Review: ‘A Most Violent Year’

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“A Most Violent Year” is a NYC-set crime drama, but not like the ones we all think of when we hear this phrase. Way less “Goodfellas” and “Donnie Brasco” and much more like the genre-inverting films of Steven Soderbergh, this is a film about a guy who is trying his best NOT to become a mobster, despite the fact that he is surrounded by them, does business with them, and even seemed to marry into it. There is a difference between the right path and the path that is “most right,” and our hero of this story seems to ignore the distinction between the two. Is he a moral businessman? Or is he just a gangster without a gun?

Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) owns Standard Oil and he is an up and comer in the industry, making headway into rival territories and building up his company into something he hopes will be massive and hugely successful. But he has a problem, and his problem is called New York City circa 1981. Corruption was rampant throughout the city, and his own industry was under investigation for their less than honorable practices. To make matters worse, Abel is dealing with the problem of his truck drivers getting beat up and his trucks hijacked for the thousands of dollars worth of fuel in them. So the union head wants to arm Abel’s drivers with guns for self-defense, but the last thing Abel needs is for one of his drivers to get involved in a shooting. And with impending indictments coming from the city district attorney’s office, his plans to take out a massive loan with his bank are thrown into jeopardy, which in turn puts him, his company and his family at risk of massive financial ruin. To say that the pressure is on for Abel Morales is an understatement.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘American Sniper’

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Rah rah, sis-boom-bah, let’s go Americ – hunh? Hold on, wait a minute there. “American Sniper” isn’t one of them flag waving, we are awesome, kill em all and let God sort the rest out, let’s feel good about what our country has done kind of war movies. Man World War II was good for that kind of stuff. But ever since Vietnam, and especially with the quagmires our country are currently embroiled within, it’s been a bunch of debbie downers, “oh look at what hell War hath wrought upon men’s souls” kind of movies.

So here we go with another of these nuanced, not so black and white portrayals of war, along with a complex look at what is considered one of our greatest military heroes for a number of reasons. So put your flags down, this is not the kind of movie that waves them around, the flags in this movie usually drape coffins and are folded up and handed to widows.

Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is a shit kickin’ Texan, a cowboy wanna be who rides broncos at rodeos on the weekends with his brother, feeling like he has more to offer the world. One day he sees news footage about an attack on an American embassy and good old patriotism hits him right in the nuts and he goes to the nearest recruiting office and signs up for the Navy SEALS at age 30. And of course we know he survives the training and since we know the title of the movie, we know he becomes quite amazing with a sniper rifle, coming to it quite naturally. Around this time two things happen to change his life forever. He meets the woman that would become his wife and the mother of his children, which is pretty big. And then there’s 9/11, which directly effects him because he finds himself deployed to Iraq, where he uses his sniper skills to protect his fellow servicemen.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Selma’

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It would be easy to just say that “Selma” is simply a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. biopic or is about the Voters’ Rights demonstrations and marches that started in Selma, Alabama, but actually this movie is taking on a number of topics, including the point and purpose of non-violent protests, a behind the scenes look at the machinations of such a demonstration, a peek behind the curtain of the civil rights movement of which Dr. King was a part, and a look at the politics of the era.

“Selma” starts with a bang and doesn’t let up. With blacks in the South being harassed and murdered at a disturbing pace and with basic rights like the right to vote being systematically denied to a vast majority of black Americans, civil rights activist and leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) is called to Selma, Alabama, where a massive nonviolent protest is being planned, with the specific goal of obtaining equal voting rights for all citizens regardless of skin tone. Dr. King used his influence to get this issue in front of President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) but when the President didn’t seem ready to pounce on this initiative due to his attentions being pulled elsewhere, the protesters felts even more compelled to march and make their voices heard one way or another.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Inherent Vice’

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“Inherent Vice” is a rambling, shambling, somewhat confusing, extremely colorful, fun yet melancholy film noir about a burn out private detective, his love for his ex-old lady, and how that love gets him embroiled in all sorts of trouble with all sorts of weird characters in a somewhat fictionalized 1970 California. Based on the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name, this is Paul Thomas Anderson doing his version of Robert Altman doing his version of a PI story, and if that sounds delightful to you, then you need to see this movie right away.

