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Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2014.5

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<dl dt_class="field"> Man of Steel (2013) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0770828/">5/10</a> <div>This movie starts off super-strong with a council meeting on Krypton. It's exciting because they filmed it with a shaky cam. It moves on to Russell Crowe as Jor-El (Superman's father) steal "the codex"---half a skull that kinda lights up?---engage in meaningless heroics in a chamber that looks ripped right out of the Matrix's breeding chambers, but without the menace or back-story. There's little back-story or character development at all to make you care about who wins or loses. Lots of shiny, though. Lots and lots of shiny CGI. And the council chamber hasn't stopped shaking yet. Who is this movie for? The technology is advanced but they fight with fists instead of the laser guns they sometimes use. Everything is automated, but they shout orders into the wind like medieval warriors. Jor-el shoots everyone but the most dangerous guy, who he lets walk right up to him and knock the gun from his hand. And then stab him, later, while he watches a pretty rocket. This is just "and this happened" and "then that happened" without any logic or possibility for the viewer to predict or reason about anything. Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful-looking movie, especially in 1080P HD. The intergalactic prison is lovely, but seems kind of extravagant for housing a handful of frozen prisoners. Just how dangerous are these people? Guantánamo is just some fences and that seems to prevent escapes just fine. Instead of a prison, it seems more of a way of keeping those prisoners alive as the planet Krypton explodes soon after, taking the rest of the population with it. Poor Kevin Costner: he gets a role in the limelight again and he has to deliver such horrible lines. Almost worse is Amy Adams as Lois Lane, who has to be an asshole/ditz who ignores sub-zero temperatures to make a Nikon commercial for a camera that would never work in those temperatures. Good God, Amy Adams is annoying and terrible in this movie. Despite the danger and destruction, there's Lois, seeking the thick of the action. As titans destroy buildings, she fears nothing. All the roles are so cliché, except maybe for Diane Lane as Martha Kent. Still all shaky cam and out-of-focus and badly framed shots for a lot of the action. Are they ashamed of what they've made? They pay about as much attention to that as they do to getting the technology right. At one point, a "hacker" shouts that General Zod's signal is <iq>coming in over the RSS feeds!</iq> Ridiculous. In the film's defense, the interleaved flashbacks of Kal-El's childhood are actually good and not annoying in the way that the trailer suggested. Also in its defense, some of the action is poorly filmed, but other parts are visceral, especially the coordination of sound and CGI to make you really <i>feel</i> the pounding. It's kind of nice that they show how much destruction would be caused by beings of that power, from the holes Superman leaves everywhere he takes off, to the swathes of destruction left by flying superhuman bodies. The laws of physics aren't really respected, though. I appreciate the fantasy and creativity that went into some of the scenes, but some of it is pretty comical and useless (the metal snake-mouths chasing Superman? What the hell was that?). Well-made or not, it's onanism not exposition. The story is not advanced by it---at least not by 45 minutes of it.</div> The Birdcage (1996) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115685/">6/10</a> Robin Williams, Nathan Lane and Hank Azaria star in this adaptation of <i>Le Cage aux Folles</i>, which tells the story of a gay couple who own and operate a burlesque club. The son they raised together returns with news that he wants to get married. His fiancés parents, however, are bigoted assholes who don't like homosexuals. The son seems to think that they should hide their gayness to smooth the way to the wedding. This goes disastrously wrong and the son has a change of heart and everything is all better. Robin Williams and Nathan Lane play the proud parents; Hank Azaria is their Guatemalan butler. I'm not a big fan of Nathan Lane, but the other two played well. The actress who would end up playing Ally McBeal was her usual wide-eyed vapid self. Gene Hackman slipped effortlessly into the role of the bigot (no surprise there) and Dianne Wiest reprised her role from footloose as conciliatory woman married to a bigot. The movie had its moments, but it was pretty uneven. Recommended for fans of Azaria and Williams. Bad Words (2013) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2170299/">8/10</a> Jason Bateman directs himself in this