April 3, 2016
jmunney
Cinema, Movie Reviews
Deadpool
I appreciate irreverence, but irreverence for irreverence’s sake can be thin and tiresome. It needs a good story to anchor it. Deadpool does not have an especially good story. However! – that is not necessarily a problem, considering that the narrative is meant to be bare-bones and take the piss out of the expected story structure. So as long as the jokes are well-crafted, we are good to go. Thus, it is so weird that this movie spends so much time on the superhero origin backstory, which is rather unremarkable and not especially fun. As for the real raison d’être, Deadpool is surprisingly light on the fourth-wall breaking, although perhaps my expectation that every line of Ryan Reynolds’ dialogue would be cheekily meta was a bit unfounded. Regardless, the real issue is that almost every quip is the most obvious one, save for the scenes with T.J. Miller, who rattles off as many punchlines he can think of off the top of his head. It is nice to see a superhero movie that is not so slavish to its source material or so controlled by the decrees of a shared universe, but what Deadpool is attempting still requires discipline, and he does not quite show enough of it.
I give Deadpool 3 Avocados out of 5 TJ Miller’s and 4 Giv It To Ya’s Out of 7 X’s.
March 20, 2016
jmunney
Cinema, Movie Reviews
Creative Control, g, Reggie Watts
David has a bit of a problem. However, it could be a positive if he were to just change his perspective a bit. The ad agency he works at is promoting Augmenta, the latest in augmented reality glasses. He falls into being one of the most skilled test users, effortlessly creating a facsimile of his best friend’s girlfriend with whom he carries on an affair. Naturally, this plays havoc with his more tactile relationships. But the potential of Augmenta makes it clear that this could be just be a great deal of fun. If everyone were to just get weird with it like Reggie Watts (stopping by as himself to be the star of the Augmenta campaign) does, they would not succumb to all the overwrought yuppie malaise. Healthy or dangerous, the tripping in Creative Control is out of sight.
March 20, 2016
jmunney
Cinema, Movie Reviews
10 Cloverfield Lane, John Goodman
There are multiple premises baked into the DNA of 10 Cloverfield Lane, and they are all significant enough to stand on their own. So the success of this film could be due to at least one of the films within it working so well or due to the confluence of all of them making for just the right formula. To best determine that answer, there ought to be an experiment breaking up this clever sequel into its constituent parts, with a control movie serving as the most bare-bones version. Perhaps there could be one sub-version of each with John Goodman, and one without, though that is unnecessary because he is clearly a national treasure.
March 20, 2016
jmunney
Cinema, Movie Reviews
Knight of Cups
There are so many cameos in Knight of Cups, from so many different sectors of the entertainment-industrial complex: Dan Harmon, Thomas Lennon, Joe Lo Truglio, Joe Manganiello, Nick Offerman, Kevin Corrigan, Jason Clarke, Ryan O’Neal, Nick Kroll, and Fabio as himself. This raises an interesting question: is Terrence Malick testing us by seeing if we will just focus on the cameos at the expense of everything else? With his typical style of associative editing and exclusively ADR dialogue, it is much easier to say, “Hey! What are they doing in this?!” than to make sense of what is going on. As with The Tree of Life, I can already see myself thinking about this film more deeply than while I was watching it and thus appreciating it in retrospect. That might be a sign of success.
March 20, 2016
jmunney
Cinema, Movie Reviews
Don Atari, Kyle Mooney, Zoolander 2
The first Zoolander worked as satire because it was about an industry desperately holding onto its relevance (with the existence of said relevance questionable in the first place) and the bobos who represented that last grasp. There is nothing inherently wrong with a sequel premiering a decade after the original, but it is always a challenge, especially so in the case of Zoolander 2. Its setting is so far removed from a natural one in that the setup necessary to get everyone where they need to be is convoluted and exhausting. The sweat comes from effort, not embarrassment.
The film comes to life when it focuses on the here and now. Hot designer Don Atari (Kyle Mooney) is where the real story is at. Fashion – or any industry in 2016 driven entirely by trends – keeps dying and rebirthing and eating itself. Mooney plays Atari as 100% ironically hipster and 100% earnestly enthusiastic, expressing his admiration for Derek and Hansel by simultaneously praising and dismissing them. It is infuriating and intoxicating. This paradoxical approach is scary, but it is how films as broad as the Zoolander’s need to distinguish themselves (see also: Fred Armisen’s face digitally transposed onto a pre-teen’s body).
