& April 22, 2015 &
With summer coming ever earlier — are we really only two weeks away from Avengers: Age of Ultron? — the trailer machine is in overdrive of late. Among them…
Zack Snyder pours on the grimdark (and, as per
and ) lifts liberally from the visual iconography of The Dark Knight Returns) in the .
Eh…I’ll definitely see it, but this seems to have the same tonal problems as . Not really one for the brooding demigod Superman — he should be more like how Chris Evans is playing Captain America over at Marvel — the last boy scout. And speaking of tonal problems…
FF is grimdark now too? To keep the rights from reverting, Josh Trank glooms up Marvel’s first family for Fox in the , with Miles Teller (Mr. Fantastic), Kate Mara (Invisible Woman), Michael B. Jordan (Human Torch), Jamie Bell (Thing), Toby Kebbell (Dr. Doom, ), and Reg E. Cathey (Basil Exposition.)
I like the casting here, but I’d like this a lot more if FF were being folded back into the Marvel universe ( — Andrew Garfield, we hardly knew ye.) As it is, this still looks like a money grab to me, albeit one with quality production values. And speaking of money grabs…
I can’t even with this
or whatever it is. Depending on what you think of , this is either the second
they’ve tried to wring more bling from James Cameron’s baby (and, Arnold, if you want to make bank reliving past glories, .)
All that being said, I wish actors like Emilia Clarke, Jason Clarke, Matt Smith, and J.K. Simmons all the best — Jai Courtney’s alright too, I suppose, but it sure seems like he came off the same bland-actor production line as Sam Worthington — so I was hoping this wouldn’t be a disaster. But the fact that this trailer seems to give away every single beat of the film (including, I presume, the main twist) while still feeling like a re-tread of T2, does not bode well. If you want to save yourself two hours/12 bucks, go ahead and click above.
Meanwhile, across the pond, Agent 007 is recovering from , and carrying his sorrows around with him again, in , with Daniel Craig, Monica Bellucci, Lea Seydoux, Christoph Waltz, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Ben Whishaw, Dave Bautista, Andrew Scott, and Rory Kinnear.
Waltz was born to play a Bond villain, and Bellucci an (age-appropriate for once!) Bond beauty, so this could be good fun if Mendes has the sense to let it breathe. We don’t need invisible cars and whatnot, but four films into the Craig era, they could stand to be a little less dour.
S.P.E.C.T.R.E, S.C.H.M.E.C.T.R.E…what about T.H.R.U.S.H? In a world where every past property from
gets a reboot —
— it’s Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin’s time in the sun in the , with Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer, Alicia Vikander, Elizabeth Debicki, Jared Harris, and Hugh Grant.
I was more intrigued by this when , but Guy Ritchie
might be amusing.
But can we say the same for Peyton Reed ? Paul Rudd suits up for Michael Douglas as the titular Avenger , also with Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Michael Pena, Judy Greer, Patrick Wilson, Bobby Cannavale, and Wood Harris. This one might be a tough sell for Marvel, but fingers crossed they can work some Guardians magic for this. (And is Evangeline Lilly playing Wasp? Because that’s good casting, and she’s
Also on the reboot tip, , and just like , Chris Pratt is now colluding with the former Big Bads, the velociraptors, to take down an even greater menace. Bryce Dallas Howard and two kids (Ty Simpkins, Nick Robinson) are also in the mix, as are a collection of fine actors that will no doubt be treated like hors d’oeuvres: B.D. Wong, Vincent D’Onofrio, Omar Sy, Irrfan Khan, Jake Johnson, David Oyelowo, and Brian Tee.
Jurassic Park nostalgia somehow missed me — I was probably too old for the original film, which I found so-so — so I’ll likely be OnDemand’ing this at some point. But, hey, good to have these opportunities for Chris Pratt to work his scoundrel edge . It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.
Want another top-secret, sinister spy organization at your multiplex? Ok, how about the Syndicate? Tom Cruise and various IMF agents of films past (Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Jeremy Renner) team up with Rebecca Ferguson to take down more Illuminati types in , also with Alec Baldwin and Sean Harris.
I saw the trailer for this a few weeks ago during Better Call Saul and had no clue it was already in the can, much less coming out this summer. In any event,
revitalized this franchise, so will lightning strike again here? The return of those goofy “perfect masks” from the De Palma and Woo outings don’t inspire confidence.
