Civil War (2024)

IMDb plot summary: A journey across a dystopian future America, following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House.

Directed by Alex Garland. Starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, and Cailee Spaeny.

Civil War is Alex Garland's latest film, set in a not-far-distant future where the United States has descended into civil war. Kirsten Dunst is our protagonist, a jaded photojournalist on a mission to document the war, and she and her crew make their way across the states to D.C. to try and get a photo of and interview with the President. Alex Garland is one of my favorite filmmakers currently, and although this is probably my least favorite of his thus far, it's still a thoughtful and engaging watch. Keeping the focus on the journalists lets us see things slightly more from the "outside," perceiving all the horrors as both everyday and still horrible. Dunst has really come into her own as an actress over the past decade, and she is excellent here as well. While it's probably my least favorite of Garland's four directorial works, it still is striking and is something that I think is going to sit with me for awhile.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Civil War > Love Exposure

Civil War > Kuroneko

Civil War < The Legend of 1900

Civil War > The Farewell

Civil War < The Fabelmans

Civil War > 5 Centimeters Per Second

Civil War < Summer Wars

Civil War < Beautiful Boy

Civil War < Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Civil War < Super

Civil War < Face/Off

Civil War < Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.

Final spot: #677 out of 3943, or 83%.

Fearless (1993)

IMDb plot summary: A man's personality is dramatically changed after surviving a major airline crash.

Directed by Peter Weir. Starring Jeff Bridges, Isabella Rossellini, and Rosie Perez.

Fearless stars Jeff Bridges as a man who survives a devastating plane crash, only to have a great deal of difficulty settling back into every day life afterward. While he claims to be fine and turns down offers of therapeutic assistance, his actions become more and more distanced from his family as he tries to identify how that near-death experience has changed him. It was interesting watching this film directly after Hero, another movie about a deadly plane crash and a man becoming an unexpected hero because of it. But this movie takes a very different angle, focusing on the many different ways grief, loss, and PTSD can show up in different people, and how difficult that can be for folks on the outside to comprehend. It's a slow-moving story that is grounded in some very good acting performances, particularly Bridges, who is so incredibly difficult to read in his state of lingering shock. It's a complex performance that I find very compelling, and the film is worth watching for that alone.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Fearless > Love Exposure

Fearless < Kuroneko

Fearless < The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain

Fearless > The Sword in the Stone

Fearless > Death at a Funeral (2007)

Fearless < Timecop

Fearless < Raising Cain

Fearless > Death to Smoochy

Fearless > American Outlaws

Fearless < Phone Booth

Fearless < Kill Bill Vol. 1

Fearless > Three Thousand Years of Longing

Final spot: #1576 out of 3942, or 60%.

The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

IMDb plot summary: In 1880s India, two former British soldiers decide to set themselves up as Kings in Kafiristan, a land where no white man has set foot since Alexander the Great.

Directed by John Huston. Starring Sean Connery, Michael Caine, and Christopher Plummer.

The Man Who Would Be King stars Michael Caine and Sean Connery as two British officers who decide to, on their own, head into a remote Eurasian country full of individual warring tribes and conquer it. This was an odd movie to watch, and I'm still not at all sure what to make of it. It's set up like a jaunty heist movie, but underpinning the whole thing is the fact that it's all about a group of entitled British men deciding to take over a non-white country. While there's a little bit of self-awareness in this -- they are ultimately unsuccessful in their goal, and it indicates that their hubris was a big part of it, which is compelling -- but I'm not sure that it was *wholly* convinced its protagonists were the bad guys, just that they did their colonizing badly. And it leans into and supports so many tropes about non-white civilizations that I was just uncomfortable much of the time. I'd like to see this story retold either in a way that is more confidently critical of our leads or, at the very least, in a way that recentered the stories of the people at the heart of the conflict. There may be more nuance to this narrative than I found, but it ultimately felt too much like a colonization romp for me to get into it.

How it entered my Flickchart:

The Man Who Would Be King < Love Exposure

The Man Who Would Be King > Ulysses

The Man Who Would Be King > Company (1997)

The Man Who Would Be King > The Stalking Moon

The Man Who Would Be King > Pitch Perfect 2

The Man Who Would Be King < The Harder They Fall

The Man Who Would Be King > Power

The Man Who Would Be King < Something the Lord Made

The Man Who Would Be King < Star Trek: Nemesis

The Man Who Would Be King > Candyman (2021)

The Man Who Would Be King > Hellboy

The Man Who Would Be King > Q & A

Final spot: #2056 out of 3941, or 48%.

Chimes at Midnight (1965)

IMDb plot summary: When King Henry IV ascends to the throne, his heir, the Prince of Wales, is befriended by Sir John Falstaff, an old, overweight, fun-loving habitual liar. Through Falstaff's eyes we see the reign of King Henry IV and the rise of Henry V.

Directed by Orson Welles. Starring Orson Welles, Jeanne Moreau, and Margaret Rutherford.

