Movies of 2014, Top Films (6, 5, and 4)

            I was going to do a top 5, with much more elaborate comparisons to good movies of last year, trying to contextualize my tastes and what-have-you... Then I found a 6th movie to put on the list, and I wanted to get these all out before the Oscars... So here is the first half of my top 6 list (6, 5, and 4), one of which is just a link to a much longer review I did months ago.  My best work?  Probably not.  But a quick read.

 A Walk Among the Tombstones

            I cannot imagine this movie making it onto many "best of" lists.  While it is very well produced, plotted, and has sequences that evoke the right levels of discomfort, it is riddled with clichés, the main character and his kid sidekick especially.  Seriously, does every ex-cop turned unlicensed private eye have to be a recovering alcoholic?  Can't they just be competent without being damaged?

            I really like crime as a genre of fiction and the nature of asking questions, gathering information, the tension of confronting dangerous situations, and the darkness of the consequences of failure.  This movie captures all of those aspects.  It is a good mystery with good characters, and there is a good resolution.

            Some minor complaints, I do not understand the accent that Liam is trying for.  He should have just been an Irish cop in the states, it would have been fine.  They also set the movie in 1999, with the Y2K bug serving as weird background dressing for what is going on.  I am not really complaining about the Y2K thing, but it is an odd choice that boarders on distracting.  I imagine this movie to couple well with my favorite movie of last year "Prisoners" for a gloomy weekend viewing.

Overall: 9/10

 

I really like the quote on this poster, "People are afraid of all the wrong things."  Weirdly profound.

Blue Ruin

            If you like "No Country for Old Men", "Winter's Bone", and maybe "Mud" this seems like the type of movie for you.  A homeless man whose parents were murdered when he was very young is told by the police that the man who did it is getting released.  Revenge is what follows.

            What sets this apart from others of this type is the vulnerability of the main character.  He is far from being the type of unstoppable badass that defines movies about revenge.  He frequently injures himself while fighting and he can't use a gun for shit.  But he makes up for it by being crafty, setting traps, being elusive, and being fully aware of how completely fucked he is.  There is a good scene in this movie, which is great when set in contrast to "No Country for Old Men".  In "No Country" the psycho hit man has a major leg wound, so he breaks into a pharmacy and treats himself like a badass.  In "Ruin" the main character tries and fails to treat a leg injury and only barely makes it to a hospital before passing out, then later has to escape the hospital while naked.

            This is a dark and violent movie which takes a very pity inspiring protagonist and puts him thru the wringer.  Very good movie.

Overall: 9/10

 

Fun fact: I did not initially want to watch this because I thought it was a low budget independent film about Jesus.

Interstellar

            I already wrote a substantive review of this.  Needless to say it is worth watching and will take you on a journey.  The sense of exploration tempered with hard science, soft science, and sentiment makes me wonder what "Star Trek" would have looked and felt like had Christopher Nolan and company had been in charge of the reboot with this kind of tone and guiding mindset rather than the generic (but fun) action movie vibe that Abrams used.

Overall: 9/10

They are going to release this in IMAX again, because it is awesome.

(Tomorrow I will continue with my 3 favorite movies of the year.)

If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

My thoughts on "Interstellar" (Spoilers-ish)

            In "Interstellar" aliens or highly evolved beings (think the Prophets from Star Trek) create a wormhole in our solar system to help humanity escape as ecological plague is destroying the Earth's ability to cultivate human life.  Using NASA's last hail Mary pass a crew sets out with an incubation system able to create hundreds of test tube babies on one of the worlds beyond the wormhole.  The movie is dense with character and motivation.  You see why these scientists need to go on what could be a suicide mission and I felt legitimately sad watching the hero, Cooper drive away from his home and family.

Also, I thought the score was great.

            In short it was great.  At no point did it feel its length, I was engaged throughout.  They dole out information in small enough bites that I never felt overwhelmed, while at the same time information is given out readily enough that I am never left questioning what is going on (this might be a side effect of having seen so many science fiction movies, read so many books, and so many comics, people less immersed in the genre might find the information coming too fast or not deep enough).  I have heard the exact same speech on how wormholes work in another movie ("Event Horizon") and as a kid watching "Star Trek Deep Space 9" I visualized how a wormhole would look to a human eye, envisioning tunnels, disks, cubes, and spheres.  I like science (especially astronomy) and "Interstellar" has lots of science.

