Being the Ricardos (2021)

IMDb plot summary: Follows Lucy and Desi as they face a crisis that could end their careers and another that could end their marriage.

Directed by Aaron Sorkin. Starring Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, and J.K. Simmons.

Being the Ricardos tells the story of one particularly tense week in the life of Lucille Ball, when rumors were flying that she was a Communist, which could lead to her being blacklisted from her TV show. On top of that, she's just learned she's pregnant and having doubts about her husband's faithfulness, so it's a high-stress week all around. Given the fact that I often really love Sorkin's writing, I found this very disappointing. The dialogue doesn't sparkle the way his best work does, feeling instead like a dull by-the-book narrative that chose the least interesting pieces of the story to focus in on. The script is certainly the weakest part, though. Nicole Kidman does an impressively good job as Lucy, and Javier Bardem is pretty good as Desi, if never quite disappearing into the role the way Kidman does. The cinematography works for me as well, jumping between the stylized fantasy of 1950s television and the way things actually were in a way that highlights the contrast. There's enough good here to make it worth a watch if you're already a interested in the story or someone involved in the project, but if not, you can skip it.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Being the Ricardos < Gas Food Lodging

Being the Ricardos > Big Fat Liar

Being the Ricardos > Sullivan's Travels

Being the Ricardos < Venom

Being the Ricardos < Tank

Being the Ricardos > Kicking and Screaming (1995)

Being the Ricardos < Wordplay

Being the Ricardos < The Avengers (2012)

Being the Ricardos > Max Dugan Returns

Being the Ricardos > Jezebel

Being the Ricardos < Tulpan

Final spot: #2160 out of 3562, or 39%.

Nomads (1986)

IMDb plot summary: A French anthropologist specializing in nomadic groups moves to Los Angeles with his wife, and starts following a group of sinister street punks who seem to live and move around in a black van. But they aren't what they seem.

Directed by John McTiernan. Starring Lesley-Anne Down, Pierce Brosnan, and Anna Maria Monticelli.

Nomads centers on a doctor who begins to have unsettling hallucinations and memories that aren't her own after witnessing a man's death in the ER. She realizes she's seeing his memories of a bizarre group of... possessed dead bodies? Also a cult? While the movie has a couple of really interesting horror bits, the plot is nearly incomprehensible and we abandon our protagonist abruptly about 15 minutes into the movie to get an extended flashback of a character we never saw. The horror elements get sillier and sillier and don't fit together nicely at all, though I do feel like that ending image could be utterly chilling... if I was sure I knew what it actually implied, plotwise. As it is, it gave me a chill and then made me go, "But wait. WHAT?!" For all the good moments this movie has, it has far more terrible ones, and some bad acting from our leading lady and a horrible French accent from Pierce Brosnan don't do much to help it along. At least he doesn't sing, I guess.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Nomads < Gas Food Lodging

Nomads > Big Fat Liar

Nomads < Dirty Dancing

Nomads > The White Ribbon

Nomads < Ghost

Nomads < Master Harold and the Boys (2010)

Nomads < Crumb

Nomads > Solo: A Star Wars Story

Nomads > How to Irritate People

Nomads < Alice in Wonderland (1999)

Nomads < Treasures of the Snow

Nomads < The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

Final spot: #2424 out of 3557, or 32%.

Sarah and Son (1930)

IMDb plot summary: A ne'er-do-well husband, after years of abusing his wife, disappears with their son, and winds up selling him to a wealthy family. Years later, the wife--now a world-famous opera singer--finally has enough time and money to begin a search for him.

Directed by Dorothy Azner. Starring Ruth Chatterton, Fredric March, and Fuller Mellish Jr.

