Out of the gate swinging for the fences, apparently. After watching something like 30 movies in the final month of 2015, I've opened 2016 with 15 films in ten days. Can't stop won't stop! Just kidding. Definitely slowing down. At any rate, here's my first movie dump of 2016.
The Master
No better way to start a year than with the A.V. Club's top-ranked movie of the first half of the decade. I'd heard great things about The Master, and I'd also heard that it was a complexing puzzler of a film that required multiple viewings and had no consensus "solution" so to speak. Yeah, sounds like Paul Thomas Anderson. I only watched this once - so far, at least - and, yeah, no, I couldn't really tell you what it was about beyond the story that unfolded on screen. But that doesn't mean I wasn't impressed. I really liked this! Philip Seymour Hoffman? Fantastic here. Joaquim Phoenix? Perhaps even better. Amy Adams? Just fine. I've read plenty of theories and reviews and deep reads regarding The Master, and I don't like any of them as much as I liked the movie itself. So, there's that. I can't imagine this will go down as my own favorite movie of the decade, but I can understand why others would feel that way about it.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
A little more than ten years ago, The Lord of the Rings was the absolute biggest story in movies. Box office records, critical acclaim, Oscars upon Oscars, and "instantly iconic" status. I feel kind of bad for Peter Jackson, because here he is making three equally epic movies this decade, firmly planted in the same genre and containing many of the same characters, and nobody really seemed to care. Hardcore Hobbit fans did, of course, but none of the same acclaim or Oscar buzz or box office success could be found this time around. These are clearly three overall lesser films than The Lord of the Rings, but they're not bad by any stretch; they're just as competently and completely made. So what happened? Did the world get sick of Middle Earth somewhere during the financial recession? Is this just due to the law of diminishing returns? I ask these questions rhetorically, but also to myself. Because despite seeing each of the Lord of the Rings movies something like three or four times, I never even bothered seeing the second or third Hobbit movies in theaters. And watching them earlier this month at home, I felt... kind of bored, honestly, during large stretches. Let's pick this up below.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Yeah, I just didn't love these. Never felt any hype for them, barely felt any excitement while watching them. And watching the second and third movies back-to-back like I did has kind of left them blurring together in my memory. The only thing I really feel like I loved from the second movie was a chaotic and well-choreographed sequence in which dwarves, elves, and goblins fought their way down a winding river. And the biggest thing I remember from the third one was the climactic showdown at the end of an overlong climactic battle sequence. (Eagles to the rescue! Again!) I don't have anything negative to say about either of these movies; I just wish I felt stronger about them in general.
Timbuktu
I need to slow down on the foreign language films. There's nothing wrong with them, but going back to last month it feels like every other movie I've seen lately is subtitled, and there's just something that gets lost in there sometimes. My attention can wane during some of these movies - I won't lie - and that's particularly difficult when I need to be looking directly at the screen and reading the words on it in order to follow the plot. Timbuktu is a movie that a ton of my favorite critics seemed to love, and it just didn't do a lot for me. Maybe that has nothing to do with the subtitles - I don't know, some of my favorite movies from the last few years have been subtitled. This should have been a powerful movie for me, based on some of my tastes, and it just wasn't. Mostly I just got the impression from this movie that Sharia regimes are horrible and oppressive and brutal - but don't the semi-regular dispatches from ISIS remind us that much?
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)
No need for me to get dramatic here; no "childhood memories" were harmed by watching this movie. It was just a pretty bad movie. Inoffensively so - don't get me wrong. But even setting aside that these were the Ninja Turtles and that I loved the Ninja Turtles growing up and all, I mean, it just wasn't very funny or entertaining or memorable. This is no affront to decency; it's more of a straight C-minus or D-plus - which some of you will surely agree is far worse to watch than an F, really.
Hot Rod
Not great, and its biggest crime was probably an inconsistent tone. Sometimes went for clever jokes, often went for simple and stupid. What piqued my interest most here was what a strange time warp it was, in many ways. (Holy shit, 2007 was nine years ago!) You've got annoying SNL-era Andy Samberg, obviously, but surrounding him are pre-breakout Bill Hader, virtually then-unknown Danny McBride, and peak (pre-Sacha Baron Cohen) Isla Fisher. Tack on an out-of-nowhere fantastic and completely against-type performance from Ian McShane - Al freaking Swearengen - as Samberg's incessantly disappointed stepfather, and this was a really entertaining look back on different careers crossing trending in different directions. And it honestly wasn't a bad movie - certainly not as bad as its box office numbers.
Philomena
Here's a formulaic 2010s-era Oscar-baity movie. Based on a true story? Of course. An anecdote that serves to tell the untold stories of a very specific and overlooked group of people? You bet - unwed Irish women forced to give up their babies for adoption in the 1950s, to be specific. Invested primarily in actors and dialogue? Yup. Totally straight-laced and vanilla shot-blocking and camera-angle staging? Entirely. No interesting editing or directorial flourishes in sight? Not one. Bad? Hardly. Memorable? Not at all.
Short Term 12
Brie Larson's performance as a social worker with the patience of a saint and a few personal demons of her own is probably the best thing about this movie taking place in a troubled youth home. I dunno, call me a cynic - I just feel like I've seen "this movie" a dozen times over already. Angry kids, caregivers and foster parents who care deeply for them but have mixed results breaking through to them, horrible but understandable tantrums, lashing out, depression, suicide. None of this is to say that Short Term 12 was a bad movie - it was well-made and powerful enough and worth seeing, for sure. I'm just not sure it brought anything new to the table. Hardly a crime!
