Review: ‘Maps to the Stars’

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“Maps to the Stars” is a satirical dark comedy about Hollywood and its denizens, namely the psycho-babble loving, attention whoring, secret hiding folks who pop up within the movie industry all over the place. A family with multiple shameful secrets, an aging actress trying to revive her career, a limo driver with acting aspirations of his own, and a mysterious girl all come together to form this weird little tale of hidden regret, sought redemption and psychosexual revenge.

“Maps to the Stars” initially focuses mostly on Havana (Julianne Moore), an actress with a famous, very respected and very dead mother, who is on the verge of an emotional breakdown, with the root causes for this being her quickly declining stature as a working actress in Hollywood and her memories of a mother whom she felt abandoned and mistreated her. Havana’s mother made a movie called “Stolen Waters,” and a remake of this movie is being planned, so Havana wants to play the same role her mother did, with the hopes that this would be her comeback. But people really don’t want to take Havana seriously, and it is kind of hard to take her seriously when she comes across as super flakey very often, as well as emotionally needy and somewhat unpredictable. It feels like Havana, especially as she is played by Moore, is a middle-aged version of Lindsay Lohan – once promising and in demand, but now washed up and the butt of all the jokes, she spends her time smoking cigarettes in her mansion, doing yoga and wondering why no one will work with her.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Top Five’

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Chris Rock has been in a ton of movies, from small roles to leading roles, and he’s even directed some of these movies himself, but for the first time we have a movie that actually feels like we are getting the cinematic equivalent of one of his stand up routines in all the best ways – the surety of the storyteller, the confidence in the delivery, the attention to detail, the wry observations and interesting twists on everyday things, “Top Five” is the Chris Rock movie we’ve all been waiting for, though no one has been waiting for this more than Mr. Rock himself.

“Top Five” is about a day in the life of famous comedian turned famous actor Andre Allen (Rock), and this is a very busy day for him. As a major part of his gambit to convince people he is more than a comedian, he is out and about in New York City to promote the opening of his new movie “Uprize,” in which he plays the lead character in a film about the slave rebellion in Haiti. Part of the promotion involves being tailed by a reporter for the New York Times all day, which ends up being a foxy lady named Chelsea (Rosario Dawson), and their relationship starts off contentious because of all the bad things the Times’ resident film critic wrote about Allen’s movies (just substitute Andre Allen for Adam Sandler and you get an idea of the vitriol he got from film critics). On top of the annoying interview tour and the journalist all over his shit trying to get a quote, he has to deal with his own past as he visits family and friends, getting mixed signals and reactions from them all.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Blue Ruin’

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The first time I saw “Blue Ruin,” I had a one word response:

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

See, I even went back and found it:

 

And now that I have watched “Blue Ruin” a second time, my reaction is still the same. This movie is so damn good in so many ways it is almost unfair. When a film shows up like this, like a ferocious shotgun blast of smart intensity, it is impossible not to take notice. Who needs huge CG set pieces, hundreds of millions of dollars and an overly long and complicated screenplay to make a memorable movie? Not writer/director Jeremy Saulnier apparently, because this is a super low budget yet very simply told yet incredibly well made and awesome movie, and should be viewed by anyone who wants to make a movie but fear they don’t have the resources to make a compelling film. Guess what, people, it can be done. It WAS done. It is called “Blue Ruin.”Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Night Moves’

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Not to be confused with the 1975 Gene Hackman-starring murder mystery of the same name, “Night Moves” is the story of three idealistic environmentalists who decide that they need to make a grand statement to the world by destroying a hydroelectric dam, hence really sticking it to The Man through an act of eco-terrorism. But of course the story is about much more than just that one act, or even the particular reasons for committing said act. Instead this is a story about the characters who perpetuate this act, and what it means to them in a more existential way, as well as what the act does to them in a physical, worldly consequences kind of manner.

Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) and Dena (Dakota Fanning) are young hippie-ish folks living in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon specifically, and they seem to really care about the environment and the world they live in. They even go to private screenings of what appear to be homemade documentaries about how the Mother Earth is being destroyed by humans, projected on a poorly hung white sheet and watched by a group of dirty stoners who react to the movie with cynicism and cries of “what are we expected to do?” But while Dena sits front row and seems to take in the message of the documentary, Josh hangs back and rolls his eyes at the lack of answers and obstinate nature of the crowd. He’s obviously over these get togethers and the rhetoric. He desires action.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’

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For years now in popular culture the vampire has been depicted in what really can only be described as “campy,” or at the very least largely non-threatening. Whether we are talking about brooding, love starved vampires with diamond skin or vampires engaged in a centuries-old sewer-set gun fight with werewolves or vampires who simply lost their shirts (as well as the mere concept of shirts), the one thing we haven’t seen lately is the idea of vampires in the real world, going about their lives, doing “normal” things like using iPhones and watching YouTube and listening to and creating music. In Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive,” this is exactly what we get, otherworldly beings in a real world setting, and we get to see how the deal with the pesky things known as people and the annoying burden on them that is known as life.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Joe’

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“Joe” is a very interesting character-based Southern drama from David Gordon Green; specifically the David Gordon Green that made movies like “All The Real Girls” and “Undertow” and “Snow Angels” and “Prince Avalanche” as opposed to the David Gordon Green known for the more mainstream “Pineapple Express” and “Your Highness.” We got a moody, atmospheric, heady film, concerned much more with character development and emotional arcs as opposed to mugging for guffaws and weed jokes and dick jokes and such. So actually I guess it depends on which mode of DGG you prefer, though there’s nothing wrong with liking both. I like both.

