Movies | the m0vie blog

My 12 for ’14: The Babadook and Living With Demons…

Posted on December 21, 2014 by Darren

With 2014 coming to a close, we’re counting down our top twelve films of the year. Check back daily for the latest featured film.

The Babadook is a delightfully well-executed Australian horror film for most of its run-time, an uncomfortable and occasionally harrowing exploration of guilt, resentment and motherhood. The scares are executed cleanly and efficiently, and director Jennifer Kent does an admirable job of ratcheting up the tension as the movie ticks along. However, the most interesting and clever aspects of The Babadook are found nestled in the movie’s final few minutes, providing a satisfying and thought-provoking conclusion to the allegorical horror film.

Note: This “best of” entry includes spoilers for The Babadook. You should probably go and see the movie, particularly if you are a horror fan. Don’t worry, we’ll wait for you. Still there? Good. Let’s continue. Continue reading →

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: babadook, children, films, horror, jennifer kent, monsters, Movies, parenting, reviews, the babadook | Leave a comment »

Trigger Street Productions and Adrien Brody Launch the Fourth Year of Jameson First Shot Film Competition

Posted on December 20, 2014 by Darren

The Jameson First Shot film competition is back for a fourth year. In partnership with Kevin Spacey and Dana Brunetti of Trigger Street Productions, Jameson is on the hunt for the globe’s most gifted, undiscovered filmmakers with compelling stories to tell. Three talented winners will have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have their scripts turned into short films and to direct Adrien Brody in the lead role. Not bad for a First Shot. The winning shorts will be premiered in LA with the acclaimed team in attendance.

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: adrien brody, cinema, competition, competitions, fim, jameson, kevin spacey | Leave a comment »

My 12 for ’14: Guardians of the Galaxy and “the Day I Left Earth”…

Posted on December 20, 2014 by Darren

With 2014 coming to a close, we’re counting down our top twelve films of the year. Check back daily for the latest featured film.

Guardians of the Galaxy is a Marvel movie through-and-through. It comes with burdened with all the trappings that one expects from a Marvel film. Thanos provides a mostly superfluous element that clouds the narrative while serving as an advertisement for a film several years away. Ronan the Accuser makes for a suitably banal villain, like a cosplaying fan who won’t choose between his deep abiding affection for Thor and his love of the Smurfs. The third act is a jumbled mess, one that occasionally loses sight of its characters amid all the CGI spectacle.

And, yet, it works in spite all this. One of Marvel’s biggest problems as a movie studio is the way that it tends to smother individual creators in pursuit of a more consistent project. The studio’s best films – Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, Kenneth Branagh’s Thor, Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 – are the films that aren’t afraid to let a writer or director’s voice shine through. In contrast, the weakest entries – Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor: The Dark World, Iron Man 2 – try desperately to drown out any hint of personality in pursuit of something that can be homogenised; rendered safely within the studio’s comfort zone.

After all, Marvel is a company that likes to play it safe. It is a studio that would replace Edgar Wright with Peyton Reed for Ant Man. It is a movie that would gladly have Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. spin its wheels for two-thirds of a season so it can wait for Captain America: The Winter Soldier to arrive in theatres. It is a studio that has build six movies around blonde white actors named Chris without a single female- or minority-led superhero film. (Sure, Black Panther and Captain Marvel are coming… eventually, but Black Widow remains a rotating co-star.)

To be fair to Marvel, this system makes a certain amount of sense. It avoids horrific misfires like Catwoman or Elektra, but also does not allow for anything as transcendental and unique as Tim Burton or Christopher Nolan’s work with Batman. Guardians of the Galaxy is very much a product of this system. It is safe, hitting all the necessary plot beats and offering minutes of screentime (and plot convolutions) as tribute to the shared universe. However, there is just enough of James Gunn left in the final product to make it all worthwhile. The film retains a sense of oddness and charm that prevents it from ever feeling generic.

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: avengers, best of 2014, films, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, iron man, marvel, Marvel Studios, reviews, starlord, the avengers | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Night at the Museum III – Secret of the Tomb

Posted on December 13, 2014 by Darren

Night at the Museum III: Secret of the Tomb is fairly inoffensive family fare. It largely sets out to do what it wants to do – providing a sense of closure to the hits series while encouraging its all-star cast to have a bit of family-friendly fun together. The movie is hardly the most compelling adventure; it never manages to generate substantial stakes, it introduces a convenient third-act villain as the plot demands, it is frequently distracted by individual set pieces. At the same time, it feels like the movie largely hits the targets that it sets for itself.

