Peter Fenton's Blog

This was a glitchy, trippy sci-fi drama/thriller feature film in all the best ways! Incredible cinematography, vibes, and production design really grounded you in the story and the production did an excellent job of achieving a lot with very little resources--scaling the screenplay properly to tell an engaging story with just a few characters within a small amount of locations. Transient poses some interesting questions, too, exploring themes about the ethics of dwelling on memories and the lengths we go to when we wish to avoid conflict.

Chris Ruppert and Sugey Cruz put together an amazing story with Transient and put together an excellent cast and crew to bring the film to life.

Watched on Tuesday April 11, 2023.

Comedy is super subjective, and often rooted in culture and language—or so I have always thought. Marry My Dead Body was the first honest-to-God comedy movie I’ve watched in a foreign language and it’s quickly become a favorite! A familiar plot is set up: homophobic cop gets connected with gay partner to investigate major case; homophobe’s heart grows three sizes—but the big twist is the gay partner is dead and through a series of contrived coincidences, the homophobic cop has by accident entered a traditional ghost marriage to him. Hilarity ensues.

What I loved about this movie was the relationship that developed between the two central members of the ghost marriage, and I loved seeing the former homophobe starting to take ownership of his burgeoning friendship with his ghost husband and fight for him. It’s a stark change laid out beautifully over the course of the film from beginning to end. Some of the police investigation part of the film wasn’t quite it for me, but the humor all throughout and the touching character journey for Detective Ming-han made this an amazing viewing experience.

This movie was gorgeously shot, sad and brooding all throughout. The atmosphere was off the charts. The story didn’t do anything too ambitious, the narrative was overall predictable and I could guess exactly where most scenes were going. Jonathan was a very well-drawn character, but I felt Carrie and Shane were a touch underdeveloped, even in a movie that was nearly two hours long that really just focused on three characters. I was a bit hazy on the timeline of the film, too, but I won’t hold that against this movie too much since I am an American and have only a surface-level understanding of Mandarin.

I wish we could’ve gotten a bit more inside Shane’s motivations and feelings, especially for the very sudden action he takes at the climax of the film and the ambiguous ending at the beach. It didn’t sit great with me narratively, as I didn’t feel a throughline was drawn. Overall, there’s not much narratively this film does that hasn’t been done better before or since—but I did enjoy the cinematography and production design quite a bit.

“Why are they doing this, the birds?” — the question on everyone’s mind in this movie that nobody—I’d argue not even the director himself—seems to have an answer for. What was interesting about this movie was how stark of a plot switch happens once the horror takes off. I enjoyed the slice-of-life rom com the first half of the movie led us through (the opening scene at the bird shop was a brilliant introduction to our two leads, Mitch and Melanie), and the switch to inexplicable bird attack-based horror in the second half, despite all the bird imagery all throughout the film, is quite jarring. For all the successful visual suspense Hitchcock builds in the sequences leading up to attack sequences, such as the scene on the jungle gym, I was a bit underwhelmed watching the attack sequences. I don’t think we needed more gore or anything like that per se, but I think a conventional movie score could’ve better heightened the stakes of the attacks and made this horror movie more… well, scary!

That all being said, it’s clear Hitchcock is a great visual filmmaker, and the characters are well-drawn. This plot is unhinged, though, and while I’d be down for that in the hands of a great filmmaker like Hitchcock, I was a bit ambivalent on the bird attacks themselves. I think a score could’ve gone a long way.

This was fun! I haven’t seen much of the MCU in the last 10 years (I bailed after Age of Ultron), but I’ve heard good things about the Tom Holland trilogy and finally got around to watching one. It’s a good Spider-Man movie and a pretty good high school movie, too. I appreciate, given this is the third Spider-Man in my lifetime, that we skipped the origin story and got right to Spider-Man antics. Tom Holland was excellent in the role, I see how this movie launched him into mega stardom. I appreciated the relatively grounded stakes of this story and the MCU-brand quippy charm and visual polish. It was an enjoyable 2-hour experience.

That being said: what’s holding this movie back for me is the attempts to connect it into the Avengers storyline. I’m sure that if I was invested into the MCU, I would’ve appreciated it but this movie’s stakes and storyline were successful enough as a stand-alone story that the Iron Man and Avengers connections felt more undermining to the good movie I was watching than additive.

