a) Oculus
This is one of the best horror movies I've seen in a while, for two reasons. One, they do everything that modern movies go out of their way to avoid to suspend disbelief, like letting the characters use cell phones and cameras to try and document the supernatural thing going on or call for help. Two, Karen Gillan gets to play a rare horror movie heroine that you can really root for, clever and funny enough to give the movie some comic relief and make you hope they figure it all out and survive. Even the back-and-forth between flashbacks and the present day storyline, which I usually dislike in movies, worked well and eventually became disorienting to great effect.

b) Captain America: The Winter Soldier
I don't feel much investment in these Marvel movies, if they're good I'm happy and if they're just okay I forget them like the hundred other superhero movies. But they've been on a roll lately, this is up there with The Avengers and the best Iron Man flicks. Even with Chris Evans being kind of straightjacketed into such an earnest character, he gets to show a little more personality in this one and the action and conspiracy stuff works pretty well.

c) American Hustle
Depending who you ask, David O. Russell either used to be an interesting director who sold out to Oscar bait, or someone who just became a major filmmaker recently. I don't really have a dog in that fight -- I saw and enjoyed a few of his earlier movies but they all seemed kind of messy and idiosyncratic but not necessarily great, and thought Silver Linings Playbook was just kinda lame. This movie was maybe not worth all the fights between the two schools of thought, though -- if anything it feels like a merging of his odd early movies and his recent awards-friendly approach. Because it's really only a faux-Scorsese period piece crime movie on the surface, it's really closer to a farce and reminds me a bit of Soderbergh's The Informant! more than anything else. It just has so many ridiculous moments: Christian Bale yelling "oh God I love gettin' to know ya!" or narrating "she was the Picasso of passive aggressive karate" or delicately arranging his super fake-looking hair into a combover on his super fake-looking bald cap, Amy Adams screaming on the toilet, Bradley Cooper exhaling cartoonishly and holding her foot. I've long been indifferent to a lot of the actors in this movie but they won me over, especially Cooper with his hysterical Louis C.K. impression.

d) The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Smaug was pretty cool, although I didn't like this as much as the first movie just by virtue of Serkis/Smeagol being by far my favorite thing about all of Jackson's Tolkien adaptations. It's definitely kinda silly that there's still another long movie left in this story, but I'm not mad about it like a lot of people are, it is what it is, I'm glad Jackson got to do The Hobbit whether it was one movie or two or five.

e) Afternoon Delight
I seem to do this every month or so -- stumble upon an indie movie on cable that stars a bunch of people I know from TV comedy (in this case, Kathryn Hahn and Josh Radnor and Jane Lynch) and then get bummed out that it's this really depressing mumblecore dramedy.

f) Adult World
This is another movie that I thought was gonna bum me out like Afternoon Delight but it turned out to be the rare gritty indie comedy that's actually funny. Emma Roberts throws herself into this satirically unsympathetic protagonist and really has some hilarious moments that make me think she should do more comedy, and John Cusack gets to bounce off of her with a lot of dryly impish, sarcastic reactions that make her performance funnier. The movie doesn't entirely come together, but it was enjoyable enough.

g) Killer Joe
I checked this out since it seemed to be one of the more well regarded recent McConaughey flicks. Started out with a bunch of annoying redneck stereotypes yelling at each other and just got more ridiculous from there, but most of the time I was never really sure what to make of it, like it was clearly going for a black comedy thing but it was more weird than funny. But then the last five minutes of the movie, and the song that played when it cut to the credits, were so batshit crazy and hilarious that it kind of justified the whole movie's existence for me.

h) The Last Boy Scout
I'm kind of a Shane Black stan, more for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Long Kiss Goodnight than the movies he's best known for, but I was never in a rush to check this out since it's kind of known as the screenplay he sold for an insane amount of money that ended up not being very good. But it was on TV recently and I watched about half of it, just to see if it had some good Shane Black banter in it, didn't really hear much.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20, 2014 at 1:44 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.