Finally, and speaking of Brad Bird, he’s left IMF to , Britt Robertson, Hugh Laurie, Judy Greer, Tim McGraw, Raffey Cassidy, Chris Bauer, Kathryn Hahn, and Keegan Michael-Key. Given Bird’s mostly stellar track record in the past, I’ll probably catch this at some point, tho’ hopefully it sidesteps the weird Ayn Randisms of
& April 22, 2015 &
And one that deserves its own post: Han and Chewie find themselves back on the Falcon in the .
I’m not as
— partly because of prequel-burn (and, let’s remember, we all lost our minds about
only now, at the end, do we understand), partly because . But let’s hope this turns out as well as this clip suggests (and that ‘s John Boyega gets more to do than look out-of-sorts.)
& February 27, 2015 &
So, yeah, this is a little late — I believe the
— but I have gotten in quite a bit of catch-up over the past two months. (In fact, I watched two of my top 25 this past week, including the aforementioned Whiplash — Thanks OnDemand!)
The only Best Picture contenders I missed in the end were American Sniper — yeah, no thanks — and The Imitation Game, which looks frightfully Oscar-baity to me, and , so oh well. Otherwise, and now that those Oscars have come and gone, time to fish or cut bait. So here’s last year’s Top 25 at last!
Suffice to say, 2014 was a pretty lean year in cinema — as weak as any I can remember (and even then the Academy made a hash of it) — so here’s hoping for a higher average quality of prospects over the next ten months.
Top 25 Films of 2014[//////////////]
1. Boyhood: YMMV, of course. But I thought Richard Linklater’s ambitious chronicle of an average Texas upbringing was the one real standout movie experience of 2014, and far and away the best film of the year.
While we’d seen glimmers of this sort of storytelling in the 7-Up documentaries, Linklater’s own Before series, and even the Harry Potter movies (where we watched all the Hogwarts kids grow up over the years), this remarkable coming-of-age tale felt like something entirely new. The degree of difficulty here is extraordinary, and yet Linklater and his dedicated adults — Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, whose onscreen aging makes the film that much more resonant — took what could’ve just been a gimmicky stunt or shapeless experiment-gone-wrong and imbued it with subtlety, nuance, and introspective intelligence.
In a sense, Linklater crafted with Boyhood the experience that Terence Malick clearly sweat bullets to approximate in
— how it’s the little things, the languid afternoons or random car trips, that stick with you as you grow up and/or grow old. But, unlike Malick’s more labored undertaking, Linklater makes the storytelling here seem effortless. Which of course, it wasn’t — this took 12 years! The magic of Boyhood is that that passage of time is woven into the fabric of the film itself. You sense it, slipping past you and the characters both, as you watch.
True, Oscar rarely gets it right —
in that regard. Still, as , snubbing Boyhood was an egregious mistake, and one that will speak poorly of the Academy’s judgment for many moons to come.
2. Only Lovers Left Alive: “There’s water here. And when the cities in the South are burning, this place will bloom.” Go long on Detroit, y’all: While the drop-off from Boyhood to the rest of the pack is a steep one, Jim Jarmusch’s wry-sexy-cool vampire saga Only Lovers Left Alive rests solid at #2. I’ve never been all that much of a Jarmusch fan — long-time readers may remember me wondering what the fuss was about over . (And, at this late, post-Twilight date, who isn’t a little sick of cooler-than-thou, elitist vampires?) Still, Jarmusch et al nailed it here.
If Boyhood reflects how quickly the inexorable arrow of time speeds us along from , Only Lovers and its bevy of bored blood drinkers suggest that timelessness can be kind of a drag after awhile also. Still, watching our heroes and heroines kick around the ruins of Detroit and Tangier is great fun and, with all due respect to
these days, it’s hard to imagine a better film made of
than what we have here. (Mia Wasikowska’s character in particular is the spitting image of Death.)
Also, while I liked her as , I’ve generally found Tilda Swinton underwhelming in the past — See, for example, what I wrote about
back in the day. Here, she’s absolutely captivating. (As for Tom Hiddleston, he’s been doing the bored immortal schtick , so this isn’t too far afield for him.)
3. Edge of Tomorrow: I haven’t read the source material (), but the concept of Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow —
— seems pretty simple: It’s “Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers.” The beauty of Edge — easily the most fun and fully-realized thrill-ride of the summer — is that it milks this one basic idea for all it’s worth. The result is arguably the best video game movie we’ve yet seen, since Cruise’s character is
until he gets to the alien end-boss.
Speaking of which, Tom Cruise
in real life, but he
excellent decisions on the action and sci-fi film front, and here’s he backed up by a very capable Emily Blunt — who hilariously promised she’d
back in 2005 — and a number of wily, likable genre veterans: Brendan Gleeson, Noah Taylor, Bill Paxton. In a mostly forgettable summer, this is a .
4. Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Is this ranked too high? Well, maybe, but The Winter Soldier was one of the most enjoyable experiences I had at the movies in 2014. Cap’s second outing is both a promising debut by the Russo Brothers, who are now apparently
after Joss Whedon, and a significant improvement over .
Perhaps the best part of The Winter Soldier — at a time when even those of us who wanted more comic movies back in the day are perhaps feeling a little buyers’ remorse — is the Alan Pakula, seventies-conspiracy-theory tone of its first two acts — heck, even Robert Redford is involved. The Winter Soldier demonstrates that Marvel is savvy enough to realize that not all their films have to feel the same (something we’ll hopefully see more of in their .)
As I said , I’m not a big fan of the floating-helicarriers-again third act or the absurd death count in this film. Still, in this age of NSA overreach, CIA torture, and general 9/11 hysteria, it sure is nice to see Cap stand up for the real red, white, and blue.
5. Selma: Ava DuVernay’s powerful Selma — the best of the Oscar contenders besides Boyhood — applies the “House of Horrors” in-your-face approach of .
All that being said, I found it hard to take my history hat off during the movie, and on that end I felt like Selma had some issues. Much has been made of the treatment of LBJ — here are the briefs
— and, while many films do worse violence to history, I still left the theater feeling like LBJ got screwed here. (His calling in a chit with J. Edgar was particularly galling.)
That aside, a bigger problem is that MLK himself seems off. As everyone knows, for copyright reasons, Selma
— which, by the way, is totally bizarre. Nonetheless, the words they came up with instead were tonally jarring — less memorable, too script-y, often (as at Jimmie Lee Jackson’s funeral) too on-the-nose. To me, they just didn’t sound like Dr. King, and didn’t capture either his poetic genius or his public persona.
However conflicted and exhausted he was in private (and this the film does well), his public voice — at least in 1965 — was more eloquent and more unshakeable in the conviction that freedom, justice, and the Beloved Community were inexorably going to win out. But, in a perfect world, the scriptwriter shouldn’t have had to reinvent the wheel — if you’re going to make a film about MLK, let the man speak his own words.
6. The Lego Movie: ? Well, for the two-odd hours The Lego Movie is on, it actually kinda is. What could’ve been a cheap-n-cheesy cash grab turned out to be a surprisingly fun trip to a witty meta-universe where the couches are double-decker, Lando hangs with Gandalf and Dumbledore, and . (“Darkness! No Parents! Super-Rich…kinda makes it better!”) And sure, the ending was a bit cloying — I’m on Team Kraggle, I guess — but I definitely didn’t expect that final reel going in.
7. Blue Ruin: I enjoy the cinema experience more than almost anyone I know, but tickets now on the north end of $12-a-pop means decisions have to be made on what to see with a crowd. So, for better or for worse, 2014 was the year that I embraced OnDemand for movie-watching.
One definite upside: the chance to catch movies like Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin, a Coen-esque indie thriller about what happens when an average, loser-ish guy (Macon Blair) decides to seek revenge on the men who killed his parents, just like they do in the pictures. Ruin loses some steam as it goes along, but few movies this year so vividly conveyed that sickly, lurching “then THIS happened” feeling of watching a simple plan unravel.
8. Force Majeure: Man, Oscar had a bad year. Just as The Lego Movie was AWOL from the Best Animation category, this darkly funny Scandinavian import about a pater familias who fails in his prime directive during a family ski vacation was nowhere to be seen on the Foreign Film list. (This .) Force Majeure is likely not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s kinda hilarious if you vibe into it.
9.Whiplash: As Larry Mullen, Jr. , “I don’t think the lyrics are worth a shit to be honest, if you ask me. I think it’s all about drums!!” I actually caught this two nights ago, and to be honest, I call shenanigans on the Tiger Mom school of artistry that’s the film’s central conceit here. (As far as I know my sis never got ritualistically abused by a dance mentor, and she .)
Nor did the stakes seem all that high to me — I guess, if I’m honest with myself, I just don’t care all that much about the world of jazz drummers. All that being said, this is a sleek, lean, well-made and very watchable audience picture with a fun performance at its core — the inimitable J.K. Simmons as the Hannibal Lecter of bandleaders. And it’s always great to see a long-time character actor get his due.
