MOVIE-POCALYPSE NOW! PRE-SHOW 2014 OSCAR PICKS

 

 

MY PRE-SHOW 2014 OSCAR PICKS

I'll surely be taking some lumps putting this up here, but I'm going to anyway.  In a few hours, I will see how my decision-making squares up with the "Academy." 

This has been a good year for some very good films. For the first time I can recall, I made an effort to see every film nominated at least in the BEST PICTURE category.

In making my picks, many of them were blatantly obvious, Cate Blanchett in "Blue Jasmine" for example, in that there really is not another performance nominated that even comes close. However, there... are a few nominations that were really tough. BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR is really a tough choice between Jared Leto in "Dallas Buyers Club" and Michael Fassbender in "12 Years a Slave." But I decided to go with Fassbender who disappeared so completely into his character that I couldn't even recognize him anymore. However, I think McConaghey's brief supporting role in "The Wolf of Wall Street" should qualify him for a special Oscar. An absolutely brilliant performance, but basically consists of 3 scenes.

The BEST ACTOR choice is a tough one too. All things being equal it should be a 3-way tie between Bruce Dern ("Nebraska), Leo DiCaprio ("Wolf of Wall Street") and Matthew McConaghey ("Dallas Buyers Club"). The swing to McConaghey is purely emotion-driven in that I just "feel" his performance slightly swings to a level beyond anything else I've seen him do.

The BEST PICTURE choices gives me a hard decision to make. Taken in total, I think every nominee other than "Philomena" are deserving. My choice of "Nebraska" as the overall best picture is based on the whole of the parts all working together to create a work of sublime storytelling that touches on the basics of the human condition -- life, love, relationship, and mortality. It's the movie I keep reflecting back on the most in positive terms. I can separate individual parts out to recognize excellence in those parts in other movies, but "Nebraska" pools all the elements together into a film I think is instantly timeless, touching, and thought-provoking.

And now....my picks:

 ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
"Her"

ORIGINAL SONG
"Let it Go" from "Frozen"

COSTUME DESIGN
"The Great Gatsby"

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
"The Wolf of Wall Street"

ORIGINAL SCORE
"Her"

CINEMATOGRAPHY
"Nebraska"

VISUAL EFFECTS
"The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug"

MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING
"Dallas Buyers Club"

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
"The Croods"

SOUND MIXING
"Gravity"

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
"The Great Beauty" (Italy)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Lupita Nyong'o in "12 Years a Slave

SOUND EDITING
"Gravity"

FILM EDITING
"Gravity"

LEAD ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett in "Blue Jasmine"

LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM
"Avant Que De Tout Perdre (Just Before Losing Everything)"

DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT
"The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life"

SUPPORTING ACTOR
Michael Fassbender in "12 Years a Slave"

ANIMATED SHORT FILM
"Get a Horse!"

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
"20 Feet from Stardom"

LEAD ACTOR
Matthew McConaughey in "Dallas Buyers Club"

PRODUCTION DESIGN
"American Hustle"

DIRECTING
Martin Scorsese for "The Wolf of Wall Street"

BEST PICTURE
"Nebraska"

 

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET Film Review

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

Wow. What a story.

Riveted from start to finish, Scorsese gets the nod from me for directing because of this movie. Leonardo DiCaprio slams a homerun and fully deserves it if he wins Best Actor.

I was warned by so many people about how filthy the movie is and how it glories in its filth that I found myself surprised by how much more was going on here than simply that. To me, none of the nudity, sex, or language every appeared as titillation for t...he viewer and all served the higher purpose of exemplifying how completely dissociated from reality DiCaprio's character, Jordan Belfort, was. In a sense, this movie is a different version of the same character path of Walter White in BREAKING BAD. A nobody who careens down a fast path into pure narcissism and sociopathy to become an arrogant criminal with a stream of destroyed lives in his wake.

Where the switch turns in Walter White because he is faced with terminal cancer, Belfort's switch gets turned because of drugs. Turns out this "normal" guy gets instantly addicted to anything if he can get a rush from it, whether it's drugs, lying, investing, speeding, or as he states at one point even his lover (and future second wife's) "pussy". He is addicted to anything and everything not related to his perverted perception of success and happiness.