Sarah and Son tells the story of an opera singer whose husband sells their baby to a rich couple in a desperate bid for money. She spends the next several years trying to find him as well as trying to make her way in the world as a singer. The lead actress was nominated for an Academy Award for this role but she really didn't do much for me. The 1930s definitely still leaned into the overacting melodrama style of performing, and she has this in spades -- more so than anyone else in the film. One article I read compared her performance here to Greta Garbo's in Anna Christie, but the performance here is miles less believable. I'm usually able to relax into the style but here there were so many moments when she would begin a devastated monologue and I would just start laughing. It's an interesting concept for a movie and it's scripted and paced pretty well, and if the rest of the cast had been following the same sort of melodramatic style I might have been able to get into it more. As it is though it's a very tough watch for me to engage with emotionally and I'm sure I'm not going to remember this for very long.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Sarah and Son < The Keep

Sarah and Son < BASEketball

Sarah and Son > Scrooged

Sarah and Son > The Machinist

Sarah and Son < 42nd Street

Sarah and Son > The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Sarah and Son > The Final Countdown

Sarah and Son < Wuthering Heights

Sarah and Son > The Rainmaker

Sarah and Son < Make Mine Music

Sarah and Son > The Peanut Butter Falcon

Final spot: #2792 out of 3550, or 21%.

The French Dispatch (2021)

IMDb plot summary: A love letter to journalists set in an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional twentieth century French city that brings to life a collection of stories published in "The French Dispatch Magazine".

Directed by Wes Anderson. Starring Benicio Del Toro, Adrien Brody, and Tilda Swinton.

The French Dispatch is Wes Anderson's new movie, and boy, is it a Wes Anderson movie. There's not a lot of plot to it. It is a sort of visual representation of an edition of a fictional magazine. We see the various stories and editorials dramatized for the screen, with all the big colors and stylized tableaux and half-animated sequences that give Anderson such a distinctive visual style. I feel about this much the same way as I felt about The Grand Budapest Hotel, in that I had an absolutely delightful time watching it but the story itself is so insubstantial and so episodic and the style so linked to Anderson as a filmmaker rather than to the core of the story or the narrative that it's almost impossible to remember as an entity in itself. It's just another chapter in Anderson's film history. It isn't set apart from Anderson's other work in any meaningful way. That doesn't mean it's a bad film, there are plenty of filmmakers who make basically the same film over and over again who I deeply love, but I suspect I will be left with the same lingering vague feelings of fondness for this as I do for Grand Budapest Hotel or Moonrise Kingdom or most other efforts by Anderson.

How it entered my Flickchart:

The French Dispatch > Dark and Stormy Night

The French Dispatch < Till Death

The French Dispatch > I Saw the Devil

The French Dispatch < The Power of the Dog

The French Dispatch > A Shot in the Dark

The French Dispatch > La jetee

The French Dispatch > A Little Night Music

The French Dispatch > Native Son (2019)

The French Dispatch < Dogma

The French Dispatch < Up in the Air

The French Dispatch < VeggieTales: Rack, Shack & Benny

The French Dispatch > Full Metal Jacket

Final spot: #1122 out of 3551, or 68%.

Last Night in Soho (2021)

IMDb plot summary: An aspiring fashion designer is mysteriously able to enter the 1960s where she encounters a dazzling wannabe singer. But the glamour is not all it appears to be and the dreams of the past start to crack and splinter into something darker.

Directed by Edgar Wright. Starring Thomasin Mackenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Matt Smith.

Last Night in Soho stars Thomasin Mackenzie as a young fashion student with a gift for the supernatural. She becomes fascinated with a ghost, a young woman from the 1960s who seems to have it all, until the darker parts of her past are revealed and leave Mackenzie deeply troubled. This was nothing like I expected it to be as an Edgar Wright film, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, just a different one. It's not a comedy, for one thing, but a strange surreal horror/mystery that I found thoroughly compelling once I stopped expecting witty one-liners and meta commentary (though Wright's familiar gift for finding the perfect soundtrack is definitely on display here!). The story comes to a rather melodramatic climax, but it all works for me. The film goes on a ride from coming-of-age story to nightmarish horror to gothic melodrama, and maybe not having any inkling of what the film was before hand made that an easier transition, as I wasn't expecting it to "settle" into any of these one genres. It's absolutely nothing like Wright's made before, but it's a fascinating step in a new direction for him, and I wouldn't be sorry to see more of it.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Last Night in Soho > The Keep

Last Night in Soho > Munich

Last Night in Soho < Hearts Beat Loud

Last Night in Soho < Grave of the Fireflies

Last Night in Soho > Is It College Yet?

