MEDIOCREMOVIE.CLUB
  • Reviews
  • Side Pieces
  • Shane of Thrones
  • Podcast
  • About
  • Archives
  • Game of Thrones Fantasy

BlacKkKlansman

1/30/2019

0 Comments

 

C+

Directed by Spike Lee

Starring John David Washington, Adam Driver, and  Laura Harrier

Review by Jon Kissel
Picture

​Spike Lee teaches film at NYU when he’s not making movies, and so many of the prolific director’s films can feel like he’s taking the audience to school.  At his most natural, like in a biopic of known lecture-giver Malcolm X, Lee merges the personal and the political with minimal effort, but he’s not always so successful.  BlacKkKlansman finds Lee at his most didactic, a deadly trait when the film also has the problem of being muddled in its characterization and its message.  However, Lee is still Lee, capable of exuding joyous cool even as he’s pointing fingers in audience’s faces.  The nuggets of greatness that the film contains are worth spending several minutes in Race and Culture 101.

Read More
0 Comments

Best Scenes of 2018

1/24/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Anyone putting together a list of the best scenes has to figure out their criteria.  If it's most spectacular or highest degree of difficulty or technical mastery, then any year that contains a Mission: Impossible movie has a go-to entry.  For as much as we go to the movies to be wowed, we also go to be shaken and emotionally transported, and that's as likely to happen with characters sitting around a dinner table as it is during a dive out of a plane.  These scenes rocked me on first viewing and have radiated in my brain in the weeks and months after, with some serving as the clarification of a thought I've been unable to fully flesh out and others as potent land mines of emotion that I can tread around if I want to make myself cry.  In their silence or in their intensity, these are the packets of perfection that film fans are always on the hunt for.

These are ordered from least to most spoilery, with links where available.

More Best of 2018:

Best Performances
Best Films


Read More
0 Comments

The Birth of a Nation

1/22/2019

0 Comments

 

C

Directed by Nate Parker

Starring Nate Parker and Armie Hammer
​
Review by Jon Kissel
Picture

The complicated story of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion doesn’t seem to lend itself to a two hour film.  It contains such thorny moralistic questions that shortchanging them risks doing a disservice to the truth of the event.  Violent uprisings against slavery were surely warranted and just, but what kind of retaliation is justified, both by the rebels and the slaveowners when they inevitably reestablish power?  Nate Parker’s film, the provocatively titled Birth of a Nation, is solely interested in the most obvious and least compelling facet i.e. the threshold of indignity and injustice before a pushback occurs.  By making this choice, The Birth of a Nation becomes a rehash of other, better films about slavery and ignores the cloudier, demythologizing parts of this story that would’ve made Parker’s film into something more than an antebellum Braveheart.

Read More
0 Comments

Leave No Trace

1/18/2019

0 Comments

 

A-

Directed by Debra Granik

Starring Thomasin McKenzie and Ben Foster

Review by Jon Kissel

Picture

Debra Granik, who along with Kelly Reichardt functions as an empathetic chronicler of white rustics, finally returns to feature filmmaking with Leave No Trace.  In the eight years between her latest and the long shadow of Winter’s Bone, Granik’s only output, thanks to failed pilots and films stuck in development, was 2014’s Stray Dog, a compelling documentary about a man not dissimilar from a character in Leave No Trace.  Fellow female auteur Lynne Ramsay also returned to screens in 2018 with her latest masterpiece, You Were Never Really Here, and the rapturous response to it and Granik’s Leave No Trace will hopefully mean that we won’t be in the middle of the next decade when their next films are seen.  As a director telling perceptive and affectionate stories about the nation’s underclass, there has to be a place for Granik on the annual release schedule, especially when she’s capable of heartfelt output like this.

Read More
0 Comments

Best Performances of 2018

1/17/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
In a cinematic year dominated by despair, some of the best performances track how such a strong emotion can begin and where it can take a person.  Youthful characters like Elsie Fisher's Kayla Day, Na-Len Smith's Ray, or Jeon Jong-seo's Shin Hae-mi might see their optimism and wanderlust curdle into the nihilistic depression of Ethan Hawke's Ernst Toller and Joaquin Phoenix's Joe, both of whom have long since given up the expectation that things will get better.  These, and five others, demonstrate that even when actors are mired in tragedy, great work like theirs can still inspire joy.

