Five By Five

I've been riddled with guilt the past couple of weeks as the movies I haven't reviewed have piled up and piled up, towering over me like... a whatsitcalled... oh yeah a giant lizard monster. In this scenario, this strange strange scenario I have decided to craft out of nowhere, I'm the car in the street (a Hummer, perhaps?) that's getting stomped on. If you've glanced at the side-bar you've noticed the endless "tba"'s beside the titles of movies I have seen... sometimes you just don't have a lot of words in you. I have been in that place. But I figure with four more days off-line stretching in front of me, it's now or it's never time. I hate to do this again, but we gotta. Here are some super quick slapdash thoughts on a few, for catch-up, starting with the big green beastie himself...

Godzilla -- Shock and awe and pretty pretty pummeling - this thing deserves every dollar bill it wrangles and then some. I do agree with the detractors argument that the first Cranston-stuffed third overshadows the rest, at least character-wise - it flattens out as shit gets bigger, and loses its focus - but it's doing some terrifically interesting things as it wraps its big rubber hands around the throat of blockbuster movie-making and attempts to rattle something unexpected and maybe just a little old-fashioned out of the big bigger biggest world of atrocity-building. Its movement from lovely sequence to lovely sequence maybe needed some stickier glue than Aaron Johnson's standard bearer of military might was slapping stuff together with, but I'll take it over the Bay-efied competition any day.

The Double -- I found this Lynch-Gilliam mash-up kind of off-putting for most of it's run-time, mostly because it felt so derivitive - it took some effort to choke it down all to the end, and it wasn't really worth the effort. There were a couple of moments when its components congealed into something curious of its own psuedo-making - Jesse Eisenberg was having some fun and I always like to watch Mia Wasikowska. But it's not a freckle on the bum of the other doppelganger movie that came out this year, which unsettled me in ways this thing never approached.

Blue Ruin -- Tense as all get-out and I really did like its peculiar every-man strut, but it's been maybe just a little bit over-hyped. It doesn't always straddle the line between its reality and a heightened world well, especially as its climax approaches and the violence climbs - shit gets a little broad in ways that betray its little person heart. But what it does well it does well - it scrapes the gunk off of revenge thrillers and taps into an erratic, exciting pulse.

Love Is Strange -- I have some leftovers from Tribeca that I didn't get around to reviewing, and this is the most prominent because it is a glorious glorious thing and I feel terrible that I haven't written about it. I was just wiped out by the end of that fest. But then I was wiped out emotionally by the end of this movie, which never presses its case but makes it with graceful heartbreaking ease all the same, along with two beautifully in-sync performances from John Lithgow and Alfred Molina. It's one of those movies that tear you apart with a single edit, and makes its case through absence - it is about negative space, and boy do you feel it.

Venus In Fur -- Am I crazy for really enjoying this? Lord knows I'm usually in the bag for a Roman Polanski movie but if any was gonna put me off this deep dive into his wife's supposed charms was gonna be it - I'm not really a fan, or at least I wasn't til this; I thought she and Amalric were great sexy strange silly fun together, and it felt like Polanski was poking fun at his own career-length obsessions. I have no idea how much changed between the stage show and the movie (I never saw the stage show) but this seemed astonishingly well-suited to his own personal cabinet of curiosities.
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