Movies I saw in May: In The Grey, Wrath of Man, The Apartment

DVD cover of “The Apartment.”

The movies I saw in May continued a distressing trend: The ones I catch in the theater are now often the ones I like the least. By a lot.

In April the dud was “Normal,” and in May the stinker was “In the Grey,” a confusingly bad offering by Guy Ritchie, who I know can do much better.

In The Grey (In the theater). Grade: D-

For all the talking this movie did explaining the small amount of action that eventually did take place, I really shouldn’t have been confused about the point of it all, but I was:

Me: So, the mission everyone was preparing for that we barely saw any of was essentially just dropping a woman into danger so you could pluck her out again?

ITG: Yes.

Me: But why does the beautiful lawyer have to meet in person with these super rich bad guys she represents — can’t they just Zoom?

ITG: No, then we wouldn’t need to rescue her.

Me: And why do I care if you rescue her? Because she’s gorgeous?

ITG: No, she also wears gorgeous outfits. Look, she’s in a red one now!

But even more frustrating than the boring and pointless meal this movie offered was the satisfying sip of brandy we got at the very end that should have been the main course: Jake Gyllenhaal and his work husband, played by Henry Cavill, operating as a very-skilled tag team of kidnappers/extraction experts.

Much more of those two, even just arguing about what music to play as they drove to their next gig, would not only have been fun, it would have made me care what happened to all those super-skilled people playing with super-expensive weapons. Instead, I found the whole thing kind of a waste of time, both theirs and mine.

Unless, of course, this was all a set-up for a sequel starring Gyllenhaal and Cavill as the “Ambiguously Gay Assassins?” Please, Mr. Ritchie, make it so! Just maybe hire Robert Smigel to write their dialogue.

Wrath of Man (YouTubeTV) Grade: C.

To remind ourselves that Guy Ritchie could make a decent movie, my husband and I decided to watch an earlier offering called “Wrath of Man.”

But while this movie was definitely better than both “In The Grey” and Jason 

Statham’s more recent “A Working Man,” it was really just a much less compelling version of “Den of Thieves,” which unfortunately keeps hopping off Netflix. So next time it appears, watch that instead.

 

The Apartment (On DVD from the library). Grade: B-.

I rented this movie thinking I was in for a bit of light, old-fashioned, romantic comedy. And while it did give me a couple of laughs, I found it mostly an unsettling mix of Mad Men and American Psycho, somehow feeling even more sexist than the television show, and almost as depraved as the horror movie. 

And while I will grudgingly admit that the romance was ultimately satisfying and certainly more realistic than how most movie couples fall in love, it was jarring to watch the sad turn it takes, though we are warned of what’s to come with the movie’s best line: Shirley MacLaine’s Fran declaring that she uses a compact with a broken mirror because it “makes me look the way I feel.”

Still, all the darkness is brightened a bit by a perfectly marvelous scene where Jack Lemmon prepares spaghetti with a tennis racket, and by some hilarious work by Hope Holiday, whose frustrated wife cries my new favorite phrase: “Some sexpot you are!”

Interesting fact: Previous audiences gave this movie much better grades than I did, because in 1960 it took home Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay, making Billy Wilder the first person to win all three of those Academy Awards. 

Finally, as for movie reviews from my grandmother this month, she was so often traveling in May to her favorite city of Paris that I couldn’t find many to offer, but on May 31 in 1997, she went to see “The Fifth Element,” describing it simply as “Crazy SiFi. Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman. Set in 2314.”

Movies I saw in April: Apex, Normal, Over Your Dead Body.