I get the feeling most people view The Great Gatsby, of which they remember the title, the author, a few lines, and not much else, through the lens of their childhood, something Important, in black and white, like an old photograph. Thus it’s jarring to see it brought to life looking like someone put a rainstick, a disco ball, some tinsel, three of your tacky aunt Edna’s animal-print shawls, and the Chrysler Building into that machine from The Fly. And in 3D, no less! With dub-step, and Black Eyed Peas songs! (*hikes flapper skirt above knees, does the Charleston while background dancers twirl spiral-patterned umbrellas*)

The wild thing about The Great Gatsby is that the sacrilege is the best part. It takes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mannered, elegant prose and turns it into a world where it’s always raining ticker tape and tinsel and confetti and shit, and no one notices because they’re too busy laughing and screaming and dancing and billowing billowing billowing about the room while seductive negroes play the trumpet. Imagine stumbling through a menagerie of art deco grotesques like Hunter Thompson inside Circus Circus in the depths of an ether binge and you won’t be far off. Hey, it’s supposed to be about decadence, right? And who does decadence better than Baz freakin’ Luhrmann? Excess tried to hang with Baz one day and spent the entire afternoon puking rainbows into the chocolate fountain.

Read the rest of this entry »

I try not to do a lot of prefacing before I get to the meat of my movie reviews, but for this one it seems necessary, so here goes: I saw a lot of Shane Black movies in the late eightes/early nineties. As an only child with no restrictions on what types of movies I was allowed to watch, the R-rated Lethal Weapon movies were to me what The Goonies and The Sandlot are to other kids (even as a 10-year-old, I had a knee-jerk disdain for anything I perceived as treating me like a child, I even hated the Ninja Turtles). I got in trouble at school more than once for parroting Mel Gibson’s creative methods of telling his captain go f*ck himself. Today I can still quote my favorite lines from even lesser Shane Black films, like The Last Boy Scout (“I think I f*cked a squirrel to death”) and The Long Kiss Goodnight (“Nah, I just sock ‘em in the jaw and yell ‘pop goes the weasel.’”). Hell, I even liked Last Action Hero. And this was years before I even knew Shane Black’s name, or that it was the same guy writing all those scripts. I always wondered if my affinity for Shane Black was just a right-time, right-place situation, with his scripts being popular and me being young and stupid at about the same time. But now that I’ve seen the Shane Black-directed and co-written Iron Man 3 well past the age when I should’ve acquired discerning taste and reason? Bros, I’m here to tell you that my youthful stupidity was downright prophetic.

Iron Man 3 blows the first two out of the water. The first had a certain beef-headed charm, and was notable for being the first to present Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, one of the all-time great casting choices. And of course, ROCKET HANDS. The second was an extended trailer for The Avengers, best forgotten, apart from Sam Rockwell smirking and Mickey Rourke’s parrot. Frankly, I wasn’t looking forward to a third. And then… All the weirdness surrounding Sir Ben Kingsley playing The Mandarin – an ethnically ambiguous sort-of Indian actor playing an ethnically ambiguous sort-of Chinese villain, who seemed to have been based on an earlier generation’s romanticized stereotypes about the Chinese and who in the movie speaks with consonant-heavy, Amerrrrican Innnnndian-esque a-rrrregional accent – all of it crystallizes in a character reveal that not only manages to make all of that make sense (!!!), but is easily the funniest scene in any superhero movie to date. And I’m counting the unintentional humor in Daredevil or the Fantastic Four movies. Was Iron Man 3 a silly movie? Oh my, heavens yes. But after that scene I would’ve followed it anywhere.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll forgive a lot for an IMAX film shot in 4K resolution with a ridiculously dramatic M83 score featuring panoramic vistas of Iceland that I can watch without shitty 3D glasses, but the surprise of Oblivion is that there wasn’t that much to forgive (though the score is pretty overbearing at times). Other than Tom Cruise’s creepy hairless torso, and the fact that every woman in the future seems to be a supermodel who wants to fling herself at Tom Cruise’s creepy, hairless, 20-years-older torso, it’s actually an artful mish-mash of older sci-fi that borrows from just enough sources that it doesn’t feel like a ripoff. It succeeds on the strength of cinematography, character design, and careful withholding of information. It leaves you feeling confused until the very end, much like my lovemaking, and when it finally lays its cards on the table, it feels like it actually had something to say. Or at least, something to say other than “thanks for the 15 dollars, sucker!”

Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper, because “Jack” is to action film heroes what “Madison” is to yuppies, but even the genericness of his name is partially explained later by a clever script. Cruise is part of a “mop-up crew,” a two-person team consisting of Cruise and a hot redhead played by Andrea Riseborough, who live a sick sky-flat with a heated pool and modernist platform bed high above a post-apocalyptic Earth, whose job it is to do maintenance work on series of droids that protect giant, seawater-fed reactors that power the new human colony on Titan, a moon of Saturn. The droids protect the reactors from “Scavs,” the remnants of an alien race that lost a war to the humans, though the Earth was rendered mostly uninhabitable in the process. (*deep breath*) OR SO TOM CRUISE AND THIS REDHEAD BROAD HAVE BEEN TOLD.

