Coming-of-age done right in thoughtful, sweet ‘CODA’

Posted on June 6, 2022 by reelentropy
Step 1: hire actors who can physically perform their parts. Emilia Jones, already a trained singer, spent nine months learning ASL and industrial fishing, and the rest of the Rossi family is played by deaf actors. Images courtesy Apple TV+.

8/10 CODA is the archetypical coming-of-age story done properly, with an earnest, complex mix of emotions. There’s a well of authenticity here that’s usually absent from the genre and brings out the best it has to offer.

Gloucester, Massachusetts- Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones), entering her senior year at Gloucester High School, is the only hearing member of her blue-collar fishing family. She harbors a passion for singing, which her deaf parents and older brother, Frank, Jackie and Leo (Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin and Daniel Durant) don’t appreciate. When choir director Bernardo Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez) starts coaching her to try out for Berklee College of Music in Boston, her competing interests in herself, helping her family and boys threaten to tear her life apart.

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Gorgeous ‘Drive my Car’ leaves a lot in the glovebox

Posted on June 6, 2022 by reelentropy
As great as it looks, even Drive My Car’s most iconic images are sort of empty, calling for the viewer to fill them with meaning. Images courtesy Janus Films.

7/10 Drive My Car is an expansive, slow-breathing odyssey across layers of performance. It’s never boring, but it’s deliberate and demands the viewer meet it halfway, and I can’t help but go away wanting more.

Hiroshima, Japan, some time ago- Two years after the death of his wife, renowned actor Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) drives across Japan to direct a performance of Anton Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya.” Due to a strange theater policy, Kafuku isn’t allowed to drive himself around town, and is forced to relinquish the wheel of his beloved hot rod-red 1987 Saab 9000 Turbo to the theater’s driver, Misaki Watari (Tōko Miura). Instead of playing Vanya himself, he unexpectedly casts his wife’s lover, hot-headed celebrity actor Kōji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), who’s had to leave blockbusters behind over an underage sex scandal, in the title role.

All of this information is scattered throughout the runtime. Kafuku’s wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) doesn’t die until the 35:45 mark – we can know that exactly now that Drive My Car has been dropped on HBOmax after several months of extremely limited availability.

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Netflix’ crown jewel ‘Power of the Dog’ shines

Posted on June 6, 2022 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Netflix.

9/10 The Power of the Dog came onto my radar around its November 2021 release as “the toxic masculinity movie,” which was an immediate turn-off because I have a lot of difficulty with that term. It’s a very specific condition that gets thrown around a lot more than feels appropriate, and I always end up consuming the media through a filter of how to prove it was inappropriately applied here, but then it usually is applied appropriately, and I have to come to grips again with how big a problem this very narrow phenomenon of externalized male insecurity is in modern American society. Thinking about these things, I don’t get a great read on the movie itself. 

Fortunately, The Power of the Dog was released on Netflix, so I could just watch it again.

Montana, 1925- Widowed hostess Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst) and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) move in with her wealthy new husband George Burbank (Jesse Plemons) and his brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch). Phil Burbank is such an insufferable prick that he turns daily life on the ranch into a question of how best to avoid him.

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Long-awaited ‘Top Gun’ sequel soars

Posted on May 28, 2022 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

8/10 Top Gun: Maverick is an audacious, historic photography project unlike anything that’s ever been done before or is likely to be done after. This is the type of sensory experience for which theaters were built.

NAS North Island- After 30 years, Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise, who also produces) has been called back to the Top Gun academy for elite Navy pilots. This time around, he trains a dozen recent Top Gun graduates for a suicide mission that calls for several of Maverick’s unique skills and ways of thinking. The trainees include Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), son of Maverick’s former radio intercept officer who died during a training exercise in the original Top Gun.

Still feeling responsible for the elder Bradshaw’s death, Maverick devises a plan that is theoretically impossible, beyond the limits of both the F/A 18F Super Hornet and the human body, but might get everyone through the mission alive if they can make it work.  

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‘Multiverse’ runs wild and mad as my love-hate for MCU deepens

Posted on May 8, 2022 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

8/10 The history of the MCU and the Disney empire generally is a history of the struggle between directors and what has effectively become a second studio system. Massive names like Jon Favreau, Edgar Wright, Gareth Edwards, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Joss Whedon and James Gunn have all been dismissed or otherwise undercut from Disney projects in recent years.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness started out telling the same tale. The first Doctor Strange way back in 2016 was written and directed by Scott Derrickson, a longtime fan of the psychedelic comic line who basically had the entire film storyboarded out and ready to shoot just for the job interview. It’s not exactly a masterpiece, but passion shines through, and he was reportedly excited about taking the sequel in a full-on horror direction. Instead, he was fired over those dreaded “creative differences” before he got to write a single draft and kept on as an executive producer so he couldn’t complain about it publicly.

Then this empire with a soul-crushing history of and apparent dedication to being as bland as possible gave the project to Sam Raimi.

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