Mediocre Movie Club Movie Reviews

Buster's Mal Heart

11/23/2018

C+
2.33

An addled man is seen at three different points of his life; alone on a dinghy, as a Montana mountain man, and as a husband and father.

Directed by Sarah Adina Smith
Starring Rami Malek
Initial Review by Jon Kissel

This review’s being written on Black Friday, an event that the protagonist of Buster’ Mal Heart surely loathes. He would see people lining up outside of a Target and deride them as sheep at the trough, and that’s before we get to the dual-sphinctered inversion that they’re all missing out on. Iconoclastic stances like Buster’s/Jonah’s are attractive, especially when his is framed against the empty Big Sky mansions of the decadent rich. Sarah Adina Smith’s film acknowledges this attraction for the working class, but ultimately has little patience for it as her addled lead hurtles towards destruction in pursuit of freedom.

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Hold the Dark

11/15/2018

1 Comment

D+
1.28

A missing boy in Alaska brings wolf hunters and the boy's soldier father back home in search of him.

Directed by Jeremy Saulnier
Starring Jeffrey Wright, Alexander Skarsgard, and Riley Keough
Initial Review by Jon Kissel

Jeremy Saulnier makes ugly films. Both Blue Ruin and Green Room are gritty and violent exercises that dispatch their characters at random, mid-sentence, with minimal dignity. They provide an anti-cinematic view of brutality, far away from the John Wicks and Ethan Hunts of the world. What keeps Saulnier’s earlier films from being oppressive is how quickly they move. A scene that culminates in a hacked forearm is onto the next thing, keeping tension on the viewer and preventing them from having their noses rubbed in what is some of modern cinema’s most repulsive violence. This is not the case with Hold the Dark, Saulnier’s third film and the first one he hasn’t written, instead relying on an adapted script from frequent collaborator Macon Blair. The tone of Hold the Dark, introspective and bleak and full of whispered portent, runs counter to what has served Saulnier thus far in his burgeoning career. It’s admirable for a director to try something new, but Hold the Dark is a risk that wasn’t worth taking.

1 Comment

The Kindergarten Teacher

11/8/2018

1 Comment

C
2.07

A teacher takes intrusive measures to mentor one of her students.

Directed by Sara Colangelo
Starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Parker Sevak, and Gael Garcia Bernal
Initial Review by Jon Kissel

It’s an easy and somewhat lazy impulse to lament humanity. I do it all the time in spite of myself. It doesn’t require much to read a news article or watch a pessimistic film and resign oneself to eventual extinction, as opposed to the much harder work of actually talking to people or even working to improve our oft-dire state. That’s my introversion talking, a trait that I doubt dominates the teaching profession, but it’s not like extroversion is keeping The Kindergarten Teacher’s protagonist from feeling cynical. In Sara Colangelo’s American adaptation of an Israeli film, a culturally-hungry woman finds genius in a place she does not expect to find it, and, feeling trapped by her family and her own lack of insight, blows her life up to be close to a true prodigy. The film does a great job in portraying an obsessive self-regard that clouds out consequential thinking, even as it does a lesser job portraying the object of the obsession.

1 Comment

Buster's Mal Heart

C+
2.33

Hold the Dark

D+
1.28

The Kindergarten Teacher

C
2.07

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Buster's Mal Heart

C+​2.33

Hold the Dark

D+​1.28

The Kindergarten Teacher

C​2.07

Authors

Categories

Archives

C+
2.33

D+
1.28

C
2.07