Having never been a Trekkie, no one was more surprised than me when I loved the 2009 franchise reboot from JJ Abrams. I kind of love it a lot. I own it and watch it sometimes and enjoy it immensely every time. Abrams made Star Trek accessible, trading in the Deep Thoughts with Kirk and Spock for fast-paced action grounded by very humane character moments. I know a lot the Trek fandom was annoyed at Abrams’ tone and just, everything really, but Star Trek had for so long been the tiniest kid given the biggest wedgie and stuffed in the grossest locker, and Abrams made it cool again. He made it okay to like Star Trek.

And then he promptly forgot everything that made his 2009 reboot great and produced a draggy, kind of boring and heartless piece of space popcorn that abandoned its early, interesting premise of Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) getting demoted and having to learn some humility in favor of a to-militarize-or-not-to-militarize-space debate that never actually gets fleshed out. There were fits and starts of several equally plausible and vastly more engaging films in Star Trek Into Darkness but none of them ever actually arrive and deliver a movie that would stick in your mind the way the 2009 one did. That movie benefitted from Kirk and Spock (Zachary Quinto) coming of age and meeting, disagreeing, and then finding common ground. Their friendship was the anchor and their development the point and the film worked as a coming of age story. Darkness never really works as anything because it doesn’t have any purpose.

Don’t get me wrong—Darkness is fun in stretches. It never quite hangs together, but individual scenes are exciting, and there are a couple righteous brawls to tide over the action-hungry audience members. But in between those points it’s slow and uneven, with a huge amount of narrative going unscoped in favor of leaping into more action (could have done without the space drop sequence as it was very similar to the base jumping scene in the first film). Still, there are enough up beats to keep the film going. The effect of the ships going into warp drive was lovely every time it was used and Kirk finding out Spock and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) were fighting and exclaiming, “What is that even like?” drew a big laugh. It’s not a bad movie, it’s just not any kind of continuation of or improvement on the first film.

What didn’t work about Darkness is its narrative function. It’s never telling us a cohesive story but instead starts three different narratives and proceeds to abandon all three. The first narrative begins when Kirk violates the “Prime Directive”, which states that no primitive civilization can be exposed to advanced technology, in order to save Spock, and Spock thanks him by getting Kirk demoted. The demotion scene is one of the strongest in the film and Pine and Quinto, plus Bruce Greenwood playing Kirk’s de facto daddy figure, Christopher Pike, carry it beautifully. I would have been very interested to see a movie about Kirk and Spock falling out and going their separate ways and the journey that brings them back together a friends and fellow officers. But that plot ends about five minutes after it begins and Kirk has no problem getting reinstated as a captain. It was supremely annoying how no consequences were applied to Kirk in the long run for breaking what was built up as Star Fleet’s Mega Rule You Do Not Break.

The second narrative came halfway through the movie when it was revealed that an admiral in Star Fleet was secretly building a militarized fleet in order to respond to the kind of threat posed by Nero in the first film. The characters all react to this idea with horror, but…why? I was more shocked by the notion that Star Fleet wasn’t already a semi-military organization. I just couldn’t quite figure out why the idea of having defensive capabilities was a bad idea, given that a single ship of angry people was able to BLOW UP AN ENTIRE PLANET in the first film, and this film introduced the vague threat of the Klingons. It kind of seemed like Star Fleet needed to get their shit together. The characters were all, “War ships? Fuck no!” while the audience was like, “That’s probably not the worst idea ever.”

But by far the most interesting and most underserved narrative was that of the villain, John Harrison, aka Khan. Played by Benedict Cumberbatch in his mainstream debut, Khan was barely fleshed out and relied too heavily on the audience being familiar with previous Star Trek properties. What was great about the 2009 Star Trek was that you didn’t have to know anything about Star Trek to roll with it, but Darkness supposed that everyone would get why Khan was a big badass without really justifying it in the present. Cumberbatch proved more than up to the task of being the big bad in a major blockbuster, bringing a silky kind of menace to Khan and a surprisingly capable and bulked-up physicality to the role.

Unfortunately, the part is underwritten and we’re told a lot about Khan without ever getting to see any of it. The two righteous brawls belong to him, so we know he can kick some ass, but we don’t get much opportunity to see him be really evil. He’s a dick, yes, but he’s a motivated dick. The fact that Khan is as much a victim as he is a perpetrator is never directly addressed—is, at points, stubbornly ignored—and the film is weaker for it. Not unlike Loki in the Marvel movies, as Khan is fucking shit up for everyone and everything, you can’t help think, “This is not appropriate behavior but maybe his anger is justified.”

