News You Can Bruise for 2022 May 7 (entry 0)

Sat May 07 2022 12:04 April Film Roundup:

• The Quiet Earth (1985): Watched this for free on Youtube because Kris mentioned it, and it really is a very Kris movie. The sort of movie you show your kid when they're ten if you're engaged in an experiment to create another Kris. However I can't recommend it wholeheartedly. There is a very distinctive climax to this film about half an hour in, and the rest of the movie is less cool and a bit anticlimactic. Cool ending though.
• Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010): We watched this because it came up on Framed and Sumana hadn't seen it. I saw it in the theater, pre-Film Roundup, and it holds up pretty well. In fact some of the cinematography that used to read as explicitly videogamey now just looks like Marvel-style action movie stuff, indicating a Man with a Movie Camera style triumph.

  I wasn't the biggest fan of Allison Pill's performance in season 1 of Star Trek: Picard, but I loved her work in season 2 when Dr. Jurati hum-de-dum with the spoiler lady. I guess you could say I've been allisonpilled. Anyway, it was a big surprise and treat to see her as Kim Pine in this film, and to then notice how her performance in Picard uses those same moments of frustration and sarcasm.

• Downhill (2014): We borrowed the DVD from some friends who'd joined Sumana on the Coast-to-Coast Walk dramatized in the movie. As we started to watch the film, Sumana got out her maps and paraphernalia for her walk... which included a postcard advertising this movie! Sadly, that was the highlight of the evening.

  Downhill leans heavily on the walk as a natural through-line, and the plot is very episodic and haphazard. Which would be okay except the movie also has the all too common problems of "no one's particularly likeable" and "one super d-bag spoils everything," so why keep watching? The answer proved to be Jeremy Swift (Higgins from Ted Lasso), and the nature views, which were spectacular.

• Departures (2008): I couldn't remember the name of the movie because Passages is a better English name. Even when I knew that wasn't it, my mind kept filling in "Passages" and I had to do some embarrassingly specific search like japanese film funeral washing best foreign picture. Anyway, this is a nice little film. Also very episodic, but I didn't mind because everyone tried their best instead of being a jerk. There is a lot of scenes where people grieve a dead loved one but they found different ways to show it so it doesn't get repetitive. Content note: it's possible they killed an octopus for this movie. I stopped watching Iron Chef altogether ten seconds after the Chairman unveiled those tanks full of octopus, so I'd want to have known.