9. The Babadook: Stephen King once wrote — I think it was in Danse Macabre — that the secret to good horror is tapping into a real-life fear or anxiety. If so, I expect The Babadook would be much higher (or lower) on my list if I were a parent. For beyond all the freaky, stop-motion supernatural antics going on in this eerie Australian horror story, the real question haunting The Babadook is: “Wouldn’t your life be soooo much better if you just got rid of this %^&@%@ kid?” Well….wouldn’t it? If it’s in a word, or if it’s in a book, you can’t get rid of the Babadook…
11. CitizenFour: For all their other mistakes this year, big ups to the Academy (and HBO) for giving Laura Pointras’ CitizenFour a publicity boost. (And how weird was it to see Glenn Greenwald on the Oscar stage? Worlds collide!) I’ve , and nothing since then has convinced me I was wrong about him. (Sorry, but , , , and
just aren’t getting the job done.)
I do wish CitizenFour had spent more time
(it does a good job on metadata, for example) and less of him, say, futzing with his hair. Still, for humanizing Snowden and getting the other side of the story out there, this is an important and worthwhile film.
12. Locke: “Do it for the piece of sky we are stealing with our building…most of all, you do it for the fu**ing con-CRETE!” I’ll say this for Tom Hardy: Whether it’s , Bronson, Peaky Blinders (also by Locke‘s Steven Knight), or this film, half the fun of watching the man at work is doing impressions of him days and weeks after the fact. (Maybe it’s time to watch Star Trek: Nemesis again…lol, no, just kidding.)
All of Locke is just Hardy behind the wheel at night,
about last year’s mistake and tomorrow’s “pour.” But damn if it isn’t engrossing for most of the drive.
13. The Double: Based on a Dostoyevsky novella and written and directed by British comedian Richard Ayoade, The Double resonated with me mainly, I confess, because it had the good sense to steal liberally from one of my favorite films (and this blog’s namesake), . Office satire, film noir sartorial sense, and unrequited love in a overly bureaucratic sci-fi dystopia? I’m in!
In any event, a fun two hours with very likable actors like Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, and Noah Taylor (the latter two also good in Only Lovers and Edge of Tomorrow this year respectively) And if the Eisenberg-Michael Cera Doubling dilemma even exists anymore — Eisenberg seems to have pulled away by now — I suppose this is Eisenberg’s answer to Cera’s .
14. Dear White People: A smart, well-written college satire of 21st century campus life — sort-of-a-Mean Girls meets Hollywood Shuffle — that’s both nuanced and topical about issues like being black in the Ivies and how white appropriation of hip-hop quickly devolves into egregious stereotypes. Writer-director Justin Simien is one to watch.
15. Guardians of the Galaxy: I thought the 70’s nostalgia was a little overdone, but still: With the help of some Douglas Adams sensibility and Chris Pratt’s aw-shucks amiability — still not sure if that’ll
— James Gunn managed to tackle a complicated Marvel property and fashion a fun and broadly engaging space opera out of it, one that somehow didn’t turn off mainstream audiences despite having a talking raccoon and Wookie tree along for the ride. (Special props to Dave Bautista as Drax the Destroyer — he was much better than I’d anticipated.) So gratz on that, tho’ I’ll be realllly impressed if they actually manage to . Lockjaw or go home!
16. The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies: Oh, PJ…well, 4.5 out of 6 ain’t bad. Battle of the Five Armies is a solid-enough Middle Earth fantasy battle pic, I suppose, and moderately engaging when taken on its own. I’m just no longer sure at this point what it had to do with J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
There are any number of small problems here. First off, the fact that Smaug the Magnificent is taken care of before the title card suggests that maybe his final fate should’ve been sorted out in . (And cut that awful Alien 3 homage at the end of Smaug too please — it makes the Great Wyrm a buffoon.) Second, having to pad out an entire movie from what’s left means a lot of filler — everything about Alfrid, the Unibrow of Laketown, was cringeworthy.
More importantly, tho’, I get why Jackson wanted to tie The Hobbit closer to Lord of the Rings thematically and aesthetically, but doing so ruins the whole point of the Battle of Five Armies. This was Tolkien in WWI mode — the battle is a ghastly and ludicrous mistake set off by greed and misunderstanding. But as portrayed here, it’s instead a prelude to the WWII, “Good Fight” of LotR against the encroaching menace of Sauron. So instead of Tolkien skirting over the battle because it’s a bunch of nonsense that Hobbits rightfully shouldn’t be caught up in, we get two hours of honor and glory and sacrifice and more martial humdrum. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for that — it’s .
As a result, Bilbo is very much a passive participant in the film that’s ostensibly telling his story, and that’s a shame. I wouldn’t say additions are necessarily the problem — far and away the best part of this movie is the White Council showing up at Dol Guldur. But it looks like there were probably two great films to make from this source material — not three. The Battle of the Five Armies is still a very competently made action epic, and one that’s engaging from moment to moment. But, sadly, it’s the least of PJ’s six Tolkien films. We’ll .
