The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015)

8/10
I enjoyed it. The first two-thirds were a little by-the-numbers "good but not great" territory but the third act definitely gives it a big hand in terms of making it a movie worth your time. The acting is fine, the script is a little banal but it does the job and the SFX are great. I could have done with maybe one or two fewer sassy Matt Damon quips and the intentionally campy soundtrack trope a la Guardians of the Galaxy was kind of irritating and unnecessary. Similarly, the "young wacky genius who comes up with a theory that no one else thought of to save the day" trope should be taken out back and shot. Ignoring the movie's reliance on these well-worn devices (which isn't that hard to do, really) it's a very fun experience. Like Gravity and Interstellar before it, it's definitely one to see in the biggest theatre possible.

Trainwreck (Judd Apatow, 2015)

3/10
This movie bummed me out. I am a fan of Amy Schumer, her stand-up album is great. Her show is a little hit and miss but most variety/comedy sketch shows are. I like that she's not afraid to show the ugly "other side" of sex from a female perspective. God knows we see enough of it from the male perspective.
So I was looking forward to seeing her translate similar ideas into the screenplay she wrote for her first major big screen vehicle. But what's strange about Trainwreck is how incredibly conservative it is, standing in stark contrast to Schumer's stand up.
First of all, I take issue with the title. Why "Trainwreck"? You expect Amy Schumer's character (also named Amy) to live up to this billing as some kind of horrendous mess of a person. Instead she's a girl with a promiscuous past who can't keep a man, and she drinks and smokes and goes clubbing. That's it. This is a trainwreck? What is this, the 50's? Reverse the genders and it's the same role Seth Rogen plays in any Judd Apatow movie (he's the director here). Except he's not called a trainwreck, he's just...the lead character. In her comedy act, Schumer gives off a very sex-positive vibe - that it's OK for girls to sleep around and be gross if it's who they are and what they want to do. After all, it's OK for guys to do it. So why did she write this movie? It's so romcom-by-the-numbers I started looking for signs of it being a really subtle parody. But nope, it follows the exact same Hollywood romcom shtick - a woman whose life just isn't complete until she finds A Good Man (Bill Hader here) and changes her ways and settles down with him. There's even a post-breakup, pre-reunion "getting her life together" montage of Amy throwing out half-empty wine bottles and bongs, for christ's sake.
So for me, this poses the troubling question: who is the real Amy Schumer? Is she really the sex-positive character she portrays in her act and on her show? And if so, does that mean Trainwreck is her selling out and writing a generic, conservative romcom just to get herself a starring role in Hollywood?
Or, on the other hand, are the conservative values at the heart of Trainwreck reflective of Schumer's actual attitudes? And if that's true, is the sex-positive character she adopts in her act just a gimmick to titillate and sell albums and tickets? I'm not sure which would be more troubling.
In any case, I would be willing to dismiss those concerns if the movie was funny, but it's not. There are a couple of good lines here and there and a really good bit of physical comedy at the end, but that's about it. Most of the one-liner jokes land with a thud. I'll give it a score of 3 entirely based on the acting, which is unexpectedly great across the board. Schumer does more heavy lifting than I thought she would and handles it very well. Colin Quinn is also really good as her ailing father, and Lebron James and John Cena are really enjoyable in cartoony versions of themselves. Bill Hader is unremarkable but he's the straight man so he doesn't have much to do beyond deliver his lines competently. I was looking forward to this movie for a couple reasons but it failed to deliver on all counts. Even worse, it soured my opinion of its main attraction.

Black Mass (Scott Cooper, 2015)

7.5/10
Johnny Depp's turn as gangster Whitey Bulger is what the advertising for the movie is banking on to get you in the theatre. And no doubt, Depp is just about flawless. It's easy to see why he was attracted to the role as a return to form - physical transformation, accent, make-up, a range of acting emotions from anger to sorrow with plenty of violence...it's all there and Depp does it all really well.
But once Depp's Bulger draws you in, it's the meat of the story that's worth sticking around for. Bulger strikes a deal with FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton, also great) to turn informant in exchange for protection. Connolly, a childhood friend of Bulger's, quickly loses track of which side of the law he's supposed to be on. This central issue is, in fact, arguably more interesting than Bulger himself, and I feel like if the movie approached the story from a different angle and focused on Connolly instead of the more cinematic Bulger, it might have proven an even more interesting movie (although a harder box office sell, to be sure). That said, Black Mass does not make any real missteps. It's an interesting story well-told and superbly acted.
My only issue is that the pulse of the movie never really quickens - it maintains the same rhythm from beginning to end, telling a fine story but failing to really ensnare the audience and pulling us to the edge of our seats at any point. And as with most biopics, the ending arrives with a bit of a thud, and title cards are used to spell out what happened to each of the men from Bulger and his gang to the FBI agents involved. Truthfully I expected worse, so the movie was an entertaining and pleasant surprise in that regard, but I can't imagine it's a movie that will leave much of a lasting impact on anyone, except maybe for Depp's performance.

Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)

8/10
Watching it on Blu-Ray, I do wish I had made a bigger effort to see it in theatres. But what can you do. It starts a little slower than expected and I feel the claims of the movie being "non-stop action" or "breathless" are a little overhyped. The action certainly stops at times and you can certainly catch your breath. It's for the best that the action doesn't stop that often because the dialogue is definitely clunky, although it gets the job done. The movie is a bit like a rollercoaster and, of course, the last drop is the best, a truly gripping and jaw-dropping sequence. I have no earthly idea how George Miller came up with 99% of the stuff in here (or how he found a studio to bankroll it) but he deserves all the credit in the world for bringing an insane vision to screen and making it work so well.

Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973)

7/10
The impact is diminished now that the final gutpunch of the movie has entered the pop culture lexicon, but dystopian atmosphere (7 years away from today!) is really well done. The city is hot and sweaty and pulses with a kind of malevolent, simmering fever. The casual misogyny is a little jarring and unexpected...but I guess that was the time (1973 I mean, not 2022). Fun enough to watch to flesh out my knowledge of pop culture movies but not essential I don't think.

