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An error has ocurred. Please try againI'd suggest skipping over the imdb plot descriptions; they have a tendency to ruin some of the surprise factor.
Updates throughout the month of October.
*Ron Guidry has been disqualified due to lack of an imdb photo.
Most of these people have made a lot of films, and those I've seen I've taken into account. But minutiae is boring so I only listed films I'd score an 8 out of 10 or higher.
Reviews
Cargo (2017)
Not perfect, but close
I should start this off by saying I am a horror movie person, which is probably something of an understatement. A film has to do a lot to truly scare me. I watch horror movies right before bed. Pretty regularly. Made the mistake of trying to do that with Cargo and I've now been awake for the past 24 hours.
As always, a film's quality is subjective, but I wonder how many of those appreciating this film less than I are actually parents.
From start to finish, at which point I started pretty much bawling, I was terrified and couldn't look away. I have a son not much older than the girl in this movie, and he has a big sister. This movie is brutal. It was almost too much to bear.
But I'm glad I did, because it's actually quite skillfully made, and has a few things to say about parenting and Australian ethnic relations to boot. It's a bit clunky in a few places, but they're far between, and it more than sticks the landing. Far more emotionally resonant than most horror flicks out there. It's probably the best zombie film since 28 Days Later. But maybe I'm just saying that because I'm a dad.
Contagion (2011)
The best art is prophetic
I just wrote a review of Mike Judge's Idiocracy with the same exact title. And here we are again.
It's scary how accurate this film is, coming from nine years in the past. Right down to the invocation of "social distancing". The only dividing line between this and our current reality is that our virus is less fatal. And this film was released in 2011, having nothing but research to go on in lieu of experience.
Not only that, but the emotional weight and cerebral nuance anyone who's been paying attention has come to expect from a Soderbergh production is in full bloom here. This is a great f*"&*ng movie, maybe his best. And no small attention should be paid to screenwriter Scott Z. Burns; he more or less predicted the future.
The best writing is writing that is prescient. Coupled with Sodergergh's instincts, it's a slam dunk.
Idiocracy (2006)
The best art is prophetic
On the surface it seems like a sub-par comedy, but it turned out to be as prescient as Orwell and Vonnegut.
It's not the best crafted film. For technical skill - tightness of writing, directing, acting - Judge's previous effort Office Space beats it hands down. It shows its age with liberal use of prejudicial slurs, which is fine by me in an artistic context, but some of the progressives might object (therein missing the point - though it really could have been toned down just a little, there is at least one point the joke goes too far. Hey it was the aughts. If you really want to be offended, go watch Airplane again).
But it foresaw a trend in the zeitgeist that many people still don't recognize, which is that we're screwing ourselves stupid. I share Judge's opinion that the smarter you are the less children you are likely to have. (I myself have two, so I must not be that brilliant, but I'm an optimist and believe in intelligent propagation. Someone needs to make sure we don't irrigate the crops with Gatorade.) And whether it's nature or nurture, stupid begets stupid. In reality we are farther down this path than Judge, or anybody, realized. It wouldn't nearly take until the year 2500 for us to devolve this far.
We'd never reach 2500, we'd do ourselves in long before that. Like a deer in the headlights, we'd melt the icecaps or abuse the warheads or kill the bees. That's the biggest problem with this film - that it isn't set a few centuries sooner. Tick tock...
Magnolia (1999)
Flawed masterpiece
Just watched it for the first time in a long time. This is undeniably the work of a major talent, but a 29 year old major talent who showed similar genius but greater restraint in later films. I like it more now than at the time; the singalong didn't bother me then - it was the frogs. Now it's vice versa.
Aside from everything else in the film flirting with extremity, this is the only sequence which dives headlong into it and doesn't come out unscathed. It's meant to be a mid-film climax, but it's more of a let-down from all the tension that the wunderkind director built before it. It doesn't need to be there - he's already made his point about people being together in their isolation, and this just serves to remove us from the film. It reminds us we are watching one. But the film itself is shot so well. And it's (otherwise) written and acted so well. Those are understatements.
He'd go on to greater heights with The Master, and he'd already made masterpieces in Boogie Nights and Hard Eight. I love Magnolia, I just feel like Anderson overplayed his hand where it counted the most. But by the closing shot, it's hard not to be on this movie's side.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019)
My emotions make me strong
For years, I've never wondered, could X-Men: The Last Stand get any worse? Now I have the answer I never wanted.
I'm seeing a lot of people complaining about the movie making no sense, because of certain characters who die but are alive in the original X-Men trilogy, which comes later chronologically.
The events of Days of Future Past make this possible. The past was essentially reset in that film, so this is not the problem. The problem is how nothing else makes sense.
Aliens that can alter space itself and contort your body with a simple wave until you die are suddenly not using that power when it comes to fighting our heroes, letting themselves just get picked off instead? Where did the powers go? Do they only work on humans, and if so, why? Suddenly their powers are more of a super-strength type thing, which is great but why not just crush the Beast's head with your mind and be done with it? They can also shapeshift like Mystique, but do they use these powers to infiltrate the X-Men? No!!! (They do infiltrate the government, but the way in which it happens is a nonsensical, under-explained mess.) A few well-placed shots of heavy artillery will take them down, but you can unload 1000 fully automatic weapons at point blank range into the leader and all that happens is some bad CGI? Why is the leader special like this, is it a mutant alien?
Can only the leader do the space-contortion thing? None of this is explained, but so is absolutely nothing else - at least adequately - so whatever.
Also, Sophie Turner is not the problem with this movie. If anyone is terrible here, it's (Oscar winner) Jennifer Lawrence, and this isn't her first offense, especially within the X-Men franchise. She can't land a single line, even something as simple as "Jean, stop!" The way she delivers "The women are always saving the men around here, you might want to think about changing the name to X-Women" is cinematic herpes.
In fairness, what a terrible line to have to deliver in the first place.
But they all have terrible lines; no one has a character, and of course there's some sort of lesson that Professor X must learn, which like everything else here is vague and half-realised. By which I mean it is nonsensical BS shoehorned in because the screenwriter needs to follow the established screenwriting rules of "a main character needs to change during the third act". And why is nobody like, " OMG! Aliens!"
Oh but there is so much more bad writing.
The climactic dialogue between Jean and the generic alien leader is literally this:
"Your emotions make you weak"
"No, my emotions make me strong"
(Major explosion; debris turns into Phoenix shape)
I have seen the future past, and it unfortunately can get much, much worse than The Last Stand. I wish I had not looked.