Sneak Overview 2019
This is the continuation of last year’s story about all the movies me and my group of Sneak Preview disciples got to see in our local cinema.
The logbook for 2020 can be found here.
The Peanut Butter Falcon 👍
(December 2019)
A small and calm movie about a young man with Down syndrome, who ends up in a retirement home, because the state is unable to find a more suitable place for him. When he follows his big dream of becoming a wrestler, he runs away and meets a very unlikely fellow along the way: a loser who just wrecked his own life. They become travel companions. This movie is pretty well done. It doesn’t over-emphasize any of the topics it touches on and focuses simply on telling a heartfelt story. It’s funny, serious, cute and all in the right dosage.
Amazing Grace 👎
(November 2019)
This is not really a movie, but rather a documentary. It shows never before shown footage of an Aretha Franklin concert in 1972 that happened during two evenings in the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles. It was never released due to technical issues. What is shown in cinemas now is a very raw, unpolished series of shots and the original album recorded there. It is very clearly targeting a small core fan base of Aretha Franklin and does very little for anyone else. It wasn’t the right choice for a Sneak Preview, but I’m sure there are a lot of people out there, who appreciate that this was made.
Zombieland: Double Tap
(October 2019)
I don’t think this one needs a lot of explanation. It’s the continuation of the original Zombieland and stays very true to the concept. Exploding zombie heads, snarky comments from Woody Harrelson’s character Tallahassee, neurotic rules from Jesse Eisenberg’s Columbus and dripping sarcasm from Emma Stone’s Wichita…it’s all still there and immediately recognizable, if you know the first movie. The movie is not a masterpiece or anything, but you can get some decent entertainment out of it, especially if you’re not watching it alone.
The Informer
(October 2019)
An ex-convict is working with the FBI to bring down a large crime organization. It doesn’t go smoothly and his handler is instructed to “burn him”. She turns this order into an ultimatum for him and forces him to agree to a new plan, which requires him to go back to prison. Here the movie takes a bit of a turn and switches from almost pure thriller/psycho drama to more of an action movie as the main character channels his innner John McClane and MacGyver. At the heart of the movie is the concept that the officials are all working towards some hidden agenda and and inherently untrustworthy. Not a novel concept, but one that hasn’t necessarily been re-used overly much yet. The movie has a good pace, some well-rounded moments of suspense and decent acting. But it’s nothing special. The thriller aspect is much better in movies like Prisoners and the whole survival storyline has classics like Die Hard, of course. Mixing both is not adding much in my opinion.
Skin
(September 2019)
This movie tells the story of a man that grew up as the foster child of a married couple that took him off the street as a child. They were, however, not a “normal” couple, but the leaders of a white supremacist group in the United States. They had formed a tight group of followers around them with almost military discipline and unwavering obedience towards their leader. The lead character doesn’t really have the same beliefs and convictions as them, but he never knew anything else. Eventually he starts to question his situation and looks for a way out.
As a viewer you are led through this awkward realization that you start to sympathize with him despite the horrible things he has done. And it does a really good job of showing the ugly face of this organization through a clever choice of camera shots and locations. It is a very well put together movie, but not something to watch, if you’re looking for entertainment.
Midsommar 👎
(September 2019)
Scandiavian cinema is known for being ruthless in its visuals and topics. This movie is no exception. It follows a group of friends as their trip to Sweden turns sour. They visit the extensive farmstead, where one of their friends grew up. What they didn’t know is that he is part of a cult that has a very strange idea of a normal lifecycle, makes liberal use of psychotropic drugs for recreation and other reasons and follows many other strange customs. As they understand more and more of what is happening around them their initial curiosity and fascination turns into horror.
I cannot recommend this movie to anyone but avid fans of the psycho horror genre and a good tolerance for very graphic depictions of violence.
Little Monsters 👎
(August 2019)
A failed musician is kicked out of his home and moved in with his sister. In an attempt to be helpful he brings his nephew to school, where he meets his very attractive teacher (Lupita Nyong’o). Totally infatuated he spontaneously agrees to jump in when the person calls in sick, who was supposed to accompany the class on a field trip to an educational farm. So far this sounds like a standard love story. It’s not, because that gets interrupted by the zombie apocalypse. Yes…a class of young school children, a very cheerful teacher and a random dude find themselves sourrounded by bloodthirsty zombies. It’s at least as ridiculous as it sounds. I can recommend it only for some laughs, if you have some people over, but unless you are a total zombie nerd, you can probably skip this one.
Crawl 👎
(August 2019)
A Hurrican races over Florida, a professional swimmer drives into the storm to look for her father. She finds him in the basement of their family home, where he was attacked by a huge alligator. They are stuck in there and the cellar slowly starts filling with water. Of course at some point she has to swim faster than a crocodile. I’d have put it into the same box of movies I never want to see, where already other nonsense like “Sharknado” lives. Guess that chance was taken away from me.
