Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Thursday, 14 May 2015 StarrLeave a comment

I have never watched any of the original Mel Gibson Mad Max movies. Since the last movie came out in 1985, I had assumed that the new one was a reboot.

However, it is a sequel. (And also a reboot…?) They don’t spend much time on world-building at ALL for this movie, which is really confusing because we are only given little hints about what the context for everything is. Here are some answers that will not be answered during the course of the movie:

What is “guzzoline”?
But really, who killed the world? Did someone or something “kill” the world?
What happened to make Max hallucinate a creepy little girl?
What about the other creepy hallucination people?
Why does half the cast speak with an Australian accent but the other half with an American one?
Why is everyone’s name so creative, but then you have Max?
Why are viable babies so difficult to come by now?
How is everyone so pale/why is everyone painted white? Is this related to the viable babies thing?
What does the silver/chrome stuff on the teeth do exactly?
What is Joe’s deal, exactly?
What is EVERYONE’S DEAL???

In fact, my big question for this whole movie was “What is the story?” What motivated these characters? Why were they in their situations? There was no real plot to this movie, it felt?

(In case you were wondering, I’m about to continue with more reasons I did not like this film.)

It was a big adrenaline rush but with no story to provide structure. Like if you took the race scenes from The Fast and the Furious franchise movies, set them in a weird post-apocalyptic steampunk desert, and took out Vin Diesel talking about family. That’s how this movie felt.
And I hate that.

In fact, just the color composition felt really tired, even though I understand why they made that decision. It was just all that orange/tan of the desert sand and then blues. I just feel like orange/blue for action movies feels really cliche now and it felt ESPECIALLY trite and exhausting for this movie. There were some instances where they made good use of the orange/blue contrast, but mostly it felt tired. Even the posters were some of the MOST orange/blue ones I’ve ever seen.

Honestly, the highlight of this movie was completely random but a nice little tongue-in-cheek joke. (I think. I actually don’t know if it had significance in past movies or whatever.) When our primary villain has his giant convoys rolling through the desert, we hear an intense electric guitar riff playing. In a cute little meta twist (you know I like these meta things), it is actually a dude strapped to the front of a truck wailing on his guitar as this offensive convoy goes busting about, setting war music. Think military drummers, but instead of drums you have sick electric guitar riffs. It was great but really had nothing to do with the movie besides sort of tell a story about what kind of mindset and culture is going on here, I suppose. It was hard not to smile whenever he showed up though, because you often forgot that he was there, just taking the soundtrack for granted.

(You know what, I liked the soundtrack. It was good at setting the tone and easily did more storytelling than most of the rest of the movie.)

The whole movie just seemed so… unnecessary? Especially without any context from the previous films but still……. the dialogue was painful, the visuals were interesting but why were they happening?

I liked Nicholas Hoult’s performance here, as it’s pretty different from a lot of stuff he’s done in the past. Charlize Theron did a pretty incredible job, although she wasn’t given much to work with given her kind of badass-and-therefore-quiet character. Folks like Zoe Kravitz and Rosie Huntington-Whitely didn’t really get to do much either, other than sit, wear ever-dirtying white dresses, cry a bit, and hose each other off. (This was a real scene. It wasn’t even terribly sexy, so I don’t know why any of this happened.)

They TRULY wasted Tom Hardy here, however, since he has almost no lines, his face is barely visible for most of the movie, and he is tied up/incapacitated for a good portion of the movie so we can’t even see him acting with his face or body. Serious waste of his talent here.

I don’t know, you guys. Just… the character dynamics and relationships weren’t really fleshed out properly. We have such interesting characters (with such bizarre names) and I didn’t feel like we really explored any of the relationships they had with each other! You KNOW how much that frustrates me. It was easily the biggest disappointment in this movie, as the lack of story is directly correlated with the lack of strong relationship building (and character building).

One good thing about the movie that I recently learned was that they really tried to minimize use of CGI. A lot of the stunts that you see are real. This is a pretty impressive feat, given how intense this movie was as far as stuntwork, pyrotechnics, etc.

I DON’T KNOW WHY THIS MOVIE EXISTS or why they made these choices??? I left the movie really relieved that it was finally over. SO relieved. I have never left a movie theater feeling that relieved that a movie was over, I think. It was just so painful. Nothing made sense. They wasted this great cast and a really successful movie franchise on this. And I don’t think you can call it a reboot if you don’t set the scene as if audiences had never seen the original movies!