The F Word (Michael Dowse, 2013)

6.5/10
This movie has been given the annoyingly anonymous title of "What If" in the U.S., because I guess "The F Word" is overly suggestive of a curse word or something (hint: in the context of the movie it actually refers to "friends"...the tagline even spells it out). Anyway it's an indie-ish rom-com starring Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan. And you know...quirky attractive boy meets quirky attractive girl, they fall for each other, then there's some difficulties, and will they live happily ever after?
So yes it's very by the numbers. But it's still a movie that's hard to dislike. Radcliffe and Kazan give very good, honest performances that are the center of the film. It's warmly funny and touching despite my better judgement to distrust it. There is a sequence of country-hopping and girl-chasing that feels pretty unrealistic but it's not a huge plot point and easy to get past. All in all it's a good date movie and, while it won't make a long lasting impression on anyone, will sufficiently entertain for 100 minutes.

Cake (Daniel Barnz, 2014)

6.5/10
I wasn't expecting too much from this, and about half an hour in I was sure I was going to hate it. Jennifer Aniston stars as Claire, a pain-riddled, grief-stricken, drug-addicted woman who initially appears to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Another woman in her chronic pain sufferers support group, Nina, commits suicide, and Claire is fascinated by the incident to the point of being visited by Nina in hallucinations. Claire eventually tracks down Nina's windower, and the fact that he's blindingly handsome and charming and accepts crazy Claire and all her problems without a hitch...well the movie starts to shape up as another one of those dreadful things where all of a woman's problems are magically solved once she finally meets A Good Man.
Mercifully (and unexpectedly) the movie doesn't really take that path. That's not to say it's totally cliche-free, because it has its share of them, and much of the staging for the incidents that occur feel more like hacky screenwriter gimmicks and less like things that would actually occur to real people. But in the last act or so the movie does finally turn out to be an emotionally honest and rather sad portrayal of grief. I've never cared for Jennifer Aniston in anything but she does a very good job in a role that easily could have been histrionic and over-acted. No classic, but ultimately better than I thought it would be.

The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014)

8/10
As far as horror movies go I found this did a really job of embracing certain conventions while subverting others (the mother/son relationship, to say no more for fear of spoilers). Like It Follows, it mostly disposes of cheap jump scares and ends up creeping its way under your skin, although I can understand some feeling let down that there's no major "payoff scare". The story is compelling and a pleasingly new twist on an age old monster movie story and the acting is exceptional, in particular Essie Davis as the mother. I liked the throwback-ness of the Babadook itself, it has a kind of charming lo-fi aesthetic that brought me back to the days when horror movies weren't all CGI and makeup. Overall it was smart, well-crafted, respectful of genre conventions but innovative as well, and delivered on the scares. Very little not to like.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)

6.5/10
More or less exactly what you'd expect to be, despite its odd existence ("black and white Iranian-language Spaghetti Western vampire movie ala Jim Jarmusch"). The B&W photography is very nice and the movie is well directed, and it has a great soundtrack. It moves at a glacial pace, but it feels a bit like it's leaning heavily on the "slow = artistic" trend and not because it serves the film any particular purpose. In fact the more I watched the harder I found it to shake this niggling feeling that if it weren't for all its pre-packaged exotica and bells and whistles ("A slow-paced vampire movie? Shot in black and white? In Persian?!?"), A Girl Walks Home wouldn't be talked about nearly as much as it is. Once you strip away those call-them-gimmicks-if-you-will, there's a concerning lack of story and depth to the movie. It's pretty and kind of cool but not something I see myself returning to, although I'll remain curious to see what else writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour comes up with next. I'd give the soundtrack a few more listens if I could find it, though.

It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014)

8.5/10
It Follows has that rare thing in horror movies these days, a truly great, original premise. It also (mostly) leaves the cheap jump-scares which have become so prolific lately at the door and generates its scares from nightmarish, surreal scenes of dread and general creepynees. That combined with its incredible score give it an appealing "old school horror" feel (not unlike the score of the last movie I reviewed, You're Next, but even better). Writer/director David Robert Mitchell directs with a lot of visual flare, there are numerous great shots that are mostly atypical of what we've come to expect from the genre. It is well acted by its young ensemble, and in particular by its star, Maika Monroe.
That said, the nature of the film's own "monster movie logic" means that the scares and creep-factor are diminished the longer the movie goes on (once we're used to "it" walking toward its heroine at a calm pace and accept the fact that our heroine will continue to escape, the tension lessens...not to mention that because of the fact that "it" is only targeting and can only be seen by our heroine, we know can let our guard down when the camera isn't fixed on her). Compounding that, I think the movie noticeably falters in its final act. Mitchell has built a great premise and executes it very well, but doesn't seem to know where to take it. A last-act confrontation (the swimming pool scene) feels clumsy and doesn't appear to serve the story in any real way, although I did like the end of the film.
Unfortunately, the nature of the "evil" in the movie makes it completely open to being sequel-fodder, and it's hard to imagine further installments being as effective as this one was, especially if Mitchell is not at the helm.

You're Next (Adam Wingard, 2011)

7.5/10
As a festival crowd pleaser, You're Next probably would have been great fun. Watched at home, its impact feels diminished, and the disconnect between its existence as both a violent home invasion horror and a borderline-goofy black comedy becomes more emphasized and feels weirdly jarring. It's hard to tell how seriously the movie takes itself, especially when it features an absurd exchange like the following, which may set new highs of brilliant stupidity (spoilers within):
-"You never want to do anything fun. Come on, fuck me on the bed next to your dead mother."
-"This discussion is over."
You're Next mostly comes out looking better than it should the strength of the direction and score, which are both completely on point. The score in particularly is perfectly evocative of some of John Carpenter's best, or the poppy Italian synth stuff that was smeared all over every horror in the late 70's and 80's. The acting is solid all-around too and it's difficult not to root for its central hero/heroine. The humor, when it crops up, is sharp too. But it's not really a scary movie at all and I feel like the ending was a missed opportunity to do something cooler. All in all not bad and does some things very well but not as great as I'd hoped.

White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932)

4/10
A Haitian zombie movie from the 30's starring Bela Lugosi, it mostly wastes its Haitian setting for a predictable love-story-with-zombies thing. I thought it was fairly boring and nothing really stood out in any way.