And the one constant through it all is that he is never ever happy. He has "fun". He has "thrills". He has financial "success." But he is never actually happy. Enough is never enough. His loss of self and any sense of behavioral boundaries is so extreme that I found myself literally holding my forehead in my hand and shaking my head in disbelief.

It is a masterful piece of storytelling to get you to feel some sense of rooting for such a malicious lying little bastard who can self-justify even the grandest of conniving little scenarios to make money off scamming the weak and the poor out of their last few pennies. And yet, through it all, Scorsese and DiCaprio (and the phenomenal supporting cast) all keep a grounding in humanity and give the viewer these little "wake up calls" to remind us not only that this really happened but that there are victims and the victims matter.

When it becomes necessary for the audience to turn on Belfort, to lose our last bit of sympathy for him, Scorsese hits us with a two-fer punch to the gut. One, literally, Belfort punching his wife in the stomach and then, in a cocaine haze, attempting to steal his daughter away.

After the film I looked up the factual details to see how exaggerated the film's details actually were.

Sadly....it doesn't sound like there was much exaggeration at all.

The scariest thing to me is that Jordan Belfort is still out there, with a narcissist's smile and a sociopath's lack of empathy continuing to ply his trade in the motivational speaker circuit.

This movie is a condemnation of mindless overindulgence and selfishness to the extreme and it does so brilliantly. My only fear, considering that the real Belfort appears in the film to "introduce" the post-jail Belfort (DiCaprio) to an audience, is that Scorsese, DiCaprio, and everyone else involved with the film may have gotten overly caught up in the debauched mythology themselves and forgotten the very real victims. Regardless, this is a film that examines many of the same themes I've been noticing throughout the year's Oscar nominations. Primarily the theme of the facades we project to the world and the lies we tell ourselves to justify them. And one thing's for certain, Belfort's ability to lie to himself was his greatest natural talent and to see it on display in this film was mesmerizing.

★★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS Film Review

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS

Paul Greengrass really knows how to direct films with tension like few others.  I really tend to avoid super high-tension films like that when I am aware of it before going in.  Greengrass's UNITED 93 is another one like CAPTAIN PHILLIPS that I waited to see on DVD because I just knew going in that the tension was going to a bit much for me.  I think I chose correctly in both those cases.  Watching them for the first time at home on the smaller screen and distractions made the intensity easier to bear.

It is an excellent film. I was never bored by it and got fully wrapped up in the events unfolding and that relentless sense of inevitability to the outcome.  I know many will have gone into this movie already knowing the story, but I am not one of those.  The 24-hour news cycle is not something I choose to partake in so when this even actually occurred I was only peripherally aware of it and was completely unaware of the specifics of how it ultimately resolved.  Everything other than knowing that Capt. Phillips was in charge of a boat taken over by Somali pirates was all I knew.

There is no attempt to justify the pirates' actions but there is humanity to them.  There is some sense of futility to their lives that earned them pathos and empathy as I was watching it.  Tom Hanks earned himself this year's Oscar nomination in this performance which felt honest and real all the way through. 

The film is excellent, but I wouldn't say it was the Best Film of the year but I can see why it got the nomination.

★★★★ out of ★★★★★

POMPEII & RIDE ALONG: A Review of Two Comedies

This is a tale of two comedies -- both cliché-ridden boilerplate movies with zero creativity.  One intentionally funny; the other unintentionally hilarious.

RIDE ALONG introduced me to Kevin Hart, who now accepts the crown of "Most Annoying Presence In Film" from Chris Tucker, as a policeman wannabe who goes on a "ride along" with his streetwise police detective and future brother-in-law played by Ice Cube.   Along the way we are treated to one more unnecessary buddy-cop movie where the two guys hate each other at first and then come to like each other by the end.

There's a couple of clever moments involving the use of Hart's online gaming friends and a bullet wound to the leg incident, but other than that this was pretty predictable Hollywood fare with nothing to distinguish it from any other buddy copy movie.

I really don't think I can fully describe how flippin' annoying Kevin Hart is.  And oddly enough this actually helps the movie work a little bit because at least his character is supposed to be irritating the living hell out of Cube's detective character.

