Film Reviews
Pretty much every big screen reboot of a beloved childhood TV show has been terrible. Yet for people with a certain nostalgia for it, they will end up loving it regardless of quality. I never watched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when I was growing up, which is why I can recognize that the recent Michael Bay-produced reboot is terrible, but a worrying amount of people I’m friends with can’t see it as anything other than an extension of what they loved when they were younger.
“If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of The Babadook”. The mainstream horror genre is in a bad state at the moment. In the wake of the success of Paranormal Activity, Hollywood studios are taking advantage of the huge financial potential of the genre, and the fact that you can spend very little money on a horror film and make a huge profit off of teenage audiences.
The only thing missing from Dreamworks’ new film Penguins of Madagascar is sanity. But we don’t go to watch a film about characters set in the Madagascar universe expecting logic. So when an octopus yells at his harmoniously compliant servants:
The Theory of Everything is the story of Stephen Hawking, reflecting his life from his early 20’s until decades later after he had become a world icon. It is at times overly romanticized, and tends to overlook certain elements of Hawking’s disease in order to instead focus on the obvious triumphs of his life. It is still a worthy film, though, and this is mostly due to Eddie Redmayne’s fantastic performance.
Every year when Oscar season rolls around I become an increasingly cynical person. I stop enjoying the movies I’m watching and instead start to tick off the list of tropes I see in a game I like to call “Oscar-bait Bingo.” In the coming months, cinema screens worldwide will be treated to my two least favorite Oscar-baiting sub-genres:
It seems to happen far too often: A new, original comedy premieres, to mostly good reviews, and so the studio decides to seize on the original’s success and create a sequel. And the sequel is not nearly as good as the first.
Animism is the belief that inanimate objects have souls. In a way, it’s self-reflective as people often project themselves upon many things. Many movies share this view as produced by such companies as Disney and Pixar.
The road of the motherless child is long and hard. So is the process of watching Hitch Hike, a short film about a teenage boy hitching a lift to find his birth mother. Although writer and director Matthew Saville’s story has the potential to be a powerful message that touches on a very real social issue, he shoots far too wide of the mark for any meaningful impact.
As much as I love movies, I’m completely against the franchise bandwagon. Every time I hear about a movie I love having a successful opening weekend at the box office I get a sense of impending dread that they are going to ruin my memories of it with a plethora of inferior sequels. Even though I grew up on the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises, both the books and the films, I’m not feeling nostalgia so much as cynicism whenever a prequel is announced or released.
Michael Keaton is one of those “If only he was given a chance, he could have done great things” type of guys. Edward Norton is one of those “If he could just suck it up and take other people’s advice he could be one of the biggest stars in the world” type of guys. This is no secret to us and it is certainly no secret to Alejandro González Iñárritu, who takes full advantage of our outside knowledge to create the only slightly twisted reality of Birdman.
Christopher Nolan has made a solid place for himself in the rank of modern filmmakers. His latest film, Interstellar, further establishes his stance. It is a wondrously beautiful movie, with intense sci-fi sequences, a solid and talented cast, and even some thought-provoking ideas.
Big Hero 6 takes the cultural stereotypes of the East and West, smashes them together to a fine powder, and fabricates from it a 100-minute ride that is so eye-poppingly pretty, so gently moving and so explosively inventive that it’s the most unabashed, jolting fun you’ll have at the movies this year. Even after turning out two very strong features like Wreck-it Ralph and Frozen, Disney proves once again that its capability to push boundaries of imagination is strengthening by each passing endeavor. Disney at its absolute peak Based on a Marvel comic, directors Don Hall and Chris Williams gather the immense arsenal of talent at Disney to conjure up on screen the beautiful cherry-bomb of a city called San Fransokyo – a hybrid mash-up of the architectural sensibilities and culture of San Francisco and Tokyo.
Nightcrawler, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, balances the crime thriller, dark comedy, and character study genres with ease. The film focuses on Louis Bloom, a mysterious young insomniac who takes to the nighttime streets of Los Angeles in an attempt to capture the most shocking breaking news. Armed with his video camera and sidekick, Rick, Louis turns real life car crashes and murders into exciting film clips to headline the morning stories.
David Ayer’s Fury is the story of an American tank unit led by “Wardaddy” (Brad Pitt) near the end of the European Theatre in World War II. Ayer is still best known for writing 2001’s Training Day, but after he made the surprisingly acclaimed End of Watch, he has been given the chance to direct a full-blown war film. Ayer’s hyper-masculine style is one that could be to the detriment of a war film that is trying to stay grounded in reality, but he is able to dial back his tendencies enough to keep it from being a glorification of violence.
A trio of rambunctious adolescents storm into a man’s house, steal his car, and then, just for the hell of it, beat his dog to death. Unbeknownst to them, the man they robbed is none other than John Wick, a former assassin who was so good at his job that he earned a nickname of “The Boogeyman.” Let’s just say that they pissed off the wrong guy.