dark comedy about a grown man (over 40) who uses loopholes in the rules to take part in school spelling bees. He levers himself up to the national championship, where he meets Chaitanya Chopra. The little Indian boy befriends him and they all live happily ever after. Just kidding. There is a lot of swearing and drinking and seriously bad words spoken, much of it by Bateman. He's a bitter, relentless man but he knows he will win the competition. There are twists, but mostly its the Jason Bateman show with him doing what he does best, being a nice-guy/jerk. It wasn't as dark as something like <i>Bad Santa</i> but it was definitely in that direction. Recommended. The Other Woman (2014) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2203939/">3/10</a> This was an execrable and derivative movie which would most likely purport to empower women but only exacerbates the problem that women and men don't take each other seriously. Mark, played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (you may know him as Jamie Lannister) is portrayed as a penis with a heartbeat, seemingly insatiable for sex and ever-manipulable by his member's needs. The women are caricatures, poor Leslie Mann is underutilized as a whiner with no backbone, although she does her damnedest to lend some humor. Cameron Diaz was, as almost always, just terrible. Like a train hitting a bus-load of schoolchildren in slow motion. Kate Upton rounded out the trio as the ostensible airhead, although it really took some squinting and concentration to tell who took the crown there. Don Johnson didn't play well, but he seems to have his weight problem under control, so that's good news, I guess. Nicki Minaj wore clothes that emphasized her ass to a nearly comical degree (not surprising) and makeup that made her look like Pixar drew her. Funny moments were thin on the ground, as were surprises. My recommendation is to avoid this movie. Life of Pi (2013) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454876/">8/10</a> This is a very pretty film with a riveting story. It was much better than I expected it to be. The story is of a family in India that owned a zoo. They moved with the zoo on a Japanese freighter to France. The ship sank off the coast of the Philippines. One of the boys survived by his wits, accompanied for hundreds of days by a tiger, Richard Parker. At least, that is the story that he tells and is the one that is wonderfully filmed. Some of the more surrealistic scenes were very evocative. Though there were a handful of scenes that were clearly made for 3D, they didn't disturb the 2D experience. Recommended. Saw it in German. The Cold Light of Day (2012) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1366365/">4/10</a> Bruce Willis stars as---surprise!---a CIA agent who hid his secret life from his family for years, à la De Niro from <i>Meet the Fockers</i>. This movie is so bad that Willis gets killed halfway through because he wanted to get out of the movie so badly. Or maybe they couldn't afford his fee for the full two hours. Henry Cavill (later Superman) and Sigourney Weaver round out the known names, but they can't save this stilted and derivative script. They're in Spain, there's a Penélope Cruz-lookalike, there are Mossad agents, rogue CIA agents and seemingly super-powered evil guys who are beaten to within an inch of their lives, but they can not only take the pain with a snicker but can also magically heal the wounds incurred thereby. The movie ends with a flash-cut, illogical and unconvincingly violent, GTA-style car chase and shootout with no clear explanation as to the passion behind certain motives. Nor will you end up caring. Not recommended. On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064757/">5/10</a> This is a pretty uneven entry in the James Bond series, the only one in which George Lazenby plays the lead role. It picks up considerably once Bond gets to Switzerland and they spend a lot of time at the Schilthorn, starting in Lauterbrunnen and ending up in Birg as well. The top is reserved for Blofeld (played by Telly Sevalas), S.P.E.C.T.R.E. and an allergy clinic populated only by gorgeous young women who take part in curling on the helipad at the top. Another man cannot get to the top with the cablecar---because the top is private---so he scales the Schilthorn to get there. You don't have to scale anything to get from Birg to the top, though. It's not particularly pleasant and it's more than occasionally steep, but it's a straightforward hike up there. The surrealism was interesting for a while, but didn't last. Not recommended. The Wire (Season 5) (2008) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0306414/">10/10</a> If I had to describe this season in a sentence fragment, it would be "a relentless exercise in cynical realism". I deliver this as a compliment of the highest order. This last season