February releases were a roller-coaster, there were some solid movies, and there were a couple of movies that I thought might take the cake for worst movie of the year. The first three movies are all foreign language films, although the third movie is in a made-up language, but I was reading subtitles the whole time, so I would say that it still counts. Also it could be argued that the first two movies are not February releases, because they came out last year, but they did not get released into my theater until February, so I feel like that counts. Also, in February, it would have made sense to flood the theaters and streaming services with new rom-coms, but honestly there were not that many, Netflix put out one, Amazon put out one, but that is about it. So here are the 19 new movies I watched in February ranked best to worst this time, even though technically this is still a part of Dumpuary.
1. The Taste of Things: This was by far the best movie I have seen this month. It is a French film, and it is about cooking. Cooking seems so simple, food gets put on the stove and cooked, or it gets put in the oven and baked, but this takes it to a whole other level. The way they talked about food was in such an artful manner and in a way that I had never heard of before. This took place in France, probably in the late 1800s in a big house. The man who owned the house was the genius behind the food, and the woman who worked in the kitchen was basically the only person who was able to follow his instructions and make his vision come to life, but he was an excellent cook as well. Their love of food helped to fuel a romance between them, but she falls sick right as their relationship starts to flourish. The kitchen, the food, and the grounds that the house was on were all beautiful. It all had a high attention to detail, and I had no idea what French cuisine actually entailed, but now I wish I had a chief that could cook me up these intricate meals!
2. Perfect Days: A Japanese man goes around cleaning the public toilets in Japan, which I would like to take a moment to say that the amount of free public toilets Japan had was amazing. It is a shame that the U.S does not have anything close to the infrastructure that Japan has when it comes to public bathrooms. Any ways, this guy lives alone, he does his job, takes some pictures, reads old books, and listens to old music. It is a simple life, but he seems to care about each part of his life. The guy seems fine with his life, but the small wrenches that are thrown in cause big changes in how he feels. There is no through line of a plot, it is more like short stories in this guy’s life that add up over time. Whenever he speaks it is calculated. The first thirty minutes of the movie, he probably says less than five words. As the movie progresses, he talks more, and it becomes clear to see that he uses his words carefully and that he uses them with people who have earned his respect and love. He is a deep thinker, and he likes his routine. The movie is almost meditative, and it seems odd that it feels so normal to be ingrained in this guy’s life, but with the way social media is now, it does not even feel that voyeuristic to be a part of everything. It is mostly calming, and his presence is a comfort. There is one moment toward the end where he is about to go through his pictures that he had taken, something that he normally seems to enjoy, but then he stops and just lays down. It felt all too relatable. There are sometimes, when I will be doing something by myself that I normally find enjoyable, and then I stop and think what is the point, who is this for, and I just want to go lie down and do nothing. It was odd to see that shown so explicitly on the screen with no words just excellent acting from this dude. It was nominated for best international feature, and there were a surprising number of people in my small theater. Check it out! It is unique, but not for everyone. I went home and meditated after. It felt so nice.
3. Out of Darkness: I wrote a whole paper about this one already, so I will keep this short. This is a prehistoric horror that is filmed in an incredibly beautiful location, and they do an excellent job of creating the tension. The twist hurts the film instead of helping, and the theme seems to shed a negative connotation on the human race, but I appreciated what it did in an underrepresented genre. More ancient horror movies please!
4. Sometimes I Think About Dying: With a title like this, it is hard not to go and see it! Also it stars Daisy Ridley, Rey from the new Star Wars movies, who I love. She works a boring corporate job, and she struggles to find any joy or stimulation in her life, so sometimes, she will stop what she is doing and think about dying or being dead. Then a new guy shows up at her work, and they start to form a relationship, but she struggles to open up to him and leave her boring life. The movie is slow, and there is not a ton that happens, but the muted and soft colors fit the tone perfectly. There is barely any background music, and when it is there, it is typically quiet and reserved, but I feel like it did a good job of reaching its goals, and I was so content to just watch this slow story unfold. It was oddly calming given the title.
5. Stopmotion: A daughter is helping her aging mother finish her last stop motion picture. Her mom has developed arthritis, which made it too hard for her to arrange the objects in the film, and while making the film, the mother falls seriously ill. They did not have the best relationship, and the daughter has always wanted to make her own mark, and to get out of her mother’s shadow. The daughter meets a young girl at her apartment complex, and with the help of the girl, they make a beyond disturbing stop motion picture that slowly starts to creep into real life. The sound in this movie is haunting, and it legitimately creeped out in a way that scary movies have not in a wild. I was jumpy just leaving the theater, and when I turned the light off to go to bed, it was all I could think about, and even when I woke up in the middle of the night, it crept into my thoughts. There was more to the movie as well, there was a story about over working one self, the struggle for perfection or fame, and dealing with family trauma while also trying to sort out grief. A truly weird find, but it drew people to the theater, because I saw it on a Monday night, and there were close to 15 people there, which is a good amount for a Monday night movie.
