Reviews of albums, films, concerts, and more from the Bay Area Music and Movie Nerds
Following in his big brother Joel’s footsteps, Ethan Coen steps outside the pair’s successful filmmaking partnership with Drive-Away Dolls, his first solo narrative feature. Unfortunately, Ethan doesn’t do as well as his brother did with his 2021 award-winning The Tragedy of Macbeth. Drive-Away Dolls probably won’t win any awards, but it’s a serviceable, if mostly forgettable, attempt at a retro, low-brow comedy.
Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, Greek mythology tells us, and for that he was punished for all eternity. While physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s fate wasn’t quite as brutal, it proves nearly as tragic, as we see in Oppenheimer, writer/director Christopher Nolan’s epic new film about the father of the atomic bomb.
If you love basketball and you want to see an in depth movie about Michael Jordan, watch Netflix’s The Last Dance. But if you love stories about high-stakes gambling, go see Ben Affleck’s Air. What Affleck gives us here isn’t a sports story. It’s a tale about business, and a wonderfully juicy one at that. Air tells the story of how Jordan’s contract with Nike nearly single-handedly transformed the middling Oregon-based company into the world’s greatest apparel empire, thanks to the story’s main characters placing big bets: on Jordan by Sonny Vaccaro, a then little-known Nike marketing executive; on Vacarro by his boss, Nike founder Phil Knight, and on Nike by Jordan’s family, particularly his mother Deloris.
Stillwater is a strange movie that somehow works in spite of itself. It tries to be many things: a murder mystery, a character study, a redemptive father/daughter drama, a romance, and a fish out of water culture clash, to name just a few. Some of these elements are strong and some are weak, but, taken together, they create a whole that is worth more than its parts, and make the picture worth a look despite its flaws.
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Let me start this review by telling you that I know squat about car racing. Indy, NASCAR, road racing — they’re all the same to me. But what I do know is quality film, and Ford v Ferrari definitely comes out a winner in that regard. Director James Mangold’s dramatization of the battle between auto titans Ford and Ferrari for dominance at the 1966 Le Mans race is one of the most adrenaline-filled, rousing good times you’ll have at the theater this year.
“Going small” is not a goal often associated with the dreams of mainstream America, but what if going small meant maintaining a lavish, upper middle-class, suburban lifestyle with all the trimmings? This deceptively simple idea underlies Downsizing, Alexander Payne’s newest film, starring Matt Damon, Hong Chau, and Christoph Waltz. The film presents enough imagination and asks enough questions to launch a series, but it never figures out what it’s trying to say.
George Clooney is clearly a huge fan of the Coen Brothers. After starring in four of their films (Hail, Caesar!; Burn After Reading; O Brother, Where Art Thou; Intolerable Cruelty), he tries his hand at directing one of their screenplays with Suburbicon, marking his first return to the director’s chair since 2014’s The Monuments Men. The result is more successful than that mostly forgettable attempt, but his fan-boy energy permeates his new film almost to distraction. Tonally and stylistically, the picture is an unabashed imitation of a Coen Brothers production, which, if you’re a Coen Brothers fan, is super, but does mean that Clooney offers no cinematic originality here.
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I chose the above picture for very specific reasons. I could’ve chosen a more beautiful shot of a heroic looking Matt Damon atop The Great Wall of China. But no, I preferred this one for the way it captures the feeling one has while watching The Great Wall — the feeling of trudging through the sewer, acting unfazed while knowing deep down that the journey will result in nothing but a sh*tty mess. If you were considering watching The Great Wall as a fun activity this weekend (or at some point), let me save you the two hours you’d never get back. First, The Great Wall is offensive for its white savior narrative. Second, it’s poorly shot and edited. And third, it features cartoonish special effects and thus can’t even manage to string together two minutes of respectable cinema without an embarrassing element restarting the clock.
One of the consistently enticing aspects of the Bourne film franchise was the mysterious history of the title character, Jason Bourne. Slowly but surely, spread throughout three films, we learned bits about Bourne’s past and the reasonings behind his dangerous predicament with the CIA, and seemingly just about every government agency out there. After a failed attempt to handover the franchise to another actor, Jeremy Renner (The Bourne Legacy — not playing Jason Bourne, mind you), we’re back with Matt Damon as Jason Bourne in…well…Jason Bourne. Non-ironically, this film reveals the most about Bourne’s past, leaving almost no mystery left by the time the end credits roll. Perhaps a little too much mystery is lost, in fact. Jason Bourne is still intense and darkly entertaining, with a welcome return to the brooding action spy hero for Damon.
No movie better exemplifies Kurt Vonnegut’s assertion that “science is magic that works” than Ridley Scott’s engaging new film The Martian. Based on Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, Scott’s picture is less a fantastical science fiction story like his Alien or Blade Runner, and more a pure and utterly gripping survival story, in the vein of pictures like Castaway or even 127 Hours. Only here, our hero isn’t trapped somewhere with the luxury of oxygen like a canyon in Utah or a remote tropical island, but years away from any human help, alone in outer space, on the inhospitable planet Mars.