Larry “Doc” Sportello (a delightfully unpredictable Joaquin Phoenix) is just laying around his home one night smoking that weed when his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterston) shows up out of nowhere and enlists him to help her out of some jam revolving around a secret plot to kidnap a wealthy real estate developer named Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts). He agrees because he still loves her, that much is as obvious as the sun in the sky, and he’s off snooping around and asking questions and just getting himself deeper and deeper into some mystery involving Neo Nazis, the LAPD, heroin smugglers, a mysterious schooner with its own back story, a massage parlor, a presumed dead saxophone player turned government snitch, a drug abusing dentist, a privatized mental hospital and a lieutenant with aspirations that include becoming a big time movie star.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Imitation Game’

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“The Imitation Game” is a movie about secrets, whether it be having them or trying to crack them, and the toll some secrets can have on people and their relationships with others. It is also about Alan Turing (here he is pretty much credited with inventing computers as we know them), his work done in code cracking during World War II, and his subsequent government mandated persecution for his sexual orientation.

Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) was a mathematician who got himself hired by the British government to work on their code breaking team, trying to crack the ultimate puzzle, the Nazi Enigma machine, which randomized the codes daily and proved impossible for mere mortals to penetrate. So Turing, played here as if he is nearly crippled with Asperger’s, thought the best way to fight fire was with fire, hence setting out to create a thinking machine that could solve the Germans’ machine. It’s like a mega prequel for “The Terminator.” Had to start somewhere.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Foxcatcher’

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“Foxcatcher” is a true life drama made by a director who seems to be making nothing but great movies based on real lives. First he nailed a great Truman Capote biopic, then he made a non-fiction book about sports statistics into the most commercially successfully baseball movie ever, and now here is Bennett Miller with the real story of John du Pont and his, shall we say, interesting foray into mentoring the U.S. men’s amateur wrestling team, which ended in what can only be described as tragedy.

John du Pont (Steve Carell, in a career changing, perception shifting performance) has the benefit of having the last name du Pont, you know, like the Du Pont family, the one that started that huge Du Pont company that makes everything? Yeah, he’s one of those old money, entitled assholes. But at first, despite being a somewhat creepy dude, he doesn’t seem so bad. He’s a philanthropist (though probably for tax reasons), a published ornithologist, and for whatever reason a philatelist, and above all else he’s a wrestling enthusiast. And that’s Olympic style, amateur wrestling, mind you. Not that Koko B. Ware versus Ricky The Dragon Steamboat fake rasslin’ shit. We’re talking about the real deal! And all he wanted to do in the mid to late 1980’s was help fund the U.S. men’s wrestling team and give them the resources needed to win gold medals. Can’t really argue against that, especially when no one else was stepping up to provide ANY support at all to the athletes hoping to represent their country in this most ancient of sports.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Wild’

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“Wild” is an adaptation of a memoir by a woman who took a 1,000+ mile hike up the U.S. Pacific Coast without any experience or know-how, as a direct response to her life falling apart all around her, a desperate bid to find her center and to reconnect with the person she felt she once was and would like to be again. It’s a story of mistakes, bad luck, worse decisions, redemption, forgiveness…you know, all the stuff that makes us human.

Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) starts her journey in Southern California and the first leg of her journey is a 100-mile trek through the Mojave Desert. And it doesn’t get much easier from there on out. She hits the trail and struggles mightily but keeps on pushing on and trying to make it, with a sense of stubborn determination that can only be admired. And as she walks by herself, her mind wanders and certain things trigger memories which then inform us as to who she is and why she is on this trip, why she felt so compelled to do something so drastic in order to shake up her life and the way she was living. Having suffered heavy personal losses, she was going down a very dark path, and she had to get out somehow, and throughout the movie we get to see her simultaneously get into trouble via flashbacks while she also hikes in the present one day at a time to personal redemption.

Being in pretty much every single scene (actually I can’t think of a single scene in which she does not appear), this is obviously the Reese Witherspoon Show, and she pretty much nails it. She had to run through a good array of emotional states throughout this movie and always pulled it off. I totally bought the hardship of the journey as well as her personal desire for a better path and a way to forgive herself, and this may actually be one of her better roles and performances. It also helps that the movie is directed well, with smart use of the varied geography Cheryl came across on her trip, as well as appropriating the free association memoir approach of the source material to tell the story, which keeps things energetic and interesting throughout.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Big Eyes’

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“Big Eyes” is probably the least Tim Burton-y “Tim Burton movie” ever, a real life drama about fraud in the art world in the 1950s and 1960s, specifically, the story of the Keanes and the dispute over who created the series of Big Eye paintings.

