Review: ‘Escape Plan’

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Oh if this movie had only been made back in 1994, back during a time when the teaming of the two biggest action stars of the 80s and 90s actually would have had more punch, back when CG couldn’t be relied upon for effects and modern shaky cam and hyper editing didn’t ruin action scenes by rendering them incomprehensible and boring, back when action movies actually MEANT something. But alas, that time is long gone, we are in a more cynical age, and alas, the best we can get now is “Escape Plan,” a halfway decent movie featuring a couple of guys you may have heard of.

In this movie that should have been made in the 90s and has a story that stinks of 90s leftovers and has the overall feel of a 2000’s direct to video venture, Sly Stallone plays Ray Breslin, a guy who breaks out of prisons for a living. But then he finds himself inside a prison that is the ultimate in unbreakable (long story), so of course he has to figure out how to break his way out. And with the help of fellow inmate Emil (Arnold Schwarzenegger), he goes about trying to put together the ins and outs of a very weird prison that looks like something mixed between the boxes of monsters in “The Cabin in the Woods” and the all-white prison of “THX 1138” so he can devise a…wait for it…escape plan!Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Carrie’

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Did you see the 1976 “Carrie?” Then you’ve pretty much seen the 2013 “Carrie,” as neither movie diverges much from the original Stephen King novel anyway, so the remake only offers updated effects and a contemporary setting. But they might as well have set the story in the 70’s, it’s all the same thing anyway. So if you liked the first one, this shouldn’t disappoint.

In “Carrie 2K13,” after a birth scene in which the mother(Julianne Moore) behaves as if she doesn’t know what childbirth even is, we jump straight to awkward Carrie White (Chloë Grace Moretz) in high school, getting her first period in the girl’s locker room after gym class and mistaking it for something much worse, and then getting teased and bullied by the other girls in the class, who all throw sanitary napkins at her and call her names and, here’s the 2013 twist-a-roo, take cell phone video of her freaking out (see what they did there? Updating that shit yo!). This starts a chain reaction of events that ends with a prank gone wrong at the school prom that causes Carrie to freak out and use her telekinetic powers to kill everyone.

Oh yeah, Carrie has telekinetic powers.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Captain Phillips’

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“Captain Phillips” is Paul Greengrass doing pretty much what he knows best, which is recreating real life events in a way that feels immediate and actual, very cinema vérité despite the fact that movie stars often pop up to remind the viewer that this is indeed just a movie. Greengrass broke out with “Bloody Sunday” and he tackled the U.S.-Iraq quagmire in “Green Zone,” and now he’s here with a story about four Somali pirates hijacking an American cargo ship and taking the captain as a hostage for insurance money.

“Captain Phillips” is very much based on the very true story of a pirate hijacking in 2009, and as it was written by Captain Richard Phillips, it tells his story and his side of the whole nasty bit of business, and now this Phillips guy must really be on top of the world now because he survived a pirate hijacking (SPOILER! Duh! He wrote the damn book!), wrote a bestselling book about it, and now he gets to see Tom Hanks play him in a movie based on the book he wrote about a portion of his own life. Oh what a world.

But what makes “Captain Phillips” really work, and this is something noted in the Captain’s own book and is also backed up with a little bit of research, is how sympathetic the Somalis are in this instance. At least in this movie, the Somali men in a small, war-torn, destroyed village are ushered to the beach with machine guns pointed at them by gang leaders and mob bosses, forcing them to “work” by being pirates, as this has become the sole source of income for the impoverished country. And there is even a bit of a throwaway line about overfishing in the area taking away the livelihood of the people actually living there, though that’s really it. There really isn’t preaching or sermonizing in this thing at all, it’s just a very interesting true story that brings up some very tricky socio-economic points and issues on a geopolitical scale about the haves and the have-nots. But really this is just a taut thriller in which at the end of the day it kind of feels like there are no winners.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Gravity’

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Holy mole, if you have not seen this one for yourself just yet, you need to do yourself a favor and check out the next available showing of “Gravity” as soon as possible. And if you like 3D, then go ahead and drop the extra few bucks on the 3D screening because this is one of the very few movies that uses this gimmick very well. But in the meantime, just go see “Gravity” and know that I love it.

I mean, woah, what a movie. Containing a very simple story structure that proves you don’t need overplotting to make a story interesting, “Gravity” is a tale of survival in outer space and that’s pretty much it. A non-professional doctor (Sandra Bullock) is trained to do a space walk in order to install a new program into the Hubble telescope, accompanied by a veteran astronaut (George Clooney), and these two become stranded when debris from an exploded satellite causes a chain reaction that sends pieces of space debris flying at them, destroying their Explorer shuttle and leaving them with no way home. So the whole movie is how these people try to survive in space and how the hell they try to get back to Earth.