Neighbors (Nicholas Stoller, 2014)

3/10
It goes to rather ludicrous, unrealistic lengths to pit a whole fraternity against a young family (Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne and their 1ish year old) and once you accept this silly premise, it forgets to pepper the script with jokes. The movie mostly glides by inoffensively enough on the charm of its actors, who are all very good (can someone explain to me why I still like Dave Franco despite the fact that he always plays the same character?). But it revisits a central concern that was dealt with many years ago in Knocked Up - that whole Judd Apatow brand of, "partying and getting high all the time was awesome and now I feel constricted by this new familial role I'm expected to play!" shtick. And seeing the same actor, Rogen, doing it again made it feel especially tired.
I did enjoy Rose Byrne a lot and her character too, and I liked how they made a point of not making her out to be the nagging shrew chastising her oafish husband's harebrained schemes (with a pointed reference to every Kevin James movie ever). Her character very much gets her hands dirty and it feels like a breath of fresh air in an otherwise boring and generally uninteresting movie.

Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore, 2012)

6/10
The more I thought about this one the less I liked it. It started off with a clever, original idea, and I would say the first third is enjoyable, but then you realize just how much of a copy-paste job of better Pixar movies it is (only not as funny or moving) and it feels like more of a disappointment. Like they dreamed up this cool universe with all kinds of possibilities and then just did something pretty boring with it, or at least nothing you haven't already seen before. Meh.

Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

8/10
Short Ingmar Bergman movie about an ailing priest losing his faith and how it affects, in particular, a woman desperately in love with him and a suicidal fisherman seeking his advice. I really liked it, it actually reminded me a little of Winter Sleep (or vice versa, more like). The priest's dilemma is moving, as are the reactions of those around him. The movie doesn't ask easy questions or offer easy answers. It's probably a "minor" Bergman masterpiece in his legendary filmography but it's worth watching.

Un Chien Andalou (Luis Bunuel, 1929)

7/10
What can you say? I've known about the famous eyeball-slicing scene since forever, never actually watched the full short (some 16 minutes). The ants coming out of the hole in the guy's hand was another well done illusion that I hadn't seen before. As far as what anything in it meant, ??????.

The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)

6.5/10
A pretty good movie, maybe a bit of a disappointment as far as movies with Hitchcock's name on them go. I liked the initial staging in the snowed-in made-up town where you meet most of the characters. The premise starts out with a lot of promise: a lady disappears on a train and a young woman is the only one who seems to know of her existence. I like the initial mystery where it's not clear why other passengers (who have clearly seen the lady in question) are now denying her existence. As the plot unfolded it got more and more lame, culminating in a weirdly out-of-place shootout between train passengers and coppers and leading to a very abrupt, kind of corny ending.

Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014)

8/10
I enjoyed this more than I expected to, based on the little I had read about it, and ultimately I found myself agreeing with both the general chorus of praises and criticisms it received. Like Inception, it's not a perfect movie by any means, but I certainly am impressed with Nolan's vision and his willingness to make grand, ambitious movies...even if they stumble along the way.
This blurb from John Beifuss (in a favorable review) says it best: "The sentimentality and Hollywoodized convenience of the storytelling prevent this mostly admirable film from achieving the escape velocities of Kubrick or Tarkovsky." That's exactly what I felt. Nolan, for whatever reason, just couldn't shake off those niggling Hollywood annoyances that weighed down his movie in ways that 2001 or Solaris (or even Gravity) were not. From casting McConaughey as the ultimate Hollywood hero (the Single Dad Doing His Best) to the worst offender of all, Matt Damon's awful performance as a horribly cliché character in a horrible cliché act that threatens to sink the entire movie. Thankfully it recovers, but these and other scenes left a bad taste in my mouth in a movie with otherwise great ideas, storytelling, special effects, music, acting, etc.
Okay, so Interstellar probably isn't as mind-melting and high-minded as it wants you to believe it is, but it's pure cinema and I mostly enjoyed myself. I feel like there's a rush to take down Nolan at every possible turn (just as much as there's a rush from the other side to prop him up at every turn) and I don't think as highly of him as a lot of others do but I'm still glad he's around and making movies like these, imperfect as they may be.

A Million Ways to Die in the West (Seth MacFarlane, 2014)

2/10
I don't particularly love Seth MacFarlane and didn't much care for his first feature attempt, Ted, either. But in that movie and Family Guy and his other projects he's shown a rare ability to craft a hilarious line that catches you completely off-guard. Almost none of that wit is on display at any time here. Frankly I have a hard time figuring out what MacFarlane was trying to do with this movie. At times A Million Ways almost seems to be a real movie, what with how seriously it takes its central love triangle (MacFarlane, barely doing anything resembling acting, torn between two beautiful blondes, Charlize Theron and Amanda Seyfried). The problem is the love triangle isn't interesting, and there are oddly long stretches where the movie doesn't even try to be funny. There are pacing issues as well, and the movie feels sloppily cobbled together. Sarah Silverman and Giovanni Ribisi figure heavily into the opening 20ish minutes and then are practically gone from the movie until the very end. Liam Neeson brings some gruff charm as the villain but he's not in the movie very much either and can't come close to saving it.
But the biggest let down is the humor, or lack thereof. When it is there, it's just not funny - most of the jokes are feeble at best when MacFarlane usually, if nothing else, at least goes for shock value. That the two biggest laughs are supposed to come from Neil Patrick Harris taking a dump in a cowboy hat and a close-up of MacFarlane's face getting urinated on by a sheep are proof of just how badly the mark is missed. These are sub-Farrelly brothers moves, getting dangerously close to Tom Green territory. MacFarlane is capable of much better and the cast he assembled here probably deserved better too.

22 Jump Street (Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, 2014)

7/10
I don't think I ever reviewed 21 Jump Street here but I like it a lot, probably one of my favorite comedies of the last few years. It had the right amount of self-awareness about its silly premise, surprisingly good chemistry between Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum, and it was consistently funny.
The 2nd one has some good jokes but overall is a bit of a step down. It really overloads the self-awareness factor, constantly poking fun of its own existence as a sequel, but sometimes it's a bit too much - like yeah, we get it. Hill and Tatum are still good together but the movie reintroduces the same conflict from the first one, only flipped: now Tatum is the popular one and Hill is the one feeling brushed aside. It was funnier when they subverted expectations by doing the reverse in the first one, now the conflict feels forced and the scenario (Tatum becoming the football stud, Hill becoming the art school geek) is not nearly as clever.
Also the feeling of sequel-itis and the need to do everything bigger and better this time creeps in and the movie rushes through a lot of plotting (the central investigation, Tatum's rise as a football stud and his bromance with the quarterback, Hill dating the police chief's daughter, a last act spring break trip to Mexico). The movie boasts almost the exact same running time as its predecessor but somehow feels longer and weightier.
But all that said, anyone who liked 21 will probably not find anything to hate here. There's some good laughs but I just don't think I'll return to it as often as I've rewatched 21. The end credits gag reel where they go through a dozen scenarios for future Jump Street installments is a must-see, though.

