The Neon Demon (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2016)

5/10
I'll gamely defend Only God Forgives, it's not a masterpiece on the level of Drive but it's still got enough going for it that it deserves better than it got from a critical point of view. Not so for The Neon Demon. Nicholas Winding Refn's now signature style is firmly in place - mind-boggling costumes, make-up and, well, neon lighting with a great score once again by Cliff Martinez. It's a little more chatty than OGF or Drive, but not by a whole lot. What's disappointing is all this aesthetic is wasted on such a by-the-numbers plotline - the virginal blonde heading to Los Angeles to make it in the cut-throat model industry. It's a little more stimulating than Cronenberg's dive into similar predictable territory a couple years ago with Maps to the Stars, but barely. Refn wrote the movie himself, I just can't figure out what he was trying to get across that hasn't been done a bunch already before. The movie has a cool, totally over the top grand guignol finale that I enjoyed a lot, and I wish the rest of the movie was equally unchained. As it is, it's pretty forgettable aside from some nice visuals.

Love (Gaspar Noe, 2015)

5/10
This is just the 4th feature Gaspar Noe has directed in 17 years. It isn't as atrociously awful as Enter the Void, but we're still far from the heights of Irreversible (I have yet to see Seul Contre Tous). Notably, Love features graphic scenes of unsimulated sex. However, recent arthouse films like Blue is the Warmest Color and Stranger by the Lake have featured graphic sex scenes as well as being remarkable films, thus raising the bar across the board. It's not enough to skate by using sex in an attempt to be "shocking", you also have to provide a great movie. Love is not a great movie. As I said, it's not as bad as Enter the Void, but it's not as adventurous either, for what that's worth. Noe is at his best making his case for pure, passionate love and sexuality embittered by what we know is coming (evoking very much his strength in Irreversible) but these moments are too few and far between. The sex becomes monotonous, the acting is dicey throughout, and it's just not that interesting or provocative. The lighting, however, is truly exquisite. And at least Noe appears to have made an attempt to edit this one, unlike Void. But it's just not good enough.

Avengers: Age of Ultron (Joss Whedon, 2015)

5/10
I really liked the first Avengers. Also, it's one of the few superhero franchises where I haven't already missed a dozen entries and feel hopelessly behind the curve (X-Men, Captain America) so I'm doing my best to keep up with this one. And I'm having a hard time trying to pin down why I didn't like this one so much. Its plot feels extremely fractured, not so much in a confusing way but just that it's so noticeably all over the place. The amount of time devoted to the in-fighting in this group (just so they can inevitably bond together at the right moment) is bordering on critical mass, and it was already a criticism of mine the first time around. It feels like padding time in a movie that doesn't need any more padding. And OK, I understand it for the heroes, but geez, do you really have to make even the villain a smarmy, quippy, banter-heavy caricature?
The battle scenes were certainly impressive, but maybe the overall effect was like spending two and a half hours with the volume turned up to 11. After a while, things stopped registering and I got bored. Maybe it's me.

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.

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.

Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015)

5/10
Thinking that 88:88 had put me in the right mindset, I decided to watch Terrence Malick's new one. His last one, To the Wonder, was godawful trash that made me want to set my head on fire. Knight of Cups is not as hateable, but it's not very good either. For the first 30 minutes or so, it's actually kind of fun seeing Malick in a metropolitan setting like Los Angeles. The fun wears off, however, and then you have 90 more minutes with a mopey, mostly mute main character (Christian Bale filling the shoes here) and a succession of women who are famous (Cate Blanchett, Freida Pinto, Natalie Portman) but who really could have been anyone being that all they have to do is walk around and be lithe. I found myself thinking, around the 78th minute, that just once I'd like to see a fat person in a Malick movie, walking around barefoot in a field or running their fingers along a weathered barn or whatever one does in one of his movies.
Like I said, after about a half hour a certain numbness sets in when you realize this is all the film is going to be and nothing more, but there's a level of melancholy too because I realized that his two most recent movies really just feel like Malick doing cheap imitations of his own previous, better films (I know Tree of Life is divisive but I'm in the "yay" camp). It's really just depressing. Yeah, there are some great shots that maybe no one else in the world would do (the dogs chasing tennis balls underwater was a particular breath-snatcher) but lately it's hasn't been worth sitting through the rest of the junk for those few moments of affirmation. Malick is rapidly eroding the goodwill he's built up over so many years, and I'm not sure how many of these navel-gazing efforts we can collectively tolerate before we say enough is enough.
I did like the score though.

