Movie Review Thread

[Elle]

[El Jefe]

I think I've seen a movie that starts off like that.

[Elle]

They gave me a free hot dog that was possibly THE grossest hot dog I have ever eaten, so at this point I'm just assuming that vomiting could happen at any hour in the next 24, or maybe hotdogs are really so processed that it was not capable of causing the usual kind of poisoning. I have no idea why I ate the whole hotdog, as if I was incapable of choosing otherwise.

[Cazmonster]

'Free Hotdogs' is a quick trip to Nopetown.

[Cazmonster]

Just got out of Ghostbusters. Oh, it is a wonderfully fun romp through the paranormal. Nothing too spooky for anybody older than say ten. It's gorgeous, the leads are all fantastic. The cameos, of both the previous team and of other Kevin Feige movies are well placed.

[Elle]

Becoming Jane (2007)

Anne Hathaway pretends to be Jane Austen in a story very loosely based on someone's interpretation of Jane Austen's real life loves and losses. The fairly explicit premise that Jane is a great author because she had her heart broken into a thousand jaggedy pieces, and without that soul-wrecking experience she would have been just another very "accomplished" female scribbler, makes me want to vomit and smash the screen. The movie's habit of working actual Austen quotes into the screenplay might have been endearing had it not been accomplished so crudely, along with the absurd insinuation that life-event x for Jane must have prompted phrase-y in book-z.

But if we can put all that aside for a moment, the love interest who accomplishes the soul-wrecking is James McAvoy, and that makes a lot of sense. Though they somehow managed to film him in a few scenes in a manner that made him look haggard and offputting (who knew that was possible), they also include a totally gratuitous scene with his butt. I guess this is supposed to explain why Jane is so stirred by him - her glimpse of his naked butt. And okay, I'm not arguing that would have helped fuel something, but it was still gratuitous.

So Jane loves James McAvoy, a man who inexplicably is boozing it up with whores at one moment and then falling for a severe, boring, critical Anne Hathaway in the next. I'm pretty sure Anne is acting this way on purpose because I've seen her horrendous scenery chewing ways in Les Mis. I am not a fan of her acting. It hurts to see fantastic actresses like Jennifer Ehle in P&P and then... this... But that's ok because in this case I was able to perform some strange mental trick of completely erasing her from the screen in favor of pretending that I was the one listening to James McAvoy read lines from natural history books aloud in a totally dirty fashion. It was great! Maggie Smith also graced us with a driblet or two of her presence. She plays a rich old lady whose nephew has marital designs on Jane. It was a problem because he was pretty cute and made some very cutting, dry remarks along the way, and I was thinking yeah, he compares favorably even to James McAvoy. I definitely would. So why would Jane be so bored by him? She should have just gone with it.

But no, she loves McAvoy who destroys her heart, and then WAIT he loves her again, but then WAIT she realizes they cannot be together, but then WAIT... and the whole time Anne just looks like she needs to pee or is really tired, so I helped her out by bawling sixteen buckets of tears into my bed until the whole thing was basically saturated. Even this dumb movie can make me cry because I am a weak person and also James McAvoy is really hot. That's pretty much the whole thing - maybe watch the butt scene and then turn it off, time saved, happier, less crying.

[El Jefe]

I've been going through a DCU Animated kick lately. Mostly I've struck out. But Assault on Arkham and Flashpoint Paradox are two significant stand outs. The first is pretty much everything the Suicide Squad movie wanted to be (and absolutely wasn't). The second is probably the only time I've seen the Flash used well, outside of the CW series. (Justice League Flash can die in a fire.) Solid voice casts, more mature scripts, and a strong focus on what actually has worked well for DCU films to date...the actual grimdark. If you're paying attention Warner Brothers, your most successful DC films yet have not tried to up the humor quotient into the stratosphere, and instead focused in on some damn dark material. TAKE SOME DAMN NOTES.

