Given that I have class tomorrow night, it’s good odds my movie-watching for March is completed! My film viewing, like my book-reading, was extremely slow for the first part of the month and then exploded in the second half.

A Simple Favor. 2018. Anna Kendrick!   An adorable and earnest single mom (Anna Kendrick) becomes friendsies with Blake Lively, a cynical and charismatic Lady of Business.  Then Blake goes missing, and Anna K’s cooking & crafts vlog becomes an odd vector for people getting obsessed with the case and submitting tips.  I didn’t know anything about the premise, so it was…er,  more racy than expected.  It reminded me a bit of Gone Girl –  compelling and repellant at the same time –  but it turns into a black comedy.  The ending was….outrageous. Anna Kendrick continues to be a favorite. 

“Secrets are like margarine: easy to spread, bad for the heart.” 

Blake Lively: “You are so nice, I have no idea how you’ve lasted this long.”
Drunk Anna Kendrick:  “I’m not as nice as you think.”

“Let’s sit here and not talk. Let’s sit here and feel lousy and watch the grass grow.”

“CAN I SAY SOMETHING AS THE LADY WITH THE GUN?!”

11.22.63   Okay ,this is a miniseries, not a movie proper, but I watched the entire series through for the second time. I largely enjoyed the film work, acting, and execution, though I suspect some of my enjoyment comes from Sadie Dunhill;  between her actor and her character she’s such a lovely character, and the “We did not ask for this room” bit at the end always moves me.  I was slightly irritated to realize while watching this that I couldn’t remember the differences between the book and the TV series, aside from the Yellow Card Man who in the series appears to have been a time traveler who found himself trapped after fruitless attempts to change the past himself.

The Irishman, 2019. Why will I happily watch this 3.5 hour movie almost every year but have resisted starting an entire pile of 2-hour movies  on account of their being “too long”.?   The Irishman is the last in Scorcese’s series of Mob movies, this one tracking the career of Frank Sheeran (Robert de Niro)  – an ambitious driver turned fixer associated with the Philadelphia mob bosses Angelo Bruno & Russel Bufalino (Joe Pesci).  The movie ultimately turns into a Jimmy Hoffa story, as Hoffa – played by Al Pacino –  is disappeared by the mob when he begins chafing at his replacement in the Teamsters Union by  Tony Pro,  a Teamster captain who was a lot closer to the mob than Hoffa was. 

Casino, 1995.  Robert DiNiro, Joe Pesci,  Frank Vincent, James Woods, Sharon Stone.  DeNiro  plays Ace Rothstein, who is tapped to manage a mob-owned casino in Las Vegas.  His buddy Joe Pesci, a made guy in the Mob who has an unfortunate tendency to mess things up in a violent way, tags along. DeNiro makes things worse by marrying a woman who is obvious trouble and then being fool enough to trust her even after she repeatedly demonstrates she has a bizarre hangup for her former boyfriend, a loser and scam artist. A re-watch for me, but it’s been 20 years. The main thing I enjoyed was seeing Frank Vincent in a minor role; he played my favorite antagonist in The Sopranos, the Shah of Iran AKA Phil Leotardo.

About my Father, 2023. Robert DiNiro plays a Sicilian working-class dad whose son Sebastian is marrying into a hoity-toity WASP family. DiNiro insists on meeting the family before he’ll give Sebastian the family ring used for engagements, and hilarity ensues.   While it frequently drifts into the absurd,  ultimately it proves to be a sweet story about a father and son. Allegedly based on a true story.

“My dad loves the 4th of July. “
“Why? Because he was in the military?”
“No, because it’s the only holiday he didn’t have to buy a gift for.”

License to Wed, 2007. I’m fairly sure I watched this twenty years ago, because I don’t miss anything Robin Williams related.   The story is simple: Jon Krasinksi and Mandy Moore want to get married, but Mandy’s family has a tradition of getting married at St. Augustine’s,  which is pastored by Father Frank (Robin Williams).   The supporting cast has a LOT of people from The Office, including Angela Kinsey and Brian Baumgartner, so I’m guessing it was filmed between Office seasons.   The movie bounds from sweet to silly to sacrilegious: it’s a fairly awful depiction of a Catholic priest, from his acceptance of cohabitation before marriage to the fact that he’s wearing gold vestments when it’s plainly not Easter or something comparable.  Prop departments, take notice: green vestments are always safest unless you’re telling a Christmas story. Considering that the story is supposed to be about weddings in a religious context, I thought it very peculiar that the theology of marriage was absolutely absent. It’s not surprising given the amount of slapstick humor – this is not a serious film – but still noticeable to me. 

Jobs, 2013.  Another rewatch: I can’t remember when I first watched this, but during this re-watch all I could think of was “Wow, the Fassbender version is SO much better”.   I periodically binge on clips from the Fassbender version because his performance of Jobs is so complex, especially when he’s butting heads with Seth Rogan’s unexpectedly good Steve Wozniak.    Anyway, this is a biopic of Steve Jobs featuring Ashton Kutcher, covering Apple from its garage creation to the launch of the iPod, which turned Apple from a struggling tech company into a behemoth. 

