Moviepalooza 2025

 So after last year's Thanksgiving weekend where we saw three movies in the theater (Wicked, Bonhoffer, and Conclave), we sort of adopted this as a new family tradition. Except that this year, the number of local screens dedicated to Wicked: For Good and Zootopia 2 made it difficult to identify three films that we wanted to see. I suggested the new Knives Out movie, to little interest (the wife and I haven't seen the second one, and I don't think the kids have seen either of them), and we decided that we could stream Hamnet as easy as seeing it in the theater. 

Thus, the first two entries in Moviepalooza were watched at home in a Friday double bill. We started with a rewatch of Conclave, which the kids still watch and mention regularly. They quoted along with the movie like it was Rocky Horror or something. My mother in law was the only one of us who hadn't seen it before, and she didn't care for it as much as the rest of us (partially because all the quoting by the boys made it hard for her to actually hear the dialogue).

We followed this up with one of the kids' newest movie faves, The Banshees of Inisherin. I'm not sure why they like it so much, or even how they saw it before I did.  I'm sure there's some algorithm to blame somewhere.  I can't say I like the film as much as the kids do, I had a kind of "whole is less than the sum of its parts" reaction to it.  I appreciated individual performances, the setting, and the score, but overall am not that interested in seeing it again.

We finally returned to the theater to see Rental Family, where Brendan Fraser plays an American actor struggling to find consistent work while living in Japan.  He winds up landing a gig with a company that will rent you a family member (or other person) for a particular occasion. 

The bulk of the movie follows Fraser's character on two jobs for the company. In one, he plays the long-departed father of a girl, whose mother hires Fraser to play the dad in order to improve the girl's chance of getting into a particular school. On the other job he is hired by the daughter of a retired actor to play a journalist who wants to interview the actor about his career. The actor is worried about being forgotten, which is somewhat ironic as he is also suffering from memory loss.

The stories are kept relatively light, even with the tension of Fraser's character becoming too personally attached to the girl and the old man. That tension comes to a head when Fraser takes the old man back to his home town, and the man's daughter thinks Fraser's character has kidnapped her father. This intersects with subplots involving Rental Family's owner and a female employee, both of whom are paying an emotional (and sometimes physical) toll from their work.

The end of the movie was surprisingly moving, underscoring that one can develop real human connection from a non-personal beginning. Kind of a "fake it 'til you make it" approach. 

It's worth seeing if you have a chance. I'm still getting used to the idea of Brendan Fraser, serious actor, though in this role he gets to bring out his comedic side more than in, say, The Whale. Kudos as well to the actors playing the girl (Shannon Gorman) and the old actor (Akira Emoto).

Only four trailers before the movie (there may have been more, they were running when we got to the theater). One was for Reminders of Him, which I still have no interest in seeing. The other three:

The Choral, which sees Ralph Fiennes as a choir master hired to keep the local choir going during World War I. 

The Testament of Ann Lee, the story of the founder of the Shakers religious sect, played by Amanda Seyfried. It's listed in Wikipedia as a "historical musical drama film," which isn't a genre I'd thought of too much outside of Hamilton. It's the follow-up to The Brutalist for Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold (with Fastvold directing this time around). 

Ella McCay, James L. Brooks' return to feature film after 15 years away, and he apparently didn't use this time to focus his concept for this movie. It appears to be a family-political-romantic dramedy, at which point I don't know why we didn't just throw in some ghosts and a musical number to cover all the bases. It has Jamie Lee Curtis and Albert Brooks in it, so it may not be a total crapfest.