Knight at the Museum…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: ben stiller, egypt, films, imperialism, Movies, night at the museum, night at the museum 3, night at the museum: secret of the tomb, non-review review, review, robin williams, secret of the tomb | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Unbroken

Posted on December 11, 2014 by Darren

The true story of Louis Zamperini is absolutely fascinating. It lends itself to this sort of big spectacle. It has everything you need for a movie that might clean up during awards season: a historical setting; a war; a sporting story about triumph of adversity; incredible physical transformations from the cast; a character enduring incredible hardship and coming out the other side. These are the sorts of ingredients that make a Best Picture contender. Unbroken just heaps more and more on top of these already alluring elements.

It isn’t the terrible and messy script that ultimately defeats Unbroken, with beloved filmmakers Joel and Ethan Cohen at the top of the bill. It isn’t the pedestrian unchallenging direction, either. It isn’t Alexandre Desplat’s condescending and patronising score, that doesn’t trust the audience to determine what they should be feeling from one moment to the next. It is not even the cynical Coldplay song playing over the closing credits, to put a pleasant life-affirming spin on events.

The Oscar race is on…

The detail that really shatter Unbroken is the fact that all of this has been very carefully and meticulously calibrated to check off the requisite items on the big Oscar check list. Unbroken is just as mechanical and lifeless a production as Transformers 4, but it happens to be built for a different purpose. There is no energy here, no enthusiasm, no emotion. It is just a bunch of things that have been successful in other stories heaped on top of one another, hoping to hit the high score on that fateful morning in January 2015.

Despite managing to eat up an incredible amount of attention and discussion in the larger Oscar race – taking attention off far more deserving contenders – Unbroken is a complete and utter misfire.

“This is what happens to anybody who suggests Merry Christmas Mister Lawrence is a better Japanese prisoner of war film.”

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: clichés, evil, film, films, forgiveness, japan, louis zamperini, Movie, Movies, non-review review, Oscar season, review, reviews, unbroken, war | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: The Hobbit – Battle of the Five Armies

Posted on December 11, 2014 by Darren

It has become a stock criticism to suggest that Peter Jackson did not need a full trilogy to adapt The Hobbit for the big screen. That said, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug was an unexpected pleasure – a movie not all hindered by the pacing concerns of the trilogy and instead interested in its own central narrative. You could cut the opening scene from The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies onto the end of The Desolation of Smaug and you would have pretty much everything that you need.

While this approach benefited The Desolation of Smaug, it puts Battle of the Five Armies at something of a disadvantage. It is debatable whether there was enough material to support three full films based on The Hobbit – even drawing from other sources in the Tolkien canon – but this is clearly not the best way of structuring those three films. There is a sense that Battle of the Five Armies suffers from the decision to extend the planned duology into a full-blown trilogy.

The not-so-magic dragon…

To be fair to Peter Jackson, he does avoid the ending issues that haunted The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. However, he does that by editing Battle of the Five Armies as a brief epilogue to the previous two films, following by a massive battle sequence. This is quite impressive from a technical standpoint, but there is a sense of fatigue to it all. As the title implies, this is a five-way battle involving thousands of participants; both organic and computer-generated. A lot gets lost in the shuffle, and the plot – as it stands – could be explained in two sentences.

More than that, Battle of the Five Armies is hindered by its status as a prequel. The fact that everybody in the audience has likely seen The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring means that they know all this spectacle is really for nothing. The first two films in the trilogy largely avoided the problem by pitching the story as a working-class version of The Lord of the Rings, allowing characters to engage in quests that are deeply personal even as they ripple to larger events.

A messed-up character orc…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: agency, arcs, cgi, characters, dwarves, endings, film, Movie, peter jackson, prequel, review, Smaug, spectacle, the desolation of smaug, the end, the hobbit, the hobbit: battle of the five armies, trilogy | 10 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Foxcatcher

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Darren

Foxcatcher is exhausting.

Director Bennett Miller’s account of the relationship between billionaire John “Eagle” DuPont and the Schultz brothers is a draining experience. Beautiful performances, stunning cinematography and a minimalist script create an uncomfortable and looming sense of dread. Even those unfamiliar with the story DuPont’s sponsorship of the United States Olympic Wrestling Team cannot help but feel tragedy bearing down. Foxcatcher is a heartbreaking and harrowing piece of work, an affecting and unsettling tale of power, desperation and loneliness.

Wrestling with demons…

Foxcatcher is beautifully crafted. Every element of the production is carefully and meticulously put together. Steve Carell transforms himself to play the role of DuPont, assisted by superb make-up overseen by Bill Corso and his team. Every frame of the movie looks crisp, the blues and reds and yellows popping out of the screen; Greig Fraser’s cinematography effectively captures the starkness of the Pennsylvanian landscape across the seasons. Miller is comfortable enough to let Foxcatcher unfold at its own pace, never rushing.

The result is a compelling and grimly fascinating story, told elegantly. There are points when Foxcatcher perhaps seems a little too distant and clinical, but the three lead performances help to keep the film firmly grounded.

