The McDonald’s founding story segment generates almost all of the goodwill this movie earns. Keaton is also kind of fun if not very nuanced. The script is a catastrophe, though.
Categories
The Founder (2016)
Category: Capsule
Major segments of this are racist and/or problematic.
BUT! I found this really funny and charming (albeit horny) teen comedy. Will Friedle has awesome comic chops. I love him as a lead. Jennifer Love-Hewitt is a smokeshow and has awesome chemistry with Friedle. I love “one epic night” type stories — it heightens and literalizes the teenage experience of everything seeming to happen at once.
(Plus romances where best friends end up falling in love is one of my favorite tropes, so I’m probably overrating this a little.)
The ultimate “blockbuster” movie for my money. Great cast, great premise, ultra-tight script where even the smallest details get a payoff down the line, a soaring score… There’s something exquisite watching all components of the movie-making process come together into a satisfying whole.
The cherry on top is that the precision and color of its contemporary details makes it feel like an inadvertent “period piece” — the movie just feels 1980s in its slang, fashion, and aesthetic.
One of my favorites.
One of Brad Bird’s and Pixar’s best films — and that’s saying something in both cases. The story of an unlikely chef with a great gift being the literal symbol of filth is mined for all its potent power, and the payoff of Anton Ego embracing the titular dish is one of my favorite moments in any movie. It has all the sense of danger and visual power to not let you forget that you’re in the perspective of a street-roaming pest. Masterpiece.