Review: ‘Out Of The Furnace’

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“Out of the Furnace” is a good movie, though it does fall short of greatness because of over familiarity. With elements of revenge films, movies about depressed blue collar towns in America, and stories about struggling families, there is little that feels new or fresh or original with “Out of the Furnace“. But there’s nothing new about chicken parmigiana yet if it is made well, it can’t be beat, right? So “Out of the Furnace” is like a meal you’ve had plenty of times before, and while it may not excite you, you still appreciate that it’s well made and with the highest quality of ingredients.

This is a story about a couple of brothers, Russell Baze (Christian Bale) and his younger bro Rodney (Casey Affleck). They live in Braddock, PA, which is a dying little town on its last legs, as rumors of the mill being shut down looms over everyone like the Sword of Damocles, and tragedy hits the Baze family pretty hard early on, and then gets compounded thanks to some unfortunate circumstances mixed with bad decisions. Soon enough, Russell has to deal with his girlfriend leaving him (Zoe Saldana) and his brother getting mixed up in a bad way with a local bookie (Willem Dafoe) and a violent criminal New Jersey hillbilly (Woody Harrelson). Round out the cast with always reliable actors Sam Shepard and Forest Whitaker and you got a movie that hums with life and meaning, even if its not saying anything original or deeply profound.

Because there is some stuff in here about the depressed American economy, thanks to both the setting and the very specific 2008 pre-presidential election setting, but nothing is really SAID about this state of the economy, it is just the setting for the story. Likewise, Rodney is a soldier with four tours of duty in Iraq under his belt, and he’s got both PTSD from the tours and he’s struggling to find work back in the States, but again, there is not much to distinguish this war veteran from other war veterans from other movies featuring characters like this.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Oldboy’

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Well Spike Lee’s “Oldboy” is not necessarily an easy movie to review (hence the small delay in writing this), as the 2003 South Korean thriller of the same name and which Spike Lee and screenwriter Mark Protosevich remade (or “reinterpreted,” as Mr. Lee insists) has become one of the more popular non-American films to storm the U.S. in the last decade, and more personally, remains fairly high on my own list of awesome movies which everyone else should watch and appreciate. So how can I look at this new “Oldboy” as its own thing? It does not exist in a vacuum.

But is it really fair to compare the two movies? To be honest, I am pretty much unable to imagine this movie existing on its own, which means I can not imagine what other people would think when they see this movie for the first time without having seen the South Korean original. Would they be baffled by this movie? How would the ending hit them? Does the movie even make sense?

This last question is kind of important, as Spike Lee recently confirmed that this movie was taken out of his hands after he turned in a cut of the film that ran for two hours and twenty minutes and it was cut down to 105 minutes without any of his input or blessing (Lee also shot down the rumor that the film at one point had a three-hour runtime). No movie can survive a 35 minute trim to the story without suffering, and I really want to know what was cut, although I do have my suspicions based on what was actually screened for audiences. Will people understand the motivations behind the different characters? Will they be confused when people are angry at each other in one scene and then they are helping each other in the next scene without any rhyme or reason or connection to what came before?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Homefront’

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“Homefront” is a fairly simple movie, based on a 2006 crime novel designed to be a page-turner, and it harkens back to the simpler action movies of the 1980s and 1990s. No wonder, considering the novel was adapted for the screen by 80s/90s action super star Sylvester Stallone, who then handed the project off to the guy who directed “Runaway Jury.” Maybe Sly had confidence in his book-to-movie capabilities?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’

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Here we go, “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” another installment of the movie franchise du jour, based on yet another worldwide bestselling book series, this time not about boy wizards or ring lords or vampires but instead about an oppressive governmental machine and the young woman who unwittingly becomes the inspiration for uprisings and riots among the poor masses against the Capitol. Continue Reading …

Review: ’12 Years A Slave’

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Look, no one said this was going to be fun for anyone involved, okay? This is a fairly remarkable story about human endurance and the atrocities of mankind, and while it may not be “enjoyable” or “entertaining,” it still may be essential viewing for many people, whether they be cinephiles or people who just need a quick reminder of where we’ve come from, as that helps see where we need to go. No, no one said “12 Years A Slave” was going to be a cinematic walk in the park. But then again, maybe that’s the very reason why it should be seen.

This is based on the very true story of Solomon Northup, a man from New York in pre-Civil War America who was drugged, kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South, where he spent the subsequent twelve years of his life living as a slave named Platt. This is the story of his survival and the horrors he saw while in this horrible position. Being a free and educated man at the time of his kidnapping, he had the skills necessary to relate his story when it was all said it done, get it down in writing in the form of his memoir, one which was subsequently fact checked and deemed as accurate by scholars over one hundred years later, so what we have here is a first person account of one of the most troubling and disturbing chapters of our American history.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Thor: The Dark World’

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Well here we go, now two movies deep into phase 2 of the Great Marvel Movie Plan, in which entire films are used to set up plot elements for future films, with the rest being nothing but filler. The first “Thor” movie set up the villain for “The Avengers,” and now “Thor: The Dark World” is merely a set up for another movie and what could possibly be phase 3 of the GMMP (more on this later). But what about all the other stuff in there, does any of that matter at all?

