Tag Archives: Kick-ass!

The highest honour we can bestow on a film. Anyrhing in this category is a must-see.

Eagle vs. Shark

Apparently this was one of my tests for marriage material and I didn’t even know it. Jay introduced me to it without any real warning or lead-in, and I remember enjoying it but none of the specifics. We’ve been on a bit of a Taika Waititi binge with What We Do in the Shadows and Boy, so this seemed like a very good time to rewatch Eagle vs. Shark.

This movie confirms that Jemaine Clement, who I knew from Flight of the Conchords before seeing this the first time, is either a terrific actor or a terrible human being. Jarrod, his character, is just an awful person who brings nothing to the table at all. So while this is supposed to be a love story, the love is entirely one-sided. Lily, the loving half of this on-again, off-again couple, is probably as much of an outcast as Jarrod (both are extremely awkward), but Lily is sweet to all those around her while Jarrod is bitter and unlikable from start to finish. As Jay pointed out last night, is it really a happy ending if these two end up together? Lily could do so much better!

If you can get over that, and I can get over pretty much any plot hole if I am being entertained, there is a lot to like here. This movie is memorably quirky and has quite a few hilarious moments, including the death of a seagull and some fantastic animal costumes (including an eagle and a shark)!

Overall, this is an enjoyable movie about a pair of social misfits, and there are some great moments here, but since Napoleon Dynamite did this material first it takes away the originality and uniqueness that might otherwise have been this movie’s calling card. Still, it’s worth checking out. I’d say watch them both and let me know which one you prefer!

Touching The Void (2003)

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What a beautiful film! “Touching The Void” is about two mountaineers (Joe and Simon), who decide to live up to their great ambition of climbing the Siula Grande, a 20, 814 ft mountain located in the Peruvian Andes. What follows is a beautifully hellish story of 2 friends’ will to survive when Joe, an experienced climber, breaks his leg as the pair are starting to rappel down one of the world’s most treacherous mountains. I was left on the edge of my seat for the entire length of the film. Besides death, not much more could of gone wrong. It was nerve-racking, at times difficult to watch but ultimately one of the most rewarding and honest documentaries I’ve ever seen, and trust me, I’ve seen many.

Very rarely will I see a film where every word holds its weight, to the point where I paused the movie many times to simply reflect. I would ask myself what would I do in these situations? Would I be as mentally strong? Would I give up? Would I capitulate and accept death? Truth be told, I don’t think anyone can honestly answer these questions without experiencing the sheer nightmare these guys went through. Just when you think things can’t get any worse for Joe and Simon, nature will gladly prove you wrong. Thin air, snowstorms, freezing cold temperatures, nasty winds, crevasses and extreme ice are just the beginning of what Simpson & Yates will be forced to deal with. I don’t want to give away too much so I’ll just say this: If there’s ever a documentary I would recommend with confidence, this is it. Within the same breath it effortlessly explores life, death, hope and despair which makes for a powerful and unforgettable experience.

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If any of you have seen this movie, I would love know what you thought of it.

Boy

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Last week I blogged about watching What We Do in the Shadows, the latest endeavour from Taika Waititi, whose work in my opinion cannot be missed. This week I went back in time to watch 2010’s Boy.

“Boy” is 11 years old in 1984. He loves Michael Jackson and girls, employing the former’s dance moves to lure and impress the latter. He lives on a small farm with his grandmother, his younger brother Rocky, and several young cousins. When grandma has to go away for a funeral, Boy is in charge of the household. At home he’s a grown up, cooking and cleaning and caring for the little ones. At school he’s still just a kid, making up stories about his jail-bird dad and getting into fights when those stories aren’t believed.

But then one day his dad shows up, along with two friends. They’re only intended to stay long enough to find the stolen money they buried before being pinched by the cops, but Boy sees it as potential bonding time.

It’s clear that the father is even less mature than his sons. He doesn’t know how to join them in grieving their dead mother, doesn’t know how to make up for lost time, doesn’t know how to put others first, and certainly doesn’t know how to give a decent haircut (though this doesn’t stop him from trying).

Watching this movie, I was struck by how Waititi feels a bit like a low-budget, New Zealand version of Wes Anderson. I don’t mean this in a copycat way, but rather that his movies share a certain randomness paired with an attention to detail that makes for a delightfully off-kilter movie going experience.

