StatlerWaldorf

Daniel Craig's got the right idea, whoever wrote this clearly did not. Or maybe they're just trying out some really high-concept redefinition of film convention, for I admit, as a two-and-a-half hour preview for the other three new-Bonds it works really well. You will leave without remembering much of what transpired, but really wanting to remember what happened in the first two movies. When you go to pirate them you will throw "Skyfall" into the mix just so you can see the intro again. Can you judge a Bond by its intro song? For "SPECTRE": yes. It warns you that they will be trying too hard to connect in the other films, it warns you that there are lazily-written love stories, and it generally does a good job of capturing the lack of oomf that defines "SPECTRE". Maybe it's better than "Quantum of Solace"? Maybe it's just hard to accept after "Skyfall". What made the Craig-Bonds work was their departure from the cartoonish form that used to define Bond. Tying this arc together with a wider nostalgia seems like a good idea, but "SPECTRE" ends up built on ill-fated nods to everything that came before it and little value of its own accord. You will have figured out the plot within the first 15 or so minutes-- it helps that it's been done before. This leaves Christoph Waltz as the main draw. The man was born to play a Bond villain, how could that not be perfect? I will tell you. Just don't give him any screen time. When he’s on screen, don’t let him say anything interesting unless he’s quoting another movie. I sort of wish they had cast Rob Brydon instead. How’s that for a nod?

I reviewed “Whiplash” cooperatively with some coworkers. We just stood around saying “Whiplash” to one another with ever-increasing excitement. Allow me to better articulate… It’s about damn time J.K. Simmons had a real role. That one kid from that thing is pretty damn fantastic too, all drumming aside. For a very small film there is a dark intensity that bristles through both leads as well as the photography and sound design that feels like big league production and career-defining performance. Unique, well-crafted, but above all: gripping. You really can’t look away and when the curtain falls it’s hard not to just sit there and wonder if you can or should watch it again. It is one of those rare glimpses into the damage it takes to create true art. That broken quality is usually a kind of unexamined trade-off, accepted posthumously as the price of genius in biopics and documentaries. You never get to see it play a live set. You never get to see two broken people make a great and terrifying whole in a way that feels as magnetic as it does disturbing. Watch “Whiplash”. Argue with people about how much it is okay to sacrifice for art, or pride, or the chance to create something only you can create. Argue and fight. It likes it when you fight.

There is more "A Topiary" than "Primer" in "Upstream Color", but one of the wonderful things about Shane Carruth is that he is as original as he is resourceful, so there is nothing retreaded in anything he does… other than time, I guess. When "A Topiary" was cancelled, those watching for it on the horizon were sorely disappointed. Was it his "Don Quixote"? His "Dune"? It’s kind of hard to tell from the script. What we can say about the movie we did get is that it’s good, no magnum opus, no revolution, but good and really **** interesting. The main problem with Carruth runs counter to the scifi status quo. Most scifi creators share a frontal lobe brain disease that impinges their self-control around neat ideas to the extent that they cannot help but blow their creative loads on a concept by drowning it in unimportant and superficial details. Mostly people create fantasy, in space; or, in the future; or, on scorched earth. Ideas remain childish, their greater implications self-consciously mapped in awkward pseudo-science soliloquies or outright ignored because the scifi elements are just there for pageantry. Carruth, conversely, has a frustrating level of self-control. With "Upstream Color" he introduces like nine different amazing scifi elements, each worthy of its own film or TV show, but then completely walks away from any attempt to explain them or milk them for thrills. It’s an amazing and infuriating talent. The movie itself is a meditation on ideas like cyclical and interdependent systems, individuality and memory, evolution and community, good **** It does this with careful pacing and wonderful attention to both the auditory and visual experiences of the viewer, and it leaves you stewing on all that indefinitely, because there are no definites in any part of this film.

