Here are some quick reviews of movies I've rented/watched on streaming lately. Enjoy!
***
Ready or Not
I was ready to completely write off this movie as...well, I don't know what. Something akin to a cheesy "Blumhouse production". But I kept hearing more and more about this thriller, in which a woman (Samara Weaving) marries into a rich family who made their money on games. It's tradition that everyone who marries into the family must select a random card with a game on it and play the game with the family at midnight on the eve of the wedding. 99% of the games are fine: Old Maid, Chess, Checkers...no big deal. But if the unlucky or bride or groom chooses the one bad card, Hide and Seek, well...let's just say the stakes become much higher.
Ready or Not is an "eat the rich" movie, where the moral is that rich people will do literally anything, include making murderous pacts with the devil, to keep their riches. Weaving is plucky as Grace, the bride who becomes the prey among a family of rich psychos who believe they must hunt her down and kill her...or all die, as part of the pact their grandfather made with a mysterious benefactor (the...devil???) Part of the fun is not knowing whether or not this "family curse" is real, or just bullshit--and hoping you might find out at the end. Darkly funny, Ready or Not is a very entertaining movie.
Grade: B+
***
Hail Satan?
This documentary is about the Satanic Temple, a "church" that really serves as more of a check and balance against the Christian right in the United States. The Satanic Temple advocates for religious freedom by basically challenging the religious right--so, most famously, they advocated for a statue of Baphomet to stand alongside a monument of the ten commandments on the Oklahoma State Capitol. Their reasoning? If Christianity gets a monument on the state capitol, surely other religions--such as Satanism--should have the same rights.
One might call the Satanic Temple trolls in action. They primarily exist to go head-to-head with fundamentalist Christianity. But their kind of "trolling" is a much-needed reality check in a country that supposedly believes in "separation of church and state"...except when it conveniently doesn't. That said, some of the Satanic Temple members are still white guys who think they know best. One of their members, a woman, is relieved of her duties as a high-ranking member of the Satanic Temple when she gets a little too radical. Even among Satanists, there are limits.
Grade: B
***
Support the Girls
Regina Hall plays Lisa, a manager at Double Whammies--a Hooters-esque sports bar that serves hot food, cold beer, and sexy babes. Over the course of a single day, Lisa has to deal with a burglar who gets caught in an air duct, new girls coming in for interviews, a manager who is not only an asshole but very stupid to boot, and her depressed husband whom she is trying to separate from.
Support the Girls is a slice-of-life film that is funny and heartwarming, but also very frustrating. Lisa sees the kind of sexism both she and the waitresses she is responsible for have to put up with, with very little recourse. The women who work at Double Whammies are generally the kind of folks living paycheck-to-paycheck and thus have to put up with rude comments, skimpy outfits, and tons of bullshit--all with a smile on their faces. Support the Girls is not a loud, flashy film, but it will stick with you when it's over...and hopefully encourage you to tip generously the next time you go out to eat.
Grade: A-
***
Brittany Runs a Marathon
Woof. Very mixed feelings about this one. Brittany Runs a Marathon is not a bad movie, but it's a movie that is benevolently fatphobic. What I mean by that is while the movie is not blatantly fat-shaming, it's very a much "all bodies are beautiful...as long as they're healthy!" type film. Jillian Bell plays Brittany Forgler, a hard-partying 28 year old. Brittany is "fat" according to New York City standards (in most parts of the country, she would be considered average). She goes to a doctor to try to scam an Adderall prescription and the doctor informs her that her BMI is too high and she needs to lose 40-50 pounds. Brittany has never heard of "BMI", which is the first clue that a non-fat, non-woman directed this film: every woman in the USA, especially every fat woman, knows what a BMI is because fat women know more about diet, health and weight than fucking anyone else. Why? Because we are forced to know it. Women are forced to know everything about calories, weight, metabolism, the "right" kind of snack (handful of almonds, amirite ladeez!?) Fat women know even more. There is no reality in which Brittany Forgler does not already know this information.
So she starts running, she starts losing weight, and her life improves. The movie tries really hard to no be fatphobic, but what do you call a film where a person loses weight and everything in her life gets better? Then, when Brittany hits a snag (she gets shin splits a month before the marathon), she reverts into a monster. She tells off her boyfriend, calling him a manboy. She commits a heinous act of fatphobia at a party for her brother-in-law's birthday where she tells a fat woman that her skinny boyfriend doesn't love her because "you can't love someone you don't respect". The movie treats this soul-crushing moment as something that is excusable/forgivable because 1) Brittany is drunk and 2) it's supposed to be her own self-hatred she is projecting. She writes a letter to the fat woman, apologizing, and the woman responds "I understand your pain". This is where the movie lost me. The cruelty with which Brittany treats this *total stranger* moves her from protagonist to irredeemable cunt in my book. I could no longer root for her. When she finally crosses that finish line at the end of the movie, I was rolling my eyes. It takes a lot of balls to have your protagonist say something so hurtful and, honestly, unforgivable and then use that to move the plot forward as if it was just another stepping stone in her journey to the skinny, self-loving good person she is inside.
Fuck this movie.
Grade: B- as a movie, but an F in my heart
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