17. Under the Skin: Definitely the better of the two super-powered Scarlett Johansson movies of 2014 (oh wait — I forgot about The Winter Soldier), I still liked Under the Skin
(and, for that matter, less than Jonathan Glazer’s earlier film, .) Whatever hidden depths others found in those black oily waters, I found it mostly a slow, surface-feeding sci-fi/horror film that was only semi-involving. Still, it was unique, and had some indelible images on occasion, not the least the .
18. Ida: As a grad school friend well put it, this Polish import about a orphaned nun-to-be discovering her roots is “stunningly sterile.” It’s a beautifully-shot film — Ida well-deserved its Best Cinematography nod — and the film offers a memorably well-drawn character in Ida’s world-weary aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza). But otherwise, there’s not much there there. Literally: This movie only clocks in at 82 minutes. This is more of a short story than anything — not a bad short story, by any means, but I much preferred Force Majeure and The Babadook as far as 2014 imports go.
19. Jodorowsky’s Dune: Of all … Jodorowsky’s Dune, a documentary about a failed cuckoo-bananas version of Frank Herbert’s classic, is good fun for several reasons. First, Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky remains a ebullient personality at age 86. Second, the sheer ambition that went into this film is staggering (Salvador Dali as the Emperor? Orson Welles as Harkonnen? Mick Jagger as Feyd? Whoa.) Third, it’s interesting to notice how many other movies
done for this flick, even decades later with . All-in-all, a lively documentary about what might’ve been.
20. The Zero Theorem: Also mining the Brazil aesthetic this year was its original envisioner, Terry Gilliam. The actual story here — about a introverted computer programmer (Christoph Waltz) seeking to find meaning through either a long-awaited phone call, the attentions of a beautiful call girl (Melanie Thierry), or theorem that will explain everything/nothing — could use some work, sure.
But the main joy in Zero Theorem is in the canvas it provides for Gilliam to rethink his Brazilian dystopia for modern times. (See, for example, Waltz .) I’ll be the first to admit the film gets lost in its second hour, but I still enjoyed this chance for Gilliam to indulge his creativity and sense of humor, be it David Thewlis in a Tigger-suit, Peter Stormare and Ben Whishaw showing up as mad doctors, or Matt Damon in zebra stripes.
21. Still Alice: In all honesty, Still Alice mostly comes across as a well-above-average Lifetime medical movie of the week — it doesn’t have anywhere near the horrible gravitas of, say, . And I think the story here would be more interesting — a la the
— if the person trying to overcome Alzheimer’s was of more limited means than Julianne Moore’s uber-yuppie professor and her family here.
Still, Moore is very, very good in Alice, and her recent Best Actress win is deserved for her slip-sliding away in this film as much as for her impressive body of work over the years.
22. The Grand Budapest Hotel:
and . Budapest almost felt like a parody of Andersonian tics — the trains, the sets,
— and, for whatever reason, I didn’t cotton to its spates of cartoon-y violence.
Plus, it may be like complaining about an Archduke Ferdinand joke at this point — and, it’s true, I hardly ever don’t find angry Hitler videos funny — but Anderson’s kitschy SS Banners fluttering about the hotel put me off. , but I personally found it a mite weird and distasteful to make a Holocaust film so precious and twee.
23. Le Weekend: Think of it as
. There’s not much to Le Weekend other than Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan kvetching to and about each other over the course of a brief Paris vacation. (Well, that’s not entirely true — there’s also a winning and well-preserved Jeff Goldblum who shows up to enliven everything in the middle going.) Still, this small film has the benefit of well-observed relationship dynamics and two great actors at work in Duncan and Broadbent. Very much in the same ballpark as Linklater’s Jesse-and-Celine series, and worthwhile in the same way.
24. Snowpiercer: Like Under the Skin and Grand Budapest, I enjoyed this dystopic comic book adaptation by Korean director Bong Joon-Ho . Even notwithstanding the oh-so-Korean-cinema cleaver attacks in the second act, both its physics and its politics are cartoonish to the extreme. (Taking the former, all I kept thinking as they moved up the train was: shouldn’t you be walking through dozens of living quarters at some point? On the latter, sure, making Captain America(!) a dupe of the powers-that-be is funny, but you’re telling me John Hurt’s character enjoyed playing
so much he ripped off his own limb? C’mon.)
Still, however nonsensical, Snowpiercer had its moments, from Tilda Swinton’s Thatcher-hatchet job to the swing . I’ve seen worse.
