Stan's Movie Dump: Late February 2016

Hey, cool. My torrid movie pace is slowing back down. Good! TV is back, the weather's getting nicer, my homework is piling up, and there are other things going on in general. Plus, the Oscars just happened, unofficially putting a button on the year of film in 2015. No reason to marathon through all those 2015 releases now, is there? Let's go!

Avengers: Age of Ultron

I'm not big into comic book movies, and I never really have been. That said, I was all aboard a few years back for the first Avengers movie. It felt momentous and important and groundbreaking in all the right ways. I didn't even see all the necessary "prequels" and I was still impressed by all the fully-formed characters collaborating on screen in what could only be called an epic battle. What a difference a few years make! This... felt like just another comic book movie. A decent one, for sure, but "just another comic book movie" all the same.

Kingsman: The Secret Service

This, on the other hand, came completely out of left field. I loved it! You've got Colin Firth and Michael Caine, among others, as British Secret Service agents who make James Bond look unkempt and amateurish by comparison. You've got Samuel L. Jackson as a lisping evil mastermind who can't handle the sight of blood. His second-in-command is a woman with Pistorius-style blade feet - like literally blades, razor sharp, that she uses to kill people. Kingsman got me right in the sweet spot - wonderfully violent and comically gory and edited perfectly. Four or five outstanding fight scenes make this worth seeing. I'm excited for the sequel!

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

I never saw The Fault in Our Stars, but this felt a whole lot like the movie that movie wanted to be, or wishes it could have been, or whatever. This was great. It was sad as hell, but it was also a "my senior year of high school" movie, so it felt kind of nice and familiar, too. I said at some point last year that The Spectacular Now was a very believable movie about a couple of kids that reminded me what it was like to be in high school. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl was almost as believable and a lot more moving. Worth a watch!

Anomalisa

Charlie Kaufman is an all time favorite of mine - Eternal Sunshine might be my favorite movie and Adaptation is somewhere in the top ten as well - so I had high hopes and a strong bias heading into this. It worked for me. It's not for everyone. It was probably better off as a play, which is what it started out as. Remember the puppet sex in Team America? Anomalisa has puppet sex played straight, and it's just as, uh, impactful. More than anything, I loved how small-scale this was, taking place over the course of one night and largely in one building.

Creed

My entire history with the Rocky franchise is documented in this blog. I liked them all! I mean, except for Rocky V. Who could have liked Rocky V? Anyway, Creed was great. Trev called it his favorite movie of 2015, and Trev saw at least fifty movies in 2015 - imagine that! Marissa had never seen a Rocky movie before Creed and still liked Creed a whole lot. I think the same was true of Danielle. My point is that everybody liked - or would like - this movie. See it, even if you haven't seen any Rocky flicks.

Escape From L.A.

After the year Kurt Russell had - Hateful Eight! Bone Tomahawk! Furious 7! - I wanted to go back and check out some of his older work. This movie... was not good. It's the sequel to Escape From New York, which I've never seen, but that hardly seems relevant. This was a run-of-the-mill mid-'90s dystopian movie in the vein of Total Recall, Waterworld, and - sure, I'll go here - Super Mario Bros. You know the type - absurd over-the-top situations, unbelievable premises, grit, anger, "raditude." Do you know what Kurt Russell's name is in the Escape movies? It's Snake. And it was Snake before The Simpsons or Metal Gear. At one point in this movie, Snake needs to make five basketball shots in ten seconds. At another point, he surfs away from gun-toting enemies in trucks. The movie is set in an alternative future (2013) in which a devastating earthquake has torn Los Angeles away from the rest of California. It's an enormous island now - and also a federal prison. Look, don't watch this.

Hail, Caesar!

My admiration of the Coen Brothers is kind of surprising, given how often their movies fly right over my head. For every No Country For Old Men, Fargo, Serious Man, Inside Llewyn Davis, and Big Lebowski, there's a Man Who Wasn't There, an O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and a Hail Caesar. Not something I disliked, mind you - I was actually really entertained throughout this movie - but just something I didn't fully comprehend. This movie is all over the place, and at just an hour-forty long, a number of characters and plots only get a few minutes of screen time. Channing Tatum? Two scenes. Scarlett Johansson? Two scenes. Jonah Hill? One scene - and you saw almost all of it in the trailer. But yeah - I don't know what parts of this were satire, what parts of this were an homage to the golden age of film, which jokes flew over my head, and which ones weren't jokes at all. I dunno! Outsmarted by the Coens - again! Still liked this, though.

The Giver

Marissa's choice! This wasn't awful. The shame here was that The Giver was published in the early '90s, long before the glut of Hunger Games and Divergents and other young adult dystopian copycats, but waiting this long to make it into a movie has rendered it absolutely unessential and played out. That The Giver plays like a plain-as-hell conventional teen dystopian story is understandable, given its nature as a prototype for the entire genre. But... that doesn't mean this movie wasn't plain-as-hell.

Trainwreck

Meh. This was sold to me as an Amy Schumer movie - and she did write it - but this is Apatow through and through. Solid, funny, oddly paced, and way too long in the third act. The best part of this movie was LeBron James and the second best part was John Cena and holy shit did I really just say both of those things and mean both of those things? I did and I did. Oh yeah, you know who else was great? Brie Larson. And also Colin Quinn. And somehow, Tilda Swinton! In an Apatow rom-com, of all movies. Amy Schumer... had some great one-liners. Bill Hader has been better.

Happy March, everybody!