Holiday Movie Binge

Over the Christmas holiday season, I had more spare time than usual and got a chance to catch up with some recent movies, as well as revisiting some older ones.

Godzilla

For some reason, I keep going back to the “Monsterverse” series (even the Apple TV+ miniseries), even though I don’t think they’re very good. The last couple of entries, especially, have been mind-numbingly stupid.

I recalled kind of liking the one that started it all, 2014’s Godzilla. Unfortunately, I don’t think it holds up. The imagery is cool when Godzilla is on screen, and evokes a Jurassic Park kind of awe. But there’s too much uninteresting family drama with cardboard characters, which really drags.

Alien: Romulus

Another series that I’m fascinated by, even though only the first two are genuinely great. I like how the monsters look and how each movie gives some variations of the design. The mythology is a muddled mess, but part of the fun for me is being confused by it, I think.

People seem to like this newest entry in the series because it “goes back to its roots” of being a straightforward horror/action thriller. It works as such and I enjoyed it, but I found myself missing the convoluted lore that we got in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, even though, again, I don’t think those were very good. It’s a paradox!

P.S. the variation of the alien design that we see in Romulus, which comes from (spoiler) a hybrid of alien DNA (?) and an unborn human fetus, was a weak point for me. I thought it looked silly and “fake” and didn’t have the same menace as the traditional xenomorphs.

American Fiction

I laughed a lot at this satire of the publishing industry, and how it treats writers of colour. (See also: How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo and Yellowface by R. F. Kuang.) Jeffrey Wright plays an unsuccessful author who decides to pull a prank by writing an exaggerated version of the type of “Black novel” that the market seems to want. To his embarrassment, it becomes a bestseller, and he has to put on a thuggish persona for the benefit of the publishers and their marketing departments.

Obviously, there’s no such thing as a monolithic “Black experience,” and the problems that he deals with are nothing like the stereotypes that he depicts in his book. His relationship with his family, and how they must deal with their aging mother, is painfully relatable.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the ending, which (spoiler) tries to take an Adaptation.-like turn, as in “And now you’re watching the movie that I wrote.” It broke the authenticity of the characters and felt thrown in for a cheap meta-joke.

Oddity

A small independent horror film, featuring a blind and apparently psychic woman who tries to avenge her twin sister’s death. She has a creepy-looking wooden life-size statue that often occupies the background of shots, menacingly out of focus. There are quite a few well-executed scares, but I kind of predicted where the plot was going pretty early on, which deflated the tension for me somewhat. Also, the villain is a bit on the cartoonish side. Still, I would recommend the movie overall.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I liked this more than Mad Max: Fury Road.

• the action scenes have more variety, rather than just a chase scene that goes in both directions
• characters have more character, rather than just screaming and mumbling
• cool economic world-building with a triangular trade system, and how the collapse of one node can bring down the other two

Blink Twice

If I were to tell you that a billionaire CEO was holding parties on a private island, and inviting young women along, would it surprise you to then hear that something untoward was happening to these women? Unfortunately, there have been so many real-life stories about abuses of wealth and power that it doesn’t work as a twist in a movie.

I grew impatient during the first half of the movie, which is filled with fun-times montages like an ad for an all-inclusive resort, but with hints of darkness and confusion. It’s actually technically well-made, but again, I had clued into what was happening before the characters did, so I was just waiting for the shoe to drop. But the film does pick up for a satisfying ending, once the tables turn.

Star Wars

I was just watching this in the background while doing other stuff. It’s one of those movies that I know in my bones, so I don’t really have to pay attention to enjoy it. I laughed out loud when Princess Leia says, of Chewbacca, “Will somebody get this big walking carpet out of my way?”