Category: Movie Reviews

Dallas Buyers Club is acting at its finest

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Dallas-Buyers-Club-FeatureIn 2009, Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner starred in a throwaway romantic comedy called Ghosts of Girlfriend’s Past.  Watching the film, you had a feeling these two actors were capable of higher quality filmmaking.  Fast forward to November of 2013 and that wish of mine has been granted.  McConaughey and Garner share the screen here in Dallas Buyers Club, in one of the better films of 2013.  Dare I say it isn’t an outstanding film because the directing and writing isn’t as memorable as the performances but the overall impact here creates a crowd pleasing film that will win at the box office.

Make no mistake, though, it’s not often that a film like Dallas Buyers Club comes along and rocks your soul without manipulating it first.  The greatest thing about this movie is that it is powerful without really trying to be and that happens because two actors, McConaughey and Leto, give Oscar worthy performances and the writers and director don’t get in their way.   What the film lacks in sophisticated storytelling and direction, it makes up for with brilliant transformative performances.

The movie tells the story of Ron Woodroof, a Texan infected with the AIDS virus who takes matters into his own hands by finding his own cure and not just helping himself but developing a system that helps fellow victims of the virus as well.  In 1985, there wasn’t a cure for AIDS and all people could do was hope to land themselves in an ill-fated drug trial.  If you got it, you had 30 days to live in agony before expiring.  Woodroof was far from a perfect man but wasn’t going to just wither away.   The movie is an understated gut punch because the story is powerful enough to get into your senses and electrify you for 2 hours.  Some true stories have to acquire a loud musical score, actors who overact and screenplays that use a Kleenex box as their defense mechanism.   Dallas Buyers Club doesn’t want your sympathy.  It wants your attention and the material speaks for itself.  The mood is grim yet doesn’t shy away from a comedic moment and the look is gray yet allows a few colors to pop in the process. (more…)

“Out of The Furnace” is all heart and grit

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Out+of+the+Furnace+MovieWhen I exit a movie, I make an attempt to break it out into categories instantly.   Is it worth watching, worth fighting for or simply one you can miss?  Some movies are easier to review than others but more than a few movies are hard to put a rating on.  Letter grade or number style ratings can force a film critic into a room where he isn’t comfortable.  With Out Of The Furnace, I put myself in a predicament.  I liked what I saw.  There were some parts I even liked a lot.  Other parts I was okay with.  In the end, I can easily recommend Scott Cooper’s grim covered blue collar menace filled tale, but it didn’t blow me away like I thought it would.   Let’s break it down into great, good and average parts.

There’s a quiet sense of power that turns more conventional thriller layers of the movie into something more and I lend that credit to director Cooper.  He creates realistic people with his characters and works very well with actors.   You can’t build chemistry in a film school and in this film the ease with which the actors work is evident from the start.  The relationship between Bale and Affleck’s brothers, which is built up slowly over the film’s first half, is genuine and powerful.  This is the best part of the film.  Affleck’s Rodney, a torn apart Iraq soldier trying to make a living at home that doesn’t include giving his life to the mill, where his brother Russell(Bale) works and his father contracted a disease from.  A scene between the brothers where Russell pleads Rodney to get a regular job is punctuated by Affleck’s tenacity he brings to the broken man. (more…)

The Edge of Tomorrow: Groundhog Day Meets Terminator

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2014-07-10-EdgeofTomorrowMovie2014Thank you Tom Cruise for bringing reliability back to the movies. Taken for what it is, Edge of Tomorrow is pure adrenaline packed excitement. If you dare to think during this flick or try to figure out every detail of the story, your brain will hurt and the enjoyment level drops. Leave it to Tom Cruise to provide us with a cinematic summer jolt of old fashioned action and thrills. With fine support from Emily Blunt (kicking ass with authority on screen), Cruise delivers again here and makes up for the misfire that Oblivion was.

Cruise plays William Cage, a coward who doesn’t want any part of the latest mission to bring a stop to an alien invasion. He is thrown into combat against his will and when he does something unexpected on the battlefield, Cage starts reliving the day over and over again, as he dies and comes back stronger than ever each time. As a fellow movie critic said after the film, the movie is like a great video game. You play it and die, but you keep hitting reset and playing over and over again, trying to reach new levels.

