Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (Jorma Taccone & Akiva Schaffer, 2016)

6/10
Even if we all know that's Andy Samberg and the Lonely Island guys pretending to be pop stars and making a fake documentary, what's the point in presenting yourself as a documentary when you just cast big stars in other roles? Tim Meadows is the manager, Sarah Silverman is the publicist, Maya Rudolph is an appliance salesperson. If the movie isn't willing to make any effort to sell itself as a documentary, even if it's a comedy, why should I care? The movie doesn't stop there but even stoops to lame meta-jokes: Justin Timberlake plays the group's chef, and in one scene he's singing to himself, and the guys tell him to shut up and leave the singing to the pros! Get it? Because, in real life, in fact, Justin Timberlake is the pro!!! It's like casting Tony Iommi or Joe Perry as a guitar tech for the Spinal Tap guys and winking at the camera the entire time. Surely this is close to if not the lowest form of comedy?
As if that isn't enough, Popstar is jam-packed with more celebrities, playing themselves, giving on-camera testimonials to the group's greatness - Carrie Underwood, Nas, A$AP Rocky and Ringo Starr to name just a few of the many. In literally every scene there's a new celeb cameo designed to elicit a titter of recognition from the crowd, which smacks of laziness to me.
But that's, overall, my problem (ideologically) with this movie. Everybody is so clearly in on the joke, so obviously having fun with the notions of what it means to be a pop star in 2016, that how could the satire not be completely toothless? How can you offend anyone if you're trying so hard to include everyone?
All of that may maybe be enough to sink the movie on its own merits...but it's actually a pretty funny movie. Notwithstanding my examples above (or once you get past them). Undoubtedly, the Lonely Island guys know comedy pretty well. There are a lot of jokes and lines that are quite funny, and even if they don't land, there's another joke coming up in three seconds that might be more to your taste. So, of course, it's the old dilemma of picking the movie apart versus shutting up and just laughing along. It's easier to say Popstar works on some levels and not on others. If you give up your hopes of Popstar being a biting satire and instead just enjoy it for what it is, you may find yourself laughing more than you expected. At least I did. I'm not in a hurry to watch it again but if I turned on the TV and it was playing, I'd probably stick around till the end. For whatever that's worth.

Unfriended (Leo Gabriadze, 2014)

7/10
I'll give this movie maybe a slightly higher score than it deserves just because I was suckered in by the central premise (gimmick if you prefer): a horror movie where the action takes place entirely on a computer screen, via Skype, Spotify, Gmail, Facebook, Chatroulette, etc. It delivered very cleverly on this premise and handled its central technology very well and believably. As a horror movie, I'm forced to admit it falls short in some areas. It's just not that scary, and for a while the movie dips into a little too much "teenage revenge drama" and neglects the scares for entirely for too long. So I enjoyed it, it moved along briskly (barely 75 minutes long too which is an ideal length for a movie like this) and it kept me entertained and engaged the entire time. No classic but a nice, clever little movie.

Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, 2014)

7/10
I will confess that I am a sucker for self-referential plots in movies. What I mean is, Kristen Stewart and Juliette Binoche are rehearsing a movie script in the Swiss alps and the movie frequently and cleverly blurs the lines between the script and their relationship. Even if, admittedly, I'm a little unclear as to the ends it achieved in this movie, I was still dazzled in a couple of scenes. The actresses are both great, especially Stewart (maybe because we expect it more from Binoche and less from her) and Chloe Grace Moretz was very good too. I probably couldn't explain this movie to you very well, but as far as a movie about an actress coming to terms with her aging self and faced with the threat of a younger generation (not at all a new concept in cinema by any means) I found it quite interesting.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, 2015)

9/10
Although I like the franchise, I'm not even a huge Star Wars fan and even I could tell just how much was being borrowed from the original trilogy. But you know what they say...if you're going to steal, steal from the best. I thought the movie was really fun, and to invoke a stupid cliché, It Really Felt Like Star Wars Again when the prequels often did not. I thought the chemistry between John Boyega and Daisy Ridley was a joy to watch. I was not expecting Harrison Ford back in such a big role but he really carried a lot the movie unexpectedly. Even Adam Driver, probably my last choice in the world for someone to play a villain in a Star Wars movie, looked great. So what I liked overall was that the script seemed to draw great performances out of lesser known actors, whereas the prequel scripts seemed to drag down even objectively excellent actors (Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman). Really lots of fun and well done.