But where Marvel works to toe the line between Loki’s hurt and his rage, Abrams makes no effort to give Khan a similar arc. I can’t help but think Star Trek Into Darkness would have been better off if it earned that title and the movie was about John Harrison falling in with Kirk and Spock and the slow reveal of his true identity as Khan was saved for the very end, when he committed some atrocity and took off into open space, leaving the door open for future conflict. It would have given Cumberbatch more to do, given the film a much-needed emotional core, and earned every bit of that “into darkness” line.

And it’s ripe for a new cinematic interpretation, especially as Gatsby’s themes of excess, longing for the more perfect past, magical thinking and the shades of pending doom (free thesis topic for students: Do we read collapse and nihilism in Gatsby’s story because we know what ultimately happens to his world, come October 1929, or did Fitzgerald actually have some sense of pending disaster, did his position of inside-from-the-outside, not unlike Nick Carraway, give him the ability to see the rot at the core of the economy, just as Carraway saw Gatsby riding for a hard fall?) resonate in our post-economic-collapse world. Gatsby is eighty-eight years old and yet feels amazingly modern. Of course it’d make a great movie.

Baz Luhrmann, he of the neon-lit and hyperactive adaptations Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge, is the perfect guy to bring us a new retelling of Gatsby, as his detailed and lush visual style and romantic heart suit the material perfectly. Unfortunately for us, the Luhrmann that showed up to make The Great Gatsby was less Moulin Rouge and more Australia. Like that awful, over-long, bloated, self-indulgent movie, Luhrmann’s Gatsby is so over-the-top as to be migraine inducing, a loud, violently bright film that assaults your eyeballs repeatedly with more glitter and Day-Glo than your retinas can handle. And in 3D, nonetheless.

To be fair, Gatsby is not as bad Australia. The cast has actual chemistry, for one, and where Luhrmann’s style was at odds with the spare and unsparing Outback, in West Egg, he’s right at home with grandiose sets, lavish parties, and elaborate, truly gorgeous costumes. (Luhrmann’s partner, Catherine Martin, is responsible for the production and costume design and she knocked both out of the park. Hit mute and turn on some Debussy and you might be onto something.) Unfortunately, though, Luhrmann goes right past “spectacle”, which is where R+J and Moulin Rouge so campily landed, and into straight up excess. It’s just too much of everything. If every scene could be reduced by 33%–33% less loud, less bright, less people, less ACTORS ARE ACTING HERE—Gatsby might have been the combination homage/update Luhrmann intended.

Perfect example of Gatsby’s too-muchness: the narrative excess. At points in the film action is happening on the screen as Nick Carraway (played by a totally wasted and wet blanket Tobey Maguire) narrates, and just to make sure that we are.not.missing.the.point, text of the narration flies at our faces in 3 Goddamn D. It reminded me of Pain & Gain with its blunt-instrument style of storytelling. And that’s the problem here. As beautiful and lush as The Great Gatsby is, there is no grace or nuance to it. It’s shallow and vapid storytelling wielded with the precision of a Neanderthal’s club.

As for the actors, individually, they range from solid but uninspiring (Maguire) to pretty damn swell (Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan), but most fall into the category of “doing everything I can to make Baz happy but fuck if this wouldn’t be better if he’d back up and let me work”. Carey Mulligan and Leonardo DiCaprio are two actors who have natural, easy screen presences and who can do a great deal with very little. Mulligan glows in Luhrmann’s lurid fantasy-land, but her acting is stiff and a beat slow, like she’s filtering through her own instincts to meet Luhrmann’s intent. It’s a shame, because on the surface, she’s a great Daisy. Ditto for DiCaprio, who labors mightily under Luhrmann’s direction and acts SO HARD he looks like he’s about to bust a vein in several scenes. This is why DiCaprio/Scorsese has been such a productive partnership—Scorsese knows when to get out of DiCaprio’s way. Luhrmann did well by diCaprio when he was a young man, but nearly 20 years later, he’s lost the knack.

I’ll tell you this, though. I wasn’t impressed with much in Gatsby, but that kid that played the younger iteration of Jay Gatsby, he was something. Brief part, but memorable. Callan McAuliffe—worth remembering.