            Much like "Man of Steel" there is an environmental message and a commentary on how the government lies to people to keep them from panicking, but that in turn only halts efforts to turn back the apocalypse.  I love that this movie has a sly sense of humor, lots of wisecracks especially from Case, one of the robots.  The robot's design is a really cool concept, maybe my favorite thing in the movie; an obvious homage to the Obelisk in "2001: A Space Odyssey" but able to unfold and move and communicate in such a way that makes them unique and full of character.  The fact that the robots are treated like members of the crew and people showing concern for them was great, serving to illustrate how to correct one of my biggest issues with "Prometheus" (which had a totally human android treated like dirt by crew members who acted less like scientists and more like impetuous asshole children).

            Scientists act like scientists, using rational thought to come to rational solutions, but at the same time they are people and they take actions out of love, madness, fear, or hope and rationalize them the best they can even if their actions are a huge danger to the mission.  I have heard people complain that the concept of capital 'L' Love being some kind of cosmic force that guides people is too irrational for a character like Anne Hathaway's, and that the idea is called back to in the climax betrays the hard science the movie is going for.  I disagree.

            Love is the explanation that is given, but as an audience member you don't have to accept it.  The aliens are time travelers, you can say that love is helping people navigate the time stream because love is so strongly keyed to memory, but at the same time the aliens could be responding to hormone levels that occur in a certain area.  Who knows?  Who cares?  It doesn't matter for the story it is just about a father trying to help his family live thru the apocalypse and in doing so becomes a ghost to them, vanishing from their lives when they felt all was lost.  But even if you take it as a canonical fact that Love is real and it is some kind of psychic force in the universe like gravity... Then that is just a sweet sentiment and the break with reality that makes this science fiction movie more fantastical in tone.  Why would that break the movie?  Doesn't for me.  (Not like there isn't precedence of love reaching across time, more if you include various movies I did not watch).

            The only real issues I had was two distracting choices in casting, Topher Grace shows up as a doctor in the third act, and Matt Damon as an astronaut with cabin fever who acts as the movies' second act complication/tension heightening device (like HAL in "2001").  Neither does a bad job with their roles, but seeing big name actors show up out of nowhere like that took me out of it a little.  But at the same time you need some big names because they are major characters in those sections of the movies, especially Damon's role (maybe we are supposed to act surprised to see Damon as the characters in the movie would feel a sense of awe at meeting a very heroic astronaut/scientist).  Not sure how to fix that complaint, but as I wrote the last sentence the issue bothers me less.

Kind of like Buzz Aldrin would be hugely recognizable to astronauts, Damon is recognizable to movie goers.

            People also seem to think "Interstellar" is too long, but like I said before it doesn't feel its length to me.  People complain that they explain too much, especially Matt Damon, but considering his character has been talking to himself for months and is a raving nut job I can't see an issue there either.  And this is a movie about explaining things.  What did you expect?  I think I will have to play the 'Robots in Pacific Rim' card, you have to accept certain things will happen in certain types of movies, you should have known that going into the theater.  Sure I heard a lot of it before (almost verbatim) but not everyone has, and imagine being a kid in the audience who has never heard a serious discussion on wormholes before, the last few "Star Trek" movies and shows were even less scientific than this movie.

            I also detect strange levels of vitriol directed at Christopher Nolan, who I find to be a fantastic filmmaker.  I haven't actively disliked any of his movies, and even his weakest ("The Dark Knight Rises") only failed for its ambition.  He has a distinct style, visuals, pacing, and dialogue scheme.  I found this movie to be a bit outside his comfort zone with the dynamics of parenthood which he only ever touched on in "Batman Begins" and as an afterthought in "The Prestige", but it is good to grow as an artist and he did.  Apparently "Interstellar" was originally intended as a Spielberg movie, and I can see it, but I am glad that they gave it over to Nolan, changed up the feel of what might have been too emotional a movie (Spielberg hits the parental issues a lot in his work.... almost all of it, "Minority Report", "Close Encounters", "War of the Worlds", "Jurassic Park", at least half of the Indiana Jones franchise, even in "Lincoln" there is a prevalent subplot about Lincoln's son)  This would have been another Spielberg science fiction movie, instead it is a broadening of Nolan's pallet.  That is good.