6. The Monk and the Gun: As far as titles go, this one is pretty intriguing. It sounds like it could be a John Wick type movie, where someone wrongs a monk, and he goes out and gets his revenge, but I guess he would not be a monk if that were true. Instead, this is about democracy coming to Bhutan, but the amazing thing is that the people in the country did not want democracy to come. They enjoyed having their king, and they did not like what democracy was bringing. There were people sent out to the rural areas to teach them about democracy, and one of the aspects that they were teaching was debate and pride in a candidate, so they were confused, why they were literally being taught to not like each other and to argue. The way the film broke down and portrayed democracy was very interesting. It is supposed to be this uniting thing that results in people representing us, but instead it just leads to fighting and division. I do not know what a better alternative would be, but it did put into light an interesting perspective.
7. Scrambled: This was my first new movie of February! A woman in her mid-30s starts to feel the pressure of not being married and not having a child. She is not even sure she wants a child, but she wants to at least have the option. So she goes through the process of getting her eggs prepared for harvest, and it is a big emotional journey. This was something I knew very little about. I knew why people decided to do it, but I had no idea the amount of work that went into this, she basically had to give up all her vices and give herself shots in the stomach every day to help make sure her eggs would be good enough to be extracted and hopefully be good enough to use if she ever decided to do so. My biggest issue with this film is that she worked as a jewelry creator on Etsy, so not like high end jewelry, and she lived in California in a place where on her walks she could see the Hollywood sign. There is literally no way she was making enough money on Etsy to be able to afford the house that she lived in, no way! Also the only people in the theaters watching this were four other single guys by themselves, which I found funny considering the subject matter.
8. Einstein and the Bomb: A straight to Netflix movie, their response to Oppenheimer. They do something interesting with this movie in that it is half a documentary, half historical reenactment. I guess in that way, it makes it like a History Channel show, except the reenactments are much better than what the History Channel does. It presents many complex ideas, and it tries to do it quickly. They basically go through the rise of Nazi Germany to the death of Einstein, but they do it in 70 minutes, which is not nearly enough time to accomplish all they tried to do. Nolan did two hours just about the making of the bomb, and the movie still had an hour left. Did I want this to be three hours? No, but they were doing such a good job of explaining how Einstein thought and some of his discoveries that I could have enjoyed it for at least 30 more minutes. Worth a watch, but it is more of a taste than a full story.
9. Land of Bad: A terrible name for a movie. A military operation over in the Philippines goes wrong, and a Hemsworth brother must do whatever it takes to survive. There was not much depth to this action movie. The story was pretty straight forward, but it gets carried by the action. There are lots of explosions, and there are multiple gun fights. There really is not much else to say other than it is a fun time at the movies, and you do not have to think too much about anything.
10. Drive Away Dolls: A totally out there movie about two lesbians that take a road trip down to Florida, but there are people after them, because they unknowingly took the wrong car. In their car, they eventually find a briefcase, and a container with a head in it, but amazingly what is in the brief case is more shocking than finding a head in basket. This is by no means a great movie, but it is only 80 minutes, and it is a fun and wild time.
11. Players: This was Netflix’s straight to streaming rom-com. It centers on a group of friends, whose friendship seemed to revolve around getting each other to successfully hook up with someone else. They would run “plays” or create fake scenarios to try to help make the hook up happen, but slowly each person in the group starts to find their special someone, but they might be with them for the wrong reason, so tension forms in the friend group. The chemistry among these characters is what makes this a fun enjoyable movie. They all get along so well, and it makes it easy to believe that they care about each other. Basically, if a sitcom was mashed into a movie. A little cliché at the end and predictable as the plot develops, but that is what a romcom is, a formula.
12. Lisa Frankenstein: I was excited for this one. It was supposed to be a horror comedy. A girl goes to the graveyard as her happy place, and one day the grave gets struck by lightning right after she wishes to meet the person in the grave, and the teenage boy comes back to life. Lisa and Frankenstein’s relationship flourishes, but it results in many bodies having to be buried. To me it was not that funny, but it did a great job of creating a period piece. The music mixed with the visuals of the 80s was great. So I enjoyed living in the colorful world that they created, I just did not think it was nearly as funny as it was trying to be, but I liked the swing.
