MOVIE DIARY 2023: LET IT RAIN!

Look, this is gonna be a weird one. I haven’t watched a lot of movies since my last post, so this is what I’ve got. But! Some good news on the way! Special guests will be returning next week, and I think I’ve got the special guest list locked in through at least March. You’re gonna love it.

Along Came Polly (2004) - dir. John Hamburg

Were there a lot of this style of gross-out romantic comedies back in the early aughts? I sort of feel like there were, but maybe I’m just thinking about Farrelly brothers movies? It’s kind of an interesting combo, and I wonder if this sort of thing would work in today’s movie landscape. Did it work back in 2004? I have absolutely no memory of how this movie was received back when it came out (I’m 22 by the way).

Aside from the gross sense of humor, it’s a pretty straightforward rom com. Ben Stiller is an uptight risk assessment guy, Jennifer Anniston is a quirked up free spirit with undiagnosed ADHD, New York is kind of a character in this story, etc. etc. You know how it goes! Rom coms are kind of like sports movies. The formula is strong. If you at least stick with the formula and if the actors have chemistry, you come away with something that’s at least fine. And this movie is exactly that, it’s fine. It knows not to mess with the formula too much, and the most it ever does to tweak the formula is the shit and piss jokes, which is really just sort of cosmetic anyway.

The big standout is Phillip Seymour Hoffman, playing the self-involved former child actor best friend. The basketball scene is really funny, easily the best part of the movie for me (really kind of laying the ground work for the basketball scene in Trainwreck (2015), another just ok rom com with a hilarious basketball scene that I love). It’s kind of a strange Phillip Seymour Hoffman performance, now that I’m thinking about it. He’s obviously great at comedy, but this one was kind of weird to me because it seemed more like he was doing a Jack Black performance? Absolutely not a bad thing, just really interesting to see Phillip Seymour Hoffman in this sort of role.

I don’t really have much else to say about this movie, so here’s a list of Phillip Seymour Hoffman movies that I think Jack Black could do, followed by a list of Jack Black movies that Phillip Seymour Hoffman could do (feel free to weigh in in the comments section on the MOVIE DIARY DISCORD):

Phillip Seymour Hoffman movies that Jack Black could do:

  • Along Came Polly (2004)

  • Red Dragon (2002)

  • Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

  • Almost Famous (2000)

  • The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

Jack Black movies that Phillip Seymour Hoffman could do:

  • Orange County (2002)

  • Tropic Thunder (2008)

  • High Fidelity (2000)

  • Bernie (2011)

  • Almost any of those movies where Jack Black is there for like half a scene, and you’re like, “Haha hey that’s Jack Black!”

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) - dir. James Cameron
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I literally just got back from watching this, and this was… a lot of fucking movie…

I didn’t really care for Avatar (2009), but I think I’d kind of softened on it in the years since I saw it in theaters and left wishing I’d walked out. People really love Avatar, and honestly who am I to say no to that? I love that one episode of How To With John Wilson as much as the next guy. I just am so surprised that people have so much genuine affection for this movie. This is all to say that the bar was pretty low for me going into this one, and honestly, I ended up thinking it was fine. It’s kind of a whatever movie, but it’s so lavishly bizarre, and James Cameron is so obsessed with making these movies in particular at this stage in his career, I gotta respect it.

There’s plenty of really interesting and fun things in this incredibly stupid movie. First off, hats off to Cameron for his commitment to completely ignoring Tom Cruise and Chris McQuarrie’s warnings and leaning further into a motion smoothing aesthetic and pushing his team to provide more fps than the human eye is comfortable perceiving healthily. I don’t know that my eyes ever really fully adjusted to the daunting fps in this movie, but to be sure, there were some very breathtaking and impressive landscapes. There were also a lot of shots that just kind of felt, I don’t know, uncanny? I know it’s a movie about a bunch of blue guys hanging out with green guys in a made up world, but mostly I’m talking about the handful of shots that didn’t have any alien lifeforms and it was just human actors on a set. I think the motion smoothing quality of it all just made those shots read like an extremely high definition version of those sort of expository mini movies that they play in the line for rides at Universal Studios. It’s just a weird thing to look at. Like one moment you’re finally getting sort of used to see our Na’vi zipping around, riding some flying fish or whatever the fuck, then the next your on like a boat with a bunch of regular-ass soldiers, and it’s just jarring. I’m bitching a lot about this, but I really have to admit that these effects are super impressive. Is it going to change movies forever? Sure, why not, whatever, I hope it does.