Dear Jupiter Ascending, I am writing to you to drop my average film score. Do you remember when we met? It was in a lonely place, an alone-in-a-cold-dark-room-at-3am place, Google results on scifi action film I hadn’t seen showing 0. I tried to respect your ambition, but you kept talking about how The Chronicles of Riddick was really cool, but how you wanted to be more than that. Oh? Do you remember how The Chronicles of Riddick looked in the mirror and was like “oh **** too far” and then turned itself back into Pitch Black? Can you do that for me, Jupiter Ascending? Can you use one of your plotholes to go back in time to that night and change yourself into Pitch Black for me? No? You still have ambition? Fine, you want to make the world a better place then instead take all of that money you spent to make yourself and give Channing Tatum a temp job going around being charming and giving out hugs. Can you imagine that world? Channing Tatum charm and hugs for everyone and no Jupiter Ascending. Holy **** That. World. No you were not my worst, but you did ooze viscous mediocrity the whole time. It took three showers and an episode of Firefly to get me right. Dear Jupiter Ascending, please do not make a sequel to yourself unless it is Jupiter Recanting: Pitch Black 3, or Jupiter Is Sorry About Before Presents: Magic Mike World Tour.

For all of its Damoniness, The Martian plays like a well done TV movie based on actual events. The strangely large cast makes for scant and shallow appearances for every character. I don’t even think I know Mark Watney and supposedly the premise is “The Mark Watney show—on Mars!” I didn’t read the book, but as an adaptation I am guessing this is lazy, in the sense that they didn’t bother changing anything, just compressing everything in equal measure until only the brochure remained. Damon, Chastain, and Daniels play what they have well enough to seem like real characters, Wiig and Glover are odd choices for miniscule roles written with watercooler-level humor. Spoiler Alert. On Mars and Earth there is only one joke: Mark Watney is alone on Mars. Is it not funny when I say it? Don’t worry, the movie will redeliver it 9 or 10 times, I’m sure one of those hits the mark. The events roll out exactly as you expect them, the only surprise being the soundtrack—oh wait—two jokes. There are two jokes on Mars and Earth. Damon is fine but the best scene is a deleted scene where he watches the part of Interstellar that he is in. As it turns out that part of Interstellar is better than both The Martian and Interstellar. How is that possible, you ask? The fifth dimension.

You can find it filed under Netflix subgenre “Overacted Visually Striking Historical Fantasy Epic”. There are two ways to watch this movie, one is just to watch it, in which case you might as well just make a slideshow of stills and set those as your screensaver. Wait, there are three ways, because you could also take mushrooms and put it on a projector, which will be a “trip”—as they are fond of saying. The third way is to watch it while mentally projecting the invisible character of Tarsem Singh pacing like an angry tiger on the periphery of every scene. In case you are unfamiliar, here’s the new synopsis: inexperienced director sinks fortune and years of his and others’ lives into passion/vanity project that is supposed to be the ultimate ode to old school film making. See Tarsem pouring over a script for too long to keep it straight. See Tarsem yelling at his adorable actors until they start to breakdown for real. But also, see Tarsem searching the world over for the most beautiful places you have never seen, and lovingly recreating the greatest non-CG effects with such audacious aplomb that you simply can’t understand how the **** he pulled off some of those shots, and see someone obsessed with dead filmmaking make a film about dying filmmaking in a confused and beautiful hurricane of love and futility. Do that and you’ll be glad you got something more than a screensaver and a trip to the hospital like your other two friends.

I feel like this movie has a similar origin story to The Fall, except that instead of trying to do and be a lot of different things, The Great Beauty just is and somehow breezes by everything else that came before it with nouveau cool. This is not for people that have seen The Expendables on purpose. It’s art, and while the characters are often pretentious it is not so itself. It touches upon everything by being true in everything it touches. There is poise, and brilliance, and perfection in the performances, the script, the direction, and the exquisite cinematography. The only complaint I can possibly think of is that it has the ambiance of that old world sexism in it, the kind that is unintentional but also unapologetic. There’s nothing overt, but the protagonist Jep smacks of those older white male intellectuals that get to go around feeling like they get something that no one else can. He is not that, because no one in the film feels like a trope, but throughout young women appear as poseurs disproportionately to their male counterparts. I don’t know if that’s true of Italy, but where everything else in the film feels like it resonates on a universal level, this feels temporal, and it drags the achievement down a little from where it might have otherwise been.