So what did I think of Mad Max: Fury Road? No. Thanks but no thanks.

Mad Max: Fury Road comes out in theaters tomorrow, May 15.

(The editing on this trailer is top-notch, by the way.
But it basically includes all that we need to know about the movie.)

Pitch Perfect 2 (2015)

Friday, 8 May 2015Friday, 8 May 2015 Starr3 Comments

The first Pitch Perfect movie was a surprising hit, to me. I didn’t think much of it when it was released, but people couldn’t stop raving about how hilarious they thought the movie was. And of course, who could escape Anna Kendrick singing “Cups (When I’m Gone)” on the radio… in the mall… in restaurants… I even did a cover way back when. (Oh to be so fresh out of college that I filmed that in my college apartment.) Anyway, let’s jump right into it, shall we? Our story begins with the Barden Bellas being suspended after Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson) accidentally shows her lady bits to President Obama, Michelle Obama, and a large audience at the Kennedy Center. (This scene is in the trailer and is literally the opener, so I’m not spoiling anything for you there.) They lose their champion tour to German group Das Sound Machine (featuring YouTube star Flula!) and have to win “Worlds” in order to be reinstated. (Because every show/movie about show choir/a capella revolves around a big competition that is usually “regionals” but taking it to Copenhagen for that international flair is nice, too.) Also everyone is a senior, so there’s that. If you’re unfamiliar with the humor in Pitch Perfect movies, let me first warn you: The humor is often offensive. But the movies are fully aware of this and basically make fun of how offensive they are. Examples of running gags that are off-color in this movie are:

Flo (Chrissie Fit), the undocumented (???) immigrant from Guatemala, who doesn’t care too much about if the Bellas get reinstated because of the horrors she endured
Announcer John Smith (John Michael Higgins), who frequently makes extremely sexist comments about women, minorities, non-Americans, anyone really

Even though the humor was definitely NOT politically correct, I didn’t find it to be crude, but rather drawing attention to how wrong these jokes are, if that makes sense? I don’t like crude, off-color jokes, but within the script, the sexist joke ITSELF is the joke. It’s a meta-joke, if you will. And I appreciated that level of self-awareness a lot.

“You know you’re setting women back like, 30 years right now, right?”

What was great is that there were so many of these jokes but they never felt too tired. I think the writers did a great job not milking a joke dry. For example, there is a running gag where Becca (Anna Kendrick) says she is intimidated and also sexually confused by Kommissar (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) so our already adorably awkward Becca has some funny interactions with her. But they didn’t overdo it with this one. THEY CAME CLOSE but they didn’t. I was really surprised that Hailee Steinfeld was in this movie? It made sense once the shock wore off that they would introduce a freshman since, as I mentioned, everyone on the Bellas was graduating. She has her own little storyline and she fit in pretty well as far as being a weirdo. I didn’t love her romance subplot, even though it was pretty cute, and I thought that some elements of her character were sloppily done, even though they made sense in the scheme of the whole movie. I just thought that her character could have been written into the story more smoothly. Can I also say that Keegan Michael Key was amazing in this movie? I’m a huge huge fan of his Comedy Central show Key & Peele, so I was really excited that he would be joining the cast. All of his scenes were really funny because he is really great at playing off other people, reacting to them and eliciting certain reactions. I did miss Utkarsh Ambudkar, aka hot Indian guy from Pitch Perfect, because I really liked his character and what he brought to the cast and to the whole movie. There aren’t that may people of color in the Pitch Perfect movies. Some people take issue with the fact that the few that are in the movies are weirdos. Ester Dean — who is a real-life songwriter for artists like Rihanna — is both token black friend and butch lesbian trope, and well, Hana Mae Lee’s character says really unsettling things very quietly. But the nice thing about how Pitch Perfect does this is that EVERY CHARACTER IS TOTALLY WEIRD. Some are weirder than others. (Am I mad that the Asian girl is clearly waaaaaay weirder than everyone else? A little, it’s okay, I’m just salty because it hits too close to home for me.) But the point of the movies is that these kids are all really weird and that’s okay because they have each other. They might even make an occasional joke about how there’s just one black girl on the Bellas. Still, it doesn’t make it okay to drop their one South Asian guy and to replace him with a black beatboxer and a blond Asian who both have no lines at all. While I’m not the biggest fan of Rebel Wilson’s brand of humor, I think fans will really appreciate her own subplot in the movie. She gets a solo and drives a lot of the movie, whereas Anna Kendrick was the very clear star of the first movie. It seemed like the sequel kind of forgot that Anna Kendrick was the star of the first one, or maybe it just didn’t care. Part of Becca’s story is that she begins to detach from the Barden Bellas as she prepares to graduate but the rest of the girls are having a much harder time letting go. (How is Brittany Snow’s character still there if she was supposed to be a senior in the first movie? Because she has been intentionally failing classes for the past 3 years to put off graduation. Yep.) For comedy movies like this, I don’t think spoilers are necessary. Just know that Pitch Perfect 2 delivers all of the insane but hilarious personality that the first one did with its characters. There’s a really great sing-off scene (another classic show choir/a cappella movie/show trope) that features a great guest star. (Those of you who have been following the movie more closely probably know about this.) It was easily one of the highlights of the movie, during which I laughed out loud and frequently. And of course, it’s a movie that features a female ensemble cast that everyone enjoys.

