At the beginning of January, before everyone came back from the holidays, I indulged myself in what is, for a parent of young kids, an unimaginable luxury: one full afternoon spent by myself, at the movies. I started with Steven Spielberg’s Pentagon Papers dramatization “The Post”. And I followed that with Aaron Sorkin’s “Molly’s Game,” which tells the story of Molly Bloom, a former Olympic athlete who came to run a high-stakes poker game for Hollywood’s elite. It was kind of a liberal’s double-header, you might say.
“The Post” is like a lot of Spielberg’s recent prestige fare: overly earnest and really, really on-the-nose about what it wants you to think and feel. It’s also visually nauseating; cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s highly stylized atmospherics have all the personality of one of those sickly sweet Hallmark posters with little kids giving each other adobrable kisses that they issued to everyone’s dentists in the 1980s. Still, the movie is not ineffective and I found myself wrapped up in it way more than I expected to be. Good flick for the plane, if it happens to be playing.
As for “Molly’s Game,” it’s tough to know which Aaron Sorkin is going to show up for any new project: the brilliant, hilarious storyteller responsible for “A Few Good Men,” “Sports Night” and the best years of “The West Wing”? Or the didactic, agenda-obsessed debate club vice-president of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and “The Newsroom”? Luckily it’s mostly the former who was on duty for “Molly’s Game” which also happens to be Sorkin’s feature film directorial debut. He generally knocks it out of the park with a smart, expertly paced, fully gripping thriller disguised as a biopic. Mind you, the movie itself is preposterous in its framing of virtue and vice, and it’s as flawed as any Sorkin work. Nevertheless it’s a blast.
Including those two, I watched a total of fifteen movies in January. Here is the full list:
- “The Post”
- “Molly’s Game”
- “The Money Pit” I always heard that this was terrible; it was not.
- “The Founder” Dodgy but it nagged at me for days; I wrote about it in this blog post.
- “The Big Steal” Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in a film noir/road movie/romantic comedy.
- “Illegal” Edward G. Robinson in a weird and forgettable legal drama.
- “Paddington 2” This is a very, very good movie if you’re a kid and you need to keep your grownup busy for an afternoon.
- “Apollo 13” Has lost zero of its power; if anything it’s gotten better with time. Also, I guess I was kind of on a Tom Hanks marathon last month.
- “What We Do in the Shadows” Rewatched this and liked it even more.
- “Megan Leavey” Sweet story, boring movie.
- “Suicide Squad” Not horrific; just horrible.
- “Home Alone” My kids lost their minds with this!
- “Atomic Blonde” Severely underappreciated when it was released last year. Charlize Theron is reinventing action movies.
- “Frankenstein” First time I’ve ever seen this classic.
- “The Bad Sleep Well” Sometimes Kurosawa meanders.
- “The Fallen Idol” Delightfully proper and then unexpectedly terrifying.
If you’re interested, here is my list of all the movies I watched last year, as well as my full list from 2016. You can also follow along with my film diary over at letterboxd.com.
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