Inherent Vice (2014)

Friday, 9 January 2015Thursday, 8 January 2015 Starr1 Comment

I got to attend a screening of Inherent Vice thanks to Cloture Club this past Wednesday. (It had a limited release late last year and will have a wider release today.)

I didn’t know too much about the movie going into it. I’d only just started seeing some trailers and commercials, and they didn’t tell me much about the actual story. (Much like how I felt about the Interstellar promotions.) (ALSO I’m going to talk about Interstellar soon. If I don’t, bug me about it.) The initial impression I got from this was a very American Hustle-esque vibe of nostalgia for an older time with some investigative hijinks? Also, check out that cast list, it is not to be trifled with. We have an awards-season gunner here.

Going into the movie, I suspected it wouldn’t be my cup of tea. I mean, here’s the description I was given before the screening:

“Inherent Vice” is the seventh feature from Paul Thomas Anderson and the first ever film adaption of a Thomas Pynchon novel. When private eye Doc Sportello’s ex-old lady suddenly out of nowhere shows up with a story about her current billionaire land developer boyfriend whom she just happens to be in love with, and a plot by his wife and her boyfriend to kidnap that billionaire and throw him in a looney bin…well, easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic `60s and paranoia is running the day and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” that’s being way too overused – except this one usually leads to trouble. With a cast of characters that includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, LAPD Detectives, a tenor sax player working undercover, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists… Part surf noir, part psychedelic romp – all Thomas Pynchon.

Are you confused? I sure was.

And to be honest, I was still confused coming out of the movie. One thing I will say off the bat is that Paul Thomas Anderson did a really wonderful job of transporting us back to that late 60s/early 70s time in American life. It’s not only the obvious costuming and set design, but the camera work and the editing. Lots of tight angles, a nostalgic grainyness… if you had not seen a movie in the last 40 years, this movie would seem very familiar stylistically to you. In one of the opening shots, we see Katherine Waterson, who plays Shasta Fey, looking so incredibly mod and the stylizing of the shot makes her look even more authentically mod.

This still is brighter and clearer than this scene was in the film.

Joaquin Phoenix delivers a great performance, as usual. He is also rocking some really incredible sideburns.

Them muttonchops put Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine to shame.

Also, for fans of Walk the Line, we see Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon reunited.

Before I attempt to talk about the plot (which I really barely understood…), I’ll just go over some thoughts:

Do not see this movie with your family unless your family has a special bond that allows you to see a movie with a lot of nudity, sex, and excessive use of the phrase “pu**y eater”. (I mean it.)
There is also a lot of drug use in this movie. It’s important to the plot and the themes of the film, but not important enough to warrant how much it’s mentioned or shown in the film.
The movie is narrated by Sortilège, a chracter who is in the film as one of Doc’s friends but otherwise… serves no real on-screen purpose? Unless I’m missing something? I don’t know why there was a need for her to be this on-screen character who is a friend to Doc for about 5 minutes total of the film. She was a good narrator, don’t get me wrong, but having her be an on-screen character confused me a bit. I think it was meant to make her seem like part of the story, but she was maybe the only character who had just nothing to do with any of the interwoven storylines.
Owen Wilson always plays Owen Wilson. I would like to see him challenge himself as an actor to not play Owen Wilson.

Also, you will get certain cravings in this movie:

Pizza
Fudgesicle (which actually turns out to be a frozen chocolate-covered banana)
Frozen chocolate-covered banana
Pancakes

All in all, this movie wasn’t really for me. At all. I would compare it to Burn After Reading. If you liked that, you’ll likely enjoy this. It has a similarly nonsensical, all-over-the-place plot, and even a similar theme of paranoia. Not my cup of tea, as I said before.

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That being said, there were a few shining moments for me. Some very random moments that were just really funny, very randomly emotional moments. It wasn’t a complete waste on me, but I just walked out of the theater not sure how everything started, ended, or what was really going on in between. It felt like just as the weirdness had plateaued, something else crazy would happen. Again, I am sure this was intentional but it’s not something I personally enjoy in movies.

This trailer actually includes most of my favorite moments from the movie:

2014 in Film

Friday, 26 December 2014Wednesday, 31 December 2014 Starr2 Comments

It’s that time of year again! I hope you have all been having a lovely holiday season! I somehow managed to get myself to write way more movie reviews this year than I have in previous years, thanks in part to my discovering a decent system for finding free early screenings.