But “Joe” is certainly the former, a story about an ex-con (Nic Cage) who runs a possibly illegal crew of tree-killers, paid to pave the way for some developers, and the 15-year old drifter kid he takes under his wing and who might actually be able to help give Joe a second chance on life.

This kid, by the way, named Gary, is played by a dude named Tye Sheridan, and he’s putting together a helluva filmography so far, with this being his third movie after “The Tree of Life” and “Mud.” Now there’s a connection there between the three movies, with David Gordon Green being a friend and collaborator of “Mud” director Jeff Nichols on Nichols’ first movie “Shotgun Stories,” and both Nichols and Green being obvious admirers of the work of “The Tree of Life” director Terrence Malick and also with Green and Malick becoming friends and collaborators themselves with “Undertow.” So it all comes back around, these great American filmmakers of different generations.Continue Reading …

Florida Film Festival 2014 review: ‘Crimes Against Humanity’

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Boy let me tell you. Film festivals are tricky to program. Well over 100 movies in a ten day span, including both short films and features? That’s a lot of movies. And there really is no way possible for each movie to be a winner. Some of them aren’t going to be so hot, for various reasons. But they’ll have redeeming qualities about them, variables that make them worthwhile in one way, shape or form. Unfortunately I don’t think “Crimes Against Humanity” meets even that criteria.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Spectacular Now’

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Every few years, a movie comes along that reminds us how we are hearing and seeing the a certain set of stories over and over, yet these particular stories seems to work and continue to reverberate with us each time we see them, and this is because these are usually stories of universal truths, very basic emotions and feelings that just about all of us have gone through and to which we can relate, so that no matter how many times you change the characters and places and even story details, the truth of the emotions still come through. “The Spectacular Now” really doesn’t offer anything new per se, but it’s still a damn good movie and quite possibly one of those films people will be referencing in the future.

In “The Spectacular Now,” Sutter (Miles Teller) is a 17-year old high school senior who is just skating by and seems to be enjoying life to the 100% fullest. The movie starts with him talking about having a hot and fun girlfriend named Cassidy (Brie Larson), but she dumps him over a weird misunderstanding (born out of his reputation for partying hard), which sends him into a drunken downward spiral. Or was he already on that spiral? And then Sutter meets nice girl Aimee (Shailene Woodley), and they develop a friendship that starts to turn into something more, and almost doesn’t, but then it does, and then things are cool, but then there’s not cool, and then they are kinda cool again, and so on and so forth. You know how these high school dramady relationships work. It’s really all about who learns what along the way.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Mud’

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Jeff Nichols started pretty small with the little blood feud Southern-fried drama “Shotgun Stories,” and then followed that up with “Take Shelter,” an oh so slightly bigger Southern-fried movie about a man suffering from visions of an impending apocalyptic storm. And now he’s back with something a little bigger in scope, a Southern-fried coming-of-age drama called “Mud,” which makes Jeff Nichols three-for-three in terms of well-made movies.

In “Mud,” 14-year old Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and his buddy Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) stumble across a dude named Mud (Matthew McConaughey), a fugitive chilling on an island in the Mississippi River in the Arkansas Delta area. Not too many movies made about this region of the world (and as a matter of fact, according to the interwebz, this $2 million movie is the biggest budgeted film ever shot in Arkansas). Mud convinces Ellis and Neckbone to help him fix up a motor boat so Mud can reunite with his girlfriend Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) and get the hell out of dodge.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Fruitvale Station’

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Starting out as a “slice of life” type of movie and ending as a brutal tearjerker (a two-hanky movie, they used to call ’em), “Fruitvale Station” is a small movie about a big issue, and the timing of this particular film couldn’t be any more perfect. Just as a gigantic mirror has been held up to this great nation so we can see just how racist we still are as a whole, this movie comes along and openly questions the perceived value of the life of a black youth in today’s America.

You have two choice right now: you can do a Google search on “Oscar Grant” and read about the tragic event that this movie is based on, or you can just go into the movie and let the shocking events fold right in front of you. Now, while I am sure it would be interesting to watch this movie play out without really knowing what the story is really about, I think it actually does the movie a great service to know ahead of time how the story is going to end. And since “Fruitvale Station” starts with real-life cell phone footage from a very fateful and horrendous night on a train station platform in Oakland, California in the early morning of New Year’s Day in 2009, it is apparent that writer/director Ryan Coogler knew this and wanted to make sure the audience indeed knows what this movie is going to end up.Continue Reading …