Review: ‘The Girl on the Train’

thegirlonhetrain_poster

From the director of “The Help” and “Get On Up” comes an adaptation of yet another global worldwide bestselling phenomenon of a book featuring the word “girl” in the title. This particular girl does not have any visible tattoos, dragons or otherwise, and while there IS a girl in this story who is indeed gone, our main character is not this person. Instead this is “The Girl on the Train,” the story of a sad sack alcoholic divorcee who gets herself wrapped up in some missing person’s case in between bouts of stalking her ex-husband and his new wife and their baby.

Rachel (Emily Blunt) rides a train to and from New York City everyday, and on her route the train stops just oh so perfectly so she can always see the backyards of her old house and her neighbors’ house. It is her “old” house because her ex-husband (Justin Theroux) lives there with his new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), and Rachel spies them from train with drunk, watery eyes. She also watches their neighbor Megan (Haley Bennett) and HER husband (Luke Evans) snuggling and sexing it up through the windows of their house, and she becomes envious of their affection and love making. She also has a habit of stumbling drunk through this old neighborhood of hers, causing problems with people there, so when Megan goes missing and Rachel was seen in the area at the same time while black out drunk, she finds herself a person of interest in the investigation. So she decides to do her own drunk investigating. Because that’s what sensible people do.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Sully’

sully-posterBefore we get started, look at that “Sully” poster there, the one featuring Tom Hanks as Captain Chesley Sullenberger, the experienced airline pilot who successfully landed a jetliner on the Hudson River on January 15, 2009. Why is he simply adjusting his collar and looking pensively to his side while standing presumably on the wing of his plane as it sits on the river, the barely-above-freezing water up to his waist? What kind of shot is this? Who thought this was the image to sell this movie? “Look at our hero pilot, half submerged yet totally fine, barely noticing the obviously oncoming hypothermia and totally ignoring the crash landed and partially sunken plane on which he stands. Isn’t this intriguing?” No, it is perplexing. What marketing department fixed this one up and which head honcho looked at it and said “yes, this is exactly how we sell this thing, put it out there now” because this is a bunch of dumb bullshit.

Okay, I feel a little better.

Now on to “Sully.”Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Hell or High Water’

HellOrHighWater_MoviePoster“Hell or High Water” is a modern western, a story about cops and robbers, set in dusty West Texas, featuring bank robberies and shoot outs and Mexican stand offs, and the “updated setting coupled with classic motifs” gambit often pays off in artistic endeavors, this being one of those times. But additionally, this movie fits another genre, one that sprang from the murky mess of the 2007-2008 housing market crash which catapulted the world into a global recession and saw the concept of The American Dream finally popped and deflated, and that’s the genre in which honest and good people find their lives on the edge of complete ruin thanks to believing in a system that failed them, with the ultimate “bad guys” being banks or bankers or anyone callous enough to be rich and openly uncaring during a time of great strife for many other people, you know, folks inflicted with “Scrooge McDuckitis.”

In “Hell or High Water,” Toby Howard (Chris Pine) is the kind of anti-hero seen in these types of movies, the ones that explore how the American Dream turned into a Waking Nightmare. When we meet Toby, he has already crossed that line, having decided to stage a series of small bank robberies in order to raise enough money to save their family farm from mortgage foreclosure. As if that’s not enough motivation, Tony also has children with his now-divorced wife and he’s determined not to let them continue down the path of poverty that afflicted his family for generations. Toby wants to secure his home and a future for his family. He’s a good dude. That’s what we are supposed to notice when we see him walk into a bank with a mask and a gun and demand money from the frightened tellers.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘War Dogs’

WarDogs_MoviePosterAn indictment of the for-profit war machine and sloppy government pandering…from the director of “Road Trip” and “Old School” and “The Hangover” trilogy? It happened, and it is called “War Dogs,” a cinematic adaptation of this 2011 Rolling Stones article detailing how two twenty-something dudes from Miami managed to get rich off of fulfilling government contracts for military weapons and supplies. One guy was sociable and worked very hard, and the other was a sociopath with the big vision and gumption to make things happen, and they enabled each other to dream bigger than ever, which as we all know in a story like this, could only lead to ruin. But what a ride on the way there.