The main saving grace for the movie is Ice Cube, by the way.  His dead serious straight man to Hart's Jerry Lewis impression made me laugh a lot.  Laurence Fishburne appears in the movie and seems to be exploding.  I swear his face is swollen up twice as big as Barry Bonds and his body is starting to look like Herman Munster.  John Leguizamo and some other actor I recognize from lots of movies get totally wasted in this movie.  But hey, a paycheck's a paycheck, right?

No way should you pay full price for this movie.  It's probably funnier if you just wait and Redbox it.  As it is, it's mostly lame and predictable but I laughed...or rather chuckled and smiled.  It is at least intentionally funny and succeeds at that....barely.

Now POMPEII on the other hand?  This movie is hysterically funny!

I started giggling 5 minutes in and was laughing out loud by the mid-point.  This thing is nothing but a mess of bad storytelling, bad acting, shitty special effects, and most of all bad directing.  Every single person in this movie was miscast but a special miscasting Oscar must be won by the horrifically awful Kiefer Sutherland as a pompous Roman senator.  The degree of bad cannot be overstated.  Kiefer is strolling around throughout this movie with his bony knees poking out below his skirt and above his knee socks boasting his 24 haircut and speaking with this affected high English dialect that I could not keep from chuckling at.  Maybe I'm just so used to his Batman voice from 24 that I didn't realize quite how...."fabulous"...his voice actually is.  Also, seriously people, with the modern advances in dentistry just why are we getting saddled with these actors who must have ill-fitting upper plate dentures that lead them to "shhhhh" all there "s" sounds????  First Old Spock's overwhelming upper-plating in STAR TREK, then Michael Shannon's Zod in MAN OF STEEL, and now Kiefer Sutherland in POMPEII.  It's maddening!!!  It's becoming the film version of fingernails on a chalkboard for me! 

Get a better dentist, Kiefer.

As to the film itself, it really has to be seen to be believed.  I so wish Mystery Science Theater 3000 could do this movie.  Oh how I wish it could happen.  The awful is just so much that it's hard to even know where to start.  I could start with our hero, Milo.  Yes.  Milo.

Milo. 

Milo is a Celtic warrior. 

Stop laughing.

He is also, essentially, Conan the Horse-Whisperer....with nicely gelled and coiffed curly hair.

There's a girlfriend, sort of, for Milo who looks like a waif weighing about 60 pounds and 20 of those pounds are her bobble-head.  There is an inept attempt to craft a love story, in one day, between Milo and this waif-girl like what James Cameron did with TITANIC, but in case you guys didn't realize it, the director of RESIDENT EVIL and DEATH RACE ain't quite James Cameron.   Oh yeah, and Mr. Eko from LOST appears as a slave gladiator who in one day becomes Milo's bestest buddy.
I laughed out loud at everyone attempting to play act in their costuming. Nobody looked or felt authentic.  It was almost like the director, Paul W.S. Anderson was actually striving for inauthenticity. It's like he was seeking to replicate the worst of the worst of those old Hercules films from the 60s.  There was every possible attempt to tug emotion from the furtive glances of the ingénue to the predictably forced overwrought dialogue and roars of rage.

The destruction as Mount Vesuvius erupts is so monstrously ridiculous I can't even adequately describe it. Just think of the most absurdly predictable sorts of Hollywood mass destruction you can think of and then add a dollup of stupid to push it right over the top.  It's all so hopelessly hilarious -- the attempt by Mr. Eko to save the little girl from a tidal wave, or the tidal wave being stopped by a boat plugging up a doorway. 

Are you laughing yet? 

Our heroes are also really strong.  How about Mr. Eko not only surviving a sword through his gut but is so strong he can break the sword handle off while the sword stays in his gut?  Or Milo, who can...using his bare hands, just....break a horse's neck? 

The amount of running and horse-riding and leaping and fighting while fire and brimstone rain down from the sky is also part of the huge hilarities in the movie.  It's so fun watching everyone else get pelted and smashed and burned and buried while our Hollywood heroes and villains miraculously dodge harm until it's time for the dramatic death moment. 

Because, you know, you don't go into a movie called POMPEII and actually expect anyone to make it out alive.

But you sure do expect them to try!  And that's where the ending becomes the funniest part of the movie.  Don't read any further if you don't want to know....

