Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015)

5/10
Thinking that 88:88 had put me in the right mindset, I decided to watch Terrence Malick's new one. His last one, To the Wonder, was godawful trash that made me want to set my head on fire. Knight of Cups is not as hateable, but it's not very good either. For the first 30 minutes or so, it's actually kind of fun seeing Malick in a metropolitan setting like Los Angeles. The fun wears off, however, and then you have 90 more minutes with a mopey, mostly mute main character (Christian Bale filling the shoes here) and a succession of women who are famous (Cate Blanchett, Freida Pinto, Natalie Portman) but who really could have been anyone being that all they have to do is walk around and be lithe. I found myself thinking, around the 78th minute, that just once I'd like to see a fat person in a Malick movie, walking around barefoot in a field or running their fingers along a weathered barn or whatever one does in one of his movies.
Like I said, after about a half hour a certain numbness sets in when you realize this is all the film is going to be and nothing more, but there's a level of melancholy too because I realized that his two most recent movies really just feel like Malick doing cheap imitations of his own previous, better films (I know Tree of Life is divisive but I'm in the "yay" camp). It's really just depressing. Yeah, there are some great shots that maybe no one else in the world would do (the dogs chasing tennis balls underwater was a particular breath-snatcher) but lately it's hasn't been worth sitting through the rest of the junk for those few moments of affirmation. Malick is rapidly eroding the goodwill he's built up over so many years, and I'm not sure how many of these navel-gazing efforts we can collectively tolerate before we say enough is enough.
I did like the score though.

88:88 (Isiah Medina, 2015)

7/10
Canadian filmmaker Isiah Medina's first feature 88:88 premiered at TIFF last year to some acclaim. It is much closer to experimental video art than anything else. Images flicker by in seconds, jump-cutting and bleeding into each other. The audio, a collection of whispered voiceovers, freestyle rapping, one-sided phone conversations, sound and music almost never matches what's seen onscreen. An obvious point of reference is latter-day Godard. Another is latter-day Malick, mostly due to the voiceovers. Robert Ashley may also be a distant antecedent.
The title refers to what's shown on electronic clocks after one's power has been cut and then restored. It would be wrong to say 88:88 is "about" being poor, but it's certainly a theme. I saw a tweet once that said something like "I'm first world poor - I use my iPhone or my laptop to check my online banking to see how broke I am". That's sort of a main idea here, where iPhones and weed take priority over heating bills.
Medina is a young guy and there is a "student film" vibe here but I don't mean that in a wholly negative sense. It's simply a film about many themes that a lot of college or university level students would spend a lot of time musing about - money, philosophy, skateboarding, girlfriends, parents, what to do with one's life. Some may scoff at a movie dealing with such first world problems (and the pretentious presentation to go along with it), but it's undoubtedly a film about themes that are real to Medina and his friends and many others his age. Visually it's fun to watch, there are some really great shots, and at 65 minutes it doesn't overstay its welcome.

Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015)

6/10
How did they take such an explosive subject matter and make such a blah movie out of it? The problem with Spotlight is that it's a movie on rails, never once deviating from the track that takes it from start to finish. There's nothing in here that you don't expect to happen, in fact, even less happens than what you might expect. In the course of uncovering the central scandal, the Spotlight team runs into almost no obstacles, no resistance, and anything that does arise as a potential obstacle to overcome (e.g. Mark Ruffalo's character getting to the courthouse in time) feels like a screen-written artifice. More cynically you could call this movie "3 Men and 1 Woman Doing Their Jobs" because that's exactly what it felt like watching.
One interesting angle (whether or not certain members of Spotlight themselves were implicit in the cover-up) is brought up and brushed aside almost immediately. It leaves enough of an impression but I wish it was probed with a bit more detail, to give even more of a sense of a community truly and collectively looking the other way.
Seen through the lens of other, similar movies nominated for Academy Awards, Spotlight is closer to me to a thing like The Imitation Game from last year. It gets up on the screen, tells its story, all the actors do their jobs well, and then it leaves without making any significant impact or stirring up any real emotion. It was fine, but not much more for me.