And of course, Iron Man 3 is destroying previous entries into the franchise, netting $174.1 million over its opening weekend, making it the second biggest opening weekend of all time, behind its big cousin, The Avengers. Presently IM3 has over $680 million in worldwide box office and is on pace to make AT LEAST $800 million cumulative, though I think it’s going to push closer to a billion. What does this mean? It means The Avengers was not a fluke.

Yes, Iron Man is the most popular of the—sub-franchises?—in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and yes, audiences have an extreme degree of affection for Tony Stark and Robert Downey, Jr., so IM3 gets an extra bump because it is and always has been the cornerstone of this project. But the real story of IM3’s success is not “people really love RDJ/Tony Stark”, though they do; the real story is that The Avengers worked so well the entire web of Avenger-related franchises is now standing on a higher platform. Exactly how much higher will be determined by Thor: The Dark World come November—with RDJ component removed that will be a better gauge for the long-range impact of The Avengers.

But it’s looking good. Even though Thor 2 is a bit of a mess at present, the early forecasters for box office predictions are strong, and they’ve gotten stronger in the wake of IM3. It’s way, way early, but looking at the benchmarks industry analysts use to make predictions, Thor 2 could be looking at a $700-800 million total take, nearly double what Thor 1 did. And that’s the post-Avengers reality: the base audience for these movies has been doubled. It’s going to be fascinating to see what happens with Guardians of the Galaxy, the first brand-new franchise entry to follow The Avengers. When Marvel announced their intent to make Iron Man starring the recently-rehabbed RDJ, the industry collectively rolled their eyes. Seven years later, the joke’s on them.

May 3

Generation Um

I suppose this is one of those “Generation X grew up to be so annoying, am I right?” movies. It’s about three different people spread across Manhattan on a single day, and one of those people is Keanu Reeves. It looks spectacularly uninteresting.

Limited

Greetings from Tim Buckley

This is actually available On Demand right now through the Tribeca Film Festival. It’s okay. Penn Badgley gives it his all—and he’s better than I was expecting—but it’s not a definitive portrait of singer/songwriter Jeff Buckley. It’s mostly notable for showing that Badgley, a former Gossip Girl twat, has some depth to him and for frequently displaying Imogen Poots’ insanely gorgeous face.  As for the singing, it’s not embarrassing by any means. But it’s a far cry from Buckley’s power and evocative tone. But then, to be fair, who’s really going to be able to even get close to Buckley’s distinctive voice?

Limited

The Iceman

Michael Shannon and his serial killer stare portray Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski, whom I learned about after Googling him when Gutterson made a reference on Justified once. He was a contract killer who murdered over a hundred people all while maintaining a perfectly ordinary family life. I have it in my head now that Gutterson knows all the serial killers and their tallies.

Bonus: Chris Evans is virtually unrecognizable as fellow hitman “Mr. Freezy”.

Limited

Iron Man 3

YES. IT’S HERE. FINALLY.

Full review here.

What Maisie Knew

This is a weird place to open this film. Starring Julianne Moore, Steve Coogan and Alexander Skarsgard and directed by the solid, character-focused duo of Scott McGehee and David Siegel (Bee Season, The Deep End), this seems more like a September or October release—something closer to award season for sure. So either it’s not that good or it’s so good they hope it will have enough legs to carry it into award season. Not going to be much middle ground between those two options.

Limited

May 10

Aftershock

Eli Roth stars in this horror movie, which he also co-wrote and produced, about people trapped after a severe earthquake in Chile. Horror isn’t usually my thing but I like Roth, and the trailer is cool. Bloody, though. Anything involving Roth in a creative capacity is always gory.

The Great Gatsby

I liked Romeo + Juliet and I LOVE Moulin Rouge, but Australia blew monkey chunks and given that Gatsby was booted off its original award-season release and that the soundtrack and the clothes seem to be the biggest selling points…I’m concerned this is going to be all spectacle and no substance. Which is a shame, because the cast is kind of brilliant, with Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Isla Fisher and Joel Edgerton. It works on paper, but…

And why is it in 3D?!

Peeples

Tyler Perry’s last film was so misogynistic and gross (a woman who commits adultery by basically being raped then contracts HIV from her “seducer” while her now ex-husband marries a sweet Christian woman who would never ever cheat) that I can’t imagine what horrible moral Peeples, in which a man (Craig Robinson, The Office) surprises his girlfriend (Kerry Washington) on a trip home to visit her family with the intention of getting her domineering father’s (David Alan Grier) approval to propose. Sounds innocuous, right? Hopefully it is just a harmless piece of fluff, since Perry is just the producer. But after the toxic Temptation, I have no patience for anything Tyler Perry.

