2014 - BIG GAME, far fetched but entertaining

After sitting through the disappointing and frankly ridiculous Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters I was reluctant to take on another tall tale of a film.  To my surprise Big Game for all it's outrageous story elements is actually very entertaining.

The film is set in Finland and involves a young boy on his first hunt.  He's desperate to prove to his father that he got what it takes to be a hunter.  For reasons really confusing to explain he happens to stumble on to a plot to kill the President of the United States played by the always game Samuel L. Jackson.  After Air Force One is shot down by terrorists over Finland, the President must rely on the boy to evade the terrorists as they race through the forest for help.

 

The film manages to have it's tongue firmly in it's cheek but still walk the line as an entertaining action/adventure film.  This is no easy task but the director manages to orchestrate the action and story elements in some quite clever ways.  The young boy hunter played by the Finnish actor Onni Tommila interacts with Samuel Jackson very well.  Tommila makes a great action hero in the tradition of an Indiana Jones adventurer and Jackson seems to enjoy his sidekick role.

 

This film is a very tall but entertaining tale.

The film was written by Jalmari Helander and Petri Jokiranta the running time is 90 minutes. 

2015 - BIG EYES, a true story indifferently told

The apparently true story of an artist named Margaret Keane as played by the actor Amy Adams.  Margaret was a painter who specialized in creepy portraits of children with the dominant feature in the paintings being kids with really big eyes.  Margaret married a guy named Walter Keane who was something of a conman and self promoter. He persuaded her to allow him to take the credit for her paintings while he successfully sold her artwork.

Walter Keane is played by the actor Christoph Waltz in a larger than life performance although you could probably make the argument this is actually kind of hammy acting.  Amy Adams as Margaret has chosen or was directed to play her role as a  very mousey woman who allows a man to dominate her life and her work.  The film eventually focuses on Margaret's efforts to get control of her life and her art and dump her domineering husband.

 

Tim Burton is the director and I suppose considering the cultivated weirdness of some of his previous pictures this would be prime material for him.  But this is no Ed Wood.  For whatever reason Burton abandoned his usual gothic style for a  more conventional story telling approach.  The whole thing is presented like a retro TV film from the 1970's.  The result is an extremely  dull and uninteresting film.  Christoph Waltz does what he can to bring some life into the film but it doesn't help.  Only during the last fifteen or twenty minutes does the film finally take off with a "paint off" contest at a libel trial between Walter and Margaret, something that actually happened in real life.

The writers are Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski who specialize in these kind of true life odd ball stories but they don' seem to be able to work up much interest in this story.   About the only thing this film has going for it is in the production design and the costumes.  But let's get real people don't watch films to marvel at the sets and wardrobe. They come for an interesting and entertaining story.  An extremely disappointing film.

The running time is 106 minutes.

2014 - MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT, late period Woody Allen romantic comedy

Another late period Woody Allen film.  Magic In The Moonlight is a romantic comedy, the kind of film Woody Allen had made before and probably a little better.  Still the film does have it's charms for the most part.  

Colin Furth is a magician called to the southern part of France to help expose a clairvoyant played by Emma Stone who has managed to ingratiate herself into a rich American family.  I've seen Furth's character before in other Allen films, the athiestic skeptic who doesn't believe in real magic but succumbs to the charms of Stone's clairvoyant.  The film at times becomes a discussion between rationality and the need to believe in a higher authority, god if you will.

The film eventually turns into a romance between Furth and Stone.  Let's get this out of the way, Furth is too old to be involved with Stone who was probably in her 20's when she filmed this but the two performers are so good you can kind of set the age difference aside, kind of.

 

In fact the film is well cast as is typical for a Woody Allen film.  The film also has nice photography on some pleasant locations and it is a pleasure to look at.  Woody Allen films are always well assembled.  For the most part this is a minor film but not without it's compensations particularly the performers and some of the amusing dialog.

 

Written as usual by Woody Allen, the film runs 98 minutes.

2014 - THE TAKING OF TIGER MOUNTAIN - good Chinese action film

 Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark's take on the battle between the People's Libertation Army (PLA) of China and a Chinese warlord played by an almost unrecognizable Tony Leung Ka-fai.  The warlord has been terrorizing the local population from a fortress located in a place called Tiger Mountain.