To catch a fox…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Channing Tatum, david schultz, dupont, film, foxcatcher, foxcatcher farms, mark ruffalo, mark schultz, Movie, non-review review, review, Steve Carell, wrestling | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Exodus – Gods and Kings

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Darren

Exodus: Gods and Kings might be more traditional in structure and execution than the year’s other big biblical epic, but it shares a lot of the same core sentiments of Noah. Both films posit the Old Testament God as a primordial and almost unfathomable force, transforming biblical parables in epic horror stories. Both accept the divine as inhuman, almost by definition; both offer harrowing and unsettling depictions of stories that many viewers will know from childhood or have heard dozens of times before.

Exodus: Gods and Kings suffers a bit with its pacing, trying to boil the core Moses stories down into a single two-and-a-half hour narrative. The film runs through a check list of iconic moments, struggling to squeeze so much in that the story of the reed basket is mentioned only in passing. Instead, the film moves from Moses’ relationship with Ramses II through to his exile through to his epiphany through to his military rebellion through to the plagues through to the exodus.

“Well, I got back to Gotham in six days, I think I can get us to the Promised Land.”

It is an epic story in almost every sense of the word, and Exodus: Gods and Kings struggles to contain it all. Often key elements are only present for moments before the film has to hurry along – the burning bush lingers in the background; the golden calf is glimpsed only from the distance. So much ground is covered that it is occasionally difficult to maintain focus, as Moses seems to lose and gain families with each passing act break. Exodus: Gods and Kings holds itself together under the pressure, but the strain can be felt.

Nevertheless, Exodus: Gods and Kings largely works. Feeling more like Kingdom of Heaven than Gladiator, the movie does a wonderful job of building a massive and sprawling (and foreign) world. Exodus: Gods and Kings looks and feels like a more traditional biblical epic than Noah, and Scott’s efforts to ground the film in a tangible reality only serves to enhance the awe-inspiring scale of the horror on display here. Exodus: Gods and Kings is an exploration of faith and devotion, asking uncomfortable questions and leaving the answers to the audience.

“Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings…”

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: christian bale, divine, egypt, exodus, exodus: gods and kings, god, hebrew, Jews, Joel Edgerton, Moses, Noah, non-review review, pharoah, review, ridley scott | 5 Comments »

Watch! Terminator Genisys Trailer!

Posted on December 4, 2014 by Darren

Well, I guess Dawn of the Planet of the Apes demonstrated that Jason Clarke is the guy you go to for your post-apocalyptic franchise films.

To be fair, Terminator films not directed by James Cameron feel like a risky proposition – it feels like so much of the first two films was tied up in Cameron, that any subsequent attempt is imitation rather than innovation. It is, perhaps, quite telling that the most surreal sequences in the new trailer for Terminator: Genisys featured a version of the T-1000 not played by Robert Patrick.

And, nevertheless, there is something interesting here. A story about how time travel has muddled and muddied a narrative universe so much that the story seems to reboot and remix itself feels like a self-aware take on the contemporary fascination with reworking and retooling classic franchises. Terminator: Genisys looks like a self-aware cocktail of the most iconic bits and pieces of the first two Terminator films.

That self-awareness could be the key; after all, trying to mimic James Cameron feels like a fool’s errand. However, a more playful approach just might work. Terminator: Genisys probably has an uphill battle ahead of it, but this trailer’s not a bad start.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: film, terminator, terminator: genisys, trailer | 3 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Birdman (or, The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Posted on December 4, 2014 by Darren

Birdman is a staggeringly cynical piece of work.

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s showbusiness satire has its knives out from the opening sequence, and never puts them away. It is a movie that is relentlessly snarky and bitter about just about any facet of the artistic process. The movie seldom pulls its punches, lawing into its targets with a vengeance. There are points where it almost seems too much, where it feels like Iñárritu might be better served to pull back or ease off for a moment as the film becomes just a little bit too much.

Showtime!

Then again, Iñárritu turns the film’s relentlessness into a visual motif, structuring Birdman as one long unbroken take. This structure is only slightly disingenuous. While there are any number of “cheats” that allow Birdman to stitch together multiple takes, the end result is still a hugely ambitious and impressive piece of work. Even viewers as cynical as the film itself may find themselves marvelling at some of the incredibly fluid transitions and extended sequences. Birdman‘s anger might occasionally come close to suffocating, but its energy is infectious.

That is to say nothing of the performance at the centre of the film, with Michael Keaton playing a washed-up has-been celebrity desperately (and pathetically) fighting for artistic credibility after a career spent in blockbuster cinema. One of the more interesting aspects of Birdman is that it seems just as dismissive of the attempts at artistic rehabilitation as it does of the original “sell out” work. Birdman is a wry, clever and vicious piece of work. It is also a phenomenal accomplishment.