The Purge: Anarchy (James DeMonaco, 2014)

4.5/10
I had heard the sequel righted a lot of wrongs of the first one. It takes a multi-character approach: instead of focusing on just one family's "Purge night", it focuses on three different groups - a mom and her daughter locked down for the night, a couple stuck out in the streets when the Purge starts, and a mysterious-looking badass who appears to be out to do some Purging of his own. This is a good start but the way these three strands all collide through various, increasingly implausible circumstances, not to mention the presence of some kind of anti-Purge night/counter-terrorist group thrown in the mix, falls even more flat in the end. The movie mostly ditches its horror film roots in favor of brassy action sequences, as the five end up outside together during the Purge and have to band together to survive. There's all manner of boring tropes to be found in their group, from the mouthy teenager to the badass with a heart of gold, and I was mostly bored myself throughout. There's an interesting (if, again, very silly) premise behind the Purge movies and it's not hard to feel like these two stabs haven't quite hit the mark yet. But the idea certainly lends itself to a lot of various scenarios (like the Saw franchise) so I won't be surprise if there's a few more tries at it before the brand is put to rest for good. Maybe one of those will get it right.

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (Morgan Spurlock, 2011)

5/10
Morgan Spurlock, best known as the Super Size Me guy, takes on product placement in movies and television by financing this entire documentary through sponsorships, product placements, brand integrations, and so on. Well, he doesn't really "take on" product placement so much as he's forced to embrace it in order to make his movie. And his movie is, in fact, the making of that same movie. Confused? It's not confusing when you watch it but it's difficult to explain. It's a self-referential exercise, whereby the scenes of Spurlock selling his film form the meat of what we watch here, the finished product. It's clever, and the first time you watch an in-movie advertisement featuring Spurlock pushing one of the products he was paid to push, it sort of clicks in a weird, Exit Through the Gift Shop type of way, where we begin to question everything we're seeing.
By the second and third time though, it feels significantly less clever - after all, watching ads, even of the "wink wink nudge nudge, we're all in on the joke" variety found in Spurlock's film, is still watching ads. And when you get to the end of the movie's lean 88-minute runtime, you realize that Spurlock hasn't said anything interesting or new about product placement in movies. It's almost as if he's afraid actually discussing the subject itself would turn off moviegoers, so he sticks to jaunty montages and scenes of him glad-handing bemused marketing execs. Spurlock has a natural charisma that makes watching him always engaging but I would have found a lot more value if the movie had taken an extra half-hour to actually talk about product placement, its history, its effect on viewers, and so on. Spurlock is definitely on the Michael Moore spectrum of "infotainment" documentary filmmaking but this one errs way too far on the side of "entertainment" than "information" and could have done with a lot more of the latter. Spurlock eventually raised the $1.5 million he needed to make his movie and then used it to say decidedly little after all.

The Purge (James DeMonaco, 2013)

6.5/10
This was better than expected, although not a classic by any means. Maybe if I had seen more from this recent spate of home invasion horrors I would have been more bored by this one than I was. It takes a pretty ridiculous (although thought-provoking enough) premise and hones it in on one family, which I understand a lot of people didn't like. I enjoyed the "moral dilemma" of the film and admittedly had fun imagining such a scenario in real life. Although it has to be stated that for this film to work the way it unfolds, a lot of people have to do a lot really stupid or really illogical or really uncharacteristic things, so it's definitely a bit of a groaner at times. But as far as entertainment goes, it was passable.

Frozen (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2013)

7/10
I get the hype, it was a good movie. I can see why it was so endearing to everyone, particularly kids. In fact I thought it was aimed a lot more at kids than some of the bigger animated movies in recent years (not that I'm an aficionado). Toy Story 3 for example definitely seems to try to appeal to both kids and adults. Frozen was going purely for kids and hit the target dead-on. Anyway I didn't love it or anything but it was fun.

The Monuments Men (George Clooney, 2014)

4/10
This is a strange, uncertain movie, done in by the fact that it can't decide if it wants to be a comedy or if it wants to be a drama. The end result is that it's not particularly funny and it's not particularly dramatic. George Clooney casts himself and a bunch of buddies who can do comedy (Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean DuJardin, Bob Balaban) so you might think you're getting a WW2-set Ocean's Eleven, but frankly the comedic moments here are so light they make Ocean's Eleven seem downright edgy.
But this is a WW2 movie after all and there has to be some sad parts (spoilers: not everyone in the ensemble makes it to the end) but the characters are sketched so shallow that nothing really registers. And while the real Monuments Men mission was undoubtedly important, the movie is a complete failure at creating any real tension, which makes the whole expedition feel mostly like a lark.
The tonal shifts make the whole movie feel messy and uneven. Murray and Balaban, for instance, are paired off and have a nice, grumpy old men kind of comedic chemistry...meanwhile Cate Blanchett plays her character like she was told she's in Schindler's List II, wringing melodrama out of just about every word.
There's an interesting story in here, and it probably deserved better than this movie, which is not inept enough to be hateable but it doesn't offer much to like about it either. Mostly it just glides by.

Arachnophobia (Frank Marshall, 1990)

7.5/10
I only half-remembered this from my childhood so I decided to watch it when it was on TV the other day. It's actually still pretty good. The "spider invasion", implausible as it may seem, is well done. Keeping the spiders out of most of the movie (except for the single ones here or there that do the killing) is classic monster movie staging, saving the huge swarms of little ones and the queen for the very end, and it works very well. Jeff Daniels' war in the cellar with the big mother spider is more than a little silly but I guess a big confrontation was needed. I was surprised at how effective the movie still is - anyone who is even remotely not fond of spiders will probably feel their skin crawl a few times. I wasn't sure how I felt about John Goodman's kind of jokey exterminator character - overall I liked him but could have done without some of the cornier scenes he was in. Not a horror classic or anything but a well-made and creepy enough movie.

Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2014)

9.5/10
Winter Sleep is a movie about a man, Aydin, who lives in and runs a hotel in the mountains of Turkey, in addition to renting out residential properties in the region to other tenants. The movie is largely a character study of Aydin, and it is a fascinating one. At first he appears aloof at best and negligent at worst, in his dealings with his live-in sister and his much younger wife and especially his tenants. It's not so much that the movie eventually exposes giant character flaws in Aydin either - it's just that it so convincingly picks at the little flaws in his character that he is completely oblivious to and which are actively causing destruction in his relationship with both his sister and his wife. However, even Aydin's wife, despite growing to hate and fear him, must consent that he is by and large a hard-working, honest and intelligent man. Aydin's flaws are more flaws of the soul, if I can attempt to be poetic for a second, and they are unveiled slowly throughout the movie's gargantuan running time (3h19m), particularly in two or three separate and equally enthralling arguments with his wife and sister (who are, to be sure, flawed in their own ways as well, and the script doesn't let them off the hook either).
The study of Aydin reminded me a lot of writer/director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's previous movie Uzak (Distant), in that it too dealt with characters who weren't overtly flawed in the way we typically think of movie characters as flawed, but who had altogether more subtle yet no less damaging and very real flaws all the same. The characters, like Aydin, float between spinelessness and altruism, with no real awareness of the former or conviction to the latter. As an example, Aydin donates money to a charity not because he wants to but because he should - but it's not even that he doesn't want to either. Similarly, his repeated defense throughout the movie is a variation of "I'm not forcing you to stay" (to his wife) or "I didn't force you to come" (to his sister) and nothing speaks louder about the type of person Aydin is. He's right that he's not the problem on one level, but he's the entire problem on a completely different level. I can't explain it myself, so just watch the movie.
The movie's final act is interesting and ultimately depressing. We are shown that despite his conflicts with his wife and sister (not to mention his minor conflicts all around him with his tenants and other people from the area), Aydin has not learned and will never learn, getting drunk, getting self-righteous in his right-but-wrong way towards a local teacher, and throwing up on himself, in that order. At the same time his wife's attempt to make amends with a tenant that feels wronged by Aydin goes horribly wrong. The impact of this scene is a little tougher to pin down but to me it showed Aydin's wife experience something of the external factors that contributed to making Aydin into the man he has become. Aydin's wife is altogether more naive and innocent and this harsh brush with an ugly reality (and her subsequent tearful-bordering-on-traumatized reaction) suggests that not only has she now been face-to-face with the kind of thing that could give rise to apathy in a person (like her husband), but that she is aware that her own soul has been poisoned too. Which is, of course, one of the most powerful things about Winter Sleep: the recognition of ourselves in Aydin and the uneasy feeling that we are like him too, maybe in more ways than we'd want to admit.
The movie was, characteristically of Ceylan, beautifully shot in a mindblowingly gorgeous location. Most movies this long are usually filled with slow, static shots. Winter Sleep has a few, but it is an incredibly dialogue-heavy movie. Unlike, say, Albert Serra's Story of My Death (another slow director turned chatty) where the dialogue made me want to drown myself, Winter Sleep's crackles. It's absolutely rich and engrossing and makes the movie's lengthy running time feel like nothing at all. And I have to give special mention to Haluk Bilginer who played the role of Aydin, and gave an incredibly naturalistic and impressive performance. No grandstanding, no huge show of emotions, just an incredibly real performance in which a raised eyebrow or a bemused smirk still said so much.

eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999)

5/10
eXistenZ has a mildly interesting concept, moreso if you set your mind back to those times in the late 90's when the movie came out when virtual reality and computers as reality and The Matrix and Y2K were the pressing concerns of the times. Viewed in 2015, eXistenZ is kind of hokey, and its "Cronenberg prosthetics" (is there a name yet for those unconvincing plasticky looking body part facsimiles he insists on using in just about all his movies?) don't help make it look any more authentic. For most of the movie I didn't care about its protagonists and the story itself is kind of muddy. As the audience, we're never really given any reason why we should care about Allegra or her game or why it needs to be preserved, especially once we go "into it" with the protagonists.
There's a pretty cool double-twist ending that I'm kind of amazed/annoyed I didn't see coming, although maybe if I had been trying to unravel the movie a little more instead of mostly just waiting for it to end, I might have (then again maybe not).

Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2006)

7/10
If you'd never seen Children of Men but only had to imagine it based on what you were told about it (the actors, a loose sketching of the plot, maybe the director), what you'd envision would be pretty much exactly the same as the final product. At least it was for me. I mean yeah it was good in just about all areas but didn't do anything particularly extraordinarily, although the initial concept and premise was intriguing. I don't normally care much for Clive Owen but he was a good fit here.
Speaking of extraordinary, the unbroken tracking shot at the climactic 'battle" scene is very impressive, but when the movie built up to an impressive trick of camerawork or direction instead of something that actually serves the story, it's hard not to feel like it's a bit showy and gimmicky. I mean yeah from a technical standpoint it was impressive but I feel like it was also there to make up for the fact that the movie didn't really have a whole lot to say in the end (or by the end) and this was just fancy window-dressing to obscure that fact.

Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)

4/10
My great shame is that I didn't see this in 3D, which is seemingly a sin on par with watching Avatar or Gravity on one's smartphone. I saw it in the officially-released 2D Blu-Ray version, so that still counts for something? I would like to see it in 3D, not because I enjoyed the movie but because apparently there's some pretty impressive and rule-breaking 3D shots that I think would be very interesting to see "for real". The way the movie is shot (by cinematographer Fabrice Aragno) is by far its strength as there's a real hypercolor beauty to a lot of the shots. Goodbye to Language is if nothing else a really strong and convincing argument for how beautiful digital filmmaking can be.
As for the movie itself, well, to me it's an arthouse Avatar. Avatar was beautiful but packaged with a dumb plot that a 5 year old could understand. Goodbye to Language is beautiful and packaged with a dumb plot that nobody on earth could possibly understand. Where Avatar quotes anyone-can-get-it fare like Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas, Goodbye to Language is its polar opposite, jammed with no-one-can-get-it references to Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Rilke, Solzhenitsyn, Ellul and too many others. And if you stripped away the technical marvels of Avatar you were left with little of interest; the same, I think, applies to Goodbye to Language. Or at least it did for me. And maybe Godard wanted it that way too. But his movie still bored me to tears. Even after watching it in part or in whole three consecutive times (it's only 69 minutes long) and reading as much as I could about it, and deconstructing and piecing back together its twin narratives and double actors and obscure references, the value of the movie was almost entirely lost on me and I have my suspicions that it would have been lost on a whole lot of other people too if it didn't have the uncriticizable name of Jean-Luc Godard attached to it.
Nonetheless I do remain impressed that Godard has not gone quietly into his twilight years - this is a movie as provocative and impenetrable as anything released by any younger filmmakers out there, and it still could not have been made by any other filmmaker but Godard. Not many directors in their 80's have ever continued to try to push boundaries as aggressively as Godard has without dipping into self-parody at any point, and I have plenty of respect for that.