Read the rest of this entry »

I applaud Trance for being perhaps the only movie I’ve seen to date that uses vagina hair as macguffin (macmuffin?). I didn’t like it much, but the sound designer who created the illusion of Rosario Dawson trimming her pubic hair offscreen by using a sound effect that I can only describe as a wool farmer shearing sheep deserves at least an Oscar, if not a Nobel Prize. She then emerged onscreen looking obviously waxed, incidentally, as if whatever machine she’d been using that sounded like something you’d have to pull start was capable of removing pubic hair follicles at the roots, but I guess that’s just movie magic. Suspension of disbelief, pubes, etc.

In any case, Trance is one of those movies where you can practically feel the storyteller working SOOO HARD to make it obtuse and convoluted and increasingly revelatory, only the story never works in the first place, and you don’t know whether to feel impressed, angry, or sad about all the painstaking embellishments. It’s like this beautifully elaborate origami weave of story strands that I didn’t believe for even a single second. It aspires to be ornate and constructed in the way that Inception is, with a labyrinthine plot that’s like a series of complex keys and locks and levers and combinations that eventually lead to an Advent calendar nugget of catharsis, only in this case your calendar is filled with pigeon shit, because once you scrape away Trance‘s convoluted complex form, the story is at best implausible and at worst laughably stupid. It’s about the journey, I guess. Without presenting a single character that you might care about, it’s just one massive logic leap after another until you want to scream “Dude, where the f*ck are we going with this?!” And there’s never any good answer. But a lot of it seems to come back to pubes, which is interesting.

Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever seen one of those episodes of Top Chef where a chef cooks something, and all the judges tell him that it’s technically brilliant, but lacks soul? I have no idea what that means as it relates to food, but I’m pretty sure it applies to Place Beyond the Pines, a movie that manages to feel great, but not particularly likable. You respect its ambition, its epic scope, the incredible acting, and its obvious craftsmanship, but there’s something oddly impersonal about it. You can easily recognize it as a “good movie” without developing much of a personal connection or a desire for repeat viewings. It’s possible that it’s too crafted. It’s like a girl you can tell is beautiful but that you’re not particularly attracted to.

First off, it’s not “Drive on a motorcycle,” as the trailer might lead you to believe (the quotes are mine, but look at that trailer and tell me I was wrong). Drive was all about the moment – so much so that the plot and the dialog (or lackthereof) often didn’t matter – whereas Pines, co-written and directed by Blue Valentine‘s Derek Cianfrance, is attempting something much bigger. It’s more like a contempo East of Eden starring Baby Goose with face tats, a multi-generational tale of intertwined families and the invisible hand of tradition. Gosling plays a sort of motorcycle carny, traveling from fair to county fair, riding his dirtbike around a big metal sphere for crowds of toothless funnel cake-eaters. His old fling Eva Mendes shows up at his show in Schenectady in the opening scene, wearing an incredibly thin t-shirt/no-bra combo that would’ve attracted at least 10 whistling dudes in hairnets at every county fair I’ve been to. They leave together, and soon we learn that Gosling put a baby Baby Goose in her last time he was in town, and is only just now finding out about it. Incidentally, the baby is played by a kid whose real name is “Anthony Pizza.” That doesn’t factor into the story, but I feel like knowing this will enhance your viewing experience.

Gosling is your classic “the only thing that matters to me now is my son” character, and he finds himself in the position of trying to prove he can provide for Braless Eva and little Tony Pizza as he tries to elbow her new boyfriend out of the picture. Obviously the job of Motorcycle Carny doesn’t pay like broking stocks, and anyway, he can’t go traveling around to different funnel cake camps all the time if he’s going to become a father to his son. So as an alternate measure, he hooks up with Ben Mendelsohn, one of the best damned actors in town and in this case, luckily for Baby Goose, a guy with a history of masterminding bank robberies. So initiates the motorcycle-bank-robber plot you see in the trailer that makes it look so much like Drive. But Pines is much more ambitious than that, folding in Bradley Cooper as a local cop with a law degree and a judge for a father, trying to good-guy his way through a corrupt police department full of sharks like Ray Liotta. Cooper eventually crosses paths with Gosling, and their fates become intertwined, as do those of Tony Pizza and Bradley Cooper’s crabcake-eating little WASPlette, who they actually make into a Jersey Shore-style super guido from Troy, NY in this. That’s right, Bradley Cooper’s son. Talk about a twist. Brad Cooper’s Baby Guido hooks up with the grown-up Tony Pizza, played by Chronicle‘s Dan DeHaan, who you know is supposed to be troubled because he never combs his goddamned hair.

Read the rest of this entry »