Keanen's Film Blog

Girl meets boy, boy fucks off to WWI and leaves girl with her shitty German immigrant parents in the middle of Kansas, chaos ensues.

I don’t love or hate this movie, but it’s interesting to study. The film makes a valiant effort to present character melodrama with the vibrancy of multi-strip color. It achieves all that and more, but my biggest complaint with this performance-oriented picture is how the performances are put to film. The directing and editing soured my experience somewhat, and the film feels like it runs at least 10 minutes too long.

I went out of my way to appreciate this movie. The least it could do is entertain me, which it did in the first half. Then it bored the fuck out of me, so I call it break-even.

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I don’t know what Jordan Peele’s personal standards are, but I will say this: This is a good movie, but maybe not by its director’s cinematic standards. Or rather, maybe he wanted to try something more on the sci-fi side with less horror, which I think is a good idea. However, I did not feel much dread or peril watching this film, and that lack of tension made for a pretty but ultimately mediocre experience.

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I sit in the tiny arthouse theater that thumbs its nose at “mainstream” film in a town that resents cultural outliers. The screening room is empty. I know what I’m getting into. This is David Cronenberg’s return to cinema.

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Even for a hardcore Matrix fan, this is a difficult film to describe. Other critics didn’t cover it on release day, and still haven’t covered it. That’s not to say it’s bad, it just asks a lot of its audience.

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This is the kind of movie that you might like if you only watch action movies. A better example is Angel Has Fallen (2019), a sequel in the Has Fallen series with some genuinely tense moments. I prefer movies where the protagonist has weaknesses rather than being an indestructible superhero. This latest Bond’s only weakness is the writing, and it’s a fatal flaw.

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