Last Night in Soho < Judgment at Nuremberg

Last Night in Soho > The Great Gatsby (2013)

Last Night in Soho < Four Lions

Last Night in Soho < CODA

Last Night in Soho > Il Postino: The Postman

Last Night in Soho > Holiday (1930)

Last Night in Soho < Roxanne

Final spot: #744 out of 3554, or 79%.

Furlough (2018)

IMDb plot summary: When an inmate is granted one weekend out of prison to see her dying mother, a rookie correction officer struggles to keep her under control.

Directed by Laurie Collyer. Starring Melissa Leo, Tessa Thompson, and Edgar Ramirez.

Furlough stars Tessa Thompson as a prison guard who is tasked with escorting prisoner Melissa Leo to visit her dying mother. Thompson is young and eager for a promotion and determined to take this assignment very seriously. Leo is excited to be out in the world after so long, and we're never sure if she's going to try to make things difficult for Thompson or if she's just enjoying the time she has out. These are two good actresses turning into two good performances in a film that is occasionally a little obviously scripted -- and by that I mean that we can see the strings working. The ending in particular, the climactic moment of the story, is a little too easy and a little too sweet to come out of the story that came before it. Thompson and Leo both make this believable on the whole and let us root for both of them at alternate moments. Interestingly, this is almost entirely a story about relationships rather than any kind of comment on the prison industrial system, aside from a very brief comment from Thompson's sister at the beginning asking her how she can be part of the system like this. It's a little awkward that that's brought up and then never really addressed again, but this isn't really a prison movie, it's a buddy movie. And while it's not amazing it mostly does what it's trying to do.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Furlough > The Keep

Furlough < Till Death

Furlough < Timecop

Furlough > Blood Diamond

Furlough > The Fly (1986)

Furlough > 12 Years a Slave

Furlough > A Doll's House (1973)

Furlough > Platoon

Furlough > The Nice Guys

Furlough < The River Wild

Furlough > Lifeforce

Final spot: #1336 out of 3552, or 62%.

Union Pacific (1939)

IMDb plot summary: In 1862, Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads compete westward across the wilderness toward California.

Directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, and Robert Preston.

Union Pacific tells the story of building a railroad line across the country to reach California. There are two competing lines that are allowed to continue building until they meet up with the other, and so an unscrupulous businessman decides to sabotage one line so the other will be able to build more. We follow these efforts, as well as the man who's trying to stop them, and Barbara Stanwyck, postmistress of the railroad, who is caught in between. This is a Cecil B. Demille film and it definitely feels grand and expensive the way many of his did. Some of the railway laying scenes we're unexpectedly compelling, a close look at everything that went into making transport across the country possible. I also found myself unexpectedly caught up in the love triangle between Stanwyck and the two men on opposite sides who love her. Both of them are portrayed sympathetically so it's not as simple as good guy versus bad guy, which makes it more interesting. It's not an astonishingly good movie but it did draw me in much more than I would have expected when I first started this. An interesting look at an exciting time in our history.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Union Pacific > Dark and Stormy Night

Union Pacific < Till Death

Union Pacific < Timecop

Union Pacific > Source Code

Union Pacific < The Fly (1986)

Union Pacific < 7 Plus Seven

Union Pacific > It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

Union Pacific > Liberal Arts

Union Pacific < The Trouble with Harry

Union Pacific > The Help

Union Pacific > Damn Yankees

Union Pacific > Captain America: The First Avenger

Final spot: #1505 out of 3549, or 58%.