Late Stage Films

 "EO", which is I assume a phonetic title based on the sound a donkey makes, is a film about a donkey. The donkey does not do  much. It is a donkey. It walks around the forests of Poland some, it gets contorted or exploited by the many humans it runs across (some kind, or at least with kind intent, but many not), and then it meets its end. To what extent an 80 odd minute abstract piece of cinema from Poland can become any kind of an international success, I have no idea, but Jerzy Skolimowski's bit of animal rights activism is one of the better films I've seen this year.  I say that without claiming to understand it all too well! To me, "EO" is beautiful in its simplicity. This is a rugged tale of nature, with its only excess coming in its trippy camerawork and baffling techno music score. The camerawork adds nice flourishes throughout - this is either a film with some very slick CGI or some very impressive drones pulling off the sweeping shots of landscapes...

 "Pinocchio" is a very strange project for Del Toro to be making. This is a man who has more-or-less made his living off of earnest fantasy films in the shape of a horror movie, and here he's kind of inverting that: a very sincere attempt to engage with Mussolini fascism in the shape of a fantasy movie for kids. Yes, he's worked in animation plenty, and yes, he's worked in tropes from fairy tales often, so maybe the ingredients are there. I don't think he's all that successful at balancing all of the elements at play.  There are two things that GDT's Pinocchio has going for it. One is the animation. It's done in stop motion, with actual puppets, which is nice and all, but the real highlight for me is the sets. The backgrounds are (all?) hand crafted, from a town square to a mountain range to an ocean. All look stunning. It's a highpoint for physically there animation, just as much as any LAIKA production that has pushed boundaries in recent yea...

 I promise that I have nothing against "She Said" or its writer or director specifically. I just think most journalism flicks are quite boring! Spending 2+ hours watching a movie that is only about conveying its true story plot to an audience, with no compelling characters, thought provoking themes, or visual flair is not my idea of a good time. I even think "All The Presidents Men' is boring, overly bogged down in details and lacking enough energy to feel like a thriller.   "She Said" covers the New York Times investigation into Harvey Weinstein's history of sexual harassments and assault. That's an important story to tell, and it's told in a way that feels accurate and responsible. The elephant in the room here is that if you're the kind of person with any interest at all in watching this, I'm almost certain that you already know the story here, and the script doesn't ever get around to adding a new dimension. There was potential t...

 The quintessential 2022 experience:  - A few conservatives pretend to be offended by, or boycott, something that they didn't know existed a day ago and were never going to buy. - The left-leaning creatives making thing choose to make "owning the haters" a weirdly big part of their marketing campaign for thing, because that rhetoric mostly does work for the other side. - The extremely online and mostly liberal audience who would actually spend money on thing think that this whole approach is kind of cringe and lose interest, maybe aided by a few ideologically incoherent twitter communists who think that actually Jordan Peterson has a point here.  Anyways, this page is about "Bros", a decent to mediocre romantic comedy that failed financially not because homophobes who were never going to watch it in the first place made a loud show of not watching it, but because the Gen Z progressives who make up most of Billy Eichner's audience thought it was cringe and l...

 The most obvious, least interesting, and maybe only correct thing to be said about "the state of cinema these days" is that any movie up for an award, or gets buzz as a film twitter or letterboxd fave, is not a movie that people actually watch. Still, the box office takes for any movie that you could primarily call a drama this year have been nothing short of atrocious.  "TAR" will end its run under $6 mil domestic. "The Banshees of Inisherin", which regretfully I have not managed to see yet and which has already left my local theaters, just passed $8 mil and won't go much beyond there. "She Said" will end up short of $10 mil. "Bones and All" and "The Fabelmans" will likely join these. "Till", "Triangle of Sadness", the really quite lovely "Armageddon Time" have all basically ended their run short of an 8th digit. Some of these movies are not super commercial, sure, but in ye grand old days o...