Edge of Tomorrow

5 Replies

Tom Cruise plays Major William Cage, an officer used to in front of a camera rather than in the front lines. He is forced to join in combat against the invading alien race and is killed in the mission, though he “wakes up” to find himself in a time loop, repeating the battle in which he dies over and over again. It’s a military, sci-fi Groundhog Day with fewer jokes but buffer bodies. Cage teams up with Special Forces warrior Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) to improve his fighting skills so that he may live long enough on battle day to defeat the alien invaders.

I liked this so much more than I was supposed to. It’s an action-y-science-fiction-y movie that should appeal to Assholes like Sean, not Assholes like me. But it did. Probably because Emily Blunt is so fantastic, beautiful and feminine and tough as hell and totally believable as a feted warrior. And because for once, Cruise portrays this inept guy who has to be trained and guided by a woman in order to become the soldier they need him to be. It’s probably the most feminist action flick made in years. Or ever.

The movie is really cool to watch. The special effects contribute to a video game feel (and now that I mention it, I guess the constant re-levelling of the characters might have something to do with that too). The editing is pretty brilliant: the battle scene is overwhelming and unrelenting and although Cruise and Blunt relive it many times, it never feels as repetitive as it should. Actually, I felt moved and heartbroken by how much of their lives were spent on a mission no one would ever credit them for.

I mentioned earlier that this movie had fewer jokes than Groundhog day, and I stand by that statement, but this movie is not without its own brand of (dark) humour. And maybe we’re also slightly laughing at Tom Cruise, perma-action-hero, who in this one, has to take the back seat. It’s a war action movie that doesn’t glorify war. It’s got more storyline than weaponry. It feels like effort has been made, and for me, someone who doesn’t appreciate “cool” explosions for no apparent reason, this was a clever gem in the genre. It made me remember why Tom Cruise is a movie star and realize that Emily Blunt is just at the start of an amazing career.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles (2014)

5 Replies

Is it still called “jumping on a bandwagon” if you hate what everyone else seems to be hating on? Michael Bay’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot seems like an easy target and wanting to feel like I have a mind of my own, I’d really love to have something nice to say about it. Bay’s project was controversial from almost the moment it was announced – with the last Michaelangelo even accusing the filmmakers of “sodomizing” the Turtles’ legacy – and has been almost universally panned by critics since its release.

I do not write this reboot off because of its comic book origins or because it uses the word “mutogen” at least five times. I don’t blame it for its source material nor its deviation from it. I do blame it though for being bad. So bad. Worse than I had feared.

I grew up with these characters and have seen the 90s TMNT movies more times than I can count. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the first (and best by far) of that franchise but I remember it being a lot more fun. I remember it as a little darker. I definitely remember it taking its time in introducing us to the Turtles, Shredder, Splinter, and their origin stories.

In 2014, we are forced to settle for a talky and lazy script, loud and incoherent action scenes, charmless turtles, and a how-is-she-so-stupid April O’Neil. Splinter and Shredder fail to command respect. I couldn’t help but feel bad for Will Arnett who plays April’s sidekick and is tasked with bringing comic relief to a witless screenplay and can barely conceal his embarrassment. Only Megan Fox, as April, seems immune from the embarrassment with over-zealous delivery as awkward to watch as Arnett’s sheepishness.

Were my childhood memories “sodomized” by this new franchise? Probably not. My memories will remain as fond as ever. It’s this mess that I wish I could forget.

Foxcatcher

5 Replies

In the sprawling Du Pont family home, there is a room referred to as the trophy room. Its walls are lined with ribbons and medals and a bounty of trophies featuring gleaming silver horses. “Horses are stupid” says John Du Pont (Steve Carrell), who prefers wrestling, though his dear, ultra-wealthy mother considers it a “low sport.” It’s funny he has such a disdain for horses since he seems to treat his own pet wrestler no better than a dog.

Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) is an Olympic gold medal winner but has lived his life in the shadow of his older brother, Dave (Mark Ruffalo), also an Olympian, and arguably the better wrestler. Mark’s living the unglamorous life of an amateur athlete, surviving on one $20 cheque at a time when Du Pont swoops in to offer him not just sponsorship, but mentorship. Desperate, Mark accepts.

