Review: ‘Unbroken’

Unbroken_MoviePoster

“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’

The_Gambler_poster

“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 …

Review: ‘The Babadook’

TheBabadook_poster

“The Babadook” is the kind of horror film in which a family is tormented by some sort of supernatural being, like a haunting kind of deal, but with the added benefit of the horror being directly tied into the emotional needs of the main characters and their relationship to each other. So there is some scary stuff about monsters in the shadows, but then there are also the monsters inside of us as well, ooooooooo, get it? The real monsters?

Amelia (Essie Davis) is a single working mom, and she is single because her husband died in a car accident on their way to the hospital, which they were heading to so she could give birth to her son Sam. And as they approach Sam’s seventh birthday, Amelia is reminded again of her dead husband. What a bummer. Meanwhile, Sam has been acting out more and more, scared of possible monsters under his bed and in his closet, and feeling more and more isolated from his schoolmates, and his tantrums and seemingly paranoid fixations are just weighing down on Amelia more and more. Her personal life, what little of it she has, is a wreck, her son is off his rocker, and she struggles to even get some decent sleep. And just as all of this is going down, a mysterious book enters their lives.

Having a nightly habit of reading a book to her son before he goes to bed, one night he pulls a red book off the shelf called “Mister Babadook” and it is a short pop-up book about a ghostly creature thing trying to come into a home to be all scary and stuff and how you can’t get rid of him, and the art and the wording freaks out Amelia as well as Sam, who then starts believing that the Babadook is in their house trying to get them. Well, really trying to get Amelia, which makes Sam scared because he wants to protect her. And Amelia doesn’t believe him at first, but then weird things start happening around her, and before long, shit really starts to go crazy for her.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Top Five’

TopFive_MoviePoster

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: ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’

Exodus_Poster

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 Homesman’

The-Homesman-UK-Poster

“The Homesman” is an interesting Western film directed by Tommy Lee Jones, which makes him two for two in directing somewhat unconventional Westerns (his other film being the sublime “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada“). An adaptation of a 1988 novel of the same name, this is a story centered on the harsh realities of living in 19th century frontier America, and the simple logistics of having to deal with people with various states of decaying mental health in a place and time in which such ailments are not very well known or treated properly. And also how much it sucks for plain looking women who couldn’t find a man and had to fend for themselves. Cause that looked like it sucked.

Mary Bee (Hillary Swank) owns her own piece of land in Nebraska and she farms it and seems to be doing pretty well, having plans to expand and plant different crops and buy more animals, so even in such a desolate looking place, she seems to be doing okay for herself. But being in her early 30s and single, she is seen as a spinster, as women were expected to have been married and have kids well before her age. And it’s not for a lack of trying, she just gets rejected mostly because she’s plain and bossy, two things she can’t seem to help much. It is obvious the loneliness is starting to get to her and it is hard not to feel kinda sorry for her situation. And then it is understandable when she volunteers for a seemingly very difficult task, that of transporting three women from Nebraska to Iowa so they could be reunited with their families back East as all three of these women for varying reasons have lost their minds and can no longer be tended to be their husbands. Early on she recruits a trouble making drifter named Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones) to help her with the job, and they are off on an arduous journey.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Citizenfour’

CitizenFour_Poster

You know about this whole Edward Snowden thing? Remember that stuff? When that NSA guy leaked all those NSA documents showing how the NSA spies on us all in every conceivable way? Here’s a Wikipedia page for you people not in the know, read it and then come back and join us informed people over here, okay great thanks. Everyone else who is (and who should be) interested in who this Snowden whistleblower fella really is and why he did what he did and even how he did it, boy do I got a movie for you.

“Citizenfour” is the kind of documentary that was filmed over a large period of time and shows events as they unfold, day by day, moment to moment, and rightly the people involved knew this was going to be a monumental moment in the history of the United States and dutifully recorded it as it happened, getting us as inside as possible, providing a perspective that could never be replicated in any other way because it is the one true perspective.

The first twenty minutes of the film unfold like a thriller, with filmmaker Laura Poitras, already on the government’s shit list, er, I mean watch list thanks to an Iraq war documentary she made, getting contacted by an anonymous source looking for a trustworthy person. Through the use of encrypted emails and spy-speak pass codes and double talk, they were eventually able to meet after an extended period of time, at which point the first day in a multi-day interview process begins between Snowden and a pair of journalists from The Guardian. They find out who he is and what information he has, and then they discuss the best way to proceed with disseminating the information.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Horrible Bosses 2’

HorribleBosses2_Poster

In 2011, in a summer of multiple R-rated comedies, “Horrible Bosses” was the surprise break out hit of the group, making over $200 million worldwide and resulting in a sequel that has come out…now. “Horrible Bosses 2” is here. But does it capture the same sense of fun and hijinks as the original? Or is this an unreasonable facsimile of something that was once good, a failure of an attempt to recapture old magic?

Well, writer/director Seth Gordon did NOT come back to do this sequel, and instead those duties were passed along to Sean Anders, who is the writer and/or director behind such movies as the not-so-good “Superbad” wanna be “Sex Drive,” the hugely successful and very not funny “We’re the Millers” and the massively disappointing “Dumb & Dumber To.” With this as our benchmark, then it can be said that “Horrible Bosses 2” is the most enjoyable film of the career of Mr. Anders, a definite highlight among comedic low lights. That being said, this movie really isn’t that good. It is not a terrible anti-comedy monstrosity like some of those other movies this guy has had the pleasure of working on, but it’s not something worth revisiting or even recommending. It’s a mild diversion for 108 minutes, with jokes built on the backs of jokes made in the first movie, and new jokes that just aren’t that funny.

Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) and Dale (Charlie Day) have quit their shitty jobs (though I am pretty sure I remember them having finished the last movie happy with their positions as they took care of their horrible bosses, because like, you know, that was the point of that movie) and they are going into business for themselves by manufacturing and selling a shower multi-tool called the Shower Buddy. They start going into business with a massive company run by a dude (Christoph Waltz) and his douchebag son (Chris Pine) and these two guys screw over Nick, Kurt and Dale, so the team of N-K-D concoct a ridiculous kidnapping scheme to try to get their money back. Shit quickly goes awry and they find themselves in it a little too deep with nowhere to go but deeper.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Blue Ruin’

BlueRuin_Poster

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: ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1’

TheHungerGamesMockingjayPart1_Poster

Well the latest installment of the newest mega franchise has been released and it has cleaned house already at the ole’ box office, making certain people instantly salivate at the prospects of the overall business for the final film to be released in exactly one year. “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1” is a big, expensive set up for the last movie, the story telling lamb sacrificed at the altar of monster profits, a truly compelling yarn discarded in favor of two hours of preamble.

For those folks not keeping track, there’s this chick named Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), and she lives in a dystopian future of poverty and immense wealth disparity, and she is also a past winner of The Hunger Games, an annual event in which children are pitted against each other in a combat to the death, broadcast to the masses and sold as entertainment. Through her involvement in this, she got mixed up in some rebellion, as the impoverished masses are close to organizing into an uprising against The Capitol, and she somehow becomes the face of the rebellion. Got it? Okay. Because that’s all this movie is about. The rebels, who are literally underground, create propaganda videos featuring Katniss to broadcast to all the different poor districts of their world in an effort to get everyone to rebel at once.Continue Reading …