Category Archives: Film

Jupiter Ascending

While choosing which poster image to use for this movie, I came across the knowledge that its original release date was mid July. I’m not sure if it was pushed back from 2014 or pushed up for this year, and honestly, it doesn’t matter. Either way, a lot of what you need to know about the movie is contained in that simple fact. Summer blockbusters that get moved to February are flawed in a way that the studio did not expect.

Jupiter Ascending is deeply flawed. It reminds me of nothing so much as a book adaptation where the director was so focused on cramming as much cool scenery and as many important events into the allotted running time that they forgot people who had not read the book would be seeing the movie, and might need some hint as to what is actually going on in and around all these cool places and events.[1] But no, it’s from an original script.

That said, everything eventually does make sense, it’s just that things are told out of order, and not in a way that would be excused by the audience learning what’s up alongside Mila Kunis, like they did with Neo in the Matrix. I think it’s destined to be a cult classic if enough people give it the time of day over the next couple years, and not because it’s bad (or at least, not just because it’s bad). See, it’s like this. If you want a movie that has the grand unified theory of conspiracies, including everything from the Reptilians to the Greys to Elisabeth Bathory just for starters, this is that movie. And a movie like that, if done even half competently[2], is going to get a cult following. Mark my words.

(Shameful admission: I kind of dug it. Maybe because Mila Kunis was named after the smart member of the Three Investigators?)

[1] And believe me, it’s a very, very pretty movie, if perhaps not quite as cool as the Wachowskis expected it to be.
[2] Cheap shot or not, half competently is pretty much right on the nose.

The Interview (2014)

Into the Woods (2014)

This is tricky. I do not want to write a review of a Stephen Sondheim musical, partly because I do not feel qualified to review musical theater in greater depth than whether I liked it, and partly because I’ve been familiar with Into the Woods since my choir friends performed it in high school. So, suffice it to say that I like the musical a great deal, even if I can never, ever remember the last 20 or 30 minutes of it.

That said, how do you review a movie when the plot is off the table? Acting? It was all fine; I especially liked Chris Pine’s princely manpain, and Johnny Depp’s excellent cameo was well served by being only a cameo. Special effects? Well, all the staging and sets were pretty great, but the few times special effects were employed, they were…. not so much. I don’t feel like this is a thing that should be cared about, really, of a stage adaptation? Either way, though. Clearly nobody screwed up the singing, and yes, it was a very faithful adaptation. So, if you like that kind of thing, this is a really good example of it! And if you do not, well… it’s a musical, so you will continue to not like that kind of thing, but it’s also a damn fine fairy tale mashup. If for some reason that matters.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

This is weird. On the one hand, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is a perfectly serviceable spy movie, in the fish-out-of-water subgenre. It hits all the right beats, it has compelling stakes, both international and personal, and it’s a story worth telling. On the second hand, it’s also a perfectly serviceable Tom Clancy prequel never written, if for some reason you didn’t like that The Hunt for Red October covers the same territory or (more likely) you cannot successfully launch a new franchise reboot while treading international political waters that are 25 years out of date.

The problem is that, despite both of these things being true, the confluence of them feels unnecessary. I mean, I’m completely fine with a Jack Ryan reboot and I hope it worked out and there will be more, because I liked the characters and the premise and I want to see more. Nevertheless, if they had not tacked the name onto the title, I never would have felt like this was a Clancy ripoff. It just did not, in ways I cannot easily express, feel like a Tom Clancy story. This is not, per se, an indictment. Like I said: pretty good movie. I just feel weird saying I liked it without saying that it was also inexplicably branded.

If there are more, I think I hope they feel more Clancyish. Because otherwise, what was the point, really? Oh, but before I forget: Kenneth Branagh did a great job of acting a character that deserved a bigger arc. I cannot speak to his direction because, clearly, the film has left me bewildered for reasons that are unrelated to its factual quality.

Pontypool

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

So, right, I watched all three movies in the Hobbit trilogy on Monday, as you know. Since that was more than 24 hours before initial release, I’m a bigger jerk than usual for taking so long to review, and plus also I burned my thoughts on the series as a whole during the previous review about the second movie. So, what can I say about The Battle of the Five Armies without repeating myself and without spoilers of any significance?

Well, lessee. I was, all in all, satisfied with the way things went. All character arcs, both the previously published and the newly contrived, ended on satisfactory notes. All the effects and battle scenes were extremely cool, as was the unexpected Billy Connolly. Unlike the previous movies, there were no scenes that felt gratuitously long, just for the sake of showing off. So, all the people saying this is the best movie of the three? They’re right. It has no new flaws, none of the major flaws of the previous two films, and all kinds of really cool, climactic things happen.

That said, I have one more thing to say about the series as a whole: The overlap between the end of the second movie and the beginning of the third… no, not overlap, but the dividing line. Could not be more awkward if it tried. I know why you can’t just release an 8 or 9 hour long movie, all of a piece. And I know why ending the second movie in the “correct” place would have generated massive confusion as to why there needed to be a third movie. But, man. So awkward.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

So, disclosure: I saw this movie a couple months ago on cable, but since I saw all three movies in a marathon on Monday, have never reviewed this one, and it would be weird to review two out of three, here we are.