13. Upgraded: This was a straight to Amazon as a Valentines Day romcom movie. A young woman, who has dreams of becoming a well-known name in the art world pretends to be her boss as a joke on a flight, but slowly the small lie spirals out of control, and she ends up in a romance with a rich man, who thinks she is someone she is not. For a straight to streaming rom com, this was not that bad, and it was about art, so I feel like if you are a film maker making a movie about art, that you will probably know how to make shots look good in the filming process. My biggest issue with the movie is that she tried to make her grand gesture, when the guy was coaching his little league soccer team in the championship. Clearly that is not the time to bother him and try to make up. Rookie move.
14. Orion and the Dark: A Netflix animated original. The reviews on Letterboxd for this were relatively high, but it did not do much for me. It started out very grounded, and it reminded me of reading Diary of Wimpy Kid. The kid has a journal, and he uses it as a way to help eliminate his fears, and I liked the direction it was headed. It seemed very grounded in reality for an animated movie, and it was a fun way to address the issue, but then it takes a total switch and went super fantastical, and there are moments, where it looks good, but I was more disappointed that it did not go in the direction I wanted it to go, so take this as a very biased review.
15. Bob Marley: One Love: This was a slight biopic of Bob Marley’s life. I say slight because it really only covers the years where he decides to move out of Jamica, until he makes his return. Marley gets shot and the political turmoil is starting to boil, so he leaves Jamica, and he makes a new album, there is some relationship trouble and some trouble with one of his band managers, but that is about it. There is barely any real tension after watching him get shot. Then he comes back and dies. The music is of course good, but whereas Queen has some serious energy behind their concerts, the music scenes here did not create that same energy, and they felt like they ended so quickly. The movie was largely boring and inoffensive, especially considering the amount of weed he smoked and baby mommas that Marley had. The only thing I ever think of when I hear “Three Little Birds” is the scene in I Am Legend, where Will Smith is singing it to his son. Now that is a movie moment!
16. Madame Web: Honestly, this movie has gotten so much hate, and many of those things being said are valid, but still it was not THAT bad. It was not good, but it was not the worst thing I have ever seen. I was still able to watch it and have a good time. The biggest issues were the sound not matching up with when the villain was talking. I do not understand how a big studio like Sony, who came to the world as a TV and stereo company could make a movie with this poor consideration of the sound not matching to the video. My other big issue is that this movie is sold as a superhero girl team up, but other than in the dream of the bad guy, there is no actual time, when the girls are dressed up and fighting crime, it is mostly them running away. Also they totally lacked any good chemistry. The Marvels was not a great movie, but they were still able to earn three stars, because the chemistry between the three leading characters was so great, that I could not help but have fun. This movie did succeed in having some tense moments, and for some reason I had a good enough time, but sadly I do not think we will ever see this trio in spider girl outfits fighting crime.
17. Skeletons in the Closet: This was a Shudder original, and to be honest I watched most of this on my phone while making lunches for the week and doing other things, but I heard it was bad, and it held up to it. It did have some serviceable moments. The monsters that they had were scary, which is rare to come by now. Typically, monsters are just CGI blobs that are so fake and out of the realm of reality that it is more comical than scary, but they went practical effects for these evil beings, and I appreciated that. They had a great looking evil scarecrow. Other than that, the weird story of a dad getting in trouble with the mob for borrowing too much money to help his daughter get treatment for her disease was really poorly done.
18. Argylle: This movie was two hours and twenty minutes long, but it felt more like it was four hours and forty minutes long. The plot was convoluted and meandering. The CGI was atrocious, and it felt like there were only a couple of times when they fully delved into the ridiculousness of the picture that they were creating. In those moments, there was a gun fight, but there were also colorful smoke bombs going off, so it created an action sequence that was like nothing I had ever seen before and was both musical and destructive, and there was the ice-skating scene, which looked very fake, but it was so ridiculous that it was fun to watch. The rest of the movie was filled with twist after twist, and some were better than others, but at the end of the day with a star-studded cast, the best part was the cat, but even the cat could not stand to be associated with the movie fully, so for a vast majority of the movie, the cat was unnecessarily CGIed. Like Madame Web, they were trying to expand this out into their own multi-movie series, but it seems like that is going to fail, unless it gets a cult following on streaming.
19. History of Evil: I watched this last Friday, and I was excited, it was a new release onto Shudder, and honestly, I cannot really tell you what happened. They are in a weird future U.S, and the mom of this family is like a revolutionary leader trying to stay safe and fly under the radar, but the safe house they decide to live in has racist ghosts? A wife locked in a bedroom with a slot in the door for food, who might have been a ghost? On top of that, they find a KKK hood in an old box, and like ten minutes later, the little kid has the hood on and tries to scare his parents… So that was bad.
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