I knew this movie wasn’t working for me when I started getting distracted by plot holes. If the characters were stronger, or the story more engaging, I would accept all the story points that don’t make sense. I’m looking forward to a better vehicle for Lily Gladstone.
If you’ve ever seen an action movie and thought “they sure have the sound up high,” know that it was nothing compared to the volume was set at for this movie. Hearing aids not required!
Man, I enjoyed this film. The humor works, the riffs on action movie tropes work, the touching stuff works… everything works. June Squibb and Richard Roundtree make a great geriatric Murtaugh & Riggs.
Bonus fun for me: most of it was filmed in the East San Fernando Valley (and they weren’t trying to hide it) so I got to play “Hey, I Know Where That Is!” a lot. “That’s the gas station near Aroma Cafe! That’s the park up the street! That’s the place where we bought the lamp by the couch!”
Look, I know this is based on a book, but “The Bikeriders” is a terrible title.
Very little of this movie actually takes place on a motorcycle. It’s told from the point of view of Kathy (Jodie Comer), who never drives a bike in the movie (though she is a passenger once or twice). It’s a good choice.
There are no surprises in the story, but the characters are strong enough to carry the film. Tom Hardy’s voice absolutely drove me nuts in the trailer, but it’s mixed differently in the movie and sounds less like a cartoon baby voice.
My second time watching a movie, then watching the short film it’s based on (the first was Sometimes I Think About Dying, part of the Mid-February Movie Rodeo Roundup Jamboree Wonder Festival). The short is about a woman in an awkward family situation. The full movie starts there, and then slowly cranks up the tension until it feels like a horror movie where the monster is bad decisions. Rachel Sennott was apparently born to play people trying to use intelligence and shields made of sarcasm to survive living in real world nightmares.
There’s this thing that happens in most comic book series: they have a great run, then someone else takes over and you keep reading for a while even though the new stuff isn’t good either from nostalgia or “in case it gets good again.” These Crisis movies are the film versions of that. Part One wasn’t very good, but at least it was a little fun to watch them set up the premise. Part Two doesn’t even have that. There are two main stories, one for each of the sidekicks of the Big Bad and Big Good, that feature verrrryyyy sloooowwww exposition. Then there’s a third story that mostly repairing equipment and repetitive fighting of generic looking shadow monsters. I was so bored that right in the middle I decided to stop and clean the litter box.
Part III, the conclusion, comes out in July. I’m guessing I’ll skip it.
A couple of days ago I wrote “there are other ways to show the vulnerability of a character beyond nude stress eating in a bathtub.” Apparently the directors of Tuesday and this movie heard me; the bathtub scenes in their movies feature no stress eating. That’s right, it’s apparently Accidental Contemplative Bathtub Scenes Week! Every movie I’ve seen so far has featured a woman and a bathtub, and in two out of three the scenes actually supported the story!
This movie is strong, even if it is… Canadian. Rachel Sennott shows pretty much every emotion, and she’s great at it.
Probably the greatest movie ever made that opens with a size-changing parrot as the personification of death. It’s weirder than I expected, but somehow more believable than the movie I watched a couple of days ago that was based on a true story. Julia Louis-Dreyfus makes the movie work.
Man, this movie does not work. See the faces they’re making up there? That’s 95 percent of their interaction. It might work in a light comedy, but it’s a catastrophe in a story about a father and daughter visiting Poland to visit Auschwitz and examine the horrors inflicted on their family by the Nazis. Also: someone please let director Julia von Heinz know that there are other ways to show the vulnerability of a character beyond nude stress eating in a bathtub. It felt like she thought “Dunham doesn’t mind being naked; let’s throw that into the mix.”
Bonus fun: I always try to do something interesting for the front page feature image, but I couldn’t figure out what to do for this. Then I thought “They’re in Poland. I’ll color the picture to match the Polish flag!” So I looked up the Polish flag. It’s this:
Which translated to this for the featured image:
Good enough for this movie.
More stuff I want to show to my students who worry that they don’t have the tools or skills needed to make a decent movie. Hertzfeldt tells a more engaging and compelling story with pencil drawings of stick figures than most big studios do with huge budgets and millions of dollars worth of actors, locations, and graphic effects.
Side note: they fixed the shake machine at the Alamo Drafthouse and I had a reward for a free treat, and that automatically improves a film.
Why has it taken me 25 years to see this movie?
I teach digital media to middle school kids. One of the things they love is filming chase scenes, and I always end up telling them the same things: It’s too long. It’s too repetitive. You need a clear, sensible story to carry the action or the audience will get bored.
This movie is basically one long chase scene repeated multiple times with a story that shifts every time it repeats, but good golly it works. I may have to show this to my classes (in an edited-for-language form) and say “here’s why this long chase is engaging and yours are less so.”