It's time for another installment of Stan's movie dump! It's summertime, which means I've seen some of the year's biggest blockbusters in theaters and also plenty of last year's most acclaimed movies as I look for things to watch during the big TV hiatus. Anyway, check out this mixed bag.
The Babadook
Hailed by plenty as one of the scariest movies in recent memory, The Babadook is an Australian film about a single mother raising a terribly behaved little shit. She reads him a gruesome scary story one night, and all of a sudden she and her son are both plagued by a nightmarish entity known only as the Babadook. I thought the movie was legitimately terrifying right up until about the halfway point; the final confrontation with the monster was dark and twisted, but also just a little bit boring. Worth a shot if you're into horror flicks, but otherwise it's easily skippable.
Jurassic World
Does it live up to the original 1993 classic? Of course not - and neither did that movie's previous two sequels. Is Jurassic World still an easy low-stakes summertime movie to enjoy while chowing down on popcorn? Absolutely. It's got all kinds of problems, like virtually every big-budget PG-13 movie from the last twenty years, but most of them are forgivable in the long run or ignorable in the short term. If you want a scientifically plausible monster movie with impeccable character development, I mean, first of all, maybe lower your expectations, but go find something else. This right here is a barrel of squeaky clean dinosaur fun and plenty of explosions - nothing more, and nothing less.
Good God, the hype around this one! And the backlash! And the partisan back-and-forth! Let me get this out of the way - I think this movie kind of sucked, and it has nothing to do with my political compass or the overblown expectations. It was just a slow and pretty boring movie - which would have been fine, except that this one also didn't try for much thematic depth or atmosphere or anything. This was just a too-long and too-simple story about a guy who served his country and suffered for it. The Hurt Locker was better. Zero Dark Thirty was better. Even Jarhead was better. Bradley Cooper was pretty great, though.
Fury
Just when you think you've seen every type of World War II movie, something like Fury comes along and reminds you that you haven't. This one just felt dark and cold and angry. It was gritty and it felt uncompromised, which I appreciated, but it also dragged on a bit too long and ended with one of the least realistic firefights I've seen in any movie ostensibly rooted in historical reality. Decent, but not great.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Trevor threw this on during an evening lull on our big friends Cape Cod getaway weekend, and wouldn't you know it, despite some initial groans we all made it all the way through. I thought it was a cute movie. Easy, silly, funny. Short, above all else, really. I just may see the sequel on my own accord one day!
Nightcrawler
This was awesome. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a nightcrawler - a freelance video footage collector who trolls the streets of LA looking for accidents and robberies and tragedies so he can point his camera at them for a few minutes and then sell the footage to the highest bidding news station. It shouldn't be much of a spoiler to say that he eventually gets in way over his head and begins to affect the news rather than just recording it - where else would this kind of movie go? - but Gyllenhaal's easygoing and completely steady performance is absolutely amazing. Nightcrawler is easily one of the best movies I saw all year and it reminded me a great deal of 2011's excellent LA noir caper, Drive.
Europa Report
At this point, low-budget found footage movies are a dime a dozen. But Europa Report was, I promise you, a good low-budget found footage movie. A crew of six astronauts heads for Europa, the ice moon of Jupiter, to do all kinds of science experiments, and chiefly to find out if life exists in its liquid oceans. While you can probably surmise how that goes for them based on the fact that this is a found footage movie, I stand by my assertion that this is worth seeing for yourself. It's only 90 minutes long and it's available on Netflix.
Ant-Man
I liked Ant-Man more than I expected to like it, and more than I've liked any Marvel movie since The Avengers a few years ago. It was refreshingly (and appropriately) small in scale, and I appreciated how low the stakes were in this particular narrative. Paul Rudd was cast more or less perfectly here, like the older and more smart-alecky Chris Pratt that he is. And hey, Evangeline Lilly! This is literally the first time I've seen or heard of her since Lost ended five years ago. Glad to see she can still find work. But no, really, this was fun.
And just like that, there are only five months left in the year. I'm at 48 movies. Can I ramp things up and hit 100 by the end of 2015? Ha! Fat chance.
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