The movies keep on rolling into the theater and I keep on going every weekend. June ended with a slew of films that ran the gamut of blockbusters to plain ol' busts. Read on if you want to know what I would recommend and what I would not.
No Hard Feelings: I had been looking forward to this movie for a while and it did not disappoint. It tells the story of Maddie (the delightful Jennifer Lawrence), a woman in her early thirties who is broke, mad at the world, and very commitment-phobic. In urgent need of some cash, she find an ad posted by some concerned helicopter parents who want a young woman to "date" their college-bound son, Percy (the very sweet and wonderful Andrew Barth Feldman). Percy is a pathologically shy teen who rarely goes out and doesn't have any friends, and his parents are desperate to draw him out of his shell before he leaves for Princeton in the fall.
What follows is an extremely raunchy comedy where Maddie first tries to get this awkward teen to realize she wants to bang him, but subsequently turns into a very sweet and earnest movie where these two broken people help each other grow in unexpected ways. Directed by Gene Stupnitsky, who also co-wrote the screenplay with John Phillips, this is both a glorious comedy that fully earns its R-rating (with one incredible sequence on a beach that might be my absolute favorite use of female full-frontal nudity ever) and also a touching one, and that's an incredibly hard tone to pull off. So watch this movie. You'll have no hard feelings (groan) when you leave the theater.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: Harrison Ford is back as the swashbuckling archaeologist Indiana Jones, and despite the grey hair and wrinkles (except for the scenes where he has been miraculously de-aged), this movie is still a wall-to-wall action extravaganza. Throw in Phoebe Waller-Bridge as his goddaughter, Helena Shaw, and you've got a thrilling film that keeps you thoroughly entertained for the entirety of it's 154-minute runtime.
Set in 1969 (though dipping into other years at various points), the premise is simple - there's a literal Nazi, Jurgen Voller (played by Mads Mikkelsen, of course), who is in search of Archimedes' dial, an ancient artefact that Indy had stolen from him in World War II. What follows is a quest across New York, Morocco, Greece, and Italy to decipher the clues that Archimedes left behind and recover this dial before it falls into the wrong hands. There are action sequences on planes, trains, automobiles, and tuk-tuks. Really, any vehicle you can think of features in this movie in some glorious stunt sequence at some point. Directed by James Mangold, this is a thrilling action-adventure with a great finale. And of course, every time that score by John Williams blares out, you'll want to stand up and cheer. This franchise is 42 years old, but boy does it feel as fresh as ever.
Asteroid City: Lately, Wes Anderson's movies have been falling fast in my estimation. Last year, I was terrifically bored by
The French Dispatch and thought he was leaning more into his twee aesthetic than the need to make actual narrative sense. Little did I know that movie would be considered a narrative masterpiece in comparison to Asteroid City, a film where he seems to have decided that plot is not of the essence whatsoever. I would really like to be able to describe this movie to you, but that would necessitate actually understanding what happened in it for an hour and a half minutes, and that is not something I can claim to have done.
Set in the 1950s, a large cast of characters congregate in a desert town in Arizona called Asteroid City. They are there to celebrate some high-school students who have made some marvelous scientific inventions and do some stargazing, but then an alien shows up so they all get put into quarantine by the US government who doesn't want word of the alien to get out. But there's also a meta-narrative about how none of this is real and is actually just the story of a play that's being put on, so you have to follow that whole parallel narrative which renders anything that anyone says completely moot? I don't know man. It was self-satisfied and artsy and I didn't have any patience for it. It was, of course, aesthetically delicious, but I am becoming increasingly convinced that maybe all I want from Anderson is a series of photographs or portraits. But cinema is not the art form he should be dabbling in if he thinks having a coherent narrative is so beneath him.
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