introduces the staff of the Baltimore Sun, which hadn't featured in the previous four seasons. Another story thread was in the state capitol with a machinating mayor, staff and legislators. Another was in the streets with the war started by Marlo Stanfield and the police desperately trying to bust him---Lester and the newly restored McNulty. Excellent writing, excellent acting, excellent direction, just an excellent series that pulled no punches over all five seasons. The other four seasons are all great as well, with season one focusing on the projects and the drug trade, season two on the docks and import/export corruption, season three on the streets and the Barksdale and Stringer Bell story-arc, season four on the school system and mayoral, city- and state-level politics. I can't recommend the whole series highly enough. True Detective (2014) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2356777/">10/10</a> Wow. Just wow. I'd just finished watching <i>The Wire</i> and expected to be only reasonable satisfied watching this show. Instead of binging on the shows, though, I found myself savoring each bizarre episode, utterly captivated by the two leads: Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Michelle Monaghan is also very good in a supporting role as Harrelson's wife. The show centers on the detective partners, working a serial-killer case in Louisiana, starting in 1995 and going all the way up to 2012 or even 2014. Rust Cohle, played by McConaughey is transcendent and wonderfully written by Nic Pizzolatto as a hyper-intelligent detective paired with passingly clever but basically animalistic, brutish and dumb Marty Hart, played by Harrelson. The plot is fascinating and unfolds slowly, delivered in dribs and drabs and partly in dialogue and partly in lovingly shot outdoor scenes. Rust Cohle is an optimistic realist to the end. Kudos to both Harrelson and McConaughey for their performances. Highly recommended. Kingpin (1996) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116778/">6/10</a> Woody Harrelson and Randy Quaid star as two bowling prodigies---one is a washed-up former champion and the other Amish. The Farrelly brother directed, in case that wasn't obvious. Bill Murray plays Harrelson's nemesis, Ernie McCracken, an absolutely unconscionable and foul Lothario who---spoiler alert---does <i>not</i> get his comeuppance. Still, the Farrellys are kind enough to let Harrelson's Roy Munson and Quaid's Ishmael have a happy ending. The silliness is held in check by Harrelson's acting chops. Not as good as <i>Me, Myself and Irene</i> or <i>There's Something about Mary</i> but still fun. Interstellar (2014) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816692/">9/10</a> <div>This movie starts with a small family living on a dessicated farm in the U.S. several decades from now. The logical results of climate change wreak havoc on mankind's ability to survive. And survival is the only thing on mankind's mind, as all thought of advancement and gadgets and growth are lost in the desperate struggle to keep the remains of the human population alive. Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a former test pilot who's itching to do more than just survive. He is one of the remains of a generation that still has an ingrained need to strive for bigger, better, faster, more. It is hinted that this attitude is exactly what led mankind to its current situation. But science and technology are strong in this movie. The belief that learning and building are better than just living triumphs. John Lithgow as Cooper's father is of the opinion that mankind is a virus and should just die out instead of trying to rise again and destroy even more of the world---or universe. Though he's almost certainly right, nobody cares what he thinks in this movie. The politics and philosophy, though a bit more thought-out than many other movies, are left to stagnate relatively quickly. So let's move on. This is going to be, after all, an action movie with science prevailing to promulgate the human race. Thank goodness, though, that the military and jingoism play a more subdued role than in other, similar treatments. Cooper and his kids find a drone, which is an old Indian one and has been flying autonomously for at least a decade---wait, that has no relevance to the story. Let's start over. Ok, Cooper's daughter thinks she's found a ghost in her room. Her Dad tells her to investigate scientifically, to form a hypothesis. They discover together that the ghost is using gravity to encode Morse-code signals. The signals are geographic coordinates. They drive to these coordinates and come upon an old military base/facility and are apprehended. There they find the remnants of NASA. Here Cooper learns that everyone agrees that Earth will soon no longer be hospitable. Michael Caine plays a super-genius scientist who is