A comedy-forward thriller is a tough genre to pull off but A SIMPLE FAVOR has done just that! I was hooked from minute one and appreciated the witty dialogue in Jessica Sharzer’s screenplay and the performances of Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, and Henry Golding. While I’d have to watch a second time to really assess how the fairly complex plot and its subsequent twists hold up, I will say one thing: this movie had me gripped and entertained for every minute of its runtime. Paul Feig delivered a fun, engaging, visually arresting film with A SIMPLE FAVOR with a complex villain, and a satisfying enough ending that left the door open for a sequel, which is hear is on the docket. I’m invested enough in these characters to want to come back a second time soon!

Also, this movie could have used more Linda Cardellini. Not sure how the story could justify more Linda Cardellini, but I wouldn’t have been mad about it!

The movie was fun enough for the first hour and a half (I’d liken it to essentially a well-executed “lost in the wilderness with occasional episodic challenges” kind of story a la The Odyssey), but whoa mama did Bonnie and Clyde become an elite film with that ending. Playing most of the scene in near-silence with just the essential sounds, with a dissonant serenity right before rapid cuts and an ending that was inevitable and so beautifully set up—I’m going to be thinking about that image for a while.

It goes to show for me, as an emerging writer and director, the power of a great ending. There’s more to love in this film, for sure—I loved how quickly we were introduced to the titular couple and effectively set up their wants, personalities, and Bonnie’s potential for violence and Clyde’s potential for romance in essentially one long walk and talk shot, and I appreciated seeing a struggle of parallel parking depicted on film—but that ending is iconic and understandably the thing people remember about Bonnie and Clyde.

Don’t sleep on the Wicked Movie, y’all. It really is that good. 

Wicked remains my favorite musical of all time, so I was inclined to like the movie no matter what—but I also know just how hard it is to make a movie musical work. So many musicals I love have bad movies. Wicked is not one of them.

I didn’t know Cynthia Erivo’s work very well prior to this film—she’s excellent. I appreciated her layered performance of Elphaba: snarky, smart, ostracized. I was also very pleasantly surprised with Ariana Grande’s acting chops. One advantage the medium of film has over theater is the ability to see a character’s inner life, and the opportunity to see a conflicted Glinda up close was something that makes the storyline work for me even more than I thought it did. Director Jon Chu did a great job showing layers to not only Glinda and Elphaba but the entire supporting ensemble. This movie was an Event with a capital E, and Jon Chu led an amazing team to pull it off.

The Wicked movie is a two-parter—what we’re seeing released this weekend is only a film adaptation of Act One. I was skeptical when I heard the musical was being split into two movies—all I thought at the time was “greedy studio, sure”—but coming out of Part I today, I actually think it makes all the sense in the world. The harshest criticism I have for the stage musical is that it often moves too fast and thus, plot points don’t all feel adequately developed. This is no issue in this film, I feel every element of the story that exists in the musical is given proper breathing room to be follow able and built upon. 

You couldn’t cut Wicked into one movie without cutting some great musical numbers and story threads.

I will admit—Act One is far stronger than Act Two in the stage show, so perhaps adapting Act One was the “easier” job, but seeing what Jon Chu, screenwriter Winnie Holzman, and the cast and crew were able to do expanding on an already killer Act One, I’m very excited to see Part Two. Same time next year? 👀💚🩷

This was an elite film. The magic lives.

Yep, that was Peter Pan. (End of review)

Don’t get me wrong, this was definitely one of the better Disney live-action remakes I’ve seen, but I—think I liked it? It’s definitely not a must-see, but not bad. It's very self-serious, kind of reminds me of the Narnia movies from the mid-2000s. I think what bugged me is that visually the photo realism made for a drab and melancholy look to the whole thing, it's not quite as "fun" looking or feeling as I'd think a Peter Pan story should be. The desaturated art direction kind of reminded me of something like Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess when I would’ve rather seen Ocarina of Time.

It felt almost like Disney was trying to make this go of Peter Pan "not just a kids' movie" and so they cut down on the whimsy, but my biggest problem is this movie didn’t do too much to replace that whimsy with—which is basically what I think has happened with pretty much all of their live action remakes. The dramatic arc for Wendy at the heart of the story was pretty good across the boards and I had enough fun taking in this adventure. Most importantly, the pacing was good and the movie didn’t feel bloated for the sake of runtime. Every scene served something to the narrative.

Jude Law’s portrayal of Hook was great even if his character arc was middling and I though the girl they had playing Wendy was fantastic. I think the boy they had playing Peter could’ve been great if they let him have a bit more fun—he was played very matter-of-fact and I won’t fault the child actor, but I’m not sure if it was a shortcoming of the screenplay or direction.

All told, glad I watched it. It was one of the more competently made adaptations of Peter Pan I’ve seen but I’m not sure how much kids would enjoy it.