March 1, 2016

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!

2 comments:

  1. Ah! I have to get to my movie dump going for February. It's been a slow month in terms of consumption as I've been sidetracked with other projects, but there's still progress that has been made.

    That said... Some solid screenings here. Glad you got around to "Creed." I understand everyone might not hold it to quite to the same status I have it at, but that final act really got me on some level -- curious what that says about me?

    "Avengers 2" is a big MEH. I LOVE the superhero genre (clearly more than you), but this just felt like an exercise in "how many heroes can we pack into one story?" and I'm not about that. I just like these genre films because they have the potential to be great morality tales that just happen to feature things that fly or can punch through walls all dazzled with spectacular laser-explosions or something bullshit. Yes, I'm a 10-year-old child at heart. But a child that still respects compelling characters and solid story structure. This film just didn't have much of that.

    Still need to get around to the new Coen Bros. flick. Hope that happens soon before it leaves theaters.

    I was sort-of onboard with the "Kingsman". It was one of those films I liked, but saw that it had so much more potential than what was given. And when I get into that mindset with a particular movie, it ends up bothering me more than it should and ruining part of the fun that I should be experiencing. In short... I have problems. Likely way more than this film had.

    Love Charlie Kaufman. I feel like each of his films could be broken down by a team of psychologists who then could each write their own doctorate dissertation on said film. I didn't like "Anomalisa" quite as much as the films you mention, but it was still a great watch. Like your take on adapting this to a stage play (or did it initially start as a stage play?). Who cares... It was a blast. And was also cool that Dan Harmon (another creator I heavily enjoy) had a hand in making it too.

    Also, super glad to see some Pliskin in the mix. This is definitely the sequel (or would you call it a reboot) to "Escape from New York" that nobody asked for -- especially that god-awful surfing scene. Did you manage to catch the Bruce Campbell cameo? Only the finest performances in this guy.

    I'll be sure to get my February list up soon.

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    Replies
    1. I definitely think Anomalisa deserves another watch from me. I was in the perfect place when I watched that one - had just taken a midterm and was able to let my mind just wander/relax/whatever for a night. Many would think a movie that takes place in a couple of hotel rooms and a cab and a restaurant is pretty boring - but I was all about it! It was also the type of movie that grew on me after letting it marinate for a while. Went to bed thinking, "I liked that," and woke up thinking, "I loved that!"

      Hail, Caesar also deserves a rewatch... but not before I read up on it a little bit. I enjoyed it on a superficial level - Channing Tatum is dancing! George Clooney is playing an idiot! - but I couldn't tell you what the hell the Coens were trying to say with that one. It's also not the light-hearted comedy the previews make it out to be. But yeah, worth a watch, like every Coen movie.

      I did catch the Campbell cameo in Escape from LA, and it could have been one of the best parts of the movie. Bad movie!

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