The film has a lot of thrilling action set pieces as only Tsui Hark can deliver and at times was clearly filmed during the winter which must have been a very miserable experience for the actors.

Tsui Hark is good a delivering action scenes and if there is a complaint it's that the movie runs 141 minutes which is a little on the long side.

The film was written by Tsui Hark, Wu Bing, Dong Zhe, Lin Chi-an and Li Yang.

Action filmmaking at it's best.

2014 - JOHN WICK, first in a series apparently

After John Wick's car is stolen and dog murdered by Russian gangsters who apparently can run amok in the United States.  Wick seeks revenge which means he shoots lots of people.

This film strikes me as a fairly mediocre action film that somehow did OK at the box office and got decent reviews, go figure.

Apparently no one remembers John Woo's classic Hong Kong films The Killer and Hard Boiled because John Wick is basically those films.  I can assure you the director of John Wick remembers those films because he definitely stages a lot of the shoot em up scenes in the style of those Woo films.



For all the beatings and blood spilling the film is curiously uninvolving.  It's hard to care about these nonexistent characters.

101 minutes.

2014 - LOST SOUL: THE DOOMED JOURNEY OF RICHARD STANLEY'S ISLAND OF DR MOREAU

This kind of ordinary documentary has a great subject matter, the attempt to make another film version of The Island of Dr. Moreau by a first time director named Richard Stanley who seems to have a screw or two loose. 

A film where about everything went wrong from the selection of a location which was an hour from civilization to the cast while involved Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer two shall we say difficult actors.  Naturally with these two characters and a relatively novice director things fell apart almost immediately.  The production came to a grinding halt while the director Richard Stanley was fired and a replacement was sought.

The replacement turned out to be John Frankenheimer a guy who had not been involved in a good project since 1973's The Iceman Cometh.  Frankenheimer bullied his cast and crew to get through the production but meet his match in Brando who was clearly in it for the paycheck and probably realized the film was essentially a hopeless mess. 

The documentary has interviews with Richard Stanley, members of the cast and crew with the exception of Brando and Frankenheimer who have passed away.  Val Kilmer refused to be interviewed.  The documentary is essential viewing and demonstrates how difficult it is to make a film and in particular a decent film when the odds of it being any good are stacked against it from the outset.

96 minutes.

2014 - ANTARCTICA: A YEAR ON ICE, a fascinating film with superb stop motion photography

A New Zealand radio technician named John Powell built his own time lapse cameras and proceeded to film life in Antarctica over a period of a year although it apparently took him 10 years to photograph this film

The film features stunning time lapse photography and breathtaking shots of this continent.  Powell also focuses on the support staff that keep the various research stations functioning  with a particular and interesting segment on what it's like to live in an environment which is completely dark about 4 months of the year.

Highly recommended.  Very well done.

92 minutes.

2014 - ST VINCENT, seen this one a couple of hundred times

The old chestnut about a single mom and her son who move in to a neighborhood where their next door neighbor played by Bill Murray is some old crabby reprobate curmudgeon.  Slowly everyone starts to warm up to each other because after all underneath Bill's heart of stone is a pretty nice guy.

Seen this plot more than I care to remember.  As soon as the film starts you know how it's going to end.

The cast is decent.  Bill Murray has done this crab apple guy before but he does it well.  One of my least favorite actors Melissa McCarthy actually didn't annoy me for a change and Naomi Watts is still pretty easy on the eyes.

St. Vincent is an OK time killer.

102 minutes.

2014 - BIG HERO 6, Disney Animation

Supposedly based on a Marvel comic book, Big Hero 6 is the usual stuff.  At times it's a frantic cartoon at other times if got the standard Disney sentimentally which is practically dripping off of the screen.  Throw in a bunch of misfits of science who become superheros and you've seen in all before.

The film does look kind of cool with it's mishmash of Tokyo and San Francisco settings.  Clearly more time was spent on the look of the film then thinking out an original plot.

The "Stay Puff" marshmallow robot is kind of cool.  But really there isn't a whole lot to be said about this one.  It made money, people seemed to enjoy it.

102 minutes.

2014 - THE HOBBITT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES, hopefully the last of this series, probably not

For all the fighting and killing and beheading in this film the supposed final chapter in the series is kind of anticlimactic.  Tolkein's book which was intended for younger readers has reached the end of this three part adaption with so much padding to it's story I didn't have a clue as to what was going on and I've read The Hobbitt twice.

