Amsterdam

AMC’s movie pass has really allowed me to see every movie I want to see, kinda want to see, and looks moderately interesting. So in addition to Smile we also went to see Amsterdam. Now I will go see anything that Margot Robbie is in, she is a phenomenal actress and anything she is in is good. Normally with an A list cast you get mediocre movies so the cast of Amsterdam didn’t do any favors in inspiring the general public to see the movie. We as movie going fans also need to stop using rotten tomatoes as a metric for whether or not a film is good. Because, as a rule, the general public is a garbage metric for the quality of anything. Media literacy is dead as is objective analysis. So audience scores really mean nothing. That said, the reality of this movie is that it was good. Nothing spectacular but it was good.

The relationships built up in this movie were set up incredibly. Our three main characters are sweet and there is so much heart in how they interact with each other. Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington had amazing chemistry and the writing of their friendship was awesome. They truly captured the feeling of best friends, there was balance in their dynamic as well. Harold and Valerie were in love without excluding Burt and making him a third wheel.

The cinematography in this movie was fantastic. The artsy shots made it feel like more than a fictionalized version of history and allowed the audience to be better swept up in the story.

For the most part the pacing of the film was great. The story got started quickly, all of the set up was necessary and added greater impact to the overall theme of the film. Acts 1 & 2 move along at a great clip, although there were at least 30 minutes of filler that could have been cut but for the most part they took their time in revealing as much as they needed to in order to get us to the climax of the movie. Act 3 is kind of where we fell apart. The third act was very choppy, and far too expositional.

Not sure I’ve ever written about it before but my biggest film pet peeve is when the theme is articulated through dialogue. It points out the insecurities of the screenwriter (you clearly think you didn’t do your job very well if you need to talk about your theme) and simultaneously calls your audience stupid (you clearly don’t think we as the audience could have possibly understood a movie…the simplest of mediums to obtain for ourselves what your theme was). Now the ending of this wasn’t quite as bad as JD fully articulating the theme at the end of Heathers but it was filled with unnecessary exposition that really took away from the impact of the ending of the film. All we really needed was to see Valerie and Harold run off together and Burt and Irma yet there was a whole lot of talking. They also could have wrapped up the political conflict a lot cleaner as well, we really didn’t need to see Valerie’s internal dialogue. That scene felt quite out of place.

Overall it did feel like a good blend between historical and fiction if that makes sense. It was grounded and pulled from reality without pretending it was a documentary. It drew attention to the time period the story existed in; pointing out discrimination and racism. Particularly through the character of Milton, in a story like this it's nice to have an overly self aware character. This movie earned a 7/10.