I knew I'd slow down. I didn't even have to split my April movie dump into two parts! I bet I only watch like ten movies all summer. (I don't actually bet this.)
Inherent Vice
Damn - I wanted to absolutely love this. But like so many other Paul Thomas Anderson films, I couldn't. Not fully. There's a lot to like in this movie, an adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel set in 1970s Los Angeles that's equal parts stoner comedy, crime thriller, film noir, and character study. Some have called it "The Big Lebowski on acid" and while I can't fully agree with that description for various reasons, at least it explains the general vibe here. Maybe I'll rewatch this one day, and if I do I'm sure I'll pick up on more things and notice more and end up liking this more. Unfortunately, on my first go-round I could barely follow what was happening and even though I appreciated plenty of scenes and lots of bits of dialogue in isolation I've got no idea how they're all meant to link together.
Wild
Despite two academy award nominations in the acting department, Wild was never really on my radar. This was a Marissa choice and, credit to her, it was excellent. Nick Hornby (the Brooklyn screenwriter) clearly has a talent for adapting books that have no business succeeding as movies into great movies. But enough about him - this is the Reese Witherspoon show. Not in an "excessive anguish" type of way - good acting doesn't mean "lots of" acting, folks - but more just in the sense that she carried this thing from start to finish. There's a minute-long take where she just struggles to get her enormous backpack on for the first time and, wordlessly, she portrays little components from the entire spectrum of human emotion. There's really not much to the movie plot-wise - a woman with some demons in her past hikes the Pacific Crest Trail - and that's probably part of what makes it so great. I really liked this!
12 Years a Slave
Every bit as raw and disgust-inducing and great as advertised. Everyone in this was great, most notably Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong'o, who won an Oscar for her work here way back in 2014 before the Oscars were so white. It took me too long to see this - and it only took me two years to see it. See it!
22 Jump Street
Like the first one, it shouldn't have been as good as it was. Jonah Hill obviously excels in these roles and always has, but who knew Channing Tatum would be at his best playing the endearing athletic doofus type? This was decent.
Finders Keepers
I've been really excited to see this for months now, and it finally came to Netflix. The premise? One man finds another man's amputated leg in a smoker he acquired and the leg's original owner would like it back. A legal battle ensues. Did I mention that the entire ordeal takes place in the backwoods of North Carolina? I didn't need to, right? At any rate, what really drew me into this one was that it was made - or at least produced - by the same guy who made (or produced) The King of Kong, maybe the greatest documentary I've ever seen. That movie took something so outwardly pathetic - two guys vying for the world record Donkey Kong score, one a lovable everyman and the other a ready-made villain who hides behind technicalities and disqualifications - and made it into this weirdly moving feel-good underdog story. The set-up was ripe for something similar here - our amputee is a plane crash survivor with a pill addiction and the leg's new owner is a flashy showman - but alas, there was nothing special hiding underneath this outwardly pathetic tale. Sweeney, who hasn't seen the documentary, put it best when he said something like "I've seen the trailer and the story sounds insane, but how could this possibly fill an our and a half?"
The Mist
The Mist was the first Stephen King story I ever read and to this day it remains one of the best. It might be the quintessential King tale - a bunch of people in a small town in Maine get trapped in a supermarket by a thick fog outside full of unseen monsters. The situation grows more dire over the course of a day or two, with bigger and more frightening creatures attacking the store and the people inside growing more frantic and desperate, turning on one another in the process. Frank Darabont wrote and directed this screen adaption and holy hell did he nail it from start to finish. This shouldn't have been a surprise - Darabont had previously adapted (and elevated) King stories into The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Perhaps the best part of this movie was the devastating twist ending that didn't happen in the original novella. It had been spoiled for me beforehand, but still, good God.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
I never wanted to see this. Didn't think I'd hate it or anything, just never really had any interest. And now that Civil War is coming out I've heard I really do need to see Winter Soldier in order to understand it. So I went ahead and did that, and holy shit was this exactly what I knew I'd been avoiding. Car chases, gun fights, explosions, yawn, yawn, yawn. We're oversaturated with comic book movies, folks, and there's no genre staler these days than PG-13 action movies. Yet they're still a license to print money. Like, everyone hated Batman v Superman and agreed that it had lots of problems, and still it broke box office records. Ugh. This wasn't even bad. It just wasn't anything I hadn't seen before. I actually fell asleep during this despite watching it at my house with company over.
White God
Ha. Another foreign film I saw on more than one "Best of 2015" list that I checked out on Netflix. This was just dumb as hell. A town (maybe an entire country?) passes new dog-owning laws. Dogs need to be pure bred, and no one can own any mutts or mixed breed dogs. Obviously, this results in just a shit ton of stray dogs on the streets. Not so obviously, these dogs form marauding packs who hunt and kill and devour people. Wow! It ends with a poignant and powerful trumpet performance. Secretly, I think this was actually a movie about racism! Blech. Eurotrash.
I'll be back after another ten movies or so, which, again, probably doesn't mean it'll be all summer before another movie dump.
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