Recommendations: Week of January 13, 2025
It's summer blockbuster season
Ok, it’s summer blockbuster season in my house specifically. I’ve been catching up on the many movies I missed last year in my pursuit of reading, television, and basketball perfection, and for some reason, I’ve been particularly drawn to big blockbusters recently. In case you’d also like to draw the curtains, pop some corn, and pretend it’s July, here are my favorite summer blockbusters from last year-ish (I promise I liked these even though I give them some grief. It’s done lovingly).
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: This technically came out in 2023, but I won’t tell if you won’t. This is a very long movie. It is two hours and forty minutes long. For two of those hours, it is a rip-roaring very fun adventure in which Harrison Ford and his indefatigable stunt double perform death-defying feats with much aplomb. I love aplomb; there are not enough things being done with aplomb these days so I am always here to celebrate some when I run across it. It is very fun to see Indy be Indy again and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s humor mostly works in the companion role. But this movie falls into a familiar trap around the two-hour mark in that it does not end. Instead, we have to endure a sequence in which our heroes travel back in time, meet a Roman philosopher, and fuck up the Battle of Syracuse. This is nonsense beyond the usual nonsense one finds charming about an Indiana Jones film once a few decades have passed. There needs to be someone in Hollywood tasked with cutting extraneous forty minutes from movies. There should also be someone who is tasked with nixing time travel scenes. I am only half kidding when I suggest you just fast-forward through the last forty minutes; you will enjoy the movie more.
Twisters: This movie is exactly two hours long, so you know I loved it. I am not usually a disaster movie person, but this one had been so hyped with the Glenn Powell of it all that I had to see what all the fuss was about. The fuss about Powell is right, he is great in Hit Man, and his cowboy/tornado wrangler persona is played with such winking joy that you can’t help but love him. He is magnetic; he is a star. He is unfortunately also a Ken doll in this movie in the sense that no one in this film is written as a person who has ever had or has ever heard of the concept of sex. It is the movie’s one true flaw (although tornadoes are so anthropomorphized in this movie that if you replaced every instance in the script of the word “twister” with “terrorist” it would still read perfectly fine, as in “the terrorists destroyed that small town of everyday Americans” or “the terrorists are getting worse and worse every year, coming after our heartland” or “the terrorists took my boyfriend from me”). There was much ado about the leads not kissing in this movie, but why would they? They are innocent as the daffodils, chaste as the wind itself. Hopefully, in the sequel, they’ll hire someone horny to consult.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: What a MOVIE this is. It feels like a MOVIE. It stars every beefcake you’ve ever heard of and is about buff spies in WWII smoking cigars on sailboats and killing Nazis, creatively. There is one woman with lines. From that description, you can guess that it is a movie by Guy Ritchie, who loves the characters in this movie so much he gives little bios for who they’re based on and what happened to them in the remaining years of the war. He also loves them so much he neglects to mention they all died terribly within five years of the action of the film. What can I say? British spies are immortal.