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piscesdreamer222
Reviews
Asteroid City (2023)
It's only up from here
As a diehard Wes Anderson fan I was lucky enough to preview this early and was excited to do so. I absolutely loved The French Dispatch and was hoping to see the same strong story telling.
What I got instead was the complete opposite.
Fans will be excited to learn that Wes has finally set out what his previous 10 films have been working towards - an actual play filmed as a movie.
Afterwards I was left thinking that really what he captured was, a movie about a movie about a play about a play. And that's where the disappointment lies.
No you aren't watching a story unfold about Asteroid City. You are watching a movie about the play based on the play of Asteroid City.
All of the WA tropes are there - The dialogue is witty, the camera movement is uniquely WA, the celebrity status is tossed aside for silly fun, and the armature animation is great, as every fan wants from a WA film.
But the narrative structure means that ultimately, there's no story. At least not one that matters.
There's no arch. No heroes or foes. No obstacles to overcome. Nothing gets solved, and there's no real payoff. It's just a story within a story within a story and you the audience is expected to marvel at how terribly clever it is. It's incredible clever. But it's not very watchable.
Diehard fans of Wes Anderson will call this a masterpiece, because they pretty much have to at this point. He's been making movies that tiptoe around them being a play since 1998 and he finally went all-in on this one.
But this comes at a great cost, and the cost is this - ultimately it's just a series of scenes, one after another, that you don't care about.
The Sparks Brothers (2021)
I so badly wanted to love this
I could not have been more excited about this documentary.
- An avant garde indie band that I somehow had never heard of?
- A slew of comedians and musicians I love?
- AND it's being made by Edgar Wright (who proved he can handle music-based movies with Scott Pilgrim)???
Well this must be THE perfect movie for me.
Wrong. Oh I was so wrong.
This movie has two fatal flaws.
One, it's less of a documentary and more of a discography.
The entirety (and I mean entirety) of the film revolves around a deep, but succinct breakdown of each and every album Sparks recorded.
Which would be fine if it was a band with a small catalog or a band you already know and love. (Say for example if this was about Daft Punk, it would have been THE perfect format)
But with a band that has made 25 studio albums... After album 14 the slog really sets in. And as each segment progressess, album after album, you really lose perspective. You don't have time to enjoy the music, or soak in the context, and even worse, any charm the band has is overshadowed by a count of exactly how many more albums you have left to sit through.
Two (and perhaps most importantly) is that there really is no narrative structure in Edgar Wright's telling of the bands story.
My guess going in was that it was going to be pretty standard for a documentary: Here's a band you've never heard of. Here's why they are great. Here's why they never made it big. And here's them overcoming an obstacle to come out on top.
Nope.
It's just a chronological recount of every album with minor setbacks and obstacles that are uncovered and resolved with the 5 minute arc, if not in the same sentence.
Those big questions aren't ever really addressed.
As time progresses in this almost 2.5 hour opus, the celebrity interviews go from lip-service, to downright annoying as they are a non-stop barrage of "Sparks is so cool. You should love Sparks. I love Sparks. It's a shame Sparks aren't famous. Why aren't Sparks more famous? Oh well you should love Sparks. Sparks is so cool. I love Sparks"
It's clear that Wright is a huge fan. Even a geek for the band. And his child-like adoration comes off as sweet. But his overwhelming devotion to the subject only holds him back as a story teller and (once again) ruins the Sparks brothers "big moment".
Now this is not to say Sparks isn't worth a listen. I have been rocking them on my streaming service ever since I saw the movie, and if they came to town I would definitely grab tickets.
But good lord save 140 minutes of your life and skip this drudge of a movie.
Serious Moonlight (2009)
Absolute garbage
Any review of this movie higher than a 3 is a plant by the studio. This movie is a nightmare with the cringiest performances ever.
Graphically telling your wife you've been sleeping with a 23yo in your marital bed - all while calling her ugly, a robber threatening to bash a man's skull in with a toilet top, after molesting a victim of a concussion, all set in the middle of a violent, sadistic kidnap plot gone awry - OBVIOUSLY a romantic-comedy, right?
And no, anyone going "this is a dark comedy" has no idea what those words mean.
1994's The Ref was a dark comedy kidnap plot.
In Bruges is a dark comedy.
Serious Moonlight is an unbalanced fever-dream told in the voice of a stalker who fantasizes about their forced abduction plot going exactly the way they hope it does.