Before I Disappear (2014)

Guy with a crappy apartment and a, literally, shitty job decides to off himself to be with his girlfriend in the afterlife...but is interrupted by his estranged sister’s call for help.

This felt like it could’ve been decent if it had been told straight. Instead, it’s rather fevered: there’s a lot of symbolism and drug-induced episodes and a whole subplot about a dead girl and rival club owners and...oh, I don’t care. It demanded too much without giving enough.

C

The Decoy Bride (2012)

I love David Tennant almost irrationally, but this movie has taught me that there are definitely limits to that affection.

Paparazzi-hounded actress can’t find a quiet place in England to marry her novelist fiance, so she decides they’ll have to go somewhere remote: the tiny Scottish island that was also the setting of his book. When a stalker photographer tracks them down anyway, a decoy bride is brought in… and, who cares. It’s kindest to call it inept and leave it at that.

The accents, at least, are charming.

D+

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1999)

We were browsing Netflix and my son said "is that any good?" which made me command that we watch it immediately -- I'd rated it an "A-" the first time I saw it back in 2000.

Well, it doesn't quite hold up. There are several clever elements, but it just felt dated/mannered/slow-moving and as though London is the smallest place on the planet with the same 25 people constantly barging into one another’s affairs.

Nathan fell asleep.

C+

Broken (2013)

Three families live in a London cul de sac -- one is comprised of a single hothead father with three growing-up-too-fast girls, one is an older couple with a mentally-challenged adult son, and the last is a barrister, his daughter and son, and their nanny. The families affect each other in ways often bad but sometimes good. It’s just life. And it was beautiful.

There’s a lot of story here, but I was grabbed from the beginning and just in awe of the storytelling. The girl who plays the main character “Skunk” is a born actress -- this is her first film and she held the screen without problem. She also sings on the soundtrack and is just lovely.

A-

Frances Ha (2013)

One of those “why does it feel so long when it’s only 85 minutes??!” movies. At first I was completely charmed, but then it just felt sad and aimless... kind of like an actual 27-year-old, I’m guessing.

Greta Gerwig was captivating, even when she was coming off as desperate/full of shit.

C+

The Inbetweeners Movie (2012)

The show is pretty funny, but stretching a 20-minute teen raunch-fest into movie length just doesn’t work.... probably due, in no small part, to the fact that I’m 47.

C-

The Awakening (2012)

Florence is in the business of exposing spiritualists for the charlatans preying on the bereaved that they are. She agrees to visit a boarding school to uncover what’s behind the sightings of a ghost there. It’s understated and spooky and I liked the ending -- I often feel that supernatural tales stumble in the last act, but I was satisfied here.

B

Housebound (2014)

Young woman gets sentenced to house arrest in her mother’s possibly haunted home. It plays with the same tongue-in-cheek “nothing to really worry about” attitude as you’d find in the Evil Dead movies, but with a just a tad less hilarity, which makes it not such a great move. It usually seemed to fall just short of its aimed-for targets.

C+

The Trip (2011)

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are doing a weeklong tour of several restaurants, their reviews of which will be published. It’s not a documentary, but they are playing themselves -- though I dearly hope that these are caricatures of themselves.

Brydon’s constant impressions got on my nerves every bit as much as they got on Coogan’s & Coogan’s perma-dourness was as trying for me as it was for Brydon. It got to feeling as though I was seeing the same scenes over and over (I know for a certainty that I heard the same impressions over and over), but every so often their was a charming bit of conversation that would pull me back in.

I’m not sure if I’m up for taking the Trip to Italy with them.  Perhaps I simply need a month or so to miss them a bit before hitting the road with them again.

C

Knock Knock, It's Tig Notaro (2015)

Tig and comic Jon Dore hit the road for an unconvential tour. People applied online to host the gigs in their homes/fields/abandoned churches so that’s where they’re going. Neither Tig nor Jon are my type of comics. I just find them a tad too conversational, like chatting with a droll friend. While I think they'd definitely be fun to hang out with, their bits with audiences convey a "I guess it's funnier in person" vibe.

Thankfully, the movie really comes alive during the off-stage moments. Jon and Tig have a great always-on-but-always-deadpan way with each other that is far funnier than their shows are. I enjoyed their boat/shooting excursion, their flea market stop, and just about all of the in-car scenes. I’m not sure that was worth making a movie for though.

C+

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

Llewyn is treading water as a starving folk singer -- he spends nights on couches and pisses off his family and gets women pregnant -- but he’s a talented singer, so most put up with him. This is a look at a few days in Llewyn’s life. He loses a friend’s cat, he plays a studio session on another friend’s song, he finds a cat, he hitches to Chicago and back, he tries to quit music and go back to the merchant marines, he visits his fatherin a nursing home…

Lots of minutiae but it works because Oscar Isaac works. Great soundtrack, too.

B

We Are the Best! (2014)

A couple of non-conformist junior-high girls in the ‘80s start a band on a whim and recruit another social outcast for her talent on the guitar. Though the story is Danish, it felt so dang familiar. I was in junior- and senior-high in the early ‘80s and always felt like I was invisible to guys and struggling to learn the rules of social life that most others seemed to understand naturally. I remember the friends I had and how all-consuming yet fragile those relationships could be -- this movie somehow captured all of that & made me feel all of those emotions as though they were close enough to touch.

An amazing time capsule. Loved it.

A

Just Another Love Story (2009)

A man whose stalled car causes an accident that leaves a woman in a coma lies about being her boyfriend in order to get in to see her at the hospital. What he doesn’t count on his that her family -- already in the room -- has heard of but never seen her actual boyfriend Sebastian and is desperate for his help in bringing her around.

It’s like a thriller version of “While You Were Sleeping,” which I know sounds like it shouldn’t work, but it really does. It’s stylish to the point that I felt cool just for watching it.

A-

Together (2001)

After getting smacked by her husband, a housewife packs up the two kids and goes to live with her brother in the home he shares with several others; it's basically a commune smack in the middle of a neighborhood. There’s the brother, his wandering girlfriend, a militant socialist, a lonely gay guy, a young idealist couple, and a family made up of a lesbian, her husband, and their kid. Bringing a middle-class housewife and kids into the mix kind of throws the household off its rhythm.

Gary and I started to watch this a few weeks back but it seemed like it tried too hard to hook us with wacky commune life right off the bat (e.g. one of the women is bottomless due to an infection, which causes one of the men to strip in protest, which is of course when the family walks in for the first time). I’m glad I came back to it as the strength of this film lies not in antics, but in connection. The children find their place despite their misgivings and the household shifts to accommodate losing some housemates and gaining others. I’m surprised to be won over by a film that initially made me roll my eyes.

B+

Something, Anything (2015)

Young, pretty Peggy marries a young, pretty guy and looks set to have a predictable life. When she miscarries months into the marriage, however, she withdraws -- not only from her husband, but from her job, friends, and lifestyle.

At first, I had a hard time getting into it as the lead is so milquetoast as to barely register as a person, but perhaps that was the point. Tragedy gave her the freedom/excuse to be someone different. It really grew on me and maybe even spoke to me.

B+