Just Look Up

Don't Look Up had some really funny moments. I laughed out loud a couple of times. (Rob Morgan's wig made me laugh every time I saw it). But Don't Look Up is also long and relentless. I had to take a couple of breaks while it was on just because it hits you with the same kind of tone over and over and over. It was just a lot to have to process without pausing.

Don't Look Up wants to be a kind of modern-day Network, I guess, but I think what I needed was more from the Leonardo DiCaprio character. I think my favorite moment with that character was the moment where he's on the phone with Rob Morgan's character and he says "you probably haven't heard of me because I haven't published in a while". I also really liked the moment early on where he's on the phone with his wife talking about his two sons. We get a sense of who he is in these moments – a sense we get just once more while he's in bed with Cate Blanchett's character – but none of this is ever about mortality, about the actual fact of the world's ending and how he is processing that for himself.

The film is about the media circus and it is a media circus, and it never really stops to be about real humans or hippopotamuses or hummingbirds, even though those would appear to be important to Adam McKay. I liked DiCaprio in this, and I liked Blanchett, and Timmy. Jennifer Lawrence glowers through the movie, as she always does when she's supposed to be "acting". I'll never understand why a person who is so dynamic and has so many different expressions in interviews chooses to make only three or four dour faces when she's playing a character. It's insane to me. She's so bad.

The movie isn't bad, I don't think. I just didn't really like it. I found its tone strange, and it never felt like it switched over into being something heartfelt or powerful to me. I loved the little story about waking up with a deer that Robert Radochia tells at the end (his performance is excellent), but then the script has Timothée Chalamet say a very sincere prayer to the Christian god that had me howling with laughter. I think maybe I wasn't supposed to be laughing at that, but it was honestly so absurd that I couldn't help but look at it satirically.

I'm a homosexual, so I loved the Ariana Grande song, obviously. It's hilarious.