May 17

Star Trek Into Darkness

When it’s cold/And the light is gone/When no one is home/And you’re alone/Star trek into darkness/Yeah, yeah/Stark Trek Into Darkness

Still the stupidest title of the summer. Movie looks cool, though. Bonus points for The Batch.

Frances Ha

I feel like Greta Gerwig has lost a little steam as Everyone’s Indie Darling since the arrival of Brit Marling. But she’s reteamed with her Greenberg director Noah Baumbach for Frances Ha. They co-wrote the screenplay together and it’s gotten decent reviews but it’s not going to serve as a breakout for Gerwig. It’s too far below the radar and she doesn’t have the star power to push it ahead of more glitzy indie offerings like The Iceman and Before Midnight. Still, a solid choice for On Demand or Netflix.

Limited

May 24

Before Midnight

Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and now, Before Midnight. Richard Linklater’s ongoing portrait of would-be lovers Jesse and Celine continues, proving that franchises aren’t just for the studios. I’ve never been super into these movies for the same reason I hated Serendipity—at what point do you stop fucking with fate and just get the goddamn hint already? I’m not patient enough for movies like this.

Limited

Epic

AKA Fern Gully 3: Honey I Shrunk the Kids.

The trailer gets points for a good use of Snow Patrol.

Fast & Furious 6

AKA Paul Walker & Vin Diesel Are Broke Again 6.

The Hangover Part III

The marketing campaign makes a point of emphasizing that this is the end of the “wolfpack trilogy”, promising that there will be no more of these, so at least someone at Warner Brothers realizes we’re all sick of these assholes.

We Steal Secrets: The Wikileaks Story

Documentarian Alex Gibney (Client 9, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) got strong reviews out of Sundance for his examination of Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange. There are a lot of Wikileaks/Assange projects are coming down the pipe within the next few years—including one starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Daniel Bruehl later this year—but Gibney, an experienced and interesting documentarian, is sure to produce one of the more informative and fascinating looks at the whole mess.

Limited

May 31

After Earth

Will Smith made this instead of Django Unchained. Also it’s directed by M. Night Shyamalan. So it sucks.

The East

Another Earth and Sound of My Voice collaborators Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling got together again and made The East, their most accessible effort yet. The East is about an investigator (Marling), who starts to fall under the spell of the charismatic anarchist (Alexander Skarsgard) whose cult-like group she’s infiltrating. Reviews have been good, particularly for the acting. Ellen Page also stars.

Limited

The Kings of Summer

A Sundance standout, The Kings of Summer is about runaways who live in the woods and it stars Nick Offerman (Parks & Rec) and Alison Brie (Community, Mad Men).

Runaways who live in the woods. …Is that you, long-awaited Boxcar Children movie?

Now You See Me

One of the more intriguing original titles in the mass market this summer, Now You See Me has a tremendous cast (Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Mark Ruffalo, Isla Fisher, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine) and is scored by the Chemical Brothers. But director Louis Leterrier scares me. He’s responsible for The Transporter, which is a badass B-grade action movie, but he also made The Transporter 2, Clash of the Titans, and The Incredible Hulk, the Marvel movie everyone pretends didn’t happen. The concept is great—magicians commit heists and give the cash away during their act—and the trailer is tight, but…Clash of the Titans. Transporter 2. And The Incredible Hulk. They SUCKED.

Iron Man 3

Directed by franchise newcomer Shane Black (Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang), Iron Man 3 is both a return to roots and a breath of fresh air for Marvel. On the one hand, Black, who co-wrote the script with Drew Pearce (a TV veteran who also penned the upcoming Pacific Rim), undoes much of the damage of Iron Man 2 by putting a lid on Tony’s more obnoxious tendencies, like his “I’m so rich, look at me be so rich” routine, and focusing instead on the fallout from the events of The Avengers.

This is a more vulnerable Tony than we’ve seen since his time in an Afghani cave in Iron Man—he’s suffering panic attacks and insomnia and is barely managing to function after his second near-death experience. And it’s only downhill from there, as a new terrorist threat known as The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley, who is gleefully, hammily brilliant) arrives on the scene and Tony’s world is literally blown apart.