Steve Carrell is nearly unrecognizable as Du Pont, and I don’t mean the prosthetic nose. I mean he walks Du Pont and talks Du Pont and hunches his shoulders and has this stillness and almost emptiness about him that’s kind of chilling and really restrained and very well done. Matt played the Oscar card in his review and I can’t help but agree. Every time he’s on screen, he’s giving out a vibe that makes you uncomfortable but prohibits you from looking away. Du Pont is basically soulless and he attempts to buy himself a biography with cash. He’s got an interest in sports but no qualifications – luckily, as long as you embroider ‘coach’ on your jacket, no one second guesses you when you’ve got millions in the bank. Carrell and Tatum both spend much of the movie in silence, so much so that a coked-up scene on a helicopter where the two repeat polysyllabic words is one of the “funnest” scenes in the movie. For the most part, it’s slow and mumbly and dark, dark, dark.

I actually think Tatum was the perfect choice to play the physically strong but emotionally stunted athlete. He comes alive in the gym, on the mat, but seems subdued and uncomfortable in almost any other setting. We see him as vulnerable and feel that somehow Du Pont has taken advantage of him, even though it’s clear he’s an adult. The movie relies on what’s not said between these two, because Du Pont is socially inept and Schultz is a dull bulb. But wordy or not, I needed something more from this movie. We never know the true nature of the relationship between Du Pont and his protégé. There’s a lot of tension and creepiness and stuff we don’t feel good about, even some erratic behaviour from Du Pont, but nothing that can really explain the drastic event at the end. I mean, what the hell? It’s not fair to spring that on us, you need to earn it, even if we knew all along we were in for some violent end.

The movie works best as a commentary on America and on social inequity than as a true-crime caper. Director Bennett Miller makes his movie as if he’s a journalist, not a story-teller. We are presented with facts; emotions are observed but not delved into. The whole thing is cold. And when shit hits the fan, we knew it was coming, but we still don’t know why.

The F Word

1 Reply

If you are browsing Canadian shelves, you’ll find this movie under ‘The F Word’ but if your Netflix is an American account, you might try ‘What If’ instead because even not saying Fuck will still earn you an R rating in the good old USofA.

Daniel Radcliffe is Wallace, a med school drop out, burned in love, who meets Chantry (Zoe Kazan) at a party in Toronto one night. They click over magnetic poetry, exchange witty banter and phone numbers, until she casually mentions — a boyfriend. So the two become friends, the kind of close, opposite-sex friends who hang out all the time, tell each other their secrets, lean on each other for support, flirt outrageously, see each other naked, but are JUST FRIENDS. You know.

The chemistry and dialogue between them is fun and fresh. You may not be used to seeing Daniel Radcliffe in a role where he can wear jeans and acknowledge that he’s had sex, but he leaps into the character quite convincingly. He’s a very good, and very handsome actor.

Unfortunately, it’s a formulaic rom-com in a trendy package. The plotting is precisely predictable and the whole thing starts to feel like an exercise in the obvious. Their exchanges are fairly entertaining but eventually you just want them to do what they’re going to do. And they do. The end.

The Book of Life

1 Reply

The Book of Life is the fourth Golden Globe nominee for Best Animated Feature Film that I have gotten around to reviewing and, unfortunately, the worst in every way I can think of.

The movie was produced by Gullermo del Toro so I know that I’m supposed to love it. And I’ve read several reviews that praised it for its focus on Mexican culture and characters. Fair point but I couldn’t help wondering on what side of the thin line between celebrating diversity and reinforcing stereotypes this film was falling as I nervously glanced around the theater once or twice to see if anyone else found this offenseive. Maybe I was the only one. I’m curious to hear what the internet has to say. What I could not forigive though were the bad song covers from which no one is safe- even Radiohead.

The book of Life may earn some points for its Just Be Yourself message. I’d be more impressed though if every other nominated animated film (although I haven’t seen the Boxtrolls yet) didn’t also have a Just Be Yourself message . In fact, if it turns out the Boxtrolls has a Don’t Stray From the Pack message, I would probably vote for it just for,ironically straying from the pack.

I may not be the target audience for this movie. Some movies are just for the kids and maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. But in the theater where I saw The Book of Life, the kids were as restless as I was, making me wonder who the target audience is supposed to be.

The Giver

The Lego Movie

12 Replies

The only thing anyone needs to be special is to believe that you can be. I know that sounds like a cat poster, but it’s true. -Vitruvius

Sometimes movies try too hard. Sometimes the effort to be meaningful or say something important is so obvious that it overwhelms the entertaining parts of the movie. That did not happen here.

This movie is gleefully insane but in the smartest possible way. It strikes a very difficult balance – it makes me laugh at the same silly things as my nieces and nephews. It feels made for all of us at once. And it makes me feel good about watching it with them, not only because it makes them laugh, but also because it has something really good to say. It has a great heart, and I think I want them to grow up to be like Emmet. Except not plastic.