Margaret (Amy Adams) got herself out of a bad marriage during a time when such a thing was not common at all, and she ended up in San Francisco, where she met Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), a charming painter who took a liking to her and her paintings of small sad or scared children with big eyes. They fall in love, get married, and Walter tries to sell his schmaltzy paintings of French side streets along with his wife’s big eye painting, and only the big eyes get any traction. In giving Walter something of a benefit of doubt, this movie show Walter going along with a simple misunderstanding and then later feeling remorse for it openly, so it is not like he is some insane plagiarist monster from the get go. But that is what he becomes.

This movie is mostly devoid of that Tim Burton weirdness. There is a touch of “Edward Scissorhands” in the depiction of Americana and suburbia and a little “Ed Wood” which can’t be avoid because it is another biopic written by the same people, but otherwise this could have been made by any old journeymen director. There is some extra lushness in the production design and in the way some of the shots are composed, but that’s about it. And that is not really a good or bad thing, it is just an observation. Could this movie have benefited from a little more Burton extravagance? Maybe it could have. Or maybe it was better to just let this wild story stand on its own, which is more or less the approach taken here.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Unbroken’

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“Unbroken” is two and a half movies in one. It is the story of a World War II bombardier and the extremely long time he was stranded at sea when his plane went down, and it is also the story of the same guy doing through some hellish times in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. And also it is kind of about how he was an Olympic runner, but that’s really just there for some flavor, and to show how hard this guy worked.

“This guy” being Louis Zamperini (Jack O’Connell), a trouble making kid turned All-American high school athlete turned US Olympian turned second lieutenant in the US Army Air Corps, and this fella has a helluva story, one good enough to turn into a movie as they say, which is why some version of this story has been attempted by Hollywood since the 1950s, and here we are now in 2014 with “Unbroken,” directed by Angelina Jolie.

And Jolie directed this movie with the grace and reverence she felt the story deserved, as the film is pretty self serious, with only a little bit of humor throughout, as they instead focused on the intense hardship that Zamperini had to overcome, and sure why not, this is why we are here, right? This wasn’t a walk in the park for Zamperini. The long middle section of the movie in which he is stranded at sea on a life raft with two other guys could have easily been an entire movie all on its own. They had to go through some crazy stuff during that very long period in which they were pretty much dying little by little every day, including surviving huge storms and fending off hungry sharks, and if that was the whole story, it would have been a hell of a story already.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Gambler’

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“The Gambler,” a remake of a 1970’s James Caan picture of the same name, is an entertaining couple of hours spent with a self-hating asshole who can’t help but “tell it like he sees it,” leaving himself prone to pissing off everyone he comes in contact with because he either doesn’t understand the basic rules of society and human interaction or he does understand and just doesn’t care. Actually, since he’s an asshole, it’s definitely the second one.

“The Gambler” is about The Gambler (Mark Wahlberg), and we are introduced to the guy crying at this dying grandfather’s bedside. Quick funeral, opening credits, then boom, The Gambler arrives at some shady, backroom gambling speakeasy with a good chunk of cash money and he starts a-gamblin’. But he has his style of gambling, which seems to be that he always goes all-in, double or nothing, hit a home run or strike out, and I have to admit, this is an exciting way to gamble. Making $10,000 into $20,000 in a matter of seconds and then immediately trying to push that to $40,000 must be a hell of a rush. Which then must make it a huge bummer when you inevitably lose and that huge sum of money disappears in one fell swoop. The Gambler doesn’t even bother taking one small marker for himself from the growing pile of winnings, he just keeps doubling down until he gets what he wants or he’s done for. And almost every single time, he does not get what he wants.

What does he want? What number is he aiming for? Well apparently he is trying to gamble his way out of a gambling debt, and right away we all know where this is going. He owes the gambling house (i.e. the South Korean mob guy who owns the place) a substantial amount, and he’s borrowing from them to gamble, just to lose that money, increasing his debt. Then he gets staked by another gangster (Michael K. Williams) and he loses that money right away and now he’s in debt to two bad ass dudes. So what does he do? He goes to another underground criminal type (John Goodman) for some possible debt consolidation. But oh boy does that not work out.Continue Reading …