a) Boyhood
I always thought it would be great if someone shot a film sporadically over a number of years, so that the actors could age naturally without the filmmakers coming up with hokey visual touches to artificially span time. So I was pretty interested to see this just by virtue of it being shot over 12 years. And given the fact that it started with a kid just a little older than my son, and followed him until he started college, I just kind of assumed it would reduce me to tears. But I dunno, I have pretty mixed feelings about it. I haven't seen too many Linklater films but I didn't think of him as making such completely slapdash TV movie-looking flicks. By the end there was a lot of accumulated affectionate familiarity with the characters that started to become entertaining on its own, even some of the deliberate callbacks and narrative devices paid off pretty well. Charming and enjoyable overall, but still a pretty sloppy and flawed movie with a couple of howlingly stupid scenes that make the unanimous praise seem kind of mystifying.

b) Ender's Game
Growing up, I read Ender's Game and probably 4 or 5 other books in the series and really enjoyed them (although my favorite ended up being Speaker For The Dead, which is a pretty different story from what most of the other books are about). And there were a good 20 years where I was pretty excited by the prospect of there being an Ender's Game, and the longer I waited the better it seemed like the movie industry was prepared to adapt it well and launch a whole sci-fi franchise around it. But of course by the time it came out last year, it'd been forever since I'd read any of the books and Orson Scott Card had turned out to be kind of vile and it was hard to get enthusiastic about the whole thing. The movie was alright, it was interesting to see how they visualized some of the more novel concepts, but it never really felt like they captured the tone of the book or what it made it fascinating to me and so many other kids.

c) Runner Runner
This is the movie that had just flopped when Justin Timberlake had his whole GQ tantrum, and that actually made me kind of curious to see it. Plus I will really watch anything with Gemma Arterton in it, she is amazing. This is not that bad, really, pretty boilerplate thriller stuff and if anything it's Affleck who should've been recast.

c) Don Jon
Joseph Gordon-Levitt has always just seemed vaguely pretentious and corny to me, but the trailer for this looked light and entertaining enough that I was kind of rooting for the dude to jump into directing with a thoroughly unambitious romcom. This movie actually does somehow end up a little too ambitious for its own good, though, chasing its big themes about love and sex and chick flicks and porn so thoroughly that the characters and the story feel beside the point. Gordon-Levitt is committed enough to his character that it feels warmer than just a snide Guido stereotype, but not enough. ScarJo gives a surprisingly great performance that's actually kind of enhanced by how the character is less than the sum of its parts, really thought it showed her comedy chops. Overall fell a little flat but not terrible. Reminded me of how the very serious actorly Edward Norton made his directorial debut with the light fluffy romcom Keeping The Faith.

d) The World's End
I'm a fan of the previous Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg movies, and more than that I appreciate that they seem to really pointedly not making the same movie over and over or recycling character types -- Pegg and Nick Frost play very different people, with very different relationships to each other, in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz and this. This, unfortunately, is not remotely as funny as either of those movies, but not unpleasantly so. In fact it's pretty well made, I liked the storytelling especially -- none of the high concept sci-fi stuff in the movie is even hinted at until about 37 minutes in, a full third through the movie. But once it kicks in, it gets pretty nuts.

e) White House Down
As dumb action movies go, this was pretty proudly dumb, although they didn't have as much fun with it as I hoped for. I did appreciate James Woods playing a villain who hates the black president at a time when that's kind of his IRL persona on Twitter.

f) Coffee Town
A decent little comedy starring a bunch of random D-list TV actors (and also Josh Groban, who's pretty funny in it). I like that the whole caper that the plot revolves around kinda gets saved for the last minute and then barely even happens, leaving the rest of the movie to just be kind of entertainingly aimless.

g) The Internship
Wedding Crashers is not exactly a classic but I think it's aged pretty well, and I would've have minded Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson had done a bunch more buddy comedies together of varying quality. But doing this one after so many years is pretty anticlimactic. I don't know how this guy Shawn Levy failed upward from tepid family comedies like Big Fat Liar and Cheaper By The Dozen to projects with some of the biggest comedy stars out, Date Night was actually decent and so is this to a degree but you just wonder if someone else could've executed them much better.

h) Hyde Park On Hudson
I think it's interesting to see how Bill Murray has kind of crossed over into being accepted as more than a comedic actor without doing a whole lot of serious or dark stuff -- even something like Lost In Translation or the Wes Anderson movies trades heavily on his impish charm but made an impact by putting him in a different context than, say, Caddyshack or Ghostbusters. So it's interesting that they even were able to find a historical film for him to star in as an American president that still manages to be lights and within his wheelhouse. It's maybe a little too light, though, it just kinda came and went without ever really registering with me. I did watch it late at night while I was writing on deadline, though, maybe I was distracted but it didn't seem good enough to watch again more attentively.

i) Free Samples
Another decent little indie comedy with a lot of recognizable but not very famous actors (and also Jesse Eisenberg) bumming around in a plot without much consequence. But I always dig movies like this that all take place in the space of one day, and it really kinda perceptively captured some particular things about working a shitty service job and dealing with customers.

j) Triangle
This is one of my favorite horror movies that I've seen in a while, starts off just building all this dread and paranoia as a group goes out for a day of sailing and then gets lost and stranded. And then it gets weirder and more high concept from there, but the production values are really high and the direction is really artful in pulling you into this weird world. It gets a little repetitive towards the end but it kind of serves to make you feel as insane as the main character.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 04, 2014 at 2:47 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.