Criteria for this list are as follows:

I saw it between 1 January 2014 and 31 December 2014
It was released between 1 January 2014 and 31 December 2014
- Exceptions will be made if they were released internationally this year
  - Snowpiercer was first released internationally last year but was released here this year so this is an exception to the exception
- The Wedding Ringer will be on next year’s list (if I don’t forget)

Without further ado, here is my 2014 movie roundup, in the order provided by Wikipedia:

* = early screening
** = not seen in theaters (streaming service/in-flight movie/DVD rental, etc.)
No notation indicates that I saw it in theater during its release

Ride Along*
From Vegas to Macau
Ex-Files
The Lego Movie**
The Grand Budapest Hotel**
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
The Right Kind of Wrong**
Divergent
The Trip to Italy
X-Men: Days of Future Past
The Fault in Our Stars
Edge of Tomorrow
Guardians of the Galaxy
Snowpiercer**
The Maze Runner*
The Imitation Game
Gone Girl
Big Hero 6*
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1
Into the Woods*
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies*

Total = 21*

*Updated 30 December with a last-minute addition to the party!
*Updated 31 December because I forgot I went to the movies in China!

I’m realizing I missed a lot of films that I really wanted to see this year. It was a really crazy year for me, and seeing movies was one of the things I sacrificed in the midst of all that chaos. (I mean, I had been wanting to see Snowpiercer since last year and I watched it yesterday so…)

Previously: 2013 in film || 2012 in film

(Do I watch fewer and fewer new releases every year, what’s going on…)

I may watch more between now and December 31, but here’s what I’ve got for you all.

What did you watch this year?
What movies that I missed do I have to make sure I see? (I know there are a lot, so I need help prioritizing.)

I’m a Moron & Questions About BotFA

Friday, 19 December 2014Wednesday, 20 April 2016 Starr6 Comments

Yesterday, I was invited to go see a late-ish showing of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies with some of my high school friends. I wanted to say no originally, because I’ve seen it already and I needed to be up pretty early this morning, but then I reconsidered and decided I have to stop saying no to opportunities to do fun things.

Anyway, we had a group of 6 people total and were taking my friend’s minivan. Since I was one of the first people to get in the car, I thought it was only right for me to climb into the farthest back row rather than the middle row, so that I wouldn’t have to force people to climb over me. The minivan is well-loved, so the lights in the car didn’t turn on when the car doors were open and… well, the back seat wasn’t up. So when I climbed around the middle seats, turned around, and reached behind me for the seat…

… I just landed on the floor of the van. Hard. On top of a tire iron, actually.

OH how we all laughed. I laughed the hardest, I think because my body didn’t know how to deal with what had just happened. I really thought there would be a seat up and had not even considered that it might be stowed away. My friend opened the trunk door to see my just on my butt, on this tire iron, laughing hysterically but also in pain.

There is now a bruise on my outer thigh/hip/butt area that doesn’t look too bad on the surface at all, thank goodness. (But it does hurt quite a bit to lie on my side. D:)

NOW I have a lot of questions about BotFA and a second viewing just made them more salient in my head. They are spoiler-y so they will come after this video. Please keep in mind that I have not read the novels so if these are questions that can be answered in the novel, or that you know the answers to, please do let me know! I want to know what is going on here.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

Friday, 12 December 2014 StarrLeave a comment

Thanks to a last-minute save by my good friend Annie, I was able to attend an early screening of the final film in The Hobbit trilogy!

Oh man, what a ride this has been. The Tolkien fandom awoke after the end of the LotR trilogy ended. We get some more New Zealand tourism goodness. We got to see Orlando Bloom is his utterly glorious Legolas wig, even though Legolas isn’t in the novel. We get a beautiful Evangeline Lilly in her gorgeous wig, even though Tauriel isn’t a character in the book either.

Let me talk about the Tolkien fandom hype for this, eh? The hashtag for this film is #OneLastTime, as in what Thorin asks of his fellow dwarves: “Will you follow me, one last time?” But of course, for the fandom, it is One Last Time to see a fresh view of Middle Earth, One Last Time to have adventures with hobbits and wizards and elves and dwarves and orcs. The feels are powerful and iminent. This is our last time, folks. Let’s take some time to appreciate that all good things come to an end. (Unless/until they make The Silmarillion.)

If you didn’t feel the feels watching Billy Boyd sing “The Last Goodbye”, you’re probably not the target audience for these films 😛

Oh, hasn’t it been a great ride, friends? No matter your criticisms for these films, it’s been so much fun experiencing the epic proportion of Middle Earth and its inhabitants.

This final installment for the trilogy jumps RIGHT into things. If you had forgotten (as I had), The Desolation of Smaug ended with Smaug leaving the Lonely Mountain and making his way to Laketown to wreak havoc. So BotFA starts right there, with a deadly dragon ready to rain hellfire upon innocent people and the action gets going from the get-go.

(If you haven’t seen the previous 2 films, or even if you just don’t remember where the last film left off, you will definitely be a bit confused at the beginning of the movie. Why is this guy locked up again? Why is Kili dying on a table? Which dwarves went up the mountain and which ones stayed in Laketown? Who are any of these people? Where did Legolas and his golden locks go?)

