Tag: Adventure

3SMReviews: American Honey

3SMReviews: American Honey

In Andrea Arnold’s American Honey we get a meander across America via a white van full of underprivileged, tattooed youth selling magazine subscriptions.* Star’s (Sasha Lane**) good heart shines through, cutting through the layers of poverty, scraping, and fighting to get a handhold up to the place where you can start pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. This long, uncomfortable*** film is worth watching and will stick with me for a very long time.

Verdict: Recommended

Cost: free via Multnomah County Library’s streaming service Kanopy
Where watched: at home

*All of these kids need a lot of interventions, probably starting with access to any amount of unconditional love.
**Who recently caught my eye in the Miseducation of Cameron Post and was also the love interest in Hearts Beat Loud
***Two hours and forty minutes of me feeling every ounce of my middle-class privilege. Plus the conflicting feelings of Shia LaBeouf’s skeevieness vs. me kind of rooting for him.

A thing my middle-class self and this lot have in common: love of music. This was my favorite scene of the movie. Stuff that advances the plot is happening while the song is playing, and the van sing-along that develops parallels many of my adolescent times with friends in a car.

3SMReviews: Support the Girls

3SMReviews: Support the Girls

Andrew Bujalski gives us a great gift in Support the Girls and that gift is Lisa (Regina Hall) as the general manager of a sports bar.* I’m a great fan of slice-of-life stories about people who matter not at all in the global sense, but matter tremendously if you are the person in their orbit and this is that kind of film. All of these women, who could have come off as the worst kind of stereotypes, are complex and interesting and that made for a stellar move experience.

*The kind where the waitresses don’t wear much in the way of clothing.

Verdict: Recommended

Cost: $3.99 via Google Play
Where watched: at home

3SMReviews: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

3SMReviews: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Tom Waits is Prospector in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a film by Joel and Ethan Coen.

I was calibrated to the wrong type of Coen Brothers film when I sat down to watch The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.* What I found were six pretty good stories firmly set in the business-as-usual Wild West.** It had the usual Coen touches,*** but I found the short story format overall to be a little draggy.

Verdict: Good

Cost: Netflix monthly fee ($7.99)
Where watched: at home, with a lot of scenes viewed through my fingers

*I was thinking this was more of an O Brother Where Art Thou?/Hail, Caesar!/Intolerable Cruelty. Fun and peppy. But it was more of a No Country for Old Men. Bloody and sad.
**You know, white men wander about doing their thing, Indians attack, women are minor characters. There’s no new ground being broken on this front.
***Visually memorable, great acting via facial expression, some odd turns.

3SMReviews: Ratatouille

3SMReviews: Ratatouille

Brad Bird’s Ratatouille is a fine example of Pixar’s prowess with plot and animation, plus no hankies are needed. It’s pretty much a sausage fest, with Janeane Garofalo the only female present, but it’s a fun Patton Oswalt performance and has a good message. My favorite part was watching the rats run in a swarm,* which was realistic enough looking that I felt a bit panicked.

Verdict: Good

Cost: Free from the Multnomah County Library
Where watched: at home, in preparation for Filmspotting Madness 2019

*Herd? Pack? What is a running group of rats called?

3SMReviews: Anne with an “E” seasons 1 and 2

3smreviews: Anne with an E

Anne with an “E” takes the Anne of Green Gables story and characters, grounds it in a trauma-informed viewpoint and steers the series in a different direction than the books.* Amybeth McNulty as Anne carefully balances the tightrope that is Anne’s enthusiasm and (potentially annoying) unbridled joy. The rest of the supporting players are very good, especially Geraldine James and R.H. Thomson as Marilla and Matthew;** plus they have cast the excellent Lucas Jade Zumann*** as Gilbert Blythe.

Cost: Netflix monthly subscription fee ($7.99)
Where watched: at home
Adapted from the book: Anne of Green Gables

*I’ve talked to two people who say that the 1985 Megan Follows Anne of Green Gables was THE Anne of Green Gables and there is no reason to ever make another version. One was rather vehement in her statement. I disagree with this view. After all, I watched four versions of the same movie this year. All were made in different decades and brought different things to their recycled plot. Just like this version’s focus on how Anne’s time as an orphan would reverberate even after she was adopted.
**Also quite good: the belt Geraldine James wears throughout the series.
***Who was so amazing in 20th Century Women

3SMReviews: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

3SMReviews: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse wasn’t at the top of my watch list, but it was at the top of the boyfriend’s and so we went. And I’m so glad because this movie has the most stunning, innovative animation I’ve seen in a very long time.* The introduction of other Spider-Men/Women/Animals added a layer of fun and the voice acting was superb.**

Cost: $9.40
Where watched: Regal City Center Stadium 12 Cinemas with Matt as part of our Christmas Eve movie viewing tradition.

*Now that animation is growing ever closer to looking like film and the Uncanny Valley issue grows ever smaller, it was great to see this film play with crisp, realistic images and then also use a bunch of other things (that probably have names that I don’t know) to ground us fully in an animated world.
**Shameik Moore (so good in 2015’s Dope) was great as Miles Morales and Jake Johnson (as Peter B. Parker) was perhaps my favorite Peter Parker ever. *** I’ll leave you to discover the other voices.
***Though I have a bit of a Jake Johnson thing. Win it All, Drinking Buddies, Safety Not Guaranteed

3SMReviews: Outlaw King

3SMReviews: Outlaw King
http://www.impawards.com/tv/outlaw_king_ver2.html

Chris Pine and his blue, blue eyes star in Outlaw King, a movie about Robert the Bruce which includes a lot of bloody treachery, especially concerning horses.* This is a solid story with attempts made to include women in the narrative.** The costumes are great in their raggedness and there are a ton of gorgeous landscape shots.

Verdict: Good

Cost: Netflix monthly fee ($7.99)
Where watched: at home

*I mean, I got what was going to happen to the horses when they outlined the technique in the training scene, so I didn’t need to watch it repeatedly during the battle scene. (The battle tactics were, admittedly, a genius move on Robert the Bruce’s part.)
**This is always appreciated, though I suspect if more women wrote and directed movies, we would see war movies where women are something besides helpers.