Leading up to the release of this movie, it is really incredible how often I heard people muse about this movie’s story and plot, wondering how they could possibly “stretch” out this premise to a feature length movie. I just couldn’t understand these people and their concerns because that is enough of a hook to make me WANT to see this film. Exactly HOW were they doing to pull this off? What were they going to do to make this a compelling and interesting movie from start to finish, or will there be boring parts of just floating in space?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Rush’

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Not the epic biopic featuring the three-piece Canadian rock outfit that we were all hoping for, “Rush” is the story of a pair of Formula-One racers in the 1970’s who developed one of the most intense and interesting sports rivalries ever. Directed by Ron Howard with consummate skill and featuring very good lead performances from Chris Hemsworth (Thor) and Daniel Brühl (Inglourious Basterds) and a tight script from Peter Morgan, “Rush” is actually better than I expected it would be, and is definitely worthwhile for people to check out.

What makes this movie work so well is that it is all based on a true story, which allows for some thinner characterization, as the real story is inherently appealing enough to carry the dramatic weight of the film. It doesn’t matter that English driver James Hunt (Hemsworth) was merely portrayed as a playboy and party animal while the German driver Niki Lauda (Brühl) was shown to be an overly serious fuddy-duddy with a penchant for pissing everyone off by being truthful to a fault; what matters is that we see these two excellent drivers push each other to the limits of their abilities in a sport that was as close to legalized Russian Roulette as any sport could get thanks to the very high death rate of drivers up to this point (the great documentary “Senna” goes into how Formula One managed to make their races much safer, but only after more tragedy hit the sport).Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Act of Killing’

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“The Act of Killing” works on two levels. First off it is a compelling look at the monsters behind the 1965 mass genocides in Indonesia and how they are still in power and see nothing wrong with their past evil deeds (or present evil deeds). And secondly, this documentary stands as a testament to the transformative power of cinema and how movies can indeed change the world, even if at the rate of just one person at a time.

Sounds like fun, no?

The backdrop of this movie is a harrowing one. There’s a reason why this movie starts with a short clip from the director in which he explains how he does not expect people to “enjoy” the film per se, but instead he hopes everyone will be compelled by it and will learn from it. He says this TWICE. “I won’t say ‘enjoy the movie’ because… .” He REALLY wanted to hammer that point home. You won’t ENJOY this. But you will still probably be fascinated by it.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Riddick’

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So I saw the latest further adventures of Richard B. Riddick but I realized I didn’t write anything about it so here we go, a little quickie review in which we decide whether or not the movie “Riddick” is actually worth anyone’s time.

And I think this might come down to your enjoyment of the Riddick character himself and whether or not you give any sort of crap about this space outlaw and his mission to find his home planet of Furya, but then again it may also come down to whether or not you like sort of entertaining sci-fi movies that are just a couple of steps above Sy-Fy Channel original movie quality.

While there is a short recap towards the beginning of the film that recaps the very ending of “Chronicles of Riddick” and attempts to explain how Riddick is lost in the cosmos and can’t find his home planet (because it’s all about family…wait a second…wrong Vin Diesel movie…), you really don’t need to see either movie that predates this one in order to follow along with what is happening (but if you haven’t yet, you really should see “Pitch Black,” as it is genuinely quite good).Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Family’

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“Hey! Ooooo! We’re Italian-Americans over heryunh, and yer a buncha snobby Frenchies ovah there, and we are violent people who love our peanut butter and pasta dishes, cause we’re fat Americans and we’re of Italian descent, ooohhhh, fuhgeddaboutit!”

That’s “The Family” right there. Just a bunch of stereotypes shmushed together. But is it any good?

Nope.

But to be fair, it’s not really bad either. It’s so right down the middle of the road, it leans closer to forgettable than anything else.

Basically imagine if at the end of “Goodfellas” Henry Hill and his family get witness protection program relocated to Normandy, France, where cultures clash and hilarity ensues. That’s pretty much the movie, but instead of Hill we got some made up guy played by Robert De Niro, and he’s married to Michelle Pfeiffer and her fake Brooklyn accent, and they have a couple of high school aged kids who look nothing like either of them and one of whom is played by an actress in her 20’s. Tommy Lee Jones shows up to mumble his way through some scenes as De Niro’s government caretaker, the violence is kicked up to warrant an R-rating, and we’re off to the races.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: ‘You’re Next’

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“You’re Next” is a halfway decent horror movie, which means people think it’s generally a great movie, that’s how low the bar is set for horror films, a genre riddled with no-budgeted, poorly acted, storyless, pointless hackjobs that try to pass themselves off as actual movies. “You’re Next,” however, isn’t that bad, as it sort of has a story and maybe it has a point? It didn’t make me want my time back, that’s for sure. So that’s something.

“You’re Next” is a home invasion movie and after watching a decent number of these types of films now, I think I can say I am not much of a fan of this subgenre of horror. Much like movies “Straw Dogs,” “The Purge,” “Funny Games,” “High Tension” and “The Strangers,” some people are inside a house, and murderous assholes want to hurt them, sometimes for completely unknown reasons, and sometimes for no reason (which is ANNOYING and the pinnacle of pointless storytelling). At least in “You’re Next” there turns out to be a reason for the home invasion, and a terrifyingly mundane one at that.*Continue Reading …