Cinesnark

Identity Thief is awful, inexcusable, insulting

Here’s my review of the “comedy” Identity Thief starring Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy: It’s a shit pile and is horrible at everything. Don’t see it.

Now that that’s done, let’s talk about Melissa McCarthy and the humor of fatness.

In his review of Identity Thief, film critic and professional asshole Rex Reed referred to McCarthy with a series of offensive and derogatory phrases relating to her weight, which totally undermined any valid points he may have been making about the film’s quality (which he did conclude was awful and unwatchable, and asshole or not, he wasn’t wrong about that). You can read a summary of that kerfuffle here.Continue reading “Identity Thief is awful, inexcusable, insulting”

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is hilariously awful

Bad movies are a guilty pleasure of mine (am lately obsessed with Miami Connection, a 1987 wonder-gem of a movie discovered on Ebay by Drafthouse Films—it has karate and friendship and motorcycle ninja gangs, what more could you want?), and I have an unofficial thesis on the different levels of bad that exist in filmmaking. To date I’ve identified four levels, although I suspect there may be five—I’m still compiling data (it’s my life’s work). The four (identified) levels are: Good-Bad, Bad-Bad, Hilariously Awful, and Money Grab. The most inexcusable of these levels is the Money Grab, which is when no one is making any effort at all to make a good movie for the sake of the movie but when it’s very clearly a product created solely to fleece the unsuspecting audience of their dollars (see also: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, still one of the most simply awful and worst-produced-on-every-level movies I’ve ever seen).Continue reading “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is hilariously awful”

Zero Dark Thirty’s muddy waters

And I’m not just talking about the debate surrounding the film’s perceived pro-torture stance. Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s follow up to the stellar Hurt Locker, is a film with an obscure center, one that suffers from an unfocused point of view. I’m a huge fan of The Hurt Locker, and was very interested in Bigelow and writer Mark Boal’s next project, which got a lot of attention and heat when what was then a movie about the fruitless task of hunting down Osama bin Laden suddenly became a movie about the successful mission to kill him after May 2011. There’s a lot going on with this movie other than its movie-ness—specifically about the access the CIA granted Bigelow and Boal and how that might have affected the film’s “positive” portrayal of torture as an interrogation tactic—but first we’ve got to talk about the movie itself.Continue reading “Zero Dark Thirty’s muddy waters”

The Top 10 Films of 2012

Amour

One of the most depressing films I’ve ever seen, Michael Haneke’s uncompromising, unglamorous look at the end of a long and fulfilling relationship is also one of the most haunting movies I’ve seen in a really long time. Despite its title, Amour is at least as much about the indignity of death as it is the perseverance of love and the delicate persistence of life in the face of one’s own mortality. It’s a wrenching, deeply moving portrait of the end of a life-long love affair that is remarkable not only for its depth but also that the couple, Georges and Anne, have had a rather charmed life together. So it seems especially cruel that fate takes Anne not in a tragedy or in any kind of bittersweet passing but in the slow devastation of stroke. Starring titans of French cinema Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, and co-starring Isabelle Huppert as their daughter, Amour is a painfully raw and honest examination of life and death, framed by Haneke’s spare and unsparing lens.Continue reading “The Top 10 Films of 2012”

Breaking Dawn part 2: Actually pretty tolerable until the end

SPOILERS. I can’t discuss this without getting into a major plot point from the ending.

The thing about reviewing a Twilight movie is that, at this point, it’s grading on a curve. Are the Twilight movies “good” by any objective rubric of filmmaking? No. Are they capable of being good within their own internal environment of Twilight movie filmmaking? Yes. And on that sliding scale, Breaking Dawn part 2: When Vampires Attack is the best entry into the franchise. 2008’s Twilight was a ludicrously bad movie, but it was fun and campy like B movies of the fifties and sixties when a hardy teen couple faced down giant irradiated ants or similar monster of the week. Weirdly, though, as the technical quality of filmmaking went up with the ensuing installments in the franchise, that sense of fun was drained away. Breaking Dawn part 2, though, is the most technically proficient entry yet (which means it’s barely tolerable by any other standard), and it also gets back a lot of that sense of fun and adventure that’s been lost along the way.Continue reading “Breaking Dawn part 2: Actually pretty tolerable until the end”

Lincoln: More myth than man, and poorer for it

I’m having one of those “I think I saw a different movie” experiences with Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. I was watching TV last night and a commercial for the movie came on and it was loaded with pull quotes from various critics, which included words like brilliant and masterpiece. I don’t trust pull quotes in general (and this is why) but I have been discussing Lincoln with others who have seen it and I find myself in the minority that do not think this movie is either brilliant or a masterpiece. It’s an okay movie, don’t get me wrong, it’s just didn’t blow me away with amazingness. While Daniel Day-Lewis does give a masterful performance as Abraham Lincoln, and the film does feature a stellar supporting ensemble, Lincoln is a fairly paint-by-numbers biopic of the closest thing we have to a national saint. Which is a shame, because Lincoln The Man is infinitely more interesting than Lincoln The Myth.Continue reading “Lincoln: More myth than man, and poorer for it”

Skyfall: Not your grandpa’s Bond

Mildly spoilery.

There’s a lot of talk in the latest Bond film, the Sam Mendes-directed Skyfall, about Bond being from another time and the relevancy of an old-school cloak-and-dagger espionage agent in a world of computers and cybercrime. It’s a question that works both for the character and the franchise, which turns fifty this year. It’s also a question that Skyfall answers with a resounding YES. Bond is still relevant and interesting as a protagonist and yes, you still believe he plays a vital role in covert intelligence.Continue reading “Skyfall: Not your grandpa’s Bond”