Sentimental Value
Directed by Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value is what I would call a very generous and humane film. It's a family drama about two adult sisters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), coming to terms with their relationship with their absentee father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgaard), after their mother passes away.
Gustav is a film director who divorced the girls' mother and left Norway to pursue his career when Nora and Agnes were fairly young. Nora grows up to be a stage actress and when Gustav returns to Norway for the funeral, he presents Nora with a manuscript of a film he wrote with her in mind. Nora is understandably pissed that her dad wants to make nice after all these years without showing genuine remorse. When Nora turns down the role, Gustav seeks out an American actress, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), to be in the movie.
The house that Agnes and Nora grow up in is a character itself, and we get to see the house's history. Gustav's mother grew up in the house and was a part of the Norwegian resistance against the Nazi occupation, which led to her arrest and torture in prison. It's implied that she passed her trauma to her son who then passed it to his daughters. The house bears witness to it all.
Sentimental Value treats all of its characters with empathy and humanity. Although Gustav is a selfish man who puts career above family, he's not a monster. The film doesn't make excuses for him, but it does show the context for his behavior. Similarly, Nora is deeply hurt by her father, but she also engages in selfish and self-destructive behaviors that, at her age, she can no longer blame on her father's absenteeism. I think the movie does a good job of holding space for how we are affected by our parents' issues while also pointing out that it's up to us as adults to actually deal with our own shit...regardless of whether or not our parents choose to deal with theirs.
This is a graceful, gracious, honest movie with a good heart and stellar acting. Highly recommended.
Grade: A+
***
The Rock
Here is a...less graceful film, but a damn fun one. The Rock is a Michael Bay film in which a Marine Corps General, Francis Hummel (Ed Harris), takes a group of tourists hostage at Alcatraz and threatens to release a chemical weapon which is lethal enough to basically take out all of San Francisco if his demands aren't met.
What are his demands? That the families of fallen soldiers received monetary compensation for the loss of their dead loved ones. So Hummel is one of those villains who is actually right (or at least righteous). However, in order to carry out his scheme, Hummel has hired mercenaries who are only committing treason for a large pay day. This turns out to be a mistake.
The Department of Defense brings two important men in to help with the rescue of the hostages: Dr. Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), a chemical weapons expert, and John Mason (Sean Connery), a former British MI6 operative who was actually imprisoned at Alcatraz when it was a functioning prison...and escaped from it. Mason has been locked up since his recapture, but he is offered a pardon in exchange for helping the Department of Defense map out and essentially break in to Alcatraz without Hummel and his men discovering them. And can you believe it? Plans go awry.
The Rock is a ridiculous film treated very seriously. A lot of crazy shit happens and the acting is mostly straight-faced, with the exception of Nic Cage and (to a lesser extent) Connery. The film has relatively little humor, but then randomly Cage will yell a line like "How in the name of ZEUS'S BUTTHOLE did you escape your cell!?" (that's a real line).
I enjoyed The Rock a lot more than I expected to, mostly because of Nic Cage. It's not great cinema, but it's a good film to escape into if you just want to watch things blow up.
Grade: B-
***
Something Very Bad is Going to Happen
I watched this new Netflix series in three days: one episode the first day, one episode the next day, and then six episodes on the third day. It was nice to surrender to getting so sucked into a story that I couldn't stop watching.
Created by Haley Z. Boston and produced by the Duffer brothers, Something Very Bad is Going to Happen accurately captures the experience of anxiety and obsessive thoughts. Just the name of the series alone is something that, as someone with anxiety, I could relate to immensely. The idea that something horrible is going to happen is one all anxiety sufferers live with, to a greater and lesser extent.
Rachel Harkin (Camila Morrone) is getting married to Nicky Cunningham (Adam DiMarco). While Rachel's mother died in childbirth and she is estranged from her father, Nicky is part of a large, close-knit, rich, and very weird family. The couple is traveling to the Cunningham family home in Upstate New York, where the wedding will take place. Also, this is the first time Rachel is meeting Nicky's family, so...it's a lot.
Without giving anything away, weird shit begins happening on the way to the house and it just doesn't let up. The Cunningham family come off as weird and aggressive to Rachel and, of course, Nicky either isn't there or doesn't really see what the issue is. Over the course of the eight episodes, information is revealed that ups the stakes of the nuptials and puts Rachel in a position to make some very difficult decisions.
This show fucking slaps. It's very scary and creepy and is clearly inspired by David Lynch. It's not exactly Emmy-winning material, but it is so fun to watch and pore over the symbolism and details. My recommendation is to watch it more slowly than I did and let yourself revel in the mystery--don't blow your wad in three days like me.
Grade: A-
***
The Pitt, season 2
Last year, The Pitt came out of nowhere and impressed us all. The medical drama was the "competency porn" we all needed in a world filled with fucking idiots. Watching intelligent people make life-saving choices under pressure was just so satisfying. And it helped that the acting is across the board excellent, especially Noah Wyle's lead as troubled attending physician Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch.
Well, Dr. Robby and crew are back for more punishment in season 2 and I ate it the up. The overarching plot is that this is the last day before Robby takes a 3-month sabbatical to go on a lengthy motorcycle trip across the country. But Robby keeps making oblique references to "not coming back", raising eyebrows among the Pitt crew who are afraid that the man might be on the verge of a breakdown.
Robby is guiding new attending physician Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) through her first day at the Pitt and the tension is high. Robby doesn't trust anyone with "his" emergency room, least of all this upstart doctor who is into using an AI app to help her take medical notes.
Returning are our favorite young doctors, residents, and interns from last season: Mel King (Taylor Dearden), Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell), Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez), and Trinity Santos (Isa Briones). They're guiding two new interns, Joy Kwon (Irene Choi) and James Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson).
