Stan's Movie Dump: Late January 2016

Here's a delightful mix of "Oscar buzz" and "Netflix crap." Enjoy!

The Human Centipede

Here's Sween's post on this one five years ago in its entirety: "Is this the most disgusting movie I've ever seen? Yes, it is." That's pretty succinct, and all I really have to add is that this wasn't just gross and disturbing but also, frankly, boring. It's a shitty horror movie that managed to break into the zeitgeist based on nothing more than its horrifying and hilarious premise. I was a little disgusted, I won't lie - but I was even more bored, all things considered. Is that weird? Anyway, yeah, this sucked ass. (!)

Sicario (2015)

Tense-as-hell action movie about the drug wars going in on in the Mexican border towns. Plenty of harrowing and intense scenes and some solid performances, but not a ton else. Like, as surprised as I am that this wasn't nominated for any non-technical awards at the Oscars, I can't say I think it deserved anything else. Beautiful movie, though. Kind of hope it takes the award for cinematography.

The Revenant (2015)

Hype is a dangerous and powerful thing, and it's just so damn easy for movies not to live up to their Oscar hype. Like, The Revenant was great, and yet I can't help but ask myself, "this is the performance that's going to win Leo an Oscar?" Don't get me wrong - it's a great movie, and he does as well as he always does - but like, damn, I think Tom Hardy was better!

Enemy (2014)

Now this was a damn good movie. Based loosely on José Saramago's The Double, it stars Jake Gyllenhaal as both a neurotic history teacher and his commitment-fearing doppelgãnger. I watched this one through from start to finish and liked it plenty, but immediately went to the Internet for takes on what the hell it was about. The crazy thing is that it worked fine on its face, telling a slightly dreamlike and surreal but easy-to-understand story about two guys and their significant others. But after watching some YouTube clips and reading a handful of Reddit opinions, I understand that this movie was operating on a whole other level. Fantastic! For real, give this one a go if you can. Also, just curious - when has Jake Gyllenhaal ever not been fucking fantastic in something?

The Overnight

Here's a fun but utterly insignificant movie about two couples doing a little bit of swinging one night. A handful of recognizable faces - Adam Scott, Jason Schwartzman, Taylor Schilling - drew me in, and a series of weird developments - butthole paintings, a huge prosthetic penis, breast pump instructional tapes - kept me interested. I can't complain about this whatsoever - it just wasn't anything that mattered.

The Big Short

Man, this movie made me #FeelTheBern like nothing else. Seriously! As far as the film goes, I dug it. Didn't love it like I ought to love a best picture nominee, but then, that's true of a great deal of best picture nominees. As big and famous as this cast was, holy hell was it underutilized. It wasn't until after I finished this one that I realized Christian Bale was nominated for supporting actor. What? Why? All he does is walk around an office building in shorts and bare feet acting quirky. Steve Carell was way better. Ryan Gosling may have been better. Whatever. Props to Adam McKay - never would have guessed that the guy who made Step Brothers was capable of making something like this.

Bridge of Spies

Here's your old school best picture nominee. Spielberg, Hanks, the Cold War, and a movie that's already been made a hundred times over. It's tough to dislike this one - I just can't believe it's earning Oscar acclaim. Then again, the Oscars are #SoWhite and also #SoOld. Seriously though - the appeal of this movie rested almost entirely on Tom Hanks, who wasn't even nominated for an acting role. I don't get it!

The Human Centipede 2

Okay, enough with all these important movies. Here's some utter garbage. The Human Centipede was gross and dumb and, ultimately, bad. I said as much above. But this follow-up was somehow so much worse. It's entirely shot in black and white and it exists "outside" the world of the first movie. This one starts out with a guy watching the ending credits of The Human Centipede and thinking, hey, yes, I'd like to try that. But where the villain in the first movie was cold, calculated, and all kinds of sinister, this new guy is just a complete creep. The first movie's villain was a surgeon; this guy literally uses staples and duct tape to create his twelve-person human centipede. At one point someone gives birth to a baby while trying to escape. The whole thing is just an awful mess. And sure enough, I'll be back soon for the third one!

Room (2015)

Believe the praise and buy into the hype, because this was fucking phenomenal. It's the story of a kidnapped woman who's been living in her rapist's shed for seven years, and maybe more so, it's the story of their five-year-old son who has literally never seen the world outside said shed. It was raw and uncomfortable and tragic and still somehow so hopeful. I laughed and I teared up. Brie Larson deserves the Oscar she's been nominated for. This kid, Jacob Tremblay, could have easily been nominated. Best of all, despite its very heavy subject matter, this movie doesn't melodramatize its punches and it never lets you wallow in any misery.

The Act of Killing

This documentary from 2012 flew under my radar until one of the most buzzed-about movies of 2015 was The Look of Silence, a companion piece. The gist is simple, if absurd. Back in the 1960s there were a series of communist purges in Indonesia where half a million or more ethnic Chinese people died. The paramilitary forces who rounded them up and tortured and killed them all eventually came to power and they still rule the country to this day - the fourth-largest country in the world, at that. Indonesia, everyone! Anyway, this documentary focuses on the perpetrators today, close to fifty years after their crimes. Again, these people are considered national heroes - they've never been punished for their actions, nor have many of them ever really worried about the morality of what they'd done. The documentarian, Joshua Oppenheimer, has gone to Indonesia not only to interview these people but to ask them to recreate all of their heinous crimes on camera. What follows is one of the most bizarre human experiences I've ever witnessed, wherein the killers round up a bunch of actors and performers and begin to reenact their gruesome deeds, most of them chuckling and smiling and reminiscing about it. Between these segments, the camera also captures a number of conversations between the killers, casually discussing how they see therapists in order to sleep at night and take drugs to ward off the nightmares. Does the movie end with one of the most charismatic genocidal killers retching on a rooftop and crying about what he's done? It might. Does this redeem him in any way? That's up for you to decide.

Before I get out of here, I also want to say something quickly about The World of Tomorrow, a seventeen-minute animated short available on Netflix and nominated for an Oscar. It was excellent. See it. Okay, now I'm all set. Later!