12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995)

9/10
Ridiculous that I haven't seen this movie until now! I don't know what I was waiting for, it was on the "someday" list forever. I'd seen the movie that inspired it ages ago, Chris Marker's La Jetee, and thought it was really cool but I wasn't confident that using it as a jumping off point for a feature would work so well. I was wrong, it worked brilliantly, and 12 Monkeys is brilliantly scripted which certainly helps. The movie has a really similar feel to Brazil in both its paranoid plot and the way the films are shot, Gilliam certainly has an unmistakable style. I never really cared too much for Bruce Willis in anything but he was really great in this. Brad Pitt is more than a little over the top and his performance is off-putting at times (specifically when we first meet him) but is okay overall. I was going to ask what ever happened to Madeleine Stowe but it looks like she recently returned to acting on TV's Revenge, which I haven't seen. Overall a really great movie, even knowing the main "twist" of La Jetee doesn't spoil the fun of watching 12 Monkeys to the end because it's so expertly crafted, every scene leaves you wondering how they're going to get to what comes next and how they made a movie that teeters on the brink of insanity yet manages to make perfect sense.

Force Majeure (Ruben Ostlund, 2014)

8/10
What a great title for this movie. Force majeure is legally defined as a "chance occurrence, unavoidable accident" (Wiki). Perhaps more relevant to the film, force majeure "[does] not excuse a party's non-performance entirely, but only suspends it for the duration of the force majeure" (Wiki again).
A near-miss avalanche that sees husband and father Tomas running for cover leaving his wife and 2 young children behind is the central concern of the film. For Tomas, the episode is little more than a story to tell at dinner; for his wife, it's a minor annoyance that slowly grows into a major impasse (a metaphorical avalanche so to speak): her perception of Tomas is permanently altered. The way this event is treated among the movie's characters was one of my favorite aspects of the movie. It's almost like an horror movie epidemic (underlined by the score's Hitchcockian string stabs), slowly infecting almost everyone who comes into contact with it: Tomas, his wife, their kids, their friends, and, more indirectly, an entire busload of people. Eventually Tomas is forced to confront his own actions, both to himself and to his children, pathetically staging a perilous situation on the ski hills where he can "rescue" their mother in front of them, an attempt to restore some kind of balance to their now-skewed family unit.
The movie makes for an interesting commentary on the fragility of not only our relationships but ourselves as people and who we are, or who we think we are. I found it very interesting to learn afterward that writer/director Ruben Ostlund came up with the movie after reading about a dramatically high rate of divorce among couples who survive major catastrophes.
The movie is beautifully shot, both in its ski resort interiors and mountain exteriors. I found it suffered from a similar "problem" as Ostlund's 2011 film Play - it presents a really interesting dilemma and asks some difficult questions that don't have easy answers, but ultimately there are niggling feelings of...incompleteness? Both movies were like reading a thought-provoking op-ed piece. I appreciate the questions they asked but I might have hoped for a little more closure and, once the questions are out there, it's hard to see much value in returning to the essay or film again. As much as I liked Force Majeure, I don't see a whole ton of value in repeated viewings, which maybe knocks its score down a notch for me.

Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg, 2014)

4.5/10
I'm still waiting for a David Cronenberg movie I really love as even his best efforts (The Fly, Videodrome) I've found overrated. He's a .200 director for me. Maps to the Stars probably isn't "best Cronenberg" by any metric. It's very reminiscent of his last, Cosmopolis, as it too feels angry and restless and makes some rather banal stabs and commentary about whatever Cronenberg was seemingly annoyed by on the day of shooting. But it's just as content to look pretty and it always does, given the gorgeous Hollywood interiors most of the movie is shot in.
The actors are the main draw here, especially Julianne Moore who is fantastic. Mia Wasikowska is fine too and I don't know who Evan Bird is but he was great as a snotty, punchable-faced spoiler child star.
As for the movie itself, it felt like David Lynch (speaking of) already critiqued everything said here with way more artistry and way more weirdness in Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire. Maps wants you to believe it's weird and arty but it's not, really, and the ending proves that. Kind of like Cosmopolis, which started out weird and arty and ended totally boring. Mostly Maps is just kind of unpleasant, certainly not something worth revisiting any time soon.

Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)

8/10
I felt especially compelled to finally watch this after someone reviewed it here and said it reminded them of David Lynch and after seeing all those okayish Oscar movies I needed a blast of something weird. Well it didn't remind me too much of Lynch but I enjoyed it and it was certifiably weird at times, although ultimately told an interesting and rather depressingly tragic story. The "feeding" scenes, I guess you could call them, are monumentally impressive and hypnotic, and I found myself wishing the movie was made of more of those and less of Scotland (although the visuals are pretty impressive all around).
The movie felt like it lost a little steam at about the 3/4 mark and had a hard time transitioning from the middle to the end. It's not the masterpiece certain indie film websites keep telling me it is but it's a very cool and very original movie and I dig it.

Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)

6/10
I'd never actually seen this before so I watched it on TV. It was fine but you know, don't have much to say about it. Guess I would have appreciated it more if I had seen it as a kid. For now I can't say it'll hold much of a special place for me.

Kill Your Darlings (John Krokidas, 2013)

7/10
A movie about that time Lucien Carr, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were sparking a literary revolution and oh yeah, Carr murdered a guy. The movie does a good job of portraying the development of both events in sidestep. It's helped along by good, credible performances, especially Daniel Radcliffe as Ginsberg and Dane DeHaan as Carr. The movie, thankfully, is not entirely reverential to the literary titans it portrays, showing them occasionally as the messy, unpleasant, pretentious, morally-confused kids they were.
First-time director John Krokidas does a very fine job, although he leans a bit too heavily on upbeat montages. They work okay when set to the hot jazz of the time, but when one is backed by TV on the Radio, well, why? Krokidas is careful to let the story to do the talking and directs pretty unobtrusively, maybe a little too unobtrusively but that's OK.