Milo and waif-girl are the only survivors as the firey ash and lava flow are overtaking the city.  They are riding away from the city on a horse when it bucks them.  But the horse doesn't ride off.  Rather than the two of them getting back on and giving it one more effort to outrun the death flowing after them, Milo tells waif-girl to get on the horse and leave him behind.  She says "NO!" and smacks the horse on the butt to send it scurrying away. And so they embrace and start slo-mo tongue-kissing while the lava flow overtakes them. Then it's a dramatic cut to their ash-covered bodies frozen in a kiss.

Cue dramatic closing music.

Cue the laughter from the audience as we all murmur together "Oh come ON!"

RIDE ALONG
★★1/2 out of ★★★★★

POMPEII
★1/2 out of ★★★★★
(the 1/2 is special bonus 1/2 star for unintentional hilarity)

ROBOCOP Film Review

 

 

 

ROBOCOP

To answer your first question: This remake is different enough from the original to justify it's existence.

To answer your second question: It depends on what your expectations are going in.

I expected the movie to be a total waste of my time and instead I found it inoffensive and good enough to sit through without getting bored. It's not particularly clever and is completely devoid of any sense of humor about itself (so it is already in very different territory t...han the original and its sharp satire just because of that). This film is not satire and is more of an exploration of what it means to be human than the original. It also explores the current state of politico-media demagoguery in ways that make it an effective enough commentary on today's cultural climate. Samuel L. Jackson's bombastic asshole TV pundit "Pat Novak" of "The Novak Effect" with its conflation of Bob Novak, Pat Buchanan, and Bill O'Reilly into one guy is about as clever as it gets -- and that's about as clever as a 90's era Image comic. Gary Oldman is very engaging as the doctor who saves Officer Alex Murphy by putting him in the prosthetic robot suit. Michael Keaton is his usual hyperactive lisping self (with terrible haircut). Robocop himself is played by Joel Kinnaman (from TV's THE KILLING). He isn't bad but I don't find the actor to be very charismatic. Original Robocop actor Peter Weller has an unbilled cameo during the final act.

For those who don't know, the plot is very simply about a near-future world where an American corporation wants to bring it's robot police drones onto the United States soil so they take a police officer blown to bits and connect him cybernetically to a robot body. This way they can convince the public and the politicians that there is still a human element to the drone program. Robocop is the "beta", so to speak.

Along the way there is a lot of super-hero style action but without any of the gore and violence that was a trademark of the original (well other than seeing his face, esophagus, and lungs working while the suit is removed a couple of times). And that is really key to the potential success of this movie. It's not a sci-fi satire but a super-hero movie now. So it fits the current moviegoing public's tastes pretty well I expect. Not one thing in the storytelling was surprising or unexpected; in fact, the entire movie is totally predictable but always slides just slightly under the bar of smart. There's even a line at one point by the evil corporation CEO where he says "You know what's better than a hero?" And I leaned over to my wife and muttered "A martyr" one second before he said "A dead hero."

And I just laughed.

Bottom line: It's a standard popcorn flick. Don't expect too much and don't overthink it. You'll have a good time. If you can't check your brain at the door or not compare it to the original you should probably avoid it. But I thought it was decent enough. Not awful. Not great.

★★★ out of ★★★★★

WINTER'S TALE Film Review

 

  

WINTER'S TALE

I don't have a freakin' clue what I just saw.

By the end I found myself trying to figure out how such an esteemed cast (Colin Farrell, Russell Crowe, Will Smith, William Hurt, Jennifer Connelly, Eva Marie Saint, and more) could all have been conned into being a part of this mess of confusion masquerading as profundity. Then it all made sense when the credits rolled and I saw that it was written and directed by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman....

Here's the problem, though. Yes, that's right Russell, Akiva wrote A BEAUTIFUL MIND for you. Yes, that's right Will, Akiva wrote I AM LEGEND for you. However, need I remind all of you that he also wrote....BATMAN AND ROBIN and those awful DAVINCI CODE movies. 'Nuff said.

Maybe it depends on his sobriety levels or something, but clearly his screenwriting swings like a bi-polar wrecking ball in terms of quality or coherence.

