Perusing year-end Netflix originals, I get a nagging, grim itch to revisit “Inside,” the comedy special that released to rapturous praise last May. I’d started some fights about it around the time of its release because I found it to be lazy and insincere, and months later, I got worried that I was being unfair. Despite appearances, I do actually second-guess myself sometimes, and getting it right is important to me. Maybe, on a more committed viewing, this will have gotten better.
It hasn’t gotten better. It’s gotten much, much worse.
Hey, what if you stopped trying to rationalize everything you do and just have sex? It’d probably be easier than this extended “is this cheating?” sequence. Images courtesy Neon.
According to everything I’d heard about The Worst Person in the World, I’ve dated this girl about four or five times, and that is exactly the case, because she’s a completely normal young woman.
Oslo- In The Worst Person in the World, Julie (Renate Reinsve) goes from training to be a doctor to a therapist to a photographer, blitzing her way through four lovers in the process to accompany each life, and that’s just the prologue. Then, over 12 more chapters, she sticks with the photography thing and stays committed mostly to Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) or Eivind (Herbert Nordrum).
1/10 Wow, they really miss Pirates of the Caribbean, huh?
In Uncharted, Nate Drake (Tom Holland) tentatively teams up with Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg) to seek the lost treasure of the Magellan Expedition – apparently, there’s a legend that the crew of first recorded circumnavigation of the globe, which embarked from Portugal in 1519 led by Ferdinand Magellan, collected a bunch of gold, from the water I guess, and then they buried it somewhere on the route instead of being obscenely wealthy for the rest of their lives – movie doesn’t address it, so it doesn’t matter. Among a company of heroes and villains all constantly double-crossing each other for no apparent reason, Drake and Sully seek “that gold.”
8/10Marry Me is a romantic fairy tale set vividly in the real world. It’s detailed, thoughtful and pleasant.
Manhattan- International megastar Kat Valdez (Jennifer Lopez, who also produces) is set to marry her performing partner, similarly massive star Bastian (Maluma), onstage in a performance of their smash hit “Marry Me,” but just as she’s being lifted onstage for the climactic performance of both song and vows, she learns he’s been cheating. Dazed, she selects Charlie Gilbert (Owen Wilson), a disinterested middle school math teacher at the concert to impress a daughter he’s trying to earn custody of but holding a sign that reads “Marry me,” out of the audience to become her new husband. Out of a complicated combination of prior dissatisfaction, genuine attraction and respect and an attempt to minimize her humiliation, Valdez and Gilbert try to make things work.
Most of Marry Me’s brilliance is anchored in its premise, this crisp and often dark intersection of public and private love lives and all the sub-conflicts that come with it – the performative elements of romance and how having an actual audience changes them, the commodification of celebrities’ private lives, the mundanity and office-like banality behind the scenes of the entertainment industry as performers put themselves on the line.
As it leans away from its more interesting underlying themes, Death on the Nile leans hard into its fantastic glamor and soapy sensibilities. It certainly knows its audience, and it’s no crime that audience isn’t me. Image courtesy 20th Century Studios.
3/10 After a long list of production- and pandemic-related delays, the second installment in Kenneth Branagh’s Agatha Christie Cinematic Universe – seriously –is finally here.
Egypt, 1937- Renowned Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Branagh, who also directs and produces) attends the wedding of Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot). The celebrated heiress met her husband, Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer) in a London nightclub six months earlier when Doyle immediately dropped his similarly short-tenured fiancé, Ridgeway’s lifelong friend Jackie de Bellefort (Emma Mackey), a moment Poirot also witnessed by chance. The betrayed de Bellefort has haunted the couple’s steps through their entire romance, leading them first to hire Poirot for security, then to bring their entire wedding party on a private cruise down the Nile, a cruise de Bellefort infiltrates. Soon, murders start to compile onboard.
Death on the Nile is swingy. Parts of it are high quality and the cast is having a great time, but they’re very lenient with some technical details, and some moments you get a clear sense that they just didn’t have enough ideas to fill a movie. Having the camera move around in a circle does not a full scene of dialogue make, but we get into that more than a couple of times.
