Tag: Films

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…)