Story-wise it’s sort of a predictable action/adventure movie, but that’s fine. Cameron can obviously pull off that kind of thing in his sleep. There’s kind of a lot going on with this movie. More characters, more made up locations, more balls in the air. Since the last movie, Jake Sully has become a not so great dad with a bunch of kids, and he and his partner Neytiri (he refers to her as his “mate,” which is weird but whatever, we don’t have to label everything, you know?) are taking the kids on the run, trying to hide from a group of military guys that Jake killed in the last movie. These once dead marines have been resurrected, their memories placed into Na’vi bodies so that they can hunt and kill Jake and Neytiri which would allow humans to continue in their attempts to fuck up the planet without having to worry about any more Na’vi ecoterrorism. It’s a fun conceit, bringing back the bad guys from the last movie and putting them into Na’vi bodies, acting as this sort of perversion of Na’vi culture, literally colonialism made flesh.

One thing I’ve always liked about Cameron is his consistent distaste for cops and military types. It’s on full display here, with these marines in Na’vi bodies. These marines are just the corniest, most arrogant fuckers, and their shitty behavior is accentuated by how outlandish it is to see that graceful Na’vi form wearing Oakleys and tactical gear while kneecapping and zip tying women and children. There’s also this whole scene where we’re following this crew of whalers while they hunt down a whale (whales called something different in this movie, I’m not looking it up, but they’re whales, it’s fine) and they explain how they do what they do. Each step and each detail is more horrific and evil than the last, to the point where it sort of becomes a funny game of one upsmanship. We’re hunting whales! We’ve got a set of brutal weapons and tactics that we use to confuse, disorient, and terrify the whales! We specifically target the mothers! It’s because their babies can’t swim as fast as the others and their mothers won’t leave them behind! After we kill the mother, the child sticks around to cry and we kill him too! What do we do once they’re dead? We harvest this fluid in their brains that we use for a cosmetic treatment to halt human aging! What do we do with the rest of the body? Fuckin’ leave it to rot in the sea, who cares! Hey by the way, all the whales are extremely intelligent, emotionally sensitive, and they’re all peaceful and super spiritual! The one you saw us kill was an artist who composed beautiful symphonies! Incredible stuff, a surefire way to get your audience to cheer when these whalers get absolutely flattened by the cool-ass rogue whale that our Na’vi good guys are friends with.

Sorry one more little bit: the action is pretty fun! It’s still cool watching our Na’vi guys sneak around and fuck people up with arrows and axes and spears. Neytiri doesn’t get to do a whole lot, but once she gets going in the last act, it’s really exciting watching her fly around blowing up helicopters and savagely beating marines to death. The last act battle with our Na’vi guys against the marines and the whalers is actually pretty fun and fast-moving, which is super welcome when you’ve already been sitting through like two and a half hours of all this already.

Anyway I maybe should have edited this down some, there’s so much happening in this movie and I just keep thinking of dumb shit to bring up, but it’s late, and I’m tired from watching a too smooth hyperreal 3+ hour movie with those dinky 3D glasses on over my regular glasses. I had fun but I’m most likely never going to watch this again. Happy for everyone involved, though, good for them. I’ll probably end up dragging myself to the next one too, but I’m weak and I simply love a spectacle on the big screen.

NOT MOVIES

No rewatches this week, and I must confess that it’s partly because I’ve been watching a lot of fucking Love Island (UK of course). I’m watching season 3, and it’s the best. Seasons 1 and 2 were a lot of fun, but season 3 is a step above. There’s way more shuffling around with the couples which makes it way more fun, the cast is pretty funny together, the challenges are gross and extremely juvenile, plus there’s a little bit of a diabolical edge to it that I love. A lot of exciting, sort of gleefully mean-spirited twists, and there’s this set of episodes where they introduce A SECOND VILLA AND A COMPLETELY NEW SET OF ISLANDERS JUST TO FUCK WITH THEM. Amazing television, and it absolutely supports my theory that reality television that lets its cast regularly smoke on camera is top tier TV (see: early cycles of America’s Next Top Model, the first two seasons of Jersey Shore, Vanderpump Rules). Insane that weak-ass, nicotine-free The Bachelor is so popular, but I guess it’s got the backing of Disney and the entire marriage-industrial complex ramming it down everyone’s throats. Not me though. The only thing I’m ramming down my throat is the geezers and birds of Love Island cracking on, general muggy behavior, getting into rows, and sticking it on each other.

Links

Don’t forget, I set up a MOVIE DIARY DISCORD for everyone who wants a comments section/forum experience for MOVIE DIARY 2023. It’s just getting started, and we’re having some fun with it while we try to figure it all out. So far there’s a comments section to discuss the latest MOVIE DIARY 2023 post, a watchlist and recommendations section where you can talk about what you’ve been into lately, and some other fun bits. Get in there and talk your shit! Last I was in there we were talking about 90s swashbuckling movies and pickling different foods, so obviously it’s going great for me personally.

NEXT WEEK: OUR FIRST SPECIAL GUEST OF 2023!