26. John Wick: As in other years, the last spot is up for grabs. This could’ve been A Most Wanted Man or Calvary or Nightcrawler or We are the Best. But, as with
a few years ago, I like to reward #25 to a genre movie that knows exactly what it is and makes no qualms about it. In this case, John Wick, a balletic action/revenge movie that does The Raid-style action remarkably well. I’d checked out a little bit by the car-centric final reel, but .
MOST DISAPPOINTING:
Interstellar: Hey, you know what would’ve made
better? If, instead of lamenting her dead kid, Sandra Bullock went back in time for the last thirty minutes to see her again! Because there’s no way audiences are going to be interested in this outer space stuff unless we glom it on to a treacly soap-opera-level story about missing fathers and second chances!
Honestly…w…t…f. Interstellar had issues from the start — nothing about getting McConaughey into space makes much sense — but there were still some positives along the way: The wave planet is suitably nightmarish, and Matt Damon’s character is an interesting wrinkle. But then that Looney Tunes, saccharine final act came along and all goodwill I had for the movie was sucked out into the vastness of space. A weird miss by Christopher Nolan — here’s hoping for better next time.
THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES:
The irony of Birdman is that the one part of the movie that may well have deserved an Oscar — Michael Keaton’s comeback performance — is the one that got short shrift. (Eddie Redmayne got the award for degree-of-difficulty instead, in the Oscar-baity and completely conventional The Theory of Everything. Because, wow, he doesn’t really have ALS!)
Anyway, with the exception of the game cast, this movie is pretentious and terrible from the word go. Everything else about it: that godawful subtitle, the interminable jazz drums, the ideas that sound smart but are awfully shallow, the high-schoolish references to Raymond Carver and Macbeth, the looking down on comic book movies which are usually better thought out than this affected drek, the delusions of artistic grandeur — is obnoxious and hollow. It’s like a two-hour adaptation of David Denby’s whiny complaint that people who saw The Matrix .
The only positive thing I can say about Birdman is that it’s better than Inarritu’s , a film which is terrible for almost exactly the same reasons — and even that’s not much of a positive, because I laughed harder during 21 Grams than I think I have in any movie before or since. This is just a lousy, pretentious movie — but it’s about how hard it is in Hollywood when nobody understands your integrity as an artist (#firstworldshowbusinessproblems) so like
and , let’s give it an Oscar.
Foxcatcher: Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher isn’t as offensively lousy as Birdman, but it is rather full of itself, not nearly as deep as it thinks it is, and deadly dull to boot.
Miller strains hard to make the tragic tale of uber-wealthy paranoid schizophrenic John Eluthere Du Pont (Steve Carell) and his fascination with Olympic wrestling (and specifically with Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum)) a metaphor for wayward father figures, the tyrannical predilections of the super-rich, and the death of the American Dream. And, yes, I’m inclined to agree that 1%’ers are generally awful, exploitative people, and success in America is all-too-often a rigged game. But tell me something I don’t know, like, I dunno, the
(Mark Ruffalo).
Instead, we get two gray and glacial hours of Tatum playing Mopey McGee, followed by a random-feeling leap to almost a decade later which briefly covers the murder. Tatum can be an engaging actor, but he’s bereft of his usual charisma here — he just grunts at things, eats sad dinners alone in his kitchen, and occasionally wrestles the pain away. (In the first five minutes, when Tatum waits in line — decline-of-America metaphor alert! — at the world’s grayest, saddest McDonalds, I figured we might be in trouble.)
For his part, Carell is solid enough as Du Pont, but he’s given an unfortunate putty nose which makes his performance seem like even more of an against-type stunt. The best part of Foxcatcher is Ruffalo, who doesn’t have much to do but is given one standout scene where he has to contemplate selling out on camera. Otherwise, this film is a portentous slog.
MOST UNFAIRLY MALIGNED:
Robocop: Like
in this category in years past, Jose Padilha’s remake of Robocop isn’t an amazing film or anything, and it doesn’t hold a candle to Paul Verhoeven’s twisted, misanthropic classic.
But having watched this reboot several months after it , I was surprised to discover it actually isn’t half-bad — The filmmakers had actually put some thought into how to update the story in a clever way. Like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, it also features a surprisingly-not-all-that-hammy performance from Gary Oldman. And months before Birdman, the beginnings of Michael Keaton’s 2014 comeback were laid here. Again, a Saturday afternoon movie at best, but this wasn’t the remake atrocity it was made out to be.