American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014)

7/10
It was entertaining enough if unspectacular for the first 75% of the film, but I felt like things kind of fell apart with the remaining 25%. Notwithstanding Kyle's actual account of the events, I thought the movie wrapped up his fourth tour way too neatly - casting Mustafa as a recurring villain gave the story a weird, almost "video game" type feel. Like Kyle had to beat the "final boss" before feeling like he had accomplished what he had to and could finally head home.
The ending was also problematic. Since the case still isn't closed on Kyle's death, there was only so much the movie could do or say in depicting it and it had a weirdly rushed, anticlimactic feel. Couldn't we have waited a couple more years to see how the trial shakes out before committing his life to film? In any case, it was not hard to be moved by the tragic poignancy of a guy who lived his life to protect others only to be murdered by one of his own...on U.S. soil no less.
I'm gobsmacked that people have criticized the movie for glorifying war or blamed it for dehumanizing Iraqis or anything like that...I don't know how dumb you have to be to interpret this as a "pro-war" movie, come on. I was actually expecting the movie to be a lot more chest-thumpingly pro-America (based on what I'd heard) than it turned out to be.
In any case, the action was mostly very good, and Bradley Cooper was very good himself, but in comparing this to other recent war movies, it's a lot closer to The Hurt Locker (i.e. meh, not bad) than Zero Dark Thirty (i.e. great) for me.

Selma (Ava DuVernay, 2014)

7/10
Following The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game in the "true stories told well" category this year is Selma, which was everything I thought it would be and little more and I could probably copy and paste my review from the Imitation Game in here and there wouldn't be much change. I liked Selma a little bit more as it was still more emotionally engaging than IT and its lead performance was much, much better but it's still not a movie that's particularly memorable or notable for any one reason. So I'll say what feels like something I've said a lot about the Best Picture finalists this year: well told, well acted, well scripted, well shot...nothing much else to say.

The Theory of Everything (James Marsh, 2014)

8/10
I really liked this. Comparing it to other Best Picture nominees, it is not tier 1 (Boyhood) or tier 2 (Budapest) but fits snugly with Whiplash and Birdman in tier 3 as movies that were not life-alteringly brilliant but ones that I can definitely say I enjoyed on most levels. On the face of it its closest comparable is The Imitation Game but I found TToE had a lot of warmth and heart that Imitation Game lacked.
I will say one thing with respect to Tkachuk4MVP's review a couple of posts ago - this is definitely a movie that knows it has a tremendous amount of ground to cover and at times it's easy to become conscious of that as a viewer. Often, especially at the beginning, it feels like it's racing along, cramming in necessary scenes and info, but not really taking as much time as it should to dwell on them (gotta stay inside that Academy friendly 2 hour running time!).
But on the other hand, I liked how it took the focus off of Hawking's genius (mostly). We all know he's a genius, we don't need the movie to go to the necessary lengths to tell us that again. And frankly I assume what would be needed to establish just why Hawking is a genius would go over a lot of the audience's heads, myself included. So I give the movie credit for dodging that battle and instead mostly focusing on a (not so) simple love story that does plenty of credit to the subject himself while remaining engaging, interesting, and heartfelt. Not to mention beautifully shot, extremely well acted, and featuring a really good score. Plainly put if you take it for what it is, it makes virtually no missteps. No pun intended.
I also thought Eddie Redmayne was exceptional and deserving of every accolade he should get for his performance including (if I had my way) the Oscar.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)

9/10
What's not to like? This is the kind of movie that could easily become one of my favorites, a la Dazed & Confused. Nothing happens, but everything happens. I never knew this was written by Cameron Crowe, though it certainly shines through in the prominence of the music selections. Just a great movie all around, loved it.

The Fall of the House of Usher (Ivan Barnett, 1949)

4/10
One of many adaptations of Poe's story, this is the 1949 version by director Ivan Barnett. It's not particularly good, especially the story which gets muddled in a hurry. The director elects to use a strange device in which the story begins in the present day with a bunch of men sitting around a smoking lounge telling tales, and one of the men decides to recite The Fall of the House of Usher, which leads to the main story portion of the film. I'm not sure why this was done, but it was pretty unnecessary.
The movie gets points for making "the hag" creepy enough and there's some cool black and white gothic shots, but one of the other adaptations probably did this story better.

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (Nathan Juran, 1958)

6/10
Switching gears slightly, this was a pretty fun, pretty silly watch. Although inconsistencies abound and the special effects were, uh, less than good. For a movie made in 1958 it had some interesting things to say (unintentionally) about how others perceive us. The amount of people afraid to say something for fear of being thought of as a nutcase is still around today (arguably more than ever, with mental health becoming an increasingly hot topic), although it doesn't involve 50 foot women.

Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, 2014)

8/10
Whiplash isn't a particularly brilliant movie - for the first hour plus it's actually pretty by-the-numbers. It's not that it turns into a brilliant movie after that point either, just that it finally gets to where you knew it was going and it still turns out to have been totally worth the wait. It's also helped along by two great performances by Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons. Simmons' performance doesn't exactly have a lot of depth but for a supporting role it's hard to ask for much else. In fact Simmons' character Fletcher teeters so often on the brink of being cartoony that he deserves a lot of credit for keeping him monstrous instead.
(Some spoiler talk below)
I read some conversation (here and elsewhere) condemning the movie for appearing to condone bullying. I'm not totally sure I agree. I think some viewers were left disappointed that we never really got to see Fletcher's real comeuppance despite him being a jerk for 100% of the film's running time, but just because we're denied seeing that doesn't mean the movie condones what Fletcher does. I mean, if the movie had shown Fletcher and Andrew having a laugh and sharing an iced tea after the final performance I might agree, but the movie smartly ends onstage, leaving any inference of right or wrong up to the viewer alone. So I don't think the movie was condoning or condemning, just portraying, which is OK too.

