#2,117: Boyhood

(Spoilers in all of this week's reviews.  More than usual, even.)

The Voice - ★★★½☆
Now sure, this doesn't sound like a good movie, and yes, I went to it because it was free, but it turns out to be pretty fun. Unless you're the purist of optimists, you know pretty much from the get-go that this is going to be a story with an unreliable narrator, and it's a (grisly) treat to see what's really going on around the edges of his perception.

My screening was followed by a Q&A with the writer, who was refreshingly straightforward with his opinions about what was on the screen, and explained away the distracting and obvious day-for-night scene: probably it accomplished something to do with when and why the cops show up, but also, along with some well-placed ADR, it keeps the innocent animals from dying horrible deaths at the end.

The Secret in Their Eyes - ★★★★☆
Foreign films get a filter that takes decades to work its magic on domestic movies - way more films were getting pumped out by the studios in the 40s-70s than they make today, but we typically only see the cream of the crop because it's what survives. Similarly, most people only see the foreign films (if they see any at all) that someone has found to be worthy of preserving and sharing with new audiences.

Anyway, this is a solid drama / mystery / thriller kind of thing that is being remade in English with gender-swapped leads, even as we speak. I just saw a big call for extras to fill up the football stadium for the remake of one of this film's most exciting scenes.

The original is a little long, but I don't know what it has to spare. There's a whole thread in there with the broken typewriter (Re: the romantic relationship of the leads), and how it doesn't type the letter 'A' and how 'A' made the difference between 'Fear' and 'I love you' and I don't know how that's going to work in English at all.

Boyhood - ★★★★★
The more I think of it, the more I liked this. Like other Best Picture nominees this year, it's biographical in nature, and it has a weird gimmick. Luckily in this case, the gimmick serves the story.

I didn't necessarily find Mason's entire story relatable to my own life, and the parts that were the most unfamiliar sometimes made me uncomfortable, but I feel like I could watch this over and over again. Things I really liked: a) the realistic accrual of influences – even the negative experiences help us to build who we are, and b) the way the movie is similar to the basement of The Cabin in the Woods. I'll explain.

There must be at least a dozen things in this movie that, in any other movie, would cause immediate and severe punishment to rain upon the heads of our characters. Oh no! He looked at a picture of a cute animal on a phone while driving! The whole audience tenses up for the crash! No. That's not how things really work. He's been given a gun as a present! He's practicing with it near his beloved family members! Oh no! No. He got a gun, he got a bible, he tried them both out and didn't seem particularly taken with either one. And that's fine. Things are usually fine. I like that a subtle hand was given to that sort of thing.

I was also taken with how moving the audience (myself included) found it when the guy who replaces pipes turned up later with his degree and a bright future. That seemed like the mostly openly manipulative moment of the movie, because everyone finds it so touching, but of course that's not a real guy. But this far in, everyone in my theater was thoroughly invested in their reality.

This is my Best Picture pick, even if it's not going to (and didn't!) win.

#2,114: Mortdecai

A Most Violent Year - ★★½☆☆
It's a struggle, writing (a scene, a sketch, a feature film) about NOT doing something. I felt a little resentful at how much of the movie is in the trailer. There's not that much story to go around here, and the trailer used up most of it. There is, however, a lot of plot. So I guess I'm grateful that we got through it all in just a couple of hours, instead of 13 hours on AMC with a cliffhanger ending and a cancellation notice.

I suspect this may have been a movie centered on someone who is not the main character in the story.

Identity - ★★★☆☆
This was more fun than I remembered. I know when I saw it in the theater I had a theory that the ending was re-written and how, but it didn't stick out to me this time around.

Resolution - ★★★½☆
I understand that I'm probably taking the wrong lesson from this movie, but I think I would have been just as happy without any of the fantastical elements involved. The mysterious plot elements were never as interesting to me as the characters and their set up.

Mortdecai - ★½☆☆☆
Given the track records of just about everyone involved, and the really polished production, I kind of have to assume the books this is based on are terrific. A passion project gone awry.

The trouble is summed up in a line from Gwenyth Paltrow, who tells Mortdecai, "don't be tiresome." The character's primary characteristic, his comic conceit, is that he IS tiresome. So no wonder audiences aren't crazy about it. I hope it works better in print.

(Also to say: it seems like every professional review of the movie I read took a moment for the reviewer to sigh heavily at a character called "Jock Strapp." Wikipedia tells us this is so, but I'm pretty sure his last name is never given in the movie or the credits. I just thought that was odd. Of those reviewers, I mean.)

#2,111: Project Almanac

Locke - ★★★☆☆
Maybe I like real time and confined space gimmicks in movies because they present a challenge? I always want to see someone pull off a great magic trick. On the continuum, this is perhaps not as much fun as Buried, but a lot better than Phone Booth. Good concept, good actor, but a story with an ending slightly more inevitable than surprising.

Cheap Thrills - ★★★½☆
This feels like the real American remake of Funny Games, not Haneke's. If only they'd actually hit rewind when it came up in the dialogue. I was sure hoping.