Jurassic World (Colin Trevorrow, 2015)

5/10
I didn't think it was bad as some people were saying, but it wasn't that great either. The Jurassic Park franchise relies on very smart people making consistently dumb and illogical decisions, and maybe it's because we're four films (right?) deep now but those illogical decisions feel harder to stomach than ever. The biggest problem for me was that the movie doesn't ever really feel fun, at least not in the sense the original did. Almost from the word go we're dropped into a park where things are (a) motivated by capitalistic greed and (b) going dangerously wrong. Where's the fun in that? Two other problems were the two annoyingly trope-y kid characters and the hilariously shoehorned-in romantic subplot. Some of the dinosaur kills felt remarkably gratuitous (even though, unlike JP, the horror aspect is almost completely dropped, so these gory kills feel weirdly out of place) and you're never totally sure who to cheer for between Chris Pratt and his group, or the militant guy and his crew who do make some decent points, or the heel-turning raptors, or the main "big bad" dinosaur, or what. It just led to disinterest for me.

Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller, 2014)

6.5/10
I intentionally kept myself in the dark about the central story so I could go into the movie blind. It just took me longer than I expected to get around to watching the movie. At first I was very much impressed with the cinematography and direction, which are not usually meant to be eyecatching in a biopic like this. But as the movie started to sag in its second act, it felt more dull than artistic. The umpteenth time we're subjected to a misty shot of the estate with a plinky piano backing score, you start to wonder if these shots are standing in for the fact that the movie doesn't really have a whole lot to say in the end. It never attempts to delve into the psychology behind John du Pont or his motivations, and it generally keeps all of its characters at a frustrating remove. And by the end of the film I was left to wonder "is that all there is?" which I suppose is a natural byproduct of making a movie about a senseless event. Full marks to the three principal actors (even though I felt Steve Carrell's accent, as good as he was overall, was a little all over the place) and the film is certainly gorgeous to look at, I just wish there were more.

Keanu (Peter Atencio, 2016)

7/10
Thought it was okay, not as laugh out loud funny as I would have hoped for but there are some good lines. I thought it poked good fun at the gangster movie cliches, but despite that the structure of the movie felt heavily borrowed from the 21 Jump Street remake - a comedy about two guys in a "fish out of water" scenario, one of them gets somewhat pulled into the lifestyle, they have to prove they're legit, etc. There's even scenes in both of them where they're made to ingest the drug at the center of the narrative. And the semi-ironic love for a pop star (George Michael here) reminded me of the Backstreet Boys in This is the End, and I feel like there's another example of this that's eluding me at the moment. So not terribly original I don't think, but entertaining enough.

Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015)

8/10
I don't have too much to say except that it's a really good story, really well-acted that constantly keeps you guessing and has everyone's motives properly kept in the dark. A good soundtrack and fantastic location and set design. Very cleverly written and I enjoyed it well enough.

Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016)

5/10
This was not as downright bad as I expected it to be but it's still an extremely confused, holy mess of a film. In fact that's partly why it's so frustrating, because good ideas, scenes, dialogue, etc constantly rub up against bad ones. It has weird contradictory problems - it's very long and is constantly throwing plot exposition at you but at the same time it feels underdeveloped and half-baked. There is enough about Affleck's Batman that's different from Bale's so as to make him intriguing as a character, but not enough to make his motives throughout the movie feel believable. Jesse Eisenberg did the best he could, but his Lex Luthor was a boring cliché of a character from start to finish. On one hand, I liked the idea of Luthor pitting Superman against Batman, but I don't think it was executed terribly well. We're never given much of a reason to care about why this is happening, and the idea of two of the biggest superheroes in the world being manipulated and acting like children was more lame than anything. The battle scenes are great, although the final one with Doomsday which felt very messy.
That's kind of how the whole movie went for me - anything done well was almost immediately undone or at least marred by something else done poorly. It became very evident that the starting point for this project was "let's do Batman vs. Superman - anybody have any good ideas for that?" as opposed to "I have a good idea for doing Batman vs. Superman". Zack Snyder has to take it all on the chin for this failure but it's also evident that enough things went wrong to suggest this was the fault of the many.

Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2015)

6/10
I was a little surprised at the overwhelmingly positive reviews of this movie. It seemed up my alley but I expected to like it more than I did. It had kind of superficial Herzog quality to it, but rather than being mystical and subtle it was kind of heavy-handed and on the nose. The sound design and mixing was excellent, but I'm a little on the fence about the use of black and white. I don't know, the movie did look good too but at the same time I kind of question washing out the whole Amazon, I feel like something was lost. Overall I found it okay, I liked the idea of a character bridging two narratives and being told via the diary of the people involved but as a whole it just didn't resonate too much with me.