Why are horses so resplendent?
- The Rider (2017): What a glorious, heartfelt movie about passion and struggling against the odds! The Rider treads the thin-red-line between reality and fiction to paint this stern, yet touching story about Brady, a cowboy who suffers a head injury that impairs him from doing what he’s best at – riding and taming (breaking in) wild horses. You can sense the potential for metaphors and drama right there, and director Chloé Zhao manages to milk it to the very last drop without ever becoming melo. Great cinematography helps in creating the setting, while perfect pacing makes for one of the best Western-themed movies I’ve seen in a while. 8/10
There’s a resplendent horse here too!
- One and a Half Prince (2018): Although I saw this and The Rider a few weeks apart (#fakechronology), it’s funny how they are both semi-documentarian movies, talking about loss. The results, however, are very different, with One and a Half Prince failing in eliciting revelatory emotions. Or almost any other kind of emotions. More in the review. 5/10
No horses that I can recall.
- RBG (2018): I was writing about this last week, in reference to the similarities it shares with Won’t You Be My Neighbour (2018). While RBG is still a fairly interesting movie, it feels more like a hagiography (God, I love this word) and focuses a fair bit on political overtones, rather than soulful subthemes. In what ultimately is a more old-fashioned documentary, the life of supreme court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg is distinctive enough to merit the treatment, but I never felt it went beyond itself to create something special. Or maybe that’s just me being pretentious. 7/10
Horse don’t associate with losers.
- Sierra Burgess Is a Loser (2018): Another tame Netflix production about teenagers being teenagers and faking relationships (all that big data is really paying off!) proves to be an enjoyable ride for an uneventful night in. Even sharing the same object of desire like the other Netflix teen-pic, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before – Noah Centineo, it’s a bit hard to set them apart. For whatever reason, I did feel All the Boys was less formulaic than Sierra Burgess and the two leads had a less absurd love-story that you could actually get behind of. This does not mean Sierra Burgess doesn’t provide it’s share of positive characters and some moments of truth, just not that many. 6/10
P.S. And if you think that big data ain’t doing stuff – Noah Centineo is number six on the IMDb starmeter, after peaking at number one a week ago. Fear the aggregated data, guys and girls, fear the aggregated data.
Nobody can afford a horse in this one.
- Support the Girls (2018): I think director Andrew Bujalski is on to something here: he’s found the recipe for making critically acclaimed movies that people rate below 6.0 on IMDb. After Results (2015), which I found to be quite enjoyable, Support the Girls is an even more accomplished picture, that seems to hit people the wrong way. Starring Regina Hall and – the apparently unavoidable – Haley Lu Richardson, offers some insight into the day of Lisa, the manager of a “sports bar with curves”. At face value, it’s a trip with Lisa managing all the things that could possibly go wrong during a day’s work. I would argue that it’s actually a critique of modern America, of cutthroat competition and self-serving, misogynistic ownership that undermines the humanism rooted in the way of life we should aspire to. There are no quick fixes, no easy ways out, just a lot of taking crap and making it shine on a platter. It turns out, Support the Girls is a movie about being stoic and willfully obtuse in one’s desire to make the best of things. 8/10
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