trying to resolve the T.O.E. in order to master gravity with the purpose of being able to launch a considerable part of Earth's population out of the planet's deep gravity well. At the same time, they need to investigate possible new homes. As luck would have it, a wormhole has been discovered orbiting Saturn and, through it, several potentially habitable worlds as well. 12 brave scientist/explorer/adventurers have already been sent to the 12 planets to investigate. Now they need Cooper to accompany Caine's Daughter---Brand, played by Anne Hathaway---and a couple of others on NASA's last rocket to get to the most hospitable of these. Boom, they're in a rocket. They hyper-sleep. They awake near Saturn and dive into the wormhole. Through the wormhole and they're in the vicinity of Gargantua, a black hole on the other side, around which a candidate planet orbits. Relativistic time-dilation effects are discussed. Decades pass on Earth while only hours pass for the astronauts. The first planet is a bust. Brand wants to go to the planet with her boyfriend on it. She makes an impassioned speech about the universe running on love. Cooper doesn't buy it. They go to the other planet. It is composed of a crust of frozen clouds and has Matt Damon on it. He has lost his marbles and tries to kill people, but Cooper and Brand escape in magnificent fashion, along with their very funny, blocky robots. They boost toward the third planet, but the only way to get there is to drop one of the funny robots TARS into the black hole. Also, Cooper. Neither of them die, Instead, they are funneled by external forces to a three-dimensional representation of the tesseract that the hyper-dimensional beings built to bring the wormhole to life in the first place. So they're fifth-dimensional beings, if you're following along. They play with tesseracts the way we play with spheres. Anyway, Cooper ends up floating in a multitude of what looks like library-book shelves but is actually a representation of the string of moments that built the reality in four-dimensional space from which he came. But, being fifth-dimensional now---if only temporarily---he, too, can view time as a static dimension along which entire universes can be glimpsed in their entirety as they were at that infinitesimal snapshot. Stop me if you've heard this one before. He realizes that he's behind the bookshelves in his daughter's room at different times, first seeing her as a child and then as an adult when she returns to ... collect something. So he's the ghost from the beginning of the film. And love, apparently, does conquer all, because it's what made her try so hard to figure out the secret of the ghost. When she does, she transcribes the further Morse code that he encodes in the deliberately defective second-hand of the watch that he gave her and which she disdainfully rejected when he first abandoned her to go to space and try to save the planet but really he was just going for his own ego and abandoning her. Sorry. Stay focused. We're almost there. He and TARS, as they fell through the event horizon, managed to collect the gravitational data that Murph (this is Cooper's daughter) needs in order to solve the equations that Professor Brand (Caine) could not solve---and which he actually knew (or thought he knew) couldn't be solved because the data they needed was inside a black hole. So she totally solves them anyway because her father is friends with fifth-dimensional beings who play with black holes the way we play with marbles and he, as mentioned above, gives her that knowledge. And the fifth-dimensional beings are none other than the future humans who will benefit from themselves having helped Cooper help save humanity with this message back to Murph. Fast-forward to Cooper waking up on a space station orbiting Saturn after having been picked up exiting the wormhole back to the Solar System. Due to relativistic time-dilation, that trip took many decades in Earth time---more than enough time for mankind to save itself with technology built with Murph's equations. Chronologically unchanged father is reunited with now aged and nearly dead daughter for one last goodbye. She tells him to go find Brand, who has found her dead lover on the third planet. She has taken over building a totally viable habitat there and waits for mankind to join her---or at least a big, strong man to save her. Mankind is totally hanging out in a bitching Ringworld-like space station, so it's hard to see what they'd want to do on a planet, but I digress again. Cooper finds TARS, reanimates him, steals a small ship that looks like a Cylon fighter from the original Battlestar Galactica and heads off to join Brand. Saw it in English in the theater. Totally awesome and fun. Highly recommended.