As a member of the audience, we are thrust into the position of Cruise’s Cage and that is key to the enjoyment of the film. Imagine if you were picked up out of your ordinary life and thrown into a war against an enemy who could not be beaten on a fair playing field. Imagine if you kept dying over and over in different ways and you were stumped on figuring out a way to get better. It would be scary and nerve racking. That’s the trick that director Doug Liman and Cruise work on the audience here. Fear, shock and blunt force action= summer entertainment at its finest. (more…)

The Purge Anarchy: Powered by Frank Grillo’s take on The Punisher

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GrilloCare for an entertaining fleeting dose of action packed cinema this summer! Welcome to the land of the purge, where people get 12 hours to set free all their animalistic demons and unleash evil on the streets. DeMonaco assembles a new cast of characters for this second go around in a series that is likely to only grow with the coming years. Ethan Hawke anchored 2013’s original, and while it made a ridiculous premise stand up inside a home invasion setting, the ending left more to be desired.  The Purge: Anarchy delivers on the promise of the original by taking the action to the streets and putting the badass better than ever Frank Grillo at the center of the action.

Grillo is a re-invigorated 51 year old action hero dropped into a plot that suits all his strengths. You have noticed him stealing scenes in films for the past few years. The trainer in Warrior, the sergeant in End of Watch and the wandering ex-con in Joe Carnahan’s captivating survival flick, The Grey. Grillo plays Leo, a man hitting the streets for a different kind of purge. Leo wants to cleanse his soul of deadly revenge, and when he stops to help a group of innocents on the verge of slaughter, he picks up the film and carries it for the entire running time.

In case you haven’t heard, Grillo was born to play Frank Castle, the Punisher, one of the roles Hollywood still hasn’t done right in two attempts. As my colleague, Max Foizey, proclaimed after the credits, “The Punisher was dropped into The Purge.” That is basically the ticking heartbeat of this film. Grillo unplugged! (more…)

The Drop sneaks up and floors you

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“There is no devil. I think some people die here and they go see God and he tells them no, you can’t come in. You will be alone…forever.”-Bob Saginowski

the-drop-posterTom Hardy is amazing and carries the latest Dennis Lehane joint, The Drop. The movie is a equal parts gangster thriller, subtle romance and quiet character study. It will be known as James Gandfolfini’s last completed work but let it be known that the film belongs to Hardy, rocking ANOTHER accent here as Bob Saginowski, a quiet calculating man who tends bar for Gandolfini’s Marv, a old lion still trying to play the criminal hustler game.

Michael R. Roskam’s direction, along with Lehane’s adaptation of his short story entitled Animal Shelter, keeps you off balance. The first half of the film is slow building and resembles the increasingly fast shaking of a tree. Little plot points fall to the ground throughout the 105 minute running time, but you don’t really know the characters until about halfway through. That’s good filmmaking and even better acting.

You have no clue what to make of Hardy’s Bob and that is the way it should be in this pot boiling thriller. Is he slow witted or slow? Is he up to something or is he just plain? Why is he so quiet yet observant? Hardy spins a cobweb around his character and keeps the viewer a distance. Like Russell Crowe or Clive Owen at their best, Hardy lets his facial expressions do the heavy lifting. A stare down with Belgium marvel Matthias Schoenaerts contains about four lines of dialogue but the way the two men stare at each other makes it seem like paragraphs are being recited. In this movie, dialogue doesn’t have to spoken for actions to be expressed. The actors don’t need to bore us with words. I felt like I knew these guys in one life and had no clue they existed in another. There is a darkness in Hardy’s Bob that I couldn’t put my finger on until the climax of the film, when a bomb suddenly detonates inside the plot and springs the film towards its final resting place. (more…)

Kill The Messenger is Jeremy Renner’s True Arrival

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Kill Messenger“They won’t care about what you wrote because the press will make YOU the story.”

Diagnosis-Kill The Messenger is a fierce reminder that important films can still be made in Hollywood if the right people come together to make them happen and there is an audience ready to digest serious material. A lot of films are good but few actually teach you something vital about history and the way America was built. This film gets the facts straight, taking the pages of a novel and fusing them into blunt strokes of filmmaking.

Jeremy Renner powers a well-balanced cast of actors born to play these roles and puts another gold star on his acting resume with his unforgettable performance as Gary Webb, a hard charging journalist in the 90’s who pushed too hard. Webb wrote for the San Jose Mercury News and uncovered a story that connected the War on Drugs and Nicaragua drug dealers to the CIA. Webb wrote it and when bigger newspapers got mad that they weren’t the first to break the story, the flack flew back at Webb and his paper. The golden rule of newspapers (at least among the bigger ones) is simple. Be the first to break a controversial story or be the first to break it down.

Renner is amazing and the film hinges on our ability to find interest in his fight and his story. The papers did everything to smear his name and destroyed his life, and the transformation in Renner’s performance is crisp. When we first meet him, he is energetically tracking down a lead on a story and when we leave him, the entire façade of what he believed in has crumbled to the floor. Bringing to mind a younger and hungrier Sean Penn, Renner gets inside Webb’s head and shows us what made him tick and what led him to explode. (more…)

FURY: Pitt, Ayer, tanks and World War II power

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I’ll be revisiting old movie reviews from the past three years here this summer. Ones you may have missed, passed up or completely forgot about. Stay tuned. First up is Brad Pitt’s FURY.

