2018 Movies

[Hymie]

@"TM2YC" Never said it was bad, just average. All of what you said was true but personally I just didn't find it all interesting. What you called classic I found to be cliche'd. Just my silly opinion though.

I was repeating what I said back in my original quoted review from 2018 about being surprised some people thought it was bad, not referencing you. Going by percentages, it's my opinion that is the silly one .

For what its worth I enjoyed it quite a bit myself.

I went in to the movie not expecting much and was pleasantly surprised.  I had played the 2013 game recently so that might have helped, but I thought it was an above average action/adventure flick that was competently made, which sadly is more than can be said for much of the genre as of late.  I enjoyed Vikander's performance and while I don't think Vogel was that strong of a villain, Walton Goggins knows how to make a character interesting despite not having much to work with.  A few of the action scenes were well done and I think now that the origins have been done hopefully the next film will focus more on globe-trotting and adventure.

 

[Gaith]

First Reformed (2018)

Essentially an uncredited remake/reworking of Robert Bresson's 1951 French film 'Diary of a Country Priest' (which I happened to have watched a couple of weeks ago). The story of a Priest wrestling with self-doubt, ill-health, drinking and troubling philosophical questions from his dwindling parishioners is the same premise but Director/Writer Paul Schrader makes it his own Taxi Driver-esque vision, layering on the troubles of the modern world. I generally loved the film, including the exquisite fixed-camera 4:3 compositions, lit to perfection in every shot. I was less keen on a particular OTT plot element (you'll know which one) because it distracted from everything else that was subtle and restrained, plus it didn't actually go anywhere in the end. On that point, I was unsure what I was supposed to take away from the last scene, symbolically, or character wise.

What did anybody else make of the end?

Just watched it (currently on US Amazon Prime), and, about that ending:

Reveal message

It clearly wasn't real - we'd seen his door was locked, and she would have reacted to the blood/felt the barbed wire through his garment. So it could have been his dying Imagine Spot from self-poisoning, or a random flight of fancy, or...

Anyhow, pretty good film. Don't really have more to say about it other than boy, am I not sorry to no longer be living through East Coast winters.

Grade: B+

 

[Gaith]

Molly’s Game
Acclaimed screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's Directing debut... let's not let him do that again!  A disjointed mixture of over-cooked and over-stylized motor-mouth musical montages and predictably well written but flatly directed dialogue scenes. Jessica Chastain is fantastic as per usual. The last act features some surprisingly lazy writing when a character has no reason to logically appear, to the point that I initially thought it was a hallucination. I was expecting a lot because this followed up Sorkin's superb 'Steve Jobs' but that had Danny Boyle at the helm.

Welp, I finally caught up with this one, and I do not agree!

Molly's Game (2018) (US Netflix)

I neglected to see Aaron Sorkin's directorial debut for several years, figuring I wasn't interested in a movie about poker. Happily, however, Molly's Game is not really about poker at all; instead, it's a compelling character study of a fascinating woman. (And, to be clear, Sorkin's excellent Moneyball script, while also filled with indelible characters is very much a story about baseball, so I'm not being evasive in saying that this isn't a poker movie. The cards really are truly not the central point.) 

Indeed, I found Molly's Game considerably more engaging than Sorkin's The Trial of the Chicago Seven, which, due to the realities of history, ended up being somewhat pointless. In building to a powerful and ringing endorsement of personal integrity however, especially in our current political moment, I found Molly's Game to be the timelier as well as the better film. As for that late-in-the-film bench scene with that character... what can I say? I loved it.

Grade: A-

 

[TM2YC]

^ That interview I mentioned on BBC radio with the real Molly is still available (though you might need a VPN):  https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p05rqkfj

That probably prejudiced me against the movie.  I take back what I said about not letting him direct again, as he did a fine job on Chicago 7 IMO.