David (Miles Teller) is fresh out of dropping out of college and he’s trying to make ends meet while living in very expensive South Beach Miami by massaging rich men for $75 an hour and trying to sell bed linen to retirement communities. When his stupidly hot girlfriend (Ana de Armas) lets him know that she is pregnant, he finds added pressure on him to find a way to make money and be a provider to the woman he loves and the baby he is stuck with because come on it’s not like they planned that shit yo. And those very one-dimensional descriptions of her character are apt because she only exists in this movie to provide motivation for David and to try to get some sympathy from the audience. She’s not a character. She’s a plot device with ridiculous eyes.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’

beasts_of_the_southern_wild“Beasts of the Southern Wild” is a fantastic movie, the feature-length debut of young filmmaker Benh Zeitlin, made in part with his New Orleans-based film group Court 13 Pictures, and it’s the type of unique and strong movie debut that makes people sit up and take notice, that this might be one of our next young exciting new voices in American cinema. And this wonderful thing, birthed outside of the studio system, outside of the box, independent in every way possible, exists as proof that imagination and new art and ambition is not dead, that we can still get something new and weird and great, something as strange and confident as “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

The story centers on six-year old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) and her dad Wink (Dwight Henry), who live in a makeshift home in the ramshackle little town of Bathtub, located on an island south of the Louisiana coast. When a huge storm heads their way, they stay behind with a few other holdouts who choose not to evacuate their homes, and after an incredibly rough storm, the entire town of Bathtub is submerged underwater. The towns few survivors band together and try to continue living in their flooded home, refusing to seek aid or shelter elsewhere. These are people thoroughly accustomed to living on their own and getting by in their own ways, so to them a government run disaster shelter is its own kind of horrible hell.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Pete’s Dragon’

PetesDragon_MoviePoster]“Pete’s Dragon” is the surprisingly sad story of a young boy who lives in the forest with a big green dragon, and it would have been a fun and light story if the whole thing wasn’t drenched in a feeling of separation anxiety and gloominess as the story of Pete is one of a childhood lost and moving on from innocence into a  worldly-tainted adulthood without magic or presumably joy. In old school Disney fashion, like the animated films of the 30s and 40s, this new “Pete’s Dragon” is here to entertain but does so in a dark way, filled with death and abandonment and dark forces working actively to deprive the young hero of their source of comfort and joy.

After an opening scene involving a car accident in the middle of nowhere which results in an instant orphan being hunted by wolves and then being saved and adopted by a giant green dragon, we jump forward six years, and this kid is now about 10 years old or so and running around the forest barefoot and shirtless, dirty and long haired, climbing trees and catching rabbits barehanded, completely adapted to his environment and at wild lifestyle. It helps that he has a big loyal dragon helping him out and getting his back when predators might stroll up. This is the story of Pete (Oakes Fegley) and his dragon Elliot, which is really just a big ole dog with wings, making him quite lovable.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Anonymous’

anonymous_xlgBased on a theory that many segments of the literari think to be ridiculous, and made by a director of films many film critics think to be ridiculous, “Anonymous” is definitely one of the more interesting and daring films of 2011. From Roland Emmerich, director of mega blockbusters such as “Independence Day: Resurgence,” “Stargate,” “The Day After Tomorrow” and “2012,” comes a movie about the complex and many-threaded political machinations of Elizabethan Britain and how the work of William Shakespeare somehow fit into all of it, and not in the way that people would traditionally believe when they think of the timeless English playwright.