Waititi is bursting with talent, but he doesn’t spread himself too thin. He’ll workshop a script for years just to get it right, which means that there’s far too little of this innovative filmmaker to be had. I first came across him with what has become one of my favourite laugh-out-loud, painfully awkward comedies, Eagle vs. Shark. Turns out, he was already an Oscar nominee by then, having received a nom for his live-action short, Two Cars, One Night (he lost but famously pretended to doze off as the list of nominees was read). He’s written and directed stuff for Flight of the Conchords (Jemaine Clement is a longtime friend and collaborator; the pair toured together as award-winning comedy duo The Humourbeasts). He’s also had a taste of big Hollywood, having starred opposite Ryan Reynolds in Green Lantern. But it’s these three movies (Eagle VS Shark, Boy, and What We Do in the Shadows) that are GOLD. You can’t ask for better than that. But I am asking for more.

X-Men: Days of Future Past

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I watched this movie with Jay on our way to Paris and it was awesome. Guardians of the Galaxy is still my favourite superhero movie of 2014 but Days of Future Past was almost as good, and I was not expecting that at all.

I read X-Men as a kid and loved it (it was probably my 2nd favourite comic behind Spider-Man). Then in my early 20s, the first X-Men came out, and I loved that! And the 2nd movie was possibly better than the first. And then the third movie came along, and it was so awful it ruined everything that had come before. It was very similar to the Matrix trilogy in that way. But unlike the Matrix, this franchise has done the impossible and resurrected itself.

This movie works in a lot of ways. It is a bridge between the entertaining prequel (X-Men: First Class) and the original trilogy. It is a standalone timetravelling adventure starring a bunch of familiar faces (it was very cool to see so many people from the previous movies make appearances, and all of them felt natural rather than squeezed in). And it is probably the most satisfying reboot I have ever seen. Too many superhero franchises have been rebooted lately, for no real reason other than a lack of imagination. I don’t need to see Peter Parker get bitten by a spider again. I didn’t ask for a new take on the Fantastic Four whose only purpose seems to be retaining the movie rights. But I was satisfied, and even excited, to see the slate wiped clean here and feel that the future for this franchise is brighter than ever. I am looking forward to see where they go from here (and apparently it involves Apocalypse!!!).

By the way, please stop putting extra scenes in the credits. It was alright once or twice but it’s played out at this point, and for the last several movies I have had to look it up onYoutube after the fact.

Overall, this was an extremely enjoyable movie, though probably too dense and convoluted for someone who isn’t a fan. But better that than another origin rehash! It gets 9 angst-filled outcasts out of 10.

Amelie

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Sean and I are celebrating our wedding anniversary in Paris; today we’re actually renewing our wedding vows at the Eiffel Tower so I’m posting about a wonderfully romantic French film about love and life in Paris through the eyes of an idealistic and imaginative young woman.

Gloriously known as Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (translation: The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain), this film introduced the rest of the world to Audrey Tautou, seemingly born to play the role though it was actually written specifically for Emily Watson, who turned it down because she doesn’t speak French. A passion project for director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, he’s been collecting the various memories and curiosities that make up the story of Amélie since 1974. Who knew that the guy who brought us Alien: Resurrection had such magic and whimsy in him?

Amélie was brought up in a rather protected fashion, her father being very concerned about her supposed heart condition. To make up for her isolation, a young Amélie lives in her imagination, and her grown-up self is still very much a dreamer, a wondrous observer and devoutly introverted. She devotes her life to making others happy, and lucky for us, she’s surrounded by a very quirky bunch.

For her father, she fulfills his lifelong dream of travel (tough for a recluse) by stealing his treasured lawn gnome and sending it all over the world. This was inspired by true events – in fact, a rash of pranks perpetrated in the 1990s in England and France.