I heard rumblings that this was supposed to be funnier, quirkier, et ceterier than other super hero movies in its family. It semi-delivered on this expectation, enough that it felt kind of fresh and made me wish other standalone hero movies were equally entertaining (that is, about 23% more entertaining). The pacing is good in the first half and rushed in the second, which may be a consequence of the rewrites, who knows. Plenty goes unexplained but the pieces fit together nicely enough, a snug click but not an exciting clack. Michael Douglas beats the toy train for Official Highlight of the Film. Hank Pym has been conspicuously absence from the new Marvel movieland and I’d rather watch him ferreting around in a lab coat and telling people they’re full of **** for two hours than see another scientist fight his own ego while wearing a Mega Man suit. Watch Ant Man, it’s fun.

It could have just been a reel of slow-motion bullet cam shots from the first five minutes and we would still sit there for 3 hours wondering what Scarlet Johansson’s left breast was foreshadowing (reviewer’s note: Scarlet Johansson’s left breast is overrated in inverse proportion to her dramatic poise). This is an alright movie as movies go. It is pretty good as Marvel movies go. I have heard grumbling, but it’s mostly nerds talking about things that can’t possibly matter or people looking to pick a fight with some low-hanging fruit. Mostly what was disappointing was that the real conflict was the same as the first Avengers movie (will the Avengers assemble? Answer: yes) which was a letdown because the opening makes it seem like the writers have finally moved on and that we can stop rehashing the plotline that is already destined for rehashing in Civil War. For a moment Whedon makes it seem like this tired emotional territory will be made anew by Hawkeye stepping forward as the hearth of the team but then he just remains in the role of underutilized acting talent while the camera lingers on him without explanation. Also, remember when Tony Stark died for a second in the first Avengers and even though you knew his contract said he had to be fine you still cared because it completed the only interesting character arc in the Marvel movies wherein a guy with no real powers and crippling narcissism changes from being a person to a Jesus? Verily he has risen, which is fine because there’s a whole other sequel where the event leaves him psychologically damaged and he must continue to evolve. You will not have that experience watching anyone die or not die in this movie.

This is a great film. If somebody asks me for a movie recommendation then this is my genre-spanning, solid entertainment, you-will-like-this suggestion. It’s got great writing, great direction and style, and wonderful performances—seriously, everyone is a joy to watch. The characters, despite their number, are fully realized and the storytelling is so voluptuous it feels like a double feature without the pee breaks and cramping. The uncommon narration, period setting, American crime story, and modern classic pizzazz make it most comparable to Good Fellas. Though, unlike Good Fellas, it feels real without being real which allows for a measure of absurdity in its self-expression, something that Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence seem to give themselves over to as readily as Ray Liotta though in a far more endearing fashion. The only complaint you can levy is that there’s nothing groundbreaking about it. That said, this is still an example of what movies should strive for. Go watch American Hustle. Already seen American Hustle? Cool. Wait ten minutes. Go watch American Hustle.

If you have not seen The Rover then stop reading this review and go watch The Rover. I walked into this movie with the background that it was post-apocalyptic and had good performances. Both of those things are true to the fullest extent one could hope for, but there is much more to it than that. There is a total desolation and perfect balance to its sparse moving parts. It stands like a confounding inverse mobile found in the blasted Outback. It is a litmus, it rewards patience, you will probably not agree with all of my praise. When the big “reveal” happens some people will groan and others will relive every moment of the film and appreciate them anew, not in the way of a Twilight Zone or Shyamalan twist, but in the way of dismantling a bit of analogue technology and seeing the beauty and simplicity of elegant design—even the name is balanced within the microcosm of the film’s (non)mystery—but the greatest part of it is that the characters show you everything about themselves from their earliest moments and with that comes a kind of perfection within the reality they portray that is rarely represented in film and heretofore missing from the post-apocalyptic subgenre. Most movies make you feel for their antiheroes by making them cool, world-changing, or having them change at the end. The Rover does not make these concessions, but if you’re really watching, then, in spite of the seeming senselessness, you will feel what Eric feels, and it will feel like what it would feel like to live after the end of the world: having had something beautiful that you did not understand destroyed in front of your eyes and knowing that nothing will ever bring it back.