I don’t want to divulge any more of the plot because the joy of Iron Man 3 is being surprised by Iron Man 3. And it is truly surprising. The more grounded character beats are a nice return to what made the first Iron Man great, but it’s how the story falls together that makes Iron Man 3 a cut above your usual threequel. Tony has a full plate with The Mandarin and the return of an old rival and an old flame, Aldrich Killian and Maya Hansen (Guy Pearce and Rebecca Hall, respectively). Don Cheadle finally gets something to sink his teeth into as Colonel Rhodes and Gwyneth Paltrow has plenty to do as Pepper Potts. Black practically wrote the book on buddy cop scenarios with Lethal Weapon, and it’s terrifically fun to watch that dynamic play out between Tony and Rhodey. And Pepper is well served, too, being both the emotional heart of Tony’s world and a stone cold badass when needed.

But it’s Black’s direction that makes the movie. He falters a little in the larger action sequences but what really sticks out about Iron Man 3 is that it feels like a Shane Black film, not a Marvel movie. In Phase One Marvel pretty well ran roughshod over their directors in order to create a coherent cinematic language and universe for their characters, and that wasn’t necessarily the wrong decision. The unifying palette of bright, Pop Art colors was a nice touch that called back to the classic comics in Marvel’s library, but there were times the films felt stifled—particularly Thor—in favor of not making too many waves for other filmmakers to deal with. In contrast, Black has a much freer rein and that wider universe has no bearing on Iron Man 3 at all. There are no other Avengers, no SHIELD, no setup for future films.

In many ways this is a plus; after the wide-angle view of The Avengers it’s nice to settle in with just one superhero and deal with his day-to-day reality. But there is a little bit of a logic glitch—The Mandarin is terrorizing the world and SHIELD is nowhere to be seen? The explanation is that the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier are occurring at the same time and SHIELD, in somewhat disarray after The Avengers, is too tied up to bail out Tony. That’s fine, but there is no mention of that at all. Iron Man 3 proves that this experiment will now work without constantly reinforcing the larger universe, but you also can’t ignore it whenever it suits you. Even just one toss off line about SHIELD being busy would’ve sufficed to acknowledge the presence of that wider world while simultaneously dismissing its absence.

Motherfucking YES.

Overall, though, Iron Man 3 is just tons of straight-up fun anchored by fantastic performances across the board. RDJ finds new depths with Tony and Kingsley is going to blow your fucking mind. The explanation for “Extremis”, the biomedical component Tony investigates, is rushed, but the Extremis comic books were terribly dense and the oversimplified explanation in the movie serves a mass audience better, even if it does get a little squiffy around the edges if you look at it too hard. Like The Avengers, Iron Man 3 overcomes what logical flaws it has with sheer, unadulterated awesomeness and if watching Tony, Rhodey, and a host of Iron Man suits plunge into battle doesn’t make you fist pump, you probably don’t have a soul.

Pain & Gain sucks. It takes sucking to new, previously unexplored heights. It sucks so hard that the only logical explanation for its unmitigated suckitude is that Michael Bay must, in fact, be the son of Mega-Maid. Because he only has two settings: Suck and blow. And once Pain & Gain has sucked so much that its eyeballs implode from the internal pressure, it switches gears and blows. It blows hard, and long, and with the unrelenting precision of projectile vomit.

Here’s a Pain & Gain mad-lib: Pain & Gain sucks so much (   adjective   ) (   noun   ) that it blows (  adjective   ) chunks.

There are so many up-angle, slo-mo, 360 camera pans that it starts to feel like every actor is standing on their own personal Sit ’n’ Spin. There’s shaky-cam, first-person shaky-cam, and the detestable SnorriCam, the most unflattering and motion-sickness-inducing camera shot as yet known to man. Pain & Gain is an ugly film, ugly in its aesthetics, its moral nihilism and its themes. And yet the colors are so bright and rich, vivid almost to the point of Pop Art. And Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson gives an absurd but completely charming performance as an ex-con falling off the wagon. And Ed Harris is beguiling as a laid-back Miami cop unable to stick to his retirement but who clearly loves his wife above everything else. And Rebel Wilson steals every scene she’s in and walks away with the final courtroom scene like it’s nothing. And there are Bonsai trees, which are always fun.