March 20, 2016
jmunney
Cinema, Movie Reviews
anya taylor-joy, Black Phillip, Ellie Grainger, Harvey Scrimshaw, Kate Dickie, Ralph Ineson, Robert Eggers, The Witch
The climax of The Witch is a lot like that of The Crucible, in which rampant paranoia fatally tears apart a New England colonial community. But in this case, there unequivocally is an actual witch. And it is perhaps even more tragic because the community is just a single nuclear family. With parent turning against child, and sibling targeting sibling, the witch almost feels superfluous. The extent of her powers suggests that she could wipe out the whole family in one fell swoop if she wanted to. However, there is also a hint that she must take advantage of familial betrayal to get herself into fighting shape. But perhaps the witch, like the audience watching her, loves a good horror film, and the 17th century equivalent of that is a tree-side view of the gradual dissolution of foolhardy settlers. In that sense her taste is beautifully freaky, with plenty of unforgettable moments (creepy twins relentlessly chanting about their prize goat, a raven pecking at a bloody breast, a cow’s udder squirting blood) proving to be fun for everyone!
March 20, 2016
jmunney
Cinema, Movie Reviews
Adam Driver, Jeff Nichols, Michael Shannon, Midnight Special
What if a cult’s prediction about a looming apocalyptic happening is correct? Midnight Special humors this premise, while also keeping the vibe mysterious and uncertain. Something will happen on March 6 involving supernaturally powered eight-year-old Alton, but nobody knows just what that something is. (Spoiler: The fact that it remains unknown means both nothing and everything.)
With Alton, his parents, and his dad’s friend on the run from the cult and federal agents, Midnight Special asserts itself as an indelible mix of eye-in-the-sky sci-fi and laconic chase movie. Director Jeff Nichols has earned auteur status; his influences (ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) are unmistakable, but his style is uniquely his own. There are not very many movies in which supernatural powers can be interpreted as meta trope awareness – Alton’s sense that the NSA agent played by Adam Driver (adorably all-business) is the guy he needs to talk to is basically a way of saying, “Okay, let’s move the story along.” There are elements that could make Midnight Special annoying or derivative, but it is so calm and its performances are so lived-in that it instead manages to be welcoming and challenging in a matter-of-fact way.
February 14, 2016
jmunney
Cinema, Movie Reviews
Carol, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Todd Haynes
“We’re not ugly people,” Carol Aird pleadingly, but assuredly, insists to her husband during a custody fight that threatens to turn nasty. Carol is a thoroughly humanistic examination of the affair between a shopgirl and a housewife in 1952 New York, and the men in their life who struggle to understand them. It is about identity: the internal challenges to find your own and the external challenges to live it out. It mostly keeps it cool, in a manner that viewers who are not already fully attuned to director Todd Haynes’ restrained style might struggle to fully embrace. But when Cate Blanchett delivers the “ugly people” emphasis, Carol finds the winner’s circle.
February 14, 2016
jmunney
Cinema, Movie Reviews
45 Years
If a film is about a decades-long marriage rocked by the revelation of long-held secrets, the natural expectation is that the marriage will fall apart. 45 Years is a little more complicated than that. Kate (Charlotte Rampling) is initially fine when the dead body of her husband Jeff’s (Tom Courtenay) ex-lover Katya is discovered. But tensions rise as the extent of Jeff and Katya’s relationship is revealed. It is never fully clear if Jeff has kept these secrets due to selfishness, embarrassment, deviousness, forgetfulness, or some combination of the above. Similarly, it is left ambiguous whether or not Kate can remain satisfied with their marriage amidst the dishonesty. Ergo, 45 Years works best as a showcase for the complications that Rampling can convey with gasps, furrowed brows, and heavy cheeks.
February 7, 2016
jmunney
Cinema, Movie Reviews
Caesar!, Hail
Capitol Pictures head of production Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) has a full slate of fires to put out: a kidnapped George Clooney who comes under the sway of communism, the need to curry favor with various religious figures, a pregnant starlet who needs a husband to maintain her good girl image, an ambush by gossip columnist twin sisters, and a cowboy actor struggling with erudition in his first romantic comedy. It’s all in a day’s work for Mannix. As world-threatening or paradigm-shifting as some of these crises are, they all turn out okay in the end. Despite the weightiness of the subject matter, this is decidedly a light feature. “Would that it were so simple”? Actually, it is.
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