-coherent, sugar-coated blast of prepubescent id.
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Shorts (2009)
Category: Capsule
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38 at the Garden (2022)
I absolutely love the Linsanity story (genuinely one of the greatest American sports moments of the 21st century), and that goodwill carries this HBO doc to a certain extent, but I was continually annoyed how little of it is actually basketball-focused and how much it rushes the story. I’d much rather see more of the footage and hear the actual crowd cheers than listen to people who watched it on TV describe it.
Also, I understand there are deep cultural connections between the magic of Linsanity and the wave in Asian American hate crimes since 2020, but it’s still kind of a curveball downer of a topic for a doc about something inspiring that happened 10 years ago.
Why is the comedian Hasan Minhaj narrating 60% of this? Why does he talk more than Jeremy Lin?
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Call Jane (2022)
Call Jane is a breezy indie dramedy about back-alley abortions. Read that sentence again.
While it crosses over into something transgressive a few times — for example, a debate about who gets their limited free abortion slots (a rape victim, a 12 year old, etc.) that plays like dinnertime banter — but in general what’s most surprising about Call Jane is how down-the-middle and low-stakes the movie is given its subject matter.
The film presents itself as uplifting slice of feminism, which I suppose is part of the point: its characters (and its filmmakers) want to normalize reproductive rights the same we do voting rights and freedom of the press and the usual topics of films like this. But it still feels so tonally jarring to me.
It’s well-made enough as a production. Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver are reliably charismatic, and Cory Michael Smith gives the film a blast of dark wryness as the doctor performing the abortions. But it just feels a little bit baffling and off-key its whole runtime.
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To Leslie (2022)
To Leslie mercifully starts us at rock-bottom, meaning this addiction-recovery drama is almost all upwards-oriented, even with the occasional backslide. Given its dour topic of a lottery winner’s life completely broken down, it’s almost charming and cheery.
Andrea Riseborough really is that good: she’s funny and humane and sad in perfect balance. It’s not on the level of Blanchett or Yeoh (or the criminally un-nominated Mia Goth in Pearl) where we’ll still be talking about it a decade from now, but the Academy has nominated less worthy performances, even this year. (See: Judd Hirsch’s 90 seconds on screen.)
Marc Maron is pretty great, too.
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse opens with a mole mistaking a tree for a cake and never gets any less whimsical than that. It ends with an inverse Jungle Book finale, and the entire script is basically The Little Prince platitudes. Serious eye-roll piece of fluff. This is just desperate to be a movie that gets sentimentally adopted as a holiday classic, but it’s far too saccharine and shallow to earn it.
The picture-book-come-to-life animation is genuinely quite lovely, though, with outstanding use of white space snow sliced by daring shadows, plus beautiful inky skies. The motion is occasionally a bit ungainly — it works better as stills — but my big complaint is the character designs which have these weird sketch-like flourishes that simulate un-erased pencil lines. It’s most distracting on the horse (you can see it in the poster) but there for all of them.
Maybe in the right context — cozied up with your kids on a snow day next to a crackling fire — it might spark magic, but it’s just a bit too much knock-off Winnie the Pooh for me.
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Till (2022)
Till is very much not the kind of movie I typically like, but it’s one of the better specimens of that racism-misery-porn Oscar bait subgenre. It’s also notably restrained — the famous murder takes place off-screen, and the film doesn’t linger too long on the horrifying image of the dead body.
This is really the Danielle Deadwyler show, and she absolutely knocks it out of the park. It’s a real powerhouse turn that does feel like an Oscar snub, though there are none I’m itching to kick off (haven’t seen Blonde yet, though).
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Troll (2022)
A competent enough Nordic riff on Godzilla, at least until it gets into kooky royal conspiracy material. The ending lost me a bit, and I’m not wild about the creature design, but the production is quite good at conveying the massive scope of the creature, which is the single most important part of a movie like this.
(Important, Disappointing Note: Not a Troll 2 prequel.)
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Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)
Puss in Boots 2 is:
- The best movie in the Shrek franchise.
- The best Dreamworks movie since at least How to Train Your Dragon 2, maybe 1.
- The best mainstream American animated movie since at least Spider-Verse, and possibly as far back as the early 2010s.
- A vessel for the best animated villain in so long I can’t even think of the last one better than this — you might have to go to the Disney Renaissance.
- And, in all seriousness, maybe the best movie of 2022.
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Moonfall (2022)
I understand there’s a sense of nostalgia around these dumb, effects-heavy, non-superhero blockbusters. But this is just a far worse Independence Day (you gotta love that downgrade from young Will Smith to Patrick Wilson) with a little bit of Contact sprinkled in there, blended into the stupidest possible slurry. And it’s not even that fun. There are a few cool images, and the score gave me goosebumps once or twice, but that’s it.
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Final Flesh (2009)
I know this is intended to be a subversive investigation of the boundaries and biases in creating art, but I find it just to be mean-spirited and impish. (That doesn’t mean I didn’t laugh a bunch of times.)