#2,099: Birdman

The Godfather - ★★★★★
So great. So much detail. So much that appears to be window dressing that, to the careful or repeat viewer is actually expertly laid groundwork for later use. Even the little things utterly incidental to the plot are perfect, like some of most realistic children I've seen on film. The construction of a consistent world is amazing, and ten times moreso given the conditions under which Coppola was making it.

I think this movie's famous scenes and lines do it a disservice. It's too easy to fall into the lazy pattern of knowing how it all turns out and watching for the famous bits, instead of taking in the suspense that should grip the first-time viewer or the depth available to the returning viewer.

Please Subscribe - ★★☆☆☆
I think these filmmakers made the wrong thing. This isn't a movie, it's a YouTube playlist. A dozen or so profiles of YouTubers that have nothing in common except that each subject was asked the same list of questions. No themes are explored or connections made. The best of the characters get just enough time to hint at larger, more interesting stories that go unexplained, and the worst soak up the screen time that could have been used to tell them.

The One I Love - ★★★½☆
I think I liked that everyone's lying to each other. If anything, I wish they'd been more direct and immediate in going behind each other's backs, but I was happy they strayed from the completely safe into something that challenged the premise. The characters promise to keep their behavior dialed down to a 5, proceed at an 8, and I would have liked it even more at a 10. But maybe that would have tipped us from a kind of light dramatic horror to horror-comedy? I've begun to suspect that every movie is a horror movie.

Birdman - ★★½☆☆
I like a real time or continuous shot gimmick in a movie. Or, at least I think I do. Part of what makes it impressive is the sense that a feat is being undertaken by the performers to make it happen, but this is so openly jammed full of tricks that I'm not entirely sure what the point of it is. Sometimes I think filmmakers might not always be using their powers for good...

I'm in favor of making a weird movie, but I think it might be bad form to include scenes expounding on why you can't criticize a weird movie.

The floating camera, the view of what's going on in Rigand's head vs. reality (which I did like), the repetitive sequencing of scenes, the tendency of people and things to appear and disappear, an occasional flying sequence, it all adds up to one impressionistic, dreamlike couple of hours. But, that doesn't mean it's much fun.

#2,096: The Imitation Game

You Only Live Twice - ★★½☆☆
I'm sure I've got a few 007 movies I haven't checked off on my list because I can't really tell them apart. I watched this one because I wanted to see one with Blofeld, who doesn't turn out to spend much time on screen here. What I took away from You Only Live Twice is that it is a ridiculous movie. Large plotless expanses based on shiny things the filmmakers heard about somewhere. Atrocious spying. And a case study in why Bond was originally described as someone who does not use disguises. On the other hand, at least 007 does stuff in this one, so it's still a cut above Goldfinger.

Rampage: Capital Punishment - ★☆☆☆☆
The original was sensationalist, but kind of interesting and had a fun turn at the end. The sequel is smaller in every way. Early on I wondered if the director imagined he was making a real point or was just hiding behind one in order to have some fun with casual violence. Luckily, he included 45 minutes of preachy filler to put an answer to that one.
     
Big Eyes - ★★★☆☆
If not for the famous actors, this would have been made-for-TV. It's basically fine, but you'd never guess Tim Burton was behind it. Come for the scenes of Christoph Waltz as he Christoph Waltzes around with his deliberate diction and slightly unbelievable angry faces, stay for Amy Adams' collection of crazy wigs!
     
The Imitation Game - ★★★½☆
I liked this better than Big Eyes, and had to think about why. It's probably less authentic to its source material, but it certainly has grander ambitions, with the intertwined time periods. It might just be that I prefer espionage to paintings of sad children. (Although, this movie -does- have sad children...) I understand that folks are upset with what this movie gets wrong about Turing's life, and the 'present day' bits do feel like they're lacking something, but I guess I got by on this one by enjoying the abstraction of code-breaking and problem solving and the doing of secret things. Abstraction, of course, because taken literally, the mechanics of what they're doing don't make a lot of sense.

#2,093: Witness for the Prosecution

The Last Stand - ★½☆☆☆ 
I watched this because I thought it was Sabotage, which I'd heard was better than people think. But it wasn't. This would be made-for-TV if someone hadn't hoodwinked Arnold into a role.
      
The Ghost Army - ★★½☆☆
I knew these guys existed, so I jumped on this movie as soon as I saw it in the endless netflix scroll. There's interesting stuff in it, but I kind of blundered right into a doc that feels like every WWII doc. The best part is seeing the art the troops made during their service.
     
TINY: A Story About Living Small - ★★½☆☆
This is a fun topic for a movie, even if the movie might not be very good. Everything about the main characters is kind of confusing, which sort of makes sense when the credits come up and you see that they made the movie too. Seeing the range of tiny homes other people have made is neat. I think I might be a little too tall for one of these myself.

Murder by Decree - ★★½☆☆
It was a shrewd move, writing "the best Sherlock Holmes movie ever made" on the poster of this movie, but it is not true today, if it ever was. The opening, which checks off items on a laundry list of Holmes references, felt as forced and silly to me as every direct Lovecraft adaptation that tries to work in every Arkham-related proper noun the writers can think of. The interesting part was seeing Sherlock statted up very differently than we usually see him today – contrast this version, who is just awful at fighting of any kind, with Guy Ritchie's version, a master of hand-to-hand combat. Even if the plot wasn't especially original, the characterizations of this version seem to be their own.