I'll give you a snapshot of the massive incoherence. None of it is spoilers because you aren't going to go see this movie and even if you do there is no way I can spoil it worse than it spoils itself.

You have a baby set adrift in the ocean in a boat in the late 1800s, like a modern day Moses, who apparently grows up an orphan in New York City and a thief, named Peter Lake, working for a demon named Pearly Souls who is in a human form and speaks with a nearly indecipherable Irish brogue.  While the film is set in the early 1900s he works for Lucifer, played by Will Smith sporting a 2014 wardrobe, earring, and haircut.  When Pearly gets mad his face splits apart like the old Fantastic Four villain, The Molecule Man (see pic).  

Make sense yet?

Apparently stars may not be giant balls of gas after all but really humans who die and become angels and choose their starlike wings to sit in the heavens. And humans all apparently have one "miracle" they are supposed to perform during their lifetime and Pearly's sole purpose on Earth is to mumble gibberish and stop these miracles from happening. Of course, we never really see any other miracles other than the miracle Peter's supposed to perform and Pearly is obsessed with stopping that miracle.

Oh yeah, and there's a spirit dog who magically appears as a glowing white Pegasus. I shit you not. It is a dog......that looks like a....horse......with angel wings.

And I learned that "consumption" (Tuberculosis) causes your body temperature to be so high that it melts snow and you have to sleep on a roof in a tent during winter so that you don't die. And if you breathe in and breathe out slowly and then quietly name some stars while breathing out that will lower your body temperature.

Good to know.

This thing is a mess. It's trying so hard to be meaningful and tell a magical story of a true love, lost love, and a Divine purpose that spans lifetimes. But what got lost was any ability to thread these pieces together into a story that could be followed, with themes that really connected on a deeper level, and most of all delved deeply into the characters so that we actually cared about what happened to them.

I sat there with a confused and furrowed brow from start to finish. That's never good for a film and is crushing for a film with the pedigree of this one.

Avoid at all costs.

★ out of ★★★★★

See More

THE LEGO MOVIE Film Review

 

 

THE LEGO MOVIE

This is my favorite movie of the year so far. Perfectly conceived and executed. The computer generated animation is photorealistic to the point that I immediately had to go online to find out if it was actually stop-motion. But no, this is mostly CGI with some surprise live-action and stop-motion integrated into the story. The voice cast is so incredibly perfect that I think the casting director should win a special Oscar just for herself. In particular, Will Arnett slam dunks the funniest Batman performance ever. His “Dangit” is already a part of my own repertoire now. Jonah Hill’s Superman-sycophantic Green Lantern had me rolling everytime he opened his painted Lego mouth. Chris Pratt’s vocal performance as “Emmett” the generic Lego construction worker who might (or might not) be a little more special than he realizes. Oh and a couple of unknowns named Will Ferrell and Morgan Freeman have parts as well.

Here’s the bottom line about this movie, it is absolutely appropriate for children of any age and it is brilliantly funny and clever enough that it is fully enjoyable for parents as well. My wife and I were the only 2 adults in the theater who were not there with kids but I’m going to encourage everyone, whether they have kids or not, to go see this movie. It is that good. Fun, funny, smart, and solidly entertaining from start to finish. If you are still on the fence, let me tell you that The Lego Movie is….essentially….THE MATRIX….with Legos. You watch it and tell me I’m wrong!

I will admit to some sarcastic mockery in me when I first saw that there was a Lego movie coming out. It’s such an obviously cynical cash grab and games/toys translated to the big screen do not have a spectacular history. Sure, THE TRANSFORMERS have been a financial goldmine for the studio but in terms of quality of storytelling, nobody is going to claim they’re anything more than just an excuse to watch robots causing mass destruction. Maybe this movie began its life in a crass and cynical way but the screenwriters and the directors transcended that to create a story with archetypal underpinnings and emotional depth deceptively hidden behind these brightly colored building blocks. The Lego Movie is the lovechild of nostalgia and childlike imagination.

Oh, and the ironically hilarious earworm-from-Hell song “Everything is Awesome” will stay with you for days and days and days and days…..

 

What's next?  THE JIGSAW PUZZLE MOVIE?

 

★★★★★ out of ★★★★★