Of course, The Desolation of Smaug is hard to review in this context as well, piled in as it was within 9 or 10 combined hours of movie. So I guess it’s a good thing I had seen it one time before. And… so, okay, if you’ve read the book, you more or less know what happens in the movies, right? So I can say things like the scenes in Mirkwood made a little more sense than I remember[1], or the barrel ride to Laketown was just ridiculously hyper-extended, and you’ll know the flavor if not the details of what I mean.

That said, before I move into more (but still light) spoiler territory, it is incumbent upon me to mention that as part of a continuous unit, the stretched out scenes, where they existed at all, did not bother me as much as I had remembered from October. There should still probably be two movies here instead of three, but given the Hollywood constraints Tolkien didn’t have to deal with[2], they’d have probably been two oddly paced movies. So perhaps this wasn’t so bad.

Anyway, as far as differences between the book and what’s on film, I have two comments. First, the love story. Was it shoehorned in? Yes, absolutely. Not in a way that made it feel unnatural or unbelievable, just in a way that made no nod to necessity. But The Lord of the Rings had a love story, and S. Morganstern notwithstanding, nobody writes kidbooks that contain both adventure and a love story. So I see from Jackson’s perspective why he felt it was necessary for balance purposes. I mean, barely, but I see it.

Second, Gandalf. It really seems like someone should have realized that you don’t capture him and then leave him to hang out until one of his friends rescue him. Yes, yes, this is a longstanding trope, and yes, yes, Tolkien needed him out of the way of the plot sometimes, since he is functionally a deus ex machina in himself, if left to his own devices. But man, when you have the same circumstance and outcome twice in consecutive book series, either you are David Eddings or you need to feel bad about yourself the second time.

So, that was the second movie.

[1] Because, really, how hard is it to stay on a damn road?
[2] To wit: motivation. You can tell kids in a kidbook that the goblins and orcs are chasing the dwarves all over the place just because goblins and orcs are bad guys who do that, and it’s good enough. But he wanted to make a) not a kid movie that b) tied into the Lord of the Rings in all the ways Tolkien knew about and Bilbo did not. So you have to[3] establish leader orcs with names and motivations and backstories to the main character, and have them interact with the Necromancer’s long term plans, even though you know they’re just going to be thwarted and it ultimately will all keep until your sequel movie filmed 60 or 80 years later, in 2001.
[3] Or, okay, you don’t have to, but clearly that’s what Peter Jackson had in mind, and I don’t begrudge him the behind the scenes portions, since they were relevant to explaining things like why Gandalf is missing all the time, plus, like I said (or maybe haven’t said yet, depending on how you personally interact with footnotes), tying into that sequel.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1

Rubber (2010)

I find myself with more time to look at Netflix lately, he lied glibly. No, but seriously, what I mean is what I’ve always claimed: I’ll watch movies at home if there’s someone to watch them with, and lately there has been. In fact, I’ve probably missed a couple of reviews, but my commitment is returned; from here on out, new-to-me movies will happen on Netflix viewings too. (I’m streaming these days, though; I gave up on my ability to return DVDs like a year ago.)

Therefore, I watched Rubber last night. Rubber is a horror movie about a tire that rolls around the desert, killing people. No, seriously. It’s somehow a great deal more than that, though. See, there’s a monologuing sheriff, a Greek chorus of sorts, a sometimes naked French lady, and metareferentiality that goes so deep it actually turns inside out on itself. If you liked carrying around no tea for the duration of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Infocom game, or if you like absurdity for its own sake, or if you like watching things explode, this movie is for you.

If you would spend the entire movie asking why there’s a tire with motivations and psychokinetic powers in the first place, this movie will try very hard to be for you anyway. If you let it. It’s an 80 minute flick that felt like it lasted less than an hour, though, and I mean that as a compliment. So maybe give it a try?

Interstellar

On Monday night, I took my father to see Interstellar. Accurate things gleanable from the previews are that it is a movie about mankind in her final hours, struggling to find an escape from a used up Earth, and that it is a movie about the tension between responsibility on small scale (family) and large scale (survival of the species), and that it is a movie about flying to Really Cool parts of space and showing Really Cool, Scientifically Factual things about those parts of space on the screen. So, y’know, it’s a science fiction movie. Cool.

Tonight, I’m sitting in his hospital room after a cancer-related surgery that to all appearances has gone well. I can’t say a whole lot about really cool parts of space here, and I can’t say a lot about the end of mankind, and I can’t really say a lot about responsibility. But I definitely couldn’t help, while watching the ten-year-old girl watch her father getting ready to leave her behind, knowing it was probably forever despite anything he had to say, feeling a twinge of existential terror. I am not, nor have I ever been, a ten-year-old girl. But I think that some parts of the human experience are universal. It may not be blood, it may not be age, it may not be gender, but correct in your mind for whatever part needs correcting and I’m still saying: nobody wants their dad to leave. No matter how good the reason might be, and not many people have as good a reason as “if I don’t, we’ll all just die anyway.”

I usually, and imdb certainly did in this case, separate out my category tags by reserving sci-fi for movies and science fiction for books. But sometimes (Children of Men springs immediately to mind, as it often does when I’m thinking about things like this), when a movie goes to such great lengths to focus on our shared experience of humanity even though we should by rights be looking at really cool things in space? Well, my point is that I try very hard to make these tags usable, in case someone were to ever want to browse by them. And this was, like I said in the first paragraph, definitely a science fiction movie.

Cool.

And, dad? Thanks for staying.

Shards of Delirium

Fragments of Delight