            I am actually liking the movie the more I think about it.  Yeah there is some stuff in there, like no one on the ship realizing how the time dilation would work on the first alien planet, but I write it off that they were experiencing tunnel vision because of the urgency of their mission.  Or the super nit picky: how in the world was that space craft able to go down to the surface of a world with such high gravity and then make it back to the ship?  Hell the extra gravity should have kept the landing gear from working, and landing in water would have caused them to sink into the ground unless they had exceptionally wide feet on the landing legs.  Escaping Earth's gravity is the big issue of the movie, let alone escaping the impossibly heavy gravity of tidal wave world.  Again: who cares?

            I also want to note this: it was better than "2001: A Space Odyssey".  "2001" is boring, soulless, and revels in its own dated special effects under the guise of letting the audience take it in.  While I respect the visuals (not really, the monkeys look fake even by the standards of the time, and the light tunnel to a nice apartment is lame) "Interstellar" has broader appeal, and is just as high minded without wasting my time staring at things.

            "Interstellar" is a movie.  It has a lot of science, a good bit of adventure, some high minded philosophizing about Love, and a very simple metaphor about how parents leave children behind and how those children grow into adults.

Movies of 2013, Superhero, pt2, Superman

Man of Steel, or "Holy shit?  Did Superman just...?"

Overall: 6/10

Why don't they just put a halo over his head?  The Christ imagery is thick as any movie I have seen in years.

            I have written about this movie before and what I was really stunned by is how it compares to "Thor the Dark World" which came out later that same year and I will discuss tomorrow (because this review ran really long).  "Man of Steel" is just fine.  It is probably the most expensive film I have ever seen that I have reacted this 'meh' to, though I liked it a lot more when I initially saw it because I thought (and still do think) that it has the single best action sequence of the year involving the devastation of Smallville.  There are numerous issues, most of which have been hit on a lot by different people but I have at least one that I haven't seen anybody else write/talk about which I will get into too.

Problem 1: Lois Lane and everyone at the Daily Planet is completely useless.

            These guys should not have been in the movie at all.  While Amy Adams is a great actress, and Laurence Fishburne is a great guy to play Perry White, my point is that they have no point.  Literally everything they do could have been done by someone else to greater effect, or left out of this movie entirely and put into the sequel.

            For instance, Lois shows up at an archeological dig in the frozen north for a 20,000 year old alien craft, Clark is there because he thinks (and is right) that it is connected to his mysterious origins on a world unknown.  Lois goes out at night and finds Clark digging his way through the ice to the ship, she is attacked by the ship's security, Clark rescues her and then takes the ship and leaves her behind.  The real issue here: why did that have to be Lois?

            There is another character named Dr. Hamilton, played by an Emmy Winner, Richard Schiff who would have filled this story role much better.  A scientist that follows the mysterious alien to an ancient ship.  Follow that up later in the movie when General Zod takes Superman prisoner, and inexplicably takes Lois too.  Why?  She has no value, instead have Hamilton ask to be taken along, that he wants to see this alien society with alien technology and be an ambassador from Earth.  Zod would allow such an envoy because he wants Hamilton to relay what is coming to Earth authorities when he does attack (cause Zod is a dick).  Instead you have Lois along for adventures that she contributes nothing to, relaying information she can't understand between characters who could just talk to each other..

            By beefing up Hamilton's role it would also complete the themes of Father figures offering Superman choices in the movie, Jor-El the scientist telling him to be a messiah, Jonathan Kent the human telling him to live his own life, and then Dr. Hamilton the human scientist offering a compromise of being both a man, Clark, and a hero, Superman.

More time with these guys would have been better than the completely useless time spent at the Planet.

            The scenes in which Lois investigates and finds Superman in Smallville could have been the opener to the next movie, having a crafty reporter recap the events of the first movie while seeking out the hero and then offering to help him become a part of the world rather than some mysterious savior would do a lot to help the hypothetical second film shift into gear.

Problem 2: Metropolis was totally pointless.