The director Peter Jackson has so stuffed this film with visual computer image garbage it's hard to care who is fighting with whom when it's obvious that it's just a bunch of computer people moving around and whacking each other with computer generated swords.

In a film called The Hobbitt, Bilbo Baggins the Hobbitt himself has nothing to do.  Even during the final fight he gets knocked out and is unconscious for most of the action.  Bilbo didn't miss much. The fighting goes on and on and the large scale battle scene that takes up the last hour of so the film was done before in the previous five films.  Jackson even hired a lot of the actors from the earlier Lord of the Rings films to provide some continuity but all that this does is add a sense of deja vu to this noisy turkey of a film.

This film made a lot of money, so there is obviously an audience for this junk.  I saw the film at a second run movie theater and I can testify that a good portion of the crowd were fantasy nerds probably watching this for the fourth or fifth time.  The price was right, $3.00 admission to watch this piece of fantasy crap.

144 minutes, written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro.

2014 - THE IMITATION GAME, is an imitation of better films.

I was completely unimpressed with The Imitation Game a film that apparently plays fast and very loose with the facts of closeted gay professor Alan Turing and his role in breaking the German Enigma code machine during World War  II.

The film stars British actor flavor of the month Benedict Cumberbatch as the very twitchy Turing and Keira Knightly because as they say there's always has to be a woman in the movies.

Every liberal in the United States is whining about about the authenticity of the story in American Sniper.  I would say this film really has fact baked factual pseudo biographies beat with ridiculous spy plots and overblown dramatic scenes of code breaking that probably couldn't possibly have occured they way it's presented in this film.

If you are looking for a good film about Alan Turing and the Engima project you could probably wait for PBS to repeat Decoding Nazi Secrets which PBS will probably run ad naseum now that The Imitation Game is a success.

114 minutes

2014 - INTO THE WOODS, another attempt at a film musical

Here we go again, another shot at making a contemporary musical in a genre that is mostly dead these days.  Into the Woods is based on the Sondheim Broadway musical which was a reworking of classic fairy tales with a modern twist.  Sondheim and his associate James Lapine's big insight in this film is that fairy tales don't always have happy endings.  This is something that I will not be going through life worrying about.

As is the trend with contemporary musicals these days.  The cast is made up of actors who can barely carry a tune.  But the nice thing about a Steve Sondheim song is that they mostly don't worry about tunes it's mostly a lot of rhythmic patter.  Between the non singers and the non songs it's fairly easy to juggle a singing performance out of an actor who is not a professional singer.

The chief exception to this non singer actor stuff is Meryl Streep.  After slaughtering about every ABBA song she got near in Mama Mia.  Streep takes a shot at murdering some of the songs in this film.  Streep tops it off with her very broad performance as the witch.  I know the witch is probably supposed to be a larger than life character but she could at least come off like she wasn't phoning it in with a megaphone.

The basic fact is that there is no longer the talent or resources to make film musicals anymore.  This genre died out with MGM in the 1950's.   That a mediocre film like Into the Woods could get decent reviews and box office show how far the musical genre has fallen.

 124 minutes, screenplay by James Lapine.

2014 - JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT, another reboot

An attempt to reboot the Tom Clancy "Jack Ryan" series with a new plot and a new cast.  The last try was with Ben Affleck as Clancy in The Sum of All Fears.  This one has what the studio considered to be a hot young cast, Chris Pine and Keira Knightley,  Throw in a couple of veterans, Kevin Costner and Kenneth Branagh with Branagh directing and I'm sure everyone thought they had another potential franchise.

What the studio got was just an OK spy thriller.  There's nothing particularly bad about this film but it's just a "seen it all before" spy movie with the usual fight scenes, sneaking around stuff and a last minute race to stop a terrorist attack on New York City.

Chris Pine and Keira Knightley are the leads.  The chief problem with them is their complete lack of chemistry as a couple.  Also, the script has to do a lot of contortions to get them together for the big spy mission  it really makes no sense she would follow him to Russia for a romantic weekend and frankly hurts the credibility of the plot.  Branagh is the Russian bad guy in this film.  He's got the smooth sophisticated evil super villain down but if you've seen any James Bond films at all you've seen this character before.  

The action scenes are OK but again nothing special.  This film ends up being strictly a time killer not good, not bad, really not anything.