Everything this movie tries, works. I just love this movie. And if you read my Big Hero 6 review, you know how much I loved that movie. But Matt was right. This is the best animated movie of 2014. Hands down. Everything truly is awesome here. You can see the love put into this in every single glorious frame. Everything is little bricks, everything looks like Lego and feels like Lego. It is unique and wonderful. See this movie and you are sure to find something to love too.

The Imitation Game

10 Replies

Benedict Cumberbatch stars in The Avengers for math nerds. As Alan Turing, he assembles a crack team called Hut 8 who will secretly try to break the unbreakable German code machine, Enigma, to win the war, while pretending to be regular schmos putting in time at a radio factory.

Turns out, pretending to be regular is probably the bigger of the challenges for Turing. He’s a genius, but he’s also probably autistic. He’s horrid with people, often laughably so in the film (Cumberbatch portrays him lovingly, with sensitivity, grace in his gracelessness, and touches of clueless humour). Turing is also gay, and closeted, necessarily. Churchill credited him with the single largest contribution by an individual to the war effort; his work probably shortened the second world war by at least two years. He was an expert in his field, the father of computer science, and a war hero and yet he struggled just to make a friend.

The film flips between different time periods: his boyhood at school where he had his first love, a post-war break-in of his home that leads to him being interrogated by police, and the time he spent at Bletchley Park deciphering Nazi codes. Both book-ending periods paint us, the audience, a picture of the things he’s keeping secret. The film does an excellent job of presenting his world as a series of codes: as a boy he confesses that for him, conversation is a code. People are an enigma. The wallpaper in his home looks like morse code, dashes and dots. The production design is upscale period all the way.

For a movie about math and cryptology, it’s surprisingly gripping. Reels of news footage help give us a sense of their urgency. They aren’t battling Germans, they’re fighting a clock. Their countrymen are dying in tunnels during air raids (as Keira Knightley already did, in Atonement), or simply wasting away of starvation. The movie isn’t 100% historically accurate, but I think it’s faithful to the time and place and people, and if the computer itself is given the Hollywood treatment, looking much more impressive than it ever did in real life, where’s the harm? Perhaps it will inspire people to go home and look it up.

I think the film’s strength is its moral question. Once the code is cracked, how and when can that information be used? How many civilialns and soldiers would you sacrifice to keep a secret that could win the war? The movie does a great job of personalizing the question and we start to feel that as awful and tense as it was in the not knowing, it was a lot more bearable than the responsibility we’re faced with when we do know. The weakness is in having painted Turing as the unblemished hero. The truth is , he was probably unknowable, and without ever having known him, I’m betting that no one could be as spotless as he’s implied to be in the film. Turing, the actual man, was mistreated by his ungrateful government, who kept his war records sealed while he was prosecuted for simply being a gay man at a time when it was illegal to be so (or at least to act on it – “gross indecency” they called it, hypocritically), and then sentenced him to chemical castration, robbing a nation, and the world, of a great mind.

Into the Woods

12 Replies

Based on the Stephen Sondheim musical, Into the Woods tells the story of a childless baker and his wife, cursed by a wicked witch to be barren forever but granted the chance to reverse the spell, if only they go into the woods to retrieve some special items for her. Their story intersects with the familiar Grimm Brothers’ tales of Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Rapunzel.

Meryl Streep plays the witch and plays her beautifully. Director Rob Marshall knows she’s the linchpin and grants her the most spectacular entrances and exits. But it’s Emily Blunt in the role of the baker’s wife who feels like the heart of the movie and Blunt really shines. She can make any line sound so natural, and her voice can only surprise you in the best way possible. She was nominated for a Golden Globe and deserves to be, possibly even more so that Streep (!). Anna Kendrick as Cinderella is comparatively disappointing. It’s always difficult for this reviewer to see past her donkey dentures, but her voice is up to the challenge, even I can admit that. But Cinderella just isn’t that exciting to watch (this problem was likely compounded by the inclusion of a preview for the new live-action Cinderella movie to be released in 2015 – my sister and I wrongly imagined some of those scenes as scenes from Into the Woods).

“I was raised to be charming, not sincere.”