Fury“Ideals are peaceful. History is violent.”-Don“War Daddy” Collier (Brad Pitt)

Diagnosis-Fury is the best World War II film since Saving Private Ryan and also brings out the best performance in the troubled career of Shia Labeouf.

David Ayer has been waiting to make Fury for a long time, holding his ace of spades in his pocket for the past decade. Let’s just say he didn’t miss when he swung for the fence with Fury, a brutally realistic punch to the gut that combines the red meat history of Saving Private Ryan with the visceral testosterone of Lone Survivor.

There are certain genres a director has to be careful with and World War II is one of them. War pictures aren’t easy to make these days because there have been so many different takes on the battle that killed many and ended in victory. Ayer could have wrapped this tale in Hollywood gloss and just phoned it in. Viewers are generally worn out with this genre that doing something original and viscerally exciting is a hard task. Ayer pulls it off here by choosing the right story and bringing an authentic touch to the camera.

Fury tells a darker tale of the war, a time towards the end that saw the monstrous German tanks leveling the lesser equipped American tanks and where Hitler got so desperate that he deployed men, women and kids to try to and win the war. Ayer isn’t afraid to show you the coldness that violence brings to the souls and how killing a man truly changes a person. (more…)

The Town is Ben Affleck’s Masterpiece

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the-town-movieBen Affleck has directed three films and the last, Argo, won Best Picture and Best Screenplay at the Oscars. Affleck’s first directorial effort, Gone Baby Gone, starred his brother Casey and a fleet of great character actors. Hollywood was taken aback by Affleck’s first attempt behind the camera, as was the viewing public. This came after a long period of inactivity from the star, who escaped from the limelight after his doomed action hero career and relationship with Jennifer Lopez. Affleck figured he needed to get away and reestablish his persona and rekindle that Good Will Hunting ingenuity. While Argo and Gone, Baby, Gone are the more critical acclaimed films of his 1-2-3 punch, The 2010 heist film, The Town, is the Fleck’s true masterpiece. I’ll give you five reasons.  (more…)

“Maggie” Pulls The Right Strings and Pushes Zombie Genre Forward

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Maggie-poster-4I grew up watching Arnold Schwarzenegger kick ass and take names. Commando, Running Man, Terminator 2, Raw Deal or Red Heat. You name it and I probably saw it six times. He was the king of “Say little and Shoot Often”. He was rarely asked to act and that was a good thing. Action stars are built on presence and stature along with the ability to convince us they can truly destroy things. If a chef in a kitchen is cooking them up, he’s using 2-3 spices instead of five. More one liners than monologues.

For his latest flick, the heartfelt nerve touching zombie flick Maggie, Arnold finally gets to act a little and it’s about time. He’s 67 years old, looks weathered in the face, and didn’t have any work done to his body or face in the last 40 years. What you see is what you get, and Arnold was the perfect choice to play Wade Vogel, a man facing the worst decision of all time. His daughter, Maggie(Abigail Breslin, wonderfully cast to tango with the big Austrian) is infected and is slowly decaying. Instead of letting her be taken into quarantine and live a tortured last set of days before being executed, Wade keeps her at home so he can “take care” of her himself when the time is right.

In this film, the actual word “zombie” is never used once and frankly, it’s not needed. We know what’s going on. Someone is bit and they slowly change into something else. Director Henry Hobson, working from a genuine simplistic piece of goodness in John Scott 3’s script, doesn’t need to turn this into The Terminator Meets The Walking Dead. He wants to go in the other direction and uses a slow burning tactic. Once bitten, the victims don’t change in minutes or overnight. It takes days, hence the need to quarantine them. (more…)

Batkid Begins Trailer Will Break You

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Boys Batman WishTrailers have the unbelievable ability to touch you inside two minutes. Through a sequence of editing of images and scenes weaved together seamlessly, a movie or documentary can cut right to your heart. In the case of Batkid Begins, the documentary about Miles Scott and his day in the life as Batman in San Francisco via the Make A Wish Foundation, this trailer will move you and if it doesn’t, go have your pulse checked.

In the beginning, the Make A Wish Foundation would grant a trip to Disney Land or show a kid a great day away from his normal life. Occasionally, they can do something magical. There’s nothing more tragic than child leukemia and in order to provide Miles with a little dose of childhood fun, the city of San Francisco and its police force, population and the thousands that flew into the city helped create Gotham for the Batman fanatic Miles. This all took place on November 15th, 2013 and the event went viral and persuaded the world to peek in and witness it. Wherever you were, Batkid was on your mind. (more…)