Who wants to have exactly zero fun watching Michael Fassbender starve himself to death? If there are any takers, I’d love to point you to Steve McQueen’s Hunger, a dramatization of the 1981 Irish hunger strike. McQueen burst onto the scene with this sobering tale of a five-year-long protest by incarcerated members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. In Hunger, McQueen offers up the raw filth of the history, but also reveals the depravity justified by a ruling government when dealing with “enemies”, a timely theme considering the ascension of the surveillance state and hard questions about the incarceration of enemies of the state.
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Category: Film Reviews
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The best action movies succeed by crafting sequences with jaw-dropping visuals and physical stunts, hopefully with characters that we care about and in a way that advances the story. More and more often, action movies in this century lean hard on the crutch of CGI to dazzle us, and usually they are happy to dispense with the story and characters in favor of large explosions, cartoonish monsters, and entire sequences “filmed” in a computer program. Used well, CGI is a powerful tool which can instill a film with detail, and acts to enhance that which appears on the screen – but we seldom see such restraint (the revelatory Mad Max: Fury Road is the most recent exception). In light of this trend, it is an absolute and almost visceral pleasure to experience The Raid from director Gareth Evans. The Raid (aka The Raid: Redemption) is a hybrid between your standard crime film and a martial arts escapade with a story semi-reminiscent of Dredd: an elite police team stages a raid on an apartment building controlled by a crime lord, but things go horribly wrong about six floors up, and the team is forced to fight their way out and struggle for survival as the crime lord’s henchmen descend upon them,
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There was never a reason to expect the sequel to Pitch Perfect to be very innovative. If you thought that the first movie was a tired exploitation of the popularity of Glee with a half-hearted attempt at comedy, then that’s what you’ll get with this rendition. Similarly, if you were amused by the a cappella mash-ups of recognizable hits and idiosyncratic humor of the original, then you’ll find much in which to delight with this continuation. There are a definite nods to the original, and I feel like the weaker parts of the first installment were minimized with the sequel, resulting in a slightly better movie overall.
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Have you ever seen a Mexican standoff fist fight – with two of the combatants chained together? Mad Max: Fury Road treats us to this scene during a lull in the action, as a way for the audience to catch our breath. This film is an absolute assault on the senses in the very best way possible, and when the credits finally rolled at the end, the reality shock was palpable. I felt as though I needed my mind to recover, to slowly remove itself from the astounding world of George Miller’s action masterpiece, which may be the best action film of the decade, if not the century.
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Last year, when Edge of Tomorrow was released in theaters, I remember being vaguely aware of it. I tried to get a friend or two to accompany me to one of the few showtimes left, but nothing came of it. I resigned myself to seeing it at some point. I knew it was supposed to be an interesting piece of science fiction action, and that meant that it would cross my plate eventually. I waited far too long, because this movie is fantastic.
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Avengers: Age of Ultron is everything one could want in a big budget summer action movie: multiple great action sequences, compelling characters, and kicking ass. Obvious comparisons will emerge between this film and its predecessor, but I very much see them as equals. Both films balance humor and action, juggle myriad superheroes, and portray interpersonal relationships with nuance– making them far more meritorious than your standard Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) installment. Essentially, however you felt about the first Avengers, you will feel mostly the same thing, plus or minus a few specifics. It is the focus of this review to opine on those specifics, while offering a caveat for the future of this franchise, and the MCU in general.
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Here in Madison, Wisconsin, the Overture Performing Arts Center screens silent movies with live accompaniment from an organist as part of a program they call, “Duck Soup Cinema”. On April 18th, I had the pleasure of watching Buster Keaton’s, The General in this setting, and it was one of the more fun movie-going experiences I have had in a long time. We were fortunate to experience this film at the hands of Mr. Dennis James, an accomplished organist and lover of silent film.
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Predestination is a movie which rewards viewers for knowing as few details of the plot as possible, and yet it is hard to talk about this film without revealing at least something, so I will keep discussion of the plot to the first seven minutes of the movie – certainly sufficiently intriguing to whet your interest. The movie, written and directed by the Spierig brothers (Michael and Peter, whose other films include The Daybreakers), opens with Ethan Hawke in voiceover, asking an unseen someone, “What if I could put him in front of you, the man that ruined your life? If I could guarantee that you’d get away with it – would you kill him?” A character is then seen carrying a briefcase and a violin case as he rushes down some stairs into a boiler room. The briefcase morphs into a containment device for a bomb which he discovers almost instantly, as if he knew it was there. But, someone else is in the room with him, and a short firefight erupts. As the bomb ticks below 10 seconds, our character hurries to drop the bomb into the containment device, but he is too late. The bomb ignites. Our character’s face is covered in flame and he writhes in agony on the floor, crawling towards the violin case. The unknown assailant steps out of the shadows, and slowly pushes the case towards the injured man. Then, a single jarring sound and we are transported to a hospital room, with a man covered in bandages.
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Alejandro Iñárritu’s Birdman, Or: (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) dedicates itself to providing commentary on the state of the dramatic arts, especially in Hollywood, while also offering a haunting, too-familiar meditation on ego and inner conflict. These two foci are married through telling the story of an actor named Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) who is desperately trying to make his mark on the New York drama scene by directing and acting in his own adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story called, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Years ago, Riggan played a superhero named, “Birdman” in a trilogy of movies that, while successful, labeled him as an unserious, talentless Hollywood actor and he desperately wishes to shed this characterization of himself.
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Plot and Theme 