Meet Mr. Karma

Hail, Caesar? Hail, No

Posted: February 7, 2016 in 2016 Berlinale, Comedy, Reviews
Tags: Alden Ehrenreich, Channing Tatum, Coen Brothers, George Clooney, Josh Brolin, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Veronica Osorio

The first scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the sequel to one of the greatest action movies ever filmed, is a musical number. There was no cinematic justification for Kate Capshaw leading a line of chorus girls in a Mandarin Chinese rendition of “Anything Goes” for three minutes while audiences asked “WTF?” before that was even a thing. No justification does not mean no explanation. It turns out that director Steven Spielberg always wanted to direct a musical. And, oh, yeah, he was married to Capshaw.

Now, imagine, not just one scene, but an entire film comprised of scenes from genres that the director always wanted to film. Read the rest of this entry »

Jane Got a Gun, But Not the Balls to Use It

Posted: January 30, 2016 in Drama, Reviews, Western
Tags: Burden of Dreams, Ewan McGregor, Fitzcarraldo, I Spit on Your Grave, Natalie Portman, Rape and Revenge Flicks

If you’re going to make a revenge flick, don’t outsource the acts of vengeance. In particular, if you are scripting a rape-and-revenge movie, empower your heroine to do the heavy lifting and genital severing on her own. Maybe I Spit on Your Grave is not your cup of Earl Grey, but at least, that film had the courage of its convictions.

Jane Got a Gun, but she ain’t got the balls to use it for too much of this genre wannabe flop. Read the rest of this entry »

JLaw is the Coolest Kid in the Class

Posted: January 18, 2016 in Reviews
Tags: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Joy, Serena, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2

Jennifer Lawrence is everywhere. It’s not just your imagination. Open any door at the cineplex, and you will see that beautifully sculpted face perfectly framed by those blonde, brunette, or ginger tresses over the statuesque figure poured into spandex, an untucked blouse and black pants, or blue body paint. She’s Joy Mangano. She’s Katniss Everdeen. She’s Mystique.

Turn on the television. She’s on the red carpet. She’s doing the buddy routine with Amy Schumer. She’s accepting another award. She’s acknowledging another nomination. She’s sassing a reporter. She’s charming an interviewer. She’s confessing to getting high before the Oscars to Andy Cohen. She’s giving false hope to Seth Meyers. She’s being funnier than Jimmy Fallon.

Jennifer Lawrence is 25 years old. She already has four Academy Award nominations and one win with the possibility of a Best Actress Oscar pending. And she has yet to find the role that showcases all of her talent. To date, we have probably seen less half of of the range in which she’s capable of playing at the highest level of the profession. Read the rest of this entry »

13 Hours Opts for Action Rather Than Agitprop

Posted: January 17, 2016 in Action, Reviews
Tags: Benghazi, Chuck Hogan, Fort Apache, Hillary Clinton, John Krasinski, Libya, Michael Bay

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi does not hedge. The graphic at the beginning of the film does not read, “Based on A True Story” or “Inspired by Real Events.” Instead, audiences see a straightforward claim of absolute accuracy: “This is a True Story.” Given how politicized the terrible events of September 11-12, 2012 have become, viewers could reasonably expect that what follows this blanket statement would be a 144-minute screed against Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, especially in light of the rhetoric coming from the current presidential campaign.

Yet, that is not the case. 13 Hours is a film full of surprises, and nothing is more surprising than director Michael Bay and screenwriter Chuck Hogan’s decision to eschew agitprop and focus instead on making a good, old fashioned action flick. Read the rest of this entry »

Star Wars: The Force Awakens – Take Two

Posted: January 16, 2016 in Action, Fantasy, Reviews, Science Fiction
Tags: Adam Driver, Captain Underpants, Carrie Fisher, Daisy Ridley, J.J. Abrams, John Boyega, Lawrence Kasdan, Max von Sydow, Supreme Leader Snoke

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a movie that demands a second viewing by most filmgoers – fanboys and casual observers alike. The reason for a repeat is rather simple. The heightened expectations surrounding the film’s release left most audiences in a state of diminished awareness, capable only of following the action from Point A to Point B and forming immediate visceral reactions: good, bad, loved it, hated it. Our eyes were wide and unblinking, but also unfocused on the less obvious and without the needed peripheral vision to incorporate all aspects of the production into our criticism. Read the rest of this entry »