LET’S JUST BE REAL: If you liked The Lord of the Rings, you liked the last 2 films in The Hobbit series, you’re going to like this final film. You’ve got everything you could ask for:

Beautiful, breath-taking New Zealand scenery
Martin Freeman as the endearing titular character
- He’s also so great with physical comedy and his facial expressions. We get great little doses of comic relief from him
Great comic relief moments overall
Interesting romance arc with Tauriel (who, again, is not a character from the canon, so all her storylines are made up)
Benedict Cumberbatch’s great voicework for Smaug and the Necromancer
Plenty of battle scenes (and I mean PLENTY, I mean it’s in the name of this film so)
Amazing cast members all around, truly
Terrific scoring by Howard Shore
Awesome effects

Can we also have Richard Armitage do a lot more voice work?

Non-spoiler-y comments:

There are POCs in this movie! Not very many, I think I saw maybe 2, but Laketown is a diverse enough town that there was at least one black person and one Asian person. Erm, okay, you can do better but you know, better than zero, I guess.
Even though many people didn’t like that there wound up being a bit of a love triangle in The Hobbit with the introduction of Tauriel (again, a non-canon character) and having Legolas in there (again, not in The Hobbit novel), I thought they handled it pretty well. I was satisfied with how they ended things. I’ll have some more comments on this below the trailer, but they could’ve done a lot worse. That being said, it did feel pretty unnecessary, but I guess they wanted us to feel more attached to these 3 characters? I certainly did.
There are really excellent moments of dramatic irony that point to events that will take place in The Lord of the Rings.
OKAY I did have an issue with a scene here and maybe some of the world building lemme break it down for you:
- First of all, not sure how orcs are so easily beaten by men who seem to have zero battle experience?
- At one point towards the end of the movie, Bilbo literally takes out orcs by throwing large rocks at them. Am I supposed to believe that he is killing them with these large rocks?
- If Bilbo throwing large rocks kills orcs, how is it that he survives being thunked on the head with the hilt of an orc’s sword? (This is not a spoiler, obviously our titular character doesn’t die, we know he survives to the events of The Lord of the Rings.)
- Basically, these orc extras seem way too easy to kill, even when compared to elf, men, and dwarf extras.
I do feel like, by this last film, I could start to differentiate the 12 dwarves that aren’t Thorin. That being said, I still can’t name half of them or tell them apart, really.
INTENSELY cool scene involving Galadriel (not in the book), Elrond, and Saurumon. We don’t see this much action from them in The Lord of the Rings so this scene was really fun to watch.
It’s also cool to see Lee Pace as Thranduil go to battle because, again, we don’t see much action from him in the earlier films, where he looks fabulous as always but in a very stationary way: standing fabulously, sitting fabulously, occasionally walking or pacing (!!) fabulously.
Would have liked to see a bit more fleshing out of Thorin’s dragon sickness. I feel like the trailer really set us up to watch this key character’s obsession and the corruption of his goals, but that was done a bit too weakly in the movie. It seems way more unreasonable than I thin it needed to seem, and then there’s just a very strange kind of hallucinatory sequence that just doesn’t carry much weight because the whole thing doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
It’s nice that we end at the scene from the first LotR film where Gandalf shows up at Bilbo’s door after his 111th birthday. It really helps to bring us full circle.

I would highly recommend refreshing your memory on the last 2 films before you watch this one, and it does help to have seen The Lord of the Rings trilogy because they make so many little nods to it in this film. But even if you do neither, you can still really enjoy this last Tolkien dream-come-true. One last time.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies will be in theaters in the US on Wednesday, December 17. (Check your individual country’s release date.) (Very sorry Argentina, as I believe you will not be getting this movie until January 1.)

Spoilers below the trailer:

The Wedding Ringer (2015)

Tuesday, 9 December 2014Monday, 29 December 2014 StarrLeave a comment

A few weeks ago, I went to a VERY early screening of The Wedding Ringer, which will be released January 16, 2015. I didn’t know a lot about the movie going into it except that it starred Kevin Hart. Here is how I will describe the movie to you:

This movie combines a little bit of I Love You, Man with Wedding Crashers and even some Pretty Woman/Can’t Buy Me Love fun. Josh Gad plays a groom-to-be who is woefully without male friends. Enter Kevin Hart, who is a best man for-hire. CUE SHENANIGANS.

At this point, I trust Kevin Hart to really deliver when he’s on-screen. I always laugh out loud and hard when I am at his movies. This was no exception. It’s not exactly my kind of movie but it was HILARIOUS. I only knew Josh Gad from his voice work in Frozen (… I hate Olaf so much) so it was nice to see what he brought to the table also. I don’t really have anything to say about Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting, I never really do.

There are a lot of great scenes, great references and nods to other movies and TV shows. (If you like catching those references in shows like The Mindy Project, you’ll like spotting them here.) Writing was just very ON POINT here and I laughed really really hard, I cannot stress that enough. There is dancing, there is fake identities, there is muddy football with senior citizens, there is fire, there is a car chase. This movie has everything, and it’ll all make you laugh.

The Wedding Ringer doesn’t come out for another month, but it’s definitely a fun one to catch with friends.