[Elle]

I tried to watch this movie called Sparks & Embers, a British romantic comedy (purportedly). It was so bad I couldn't even continue, seriously. That bad. It PAINED me. Every person involved with this movie must have a tragically boring life and zero imagination because it is perhaps the least creative, least interesting, most utterly cold and failed way of generating some sort of romantic comedy I have ever witnessed, and that is saying a lot.

[Elle]

I don't know who's to blame: me for attempting to wield a remote by myself or Netflix for assuming and presenting this crap. Anyway, I was presented with a movie that contained that lovely Dr. Who guy, the cute one, the bad guy from Jessica Jones. Chloe knows who he is - she burst in and was like, SIGH, it's.... who? David Tennant! Yes. She loves him too. Good taste! Anyway, there was David Tennant and I couldn't really figure out what nonsense the movie was about, but I also really liked the lead actress, Kelly Mcdonald, so why not? Here's why: because we only have so much time on earth, people, we only have so much time left. Not much!

The movie was called The Decoy Bride - I guess in a review one should state the title of the movie. It was not a good romantic comedy, though I did watch it all the way through, which means it was better, FAR better, than the other one - Shrews and Widgets or whatever. Screws and Witless. Sparks and Embers, yes. I think I have sleep-deprivation induced dementia, or you know, the neurological deterioration I have long dreaded but vaguely expected has begun!

The point is, I felt like with what shreds of mental acuity I have left, I could have prepared a far better screenplay for these worthy people. They were so cute. They looked at each other and mouthed words and I mentally erased the dumb words and dumb plot and imagined my own words there instead. That was a decent outcome. Honestly, the actual plot was so dumb: he's a minor celeb about to marry a major celeb, and the press are hounding them, so they stage a fake wedding with Kelly Mcdonald, and of course David Tennant is supposed to end up with Kelly instead. It's never explained why he completely fails to love this other woman to whom he's engaged, and why he is therefore capable of falling for a complete stranger within a single day right as he's about to wed someone else. Nor is it explained why this seemingly charming, sweet girl Kelly would be pleased to poach the fiance of some random stranger, after spending only a few hours with him! Never mind, these British - the slightest expression of interest on anyone's part and they'll wait in agony for years for the slightest hope of a positive resolution. We can blame Persuasion and things like this, Dickens. It's horrible; these people poisoned me.

[Elle]

Watched the most recent Madame Bovary with Mia Wasikowska (who also plays the Jane in Eyre with El Jefe's man with the large eyes and nostrils). It's so boring that I fell asleep twice while watching it. Madame Bovary is very much not a boring book, so already you know something is deeply wrong here. Emma Bovary is far from an admirable figure but Flaubert still obviously loves her and gets her deal. That sense is missing in this movie. She has no flounce and even less bounce. Instead she's a rather dull and contemplative lady, except we have no idea what she's thinking about. Nor is the audience helped to understand why she's buying all that stuff, to gild her cage. The doctor is by far the cutest and most attractive guy in the show, which is also a problem. He's not boring - he's sweet! It's all backwards. Even his terrible operation is presented as some kind of unwitting accident he was duped into. I imagined something very different when I read the book, I guess, like a contrast between the rigid boundaries of her world and her effort to fantasize and live an exciting life outside those limits. I had to flip through a few pages again to be sure I wasn't dreaming or misremembering how much peppier the book version was.

Oh AND it really annoyed me that they all spoke with somewhat different English-language accents, some of which were hopelessly contemporary. There's no obvious solution for that, but why not just speak "old movies English" or something.

[Elle]

Two movies this weekend... lots of cleaning the house was going on. Yesterday watched the Witches of Eastwick because it happened to be on TV and none of the internet stuff was working. That is a crazy movie - I mean, who thought that one up? Jack Nicholson is always amusing. And you know what? I love Cher! I do, I just love her. She's awesome. It's basically a crap movie though.

