Venom. Ruben Fleischer. 2018.

This movie is kinda famous for being critically panned but well-liked by the audience, so I was curies as to what this was going to be like.

This is, of course, a spin-off of Spider-Man, so it’s a Marvel super-hero movie not done by Disney, which is a rare thing these days.

I’m at the 15 minute mark as I’m typing this, and I’m bored silly. The actors are basically a bunch of Hawkeyes, and the cinematography is… there…, the editing makes every take slightly too long, and the plot is super-tedious. The protagonist works as a journalist who is, of course, fired by his boss for being too good at his job, and it’s all OH WHY.

Perhaps it’ll get better once the symbiote shows up.

OK, half hour in, and still nothing entertaining has happened. It’s just like bad, on a scene-by-scene and a line-by-line basis.

Hardy is trying his best at making this funnier, by being over-the top and all nervous and stuff, but the rest of the cast gives him nothing to work with.

It does pick up once the symbiote symbiotes with Hardy. There’s some fun action scenes and they’ve got a Not Very Odd Couple schtick going between the symbiote and Our Hero. The storyline seems oddly abrupt once it gets going: Perhaps it had been better if they’d cut the first 45 minutes and then expanded the fight scene part of the movie with 15 minutes.

It’s disappointing that they’ve gone for the cheap CGI solution of doing the action scenes in the dark so you can’t see whether the CGI Venom is any good or not. Yes, we all understand why fight scenes take place in the dark: It’s because it’s cheaper.

Just a Question of Love. Christian Faure. 2000.

Oh, I thought this was a movie by that Hong Kong guy… Wong Kar-wai? Yes.

It’s not.

Oh! It’s an old-style French movie about young gay romance. Yay? It feels like it comes from a different century. Which it does, if you’re one of those weirdos that start counting at year one instead of year zero.

The DVD transfer is odd: The bit rate is 50% lower than on normal DVDs and whenever the camera pans, everything goes all choppy.

Incisive:

Anyway, aside from the fact that the main guy was fugly, it was pretty good

It’s a sweet movie, but it’s difficult not to be impatient with this type of narrative now.

Allen writes such naturalistic dialogue. Of course, here it’s supposed to be awful…

See?

Melinda and Melinda. Woody Allen. 2004.

I bought a box set of Woody Allen movies (I know; boo hiss), and this can probably be termed late-stage Allen? I stopped following him like a decade earlier, because I felt that all his movies were about the same set of upper west Manhattan dwellers that didn’t really interest me that much. Crimes and Misdemeanors (from 1989) may have been the last one I saw? I may be wrong.

But somehow, I think this is one I’ve seen before. It’s super-meta: There’s a framing story where a bunch of screen writers are speculating about how to make an anecdote into either a comedy or a tragedy, and we get to see the different takes on the different scenes.

Except for the meta bits (which are kinda exhilarating at times), this movie is everything I stopped watching Allen for. Characters I have no interest in and actors that are doing cosplays of Allen’s 70s movies. (Except Chiwetel Ejiofor, who has nobody to cosplay.) This movie has the added disincentive of having a bunch of stand up comedians popping by.