Joker

Dumb. Gross. Vile. Phony. It’s trying so hard to be “edgy.” Look! He’s not wearing his shirt again! Look how bony he is! Look how slowly he paints on his clown makeup! That’s so creepy and edgy! Everyone knows that the Joker is a super-villain. But to make him a protagonist/anti-hero, there needs to be a dichotomy. A force for good somewhere in the script. There isn’t. So we get to watch a disabled malcontent get his ass kicked for 90 minutes, but we don’t really care about him because even though he’s a clown he’s not interesting and even though he’s a comedian he’s not funny. Does Leaf Phoenix do a good job playing this icky, forgotten, Bernie Goetz-inspired misfit? Sure. But if the “involuntary celibate” weirdo doesn’t redeem himself in anyway, what’s the point? This story needs a hero. Blech!

Jo Jo Rabbit

I’ll admit: I was apprehensive. A comedy about Hitler? Seems touchy. It would take a genius to strike the right balance in tone. Jo Jo Rabbit jumps from goofy, Monte Python humor to the true horrors of war and back again. As skeptical as I was, Taika Waititi and company succeed splendidly. This was great. Because it’s NOT a comedy about Hitler. It’s about a child imagining Hitler - rendering and reconciling the Nazi youth and how stupid war is. It’s a journey, to be sure. The mood swings are wild. But the performances are top-notch. The style and design is genial. The filmmakers swung for the fences and knocked it out of the park. You cannot help but admire them for, above all else, the risk.

1917

Introducing a ticking clock and telling a war story in real time would normally create a suspenseful, intense spectacle. Too bad they gave away most of the plot in the trailer. So, with all of those pesky plot surprises out of the way, the best scenes in this are the emotional departures and detours that help paint a more complete picture of war and, frankly, how stupid it is. The gimmick, the conceit, that the whole movie is “one shot” is flat-out wrong, even if it helps the marketing of 1917. There are obviously edits in the movie. What would be more accurate, maybe, is to say it’s in “real time.” Although even that isn’t totally accurate, since there are obviously moments when filmmakers are twisting and manipulating the timeline. Nevertheless, it’s a real technical achievement and succeeds more as an action movie than as a drama. It might win the Oscar for best picture. But for me, it was the smaller interludes in the middle that make it worth seeing -- diversions into underground bunkers, dairy farms, and bombed-out hiding places that are more about drama than scope.

6 Underground

Imagine if Michael Bay had a baby with Michael Bay. And they gave birth to twins and they named them both Michael Bay. And those twins had an incestuous baby and they named him Michael Bay. And then that Michael Bay made a movie. That movie would be 6 Underground. It’s pure mayhem. It’s so gaudy and stupid. It’s so cutty, I’m sure it broke some kind of record for the most edits in a single movie. It's jumping! It’s jittering! There are so, so, so many yachts. Someone made a bet with Michael Bay that he couldn’t make a movie as over-the-top and bombastic as the "Fast and the Furious" franchise and he said, “Here: hold my cocaine…”