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.