#2,134: Merchants of Doubt

The Myth of the American Sleepover - ★★½☆☆
I think this would be the middle movie in a trilogy that starts with Dazed and Confused and ends with a movie that hasn't been made yet about kids in the 90s or 00s about to enter high school, except in that third movie, they'll all sit at home texting each other. The really daring kids might video chat a little.

Almost nobody gets what they want, and only a few people get what they deserve. Each story had a side-character that I kind of felt bad for.

2 Fast 2 Furious - ★★★☆☆
This movie doubles down on the two most notable things from the first movie: car chases and embarrassingly bad dialogue. I give 'em credit for making what seems to be the only traditional sequel in the series - it's the same movie, but not, and bigger. Also, points for no dumb just-because romantic sub-plot.

I wonder if Ludicris appears in the movie because they want him to do a song, or if they let him do a song so he'll act in the movie.

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief - ★★★☆☆
I don't know what I thought this was going to be, but it's pretty much what you'd expect: every story you've heard about scientology. Not as flashy as Merchants Of Doubt, but better organized. Similar in pacing though, and it definitely has an opinion, maybe even a mission. I've been working with a lot of documentary projects recently, and it's refreshing to see a movie that knows what it wants.

Merchants of Doubt - ★★★½☆
Even if I completely set the content aside – which is admittedly a weird thing to do – I really liked how this is a movie that has a thesis and presents its case in interesting ways. Consequently, I was kind of unhappy with the last third of the movie, which seemed to wander somewhat from the original point.

Unlike Going Clear, I'd be interested in checking out the book that was the basis for this movie, but mainly because I'm curious to see where it diverges. Although Merchants may have been an adaptation, it felt like its own filmic creation, where Going Clear felt more like a translation - a conveyance of existing material into a new medium.

#2,130: It Follows

Swingers - ★★★½☆
Such an LA movie. So many little gags that I don't think I'd appreciate without living here. It's probably nonsense, but I felt a little bit of fake nostalgia, or maybe envy, for Mike's computer-free lifestyle in his little apartment across the street from the scientologists.

Dazed and Confused - ★★½☆☆
In much the same way that I was better able to appreciate Swingers for having lived in LA, I can't help but think that I'm not appreciating this movie to the fullest by not having lived in the 70's. This is not a high school experience that I simply missed out on, this is a high school experience that no longer existed in any recognizable fashion 20-some years later, if it ever existed at all. I'm glad I finally saw this, but it's nostalgia for something completely alien to me.

To Live and Die in L.A. - ★★☆☆☆
More like To Live and Die in Long Beach.

A story of the Secret Service's worst agents, featuring an incredible-for-its-day car chase and honest-to-goodness character arcs, both of which have had their edge somewhat dulled by decades of CGI reproductions.

Cinderella - ★½☆☆☆
I don't really want to believe in 'boy movies' and 'girl movies,' but this one just wasn't for me. The storybook dialogue was too ridiculous, the story itself was too beat-for-beat exactly the way you know it, the choice to make references to the cartoon was almost as weird as the fact that they apparently recorded a lot of the songs and then didn't use them. Was this going to be a musical at some point?

I am glad they went all-in on sincerity, at least, but this felt like a movie based on a wikipedia summary of another movie.

It Follows - ★★★★★
I wanted to put that line from Death Proof here, "kind of cool, kind of sexy, kind of funny but definitely not funny looking" or however that goes.

I really think that a lot of the reviewers of and commenters on this movie are getting it wrong. The movie isn't saying that sex is bad, it's saying that growing up is tough.

#2,125: Focus

Citizenfour - ★★★★☆
Very interesting to get to see a record of a moment like this as it happens, not 50 years after the death of everyone involved, on a participant's deathbed, or reconstructed from leftover, fading printouts.

Safe - ★★☆☆☆
It's really interesting how not interesting this movie is. Over and over, I'd cotton to the idea of what the movie was going to be about, settle myself in for a story about X, and then this isn't a movie about X. Or almost anything else. I don't feel like I need to know whether her problems are psychosomatic or real, but I guess I want the movie to have an opinion. About anything.

The Fast and the Furious - ★★★☆☆
I guess I never bothered with this movie before because I thought it was going to be dumb. And, it was dumb. But that's okay.

Focus- ★★½☆☆
Luckily, this is better than the trailer. I wonder if now would be a good time to mention that I've been using MoviePass this year. It's a flat fee for almost-unlimited movie tickets. So if you've been reading along and worrying about me as I report back on some of the worst of what 2015 has had to offer so far, then a) fear not, but b) I am somewhat concerned that the Wednesday night ticket taker at my local cinema just thinks that we're a couple of idiots, seeing all these sub-par movies.

