by Adam Riske
My take on some recent releases in theaters, ranked from least favorite to favorite.
The Bye Bye Man – I went into this movie expecting it to be pretty bad with the hope it would be enjoyably so. It absolutely is. This is a very unusual and fascinating bad movie.
The Bye Bye Man certainly recalls those garbage teen horror movies from earlier in the 2000s (e.g.
Darkness Falls), but this one has just enough WTF moments for me to recommend you watch it drunk sometime in the future. Most of the acting is atrocious, there’s a CGI dog that looks like something from
Spawn and it features the greatest/most illogical librarian character in the history of movies.
The Bye Bye Man is so oddly put together that it is even kind of creepy and sad (not, like, ironic sad but actual sad) at times. It’s a fascinating movie. It is also exactly what I needed in the midst of night after night of going to bed traumatized from watching current events on MSNBC for hours on end. As described by Nicolas Cage in
Bringing Out the Dead, I’ve felt like a grief mop recently and something so silly and inconsequential as
The Bye Bye Man provided a brief respite.
Patriots Day – Boy do I have complicated feelings about this one. It’s very well-made and suspenseful with mostly strong acting across the board, BUT should it have been made at all? I find myself of the opinion that I simply don’t know. I feel queasy watching a movie like
Patriots Day because it’s supposed to be honoring the heroes of the Boston Marathon bombing (and the city overall), but isn’t it also exploiting those same people for entertainment purposes? Does it help the victims to have a recreation of these events on-screen as a reminder? Here’s where we get into some gray areas. By this rational, should there be a
Schindler’s List? Or
Roots? Of course there should be if for no other reason than as a reminder that those events should never have happened or happen again. But is that
Patriots Day's aim? All I know for certain is that I think the movie is good and moving but also an experience I squirmed all the way through for multiple reasons, only some of which I’m sure the filmmakers intended.
Paterson – Here’s a movie that is alternately beautiful (e.g. the scene where Adam Driver’s titular character listens to a teenager’s poem from her secret notebook) to maybe a little too staid for its own good. What I like most about
Paterson besides Driver’s performance -- he’s always good -- is that it helped me better appreciate poetry by seeing the genesis of several poems and how they were inspired. I think the movie touches on some interesting elements but abandons them (e.g. Paterson seems to be a deep/existential artist but his wife seems to be more of a populist one) and that prevented me from loving the film. I’m not sure what the movie is trying to say to be honest. Is Paterson just a simple man of simple pleasures and is satisfied with his lot in life? Is he dying on the inside? Could I just be projecting onto his character since he’s sort of a blank? What I take away most from
Paterson, though, is that it’s a celebration of art and the artist – no matter what scale it is (i.e. even if for an audience of just you).
The Founder – Here’s a movie that’s very good and seems to have been lost in the pile of adult dramas at year’s end. Michael Keaton is perfectly cast and gives a tremendous performance as Ray Kroc, “founder” of the McDonald’s corporation. The story itself is fascinating as a chronicle on the rise of this global giant and it’s told in a refreshingly straightforward and non-flashy way through the great Robert Siegel’s (
Big Fan,
The Wrestler) script. The direction from John Lee Hancock (
The Blind Side,
The Rookie) is modest, almost wholesome, and I think the juxtaposition of Siegel and Hancock really works to the movie’s benefit since the McDonald’s brothers (the true originators of the company) are genial and naïve while Kroc is a cutthroat scumbag on the prowl. There’s an added element that factored into my enjoyment of
The Founder as well, which is the representation of so many suburban Chicago locations very rarely (if ever) seen on screen, from Arlington Heights to Schaumburg. It’s cool to see neighboring cities and your own hometown pop-up (by name) on a movie screen. It’s even better when it happens and you’re watching it in your hometown (though the movie I’ve heard was shot in Georgia). That would explain Keaton’s garbage Arlington Heights accent. Just kidding, but yeah, it really doesn’t sound anything like us.
Have you caught any new releases worth recommending? I’ve been meaning to catch up with
Lion,
Sleepless and
Toni Erdmann. Has anyone seen those?