Oh **** Mad Max: Fury Road. That’s a good place to end, but no, just like George Miller we are plowing through to the bitter end. I watched somebody watch this on the little screen they stick on the back of airplane seats for long, cheap international flights. What the hell? Are you reliving the storyline so you can untangle some of the more complicated plot points (oh, that scene had 37 explosions, 2 were very subtle)? Are you soaking in all that rich character development (yes there is some, but stop acting like that’s revolutionary just because it’s better than would have been bad)? Did you accidentally see Confessions of a Shopaholic and just immediately need to burn the experience out of your veins? No, fellow traveler, you probably just love it so much that you would watch it on a **** if Apple would only let you, basking in the memory of all that blistering sight and sound while squinting against the glare on the morning train. I grew up with Mad Max. I wore out my bootleg Road Warrior tape when I got chicken pox. This is a different Mad Max in nearly every way, but it’s also a better one. I take it as a reboot. That makes things cleaner. There is maybe a 5% chance a sequel will be half as good or more than this new original—so revel in it while you can. And if you meet someone who doesn’t like it, don’t get on their case. They are weak, they have a condition, they don’t have the constitution for your impression of a War Rig.

This is a fun little tech thriller. Oscar Isaac is turning out to be a really good actor, and hey, Alicia Vikander! You’re suddenly a thing now! That’s great too, we love your expressions and non-expressions; they are very expressive. Vaguely familiar nerdy white kid, you are also good at your job. Isaac oozes tension from the first minute he takes the stage. His presence shrinks the halls into jagged chutes to oblivion. There’s a great cat-and-mouse story in here, but it feels like it’s written at the scale of a decent Black Mirror episode, what extends beyond that is really just style and cool attitude that you can take or leave depending on how superficial you’re feeling. The ending is a copout. It’s one of those endings popular now with movies that do get lost in style, where it’s not about making narrative sense but rather upholding a mood. Is the AI dumb or is the writer dumb? You can pick, but either way it’s not as interesting as the character the movie seemed to be building up to or a fair attempt at examining the development of mind in an abusive home, a concept that is great and inevitably visioned in the formation of AI. I’d love to see the Nicholas Winding Refn version of this movie. I feel like he knows how to balance cool and the contemporary urge to make everything mildly dissatisfying. Tip for new directors. Frustration and ambiguity do not imbue realism.

I put off watching Gravity because someone told me it was a really good film about a dying astronaut and I pictured something like Ray Bradbury’s Kaleidoscope, which has, in my mind, always been itching to be a really slow, understated, Oscar-bait-port-to-film. My imaginary version of Gravity is a better meditation on death but it’s also way the **** boring as compared to the real Gravity. Alfonso Cuarón perfected some of the best longshots in film history with Children of Men and he brings the same choreographic talent to 0 G—shut up Neil Tyson, stop texting during the goddamn movie—sorry. Anyway, it’s beautiful and real enough to be a non-stop human vs. space thrill. An internal subplot about Sandra Bullock’s daughter and some heavy-handed symbolism kind of stilt the action through the second and third trimester (wink) though. It’s frustrating because in a very spare film these sorts of additions stand in high relief, which is great if you’re trying to say something, but just confusing if you have nothing to say. I don’t think Gravity actually has anything to say about death, birth, or evolution, but I liked it enough as a space thriller that if someone can convince me that there is something to its reference of those three concepts in a way that does not make you sound like a stoned college freshman then I will call it an 8.