I FINALLY caught up with Sicario after it managed to avoid me for a couple weeks, and while I’m glad I saw it, it did not blow me away. It’s a highly competent movie featuring highly competent actors, made by a bunch of highly competent people, but it’s only intermittently engaging and it does not offer any ideas or insights deeper than your average Nightline special. Directed by Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Enemy) and starring Emily Blunt, Sicario is basically Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic with a dash of Michael Mann’s inscrutability. With Roger Deakins working as the director of photography, this is a gorgeous movie to look at, and Villeneuve puts together a few really tense action sequences, but in between the action beats the film is curiously flat, with characters who are all so painfully cool—and one who is epically dumb—that they’re more like ideas of people dreamed up by a sixteen year old boy who thinks CIA agents and hitmen are like, totally awesome.Continue reading “Emily Blunt is Sidelined Action Heroine in Sicario”
Cooties is an odd-ball horror/comedy that excels at neither
I have generally enjoyed Elijah Wood’s post-Lord of the Rings career as he’s largely retreated into genre and takes on interesting and offbeat projects like Wilfred and the Maniac remake—both of which are good, as is last year’s Grand Piano—but his latest movie, Cooties, of which he is both producer and star, is not up to his usual standard of oddball fare. (He also has movies with Vin Diesel AND Nicolas Cage coming up, which means that either he’s taking “ironic performance” to whole new levels or that LOTR money is running low.) Cooties is a zombie movie with the twist that it’s set at an elementary school and the kids are the only ones affected by a zombie virus outbreak, leaving their beleaguered teachers to fend them off or die trying.Continue reading “Cooties is an odd-ball horror/comedy that excels at neither”
Straight Outta Compton is half incendiary history, half rote biopic
The first half of Straight Outta Compton is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a while. Tense, incendiary, tightly directed by F. Gary Gray (Law Abiding Citizen, The Italian Job) and beautifully acted by an ensemble cast fronted by Corey Hawkins (Non-Stop), Jason Mitchell (Contraband), and O’Shea Jackson, Jr. (Ice Cube’s actual son), Compton is fierce and unrelenting and explosive. …Until it downshifts about halfway through and becomes a chronicle of contract disputes, and then it loses all momentum and limps across the finish line, hobbled by a genre it outstripped within the first twenty minutes. It’s a worthwhile movie for a lot of reasons, and definitely worth seeing even if you don’t care about the history of rap, but the lame second half throws a big bucket of ice water over the fire and rage of the legitimately brilliant first half.Continue reading “Straight Outta Compton is half incendiary history, half rote biopic”
Southpaw is a lot of Jake Gyllenhaal’s wasted effort
The problem with boxing movies is that there are only two possible stories to tell: 1) A boxer trains hard, overcomes adversity, and wins, or 2) a boxer trains hard, overcomes adversity, and loses. Occasionally you get a boxing movie that throws a little extra juice into the formula, either by supplying a twist (Million Dollar Baby), or by using side plots as co-dependent metaphors—boxing is life and life is boxing!—like in Rocky and The Fighter. But no matter how you tinker with it, boxing movies only ever come in two varieties, win or lose, which means escaping clichés is virtually impossible. It’s the inherent problem of boxing movies, and it’s a problem that Southpaw, written by Kurt Sutter (Sons of Anarchy) and directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), can’t overcome. Also Southpaw is incredibly stupid on a fundamental level.Continue reading “Southpaw is a lot of Jake Gyllenhaal’s wasted effort”
The elegant visual insanity of Mad Max: Fury Road
After a thirty year hiatus director George Miller returns to cinemas with the long-awaited fourth installment in his Mad Max franchise, Mad Max: Fury Road. This movie had a famously troubled production, going over budget and falling behind schedule, but sometimes nightmarish film shoots end up producing true cinematic gems (see also: Apocalypse Now, Jaws, The Hurt Locker), and this is undoubtedly the case with Fury Road. It’s a gonzo blockbuster of epic scale that pushes reset on the CGI-dominated spectacle of mainstream movies. It’s simultaneously a dumb movie about people in a wasteland chasing each other in souped-up cars, and a smart movie about feminine assertiveness and agency. Fury Road is gorgeous and exhilarating, but it’s also an elegantly told story that requires no exposition to understand.Continue reading “The elegant visual insanity of Mad Max: Fury Road”
Chop and Change: The Shifting Nature of Natasha Romanov
SPOILERS AHEAD
The most prominent female superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Natasha Romanov, aka Black Widow, has made appearances in four movies over six years: Iron Man 2, The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and now Avengers: Age of Ultron. This forces us to take Natasha not as different iterations of a character but as a constantly evolving singularity. Her arc is less of an arc and more of a Rubik’s cube, with different facets aligning to reveal new elements to her character.
Continue reading “Chop and Change: The Shifting Nature of Natasha Romanov”
Fifty Shades of Grey is minimally-acceptable entertainment
There are so many conversations we could potentially have about Fifty Shades of Grey, the film adaptation of EL James’s wildly popular romance novel. We could talk about its roots as Twilight fanfiction and whether or not publishing a derivative work that originates as a free piece of fan service is right or not (it isn’t, but so far I’ve only seen it happen in genres where demand outweighs supply, like romance and young adult, so I understand why it happens—publishers are desperate for material for enormous markets). Or we could talk about the extremely fucked up sexual politics at the center of the story, except other people are already on that. Or we could talk about the hopelessness of adapting garbage source material, except I don’t believe in that. Every movie, regardless of its source, has the potential to be good. What’s more, we should want them all to be good. Rooting against a movie being good is insane—why bother liking movies at all? So let’s just talk about Fifty Shades of Grey for what it is—a mediocre movie.Continue reading “Fifty Shades of Grey is minimally-acceptable entertainment”
Cinesnark 