Worth Netflixing: Calvary, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Fault in Our Stars, Frank, God’s Pocket, Godzilla, Gone Girl, Horns, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Pt. I, The Immigrant, Inherent Vice, Kill the Messenger, Life Itself, A Most Wanted Man, Neighbors, Nightcrawler, Noah, Palo Alto, The Skeleton Twins, The Theory of Everything, We Are The Best, X-Men: Days of Future Past
Don’t Bother: 300: Rise of an Empire, The Amazing Spiderman 2, Devil’s Knot, Fading Gigolo, Filth, Lucy, The Monuments Men, Nymphomaniac, Transcendence, St. Vincent, This Is Where I Leave You
Best Actor: Tom Hardy, Locke
Best Actress: Julianne Moore, Still Alice
Best Supporting Actor: J.K. Simmons, Whiplash
Best Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
Unseen: 3 Days to Kill, Alan Partridge, American Sniper, Annie, Begin Again, Belle, Big Eyes, Big Hero 6, Blended, Cesar Chavez, Chef, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, Divergent, Dom Hemingway, Draft Day, The Drop, Dumb and Dumber To, Earth to Echo, Endless Love, The Equalizer, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Fury, The Gambler, God Help the Girl, The Giver, Heaven is For Real, The Homesman,
I Frankenstein, If I Stay, The Imitation Game, Into the Storm, Into the Woods, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Jersey Boys, Joe, The Judge, Labor Day, Let’s Be Cops, Left Behind, Life After Beth, Maleficent, The Maze Runner, Million Dollar Arm, A Million Ways to Die in the West, Mommy, A Most Violent Year, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Mr. Turner, Muppets Most Wanted, Need for Speed, Nonstop, The November Man, Nurse 3D, Oculus, Pompeii, Ride Along, The Rover, Sabotage, Sex Tape, The Signal, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, Starred Up, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, They Came Together, Think Like a Man Too, Transformers: Age of Extinction, The Trip, Top Five, Tusk, Two Days One Night, Unbroken, Veronica Mars, Walk of Shame, Wild, The Wind Rises, Winter’s Tale
A Good Year For:
Brazil Homages (The Double, The Zero Theorem)
Chris Pratt (The LEGO Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy)
Jazz Drums (Birdland, Whiplash)
Marvel (Captain America: TWS, Guardians of the Galaxy)
Stars Driving Around the UK (Locke, Under the Skin)
Tilda Swinton’s Thatcher Impression (Snowpiercer, Zero Theorem)
A Bad Year For:
The Family Dog (Calvary, John Wick, The Babadook)
Hydra (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, CitizenFour)
Parenting (The Babadook, Force Majeure)
Sony (The Amazing Spiderman 2, The Interview)
2015: Ant-Man, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Blackhat, Chappie, Cinderella, Crimson Peak, The Fantastic Four, Far from the Madding Crowd, Fifty Shades of Gray, Frankenstein, Furious 7, Hot Tub Time Machine 2, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Pt II, Inferno, The Jungle Book, Jupiter Ascending, Jurassic World, Kingsman: The Secret Service, London Has Fallen, Mad Max: Fury Road, Magic Mike XXL, The Man From U.N.C.L.E, The Martian, Midnight Special, Minion, Mission Impossible 5, Paddington, Peanuts, Penguins of Madagascar, Pitch Perfect 2, Poltergeist, San Andreas, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Seventh Son, Silence, SPECTRE, Straight Outta Compton, Taken 3, Terminator: Genisys, Tomorrowland, The Walk, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, and
“There has been an awakening…can you feel it?”
& February 25, 2015 &
fifteenth birthday. Rest easy, old friend.[, 1, 2, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ]
& January 16, 2015 &
“‘It feels like we’re living in the future, or science fiction is coming to life. We thought it would be really cool to explore the characteristics of each planet through the context of travel.'” As , NASA celebrates by . Either of the above might be good for a swing-through .
& January 16, 2015 &
My only weakness is…well, never mind, never mind: By way of a little red-haired girl, Oakland graphic designer , fuses Smiths lyrics with Peanut cartoons over at .
& January 16, 2015 &
“‘I’m very excited to return to the strange and wonderful world of Twin Peaks…May the forest be with you.'” But how’s Annie? Official announcement is made that the well-preserved . Damn fine news.
Which reminds me: I
and, yeah, that back half of Season 2 — what with
and all — is a little more ragged than I remembered as a sophomore in high school. Still,
Update: , and it sounds like Audrey Horne’s coming too.
& January 15, 2015 &
As most of y’all have probably already seen via the Facebook, my
got ” column. (The link is paywalled, so you’ll probably do better to read it .)
