Review: ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’

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Well this is unfortunate. Is there any worse feeling for a movie-goer to finally see a much anticipated film and then come out of the other side realizing that it was months of build up to nothing but disappointment? “Exodus: Gods and Kings” surely has its moments and things about it that work, but it doesn’t come together in the way that was surely hoped by everyone involved when they heard the words “Ridley Scott” and “biblical epic” in the same pitch.

“Exodus: Gods and Kings” (the unwieldy subtitle added after 20th Century FOX couldn’t secure the rights to the title “Exodus“) is the story of Moses (Christian Bale) and how he got 400,000 Hebrews out of Egyptian slavery, though not without some help from God and some well timed plagues of…well…biblical proportions. But before we get anywhere near there (you know, the good stuff), we have to set up Moses and his relationship to both the Pharaoh and his son Ramses (Joel Edgerton), and this takes a good portion of the movie. This problem with this set up is that Ramses’ intentions and true feelings are never really shown, so we get two Ramses in one. First there is the Ramses who grew up with Moses like a brother and who cherishes him and has great affection for him; and then there is the Ramses who is immediately distrustful of Moses and is afraid that he will somehow rise up and take power from him in Egypt, despite the fact that Moses is not the actual son of the Pharaoh. So out of one side of his mouth, he declares his love for Moses, and out of the other side of his mouth he is calling for him to be exiled. This guy is confused, and confusing, and as such, muddles the movie a little.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Theory of Everything’

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Based on the SECOND memoir published by Jane Wilde Hawking, “The Theory of Everything” is not so much a biopic about the world’s most well known physicist as it is an examination of a marriage enduring great obstacles and challenges, and the toll these challenges take on the people involved.

“The Theory of Everything” starts with Stephen Hawking’s (Eddie Redmayne) first year studying for his doctorate at Cambridge University, where he meets a fetching young art student named Jane (Felicity Jones), and they hit it off and embark on the beginning of a nice little relationship. At the same time Stephen is trying to figure out what his ultimate thesis at school will be (spoiler alert: it’s time), and he is growing into the most promising student at Cambridge in years. But the problem is that he is slowly deteriorating, at first for reasons he does not know and then eventually diagnosed as ALS (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease). His muscles stop responding as they should, and he soon develops difficulty with just about everything we take for granted, like walking, eating and talking.

Given two years to live, he sinks into a depression and tries to push Jane away, but she refuses to go anywhere and instead insists on helping him in any way possible because of love damn it. So they get married and have kids and he comes out of his funk and continues to work on his doctorate, and then goes on to work on other theories and ideas while he becomes confined to a wheelchair and his wife helps him with everything. And of course this becomes a strain on the relationship, as Jane set her own life and ambitions aside so she could help Stephen live the rest of his life.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Whiplash’

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How far would you go to be the best at something? That question is at the center of “Whiplash,” a drama about a music school student and the adversarial relationship he develops with the school’s top instructor whose techniques are more akin to a military boot camp than they are band camp. And for being a movie about the student-teacher relationship in the world of jazz drumming, “Whiplash” is surprisingly tense and in your face, filled with danger and menace and tragedy, done in double time.

Andrew (Miles Teller) is a freshman at music conservatory in New York City, a place considered to be the top music school in the country, and roaming the halls of this school is a bald, intense, wound up knot of a man named Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), who apparently has a reputation demands people pay him the utmost respect. It probably has something to do with how he picks the best students for his ensemble and trains them for competitions that could lead to promising careers so people are desperate to get his approval because his opinion matters so much. When Andrew finds himself somehow in the same room with this guy and with the chance to earn a spot in his band, he does everything he can to make that happen.

And that’s not enough because almost immediately Fletcher is on Andrew’s ass, pushing him harder than Andrew’s ever been pushed before, breaking him down emotionally from the very beginning so that Andrew could possibly reach deep down inside and somehow work even harder to be a better drummer. So rest assured, this movie features drums covered literally in blood and sweat, and we can easily assume that tears hit the drum kit at some point as well, so there can be no doubt whatsoever that this Andrew guy is truly giving it his all. But is it enough? And what could happen if it isn’t?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Killing Them Softly’

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Originally published on Examiner.com on December 12, 2012.

Is “Killing Them Softly,” an arty mob drama about the death of the mythical American Dream, too cynical for today’s audiences? And is that even possible? What could be the reason for the backlash against this expertly crafted and confidently presented stripping down of the usually flashy and glitzy mob gangster genre? Are people uncomfortable with the message, or how the film conveyed the message? Or did “Killing Them Softly” lack a strong message in the first place?

After a mob protected poker game gets knocked over by two dumb thugs working for a third, slightly smarter moron, the whole local mafia economy goes into the toilet, because no one wants to go to a poker game to spend money if all that money is just gonna get stolen anyway. So the mob’s beleaguered lawyer (Richard Jenkins, Burn After Reading) calls in the mob’s version of internal affairs, a greasy haired, too cool for school enforcer named Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), and Jackie grabs the mob underworld by the ankles and holds it upside down and shakes it until he gets the answers he’s looking for.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Nightcrawler’

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“Nightcrawler” is an intense little movie about some pretty big ideas. The media we consumer as a culture has to come from somewhere, and this movie focuses in on one particular part of our media, one that long ago has seen the ideal of “journalistic integrity” shredded to bits in the wake of advertising dollars and sweeps weeks ratings, that being the news, the people and companies tasked with dispensing information to the concerned public.