The Operative
(July 2019)
Diane Kruger plays a young women, who is brought into the Mossad as a secret agent by her handler (played by Martin Freeman). After initial missions to test her resolve, loyalty and resourcefulness, she is sent to a long-term infiltration of a technology company in Iran. There, things start to turn sour as she gets attached to her new life in Teheran and the decision-makers in her organisation start to change the course of action. What’s special about this movie is, that it’s told from the perspective of an investigation that happens after the movie’s story already played out. The clever use of jumps between timelines and subtle switches from long-lasting quiet scenes to intense spy action — but without ridicuolous explosions and gun fights — really manages to build an intriguing story arch. It’s a solid film and worth watching, if you like the genre.
Anna
(June 2019)
Luc Besson’s latest movie tells the story of a poor, drug-addicted Russian woman, who catches the attention of the KGB and is taken on as a secret agent. From there on she is in their clutches and struggles with the effect her new life has on others and how everything interferes with her own desire for peace and quiet. The story is not super innovative, but comes with some moderately interesting twists. I’m not the biggest fan of having unnecessary violence shown in movies and this one does quite a bit of it. But aside from that, it’s a good watch and certainly worth sacrificing two hours for.
Kursk (aka The Command)
(May 2019)
I still remember the news reports from 2000 when the Kursk sunk and vaguely recall that there was a lot of confusion and uncertainty for a surprisingly long time. This movie tells the story of what happened to the Russian submarine and its crew of 118 marines. The story was, of course, adjusted to make it more dramatic. According to Wikipedia there were indeed some survivors, but they only managed to survive for about 6 hours. In the movie it seems like they survived for days. The Kursk disaster sparked heated discussions about the state of the Russian navy, bad maintenance discipline and poor equipment quality. The way the Russian government (under newly elected predident Vladimir Putin) handled the situation was openly criticised. And this film puts a lot of emphasis on this, portraying the Russians as inappropriately proud and slow to act. While certainly not an accurate documentation by any means, this movie is intense, depressing and does one very important thing: I puts the focus on the crew, their families and the mistakes that were made by people far far away, which affected all of them.
King of Thieves
(April 2019)
Michael Caine plus Heist Movie sounds like a pretty well-proven recipe, right? Well…this movie tells the true story of a group of seniors, who robbed the Hatton Garden safe deposit in 2015. The problem of this movie is that as a viewer you have high expectations when you see names like Michael Caine, Jim Broadbent and Michael Gambon. However, the heist is not really at the core of this movie at all, because it’s not even a particularly exciting plan they are executing. I guess the main topic of the movie was supposed to be the dysfunctional dynamic between the thieves, but it doesn’t really come through, seems a little to flakey and chaotic overall. And thus in the end it’s really just a below average heist movie.
Serenity
(April 2019)
Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway used to be a couple. Now she is married to a brutal, rich egomanic; while he wastes away on Plymouth island, trying to scrape a living from catching fish. But his deepest desire is to catch a legendary fish that got away from him a couple of times already. His life is interrupted, when his wife suddenly shows up at his boat and asks him to kill her new husband for money. But then it is slowly revealed that the story is not really happening in the real world. The movie is moderately entertaining, a little confusing at times and certainly falls short when it comes to execution.
Serial (Bad) Weddings 2
(March 2019)
This sequel stays true to the style introduced with the first movie, which is — in my limited experience — a very typical French comedy. It is ridiculous in how exaggerated all characters are, it carries some criticism for society and it never stops piling on more nonsense. As with several other French comedies I have seen, this one also feels like it was never intended to work for any other than the audience in France.
Cold Pursuit 👎
(March 2019)
Yet another Liam Neeson movie. It’s very similar to many of the others just with much more snow than usual. Very average in almost all aspects. The only amusing thing is the fact that this is one of these movies that got a weird alternative name in Germany: “Hard Powder”.
White Boy Rick 👎
(February 2019)
It’s hard to figure out what this movie is supposed to achieve. It tells the story of Rick Wershe Jr., who struggled through life as a teenager in Detroit in the 80s. His father was an unsuccessful gun dealer, who always walked the edge between legality and crime. In the end he ends up selling drugs to save his family, is betrayed by the FBI, for whom he had become an informant, and ends up in prison with a lifelong sentence. He became the person with the longest prison sentence in the US for a non-violent crime.
The movie paints a pretty grim picture of the life of a normal working class family in that time period. Matthew McConaughey does a good job portraying a father, who finds himself incapable of keeping his family together after his wife left. But the real weakness of this movie is it’s incredibly slow pace. Everything seems to happen in slowmotion and despite a very linear plot some scenes feel disconnected, because they are so drawn out. In the end, the movie does not really have a clear message or at least none that was obvious to me. Maybe it is meant as a social experiment, because it raises the question, if it is okay to develop some sense of compassion for a person that ruined hundreds of peoples’ lives by selling them drugs. While somewhat intriguing, it’s just not an enjoyable movie to watch, despite its good acting and videography.
Creed II 👎
(January 2019)
This is another sequel of the mother of all boxing-related movies: Rocky. After the movie I jokingly said, “If you have seen one movie about boxing, you know all of them.” This movie includes most of the well-known clichés about boxing in movies: a bad (Russian) guy as mortal enemy, an intense training session that transforms the main character into a machine of a boxer, shady boxing promoters and a lot of fluff to make it look like a completely new take on the default storyline. I guess from a videography point of view the movie does some things really well, but all in all it is just a very long-winded repetition of stuff that has all been seen before, which might be enjoyable to hardcore fans of the genre.