Two for the Money, 2005.  Pacino & McConaughey? Alright, alright, alright!  Matt plays a high school football star whose future career in pro ball is blitzed by an injury;  while he waits for healing and his attempt to enter the draft again, he starts handicapping sports betting and proves to have quite a knack for it. Al Pacino, who borrows from his Milton in The Devil’s Advocate, is a professional handicapper whose firm gamblers pay for leads; he hires on  McConaughey and  soon the two are raking in the money – but then McConaughey’s gift seems to disappear.  I watched this for the lead actors and that was about the only reason to watch it.

BlackBerry, 2023.  This proved to be an all-around interesting movie about the rise and fall of Blackberry, though in my background reading I see that it took liberties with its characters.  We see a couple of nerd-engineers who have found a genius idea failing to pitch it successfully, then being bailed out by an corporate insider who is not a techie but who knows how to pitch an idea and run a company. He drives them to greatness, but then his new interests (buying sports teams) and the unexpected arrival of the iPhone enter the picture.  I gotta say, I loved the late 1990s/early 2000s nerd culture, from the DOOM t-shirts to the company LAN party paying Command and Conquer. I also read Losing the Signal, a history of the rise and fall of BlackBerry shortly after this, and let me say – the movie took a LOT of liberties with the characters. The corpo was familiar with the field, for instance, and he was not fired for delivering someone else’s pitch; his company was bought out by another and he was made redundant.  The book also goes into far more detail on how BlackBerry struggled to adapt to the iphone and its infrastructure:  the BlackBerry team weren’t caught by surprise by the iPhone, but the product they’d created was simply too different (in terms of its security architecture) to allow for an easy pivot to the iPhone’s data-driven approach.

Favorite moment: when the hockey-obsesed exec yells “I’M FROM WATERLOO, WHERE THE VAMPIRES  hang out!”. This is evidently a reference to a video that went viral in Canada, which is anachronistic but very localist.

Blast from the Past, 1999. A rewatch with the lady-friend. This is an old favorite and one I’ve rewatched many times over the years. A wealthy but eccentric engineer builds a fallout shelter for himself and his pregnant wife: in 1962,    during the Cuban Missile Crisis,  they retreat into it just in case things go southwards.  As it happens, one thing does go southward: a jet, which plows into their house and sets off the containment measures. 35 years later,  the engineer’s son emerges into a very changed world and hilarity ensues.  “Adam” is basically an Ozzie and Harriet  kind of guy in a Seinfield world, so most of the humor comes from the dissonance – but so does its charm, because Adam is a sweet guy who makes a couple of friends who don’t know what to make of someone who is so un-cynical.   It’s clearly been a while since I watched this, since I was startled to see Nathan Fillon from Firefly and to recognize Sissy Spacek as the mother. 

Another Simple Favor, 2025.   Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively return as besties-most-likely-to-murder-one-another.  If you haven’t watched A Simple Favor, close your eyes and hum if you don’t want spoilers.   Blake Lively is out of prison – the prison Anna put her in last time – and is getting married. She’s invited Anna to said wedding. Why?  Who knows?!  This has the same perverse energy as the first movie –  where beauty and funny and menace are all mixed together,   where teases and flirts and threats are NOT far apart.  As with the first movie, there’s a delicious  plot twist that puts things on their head. The cinematography is  quite well done,  though I can’t give specifics without spoiling a bit.  Anna Kendrick is ever adorable, and Blake Lively excels as the attractive but dangerous femme fatale.  She shows a lot of acting range here, but again no specifics because of spoilers. 

“You’re going to watch your [book] sales and followers soar as you maid-of-honor the woman who tried to murder you!  Did I mention it was in Capri? ….if I do try to murder you, it will make an amazing sequel.”

“What did she say to you to convince you to come to this farce?”
“Oh….a little emotional blackmail, potential lawsuit, dangling my livelihood over my head. You  know, just girlfriend stuff.”
“Well. Here’s to murderous girlfriends and murderous exes.”

Mrs. Doubtfire, 1993. Robin Williams plays an irresponsible but loving father who is divorced by Sally Field;  after learning that she’s looking to hire a housekeeper (rather than let him spend time with the kids in the afternoons), he decides to ….be an elderly pseudo-Scottish housekeeper!    Lots of physical comedy and emotional drama ensues. This is a rewatch for me: I know I watched it in the 1990s on VHS, and at least one time thereafter, but it’s been a long time – like, I don’t think I’ve seen it in my adult life. Portions of the film are MUCH funnier because I understand the film references, from “I’m ready for my close-up!” to the montage where Robin Williams is channeling Tom Cruise in Risky Business.