But does any of that save Pain & Gain from itself? No. It’s an ouroboros, but instead of a snake eating its own tail, this ouroboros is made of dog shit—it’s a dog eating its own shit and then shitting out more shit to eat. It’s an unrelenting pile of shit. And the sad thing is, in different hand—better hands—there’s a helluva movie buried under all that dead weight. Pain & Gain tells the highly entertaining and questionably “true” story of Daniel Lugo, a personal trainer who kidnapped and tortured a dude in the 1990’s in order to steal everything, and the whole thing ended in a double homicide. It’s tragic, yes. But as Ed Harris points out, even the victim is completely intolerable, a “half-criminal” asshole who may not have deserved everything that happened to him but who certainly wasn’t living the kind of life that would avoid it, either.

At its heart, Pain & Gain is a Cohen Brothers movie. It’s about the American Dream and the perception and failure thereof, about masculinity and what it means to be a man, the notion of God and justice, and, of course, it has ever-escalating violence that grows until it reaches its inevitable, tragic conclusion. The dismemberment scene is straight-up Cohen and is also one of the most effective sequences in the movie because Bay actually stills his cameras and lets his actors do the heavy lifting and the scene is a credit to screenwriters Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (Captain America, the Narnia trilogy). It’s the most uninterrupted scene of actual writing and plot in the entire movie. It proves that if Bay would just let the writers write and not try and make everything look like a music video from 1996 that he can achieve something resembling cinematic success.

But he ruins it, of course he does. Because Bay cannot resist completely unnecessary and painfully redundant voice over (several times throughout the film the characters will echo their actual dialogue with voice overs that repeat what they just said almost verbatim). And this totally unneeded voice over is not limited to one point of view. Oh no, it’s not a real Michael Bay movie until everything is done TO THE MAX, and to that end, there are five narrators. It’s a ridiculous waste of time for a movie that runs a sluggish 130 minutes. The pacing is as horrible as one would expect—the movie is too long and too slow but yet jumps around like it was edited by a cokehead.

Pain & Gain is a ridiculous film, a complete waste of time and Ed Harris, even if The Rock does prove to have real (and underutilized) acting chops. It’s a soul-crushing exercise in excess and poor taste and amounts to no more than a turd Michael Bay crapped out and called a movie.

The first thing to keep in mind—the thing to always keep in mind—when watching iSteve is that this is a joke. It’s a joke, and it’s a joke with several punchlines, the most central of which is that biopics have become less about revealing truths or telling a compelling story than about deification (see also: The Iron Lady, Lincoln, 42). Mat Honan at Wired was unable to keep that in mind when reviewed iSteve for the magazine and so he ends up coming off as the butt of FoD’s joke. But if you’re okay with an irreverent and deliberately misinformed parody/biopic of Jobs (which I was, as the extent of my knowledge re: Steve Jobs is “invented Apple stuff”), iSteve is worth 78 minutes, especially since it’s free.

Which is really what FoD’s experiment is about. Yes, they made quite a funny movie. It lags in the third act and probably would have been better served by being half as long, but the goal wasn’t to make a funny forty-minute video, it was to make a feature length film under the FoD shingle and release it—FOR FREE—online. They did that, and it’s not horrible. Parts are actually really, really funny. The “montage” of Jobs, Bill Gates (James Urbaniak, The Venture Bros.) and Steve Wozniak (Jorge Garcia, Lost) building computers by literally pounding on circuit boards with hammers and screw drivers is particularly funny. It plays on how the montage has become so hackneyed in a biopic that you don’t even need to see a proper re-enactment of the events, just the barest sketch of the idea of the event and your mind can fill in the rest, and also that building computers is actually really hard and clearly no one involved knew how to do it.

Other solid comedy beats include the complete marginalization of Steve Wozniak, Jobs’ and Melinda French Gates’ creepy virtual date night, and a scene in which Jobs berates “Justin Long” during the filming of one of those “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” commercials. That scene gets meta but it remains funny and Long isn’t precious about his “legacy” as a spokesman for the brand. But the real meat of the experiment is whether or not FoD can make and release a feature length film, for free on the internet. The answer: Yes.

As the studio comedy is increasingly a bleak and barren wasteland peopled by the mutant corpses of Adam Sandler and Kevin James, if FoD really put their minds to it, they could become the top purveyor of not only sketch comedy but feature-length comedy as well. After watching iSteve, the natural next step is to wonder what it would look like if they gave Edgar Wright ten thousand dollars and two months to make a movie. Or Danny McBride. Or Mike White. Or Kristen Schaal. iSteve proved the merit of the experiment. Now let’s see it taken as a challenge.

You can watch iSteve here.