The traveling gnome was inspired by a rash of similar pranks played in England and France in the 1990s. In fact, the theft of garden gnomes is so pervasive it even has a name – “gnoming.” A gnome is taken from someone’s garden and released back “into the wild” (wherever that is for an inanimate object – the shelves of Walmart?). In 1997, a the leader of the Garden Gnome Liberation Front was convicted of stealing over 150 gnomes – his prison sentence was suspended, but he did pay a hefty fine. (A couple of years later, there was a “mass suicide” of garden gnomes in a small town in France – residents woke up to find 11 gnomes hanging from a bridge, swinging from the nooses around their necks). At any rate, Amélie was responsible for bringing the whole garden gnome kidnapping thing to our attention, and the idea was later used by Travelocity in an ad campaign.

Although the movie is shot in a dreamy sort of way, with Paris polished, glowing, and blemish-free, some of the locations can actually be found in Montmartre. The cafe where Amélie works, for example, can be found on Rue Lepic (and is conveniently also named “Les Deux Moulins”). The fruit store run by M. Collignon is at 56 rue des Trois Frères. And of course the church where Amélie’s mother is crushed to death by a suicidal jumper is none other than the uber-famous Notre Dame cathedral.

Amélie’s watchful neighbour paints the same painting yearly – he’s up to 40 copies of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, and he still hasn’t got the girl-drinking-water’s expression quite right. Pierre-Auguste Renoir is a French artist of the impressionist variety and I’m looking forward to ogling his stuff at the Museé de l’Orangerie, but that particular painting can actually be found in The Phillipps Collection in Washington, DC.

If you haven’t seen this, you should, and if you have, no time like the present for a re-watch!

Selma

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I know who Martin Luther King was. But this movie made me realize how little I know about what he went through as a leader in the civil rights movement, and it was just a tiny sample of what must have gone on throughout the 1960s (and beyond). It made me want to learn more and I think that is an important accomplishment. It has now been 50 years since the events in the movie actually took place, and I think the horrors that went on need to be remembered so we can try to learn from them (because we do still have a lot to learn). All of this is in the background. This movie would be notable for that alone, and it is hard to separate out the fact that what we are seeing actually happened, which I have been trying to do so I can then judge Selma as a movie and not just as something that needs to be seen as a record of important events.

The events in this movie are horrific. It is difficult to imagine that any of them could ever have happened, but then you remember that things like this still DO happen, that for some reason the USA still can’t or won’t indict cops who kill black people (and it is not just a US problem, the recent incidents just happened to take place there). And still that is only a small part of the big picture, because it is not just “white, black and other”. There are lots of concurrent struggles for equality going on, still, with no resolution in sight. We have made some progress but not nearly enough (and as a straight white male what I would consider enough may not even actually be enough, which makes it even clearer that 50 years later we still aren’t close to achieving real equality).

I would not likely have thought about any of this today if I hadn’t watched Selma, and it goes to show again that regardless of how well this movie was made, I am glad I saw it. But here’s the thing: this movie is incredibly good. David Oyelowo IS Martin Luther King. He is phenomenal. He would have carried this by himself but he does not need to. Everyone involved is intent on making this movie the best picture of the year. Their love and respect for the subject matter drew me in from the very start. I do not think this movie could be any better. Because of the subject matter I cannot promise that you will be entertained but I can promise that you will be moved.

Ten out of ten. See it.

The Lego Movie

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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.

Home Alone

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I thought I was too old to see this movie in the theatre. Now I have probably watched it ten times in my 30s (all by choice). It is somehow a sweet movie despite little Kevin nearly killing poor Harry and Marv (according to some doctor on the internet, they would have died several times over in real life from the injuries Kevin gives them). It is somehow a tale of a mother’s love for her son even though Kevin’s parents are totally neglectful. After all, if they had just sat in coach instead of abandoning their kids there, Kevin’s parents would have clued into the fact that they were missing their son (and as an added bonus they could have prevented their other kids from terrorizing the rest of the passengers on the plane). It is a story of an old man saving the day on Christmas Eve, but also apparently taking great pleasure in scaring the neighbourhood kids the rest of the year. And be sure not to think too hard about how Harry and Marv ever got away with any of their alleged string of burglaries, when every step of the way they get thoroughly out-schemed (as well as savagely beaten) by a ten year old.

