Malcolm1980's 2019 Review Thread

[malcolm1980]

12/30

Mindanao (Brillante Mendoza) *** - A Muslim woman cares for her young daughter who is stricken with cancer while her husband is off fighting Islamic militants as a soldier. Just like the other Metro Manila Film Festival entry, this film feels like a compromise in order to placate the masses. Director Brillante Mendoza's aesthetic here feels quite more mainstream than his previous films even though he's still tackling similar themes. There are also fantasy animated sequences peppered in all throughout the film in the form of a bedtime story being to the dying child but it honestly feels almost shoe-horned because someone said, "We have to make this entertaining for the kids!" I'm willing to bet that's exactly what happened. But it's not a bad film. It's watchable and it has its moments but it's not Mendoza's best work.

Shampoo (Hal Ashby) *** - A womanizing hairdresser wants to put up his own salon but gets entangled in his sexual pasts along the way. Coming into this, I thought it was going to be this bawdy sex comedy/romantic comedy. Yes, it's still pretty funny and sexy stuff does happen but I was surprised by how rather dark it is and I was also taken in by surprise by the ending as well. It features some really great performances by the entire cast. There are scenes here where I think Warren Beatty does some of his best acting work. All in all, it's no must-see masterpiece but it's a solid intelligently made adult romantic dramedy.

[malcolm1980]

12/31

Booksmart (Olivia Wilde) ***1/2 - Two overachieving senior girls realize they've missed out on all the high school fun and decided to party on the night before graduation. It's a tried and tested formula of the R-rated teenagers party, get drunk and try to laid comedy. But somehow director Olivia Wilde and a team of writers found a way to make this formula fresh and funny. Some trolls will disagree but actually updating the formula with more progressive mores is actually one of the reasons this is more refreshing than tired. Both Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever are wonderful and gives this film sweetness and depth which actually helps it rise above your average bawdy teen comedy. This is officially my last film of 2019 and this was a nice way to cap the year.