Compliance
Holy hell - a perfect example of a movie "based on a true story" where you think, no, impossible, there's no way a group of people could have collectively been that irresponsible, ignorant, or stupid - and sure enough, you race to Wikipedia and the rest of the Internet once it's over and learn that, yes, this really did happen, more or less beat for beat the way it did in the movie. I'm being vague, I realize, but this seems like a movie best entered cold. You know how it's going to unfold within about ten or twenty minutes, and there's no big trick or anything - you just keep realizing, oh man, there's too much time left - this situation is going to get even worse. And, yes. It does. Repeatedly. From a technical standpoint, it's a fine-but-not-great movie. There's a wooden performance or two - most disappointingly from Dreama Walker, the most recognizable name in the movie playing the character who probably deserves the best actor - and the ending feels simultaneously rushed and unnecessary. They also "reveal" the antagonist long after such a revelation should be capable of surprising anybody. But enough of the negatives - this is worth a ninety-minute watch. On Netflix, of course.
Selma
Credit where it's due - I expected another soft Oscar-baity biopic and was pleasantly surprised to see how violent, raw, and emotionally gripping this was. And it wasn't just some big puff piece on MLK, either. His reputation as a philanderer was addressed, if only briefly, and he was shown to be indecisive and argumentative on a number of occasions. LBJ also came out looking like a near-total asshole - in a movie loaded with murderous and vile bigots, no less. No wonder his estate wasn't pleased with this movie! But yeah, this was an all-around solid movie with way more to it than I had been led to believe.
Sunset Boulevard
It's always good to mix in an old classic every now and again, right? Here's a famous noir-like dark comedy from 1950 that holds up about as well as any movie from 1950 could be expected to hold up today. You're probably familiar enough, in broad strokes. A wealthy older actress plans her comeback after an eighteen year hiatus from the movie industry. The character - Norma Desmond - is luxurious and sultry and a total diva. In short, she's crazy - and perhaps the origin of her own very archetype. As always seems to be the case when I watch anything more than, say, thirty years old, I'm sure this was once in fact a fantastic movie. Hey, if nothing else, it's great to grow familiar with the classics, right?
Cabin Fever: Patient Zero
Total inconsequential crap. I kind of alluded to it above in my Ninja Turtles paragraph, but there's a big difference between fun bad movies and boring ones. When something's an absolute trainwreck, it's entertaining to watch. Find the plot holes, laugh at the acting, and so on. But when something's competently made and still completely mundane, why bother with it at all? That's the case with Cabin Fever: Patient Zero, the third movie in the Cabin Fever franchise - the second one sucks too, by the way. Nothing scary here, nothing fun, and nothing particularly memorable. There's a flesh-eating-virus-based oral sex scene played for squeamish laughs, but it just feels like a diminished version of a better gag from the first movie. This is an early but strong candidate for worst movie I see all year.
Inside Llewyn Davis
I think I love the Coen brothers, but honestly? They're a bit hit-or-miss for me. I mean, mostly hits, for sure, but every now and again one of their movies just leaves me cold. One such movie was O Brother, Where Art Thou? - ironically, the second time I saw it. (Liked it just fine the first time, but was also twelve years old.) So how did I enjoy this largely non-violent and straightforward music-driven nostalgia trip? A lot, actually! The folk music was pleasant, the tone was perfect, the story was simple but the themes it explored were deep. I have nothing bad to say about this one at all. In fact, I loved it!
The Comedy
This one hit a little close to home for me. It's a character piece that looks at a bored thirty-ish well-to-do white guy and how detached he is from everyone and everything around him. What makes this film different though, from so many "bored and depressed" movies like Garden State and the like is that this guy isn't really despondent or sad or in need of being saved; he's just completely sarcastic and ironic and either unable or unwilling to treat anyone or anything around him with any level of earnestness. He's got his circle of friends, but all they seem to do is make fun of things - themselves included - and riff on one another. I heard the movie best described as one in which "everyone is joking and nobody is laughing." It's not an exciting movie, nor does it really have any characters you want to root for, but it's an interesting and slightly cautionary look at how viewing the world around you with nothing but cynicism is a really shitty way to live.
The Hateful Eight
Saw this just earlier today, so perhaps I haven't fully digested it yet. Bear with me! First of all, I nearly always love Tarantino's work and I knew going in that I would love this film. It's vintage Quentin; the first hour and a half is almost entirely comprised of dialogue. Tense, wonderful dialogue. And then of course the bullets and the blood begin to fly and we jump back in time in order to explore a different point of view and by the time the dust settles and the movie ends, it isn't entirely clear what the point of the story was. If anything, I'm left wanting more. That's not to say I didn't thoroughly enjoy this movie, nor is it to say it wasn't what I expected it to be. But by the eighth go-round, I just thought Tarantino would have something to say, either overtly or within the subtext, and there just isn't much of that here. It's as straightforward a tale as Reservoir Dogs was - not that there's anything wrong with that! The acting and writing are absolutely perfect here; I just hoped this would be deeper or more challenging in some way. This is the first time I came away from a Tarantino movie really wondering, "okay, he's amazing at doing exactly this, but can he do anything else anymore?" I know some people got there years ago.
Alright then. Bye for now!
No comments:
Post a Comment