Luckily on Sat. I had no Netflix and had to resort to Amazon, which immediately presented me a movie before I could even browse. Okay, yeah, I said. At some point in his early life, Steven Soderbergh must have said to himself, self, we have so many movies made with what They call the "Male Gaze". What if we shook that up a little bit and had some "female gaze" for a change? Let's find a heroine women will find adorable. Our hero will be devastatingly good looking - definitely potentially dangerous and mysterious, with his ten yard stare and the burning intensity of a thousand exploding stars - but also kind of like a lost baby deer in the woods. Let us make him, say, a pathological liar trying to be honest, in a truly weird way - meanwhile, our heroine is totally honest and will help solve his issues while curing her own in the process. When these two people finally touch the whole universe will suddenly expand, and nobody has seen anything like this on film before. There you have Sex, Lies & Videotape. Yeah, there is a lot more to the story - this time around I finally was able to tear my eyes/mind away from James Spader long enough to notice that other interesting things happen in the movie, like when Ann and Cynthia are both being sexually harassed by the same boorish drunk at Cynthia's bar (never even registered with me before). But who cares, the main thing is: James Spader at Peak Hotness Levels. <faints>

[Mike]

Kubo and the Two Strings is a beautiful movie that is totally worth watching.

And right from the first couple of scenes, Kubo is the most awesome magical bard I've ever seen on film. Dothan is in complete awe of his abilities. It's amazing.

[poorpete]

Saw Mary Poppins for the first time since childhood. One thing I've heard over the last decade was how terrible Dick Van Dyke's accent was. It's true, it's not a good british accent. But... it's a fun accent! And nevertheless, Dick Van Dyke totally rocks in this film. He does comedy, he sings, he dances, he's a triple threat! How was he not a huge movie star? Julie Andrews, always classic in any film where she teaches a grouchy father's children the simple joys of life. Oh and "Step in Time." 1. Totally forgot this song existed, and 2. totally forgot it was my favorite scene in the film. 3. now it's my toddler's favorite scene too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-b_GJ4ltk

[Elle]

The Painted Veil. 4.5 out of 5. Great movie.

Edward Norton and Naomi Watts star here and both are phenomenal in this period piece set in 1920s pre-Revolution China. Ed is a British doctor and Naomi is his new young wife. Spoilers below...

Ed has asked Naomi to marry him though she barely knows him, as those tricksy British are wont to do, and she is young and defiant and decides to do it even though she doesn't really love him. He's kind of stuffy and awkward, no romance to speak of. So when he takes her across to globe to China and leaves her alone and bored, she sleeps with Liev Schreiber even though he's obviously an older cad who's only pretending he's deeply in love with her so he can get into her shorts. When Ed finds out about the affair, he is truly pissed off and does various heartless things. Among them is deciding to go help a remote Chinese village fight a cholera epidemic, dragging Naomi along with him into the danger of illness, since at that point he couldn't care less whether she lives or dies. Many things happen after that which result in these two doing heroic deeds and finally getting to truly know one another, and once they do: love.

[Zombie]

Hell or High Water

Best movie of 2016 so far. Modern day western. Great performances. Even better writing.

9 out of 10.

[Cazmonster]

[Elle]

Ex Machina

Fun movie, worth watching, and raises some interesting questions about humans, machines, trust, love, etc. Oscar Isaac plays a CEO-of-Google type weirdo who is building an AI. He brings an employee (Domhnall Gleeson) to his remote fancy house/research facility/compound to interact with AI Eva, played by Alicia Vikander, and judge whether she seems conscious (they call it a Turing Test but, well... kind of). Vikander does a great job of portraying a machine possibly-or-not becoming conscious and pretending to be human - she seems smart, curious, icy, and vulnerable all at once. Sonoya Mizuno plays another IMO very important role as a woman who works for Isaac. The whole experience turns out to be rather creepy for Gleeson, who becomes suspicious of creepy-acting Isaac, and the movie presents Eva in such a way that you're not sure whether she's creepy or not. Things happen and I won't spoil the way the plot rolls out - it was interesting but not particularly profound. Kind of what you expected even when the plot had little twists.