Like any other television program, your local news programs on the various networks are all vying for the same eyeballs, and it is a bit of a war when it comes to the ratings. And just like with any other programming entity, the better the ratings for the show, the higher the cost of advertising on said show. Get more people to watch your, show, get more money spent on your show, which means more money for the powers that be.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Kill The Messenger’

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“Kill The Messenger” is a movie telling two stories. First it is the story of how the Central Intelligence Agency facilitated cocaine sales in our country in the 1980’s so that the proceeds from those sales, at one point reaching a total of $3 million per day, could be used to illegally fund rebel fighters in Nicaragua, all done with the complicity of the Reagan administration, a presidency which double downed on Nixon’s War on Drugs. And secondly, this movie tells the story of the reporter who did the most work in uncovering these ties, and who was subsequently discredited by the mainstream media, apparently acting on behalf of the government. So basically this is the feel good movie of the year.

In “Kill The Messenger,” Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner) is working at the San Jose Mercury News, and coming off the success of his most recent published story regarding civil forfeiture, someone contacted him out of the blue with a tall tale so tall it just had to be true, and this was a story involving drug dealers in cahoots with the US government. Webb meets this person, who gives him a name and sends him down a rabbit hole that went so deep there was no hope of ever coming back out. Webb goes around asking questions, dropping names, and before long, he is visiting a jailed drug kingpin in South America and he’s finding out way more information than he ever hoped to find, information that tied the US government to the crack cocaine epidemic of the inner cities of America, with Los Angeles being ground zero.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Left Behind’ (2014)

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“Left Behind” is the second feature length adaptation of the first book of a hugely successful series of Christian books from the 1990s, a series of thrillers set against the backdrop of the Rapture, a worldwide event in which all of the world’s Christians, along with all the babies and children in the world, get instantaneously sucked up into Heaven, leaving behind their clothes and their possessions and oh yeah all the stinking non-believers who now have Armageddon and what not to look forward to, you know, all the worst parts of the Bible. And who better to usher us into this horrible wasteland than the one and only Nicolas Cage?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘A Walk Among the Tombstones’

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Who ordered the grim detective noir story featuring rape, torture, mutilation, extreme blood loss, and Liam Neeson saying “Let’s get our eat ons together?” Because your order of “A Walk Among the Tombstones” is up and ready, hot and steamy and messy and in your face and not all that pleasant.

Based on a 90’s novel of some sort, part of a series of novels featuring the same character, “A Walk Among the Tombstones” is about some guy named Scudder (Neeson), an ex-NYC cop with a guilty conscious and 8 years of sobriety under his belt who works as an unlicensed private investigator. A drug trafficker hires Scudder to find out who kidnapped and killed his wife and before he knows it, Scudder finds himself sucked into a crazy plot involving other women brutally murdered in the past and possible future murders n the verge of happening unless he can do something about it.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Drop’

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“The Drop” is a small little crime drama that is more about reputation and name recognition within a certain segment of society than it is about any one crime in particular. Despite the trailer making this seem like a movie about a mob-backed bar being knocked off and the bar managers being tasked with finding out who did it, there is actually more going on with multiple characters and an old unsolved crime and a puppy that was thrown away but then saved and then got stuck in the middle of an ownership dispute and there’s something also about a church closing down but that doesn’t really matter. It’s well made and well acted, it just doesn’t add up to much in the end. It’s good, just not great. And there are worse things for a movie to be.

So Tom Hardy plays some guy named Bob and Bob is just a New York boy working for his cousin Marv (James Gandolfini’s last role) bartending at his little shitty tavern, a tavern that Marv operated but no longer owned. Apparently the local Chechen mob bought out Marv’s sometime ago and they really run the show. So when some punk kids rob the bar of $5,000, the Chechens go a little overboard in their mandate to Bob and Marv to recover the money.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Jersey Boys’

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Here is one of my patent-pending “a day late and a dollar short” reviews, cause I saw “Jersey Boys” a week ago and still haven’t gotten around to doing this, and by now enough has been written about this movie that is there really anything that I can add, or will it just be more white noise? In any case here we go, a quick little write up on an adaptation of an extremely popular Broadway musical featuring the music of the late 1950’s made by the guy best known for starring in Westerns and Cop films and directing muted films scattered over a wide array of genres.

I did not grow up listening to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and I never saw the Broadway musical which this movie is based on (which itself is the “official” story of the Valli and the Four Seasons, as still living group members Valli and writer-producer Bob Gaudio produced the whole thing, hence telling their side of the story, so take that how you will), and as a matter of fact, I am the kind of person who just realized thanks to this movie that a bunch of songs I’ve heard over and over were actually written and performed by the same group. So this is all to say that I was able to sit down and watch this movie without any baggage of having to compare it to the musical or having any vested emotions into the group and what they meant to me (as in the long run they really mean nothing to me), hence there is nothing for me to get hung up on, I can just watch this movie as just that, a movie.Continue Reading …