Being somewhat of a horror nerd (Sarah: Read—he’s a huge horror nerd), I’ve watched numerous documentaries on the genre where guys like Tom Savini, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter describe the atmosphere at the original screenings of their movies.  The mood is electric.  Nervous tension runs rampant.  Screams and flying popcorn litter the air…the audience is genuinely scared.  This is the experience I want to have when going to a horror flick and Fede Alvarez’s version of the Sam Raimi classic, Evil Dead, delivers just that.

Though a remake, Evil Dead is able to walk the line between staying true to the original and creating a new piece of cinema.  The five main characters are staying in a remote cabin to help Mia (Jane Levy, Suburgatory) kick her drug addiction cold turkey.  They discover a cellar filled with dead cats hanging from the ceiling, strange artifacts, and what appears to be a book, wrapped in a garbage bag and tied shut with barbed wire.

Rather than leave, they decide to ignore Satan’s basement and stick it out, for the sake of Mia’s rehab.  Curiosity gets the best of Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci, Beginners) and he unwraps the book, which happens to be bound in human flesh and written in blood.  Being a student of the occult and theology, he ignores the obvious warnings and reads a couple of passages.  This unleashes an evil spirit that wreaks all sorts of bloody havoc from which the five friends have to try and survive.

The least awful image from this movie I could find.

With a rash of poor remakes hitting the screens, it’s refreshing to see a movie like Evil Dead, where you don’t walk away feeling like Hollywood is just trying to cash in on nostalgia.  And with buckets of gore and scenes to make you squirm, this movie earns its solid R rating.  There have been a lot of soft, PG-13 “horror” flicks lately that left me feeling like the director cut something out so he could get more kiddies in the seats.  For those of you who are die-hard fans of the original, you will not be disappointed.  There are numerous nods to the 1981 classic (especially visual) that will put a smile on your face.  The humor aspect is practically gone and there is no Bruce Campbell, but this film sets out to put the “evil” in Evil Dead and succeeds.

The first time I saw him in a screening I was more starstruck than any other time in my life. The first time he spoke to me, with his electrical voice, I couldn’t muster an intelligible reply–nothing, NOTHING, could dampen the wit and experience and intelligence of his voice. That he kept communicating with me meant more than almost anything. No one has done more to foster a love of movies, writing, and discourse in young writers and critics than Roger Ebert. He took a personal interest in everything around him and it impacted us all, from those who read or watched his reviews to those who were lucky enough to know him.

There’s a big gaping hole in film criticism now, a silence where there should be a voice, a blank page where there should be words. And for some of us, there’s an empty seat in a theater where a friend, mentor and teacher once sat.

March 1

21 and Over

Half as grown up as The Hangover and twice as funny as Project X. Just once I’d like to see a young Asian character in a movie NOT trying to get into med school.

Jack the Giant Slayer

This looks terrible. But Ewan McGregor looks hot with his little Renn Faire beard, and it stars beautiful nymph-boy Nicholas Hoult, and also that sarcastic bitch Stanley Tucci. So I’m seeing it anyway. Which means it will probably do just well enough to keep the fairy tale train rolling a little longer, even though as a genre, I don’t think this is working out for anyone, really.

The Last Exorcism Part II
How can this be “part II” of something that was already “the last”?

Phantom

This should be on TBS. Seriously. How is this a feature film?

Stoker

This is amazing. You should see it. Full review here.

Limited

March 8

Beyond the Hills

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is one of the most depressing movies I have ever seen. Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu may make depressing-as-shit films, but he has a strong narrative voice. I saw Beyond the Hills last fall at the Chicago Film Festival—it’s not as depressing as 4 Months but it’s still pretty bleak.

Limited

Dead Man Down

Niels Arden Oplev, director of the original (and best) Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, reunites with Noomi Rapace for a mob-revenge story. Also starring Colin Farrell—who needs a win after Total Recall failed to take off—this doesn’t look terrible (for instance, it doesn’t look nearly as bad as Olympus Has Fallen), but nor does it look like it would hold up in the more competitive summer months. Basically, this is the quintessential March movie.

Oz the Great and Powerful

I’ve never been a huge Wizard of Oz fan, so this is lost on me. It looks like pretty much every other fantasy-land film since Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, and goddamn but those flying monkeys looks fucking creepy in CG.

March 15

The Call

Clearly Halle Berry’s ongoing custody battle is getting expensive.