</div> X--Men: Days of Future Past (2014) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1877832/">6/10</a> <div>The first fifteen minutes proves just how boring super-hero movies are when there is no context and no attachment to the characters. All of the male superheroes look the same to me and they all flit and fly around unconvincingly, with portals and robots and power-blasts choreographed to within a nanometer while still managing to be unbelievably boring. There is no drama, no <i>tension</i> if you have no idea <i>why</i> you should care that the super-snazzy robot is about to kill a young girl and a giant black guy. I happened to know that they were Kitty Pryde and Bishop, but I still had no idea what was going on. It looked and felt less like a movie and more like a lovingly rendered but still stilted tech demo for the new Unreal or Crytek Engine. It eventually settled down a bit and unpacked a time-travel plot that served as a backdrop to mostly unconvincing set-pieces with a lot of bluster about hating mutants. The ending was familiar from the comic books and somehow seemed more convincing there. In the film it felt more like <i>The Wizard of Oz</i> updated for the Sci-Fi set. The cast is good and includes a lot of heavy-hitters---Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellan, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Peter Dinklage, Jennifer Lawrence and Ellen Page---but it was hard to avoid thinking that they were mostly wasted. Recommended but only for fans of the genre.</div> Joe Dirt (2001) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0245686/">5/10</a> This movie starts off very stupid and awkward and gradually---through the power of David Spade's innocent charm---becomes much less awkward, endearing even. It tells the story of Joe Dirt(e), a mulleted man whose family abandoned him when he was 10 years old. He appears on a radio show to tell his story, which includes many misadventures of a hick variety, many forced but some genuinely funny. He also meets a lot of very attractive and nearly ridiculously healthy-looking women along the way, in the form of Brittany Daniel, Jaime Pressly and a few other anonymous souls. Christopher Walken, Kid Rock and Dennis Miller have smaller roles, listed in decreasing order of savoriness. Watched it while indoor-cycling so it was good for that, but it's hard to recommend as a movie to just watch by itself. Barbarians at the Gate (1993) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106356/">5/10</a> This movie is a quasi-documentary (a made-for-TV movie) about the sale of the R. J. Reynolds Nabiscocompany in 1989. It was a leveraged buyout (LBO) in what would become the classic mold: load up on debt (leveraging) and gut the company to pay back the investors who bought the company with that debt. James Garner played the then-CEO F. Ross Johnson, who ended up being beaten out in his bid to buy the company by an even-shadier KKR group, headed by Henry Kravits, played by Jonathan Pryce. It was kinda boring but some parts were well-done. Too 80s, with cheesy music, too many montages and not enough meat. Recommended for economic historians interested in seeing the beginning of the latest era of LBOs and unhinged greed and utter disregard for actual economic value. Battle of Los Angeles (2011) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1217613/">2/10</a> This is the story of an epileptic cameraman with a strobe light strapped to his face. Shaky cam doesn't even being to describe this movie that follows a group of marines charged with clearing the Fallujah-like streets of a Los Angeles under attack by mysterious but very militarily minded aliens who have conveniently invaded on foot and without any air cover whatsoever. The fog of war is everywhere and glimpses of aliens are offered in horror-movie style until one finally shows up in all of its glory. Luckily, it can travel across the vast depths of space but it has no idea of close-quarters tactics, using a conventional projectile weapon that it is unable to point in the right direction before several marines M16 him into oblivion. This is a military advertisement with a very small alien component. It's kind of like if Starship Troopers took itself seriously. Now I know what an embedded reporter must feel like. Not recommended. Terrible. Just play Call of Duty or Battlefield yourself if you need to get your military rocks off. Orange is the New Black (2013--2014) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2372162/">8/10</a> This is a show about the journey of a whiny, privileged and entitled New Yorker. She has a past, she dated a drug dealer and traveled the world with her. Nearly ten years later and she's been implicated for her past and is on the way up to to Litchfield prison, in upstate New York. The prison is low-security and has an interesting cast of characters. It's not all gold, but it's interesting and fun, with a bunch of the characters growing on you. </dl>