Witness for the Prosecution - ★★★★½
This one's a lot of fun. Of course, because the announcer asked me not to, I won't discuss the ending with you, but just knowing it was an Agatha Christie adaptation meant I was going in with my eyes open extra wide, suspicious and looking for clues.

#2,087: Interstellar

The Kid Brother - ★★★½☆ 
A lot of my viewing experience with silent comedies is with Buster Keaton, so I was not expecting the sheer volume of acting Harold Lloyd does, all over this movie. So much acting! I think a lot of movies like this (including other Lloyds, like The Freshman,) show the hero as put-upon, reacting to crazy circumstances and overwhelming odds, but in The Kid Brother, although Lloyd's character is nominally the underdog, he seems incredibly clever. He's always one step ahead and so much of the humor here is about the sleights of perception he pulls on other characters and the audience. Another movie would have made a whole scene out of outsmarting a guard dog, but clever Harold Hickory's got that one in the bag. I also thought it was interesting that there is almost no set dressing in this movie. If an object is in the scene, it's almost certainly a prop, waiting on its mark to support another gag.

The Freshman - ★★★☆☆
In contrast to The Kid Brother, this felt a lot more like what I've come to expect from a silent comedy: the low status hero, the structuring to accommodate what's mostly a series of sketches - where it differs from, say, a Keaton, is that it's pretty wordy for a silent movie. There are stunts and sight gags and physical jokes, but Lloyd doesn't really compete on physicality, so he makes up for it with the sheer volume of jokes of all sorts. The Freshman isn't so jaw-dropping as Sherlock Jr, but it packs in more laugh-out-loud moments.
     
Feast - ★★★★★
Pretty great! Right up there with Partly Cloudy as a lovely, funny, and touching short film.

Big Hero 6 - ★★★☆☆
I didn't like this as much as I expected to. I still liked it, just, less than my twitter feed did. It seemed like there were a lot of setups that didn't bother with payoffs, and the supporting cast was pretty thin. (Does TJ Miller ever play another character?) I thought it was interesting that Hiro makes everyone's supersuits and doesn't give himself the biggest best and baddest.

The Q&A after my screening had one of the writers talking about how a superhero movie is only as good as its villains are bad, but this movie isn't really driven by its villain. The bad guy here is doing his own thing and mostly can't be bothered with or isn't aware of our heroes. I think the writer was correct, but not in the way that he meant.
     
Interstellar - ★★★★★
I bought my IMAX ticket out of something like obligation - the ads looked lousy, but it's Nolan, and shot in IMAX, so I went - and it turned out to really work for me.

The Filmically Perfect podcast used to say that a perfect movie defines the world it inhabits, and then sustains that world, and on those fronts, Interstellar delivers. I think a lot of the folks that walked out unhappy have been upset that the movie did not live up to ideals it never actually promised us. Sure, there's more science explained in here than in Star Wars, but it's no surprise the reviewers sticking it with the 'hard sci-fi' label are tearing it down for not actually being hard sci-fi. I wouldn't even give this a regular 'sci-fi' shelving. Ideally, I'd label this as a movie in the 'weird fiction' genre, but since we're a century too late for that, my second choice would be 'horror-fantasy.' Even though we're in space a lot (and that's a big plus: if you're going to make a movie about being in space, actually be in space!), I think Interstellar has just taken a place among my favorite lovecraftian horror movies. I really liked the sanity-blasting effects of the adventure upon the investigators. We also see man's infinitesimally small place and stature among the stars, and an ending that fits right in with every other movie in this narrow genre.

I can award a few demerits for the first act, where Cooper gets saddled with all those lines they wanted in the trailer, but there's even something a little bit satisfying to me about how easily he finds himself on the ship's crew. An adventure had to begin, otherwise it's not going to be much of a movie. As a technical aside, I thought there were some moments that were just amazing visually, regardless of whether or not that's the IMAX talking. I don't know what the audio problem folks are complaining about actually is, but it was kind of nice to hear the whirring of the projector in some of the film's silent moments.

#2,082: Oblivion

The Score - ★★½☆☆
I was surprised to see how recent this movie is. It feels dated the way a genre classic can sometimes feel dated – although it does a lot of what it does well, the films that came after reused and built upon its foundations, leaving modern audiences expecting more layers – except this isn't a genre-defining classic. It feels too easy. Like the last act is missing.

The Most Dangerous Game - ★★★★☆
A classic story told in a way that may feel dated today, but is still pretty fun and effective. Refreshing to see plot points that would be soaked in irony today played with some authenticity.

The Orphanage - ★★★★★
This movie is just full of things that I like.

For one, the trading game they play. I always like when adventure game-like elements turn up in a movie. For another, this movie has a spectacular bus hit.

Best of all, although I don't think of myself as a hardcore skeptic, the skeptic part of me loves that there's a movie like this one, a horror movie, and maybe a ghost story, where there's nothing supernatural going on.

I'd forgotten a lot of the opening to the movie, and how Simon says all these things that seem ominous in a scary movie, but probably aren't that weird for an imaginative kid to say. It's great how often the filmmakers are just screwing around with the audience, using the language of movies to insinuate things that aren't there. We get the benefit of Laura's confused, desperate, maybe drug-addled perspective.

Oblivion - ★★☆☆☆
I don't know what this film was really about. It seems like there were several more interesting stories going on just off-camera at any time. The exposition to plot ratio is enormous. This feels like Cruise's first try at satisfying the sci-fi, video gamey itch that didn't get scratched until Edge of Tomorrow