Ginger & Rosa

An arthouse coming-of-age story set in 1962 London, Ginger & Rosa garnered mixed reviews on last year’s festival ciruit, though the acting of the two stars, Elle Fanning and Alice Englert (Beautiful Creatures) was generally praised. It looks like a rote “burgeoning female sexuality” movie, and while I might get around to it eventually, mostly it just makes me want to watch Cracks again.

Limited

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

There was a lot of hype around this Steve Carrell movie about a magician competing against his arch-nemesis (played by the desperately-needs-to-get-back-on-track Jim Carrey) for a plum Vegas gig, but the fact that it is coming out in March and not June makes me think it didn’t turn out as hoped. There are some funny bits in the trailer, but I wonder if that’s all there is. And Carrey is so far past his sell-by date I can’t stand it. I will always love his work from the early 90’s, but he, I, and everyone else has long since outgrown his schtick.

March 22

Admission

So far Tina Fey has given us her version of teen comedy (Mean Girls) and buddy comedy (Baby Mama), and now she’s tackling the rom-com with Admission. I hope this is more Mean Girls than Baby Mama, and I hope it is, and have no reason to believe it won’t be, at least a halfway decent rom-com. Could there be a more likeable pairing than Fey and Paul Rudd? No, I tell you. No.

The Croods

Ugh, seriously, Dreamworks, just put out How to Train Your Dragon 2 already.

Olympus Has Fallen

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

The Sapphires

The simple summary is “Australian Dreamgirls starring Chris O’Dowd”. The slightly more involved synopsis is that in 1968, four Aboriginal Australian sisters had a girl group that went to Vietnam to entertain troops. Reviews are mixed but it seems like a relatively harmless piece of fluff, a more cheerful option amongst the other, more depressing arthouse fare this month.

Limited

Spring Breakers

This has STUNT written all over it, from the stunt-casting of former Disney darlings Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens to the team up of filmmaker Harmony Korine (Gummo) and The Artist Formerly Known as James Franco. Reviews have been mixed—Korine is an acquired taste, to say the least—but this also has “cult classic” stamped on it. It’ll find an audience, probably a small, very dedicated audience.

March 29

Blancanieves

Now here is an interesting spin on a classic fairy tale. Spain’s top film of 2012, Blancanieves is a silent film set in the 1920’s in which Snow White is the daughter of a famous bull fighter and has her own destiny awaiting her in Seville’s legendary Plaza de la Maestranza. This is a beautiful film which I enjoyed way more than The Artist, and where other fractured fairy tale films have claimed to a “new twist”, Blancanieves actually is a singular, new way of telling the story.

Limited

G.I. Joe Retaliation

G.I. Joe was horrible, but it was gilded with Channing Tatum’s Midas touch and so it did well enough to justify a sequel. Which is this movie, here, now. G.I Joe 2 was actually supposed to come out last year but was delayed for extensive reshoots because someone woke up one day and went, “Oh my God, we made another one of these shitty G.I. Joe movies, what are we doing?” and then tried to undo it. No such luck—it’s still a shitty G.I. Joe movie, but this time it stars The Rock and Bruce Willis (Tatum was rumored to have tried to get out of this sequel, making no secret of how little he liked the first one, and so his character, Duke, is “dealt with” early on, but wouldn’t the more fitting punishment have been to make him be in the whole thing?).

The Host

Between my apathy toward sci-fi in general and active hatred of Stephenie Meyer’s writing in specific, I couldn’t get with The Host. And though writer/director Andrew Niccol will always get a pass for The Truman Show and Gattaca, I think it’s fair to say he hasn’t lived up to the potential he showed in the 1990’s (2011’s In Time was ridiculous). The Host is basically Invasion of the Body Snatchers grafted onto a Twilight-esque love triangle and starring the very likeable Saoirse Ronan. I’m not convinced it will be Twilight huge, but it will probably do well enough to allow Meyer to continue deluding herself into believing she’s making valuable contributions to our culture.

The Place Beyond the Pines

Blue Valentine writer/director Derek Cianfrance reteams with Ryan Gosling for Pines, which was extremely well received at TIFF last fall, and is expected to have award season implications this year, especially for Gosling and co-star Bradley Cooper, who got some of the best reviews of his career for Pines. Gosling and Cooper both have two top-notch looking films this year—Pines and Only God Forgives and David O. Russell’s ABSCAM movie, respectively—so it will be interesting to see what kind of momentum they carry into award season.

Limited