Alex Garland's Civil War

Civil War is a movie about journalism—it is not a movie about politics or humanity. And, in fact, it follows most of the tropes of those movies, just without any serious emotional depth. I hated this movie, and mostly I hated it because this movie loves war and plays to the audience’s enjoyment of violence. 

There is a case to be made that Garland’s film tries to make a movie about journalism in a war-torn country while also avoiding the usual Orientalist or paternalist gaze that those movies turn toward the places where the stories are set. I think that’s probably true. The movie does avoid that.

But the movie still gets off on showing the audience a war zone and asking us to enjoy the thrill of destruction, murder, death, and wholesale slaughter. 

I did like the scene with Jesse Plemons. It’s taut and interesting, and it’s also politically sound, by which I mean that that sequence makes a smart anti-war case. The rest of the movie thinks guns are fun.

Also, have you all heard of Joe Dante's film The Second Civil War? It's much better than this business.

Challengers (2024)

Challengers is the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross show. 

Actually, look, everyone in this is a star. And they’re all sexy as hell. And this is shot gorgeously. And the editing is fucking brilliant. And the script is just a silly sports melodrama, but it doesn’t matter because it’s so perfectly made and exquisitely directed. 

The fucking shot when everyone is turning their heads back and forth to watch the ball and Zendaya just is staring straight ahead??! Perfection.

I know not everyone will love the ending of this movie, but what I love about the ending is the way that Challengers moves into the realm of the metaphorical more and more steadily as the match goes on until it just exists purely as metaphor and refuses to go back to the real. It's so great.

The Fall Guy

This is a great time from start to finish. The jokes are funny and they’re delivered very well by an excellent cast. The fights are so much fun. Really the whole thing is just a blast. The thing is, Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling are fucking stars, and they just run the whole thing perfectly.

This is very much like David Leitch's last movie, Bullet Train, which I also thought was a very good time.

Mars Express

This movie is visually stunning with absolutely exquisite worldbuilding; this is a very smart movie about AI. It’s the kind of intelligent, generous, and humane exploration of AI that we need. But Mars Express is a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants action–crime thriller that kept me guessing and surprised me constantly. Great stuff.

Housekeeping for Beginners (2024)

Housekeeping for Beginners (Домаќинство за Почетници) is good. Goran Stolevski is an interesting filmmaker who really has a way with writing characters. I wish this film surprised me a bit more, but although it started off with some twists that were very interesting it moved into more familiar territory in act two. Still, I liked this despite its rather conventional ending.

Monkey Man (2024)

I love Dev Patel. I think he’s beautiful and I think he has good ideas. I’m glad he got funding to make this very very expensive movie, and I’m glad he made this movie. I’m glad lots of people went to see this movie. But I did not like this movie. 

Monkey Man is so slooooow, and then all the revenge killing is fun and brutal and just kinda disgusting but definitely fun. Then it goes back to being so slooooow. The revenge plot was unclear, and I found the monkey man kind of hard to root for. I did root for him, don’t get me wrong, and like sure, cops are awful, but I do find it difficult to root for a man who will just kill literally anyone. The information about motivation for the revenge was given to us so slowly I just couldn’t get behind the force of it. And anyway why now? This guy looks about 30. What’s he been doing with his time?

Also, there's a little army of hijras? Who are like really violent and happy to kill people while wearing sequence gowns? I'm lost.