The Hateful Eight: Standard Version vs Roadshow Edition

Posted: January 13, 2016 in Action, Drama, Uncategorized, Western
Tags: 70 mm, Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino wants you to know that he has now directed eight feature films. “The Eighth Film by Quentin Tarantino,” appears in the opening credits of his latest work. His eighth film even has the word eight in the title. Short of pulling a Chad Johnson and changing his name to Ocho, there seems little else Tarantino can do to convey that (1) he has done seven films before The Hateful Eight, and (2) he attaches great importance to the number. To celebrate the accomplishment and further his self-sustaining image as a film buff extraordinaire, the director turned the premiere of The Hateful Eight into a week-long event by releasing a “Roadshow Edition” of the movie to be shown in 100 theaters before the wide release of the standard version. Read the rest of this entry »

Is Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant the Best Actor?

Posted: January 12, 2016 in Drama, Reviews, Western
Tags: Academy Awards, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Golden Globes, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Punke, Tom Hardy

Is Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant the best actor?

It would seem, for the moment, that question has been answered by the Hollywood Foreign Press, which bestowed the Best Actor award (or more precisely, the Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama award) to DiCaprio at the recent Golden Globes. The win was expected. Michael Fassbender (Steve Jobs) and Bryant Cranston (Trumbo) were seen in films seen by far too few. Will Smith’s turn in Concussion generated next to no buzz. That left Eddie Remayne in The Danish Girl, work that was too soon since his last win for The Theory of Everything and too far out of the mainstream for some.

So, if the matter is settled until the Oscar nominations are announced, let’s tinker with the initial query.

In The Revenant, is Leonardo DiCaprio the best actor?

Now that is a very different question. Read the rest of this entry »

Trumbo Review

Posted: October 23, 2015 in 2015 London Film Festival, Drama, Reviews
Tags: Bryan Cranston, Dalton Trumbo, Edward G. Robinson, Hedda Hopper, Helen Mirren, Hollywood 10, Jay Roach, John McNamara, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Otto Preminger

Leave it to Hollywood to turn one of its darkest periods of cowardice into a self-aggrandizing cinematic triumph. Celebrating the life of Dalton Trumbo in a major movie from Tinseltown is irony itself; the question is whether the aftertaste is sweet or bitter? Coming off the keys of Trumbo’s typewriter, which he sat behind for hours at a time in his bathtub, beating out some of the most famous screenplays in history, the script of his own life would undoubtedly have been both sweet and sour, awash in fine wine, and surrounded by bilious clouds of cigarette smoke from his six-packs-a-day habit.

Trumbo gives us this Trumbo – a larger than life character in a story that is almost too good to be true. The short version is that Dalton Trumbo was a prolific and outstanding novelist and screenwriter, who, like many of his peers in the 1930’s and 1940’s, was also a member of the Communist Party of America. Read the rest of this entry »

Bone Tomahawk Review

Posted: October 22, 2015 in 2015 London Film Festival, Horror, Reviews
Tags: Kurt Russell, Matthew Fox, Richard Jenkins, S. Craig Zahler, Western

Bone Tomahawk is a horror-western hybrid – think The Searchers meets The Hills Have Eyes. Hey, nothing wrong with that except director/screenwriter S. Craig Zahler opted not to take the best elements of each genre, but rather all the elements of both. The result is a movie with an unconscionable run time of 132 minutes, which is at least 30 minutes too long, given the subject matter and treatment.

Put more bluntly, if the centerpiece of your movie is a lost tribe of murderous cannibal mutant freaks, don’t keep them off the screen for three-quarters of the film. Read the rest of this entry »

Momentum Review

Posted: August 25, 2015 in 2015 Fantasy FilmFest, Action, Reviews, Thriller
Tags: James Purefoy, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, Stephen S. Campanelli

Given the preposterous casting of Olga Kurylenko as a jewel thief and discredited CIA operative, the largely phoned-in performance of Morgan Freeman (not a comment on the quality of his acting – his sporadic appearances in the film are almost entirely limited to being one half of a phone conversation a continent away from the action), and the start-to-stop silliness of the premise, plot, and denouement, the surprising thing about the new thriller Momentum is that it’s not absolutely awful. In fact, it’s even somewhat entertaining and enjoyable and not entirely in the “OMG, this is so bad, it’s good” way.

How can a film destined to be terrible wind up as not too bad? Read the rest of this entry »