            Zod is supposed to be a tactical genius with a technological advantage over those he is at war with (Earth) so why is he situating his key piece of technology (the key to his whole plan) in a major metropolitan area in which it could be exposed to attack by the most powerful military on the planet?  Why not park the things at the north and south poles?  It would take hours for American or Russian military weapons to be brought to bear against him, by which time the gravity weapon would have such a huge wake that no plane could fly in it, and no missile could be modified to target it (missile targeting depends on gravity working a consistent and certain way).

            Heck have it in Smallville, the idea of Superman's Earth life being literally smashed to nothing by the gravity of finding who he is would be a really good METAPHOR with a lot of emotional resonance and have just as many tactical issues as attacking Metropolis.  And the destruction of Smallville in this movie would prompt Clark to move to the big city in the second movie.

Problem 3: Lara Lor-Van of Krypton is completely useless.

            Aside from giving birth to Clark the role of Superman's Mom in the story is... Couldn't tell you.  To look stoic while her home planet explodes with her on it.  Compare this with Freya's role in "Thor the Dark World" (SPOILERS for Thor 2; go watch Thor 2, it is a lot of fun and has a lot working for it).

Well, I was a well developed character.

            To skip spoilers continue to my next problem.  In "Thor the Dark World" Frigga, Thor's Mom takes it upon herself to protect Jane Foster, Thor's girlfriend who is the designated MacGuffin carrier.  Freya fights against and nearly kills the main villain of the film and is only undone by the biggest physical threat seen in the movies aside from the Hulk.  Frigga is crafty, smart, has good (albeit limited) character interaction with the main characters, she has traits and a role in the story to die heroically trying to protect the universe from ruin and darkness.  Freya is cool.  Lara is not.

            How would you fix Lara?  Make her a warrior.  On Krypton people are not born, they are created and grown for purposes.  You could be designed to be a scientist, laborer, leader, soldier, or whatever.  Superman's Dad, Jor-El is a scientist, and somehow he manages to kick several soldiers' asses at a time and go on daring adventures... Let's not have him do that.  Let's have Lara do that.  Have her be a member of the warrior class, same as General Zod, and another symbol of duality in Superman, he is the child of two forbidden lovers, one a scientist, the other a warrior, it would also so Krypton to be more divergent from Earth toward gender roles, that being a man or woman does not mean one thing or the other, a concept only hinted at with the villain Faora.

            This could also add an element to Zod disliking Jor-El, that Lara was a good soldier till she met Jor-El and then left Zod's army.  It might also explain why Lara does not appear as a hologram later in the movie, that she (not Jor-El) was busy fighting Zod and buying time for Jor-El to get baby Superman on his rocket ship, so Jor-El did not get a chance to scan her into the program, currently it just looks like Jor-El left her out for no reason.  Lara is the most underused character in the movie.

Problem 4: Krypton's gloomy look.

            Krypton is the most well known planet in popular fiction aside from Planet X, which is actually just a generic catch all term for a hypothetical 10th planet in our solar system.  Having existed for 70 years Krypton has been drawn hundreds of times by a multitude of artists who have seen it as a world of crystal, a world of brightly colored tights, or in this case a world of very cold metal.

Seriously, when everything about the culture screams evil, you feel less bad that they are all dead.

            This is really the least of my problems with the movie.  My personal favorite look for Krypton is from the Animated Series in the 90's, or the goofy but shameless look in the "All Star Superman" comic from which some of Jor-El's dialogue is directly lifted.

            This is not the only movie out there going for Alien = Dark, and so it does not set itself apart from the pack.  "Star Trek" in 2009 turned heads by having everything incredibly white and shiny (hard to keep clean, looks like Apple took over) but it was eye catching and you felt like it was a bright shiny future worth saving.  In fact that is another good comparison, in "Star Trek" the main bad guy comes from a doomed plant in a dark ship that has a squid or spider like design and uses a gravity weapon to destroy of world full of people; "Man of Steel" has a villain from a doomed planet in a dark ship that has a spider or squid like appearance and he uses a gravity weapon to try and commit planetary genocide... Hell, the climax of each movie involves hitting the big unstoppable ship with a tiny ship causing the big ship to be sucked out of reality by a black hole... Fuck, that is some lazy hack writing when you get down to it.

Okay, Zod has far fewer tentacles/legs on his ship.

And come on, this space beam is orange... Not Blue!  Come on, totally not the same.

