Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Our reviews and thoughts on the latest releases, classics, and nostalgic favourites. Things we loved, things we hated, and worst of all, things we were ambivalent about.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

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I walked out of Birdman last night feeling exhilarated, confused, and unqualified to review it.

The film, nominated for seveon Golden Globes including Best Picture- Musical or Comedy and Best Director), follows (literally, through most of it) Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), a fictional ex-movie star most famous for playing a superhero called Birdman as he tries to re-invent himself as a Broadway star in a play that he wrote, directs, and stars in. The production is shaping up to be a disaster throughout rehearsals as it’s star must not only deal with his own demons but also with his eleventh-hour replacement co-star who threatens to steal the spotlight (Edward Norton), a high-maintenance actress afraid of spoiling her one chance to be in a Broadway show, his high-strung lawyer (Zach Galifanakis), and his resentful daughter who is straight out of rehab.

Whenever possible, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inamitu gives the appearance of one long continuous take as he follows his actors from backstage to Times Square to a nearby bar. Some of this was accomplished through fancy editing tricks but the film’s stars apparently would have to shoot up to 15 pages of dialogue at a time. That and the complex choreography of the walk make what would otherwise be a pretty talky movie feel action-packed. Even those with little interest in cinematography and editing are likely to be impressed. And the cast, with Keaton and Norton being clear stand-outs, seem grateful for the challenge.

I feel shy about reviewing Birdman because it’s more surreal touches involving Thomson’s frequent arguments with the voice of Birdman in his head left me scratching mine. Many scenes are ambiguous and are probably meant to be but sometimes left me feeling like I wasn’t understanding what was going on. But mostly, I feel shy to review it because few seem to be able to escape its brutal honesty as it takes aim at Hollywood, Broadway, critics, bloggers, Twitter, awards season, and self-importance in general. I felt like I was being dared to love this movie- or to hate it- only so it could mock me for it. The script and acting feel refreshingly honest even as it seems to question its own ability to do so. Keaton and Norton contribute to the multi-layeredness, both playing parts that are so close to their real-life public personas.

My review of this is all over the place. Sorry about that. I’m still not sure what to make of this movie. I can tell you that you I doubt you’d regret watching it. And that (I never thought I’d say this) someone should nominate Michael Keaton for an Oscar. Even if the makers of Birdman would laugh at them for it.

St. Vincent

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Nominated both for Best picture and best actor (musical or comedy in both cases) at this year’s Golden Globes, St. Vincent stars Bill Murray as a lonely old alcoholic who just wants to be left alone until, needing the money, he takes a job as a 10 year-old kid’s babysitter. During their time together, Bill introduces him to a lady of the night, teaches him how to fight and gamble, and takes him to a bar. The two also develop an unexpected (at least to each other) bond while we ponder the true meaning of sainthood.

There’s almost nothing in the script or the direction that deserve the charm or emotional payoff of the finished product. The credit really has to go to the actors. The kid, played by Jaeden Lieberher, is too smart and grown up. The kind you only see in movies. But played by Lieberher, we can almost believe it. I don’t know where they found this kid but the way he plays Oliver as a kid learning to be more comfortable in his own skin is believable even if the lines he has to read aren’t. His troubles fitting in at his new school should be a chore we have to sit through while we wait for more misbehaviour with Murray but, because Chris O’Dowd is so likable as his teacher, they are some of my favourites in the whole movie. Melissa McCarthy as Oliver’s mom plays it refreshingly straight.

But none of this would be nearly enough if not for Bill Murray. At this point in his career, Murray can play sad and aging with about as much effort as it takes Morgan Freeman to play old and wise or Johnny Depp to play Jack Sparrow but in the last half of the movie, he even shows aspects of his talent that we haven’t really got to see yet. It’s a performance that makes his Best Actor nomination a no-brainer, even if the Best Picture nomination is bizarre. I blame Murray for the lump in my throat I had at the end, with emotions that this script just didn’t earn.

See Jay’s review of St. Vincent.

The LEGO Movie vs Big Hero 6: Everything is Awesome

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It was announced last week that The LEGO Movie was (no surprise here) nominated for the Best Animated Feature Film Golden Globe. This, of course, prompted me to rewatch it, leaving me wondering who should win the Baymax/Will-Arnett’s-Batman battle. This is the problem with awards season, I guess, in that it makes us have to decide between stuff we love.