And the answer is…kinda, I guess? For all of those people who were dying for more of that great dynamic between Norse god Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and human scientist Jane (Natalie Portman), here you go, another two hours or so of these two looking at each other longingly. Meanwhile there’s some bit of business about some dark elves and the dude who leads them and the great magical power that they seek to harness, etc. etc., I mean for crying out loud why do all of these movies have to be the same freaking thing?

Seriously though, here is yet ANOTHER super hero movie in which an evil character, who is evil for no other reason than because the story dictates him or her to be so, who wants to take over the world, or in this case the whole universe, by somehow just destroying everything. And when this movie had a cold open with a voiceover explaining the movies macguffin, in this case a magical substance that can’t be destroyed and which makes it’s host body super powerful, and then cut straight to a huge Lord of the Rings meets Star Trek: Deep Space Nine battle between a bunch of people that literally didn’t matter in the long run, my eyes glazed over faster than the donuts on a conveyor belt at Krispy Kreme at five in the morning, no what I mean?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Kon-Tiki’

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“Kon-Tiki” is a great Norwegian historical drama about explorer and scientist Thor Heyerdahl, who set out on a journey in 1947 with five men on a raft made of balsa wood from Peru all the way across the Pacific Ocean to Polynesia, in an attempt to help prove his theory that Polynesia was populated by migrants coming from the east, as opposed to the prevailing theory at the time that the settlers came from the west. But really it is a story about how this fella Thor had an idea and was determined to see it through, even if that meant absorbing tons of rejection from all sorts of people and eventually heading out on this dangerous mission just to prove his point.

This is a pretty spectacular movie regardless of whether the story is real or what was fabricated to enhance the drama of the movie (apparently there was some beef with one of the characters being portrayed very differently from his real life counterpart, resulting in the filmmakers even coming out and apologizing to the family members of this misrepresented person). It is a pretty simple set up, in that these six guys agreed to set out on this mission, and the 101-day, 5,000 mile journey pretty much changed them all forever (but then again, how could it NOT?). But while the mission and goal are easy to understand, it is obvious that the trip was not going to be a piece of cake.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Ender’s Game’

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“Ender’s Game” is a nifty sci-fi movie that is more serious-minded and morally complex than most other big budget movies out there. Based on an award-winning and highly touted sci-novel of the same name, this is a story that tackles some pretty big issues, and while it doesn’t get so deep into these things that the movie comes across as a lecture or preachy, at least it feels comfortable enough to even bring these ideas up, daring the audience to actually think about the parallels between this sci-fi world and our real world. Plus there is some cool space stuff, so that helps.

In “Ender’s Game,” our protagonist is 12-year Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield), who has been chosen to be groomed to be the next great commander of Earth’s international space fleet, which was formed after an alien invasion years prior nearly wiped out all of humanity. Since the invasion, everyone on Earth banded together to put together a military force that could repel future attacks, and in an effort to find the best leaders possible, children were regularly drafted into the military and put through different camps and schools in order to find the absolute best of the best. Of course, as indicated with the title of this story, Ender is one of these chosen few, fortunate enough to be considered a candidate to be a great leader, and unfortunate enough to have the weight of mankind’s possible extinction placed squarely on his shoulders.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Counselor’

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What on Earth happened to this movie? How did so many extremely talented people get together to make such a muddled movie? How come no one saw this coming? Why should we have? A ton of money was given to Oscar winning filmmakers and a Pulitzer Prize winning author to make whatever they wanted to make, and what should have been something great and worthwhile is instead, well, instead we got “The Counselor.” What a shame. What a crying out loud god damned shame.

There is a plot to “The Counselor” but the movie does not focus on it so much as it does the emotional and psychological ramifications on the different characters in the film. You see, there’s some sort of drug deal set up that involves shipping cocaine from Mexico to America, and somehow a lawyer only referred to as Counselor (Michael Fassbender) gets himself involved with this transaction, though it is not explained in any way, shape or form how he is involved with this deal. And then when the deal goes wrong, it is somehow linked to him tangentially, which is apparently enough for the Mexican Cartel behind this particular deal to come after him and everything he holds dear, which is personified in his new fiancée Laura (Penelope Cruz).Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Don Jon’

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This Joseph Gordon-Levitt guy, who does he think he is, what with the writing and the directing and the starring and what not. Know what I mean? This was the long hair doofy kid on “3rd Rock From the Sun” slash that orphan kid that saw Doc Brown as an angel in “Angels in the Outfield,” and now here he is writing and directing and starring in “Don Jon,” his own movie in which he gets to write his character having sex with many women, Scarlett Johansson being chief among them, and this guy even admits he wrote this with Johansson in mind! He set out to make a movie in which he beds ScarJo, and he succeeded! Like I said! Who does he think he is?!

Well he’s a damn genius that’s what he is, at least in that department. But surely the reason she even did the movie was because ot its strong, character-centric story which tries to break the typical rom-com mold, being much more upfront and real about sex and people’s sexual wants versus their sexual needs, with the added spin of internet pornography (and porn in general) being an obstacle for a character to get over and not just the source for some cheap “American Pie” style humor.

Instead it is a pretty focused story about a guy named Jon who makes it ABUNDANTLY clear that the only things he cares about are his body, his pad, his ride, his family, his church, his boys, his girls and his porn.Continue Reading …