Broken Embraces is incredibly melodramatic in a way that Almodovar usually isn't, at least not so explicitly. Although, thinking back on it, I don't remember very much about Almodovar's other movies. I saw them a long time ago and remember liking Talk to Her, All About My Mother, Bad Education, and Volver, but again, I only have vague recollections of them and don't have very many specific comments about them. Maybe that means I should revisit them but maybe it means none of them left a very strong impression on me.
Steve McQueen is somebody who I appreciate more on paper than in practice. His direction is always cold and austere and he specializes in protracted portrayals of misery/suffering but in an detached way that makes it so that I end up not actually caring. He is a very good director technically but has not done anything that completely works for me.
I've seen some things lately.
Don't Think Twice: Reinforces my belief that improv is a weird cult. I really like Gillian Jacobs and think she should be in everything.
Hell or High Water: Jeff Bridges is a national treasure. This isn't the first time he's played a mumbly, fart voiced sheriff before, but who cares because he's pretty great in the role. The movie itself doesn't actually contain much action, building relationships between characters by showing them shooting the shit. Wherever they are in Texas also seems kind of horrible and shows what happens when literally everybody has a gun. It also has a Big Short-esque commentary on banks, which I wasn't quite expecting. Worth watching. I think it's good but not as good as the universal acclaim it has gotten.
Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World: I will watch anything by Werner Herzog and I was really excited when he was doing a documentary on the internet and technology. However, it is really diffuse and is broken up into small vignettes that don't really do their subject matter much justice, which makes me feel like this should have been like a TV miniseries rather than trying to cram everything into one doc. It covers some interesting topics, like robot soccer, self driving cars, variations of sunspots resulting into disasters on earth, Mars colonies, and artificial intelligence/consciousness, as well as the dark side of things like internet addiction/harassing assholes online, but it doesn't have time to go into any of these topics in very much depth. As such, it serves as a bit of a survey with shallow coverage of interesting subjects.
I thought he would spend more time with how shitty people can be to each other on the internet. That segment involves a family who have lost a child in a bad accident and the pictures of the kid's gruesome death were posted online, with some people harassing them. It's probably a fine story to illustrate things, but it's framed really strangely, taking place in their house before a wake or something, so the family is dressed in all black but there is a spread with croissants and fruit around the house while Herzog films the sad family silently staring into the distance for long shots with a nice food spread on the table. It is really strange and makes me wonder whether this was the only way that he could get them to approve getting footage of them.
Herzog specializes in humanity's relationship with nature and the sort of inexorable struggle we have with forces beyond our power, but he describes himself as a luddite and doesn't have the same insights when it comes to our relationship with technology. He has thinly veiled contempt for some of these things but the movie doesn't really have a clear thesis. Again, I think if he had more time with these subjects and it was more of a miniseries, this could be really good. As is, it's worth watching but still very uneven.