Anyhow, Focus plays out pretty much just like you might expect it to, if you're paying any attention at all, or you've seen a con man flick before. It's a little bit of a drag that the most fun scam in the movie is based in complete nonsense, and a little bit more of a drag that it takes place so early in the movie. I thought it was odd that the filmmakers opted to force a needless R-rating. I wonder if it was a kind of excuse insurance against low box office.

If I knew anyone else who had seen this, maybe I'd like discussing with them how many acts they think this movie has.

#2,121: Ernest & Celestine

Wild Tales - ★★★★☆
I think for my own taste, I would have either trimmed a few minutes from each of the last 3 (of 6) stories, or dropped the one about an accident altogether - that one didn't seem to be built as strongly on a theme of revenge as the others. On the whole though, this is a lot of fun.

Kingsman: The Secret Service - ★★★½☆
Stories about people going to school or training to learn to do something extraordinary are always fun. I liked that we spent very little time on the ins and outs of how to literally do actions, and more time on lessons about how best to apply those actions. Hopefully that's what we get from the inevitable Jedi Academy type movie when they get around to making one. The second half is inherently less fun because it's crammed full of plot instead of exploring this interesting world. And it's missing the movie's most compelling character.

Obvious Child - ★☆☆☆☆
I didn't enjoy this at all. I've been reading about folks liking this for taking a realistic and honest approach to its subject, but for me it was - in the words of a hundred awful open mic'ers - too real. I know the real-world counterparts of this character, and they're the worst.

Ernest & Celestine - ★★★★★
This was so great. It is at times funny, exciting, intriguing, and always beautiful. All throughout I was thinking of who I could tell to go and watch it. I haven't seen Frozen yet, but I can't even imagine how wonderful it must be if Ernest & Celestine was not the best animated feature of last year. 

Of course I kid. You can't win a popularity contest with a movie nobody's seen. But YOU should see it, because it's great. Available at the time of this writing on Prime Instant.

#2,117: Boyhood

(Spoilers in all of this week's reviews.  More than usual, even.)

The Voice - ★★★½☆
Now sure, this doesn't sound like a good movie, and yes, I went to it because it was free, but it turns out to be pretty fun. Unless you're the purist of optimists, you know pretty much from the get-go that this is going to be a story with an unreliable narrator, and it's a (grisly) treat to see what's really going on around the edges of his perception.

My screening was followed by a Q&A with the writer, who was refreshingly straightforward with his opinions about what was on the screen, and explained away the distracting and obvious day-for-night scene: probably it accomplished something to do with when and why the cops show up, but also, along with some well-placed ADR, it keeps the innocent animals from dying horrible deaths at the end.

The Secret in Their Eyes - ★★★★☆
Foreign films get a filter that takes decades to work its magic on domestic movies - way more films were getting pumped out by the studios in the 40s-70s than they make today, but we typically only see the cream of the crop because it's what survives. Similarly, most people only see the foreign films (if they see any at all) that someone has found to be worthy of preserving and sharing with new audiences.

Anyway, this is a solid drama / mystery / thriller kind of thing that is being remade in English with gender-swapped leads, even as we speak. I just saw a big call for extras to fill up the football stadium for the remake of one of this film's most exciting scenes.

The original is a little long, but I don't know what it has to spare. There's a whole thread in there with the broken typewriter (Re: the romantic relationship of the leads), and how it doesn't type the letter 'A' and how 'A' made the difference between 'Fear' and 'I love you' and I don't know how that's going to work in English at all.

Boyhood - ★★★★★
The more I think of it, the more I liked this. Like other Best Picture nominees this year, it's biographical in nature, and it has a weird gimmick. Luckily in this case, the gimmick serves the story.

I didn't necessarily find Mason's entire story relatable to my own life, and the parts that were the most unfamiliar sometimes made me uncomfortable, but I feel like I could watch this over and over again. Things I really liked: a) the realistic accrual of influences – even the negative experiences help us to build who we are, and b) the way the movie is similar to the basement of The Cabin in the Woods. I'll explain.

There must be at least a dozen things in this movie that, in any other movie, would cause immediate and severe punishment to rain upon the heads of our characters. Oh no! He looked at a picture of a cute animal on a phone while driving! The whole audience tenses up for the crash! No. That's not how things really work. He's been given a gun as a present! He's practicing with it near his beloved family members! Oh no! No. He got a gun, he got a bible, he tried them both out and didn't seem particularly taken with either one. And that's fine. Things are usually fine. I like that a subtle hand was given to that sort of thing.

I was also taken with how moving the audience (myself included) found it when the guy who replaces pipes turned up later with his degree and a bright future. That seemed like the mostly openly manipulative moment of the movie, because everyone finds it so touching, but of course that's not a real guy. But this far in, everyone in my theater was thoroughly invested in their reality.

This is my Best Picture pick, even if it's not going to (and didn't!) win.