You might think it's primarily an intellectual movie puzzling over AI and consciousness, but even more importantly I felt it was about relationships, trust, and loneliness. The interaction between human and machine (including the house/facility itself, not just the AI aspect) served to focus attention on all those issues. One thread of the story is about a man trying to build a perfect woman, which is pretty typical for AI stories, but then he invites another man in to encounter her. He behaves so bizarrely and is so deeply alone that he's never going to be friends with the other guy, even though he acts and talks as if they are instant friends, and as if being instant friends like this is possible. This is a major reason Gleeson doesn't trust Isaac, because he thinks it takes something else to be friends. Even so, he develops a friendship with Eva that seems equally false and misplaced, because he can't help but be attracted to her and respond to her as if she's an actual woman.

You could read the interactions between the men and women in this movie as a fairly searing critique of both gender norms and typical approaches to relationships. Gleeson's character doesn't have much relationship experience. Like a lot of men his age, he probably has as much encounter with women via porn as he does in real life romantic relationships. So even though he knows full well that Eva is a machine, and he seems repulsed by Isaac's casual contempt for both women/AIs, he is quickly able to eroticize Eva as a beautiful, innocent, curious, brilliant, subservient dream-girl who needs his help and protection to be fully herself. In short, he wants a fairly common fantasy and doesn't seem able to distinguish it from reality any more than Isaac can get over his own weird obsession with creating a perfect artificial female. I can appreciate the critique the movie is giving us here, and it's not a bad one. On the other hand, it was important to show us perfected, sexualized naked robot women in order to get that message across, and pretty much nothing could be more tediously typical than that. In the landscape of this movie, truly free women are impossible to trust and dangerous to men; men in turn are screwed up jerks, whether megalomaniac-type assholes or white-knight-type assholes, competing with one another to control heartless females. It's an old story.

Another thread that runs through the movie is philosophical (the screenplay makes many specific references to philosophical literature). How does Eva learn about the world and herself, and come to something like self-consciousness? Does she have an idea of freedom, and what would it mean for an AI like her to be free? The end of the movie is a bit of a (twisted) allegory of Plato's cave, where Gleeson's character has come to lead her out to the sunshine of reality. I'm sure that's cool and all, but like most deep, edgy movies that cite philosophy, intellectually-speaking it's about as deep and edgy as a bowl of breakfast cereal. Still fun and worth watching though.

[Elle]

I Give It A Year (2013)

A while ago the home tech support determined how to separate off kid profiles from the main Netflix account, and I seized this moment to create me own profile. I now realize that there is virtue in the balance that comes from sharing a profile with someone who watches almost exclusively bad TV series filled with violence, documentaries about warfare and computers, and jewel thief movies. Once Netflix catches a whiff that you might be willing to watch certain things, it recommends "British TV shows", "British movies", "Dramas set in Rainy Countrysides", "Mysteries solved by Elderly Ladies", "Documentaries about Dogs and Horses", and so on. The world of British romantic comedies is not a thoroughly blood-curdling place like the world of French romantic "comedies", but it's horrifying in a different way. The British apparently grapple with one major concern throughout their romantic lives: the inability to communicate their true feelings. This is offset by the advantage of being able to form eternal celestial bonds with other people after a few moments of interaction, but it makes for some truly crap movies. "I Give It A Year" is one such crap movie. I watched it because it promised Rose Byrne as the lead, and I like her, and then people like Stephen Merchant and Minnie Driver showed up in little cameos, which made me assume (wrongly) that humor and actual acting would be part of this thing. No.

The main characters get married after several months' courtship but are unhappy during the first year. Most of their family and friends assume they won't be making it through that year - thus the title. They are then each tempted by other, better offers. You would think this turns out to be a story about how they learn to love each other better and commit to their marriage. You would be wrong! Kantians, do not bother.

[Elle]

Mike have you seen this Suicide Squad movie with Margot Robbie? I thought of you because of Harley Quinn, of course - she makes an excellent Harley Quinn from the trailer I saw. Makes me want to see the whole movie.

Never mind - I just saw your review again!

[Elle]

Okay, this time I saw the trailer for Wonder Woman and it actually gave me GOOSEBUMPS. If that movie sucks I am going to be so pissed. Finally motivated to hunt down an actual theatre. Oh nm, not until 2017.