ALSO I got a yellow cup (because CUPS) and a flashlight (there’s an original song in the movie called “Flashlight”), which I thought was some pretty nice and clever branding. (Although I didn’t love the lyrics for the song “Flashlight”. They were kind of dumb.) Are you going to see Pitch Perfect 2? Did you like the first movie? Do you like movies/TV shows about competitive singing? Pitch Perfect 2 is in US theaters May 15.<

Seventh Son (2015)

Friday, 6 February 2015 Starr2 Comments

This was not a good movie. It pains me to say this because I have a friend who worked on it (the visual effects were great, B!) but oh boy.

Okay, now that I’ve blurted out my thesis, it’s time to back it up.

First of all, is anyone surprised? When my friend Annie told me she had early screening tickets on Wednesday, I had no clue what she was going on about and very vaguely knew that it was a movie at all. Something something… fantasy or sci-fi genre? Am I out of the loop or did it seem like there was very minimal promotion going on for this? (Not a rhetorical question, it is entirely likely that I just was never targeted for advertising for this movie.)

I am assuming that all the actors in this film were really well-paid because ugh, it was just awful. I really take issue with the writing. The dialogue made me roll my eyes into the back of my head and the plot points were so loosely tied together. The movie itself was pretty short, which was great for me because that meant I didn’t have to endure it for more than 2 hours. But maybe they could have used some extra time to build the world here? World building is crucial and I will never excuse any book, movie, TV show, etc. that doesn’t take care to do it. I mean, there’s a scene where we are looking at a tombstone. It says “REBEKKA” backwards. Is this the script of this grand world? Mirrored English? That was one of the worst offenses, that they made such a laughably barely-half-arsed attempt at the world-building. This is a movie based on a book series, the world-building is done! You just have to put it in the movie!

You know what’s worse than a movie with an all-white cast?
A movie where the only people of color are the secondary villains who have zero character development and are killed off.
Djimon Honsou is in this and it’s such a shame that his talent is wasted here. There was an Asian secondary villain who doesn’t have any freaking lines before he is killed. Do not even get me started on the black female secondary villain who takes the form of a leopard. She is reduced to an animal much more than the other villains, and the Asian one was a bear chained in a cage for most of his scene, so that’s telling. And of course, she has no lines. At least Djimon Honsou had lines.

I cringed during most of Jeff Bridges’ and Julianne Moore’s scenes. I think I cringed most watching Julianne Moore play this poorly developed villain. I couldn’t help think of her standing in front of a green screen pretending to wield magic while she has been nominated for an Oscar for the fifth time. I’ll go more into how I think her character fell completely flat later, but just… know there was a lot of putting my head in my hands in the middle of the theater. I don’t blame her at all. She did the best she could with what she was given… but she was given baloney.

Jeff Bridges, the Oscar-winning actor, may have known this was all ridiculous. He uses this strange affect when he speaks in this movie, like if Sean Connery was trying to play Gandalf. Maybe his character is supposed to be a kind of washed up old fool, but it was still very sad to see him like this. I’d like to think that he knew this whole movie was ludicrous and was just having fun while getting paid.

Ben Barnes actually did a pretty good job. I’m not familiar with his work (sorry Prince Caspian fans) but you know what, he looked good in this role and I think he delivered. Not sure why his character was the only one with any real depth but okay then. I’d watch more movies with him after seeing Seventh Son.

