#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.

Media Monday: iOS Games

This week, let's look at a bunch of games. All played on the iPhone and iPad. 

Star Wars Commander - ★★★☆☆
A Star Wars take on Clash of Clans. I made it to Level 6 before it lost me. The biggest takeaway I have from this game is how not worth playing it feels. And, since I've stopped playing, I've racked up way more points (medals) than I would have by working at it, since waves of randos throw themselves on my well defended but mostly abandoned base.

INGRESS - ★★★★☆
Google does a great job of hitting the facets of freemium games that make this addictive, but it's basically capture the flag with flags that dissolve even if nobody's actively destroying them, as a front for a big data mining operation. I don't regret playing, but there's no end, and I know I'm not going to get as involved as the people hacking the system to do brilliant and impossible things, so level 8 is going to have to be my victory condition.

Defuse Dbomb - ★★☆☆☆
I figured there had to be a game in the app store about bomb disposal, and after trying a bunch of demos, this was the one that seemed the most similar to fun. I thought there would be lockpicking games too, but there's not much.

Smash Hit - ★★★★☆
This is a game about breaking glass things with marbles. Or ball bearings, maybe? Anyway, it's pretty satisfying to smash things, and because I didn't buy the IAP unlocks, I got good enough to play the whole game in single sittings. 

God of Light - ★★★★★ (iTunes)
A really well done puzzle game. I got 3 stars-or-whatever on every level and found all the fireflies. The core game is about reflecting beams of light around, but new mechanics and units are added regularly to keep things interesting. Really nice.

Space is Key 1 and 2 - ★★★☆☆
A port of a simple-as-can-be flash platformer, in which you make your square jump over the rectangles at the appropriate times. I didn't think much of it at first, but I played through all 100 levels (between the game and it's included sequel), and then the next night I did it again.

Forbidden Island - ★★★★☆ (iTunes)
This is a port of a board game to iOS, but that makes it a video game, and I did win several rounds of this game. I beat it playing two characters on my own, and in two player games where we played one and two characters apiece, on various difficulties. Have yet to beat the toughest modes or buy the additional island setups. A solid adaptation.

80 Days - ★★★★☆
I was genuinely surprised to find that I successfully navigated around the globe in only 77 days. I thought all was lost! This seems like a huge game, with so many more possible cities to visit, routes to take, or even things to do in the cities I've already been through. The sheer difficulty of seeing everything makes this seem like the kind of game that would drive me crazy, and might even somehow slow me down from playing more in the future. I have a lot of exploring to do here..