Zero Charisma - ★★★☆☆
I heard of this one from Nerdist employees who found it strange that the company would buy and distribute a movie that sets their boss in its crosshairs. I watched with a little bit of voyeuristic curiosity because of the nebbishy main character's similarity to an ex-roommate.

This is a movie about a loser. It seems harsh to put it that way, but then you see him lose in every encounter. Even when he turns out to have been right about his rival, or about his mom, it doesn't keep him from losing. Who's side is the movie on? Who's side is the audience supposed to be on? And why? (Show your work for full credit.)

Project Almanac - ★★☆☆☆
At first I thought that someone named their time travel movie after a Back to the Future reference, but after I saw it I did some hunting around online to see if this was in some way intended as a spiritual sequel to Project X. (As far as I could tell, it is not.)

Although it's presented with a thick veneer of fun, this is a pretty flabby movie. A lot of the scenes in the incredibly long 'time travel is great' section cover the same ground without addressing the parts I was curious about. I can only assume that there are just piles of dead Davids stacked up beyond the edge of the shaky frame.

As a found footage movie, all the mistakes are made: wildly unmotivated filming, "wait who's holding the camera?" moments, privileged shots where there's clearly no camera in the room. I like found footage as a technique, but it didn't help anyone here.

Hopefully whoever goes back to undo this mess will start their script right about where this one ends.

#2,107: Blackhat

Selma - ★★★½☆
So many biographies in the Oscar field this year. I think this one might have been ripe for more acting nods than it got, but I bet it's not Best Picture. Also, I have no idea how someone decides what the best acting or movie is in order to award a prize. This movie as a whole is like a long slow zoom in from a panorama of the civil rights movement to King himself.

I thought this movie stood in contrast to American Sniper or Imitation Game in its appropriate use of captions to summarize how the characters would turn out.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 - ★★½☆☆
This is the first 3D movie I've seen in ages. Lots of fun flying, but not as good a movie as the first one. Very happy that it wasn't a standard 'lost powers' plot, but it felt pretty paint-by-numbers, marking time until it's a trilogy. The supporting cast of dragon riders is completely wasted.

There was a Q&A afterward where it was fun to see Djimon Hounsou politely express his surprise that his character turned out to be white.

Lone Survivor - ★★½☆☆
It's weird, the different versions of realism. Like American Sniper, in which gunshot victims generally fall down and require medical attention, this is a story based on a biographical book and an actual soldier. Except these characters withstand action hero levels of punishment and press on, perhaps more damaged mentally than physically. Neither one is exactly crammed full of plot, but this one felt more visceral, and therefore a little harder to watch.

Also, I wondered while watching this if every SEAL class does identical training exercises, or if the makers of Sniper just watched this movie for research. The scenes seemed remarkably alike.

Blackhat - ½☆☆☆☆
This movie hit me like a wind turbine hits a bird. There's just nothing in nature to prepare you for how boring this movie is. It's like a 70s movie that squeezes every bit of action into the trailer because they know you're not going to go see a movie that advertises hours of embarrassing dialogue.

Luckily, it's not just boring, it's also really long, featuring multiple trips into a deep visualization of the information superhighway and a completely nonsensical gun battle. I don't remember it now, but there was probably some kind of long car chase too.

Also interesting: apparently this is not this cinematographer's first movie. That probably means that the weird shutter stuff is on purpose, as is that scene in the emergency trailer that looks like it was shot on a phone. I laughed out loud when the first fight scene began and we kicked into Intense Shaky Cam mode.

No wonder the ticket taker had such concern in her eyes for us...

#2,103: American Sniper

Wingsuit Warrior - ★½☆☆☆  
You should probably just watch 45 minutes of wingsuit videos on YouTube instead.

Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings - ★★☆☆☆  
You should probably just watch 45 minutes of Jake Shimabukuro performing on YouTube instead. Good soundtrack.

Jimmy Carr: Laughing and Joking - ★★★☆☆  
Compared to a lot of the comedy I see, it's kind of refreshing to see someone saying horrible things on purpose. There were more than a few lines that I hear a lot, which I would have assumed were just hacky street jokes, but for all I know they were his in the first place.  

American Sniper - ★★★☆☆
The first half of this (at least) was like the opposite of movie magic to me. I just couldn't stop seeing it as footage of actors walking around on different sets. I've read the reviews that said this should have dealt more with a) the enemy sniper or b) the wife, but I thought that a) they actually did a nice job showing Mustafa's parallels without beating us over the head, and b) Miller couldn't carry the scenes she had; more would have been terrible.

One one hand, I think it was too soon to make this movie. Too close to the life of the actual man. I never thought it was going to be a particularly subtle or nuanced portrait, but the movie still lays it on pretty thick with what an unimpeachably wonderful person he was. And then it introduces a half dozen characters to verbally confirm his wonderfulness.

On the other, The Hurt Locker is six years old and better in every way. The biography here gets in the way of the movie.