Sorry, Hiro. There’s just something special about Warner Bros.’ feature-length tribute to (or commercial for) the world of LEGO. Whether it’s the stays-in-your-head-for-days signature song, the exceptionlessly great voice cast (my favourites probably Liam Neeson in his one-man good copy/bad copy routine), or the genuinely touching ending, The LEGO Movie has so much that makes it stick out. The think for yourself message manages to be effective even as it hints that we should buy more LEGOs. And spend less on coffee. It’s more consistently funny than Big Hero 6 and even more creative. Batman, Superman, the Wild West, Han Solo, pirates, and Abraham Lincoln could only co-exist in the world of a kid and his Lego set. Until now. Only an Up or a Wall-E, which we’ve had to do without this year, could beat that. Thanks to LEGO and Big Hero 6 though, it’s still going to be an interesting category at the Golden Globes.

6 Big Reasons to See Big Hero 6

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I am a little late to the party seeing Big Hero 6 so I will not review it the way that I normally would but will instead try to sum up in 6 reasons why, if you haven’t seen it yet, in the words of Hiro Hamada “I fail to see how you fail to see that it’s awesome”.

1. It was announced last week that Big Hero 6 has been nominated for a Best Animated Feature Film at the Golden Globes!!! Hmmm.. That sounded more exciting in my head. Okay, even I don’t really care about the Globes but, come January, I’m sure it’ll also become a must-see for any educated Oscar pool. Besides, you don’t want to be the only one in the room not to get it when Tina and Amy make a hilarious Baymax joke, do you?

2. If you don’t usually like Disney movies, don’t worry. This one’s also from a pretty deep and obscure corner of the Marvel universe. Apart from one robot, all the characters here are human . Just like any superhero movie, Hiro starts out as a bit of an outsider with a tragic past and must use what makes him unique (in this case, his intellect) to save the city. His pet robot Baymax also makes the transformation from cuddly to badass. There’s even a Stan Lee cameo.

3. If you’re tired of superhero movies, don’t worry. This is still a Disney film at heart with all the creativity, visual genius, and great characters you’ve come to expect from Disney’s best movies. Baymax really is an awesome creation and, although all the rockets and armour that Hiro adds later feel straight out of Iron Man, the health care provider that he is deep down is all Disney.

4. Hiro is backed up by a great supporting cast of four nerds-turned-heroes. Some Disney sidekicks are really there for the kids and can be distracting or even annoying. Wasabi, GoGo, Fred, and Honey Lemon offer necessary comic relief and support for Hiro, who is much younger than the rest.

5. A teenage boy who’s a bit of a loner bonds with and fights aongside a robot to save the world and it’s not directed by Michael Bay. So, there’s that.

6. Ever since Sean saw saw Big Hero 6, I could barely understand what he was talking about half the time. Now I can. he loved it too and you can check out his review.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

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Matt and Christina Drayton (Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn)’s daughter has come home from university with some exciting news: She’s met a guy! She’s only known him for 10 days but she thinks she’s in love and would like to get married. They’ve never seen her so happy so, even though this is pretty sudden, this is great news. What’s his name? Dr. John Prentice. Oooohh, a doctor? What’s he like? Well, Mom and Dad, There’s just one little thing. It’s not a big deal but you might want to sit down. He’s, well, he’s black.

You probably still could pull enough drama out of this concept to make a movie today but, in 1967, no one else had really tried to make a movie about inter-racial marraiges in a positive light. Hell, it was even still illegal in 14 states when they started filming. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was a huge success, disproving the conventional wisdom of major studios at the time that films with black actors and black themes would not be interesting to mainstream audiences. It was also nominated for 10 Oscars. But how does it hold up today?

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner has been the subject of some controversey in recent years. Both Herman Koch’s novel The Dinner (read it if you get the chance) and Lee Daniels’ The Butler feature impassioned dinner table debates over the film’s message. Dr. Prentice is played by the great Sidney Poitier as polite, well-spoken, and successful. Of course her parents learn to love him, modern haters claim. Prentice is as non-threatening as can be, with some criticizing the character as too “assimilated” or even “too white”.

I will not address these criticisms except to suggest that they may miss the point. This was a pretty forward-thinking movie for 1967 but it was still 1967 and it was made with a white audience in mind and it’s what’s going on with Tracy and Hepburn’s characters that make things interesting. A less interesting movie would have potrayed them as a couple of overt bigots, leaving it up to Poitier’s character to shatter their prejudices. Instead, Matt and Christina are San Fransisco intellectuals ( he runs a newspaper, she runs an art gallery) and self-appointed liberals. Matt’s daughter describes him as a “life-long liberal who has spent his entire life fighting discrimination”. But what happens when a black man asks him for his daughter’s hand in marraige? One friend of the family watches the whole drama with amusement, “watching a broken-down phony liberal come face-to-face with his principles”.