There is a lot to recommend in this movie. The ensemble cast is spectacular. After their opening number, “Into the Woods” I felt like I should applaud. And if you had doubts that Chris Pine could sing, let me assure you that he’s learned more than just a thing or two from Shatner along the way. Actually, our group quite enjoyed the scene between Pine’s Prince Charming (recycling his smug asshole look from Horrible Bosses 2) and Rapunzel’s Prince (Billy Magnussen, leatherclad) – the two men are singing about their respective woman-induced “Agony”, splashing about homoerotically in a waterfall, trying to out-macho each other, crotch-thursting, popping buttons to reveal increasingly deep vees of smooth, tanned chests, reminding us more of a duet between George Michael and Freddie Mercury than your typical fairy-tale princes. Delightfully tongue-in-cheek, you almost wished more of the movie could feel this way.

“Scrumptious carnality”

The sets are gorgeous, and no matter how many times our characters go into the woods, it never feels like they’re passing the same 5 trees, it’s a truly enchanted forest that creates a storybook look that’s fun to get lost in. And the fabulous Colleen Atwood heightens the visual gorging with a stunning array of costumes, including a suit that transforms a man into a mister wolf. Johnny Depp, playing the wolf, is lurking inside those woods, looking lupine and oily, putting out vibes that should warn us away. Although top-billed, Depp’s in the movie for maybe 5 minutes, but that’s more than enough to turn things pretty sour. How do I say this…I felt like I picked up on certain nuances in his song that I was uncomfortable with. As in: sexual innuendo. As in: the wolf would like to “eat” Little Red Riding Hood in more than one way. He’s an absolute creepster with a real pedophile’s mustache and his singing “Hello, Little Girl” will send shivers up your spine. He tells us there’s a “scrumptious carnality” about to be had, and maybe that works in the Broadway production, but it feels grossly inappropriate in this toned-down Disney version where the actress playing Red is indeed a little girl, much too young to be on the receiving end of this lascivious song. And when she starts responding that what they’re doing is new and scary but also kind of exciting, well…I wanted to slam on the brakes.

The characters wrap up their traditional story lines around the 80 minute mark – but wait! These poor schmucks don’t get their happily-ever-afters. The story continues. And I’m glad that the movie doesn’t end on Cinderella’s wedding day because I would have felt cheated. But 80 minutes of singing and skipping through the woods was about as much as I wanted. So the remaining third of the movie, which gets a hell of a lot darker, felt entirely too much. Streep delivers another great song but I was fed up with the inundation of special effects, my patience was waning, and it just felt like filler. My sister felt that since all the characters start (or continue) making selfish, morally ambiguous choices, she didn’t have anyone to pull for. She’s not wrong. My husband felt that the songs were not particularly catchy or memorable, and he’s not wrong either. I enjoyed the movie, enjoyed it quite a bit, it would be impossible not to given the sheer amount of talent (although I am wondering why all of that talent had to be white), but I’m not feeling it for Best Picture this year. Of course, I’m sure I said the same about Rob Marshall’s Chicago and we all know how that went.

Foxcatcher

10 Replies

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of Foxcatcher all year. Director Bennett Miller (Capote, Moneyball) is doing what few can do better- a film inspired by a true story. But it was Steve Carell, playing millionaire schizophrenic John du Pont, that I was most excited to see. This isn’t the first time he’s tried to surprise us. I was completely caught off guard by the sincerity of his performance in Little Miss Sunshine and even more so in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. The more risks someone takes, the more I root for them and I knew that pulling off something so dark would be his biggest yet.

On his against-type casting choice, Miller apparently said “I think all comedians are dark”. After the recent passing of Robin Williams, the cliche of the sad clown has been discussed online at length but it’s always been especially on the surface with Carell who, even in some of his most straight-up comedies (The Office and 40 Year-Old Virgin in particular), has never been afraid to let his dark side show. Michael Scott, the boss from hell on The Office, can be obnoxious and selfish but Carell rarely forgets to play the sadness and loneliness that’s behind his less likable traits.

As John du Pont, Steve Carell doesn’t disappoint. I didn’t know much about this story at the start of the film and only knew that all this was supposed to end in tragedy so du Pont’s creepy persona and erratic behaviour unnerved me every time he was on screen. Carell plays him as unpredictable (quite a feat given that his voice rarely raises above a mumble) and nearly impossible to read. It’s a performance that I found impossible to forget as I tried and failed to sleep later that night and I hope Oscar takes as much notice as the Golden Globes have.

As for the film itself, it’s never less than compelling and held my attention long after it was done as I tried to piece it together for the next few hours. Miller uses dialogue only when necessary and seems more interested in telling his story through haunting images and the looks on Channing Tatum and Steve Carell’s faces, resulting in a finished product that is exceptionally well shot and edited and easy to admire. But because both leads (Tatum and Carell) say so little and because Miller keeps his audience at such a distance, there’s not much to get emotionally involved in.