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.

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).

Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, 2003)

5/10
Never saw it way back when so I watched it last night. I'm a little surprised at its widespread acclaim, especially for the acting (personally I found both Penn and Robbins to be extremely hammy). I didn't find the story particularly interesting, and the point the movie was making was sinister but ultimately also a little silly. I guess for the personnel involved and the hype I expected a lot more than a kinda interesting detective story with a kinda goofy lesson at the end of it.

(Spoiler talk below)

The reason I didn't really like it because Sean Penn, in the movie, is essentially a gangster. Right? He went to prison, he was hanging out with bad dudes, he had killed people before, all that stuff. So the fact that he killed Tim Robbins' character...it was like, yeah, that's about what I would have expected him to do.
It would have been way more chilling to me if Penn's character was just a regular guy who suddenly lost his daughter to a senseless murder and then was torn between the dilemma of taking out immediate vengeance (but possibly on the wrong person), vs. waiting for the law to take its due course.
I thought the speech at the end by Penn's wife (about the strong doing what they have to do to survive no matter what) was kind of interesting and helped save the ending for me a little bit, but not much to raise the movie above a "meh" for me.

The Immigrant (James Gray, 2013)

5/10
The Immigrant is a movie that hits the ground walking, and breezes by without ever really registering anything in the viewer. Its story is steeped in melodrama, not helped at all by the cinematography (the entire film is shot in a kind of gold/brown hue that I guess is supposed to evoke the 1920's by force) or its syrupy, string-heavy soundtrack that runs almost continuously throughout the film. Writer/director James Gray allegedly based most of the movie on the stories his grandparents (or great-grandparents?) told him of their arrival in New York, but it still feels heavily constructed and artificial.
The movie's biggest downfall to me is the main character Ewa, portrayed by Marion Cotillard. For most of the film she's barely more than a blank slate, and we are rarely given insight into what she really thinks or feels. I guess this was intentional and in concert with the movie's anonymous, non-descript title ("the immigrant") but I don't think it did the story many favors.
Despite boasting two heavyweight actors (Cotillard and Joaquin Phoenix), I couldn't really say the acting was a strength either. Both do their best to breathe some life into characters that don't have a lot of depth, but it just feels like they're overcompensating for the fact that there's not much to work with.
I also feel bad for Cotillard in a way, whose agent seems to be swinging wildly in an attempt to find a post-La Vie en Rose vehicle for her but is coming up with a lot of should-have-been-better duds (Public Enemies, Nine, Rust & Bone, The Immigrant).

Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski, 2013)

5/10
This was a movie I wanted to like a lot more than I actually did, or maybe one that I thought I would like more than I did. Shot in documentary style with a black-and-white camera and taking place over a weekend of a computer chess tournament at a hotel in the early 80's, it has an appealing retro feel. The story drifts around, spending time with participants in the tournament and other funny/bizarre going-ons at the hotel, but never commits to anything conceptually. It's billed as something of a comedy, but it wasn't particularly funny. A few strands are interesting or humorous, but nothing to write home about. This was a movie that did very well at the Sundance festival earlier this year, and my reaction to it is the same as my reaction to a lot of Sundance-approved films...it's nice and quirky enough for Mom & Pop to think it's different and exotic, but safe enough to risk offending no one. I personally thought it could have done and been a lot more.