And of course who could forget Mama Bear Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa), the charge nurse with the heart of gold and will of steel, who deserves to win an Emmy for her performance this season.
I could spend this entire review simply naming characters because this is nothing if not a character-driven show. And the beautiful thing is that the characters, no matter how small or large their parts, are three-dimensional human beings. The Pitt can admittedly be on the nose with its "woke" agenda, but it gets away with a bit of preaching because the characters are SO well-written. I pretty much avoid all discourse on this show because some of the fans are real weird about it, and that frees me up to just enjoy such a wonderful, compassionate, thrilling TV series where I give a shit about the characters--including the ones I don't particularly like!
If you've been sleeping on The Pitt, it's time to wake up: the show absolutely lives up to the hype.
Grade: A
***
Lee Cronin's The Mummy
Plenty of people have goofed on Lee Cronin for putting his name in the title of this film because it implies that Lee Cronin is a big name when he objectively is not. I think that he added his name to indicate that this mummy movie has little to nothing to do with other, more famous mummy movies.
And it's true that Lee Cronin's The Mummy isn't really about a mummy...although that brings up the question of "what IS a mummy?" In any case, the movie is about a young girl who is abducted and used as a vessel to contain a demon which has cursed a specific family for generations. When that girl is discovered, she appears to be...alive. Sort of. She looks and acts like someone who was kept bound in a sarcophagus for eight years and miraculously survived--in other words, she ugly.
The unfortunate girl in question is Katie Cannon, the eight year old daughter of Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor), a journalist living in Egypt with his wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), and son, Sebastian (Shylo Molina). Katie (played as a child by Emily Mitchell) is taken from her own backyard right under her father's nose. The authorities are useless. The film cuts to eight years later, when the Cannon family is living in New Mexico with Larissa's mother, Carmen (Veronica Falcon), and have a daughter, Maud (Billie Roy), who is about the age that Katie was when she went missing. The Cannons have preserved Katie's bedroom but generally seem to have moved on from the horrific tragedy of losing their daughter and never even having the closure of knowing if she is dead or alive.
Well, turns out that Katie is discovered--bound like a mummy in a lead-lined sarcophagus discovered in the aftermath of a plane crash. As I wrote above, she is "alive" (she has a strong pulse and is breathing), but she is all sorts of fucked up. The doctors send her home with Charlie and Larissa, who are horrified at Katie's state, but relieved to have their daughter back with them. That is, until Katie begins acting strange.
By "acting strange", I mean crawling around the house at night and eating scorpions. I mean self-harming in disgusting and alarming ways. She's also super strong, which is WEIRD for someone who has been in a sarcophagus for nearly a decade. Clearly, something is wrong with Katie and it's not just that her brain is fried like the "Sloth" victim in Se7en.
Katie wrecks insane, horrifying, and often very, very funny havoc on the Cannon family. Larissa's response is to mother Katie harder and Charlie's is to go into journalist mode to find out what happened to her. I will say that a really strong element of Lee Cronin's The Mummy is that the family acts like a real family--the actors have good chemistry together. I won't say that Lee Cronin's The Mummy has anything profound to say about family, or guilt, or grief. It's just a really gross movie about a possessed girl.
Despite the fact that Lee Cronin's The Mummy ain't gonna win any awards, it was a hell of a lot of fun. I was screaming in delight at the grossest scenes and laughing my ass off during the mayhem (which was the director's intention, I'm pretty sure). As pure entertainment, it delivered.
Grade: B-
***
Shelby Oaks
Shelby Oaks is the passion project of YouTube film reviewer Chris Stuckmann. It's a horror film about a group of paranormal investigators--the "Paranormal Paranoids"--who go missing while investigating the ghost town of Shelby Oaks. While the bodies of three of the four investigators are found, the body of Riley Brennan (Sarah Dunn) is never recovered, which means her sister, Mia (Camille Sullivan), never gets true closure.
That is, until a man shows up at Mia's house with a tape labeled "Shelby Oaks". Mia watches the tape and continues the investigation into what happened to her sister 12 years after she disappeared.
Shelby Oaks is pretty cheesy and derivative, but it's not unenjoyable. For a first time filmmaker, it's not terrible. But it definitely feels like a collection of horror tropes that Stuckmann has seen in other films more than a unique vision in and of itself. It has some genuinely chilling moments, but I was mostly left with a lot of questions about the timeline of events in the film.
Shelby Oaks is worth checking out if you're a horror fanatic. For everyone else, you're not missing much if you skip this one.
Grade: C+
***
Language Lessons
Language Lessons is a screenlife film worthy of the medium. Taking place as a series of Zoom calls and video messages, the film follows Adam (Mark Duplass) and Cariño (Natalie Morales, who also co-wrote and directed the film). Adam's husband bought him 100 Spanish lessons from Cariño (a Cuban native who now lives in Costa Rica) as a surprise gift. Adam and Cariño get to know each other as they chat mostly in Spanish and occasionally in English.
A surprising turn of events deepens Adam and Cariño's relationship very quickly, and what begins as a student-teacher relationship morphs into a friendship based on mutual support (although not without its misunderstandings along the way). To say more would be saying too much, but suffice it to say that Language Lessons explores human connection and the idea that people come into our lives for "a reason, a season, or a lifetime".
This movie is deeply moving due to the beautiful and empathetic performances of Morales and Duplass, actors who both excel at naturalism. The script is casual and loose and the emotions that play across both actors' faces are honest and subtle. Language Lessons truly feels like you're eavesdropping on Zoom conversations between two real people.
I highly recommend this life-affirming film about the power of platonic friendship.
Grade: A
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