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.

88:88 (Isiah Medina, 2015)

7/10
Canadian filmmaker Isiah Medina's first feature 88:88 premiered at TIFF last year to some acclaim. It is much closer to experimental video art than anything else. Images flicker by in seconds, jump-cutting and bleeding into each other. The audio, a collection of whispered voiceovers, freestyle rapping, one-sided phone conversations, sound and music almost never matches what's seen onscreen. An obvious point of reference is latter-day Godard. Another is latter-day Malick, mostly due to the voiceovers. Robert Ashley may also be a distant antecedent.
The title refers to what's shown on electronic clocks after one's power has been cut and then restored. It would be wrong to say 88:88 is "about" being poor, but it's certainly a theme. I saw a tweet once that said something like "I'm first world poor - I use my iPhone or my laptop to check my online banking to see how broke I am". That's sort of a main idea here, where iPhones and weed take priority over heating bills.
Medina is a young guy and there is a "student film" vibe here but I don't mean that in a wholly negative sense. It's simply a film about many themes that a lot of college or university level students would spend a lot of time musing about - money, philosophy, skateboarding, girlfriends, parents, what to do with one's life. Some may scoff at a movie dealing with such first world problems (and the pretentious presentation to go along with it), but it's undoubtedly a film about themes that are real to Medina and his friends and many others his age. Visually it's fun to watch, there are some really great shots, and at 65 minutes it doesn't overstay its welcome.

Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015)

6/10
How did they take such an explosive subject matter and make such a blah movie out of it? The problem with Spotlight is that it's a movie on rails, never once deviating from the track that takes it from start to finish. There's nothing in here that you don't expect to happen, in fact, even less happens than what you might expect. In the course of uncovering the central scandal, the Spotlight team runs into almost no obstacles, no resistance, and anything that does arise as a potential obstacle to overcome (e.g. Mark Ruffalo's character getting to the courthouse in time) feels like a screen-written artifice. More cynically you could call this movie "3 Men and 1 Woman Doing Their Jobs" because that's exactly what it felt like watching.
One interesting angle (whether or not certain members of Spotlight themselves were implicit in the cover-up) is brought up and brushed aside almost immediately. It leaves enough of an impression but I wish it was probed with a bit more detail, to give even more of a sense of a community truly and collectively looking the other way.
Seen through the lens of other, similar movies nominated for Academy Awards, Spotlight is closer to me to a thing like The Imitation Game from last year. It gets up on the screen, tells its story, all the actors do their jobs well, and then it leaves without making any significant impact or stirring up any real emotion. It was fine, but not much more for me.

The Big Short (Adam McKay, 2015)

8.5/10
The tone of the movie was exactly what I expected going in, and it straddled the line of serious/comedic very well. With a directing history filled with comedies I was impressed by Adam McKay's ability to stay on the right side of the line. I even enjoyed the "dumbing it down" celebrity cameos which could have felt gimmicky and self-conscious in another movie but felt welcome in this one.
I haven't read the book (yet) but no doubt Michael Lewis provided ample material for McKay and the ensemble cast to work with. Everybody is pretty much great across the board, and the performances feel genuine despite the goofy hairpieces (in contrast to American Hustle, for example, which had goofy performances to match the wigs).
I was also glad they focused largely on the heart of the matter, the financial crisis and the "big short" plot itself. The Moneyball adaptation faltered shoehorning in Billy Beane's daughter. The Big Short veered a little in that direction (the brother's suicide) but mostly stayed on the right side of the line. Entertaining, informative and scary.

The Last Days of Disco (Whit Stillman, 1998)

6/10
I watched this one a while ago but never reviewed it. It was OK. It started off very promising with a really cool, persistent disco soundtrack. At first I thought the whole movie would take place over one night in the club, which would have been great. But as we got to know the characters better the movie took a dip for me. Writer/director Whit Stillman call this part of his "doomed-Bourgeois-in-love" trilogy and that's a pretty apt description of what happens here as you get to watch a bunch of white, well-to-do, attractive people bicker and try to find their way as young adults. Their problems come off as very much the privileged, first-world kind and none of the characters are especially sympathetic, and often they feel more like ciphers for Stillman's unique lines and phrasings as opposed to relateable adults. The beginning is good, the end is good, but I kind of wish the middle was a different movie about different things. Good soundtrack though!

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.