Oven-Dried Tomatoes

Not a particularly good effort here. Seems like a waste of two very talented actors and a talented director too.

It’s fine, perfectly fine. Rehashes some of the first movie’s tropes but improves others. Evangeline Lilly (Wasp) is given much more room to breath here. It does get a huge knock for weak villain and a side story with some “other villain” (Walton Goggins who I really love usually) that felt shoehorned in and added nothing to anything.

It’s fun and entertaining. If you liked the first one, well, pretty much you would like this one.

It is always a pleasure to dive into an old highly regarded movie and discover that, yes, this is a fun great work of art that holds up as opposed to a slog. It’s a minimalist heist movie where 4 guys are plotting to steal some expensive jewelry. We go through the planning phases, learn who they are and deal with the consequences. The crown jewel of this masterpiece is the 15 minute or so totally silent heist. It’s a film I would not mind watching again soon.

I want more movies like this. It is not perfect but it’s a movie that gets under the skin. It is wrapped in a Sci-fi shell but it is more about loss, grief and self destruction. When the “shimmer” shows up next to the beach somewhere seemingly after a comet crash, the area starts changing and expanding. Several expeditions of military personnel are sent in to investigate the phenomena and none come out. Enter Lena played by Natalie Portman who is a scientist whose husband (Oscar Isaac) was on one of those lost expeditions. Then he shows up at home, then he is horribly sick. When he is taken to a secret military station right outside the shimmer, Lena meets the next group who will be going in lead by Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh). She joins up. This time the expedition is all women. Each one of them has some sort of tragedy in the background…why else would anyone volunteer to go on mission like this? This is all in the first maybe 20 minutes. Then they enter the area and Garland creates a world of amazing beauty, horror and haunting images and sounds. It’s  a film that surely pays to re-watch and I will be doing that soon.

It has it’s flaws. Our protagonist wanders into too many hallways of the creepy sanitarium in Switzerland, late at night, finding things out, not getting caught…way too many times. The plot is a bit silly I suppose. Maybe it is a bit too long. Yet, yet this is a glorious film to watch. It sucked me in with amazingly beautiful cinematography, set designs, surreal settings and a mesmerizing mix of horror and beauty. I cannot stop thinking about it and for that it wins in my book. So many water shots here I did not even know water can look so interesting, crystal clear, black mirror, mirror like, sloshing, calm, murky and steamy…weird thing to highlight but it really is beautifully done.

I love it when a movie about a story I really would never have thought I wanted to see pleasantly surprises me. As the title suggests the focus here is on Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie), her perspective, her upbringing, the family and cultural background that led to the infamous “incident”. The performances here are really good. A personal favorite is the character of Shawn played by Paul Walter Hauser and is just so damn funny and sad at the same time.