This wasn’t my idea, and I’m not a big fan of the pic, but this came out ok, all in all (even if that one sentence/thought wasn’t meant to end at “cognizant.”) Thanks to Alex Gangitano and the good folks at CQ/Roll Call for taking the time.
& December 31, 2014 &
You may not have the resolutions sorted out yet, but here’s a solid list of things you probably don’t want to happen: , a web-comic by
(as seen at .)
& December 31, 2014 &
Just so GitM is keeping up with all the various social media platforms on the sidebar, as of two days ago I’m now in my forties. (That’s
and a bottle of twelve-year-old Jamesons, courtesy of Amy.)
Feels much the same on this end (so far), but then again I rolled the clock over in my head somewhere around 37, and
happens in dog years anyway. Onward and upward.
& December 30, 2014 &
I’m currently working on , and be advised: I’ll probably give myself a few more weeks into 2015 since I have so many holes still to plug. (Even if I was in top movie-going form at the moment, which I’m not, DC is still a second tier town in terms of the release schedule.)
But in the meantime,
, David Ehrlich has
with his choices. I disagree mightily with some of his picks — let’s just say Nymphomaniac won’t be cracking my list — but, once again, Ehrlich’s infectiously fun Super-Cut makes me wish I’d seen more movies this year.
& December 30, 2014 &
“One of the frustrating things about covering American politics from a vaguely left-liberal perspective is that many of the left-left theories turn out to be true, or true enough. You try to point out to the street protesters and tenured Marxists that things are more complicated than Noam Chomsky and the late Paul Sweezy would have you believe, and, all too often, it turns out they aren’t much more complicated. The
while . The , and the . The big banks and corporations really do run Washington—or, at least, that’s how it seems on this chilly December day.”
earlier this month — thanks to a
— The New Yorker‘s : Namely, the . “‘It’s morally reprehensible,’ Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat, told reporters. ‘They’re saying government bailouts are back.'”
By the way, if the bad news is too much to handle these days, there was one silver lining to the godawful CRomnibus: Crom may , but . Otherwise, well…
& December 30, 2014 &
from what should be a sideshow: . (He only got half a sweetheart deal.) “Greenberg’s case is revealing that the bailouts were done selectively, and there was an attempt to cover up what happened…bailout opponents were largely correct, and the bailout apologists were lying and/or wrong.”
& December 30, 2014 &
There are many reasons why I post less frequently at GitM these days, and a lot of them are the usual prosaic stuff — , the days are very busy, my . But among them also is, quite frankly, it’s sometimes hard to see a purpose to it anymore, at least in GitM’s current incarnation. Case in point: .
Like countless others, I
here for . So this isn’t a breaking story. Still, the recent Senate Report — which the “most transparent administration in history”
For example, so it turns out that we — you and I — paid foreign governments $300 million to construct and maintain our dungeons.
We — again, you and I — also paid . (And their contract was originally for $180 million!)
These two assholes got on the payroll after Al Qaeda higher-up Abu Zubaydah was captured. Zubaydah was then , mainly so he and others would .
We also tortured people for not calling CIA officers “sir,” or having a stomachache.
We even tortured our own informants.
We anally raped detainees with pureed hummus, causing anal fissures and a rectal prolapse due to “excessive force.”
We also may have . And it
in our custody as well.
Another detainee froze to death during his Room 101 session.
Naturally, the CIA tried to cover all this up. First, they blatantly lied about the efficacy of their torture regime. (And, since it cannot be said enough, particularly in the wake of the : .)
Then, they — with the full and active complicity of both the Bush and Obama administrations — blocked the American people from seeing the evidence of their depravities, including , , and .
And, still, over a decade later: Even though the , even though it is a crime to lie to Congress, even though it is , Nobody Has Gone To Jail — well, .
And on top of everything else, .
So, what is there to say? The illegality here is black and white, the crimes abhorrent, the moral corruption pervasive…and yet we all just collectively shrug. The sad and hilarious thing about
— “That hungry half-man, half-bull kept us safe from the terrorists!” — is this is basically the world we live in now.
Makes me sick, m*therf*cker, .
& December 8, 2014 &
Self-explanatory. The on-the-button Serkis voiceover threatens lameness, but I like John Boyega’s urgency, and was surprised to see Oscar Isaac in an X-Wing (given that I heard/presumed he was the Han of the new cast.) Show me more!
Update These
on throwback-style Topps cards: Boyega is “Finn,” Ridley “Rey,” Isaac “Poe Dameron,” the shadowy Sith fellow “Kylo Ren,” and the wheeldroid is BB-8. But who is Tenzing Norgay?
Incantation
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