The haters aren’t wrong. It is dated. The music is corny, the backyard scenes are so obviously filmed on a set that it’s almost hilarious, and a couple of scenes are just plain silly. But the dilemma that Matt and Christina face still rings true. Spencer Tracy is especially compelling as he lashes out at everyone, angry mostly at himself as he comes to realize that maybe he wasn’t as enlightened as he thought, now that he himself has to make the changes that he keeps insisting America must make. Maybe because Poitier has such screen-presence, it can be easy to put the focus on Dr. Prentice but the film’s main struggle is really between the Drayton’s and their own values. Watching this unfold is what makes Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner a Hollywood classic, one that I make a point of revisiting every couple of years and that will endure long after we’ve all forgotten about Lee Daniels’ The Butler.

The Madness of King George

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

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For a blow-by-blow account, read Jay’s live blogging of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.

“I’ve gone and done something again. Wish I could remember what”.

Marv (Mickey Rourke) has gone and done it again. It’s bad to forget your medicine when you’ve got a condition. This opening, based on Frank Miller’s short story Just Another Saturday Night, does not bode well for the rest of this sequel that I’d been anxiously awaiting for nearly 10 years. The first scene of Sin City, where Josh Hartnett plays a contract killer who completes a contract that a woman apparently put out on her herself, was not like anything I had ever seen. Sin City 2’s opening felt so much like a movie that I’d already seen before that, when watching it with Luc, it took me five minutes to convince him that we weren’t accidentally rewatching the first one. This had better get better fast.

“Poker. Savage power in gentlemen’s hands”.

If you’ve read my other reviews, you might have noticed that I have a bit of a Joseph Gordon-Levitt bias that I might as well come clean about. With that kept in mind, this next segment of the film, an original story by Frank Miller written for the movie, is the strongest by far. JGL plays a gambler who wins more than he should have against the beastly no good Senator Roark. He’s cocky but with more than his share of demons and if there’s one thing JGL knows, it’s cocky with more than his share of demons. Plus, movies like Brick and Looper have prepared him for lines like “Sin City’s where you go in with your eyes open. Or you don’t come out at all”. It isn’t just him that makes this the best of the four stories though. Everyone involved seems to be having more fun, especially Powers Boothe as Roark, who seems to get hard with every ruthless word.

“It’s another hot night, dry and windless. The kind that makes people do sweaty, secret things”.

This is really the main segment of the film, a nearly panel-for-panel adaptation of one of Miller’s more popular graphic novels, A Dame to Kill for. Eva Green plays Ava Lord, a damsel to kill for who seduces men into doing horrible things, including our old pal Dwight (this time played by Josh Brolin). The almost constantly naked Green is even more wicked than in Miller’s 300: Rise of an Empire earlier this year. She seems to relish playing her, even if she never seems sure what to do with her accent. Everyone else is phoning it in though. Brolin growls through all his lines like he’s trying to out-Marv Marv. Rourke, as Marv (over-used in the sequel) sounds like he showed up to the ten-year Sin City reunion only to find that it wasn’t nearly as much fun as he remembered. And Ray Liotta, in a short cameo, uses the campy dialogue as an excuse to go full Liotta. This story might have been a better fit for the first film, when the novelty was still there.

“I don’t use the stripper logic anymore”.

We end with another original story, this time focusing on Jessica Alba’s character. It gets off to a pretty good start. Nancy starts to fall apart after the death of Bruce Willis’ character in the first movie and Alba plays it better than I would have expected. The segment itself starts to fall apart very quickly though with more skull-crushing from Marv and a crossbow-wiedling Nancy. It ends with the death of a character that may kill the possibility of a third Sin City, which I would have been disappointed by 9 years ago. After watching this sequel though, it’s probably for the best.

Looper

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After reviewing Mysterious Skin yesterday, I was inspired to buy and rewatch Looper. I think this movie was high profile enough for me not to bother with my usual summary of the plot so I will just offer a reminder that this is the one where Joseph Gordon-Levitt (the connection to Mysterious Skin in case you were wondering) plays a specialized hitman who must hunt for his future self (Bruce Willis) who has been sent from the future for assassination.

