Started as two quick takes, ended up longer, so I didn't really edit this. I hope it's OK.
Shiva BabyThis has my type of raunchy, somewhat random, and irreverent humor. I think for how seriously I take certain issues, I can take a well-meaning joke on anything.
"You look like Gwyneth Paltrow on food stamps," while certainly cutting and body-shaming, nevertheless cracked me up. There is also a ton going on here as far as identity politics is concerned, and the depth this film manages to cover on issues of gender and bisexuality is pretty great. While there is the primary character, Danielle, and then her former female love interest, Maya, who are both incredibly important, the third woman, the entrepreneur and wife of the primary's sugar daddy, Kim, who is the one that actually makes all the money, is complex and ultimately sympathetic in a way a lot of blonde power players are not. Actor Dianna Agron takes advantage of this smaller role and shines as much as Rachel Sennott and Molly Gordon in the lead and larger supporting roles. Read some fan reactions comparing it to the intensity of Uncut Gems, but considering I think I hardly breathed during UG, it didn't quite hit that level, but is nevertheless captivating throughout its relatively short run time. One of the best I've seen from 2021 so far, along with the next selection.
StrayA Kedi companion? Not quite, as this work on the dogs of Istanbul and surrounding areas eschews the interviews and direct human insights for a dog's eye view of the city. (No disrespect to Kedi, really like that one, too.) While I love dogs, movies about them are hardly a shoe-in. It's the stylistic accomplishment of this film that most moves me. The ambient noise of the city is captured quite vividly, and the camera manages to get in close to the animals and produces brilliant tracking and POV shots where you feel you are seeing the world from their level at all times. Obviously, we are making many more inferences and having much different reactions than the animals; the point is not understanding the world as animals do, just seeing it. I'll be damned if that's not a major purpose of films that matter. As the film proceeds, we see the primary subjects, a trio of dogs, but most particularly a female named Zeytin, often around a group of children refugees from Syria stumble around the city huffing glue and begging for money. We find they are from Aleppo, the subject of two Oscar nominated documentaries from 2020, The Cave and For Sama, and if you have seen those features, you know the dire straits that area is in from the Syrian civil war. There are title cards fairly evenly spread out in the film with quotes, primarily from Diogenes, that comment on the "work" and role of dogs in society, almost making them sound as if they are both sounding boards for philosophers, noble beasts, and social workers. There are no interviews or voiceovers, just the movement of the dogs, a bit of history via title cards at the beginning and end on the struggle of the people on behalf of stray dogs over a century, with the timely and basically perfect application of an effective, minimalist score. I went into this one expecting to like it, same as I go into basically all films, but this could easily be a top ten pick for 2021, and
that I did not expect.
Godzilla v. KongNot having seen the previous three films from the MonsterVerse, I didn't know what to expect, besides that two giant creatures were about to throw down (obviously). While I'm not usually taken in by visual effects, this one will likely earn my FYC, as I feel they want maximalist with the details on Godzilla and Kong with ever hair follicle and ridge and wrinkle, and made it work. I was pleased that this one didn't have any excessive flag-waving or other trappings of films that purport to be escapist, but still end up pulling us into some Cold War-era or Holocaust-like struggle, though I also wouldn't call it apolitical after having thought about and reading into a little more. The monsters stomping through Hong Kong has to have some level of significance to their struggle for democracy, though nothing overt whatsoever. It's also not hard to read in a critique on the more savage tendencies of capitalism gone wild as seen through the entrepreneur who becomes consumed with a god complex that leads him to creating a sort of neo-Mechagodzilla that embodies the megalomaniacal tendencies of the worst members of our species.
I like stories where characters on supposed opposing ends realize who the real enemies really are. Gives me just a drop of hope for humanity, even if these are "just" giant monsters.
Godzilla: King of the MonstersThis was worth seeing just for the character designs of King Ghidorah, Mothra, Rodon, and the other monsters. Wish we would've gotten more mammoth mammoth! This one is otherwise too militaristic, too dumb on questions of human nature, with the odd eco-terrorist bogeyman that doesn't really exist as at least a secondary concern. I find myself constantly awed by megafauna, both extinct and still-present, so I think the MonsterVerse is an easy point of entry into modern blockbusters for someone who doesn't really care for them on the whole. I loved dinos growing up, love reading about and watching whales, so it's not terribly surprising I'm into Godzilla and all the others that make an appearance here. Also to note, I did catch the significance of Serizawa as a Japanese man reviving Godzilla with a nuke, it might be a little heavy-handed, but it's generally good to have a callback to an original series that had so much political significance in its heyday. Still, the current MonsterVerse carries maybe not even an echo of what the first Godzilla (which I've read about quite a bit over the last week, but still haven't seen) was trying to do.
Eric, you want movies to do too much. Netflix (actually Paramount) and Aaron Sorkin are trying to entertain you first. Sorkin is a student of the classical style of storytelling. He admits he knew nothing about the Chicago 7 when Spielberg first approached him years ago. He found books and a living witness and learned from them enough to craft his story. He doesn't claim to be a scholar on the subject, but he knows how to write characters and dialogue.
I want movies to do justice to their subject matter, and I think there's a lot of films out there that take important historical events and do just that. I don't claim to fully understand what makes something generally entertaining, but if the goal is engaging and witty dialogue, big characters, and fast, alluring edits and montages, I don't know why it simultaneously has to include a historical event so difficult to interpret and present in a just manner. To me, The Trial of the Chicago is exploitative of both the moment in history and our emotions. At the end of the day, we end up cheering for a bunch of individuals who don't really deserve it, and one especially troubling character, the Joseph Gordon-Levitt prosecutor, is humanized in a manner he truly doesn't deserve.
I'll also say that in my own personal battles - internal and external - I have a great deal of trouble dealing with how the Boomers sold out our whole world, and don't think it's fertile ground for a political spectacle. I find Judas and the Black Messiah problematic for many of the same reasons as stated above, but I find it did justice to the plight of the Panthers, while Chicago 7 mostly forgets the actual problem of that political moment, the Vietnam War (except what are to me token moments in the beginning and end).