105 minutes written Adam Cozad and David Koepp.

2014 - A CHRISTMAS MYSTERY - No 8, that's all I could take.

Enough was finally enough.  Trying to get through contemporary Christmas films finally led me to the conclusion that all of these films suck.

Let's get this one out of the way, some actor named Esme Bianco is a hard hitting but hot reporter trying to figure out why her father disappeared years ago when she was 12.  Joined in her investigation is a piece of beefcake private investigator.  I don't have to paint anyone a picture where the plot of this one is going.

As seems to be the pattern with these Christmas films, this one has nothing to do with Christmas other than to provide a background for the lame mystery story the viewer has to sit through.  A Christmas Mystery is just another light weight love story featuring very good looking people who exist only in the world of white bread entertainment. 

If you are looking to evoke the spirit of Christmas, it's probably best to avoid these films and probably spend your time going to church or reading the Bible.

88 minutes.

2014 - THE GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, I think I've heard this same old song before

Doesn't anyone remember Star Wars Episode 4 anymore?  Guardians of the Galaxy borrows a lot from that film.  The green woman is a stand in for Princess Lea, Star Lord is Han Solo, the tree creature is Chewbacca and there's a couple of bad guys who are clearly modeled after Darth Vader and The Emperor.

A lot of drivel was written on the Internet about how this was Marvel Studio's phase 3 in their story arch series, but this film sure looks a lot like phases 1 and 2 to me.  There is an elaborate story arc connection with regard to some magic stones or something that has been in the works and referenced in the last several Marvel movies.  However I skipped the last Thor movie because I just didn't care so I don't know if the power stones were mentioned in that film or not.

This was the film that supposedly was to be loaded up with humor.  What passes for humor in the Marvel Universe is a talking racoon and listening to music mix cassette tapes from the 1970's.  Chris Pratt appears to have been hired to carry the comedic load and I guess he does about as well as can be expected with the script and story.  Speaking of the script the co-writer and director James Gunn plays it very safe in this film.  There is none of the subversive and sick humor that permeated his bizarre film Super.  I'm sure the studio wasn't about to go down any road that made fun of religious fanaticism. 

Come to think of it Guardians of the Galaxy also borrows from another classic film, The Dirty Dozen.  Assemble a team of people who barely get along with each other and have them work together to fight the evil Nazis Kree.  This is a very derivative film.

The audience I saw this film with loved it and this film made a lot of money.

122 minutes.

2014 - THE AMAZING SPIDERMAN 2, is commercial filmmaking at its most cynical

The first reboot of the Spiderman series was no classic, the 2nd film unimaginatively called The Amazing Spiderman 2 manages to be even less successful as a commercial entertainment.  I lasted about 45 minutes to an hour on this turkey, skimming ahead to watch the final fight between Electric guy or whatever the villain's name is and the Green Goblin who shows up towards the end because you can't have enough action stuff going on unless you completely overwhelm the audience with noise and chaos.

The main leads in the film Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are supposedly to be playing teenagers graduating from school.  They are starting to look a little long in the tooth.  Garfield is 31 years old and Stone is 26 and the cuteness thing she had in the first film is looking a little rough around the edges.  The rest of the cast is clearly slumming in the great "where's my paycheck" school of acting tradition.  Particularly pathetic is Paul Giamatti who is supposed to play the villain "Rhino."  Giamatti shows up at the beginning of the film and the end of the film blathering in some ridiculous Russian accent.

The action scenes are the usual overdose of computer imaging Spiderman flying around New York looks like a cartoon character who would be at home in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.  Spiderman is never in real danger because Sony Pictures had announced that there would be another film is this series with Spiderman taking on the Sinister Six, whoever they are.

Unfortunately for Sony, this picture was not the big blockbuster hit they had been hoping for.  The film made money but not the millions and millions of dollars they wanted.  Apparently the studio is spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to save this series from the ennui that seems to be settling in on these superhero films.

142 minutes.

2014 - EDGE OF TOMORROW aka Live Die Repeat

Edge of Tomorrow was the summer action film that received good reviews from most of the critics and failed to be the big blockbuster Warner Brothers Studio was looking for.  After watching this film I would include myself in the "why didn't this film take off" camp.  However, I will have to admit I did not rush out to see it this summer.

