on Christmas day my girlfriend and I went to see "Vice" and we both thought it was fantastic. Bale's performance is masterclass and combined with the make-up/prosthetics you feel like you're watching Cheney, which goes a long way to make other more artistic/satirical aspects of the movie work as well as they do. the movie goes out its way to humanize Cheney while also presenting him in the cold harsh light of reality and that complexity, some might say dichotomy, of the Cheney that is presented does not offer a thinking audience an easy, judgmental headspace. Amy Adams does work that is at the same level as Bale's playing Cheney's wife, a character the movie is less kind to in its portrayal of the matriarch who was more of an ideological zealot than Cheney, one who lamented how unfairly Nixon was being treated while Cheney was handling the situation as an opportunity for his career. the movie portrays Cheney as someone who was free from an ideological/religious anchor, driven only by the respect and pursuit of power and the ability to wield that power as freely but discretely as possible, a man who wants influence over the very course of human history but doesn't want the people to know what he was really doing. that is the contradiction and what I would call the corruption that IS his belief system, his "religion". this movie is probably going to win more Oscars than it deserves just because of the overall impact of the quality of its conception. Bale and Adams' work deserves a win for best actors, but Rockwell might win for best supporting and his work here really doesn't merit a nomination let alone a statue, at least imho. I also still think the writing of the Coens for Buster Scruggs deserves the Oscar more than Vice's screenplay but not sure if that is how it will play out.
the day after Christmas I went to see "Aquaman", the most overrated movie in a while. if I had been able to see it fresh I could have enjoyed it as a stupid, cheesy, matinee fun movie....but of course I go into it with baggage of how movies that preceded it have been received compared to their quality. it ended up pissing me off. this movie was no better than other big budgets flicks that have been derided by reviewers and failed at the box office. derivative is an understatement, there is a scene that blatantly rips off Valerian that had me rolling my eyes, for instance. and can someone explain to me why Vin Diesel gets mocked and made fun of mercilessly but Jason Momoa gets his ass kissed for doing the same fucking thing as Diesel does in his movies? because he's better looking? I don't get it. by the end of the movie I was so sick of Momoa overtrying to speak with the lowest, most gravely voice possible in every fucking scene while the camera zoomed in on his digitally enhanced eyes that I was fighting the urge to yell "just shut the fuck up already!" at the screen. best part of the movie was the Black Manta arc, wish there had been more of that, they should have made a movie with him as the main character as someone who becomes famous for killing Aquaman.
probably 4 different people were on their phones around me during the movie periodically and their screens were fucking bright, too, not even the decency to dim them. it would have pissed me off even more if i was watching a movie i was really into but the outright fucking rudeness of it was still enough to remind me why a plague wouldn't really be such a bad thing in the grand scheme of things........