So how have I watched this so often and enjoyed it every time? Because this movie just works. It hits all the right crazy notes. It captures the magic of being a kid at Christmas. It doesn’t worry about justifying its ridiculous premise or anything else along the way. It takes pleasure in ramping up the craziness at every opportunity. It is truly joyful, a live action cartoon, a John Hughes caper to end all John Hughes capers. For accuracy’s sake, I checked the back of the DVD case to be sure that the late great Mr. Hughes had, in fact, written this movie but I was sure he had. It has his fingerprints all over it and that’s a wonderful thing.

Hands down, this is my favourite Christmas movie, for what it is and for what it captures. By the way, don’t bother with any of the terrible sequels, just watch this one three or four times and you’ll be far better off.

Ten wet bandits out of ten.

Force Majeure

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Force Majeure is a fascinating movie and a great conversation starter. Basic spoilers will follow but I’ll try to rein myself in as much as possible.

I saw Force Majeure with Jay and Matt yesterday. We talked about it for at least an hour afterward, discussing what we would have done and how we would have reacted (as one of the leads and as their dinner guests), what Tomas could have done differently (once he abandons his family in a moment of panic), and what might have happened after the movie cuts to the credits. Any movie that is this thought-provoking is a worthy watch. Force Majeure definitely excels at drawing the conversation out.

This film also takes great pleasure in making us extremely, extremely uncomfortable. After their disastrous outdoor lunch where disaster (almost) strikes, our interactions with Tomas and his family consist almost entirely of awkward silences, anguished wailing, and/or passive aggressive attacks on each other at group dinners. All these interactions are extremely hard to watch because their relationship has gone so bad so quick (though I liked the inclusion of some hints that it might not have been that good in the first place).

I am told this is Sweden’s candidate for the Academy Awards’ best foreign language film. It’s very worthy of consideration for that award. It makes you think, it makes you feel, and it makes you want to talk about everything you’ve gone through. The inclusion of some scenes was a puzzle to figure out as I was watching, though in discussing many of them with Jay and Matt afterward I was able to understand their relevance more, as each scene tries to show us something about our characters’ feelings or mindsets. That puzzle element, in hindsight, is a neat aspect of the movie, providing insight into these characters’ fragile states and letting us experience for ourselves the devastating consequences of Tomas’ split-second decision. This is not an easy movie to watch but it is one to seek out and experience for yourself. And once you do, come back and let us know what you thought!

Interested in hearing what another asshole thought? Read Jay’s review here and Matt’s over here. Which asshole got it right?

Guardians of the Galaxy

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Since the DVD release for Guardians of the Galaxy is next week, it’s the second best time to review the movie (and I missed the first best because this site didn’t exist in August). If you read my Frozen review you already have a hint at how much I love this movie and I wanted to share that with you.

Judging by the fact that this movie is the highest grossing one of 2014, I’m guessing a lot of you have already seen it. If you haven’t, what are you waiting for? It’s fantastic. It’s big and loud and mostly dumb, but it’s also funny and charming and heartwarming, with a lot of standout performances. Chris Pratt is awesome but to me the best part of the movie was Groot, and Vin Diesel deserves a ton of credit for his performance. He only had one line (basically) to say, and yet he really does make it mean so much more than I expected, he does somehow convey something along with it. So I was able to believe without question that Rocket really could understand what Groot was saying, because it seemed that the words “I am Groot” weren’t really as important as the sentiment that was attached. Going in, I knew the basics of the characters (though never read that comic) and was skeptical of the concept, but coming out I was satisfied. It totally worked and that has to be because of Vin Diesel. And having that character be a REAL character, not just CGI, helped me invest in the movie. Get ready to laugh out loud at Groot’s little smile after he impales about 30 bad guy foot soldiers at once, and feel a little sniffly at the climax when Groot’s words change just enough to sum up the evolution of these five outcasts from Groot and four selfish assholes/criminals to one kick-ass superhero team that can overcome anything (spoiler alert: they win in the end).

At this point comic adaptions are pretty played out (with a ton more to come) but this is one of the best there is and I wish I didn’t have to wait three years for a sequel (and I’m sure Marvel wishes it was coming out sooner too, but this movie was in no way a surefire hit). It’s a nice changeup from the superhero team movies we’ve already seen in that it doesn’t take an hour to get started (I’m looking at you, Avengers), takes a tongue in cheek approach that matches the characters perfectly, and is such a fun journey, and it fully deserves its rating of 21 space guns out of 10.