While laziness in filmmaking makes me angry, the thing it pains me the most to watch is a would-be good movie that can’t get out of its own way. Sometimes that’s worse than watching a just plain bad movie. It’s easy to dismiss the awful and lazy, but it’s incredibly frustrating to sit through a movie that is making some good decisions and can be at times engaging and compelling, but also makes terrible decisions and swings into boring/uninteresting territory. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 falls into that latter category. It’s frustrating and sometimes outright annoying to watch what could have been an incredible movie stumble repeatedly over its own ill-fitting clown shoes, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Not the worst Spider-Man movie—that title still belongs to the execrable Spider-Man 3—but the most disappointing for sure.Continue reading “Batman Forever + Iron Man 2 = The Amazing Spider-Man 2”
Only Lovers Left Alive is dreamy, erudite romance
Jim Jarmusch’s new film Only Lovers Left Alive is a moodily lit, moodily acted languid piece of cinema that does not concern itself overmuch with story or character, yet strangely engages on both levels. Starring Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton as a pair of centuries-old vampires who are, though they live apart, deeply in love and committed to one another, Lovers exists as much “in the now” as a movie can. It’s less a recounting of events and more like peering into an alternate dimension and seeing lives being lead in the moment. Time is, in many ways, the real protagonist of the story as the vampires have simultaneously too much and not enough of it.Continue reading “Only Lovers Left Alive is dreamy, erudite romance”
Johnny Depp has officially lost his touch
Transcendence, Johnny Depp’s latest movie about a guy who gets sucked into a computer that somehow isn’t a reboot of Tron, is dumb. It’s really dumb and it’s no surprise it completely shit the bed over the weekend. It’s dumb in many ways, one of which is the supremely baffling “How did so many smart people end up in such a dumb place”, aka the Tijuana Jail Theorem (smart people + Tijuana jail = how did we get here?). I wish the movie had been called Tijuana Jail Theorem, because then I would have known not to bother. But I was curious about Transcendence because it’s the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan’s long-time cinematographer, a man who has been one of the consistently best DPs working in film over the last 10+ years.Continue reading “Johnny Depp has officially lost his touch”
Introducing the Winter Soldier: The creation of a truly terrifying Marvel villain
A couple weeks ago film critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote a plea for fellow critics to include discussions of form in their film reviews, to at least mention how the language of film is helping or hindering the movie being reviewed. It was an eloquent point well made, and also apropos of what I want to talk about in re: Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I’ve already reviewed the movie (available here and spoiler free), so what I want to get into now that we can talk about stuff without people yelling SPOILERS (seriously, if you haven’t seen it, stop reading now) is how all of the elements of filmmaking worked together to bring to life the Winter Soldier, the most memorable, bone-crunchingly scary villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe yet.Continue reading “Introducing the Winter Soldier: The creation of a truly terrifying Marvel villain”
Noah is grand, ambitious, messy
There is a lot to admire in Darren Aronofsky’s big-budget, large-scale epic, Noah. There’s so much to admire, in fact, that it’s hard to call it a bad movie, even if parts of it feel shoe-horned in and it’s overblown and it’s not particularly fun to watch. And no, I don’t mean that every movie has to be upbeat and positive in order to be good. 12 Years a Slave was not upbeat but I was never bored or disengaged by it. At points in Noah, I was checking my metaphorical watch (because seriously, who wears a watch anymore?) because it was about twenty minutes too long and the pacing was slightly too uneven to affix my interest for the entire run time.Continue reading “Noah is grand, ambitious, messy”
The Grand, Grand Budapest
Wes Anderson is not for everyone. At this point, his films are an acquired taste, and there’s enough of a body of work for people to make up their minds whether they like the brand of hand-made, exquisitely carved life-sized doll houses he’s selling (if you told me a major director was also a serial killer, my first guess would be Wes Anderson). I happen to be an avid Anderson fan, but I don’t argue with people who aren’t. His bouts of whimsy are prone to self-indulgence, and his austere emotionalism can be hard to connect with. He’s a tremendous filmmaker but he isn’t invincible—The Life Aquatic is self-indulgent, The Darjeeling Limited is just plain bad. Still, Wes Anderson on his worst day is better than 98% of working directors on their best.
Need for Speed is delightfully dumb
You know those movies that come on TNT on a Saturday afternoon and maybe it’s just started or maybe there’s only twenty minutes left, but either way, you watch the movie? It’s not even necessarily that it’s a good movie, there’s just something about it that makes you watch, regardless of how much of the running time is left. And no matter how many times you’ve seen it, you still have the same stupid questions about it, as if each time it comes on you think—Now will be the time X plot point finally makes sense. Except it never does because it’s the same dumb movie it was the time before, and the time before that, yet it remains eminently watchable and enjoyable no matter what. Warriors is like that for me, or the remake of Gone in 60 Seconds, or anything starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. And now so too is Need for Speed, the dumbest movie I’ve seen in a good long while.Continue reading “Need for Speed is delightfully dumb”
Cinesnark 