All the Wrong Reasons (Gia Milani, 2013)

5/10
Cory Monteith gives his last performance in this movie about four people – a career-obsessed man and his traumatized wife, a single mother barely getting by and a man trying to get his job back after losing his hand in an accident. Their stories interweave, much of the life lessons doled out here involving infidelity, but no insights greater than what one would glean from a soap opera. In fact most of the acting is pretty melodramatic and the script is passable at best – it takes some logic-defying leaps that had me rolling my eyes quite a bit.

On the Road (Walter Salles, 2012)

5/10
A film adaptation of Kerouac's book has been in development for, like, 15 years. I can't imagine anyone who had been holding their breath that entire time waiting for the result would be too blown away with what Walter Salles put together here. On the Road struck me as an unfilmable book and this would appear to be the evidence of that. None of the manic urgency and pulse of Kerouac's story is here, and you get the feeling that Salles knows he's painted himself into a corner with this move...scenes pass by without any real conviction or importance attached to them. Major events in the book (Sal's stay at the farm, the sojourn with Burroughs, Mexico) come and go almost as brief vignettes that appear only in the movie because, hey, they were in the book and we had to film them.
Another strange thing is how rarely it felt like the movie was taking place in the late 40's/early 50's. Rather, I was very aware that I was watching a 2012 movie.
As far as the ensemble cast, I felt Garrett Hedlund (Dean) and Kristen Stewart (Marylou) were solid, but didn't really like Sam Riley as Sal and his forced "Kerouac voice". Viggo Mortensen made the best of what he had to work with and Kirsten Dunst felt horribly out of place.
On the whole, this just felt like a movie that didn't need to exist, illuminating nothing from its source material and failing to entertain in addition to that.

Sweetwater (Logan Miller & Noah Miller, 2013)

5/10
This is a decent-enough Western starring Ed Harris and January Jones. I keep seeing these indie Westerns thinking one will truly blow me away, but I haven't seen one yet. It's disappointing. Sweetwater doesn't make any grand missteps, really - it's just kind of...goofy. The plot is pretty threadbare...Ed Harris plays a lunatic of a sheriff who comes to town after two relatives fail to arrive with suspicion falling on the evil preacher (such a worn out trope) who's also fallen on the bad side of Jones' character once her husband goes missing. These plots lead exactly where you think they will. Really the only attractions are the beautiful, HD-shot landscapes and Ed Harris hamming it up as a zany badass who gets all the good lines and who is clearly having a blast. It's so against type from Harris' usual straight-laced and stiff characters that it makes the movie way more entertaining than it has a right to be, as everything else is fairly unimaginitive.

Stoker (Park Chan-wook, 2013)

5/10
To give you a sense of how alien Park Chan-wook's Stoker is, there's a moment early on where Nicole Kidman's character suggests to her daughter that they go shopping together, and the word "shopping" hits like a slap across the face. The movie seems so much like a movie that it's impossible to fathom these characters doing anything remotely human, let alone something as mundane as a trip to the mall.
As the movie plays on and you get increasingly immersed in the world of Kidman, her daughter India and her dead husband's brother, the movie starts to work a little bit better, but there are still oddly jarring moments whenever the "real world" creeps in, such as when India is at school. So it goes with the rest of the film - it takes place in a seemingly indeterminate time period, mixing past and present styles (emphasizing its sheer movieness and its stylistic overload), and the overall feel of the movie is the Addams Family gone Stepford Wives with a Hitchcockian twist.
It's not a total bust. The acting is great all-around and the movie is gorgeous. Park Chan-wook directs with flair, but ultimately his showy style is let down by a script that underdelivers. The whole thing just seems out of whack, a failed experiment that I wanted to like more than I actually did.

Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, 2012)

5/10
This is not a very good film, and what makes Rust and Bone even more disappointing is the fact that it has so many strong elements - you get the sense that there's a really great movie just outside the frame, waiting to be put together into something fantastic...and either Audiard lost the plot or I just didn't get it.
This movie has absolutely no rhythm, the tone is consistently messy, and it completely wastes the definitely-there chemistry between its two leads (who both give excellent performances). It's soundtrack is overwrought (figures that it's Bon Iver, a band I always suspected would annoy me), no more so than at the end of the film, when the "slow the action down and hit play on the soundtrack" reaches its height of saccharine stupidity. The movie is completely devoid of humanity or humour when it would benefit greatly from both. Just an ugly, disappointing experience that could have been so much more, and frankly baffling coming from the hand that crafted A Prophet.

Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer, 2006)

5/10
Friend wanted to watch this again, I'd never seen it, though I remember the ads for it. With the blues soundtrack as hyped as it was, I was underwhelmed. Not enough of the old, dirty, gritty recordings featured in the movie itself - too many newer renditions and covers (some in-film by Samuel Jackson himself, who does a good job at it). I don't know, overall, this movie felt pretty inconsequential - it has a ludicrous premise and still doesn't do a whole lot with it. Christina Ricci's performance is amped up to high volume and not always better for it, but Jackson is good. Overall, not much here I found worth the time.

Antiviral (Brandon Cronenberg, 2012)

5/10
Antiviral is the debut feature from Brandon Cronenberg, son of David. What's surprising is how similar its themes are to the work of his father - specifically body horror, bizarre fetishes, and celebrity obsession.
Its plot centres around Syd, the employee of a clinic in the unspecified future that sells viruses and diseases from celebrities to their obsessed fans. Syd also deals samples of these diseases to the black market, smuggling them out of the clinic in his own body and cracking their encryption in his home. When mega-celebrity Hannah Geist is revealed to be ill, Syd naturally co-opts her blood, realizing only later that someone has poisoned her, and now he's dying from the same mysterious ailment she is, and has to find some way to stop it - or at least deal with it.
Antiviral is on shakey ground from the start - at no point does it attempt to explain why people would want to infect themselves with celebrity diseases. We're just to assume that, In the Future, this is what we do. On the other hand, Cronenberg spends a lot of time explaining and developping seemingly insignificant or unnecessary plot points, which feel introduced only to overcomplicate things (the encryption, namely). The movie jerks about rather than ever settling into a comfortable flow, even if it always looks immaculate when doing so (this non-specific Future is the same one where everything is brightly white and well-lit, Stepford style).
I should also call attention to Caleb Landry Jones' performance in the lead role. If ever any performance on the planet needed reeling in - it was this one. I don't blame Jones - he does a great job. But Cronenberg is clearly pushing for too much. Jones spends almost every single frame heaving and sobbing and straining and vomiting and contorting. When the volume is at 11 the entire time, it's tough for anything at all to register.

Forest (Benedek Fliegauf, 2003)

5/10
A few years ago Hungarian director Gyorgy Palfi put out a movie called I Am Not Your Friend. Shot ultrarealistically, it compiled scenes featuring non-actors given a loose scenario and then improvising from it. It was okay. I suppose its spiritual predecessor was this Hungarian film from 2003 by Benedek Fliegauf. Following an opening where a bunch of people are milling around what seems to be a closed space in a shopping mall, we "meet" the same people involved in intense discussions or arguments. The unbroken shots each last for about 10 minutes each and feature unusually extreme closeups - the most we ever get to see are the participants faces. The topics of conversation range from a man pawning a dog off on a young man ("the dog has chosen you") to a father's bizarre way of coming to grips with his daughter's pubescence to a strange story told in a canoe of a fish so large the townspeople have been feasting on it for decades. It doesn't amount to much more than a mild curiosity and with two Hungarian movies so similar in subject and approach with five years of each other, I kind of wonder what the attraction is.

10 Things I Hate About You (Gil Junger, 1999)

5/10
Even for fluff fare, I was still let-down. Expected more from JGL and Heath Ledger, but Julia Stiles (who I'm no fan of) was good. The pace was kind of choppy and I didn't think it juggled humor and "drama" very well. Pretty meh.