            Maybe having the main bad guys, General Zod and company show up dressed like they are going to fight "Flash Gordon" might have seemed silly, but isn't that kind of interesting?  Invasion of the goofy aliens sounds cool to me in an age of cynical and grim dark.

Problem 5: The double beat.

            The first 20 minutes of this movie is Krypton getting obliterated and having a civil war at the same time.  It is a weird alien planet with elements borrowed from "Avatar" mixed with "Alien", that is fine (even if it did not appeal to me it is a fine way for there to be an authorial stamp of those making the movie, "our Krypton is different").

            At the midpoint of the movie Clark discovers a spaceship that has a hologram Jor-El tell him about Krypton's obliteration and civil war... This is called a double beat, explaining something to the audience something they saw or have already had explained to them.  The effects and art direction of the scene are beautiful, using no color but clever moving relief sculpture to illustrate the war... Hell, this could have been the only thing we see of the destruction of Krypton, cutting out the whole opening, which is ultimately filler.  The fact is, pick one or the other, having both does only one thing: it kills the movie's momentum.

            To fix this scene you have to have Jor-El say, "I must explain to you about the end of Krypton and why you are here on Earth."  Then cut to something else.  The ship warming up to fly away, Zod's ship appearing at the edge of our solar system, Dr. Hamilton analyzing something.  But you do not explain to the audience a second time something they already know.  It is a waste of time.

Problem 6: Most of the fights.

            The fight in Smallville is the highlight of the movie and steals the thunder from all other encounters.  It is fast, destructive, showcases Superman's strength and speed, and displays the threat Zod's forces present to the Earth.  Zod's forces are fast, strong, and have training as soldiers, allowing them to use martial arts and group tactics to effect; but contrast, Superman is faster, stronger, can fly, has super senses and heat vision, but is limited by lack of training (who needs to learn wrist locks or effective punching when you can bend metal by flexing your toes)?  The Smallville throw down is amazing and showcases better than any other movie superheroic action with modern special effects.

This was the turning point of the movie, When a pilot gets vaporized into bloody mist by a Kryptonian soldier.

            The fight immediately after word is between Superman and robot tentacles in the middle of the Indian Ocean.  Here is the thing, they probably did this to shake up how and what Superman was fighting, much like how "Iron Man 3" has him fighting in a small town bar, catching people as they fall out of a plane, or an oil rig.  Visual variety is important in keeping the audience engaged, and is a big part of why the Smallville fight is so cool: Gas Station, Main Street, Department Store, Diner, Train Station, Bank, Corn Field, Farm (also allows for criminal amounts of product placement, even though Sears and IHOP do exist, so it is product placement that doesn't feel all that out of place).

            Smallville has so much to look at, so much to throw, to hit, to break, and things to be broken over, it offers a lot of destruction in an area that looks lived in and people can see themselves living in.  The middle of the ocean has no visual variety, and the tentacles just swirl around and try to ensnare.  The Tentacles are boring.

            Honestly the Smallville fight should have been the end of the movie.  Metropolis, while offering untold carnage is visually boring, dozens of buildings are falling over (cool, yes) but they all might as well be identical, none of them has visual personality or a sense of reality, they are just really big grey, and seemingly empty buildings.  Compare this to "The Avengers" which has Captain America killing aliens in an attempt to stop a massacre of civilians in a random lobby, and how (in spite of being filmed in Cleveland) the movie showcases real buildings that have a variety of visuals to them.  Hell, the part where the Hulk races through a populated office building knocking through cubicles and around people, jumping through a window and tackling a space dragon to keep it from slamming into the building and killing everyone is great, it shows signs of life and stakes.

            The final end of the movie (the most controversial thing about it) only works because Superman and Zod's fight terminates in a structure that has people in it that are in peril because of Zod, the gravity of the situation is shown on the micro level instead of just a giant smoking crater.  Where as the Smallville fight has people everywhere, feet away from soldiers getting obliterated by Faora, an awesome foe who is not named Ursa for some reason.

            And I don't know why so many action sequences seem so empty, Zack Snyder was smart to show the home front in "300", Nolan showed in the "The Dark Knight" that there were people everywhere for Batman to rescue, and David Goyer had Blade rescuing people in "Blade" several times.  All of the creative team have managed to capture the human element in their past movies, so why is it hit or miss here?