More Best of 2018 countdowns:
Best Films of 2018


Read More
0 Comments

Only the Brave

1/11/2019

0 Comments

 

A-

Directed by Joseph Kosinski

Starring Josh Brolin, Jennifer Connelly, and Miles Teller

Review by Jon Kissel

Picture

Joseph Kosinski sheds the high-flying science fiction of his earlier career to get down in the dirt for the gritty saga of Only the Brave.  The director of Tron Legacy and Oblivion is on far firmer ground here, able to omit fantastical world-building in exchange for a surprising grasp of character and chemistry.  In adapting the true story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a crew of Southwestern wildfire fighters, Kosinski and writers Ken Nolan and Eric Warren Singer make an appealing and affecting tribute to benevolent masculinity, the kind that betters instead of levels and values self-knowledge instead of repression.  

Read More
0 Comments

Mission Impossible: Fallout

1/7/2019

0 Comments

 

B

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie

Starring Tom Cruise
​
​Review by Jon Kissel
Picture

Tom Cruise’s efforts to distract from his high placement in Scientology while simultaneously advertising for its apparent rejuvenating powers continue with the sixth entry in the Mission Impossible franchise.  A series that has continually topped itself with each entry, Mission Impossible: Fallout is the first to experience diminishing returns.  Make no mistake; Christopher McQuarrie and his team are producing peak action filmmaking.  Fallout contains what could be the best fight scenes, the best skydiving scenes, and the best land/air chases possible, but the bar has been raised so high by skyscraper climbs and underwater safe cracking that the best is no longer good enough.  The film’s mastery of technique is appreciated, but it’s ingenuity that Mission: Impossible thrives on, and there’s just not enough of it here.

Read More
0 Comments

Blindspotting

1/4/2019

0 Comments

 

B+

Directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada

Starring Daveed Digs and Rafael Casal
​
​Review by Jon Kissel
Picture

​Oakland found itself as a key location in three significant 2018 releases.  Far away from the Wakanda-adjacent Oakland of Black Panther and the tech-dystopia of Sorry to Bother You lies Carlos Lopez Estrada’s Blindspotting, the only one to take place in a contemporary reality and, by extension, the best of the three.  Written by and starring Oakland native Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, from neighboring Berkeley, the film feels like a sociological snapshot of a rapidly changing city torn between the people who’ve lived there for generations and the waves of new money crashing on its shores.

Read More
0 Comments

BestĀ Films of 2018

1/2/2019

0 Comments

 
So many of the best films of 2018 radiated despair.  Whether this applied to First Reformed Ernst Toller contemplating suicide bombings, the grief for the unworthy men of Widows, or Eighth Grade's Kayla Day's dread of a never-improving social standing, so many characters looked into the future and saw no reason of a return to contentment or normalcy.  While some of them incorporated this feeling into their lives, others, like Paddington Brown and Fred Rogers, embodied a hopefulness based on small acts of kindness, that if enough of them could be stacked on top of each other, then things will improve. Still others, like Joe from You Were Never Really Here and Neil Armstrong from First Man, put their heads down, choked down their pain, and did their jobs.  An excellent year for film produced an above-average quota of tortured protagonists, whether by their own demons or by outside forces.  Joy is the most-searched for film-generated emotion, and though it was in short shrift in the cinematic year, plenty of joy can be taken from filmmakers unafraid to dig into the darkest human emotions and experiences with curiosity and honesty.

Read More
0 Comments

    Side Pieces

    Random projects from the MMC Universe. 

    Categories

    All
    Action
    Adventure
    Author - Bryan
    Author - Drew
    Author - Jon
    Author - Phil
    Author - Sean
    Best Of 2016
    Best Of 2017
    Best Of 2018
    Best Of 2019
    Best Of 2020
    Best Of 2021
    Best Of 2022
    Best Of The Decade
    Classics
    Comedy
    Crime
    Documentary
    Drama
    Ebertfest
    Game Of Thrones
    Historical
    Horror
    Musical
    Romance
    Sci Fi
    Thriller
    TV
    Western

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    June 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015

    RSS Feed