In spite of the good reviews, the thought of sitting through another Tom Cruise movie was just not very appealing.  It's unfortunate, because Cruise actually has to put in a little more work on his character in this film.  For a guy in his 50's he seemed to be getting slightly long in the tooth to be playing his usual smiling preppy character.  At least that was my thought anyway. 

I had no interest in putting up pictures of Tom Cruise again

Obviously the influence of Groundhog Day and video games is in this film.  But director Doug Lyman stages the film in such an entertaining way it's not a distraction but a clever way to tell the story of yet another alien invasion.   

Considering all the hard work that everyone obviously put into a fairly original film for a change Edge of Tomorrow should have done much better.  Unfortunately this film will only add fuel to the fire of promoting sequels and comic book franchise films.  Warner Brothers has learned its lesson and has announced that it will be making at least ten films based on DC comic book super heros.

Well in spite of all the baggage that this film carried, Edge of Tomorrow is a very good science fiction/action film.

113 minutes

2014 - LUCY, science fiction action thriller from Luc Besson

In this highly ridiculous but highly entertaining science fiction thriller from Luc Besson.  Scarlett Johansson is forced to consume large quantities of some weird drug by an evil Korean gangster.  This drug expands the powers of her brain while draining her of her emotions and humanity.  She becomes sort of a "Mr. Spock" crossed with "Carrie" combination.

The emotionless character Lucy is the perfect part for the monotone none acting of Scarlett Johansson in this film, she's actually a fairly talented performer.  Throw in "anything for a paycheck" actor Morgan Freeman, a bunch of nasty Koreans and some French guys and you have the perfect bizarre cast to keep you watching.

At times Lucy seems like it's trying to say something about evolution and the human condition.  But just when things are getting a little pretentious, Besson throws in a gunfight between the bad Koreans and the French police guys  This is all highly entertaining if violent nonsense put together in an enjoyable and skillful manner.

Luc Besson may have made a ridiculous film but he was smart enough to keep the running time down to less than 90 minutes.  A very tall tale like this film doesn't bare a whole lot of scrutiny if any scrutiny at all.

89 minutes, written by Luc Besson.

2104 - TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION - # 4 in the series

Coming in close to 3 hours.  It's hard to believe we've come this far in this rock em sock em robot extravaganza since the 1984 cartoon series that I believe aired in syndication.  The original cartoon series was cheaply made with limited animation and simplistic plots for kids, primarily young boys.  It was all about selling toys back then.

30 years later this series is now a big budget Hollywood production although the plots are still about on the level of the cartoon series.  2007 was the first appearance of the Transformers directed by the master of large scale action, Michael Bay.  Bay has now invested about 7 years of his life in this series but since the films have made so much money I can imagine he has been well paid.  Come to think of it, I've been watching these films for 7 years now and nobody is paying me for my time.

Sick at home with food poisoning of all things, this seemed like the perfect non think film to watch while my temperature climbed to 102.  However after about an hour of robots throwing each other around  I grabbed my laptop and spent the rest of the running time of the film wasting my time on the internet while the computer generated robots constantly bashed and smashed each other.

It seems like these big robot movies have kind of worn out their welcome but this latest Transformers movie has made a lot of money guaranteeing that there will be a Transporters 5.  But let it be said this is not a good popcorn film.

165 minutes.

2014 - THE TRIP TO ITALY is more of the Trip except it’s in Italy

This is a sequel/remake of The Trip with the exact same setup as the first film.  A couple of comedians played by Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play a couple of comedians named Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.  Like the first film they are on a tour of Italy dining in some very scenic and  fancy restaurants in order to write reviews for a British newspaper. 

This film looks to be basically improvised by the two comedians with some story structure about their grappling with middle age and their relationships with their families.  But really the film is about these two pretty funny guys doing imitations of famous British and American actors and basically trying to top each other in the shtick department.

The Trip to Italy is probably what passes for a fairly sophisticated comedy these days although it's mighty silly at times.  Coogan and Brydon know what their audience wants to see, pretty pictures and silly voices.  The result is an entertaining film which at times has some genuine wit when you cut through all the Al Pacino and Michael Caine impressions.

This is a film you have to actually listen to.  It's an end of summer film that doesn't contain Godzilla smashing strange monsters or Captain America fighting evil comic book villains.  An enjoyable film however I sure wouldn't want to be sitting next to these two guys in a restaurant listening to their shenanigans while I am trying to eat.

108 minutes