Won’t You Be My Neighbor (2018)

I think I would've enjoyed this a lot more if they told about Fred Rogers early life. I enjoyed the show as a kid, but I was a kid and didn't have good taste. The archival footage was cool, because I always like found footage. It was especially cool to see how he engaged with people and how the show adapted after he went away. It’s also good to remember how famous he was for a while.

I did enjoy the part where he got PBS funding in Congress by testifying, but besides that....the pacing was weird and the animations were completely unnecessary.

I never knew about his Old Friends, New Friends show after he stopped filming old episodes of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. That said, it felt saccharine. I appreciate his sincerity while he lived, and that he touched so many lives. It's more than we can say about a lot of folks, but I don't feel bad about avoiding the film until now.

Watching the show as a kid, I’m not sure that I really learned anything or have particularly fond memories of the show besides the intro song and the consistency of him always putting on those sweaters. Perhaps it was because I was too young to really metabolize what the lessons were. 

If there’s a lesson from the show, it’s the value of what public television offers in ways that you can’t always get from other networks. Getting the chance to experiment, be creative, and explore your ideas is a really powerful thing especially to a wider audience like Fred Rogers was able to.

Ant Man and the Wasp (2018)

Being a sequel is hard, and being a sequel when the first movie of the franchise to be witty is even harder. Ant-Man and the Wasp is hard to review in some ways because it’s competently done, but forgettable. Paul Rudd is good at playing Scott Lang-- who is now under house arrest-- and juggling his desire to be a good a present dad and be Ant-Man.

Except, he isn’t. Not really. His ex-wife is supportive, his precocious daughter had all the lines of the supportive girlfriend trope except she was a child. so that was a little strange. 

Instead, the plot is about Hope Van Dyne trying to rescue her mom from the Quantum land (I know it’s not called that, but I like it better), and Scott trying to re-ingratiate himself after he went to fight with Captain American and didn’t tell them. Also, there’s a well-manufactured clock in the plot to make it all feel urgent. 

This is all well done. The script has some good jokes, the visuals are great, but they gave away the best parts in the trailer, which is not a choice I would make.

This review says nothing? Maybe? But the movie also doesn’t, which works for summer. 

Mid90s (2018) - Trailer

hmm...it’s time for lots of 90s nostalgia, I guess. We’ll see how this one plays out.

Kin (2018) - Trailer

This might be interesting. Saw a trailer and left intrigued.

Eighth Grade (2018)

I love a good coming of age movie, so after hearing all of the positive buzz (on Twitter, a terrible barometer for what’s going to be good, tbh.) I decided to double feature this after seeing Blindspotting.

It was certainly a breezier film at times. The comedy was biting, Elsie Fisher was a star depicting Kayla. From there, the film is extremely uneven. The parts depicting social media culture in the current day had a lot of resonance, but the pacing felt off. 

It’s hard for me to write about the film without giving away spoilers, but there are just a dizzying array of choices made that don’t reflect the average reality this film is depicting, and it gives you a lot more questions than answers. Where is Kayla’s mother and what happened to her and the dad? Clearly it must’ve been tragic, which is why he lets her basically do whatever she wants. 

In a world full of overscheduled teens, I had a difficult time believing much of what Eighth Grade wanted me to take at face value. I’m inherent skeptical of a dude writing about a young woman’s experience anyway, which frankly was the hardest hurdle for me to jump over, in watching this. 

The longer I watched, the harder it became for me to understand what resonated about this film for so many people, when it somewhat transparently appeared to be a film that an adult wrote about what they perceived to be stitches of awkward times. 

Like the other indie films I’ve reviewed recently, Burnham gets points for attention to detail things that made the film immerse you, and Fisher’s deadpan and schlumpy awkwardness, coupled with a very real depiction of anxiety were handled very well. There were fragments of a good film somewhere, but this almost felt like a story that’d have been better as a Netflix one-off series handled by the BBC so we’d get potentially better drawn characters, an opportunity to understand the “why” and not just husks of potential storylines being discarded to deliver us to an unsatisfying ending.

Sorry To Bother You (2018)

Sorry To Bother You isn’t a film I watched in a present reality which made it easier to watch. It’s taking place in a world similar to ours, but with some differences. I appreciated its sharp takes on late capitalism and  the ways that politicians are complicit on all ends of the spectrum in selling people out for baubles whenever it’s politically expedient. 

The entire cast does a good job, the story itself is just plain weird and doesn’t stop being weird throughout. Personally, I’ve yearned for movies that are just strange but have black characters in them, because so many movies -- of an indie sort -- have tended to depict worlds where we’re in the background or just don’t seem to exist at all. Sorry To Bother You in some ways is challenging art, part sci-fi, and fantasy, while being a very relevant commentary on the challenges (and pitfalls) of “making it.” Much like my criticism of Blindspotting, “Sorry To Bother You” seems to obscure black women (besides Tessa Thompson) in a city like Oakland which is a glaring oversight. 

Sorry To Bother You is worth seeing. It ends better than an earlier effort to tell similar themes - Spike Lee’s Bamboozled - did, but I felt it certainly was inspired by that effort, and if you haven’t seen it, add it to your list.

Blindspotting (2018)

Blindspotting is one part buddy movie, one part exploration of a real-life struggle that plays out in cities all the time. The connection between Diggs and Casal could simply not be faked, which was truly where the film shined. The supporting cast did a very good job, but were not especially drawn in complex ways. This film does the details so well, but the overall story tried to cram a lot of complexities into 90 minutes.  The most glaring part of the movie for me, was how is it possible you set a movie in Oakland and somehow the only dark skinned black women who stand out are the main character’s mother, and a bit player later in the film. 

I’m sure it was really a movie about his lived experience, but it’s a common thread among the two major releases that came out of Oakland this year and it shows why we need a broader array of filmmakers telling stories rather than relegating women to support roles.

Nonetheless, Blindspotting did the comedy and reflecting the relationship between two best friends well. It also showcased a real love for a city that is evolving rapidly. 

Finally someone has been reading my tweets about this idea. 

Ali Wong: Hard Knock Wife

I didn’t see Ali Wong’s previous standup special, so all of the jokes are new to me. While I’m not huge on physical comedy, and there are surely too many raunchy jokes that aren’t really to my taste, Wong’s delivery and writing are top notch. This special coupled with her work on Fresh Off The Boat makes her one of the best minds in comedy right now.