The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Re-watched this Wes Anderson tone poem for the first time in years. It’s still enjoyably silly, beautifully designed, and a bit slow.

Sisu

“Finnish grindhouse” is not a marriage of words that I ever expected to see or enjoy, but filmmakers go full H.A.M., balls-to-the-wall exploitation here and it’s unalloyed fun. It’s part Indiana Jones, part Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead, and part Bugs Bunny. Finnish filmmakers appreciate the imperative that if you’re going to blow someone up in a movie it should probably be a Nazi. And man: it’s satisfying to watch the variety of ways that Nazis explode and die in this master-class menagerie of chaos. When history looks back at this era and wonders why we as a society allowed the Nazis and fascists to take control again, they will at least have fine works of art like this to demonstrate that SOME of us didn’t WANT to be under Nazi rule and made art to express it.

The Beanie Bubble

I enjoyed watching these three women (Elizabeth Banks, Geraldine Viswanathan, Sarah Snook) outsmart and outplay the Beanie Baby weirdo, Ty Warner, played with unlikeable narcissistic precision by Zach Galifianakis. But filmmakers complicate the plot unnecessarily by cluttering up the timeline with non-linear time-jumps, etc. It’s often funny, and it’s an interesting history. It’s too bad the filmmakers got the Rick and Morty editors hopped up on speedballs to cut-up the chronology beyond all hope.

Napoleon

Behold Sir Ridley’s huge castles and epic battles. It’s eye candy. But there isn’t a likeable character in this, and as hilarious as it may be to watch Leaf Phoenix method-act for 2 1/2 hours, this won’t resonate. There’s no hero’s journey. It’s a suitable history, which makes it worthwhile, but if you’re looking to be inspired, look at other epics in the Scott lexicon.

Dumb Money

It’s like an Altman movie (but caffeinated) that jumps around from character to character elaborating on the weird Reddit/Robin Hood stock market movement to save GameStop. Despite the all-star cast, this probably didn’t make a huge splash in theaters because there are already a few documentaries about this exact subject. Notwithstanding, thanks to Paul Dano as the rebel investing nerd, this works and charms as we watch a few little guys beat the system.

The Killer

David Fincher’s lone assassin yarn yields to many of the “solitary hitman” conventions, but still offers some surprises amidst excellent filmmaking. In voiceover, Fassbender’s lone gunman is compulsively reciting the hitman rules, which reminded me a lot of the TV show Burn Notice. Also, the only music he ever seems to listen to is The Smiths, which could be depressing for him and expensive for the filmmakers. It’s an entertaining crime-tastic noir, a cold-fusion of James Bond and John Wick with plenty of killin’.

Fancy Dance

Lily Gladstone from Killers of the Flower Moon is the lead and she drives the plot. It’s a conventional missing person thriller, and the stakes are low. Filmmakers drum-up trouble for the heroes, which is fine since the “world” of the Indigenous woman straddling the line between the res and the non-res is the focus, not really the criminal underbelly plot. Nevertheless, the thriller unfolds adeptly, striking a strong balance between the genre stuff and the culture stuff.

Fantastic Machine

This Swedish documentary ruminates on the impact of the camera on humanity, some of it good, but most of it bad. From early films to modern Tik Toks, image is an obsession in culture, to the point where we don’t even recognize it anymore. Well-edited and a bit like surfing YouTube, filmmakers keep you riveted, but hardly scratch the surface of how life-changing the camera can be.

American Fiction

This is not the first movie where a novelist or artist invents a fake persona to represent their work. It’s Shakespeare. It’s Oscar Wilde. It’s Tootsie. It’s The Hoax. And the racial stereotyping, or pandering to people's stereotypes for some kind of gain (mastered by Eddie Murphy), is tricky. It would be eye-rollingly offensive if it weren’t for the delicate, precise, high-wire performance from veteran Jeffrey Wright. It functions as a racial satire to point out the book-world hypocrisy, but also evolves into full H.A.M. meta-movie, with multiple endings, etc. Thoroughly entertaining, mainly due to Wright, but also, like all good satires, shines a light on a societal minefield.