“Anonymous” tells a story that goes something like this: with Queen Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave) all old and on the outs, a political tug of war ensues to get the Queen to pick a successor. Her immediate aides and advisors pulled for the King of Scotland, knowing that his appointment would secure their further employ in the castle. And they feared that the Earl of Essex would try to claim the throne, being a cast off bastard son of the Queen, and he would dismiss them, take their property and throw them out on their asses. So they did what they could to make sure the Earl didn’t take the throne.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘A Better Life’

ABetterLife_PosterIt is said that there are seven basic types of stories, and all movies (and books and short films, etc.) are comprised of any mixture of these story types; basically, there’s nothing new under the sun, and we’ve seen it all before. When someone sets out to tell a strong yet simple tale, it is easy to recall all of the other similar stories we’ve already seen and heard. So what can be done to overcome this inherent problem in the millennia-old tradition of storytelling? How can a story set itself apart from the myriad of similar stories that have come before it?

How about with some confident direction and strong writing? Sounds easy enough right? But if it was easy, how come we don’t have more good movies? Movies like “A Better Life,” which tells the story of an illegal immigrant named Carlos (Demián Bichir, Che) who is raising a teenaged son all by himself in Los Angeles, and his story is one of struggle, that’s for sure. This guy just keeps his head down and works his landscaping job, but the incredibly long hours keep him from being able to do anything with his son Luis (José Julián), who is getting his life lessons from the local thugs and street gangs and is on the verge of joining up with them himself.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Infiltrator’

TheInfiltrator_MoviePoster“The Infiltrator” is based on the true story of the US Customs official who helped take down a huge money laundering syndicate in the 1980s by going undercover and tracking all the Colombian drug money back and forth between Colombia and America via complicit banks set up both abroad and in America. While going undercover, though, this fella maybe starts to lose sight a little of who his friends really are and also seems to enjoy being this fake mob-associated kind of guy and also it is destroying his marriage and also he’s in a lot of danger because he got in over his head a little. But while that may seem like a lot to throw into a movie that is barely over two hours long, rest assured, it IS a lot, too much in fact, so that while this movie tries to be about a lot of things, it ends up being about nothing.

Robert Mazur (Bryan Cranston) has been going undercover for years and he’s tired of making so little progress in the war on drugs, so he convinces his bosses to allow him to take a different approach, one that we’ve all heard before in many contexts, which is to “follow the money.” By getting his foot in the door with Pablo Escobar’s people by presenting himself as a big time money launderer, he’s hoping to amass the evidence needed to find out what they do with their money, who it goes to, and how it gets back to them “clean.” He doesn’t get along with his partner Abreu (John Leguizamo) but that is an issue for all of one scene early on in the film and then they work together with no problems for the rest of the movie. So most of “The Infiltrator” is Mazur pretending to be some made up guy named Bob Musella, and he uses this alias to embed himself with the drug cartel, starting out low on their totem pole and slowly working his way up to their bigger bosses. Along the way, Mazur and Abreu are forced to involve an agent going undercover for her first time, Kathy Ertz (Diane Kruger), and the three of them work together to try to bust as many people at one time as possible.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The BFG’

The BFG movie poster“The BFG” is an adaptation of a 1982 Roald Dahl book of the same name directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Melissa Mathison, and the last time these two made a movie together was back in 1982 with “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” so the pedigree of this particular movie is most certainly of a high quality, and as such some bigger expectations are involved because how can they not be? This story of a 10-year old orphan girl and her new friend, a 24-foot giant who collects dreams at the top of a mountain and blows them into children’s bedrooms at night, is very imaginative and goes to some surprising places if you are not familiar with the story going into it, and there was definitely potential there for a new children’s classic.

But “The BFG” does not live up to those kind of ridiculous expectations. While not an “insta-classic,” which is an admittedly absurd thing to expect ahead of time no matter the people involved, it is a perfectly fine film, overall very nice and bittersweet. There is also some darkness and danger, a staple of those great 1980’s Amblin movies we all know and love, but the prevailing feeling for the movie as a whole definitely leans towards saccharine, as both the tone of the movie and the story seem designed to elicit awe and delight, two things that Mr. Spielberg loves to represent on film.Continue Reading …