The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum, 2014)

6.5/10
I mean, you know, it is what it is. Incredibly formulaic, tells a reasonably interesting story, well scripted, well acted, perfectly pitched at the old white dudes who give out the awards...there's not really much to say. I remember in reviewing a movie once kihei said, as a kind of metric, 'there must be someone, somewhere out there who claims this is their favorite movie, but who?'. I felt that way about The Imitation Game, so non-descript on so many levels that I can't imagine anyone ever claiming it as their favorite movie of all time...but I guess there must be someone out there!
With regards to the movie itself, one thing I didn't like was the inclusion of newsreel clips and historical footage of rote scenes like soldiers going to war or ships ablaze in the ocean or whatever. It felt ugly and unnecessary.
I've heard some complaints about the way they dealt with Turing's homosexuality and whether it really had a place in the movie but I didn't mind the way it was handled. Surely it would have been a bigger omission to not address it at all? Especially since it deeply affected his life and his work.
I also, of course, went on Wikipedia and read all about the inconsistencies/inaccuracies, of which there are many, but I usually don't care too much about that. I try to take a Herzogian 'ecstatic truth' approach to biopics like this as opposed to expecting a historical record from a piece of entertainment.
But whatever. Accurate or not I'm not going to remember it too far beyond this week.

Birdman (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, 2014)

7.5/10
Not going to lie, I was a little bit expecting to be more blown away than I was, rather than just pretty entertained, amused, and impressed by Innaritu's rather insane vision and execution. I'm actually surprised the Academy has latched on to this movie as much as they have, it's arguably one of the strangest Best Picture nominees since...well I don't know. Since a long time ago, it feels.
All the acting was great, especially Keaton and Norton, and I loved the jazzy drum score. The one-shot (but not really) technique was all it was hyped to be, and very well done. If anything the film lacks an emotional punch I was expecting/hoping for, which I think goes a lot of the way to explaining why I didn't like it more than I did. i.e. remaining impressed by it as opposed to being enthralled with it. I do feel like it's a movie that would grow on me with repeated viewings. And hopefully its widespread acclaim leads to more movies that take the kind of chances this one does.

New Year's Evil (Emmett Alston, 1980)

3/10
Recorded this off TV around New Year's, it's a pretty lame 80's slasher pic. A killer calls the host of a New Year's Eve new wave party show and promises to kill someone at midnight in each timezone leading up to her death. The only cool thing about the movie is the new wave rave with some pretty groovy tunes from the house band. Nothing else is particularly interesting or notable.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977)

7/10
I never saw this one before so I recorded it off TV, it was good. Classic Spielberg really. Richard Dreyfuss was great and I really liked how Spielberg made it a family affair (in the beginning at least). He has (had? He doesn't do it so much anymore) such a knack for making even movies about aliens or sharks tie back to family relationships and whatnot. Nothing much to complain about, I enjoyed it.

Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)

4/10
I read the book last year in anticipation of the movie. It was no masterpiece - messy and convoluted, as expected from Pynchon, but not worthless. Doc Sportello is a great character (the book is full of great characters honestly) and the almost-but-not-quite-post-hippie fried California 1970 vibe was nailed.
The book was fun and frustrating, and obviously any attempt to bring its mess of plot and characters to the screen was going to be a challenge. PTA does a reasonably good job of paring Pynchon's novel down into something that could be put on screen, although in 2 and a half hours he still doesn't ever really come close to saying anything worthwhile or telling a compelling story. What's shocking is how boring the movie is, which the book rarely was. Maybe it's Pynchon's language that made the book compelling and was lost completely in translation. I was reminded of an earlier adaption, Walter Salles' On the Road, which put the book on the screen but completely lost the charm of the author's voice in doing so.
I found the movie really dropped the ball on my two previously-mentioned favorite parts. I really didn't like Phoenix's portray of Doc. Doc in the book reacts to the ridiculous circumstances he gets caught up in with a fried, bemused, mildly curious detachment. Phoenix reacts to almost everything with a furrowed brow and a scowl. Paranoia is a theme in the book but Phoenix's portrayal takes it too far. Sportello as a character to me is way closer to someone like the Dude in the Big Lebowski - solving the mystery of the story almost because he has nothing better to do so why not.
And the other aspect, the stoned early 70's in California, was almost completely absent. Too much of the movie takes place in mostly cramped, unattractive interiors. The era was endemic to Pynchon's book, Anderson treats it almost as an afterthought. The movie could have easily taken place in the present day and there would be little difference.
Finally I was really disappointed in PTA's direction, which was so bland and unadventurous I never would have guessed it was the guy who did There Will Be Blood and The Master at the helm of this thing. A director for hire could have put together a similar effort.
So there you go. There's almost nothing in here worth recommending to anyone for any reason. A huge missed opportunity to make something really cool, in my opinion.

All is Lost (J.C. Chandor, 2013)

8/10
I was surprised at just how much I liked this. It's Robert Redford stranded at sea once his boat and communications equipment are damaged. He's the only actor in the movie (credited as "our man" in the credits, which I enjoyed) and there's barely any dialogue at all. It's a really strong performance, and Redford was a good choice for it - he has a natural believability in the role.
There's just something in his weathered face that suggests that Redford absolutely could have endured something like this at some point. I liked how there was very little grandstanding - no dramatic physical transformation, no "I have fire!!!!!" moment like in Cast Away. I could have even done without the few "will he or won't he be saved?" moments (the rote scenes you would expect - the radio starts to work then dies, the ships pass by but don't see him). I get they're there for dramatic tension, but I want to see a movie do away with those and just deal with one guy working with what he has in front of him and nothing more - no tawdry flickering hopes for survival. Is that misanthropic?
Anyway my strong feelings about those points made me think I would hate the ending all the more, but I really didn't. I liked how it was done, the way it pleasantly subverted my expectations made me like the film as a whole even more.
I also liked the decision to keep the character almost ultra anonymous. Outside of his opening speech (which is really his farewell, and the movie then rewinds to the events of the preceding 8 days), we don't know anything about the character. Who has he left behind? Who, in his speech, is he apologizing to? And for what? Is anybody waiting for him? Did he leave on good or bad terms with whatever life he had back on land? I'm glad the movie didn't shove those questions in our faces but instead made us pose them ourselves. All the more effective.

Good Morning (Yasujiro Ozu, 1959)

7/10
An Ozu film involving a small community (neighborhood I guess) and their amusing internal politics, the central ones being the neighborhood's collective rent that went missing instead of being turned in, and two of the young boys refusing to speak until their parents buy them a TV. It is typical Ozu - charming and lightly humorous and a little poignant at times. I don't love any of Ozu's movies but they're all enjoyable on one level or another.