If you’re familiar with my reviews, you might know that I care deeply about world-building and relationship-building. The relationships between characters bond us to them more than their actions independent of other people. The relationships in this movie were almost all BS. There’s, obviously, a love story and it’s completely limp. It drives much of the plot ending forward and I was so detached from it that I was really disgusted. Two attractive actors with some on-screen chemistry does not a love story make! The only maybe compelling relationship, to me, was of Tom Ward (our protagonist) and his mother. His mother was a pretty cool character, played by Olivia Williams, and I maybe felt most attached to her. But maybe that’s just because it’s easy to write maternal traits without having to do much else.

I mean… I have so many negative things to say here. A waste of Kit Harington, who is only in the movie for the first 10 minutes, sorry to all his fans. A waste of admittedly, as I said early, really nice visual effects to create magic and mythical beasts. A waste of what seems like it was a really cool world. This story is just empty and flat and I had no reason to care about it. I was so uninvested in the characters, in the story, about 5 minutes into the movie. Spoiler alert: Gregory locks away Mother Malkin and she escapes because “time made her stronger” and that is the impetus for our conflict? That after enough time passed, she could just leave her prison? As soon as this happened, and Julianne Moore was introduced in just an utterly tragic costume, I knew this movie was worse than I thought it would be going into this screening.

I’m just going to show you the trailer now, I guess. More ranting afterwards.

Birdman (2014)

Saturday, 31 January 2015 StarrLeave a comment

Oh, where do I start with Birdman. It was so different, so bold, so ambitious, but it pulled off what it was looking to achieve so perfectly.

The thought I had consistently throughout this film was how meta it is. The film was a really thoughtful satire about acting, theater, Hollywood, critics, Michael Keaton’s career, and more. Extremely self-aware, extremely reflective. So good.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but one of my favorite things about this film was how it played with audience expectations. I’ll talk more about it after the trailer, but let me tease you by saying it reminded me of Magritte. This movie was so introspective that it made me think of surrealist art. My friends and I left the theater feeling like we had left one of our humanities seminars in college.

First of all, it stars Michael Keaton as Riggan Thompson, a washed up actor who previously found fame starring in comic book superhero films “Birdman”. You did hear me mention that this film satirizes Michael Keaton’s acting career, right? Maybe it would have been a more subtle satire if they had cast a different actor, but it was so perfect with Keaton playing the role himself. (For those not in the know, Michael Keaton is most famous for playing Batman in Tim Burton’s films Batman and Batman Returns.) The movie mirrors his career very closely; at one point, he cites how the last Birdman movie he did was in 1992, which is the year that Batman Returns was released.

Michael Keaton is great. What a stupendous performance. I really know him best from Beetlejuice, actually, but this has really opened my eyes to Michael Keaton as an actor. Amazing comeback performance. He delivers so simply but deliberately. Just excellent work on his part.

I loved this movie stylistically. The pseudo-one-take style made for really great transitions that I was a big fan of. One criticism is that the shakiness of the camerawork would get distracting. It really lent an indie film feeling to it, not really in a good way. It would seem amateurish at times, to have tight shots that were wavering over an actor’s face.

But speaking of these tight shots, I really appreciated the emphasis on the actors’ monologues in this. Combined with the seamless cinematography, the monologues added to the theater feeling of this movie, which I found refreshing. How often do you watch a movie that feels a bit like watching a play? Even when Hollywood adapts plays for films, you lose that. I loved this.

I also have to really commend Edward Norton. I haven’t seen a film of his in a long while and this performance is pretty different from the ones I’ve seen in the past. He plays Mike Shiner, a diva stage actor who is incapable of much else but acting. I forgot how much I love watching Edward Norton. He is the secondary protagonist, I would argue, for this film. While he is the source of most of the comic moments in the film, there’s this darkness in his character that we see slowly being resolved over the course of the movie. This is the kind of role that makes you an Edward Norton fan, trust me.

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu did a great job and I appreciated many of his little deliberate touches. For example, in the opening shot, we see a brief glimpse – maybe a one-second cutaway – of jellyfish on the beach. If you weren’t paying attention, you wouldn’t have know what it was or you would have missed it completely. By the end of the movie, we know what this moment was, it is significant. Little things like this are so pleasing to me in movies, tying little ends together at the beginning and end of a film.

More comments after the trailer:

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: