Great review Roy, of a quietly wonderful film. I didn't make me cry but I did cry out at Jojo's sudden desperate realization, a moment which has stayed with me for weeks after seeing the film. Taika Waititi ... genius, is perfectly accurate and his goofy Hitler lightens the film until getting near the end when he turns into the jarringly sinister manipulator.
I truly loved this film and all the performances in it, especially, as you say, the brilliant child actors and the dazzling turns of all of the adults. Rockwell and Johanssen especially are really starting to hit their straps.
Waititi’s great. He was the director who made the most recent Thor movie watchable (indeed, fun to watch).
And What We Do in the Shadows is fantastic. Really. (We’ve just rewatched it.) One of those films you and your friends will be quoting lines from to each other for the test of your lives.
Agreed, this guy is amazing. I am not a superhero aficionado but I enjoyed his Thor: Ragnarok so much that it made me go back and start watching some of the 10-15 Marvel movies I'd skipped. Turns out none of them are quite as fun or smart as his -- I mean Kenneth Branaugh did the first Thor movie, and it's just... what you expect. Guys in capes being taken seriously. Waititi made the only MCU movie that really understands in its bones that it is a comic book, not Hamlet For Our Time. (For the record, the other fun ones are Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Captain Marvel -- but Ragnarok is the best.)
When the cockroaches and Keith Richards are basking in the radioactive glow of New York, someone will be making a nonacetate film about a kid and an imaginary Trump.
Too bad the New Yorker couldn't have run your review instead of this nonsense: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/springtime-for-nazis-how-the-satire-of-jojo-rabbit-backfires (in which making fun of Nazis is a *bad* thing and has been done too often).
I loved this review. Very anxious to see this film myself.
Great review Roy, of a quietly wonderful film. I didn't make me cry but I did cry out at Jojo's sudden desperate realization, a moment which has stayed with me for weeks after seeing the film. Taika Waititi ... genius, is perfectly accurate and his goofy Hitler lightens the film until getting near the end when he turns into the jarringly sinister manipulator.
I truly loved this film and all the performances in it, especially, as you say, the brilliant child actors and the dazzling turns of all of the adults. Rockwell and Johanssen especially are really starting to hit their straps.
Five stars.
I felt a lot of the same things. It seems some people really warm to it, others not. Not sure what makes the difference. The anonymous Oscar voter (first one of the season!) whom Musto interviewed says Jewish Americans don't go for it, which I'm not sure I get -- the Elsa subplot is intensely philo-Semitic. Who knows. https://www.thedailybeast.com/an-anonymous-oscar-voter-reveals-1917-and-joker-will-win-big-diversity-problems-overblown
Oh, no, Roy... have you not seen What We Do in the Shadows?? Please put it on your list. You will not be disappointed.
Also the third Thor movie, probably one of the two or three best superhero movies ever made.
And "Hunt for the Wilderpeople", for my money the best movie of 2016.
Waititi’s great. He was the director who made the most recent Thor movie watchable (indeed, fun to watch).
And What We Do in the Shadows is fantastic. Really. (We’ve just rewatched it.) One of those films you and your friends will be quoting lines from to each other for the test of your lives.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople is also very good
Agreed, this guy is amazing. I am not a superhero aficionado but I enjoyed his Thor: Ragnarok so much that it made me go back and start watching some of the 10-15 Marvel movies I'd skipped. Turns out none of them are quite as fun or smart as his -- I mean Kenneth Branaugh did the first Thor movie, and it's just... what you expect. Guys in capes being taken seriously. Waititi made the only MCU movie that really understands in its bones that it is a comic book, not Hamlet For Our Time. (For the record, the other fun ones are Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Captain Marvel -- but Ragnarok is the best.)
I don’t usually go to films with Nazis, but when I do I think “Fucking Nazis, is there anything that can make the Holocaust funny?”
When the cockroaches and Keith Richards are basking in the radioactive glow of New York, someone will be making a nonacetate film about a kid and an imaginary Trump.