Chimes at Midnight is Orson Welles' cinematic retelling of Shakespeare's Henry history plays, focusing nearly all the action through the eyes of the young carefree prince's constant companion, Falstaff. Welles himself plays Falstaff and we see his friendship with the prince change over the course of the film. Shakespeare's histories have never been my favorite of his plays, and I struggled as always to connect with this story on an emotional level. Welles is, of course, a very engaging orator, and his Falstaff monologues were fairly engaging, but there's just not much else for me to latch onto. I admire what it's trying to do, and, on a very specific note, I really appreciated the range of vocal choices being made by all the actors throughout. Even when I couldn't care about the story, I could just appreciate the vocal work bringing all the minor characters to live. If I was a bigger fan of the original histories, I'm sure this would be a more compelling watch, but as it was, it was well-done and I was unmoved.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Chimes at Midnight < Le voyage au Groenland

Chimes at Midnight > Ulysses

Chimes at Midnight < The Happiest Millionaire

Chimes at Midnight > Father of the Bride (1950)

Chimes at Midnight > National Velvet

Chimes at Midnight > BlackBerry

Chimes at Midnight > For Your Consideration

Chimes at Midnight > Call Me By Your Name

Chimes at Midnight < The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Chimes at Midnight > Jezebel

Chimes at Midnight < Wild Zero

Chimes at Midnight > The Secret of Nikola Tesla

Final spot: #2472 out of 3940, or 37%.

Phir Hera Pheri (2006)

IMDb plot summary: Baburao, Raju and Shyam are living happily after having risen from rags to riches. Still, money brings the joy of riches and with it the greed to make more money. And so, with a don as an unknowing investor, Raju initiates a new game.

Directed by Neeraj Vora. Starring Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty, and Paresh Rawal.

Phir Hera Pheri follows three men who lose all their wealth to an investment scam and get into various hijinks trying to regain that money. This is apparently a sequel, but I haven't seen the original, and while it might be helpful to understand how the characters got to where they are, it's certainly not necessary for character development, as these are incredibly broad characters and problems. The new revelations of dangers and hare-brained schemes to get money felt so repetitive after the first few times, and there wasn't a story arc so much as just an episodic series of events, which is too bad, because I can feel them trying to reach those exaggerated farcical heights where everything gets zanier and zanier until it explodes in chaos at the end. But this plods way too much to get there, most of the jokes don't land (or at least not without a cultural knowledge I don't have), and none of the characters are engaging enough to care about their journey. By far the least interesting of my Bollywood watches this month.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Phir Hera Pheri < Le voyage au Groenland

Phir Hera Pheri < Obvious Child

Phir Hera Pheri > The Last Picture Show

Phir Hera Pheri < The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Phir Hera Pheri > Simone

Phir Hera Pheri > Nobel Son

Phir Hera Pheri < Easter Parade

Phir Hera Pheri < Freaky Friday (1976)

Phir Hera Pheri > Casino Royale (2006)

Phir Hera Pheri > Suez

Phir Hera Pheri > The Fast and the Furious

Phir Hera Pheri > Abraham Lincoln

Final spot: #3247 out of 3940, or 18%.

The Fall Guy (2024)

IMDb plot summary: A stuntman, fresh off an almost career-ending accident, has to track down a missing movie star, solve a conspiracy and try to win back the love of his life while still doing his day job. What could possibly go right?

Directed by David Leitch. Starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

The Fall Guy stars Ryan Gosling as a former stuntman who is injured badly on the job and quits. When he hears that his former lover, played by Emily Blunt, wants him to work on her new picture despite him ghosting her completely after his accident, he agrees to come back for one last picture. Gosling is of course a phenomenally charismatic actor, gifted at action, comedy, and heart, and all of those work together here, where his persona carries the majority of the picture. There are also, as there should be in a film about stuntmen, some really fun action scenes as Gosling runs around trying to solve the mystery he finds himself in the middle of. It's a big fun popcorn flick that keeps the mystery interesting but not overly complicated, and there are some nice human emotions grounding the whole thing. Am I going to remember it? No. But if somebody else tosses it on, will I occasionally look up at the screen and chuckle? Sure.

How it entered my Flickchart:

The Fall Guy > Love Exposure

The Fall Guy < Anna Karenina (2012)

The Fall Guy < Kajaki

The Fall Guy > The Sword in the Stone

The Fall Guy < Ben-Hur (1959)

The Fall Guy > The Speed Cubers

The Fall Guy > Albert Nobbs

The Fall Guy > Mosaic

The Fall Guy < Nothing in Common

The Fall Guy > Mr. Holmes

The Fall Guy > The Curse of the Jade Scorpion

Final spot: #1609 out of 3939, or 59%.

Lovin' the Ladies (1930)

IMDb plot summary: Jimmy Farnsworth (Allen Kearns) bets his friend $5,000 that he can get any two people, under the proper environment, to fall in love and become engaged within a month.

Directed by Melville W. Brown. Starring Richard Dix, Lois Wilson, and Allen Kearns.

Lovin' the Ladies is a 1930 movie in which a man makes a bet that he can make any woman and any man fall in love with each other. He's taken up on the challenge and presented a working man and an extremely snobby upper class woman. Along the way, however, his male target finds himself falling in love with the better's girlfriend instead of the woman he's supposed to be pursuing. This is a quick, light story that I had very few lingering feelings about. I had a decent time watching it as it played out, but almost immediately forgot I had seen it. There are some mildly entertaining mistaken identity moments, and our romantic hero and heroine are a nice couple, but not a lot to make the film stand out very much.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Lovin' the Ladies < Le voyage au Groenland

Lovin' the Ladies > In the Line of Fire

Lovin' the Ladies < Company (1997)

Lovin' the Ladies > Roman J. Israel, Esq.

Lovin' the Ladies < Short Circuit

Lovin' the Ladies < My Girlfriend's Boyfriend

Lovin' the Ladies > Awake

Lovin' the Ladies < Saturday Night Fever

Lovin' the Ladies < The Big Sleep

Lovin' the Ladies < Dracula

Lovin' the Ladies > Bronson

Lovin' the Ladies < Li'l Abner

Final spot: #2674 out of 3938, or 32%.