If you haven’t already seen it, I highly recommend it. Director Rian Johnson (Brick) creates a version of the future that is different enough from our present to be interesting but similar enough to be relatable. Because people are sent from the future just to be executed, not to change the past, Looper even avoids most of the logic problems that are usually par for the course with time travel movies. Okay, there are still a few “yeah, but wouldn’t…” moments but maybe that’s even part of the fun. JGL apparently spent a lot of time watching old footage of a younger Willis and, with the help of some talented make-up artists, the two actors do a better job than you might expect of being convincing as the same guy. Oh, and you have Jeff Daniels playing a gangster. So, see it.

But I’m mostly writing this not to the people who haven’t seen it but to those who have. Or at least to those who have either seen it enough times or seen it recently enough to remember what I’m talking about. Please, please, explain that ending to me! When I first saw it back in 2012, I promised myself that if I saw it again, I’m a smart guy- I could figure it out. But I just rewatched it and I still don’t understand how the last five seconds could possibly fit. So, if you have any thoughts, please leave them in the comment section.

Mysterious Skin

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In the early 1980s, two 8 year-old boys are molested by their baseball coach. They react to the trauma in very different ways. Neil, who had been abused by his coach repeatedly, grows up identifying with his abuser, carrying around some secret pride that he was coach’s favorite. At the age of 15 (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), he starts working as a prostitute. Brian, on the other hand, a quieter and shyer kid than Neil, grows up having no memory of his abuse and, as a teenager (played by Brady Corbet), has spent years fascinated by stories of alien abductions, convinced that he himself had been abducted. Searching for answers, he tries to track down Neil hoping he can explain the gaps in his memory.

Mysterious Skin is not for everyone. Many will be turned off just by the quick synopsis that I offered in the first paragraph. It deals unflinchingly with subject matter (child abuse, prostitution, and rape) that most of us don’t want to think about in such graphic detail.

Many of us can forgive a mediocre action movie or convenient twists and lazy writing as long as they keep us entertained. For most people, though, if we’re going to sit through a movie with subject matter like this, it had better be GREAT. Which this isn’t. Not everything works, Corbet’s performance as Brian rings true but a subplot involving an alliance with 24‘s Chloe, who plays a reclusive 32 year-old with an alien abduction of her own, is particularly unconvincing.

But director Gregg Araki gets most of the details right. This film is refreshingly, even brutally, honest about the traumatic impact of childhood sexual abuse. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s half of the film is particularly convincing. JGL has made a career of playing tortured young men and he’s at his best here. Neil is charming but unreliable, constantly letting down and pushing away the people that care about him. He seems to have a bit of a death engaging in increasingly risky and unsafe sex. We see a gentler, more compassionate side to him though when he finally reconnects with Brian, leaving us with a glimmer of hope that maybe there’s hope for these two characters after all, quite a feat for a film that is a mostly bleak and punishing experience.

Force Majeure

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A Swedish family vacationing at a ski resort in the French Alps are enjoying a nice lunch at a restaurant admiring the beautiful view of the slopes and eating food off each other’s plates. Tomas is a workaholic and spending a little too much time on his phone but overall not a bad family trip so far. Suddenly, a “controlled” avalanche begins to get a little too close for comfort. At first, Tomas reassures his nervous wife Ebba and his panicking son that everything is under control. Then, the avalanche is WAY too close for comfort and Ebba instinctively runs to protect her son and daughter while Tomas instinctively grabs his phone and his gloves, pushes a stranger out of the way and gets the hell out of there. Within seconds, it becomes clear that no one was in any real danger and with some nervous laughter, everyone is enjoying their meals again, with Tomas sheepishly returning to the table as if nothing had happened.

What happens from there is best seen for yourself than read about in some review so I will not give anything away except to say that you should not miss Force Majeure, a strong candidate for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. What happens at the restaurant shakes this family to the core and no one knows what to say or what to feel. Some of the best scenes involve other couples listening to Tomas and Ebba’s very different versions of what happened. Their story seems to wreak havoc on anyone who hears it, leaving them wondering what they (or their partner) would do in the same situation.

This is a thought-provoking film that is a must-see even if just for the fun of arguing about it later. I couldn’t help but put myself in the shoes of every character, wondering what I would do in their ski boots (definitely not run).

See Jay’s review of Force Majeure here, and Sean’s over here, and then tell us who’s right!