Captain Phillips

Have you ever heard of Barkad Abdi, Barkad Abdirahman, Faysal Ahmed, and Mahat M. Ali?  Neither have I, but I hope they get the chance to branch out from pirate roles because these four guys did a lot of the heavy lifting that made Captain Phillips one of the most engaging suspense-drama-thriller-type-movies I've seen in a long time.

Hey, Somali pirates, don't hurt Tom Hanks!  He's like the most affable man who has ever lived.  Also, don't try to outrun the US Navy in a shitty little lifeboat.  Ooh, this isn't going to end well.

Captain Phillips was good.  It was constantly suspenseful (although there was a little too much shaky-cam), it had scenes with lots of big boats and helicopters and things that at least appeared not to be CGI, there were surprisingly great performances from totally unknown actors, and it was all Based on a True Story.  It's the only movie I've ever seen that has pirates in it but does not absurdly romanticize the idea of what it means to be a pirate.

Its rating of PG-13 is a measure of how miscalibrated the MPAA rating system is.  The terror and violence and blood in this movie make it way more inappropriate for children than boobs or the f-word ever could.  So don't bring a kid to it.  But go, if you want to see a well-put-together thriller that will leave you a bit shaken and a bit thoughtful.

Ender's Game

Ahhh, that's the book cover I remember from my youth.  Those were simpler times.

I've always had a hard time enjoying T. S. Eliot's poetry because one of the first things I learned about him was that he was an anti-Semite.  I heard somewhere that Robert Frost beat his wife, and I have no idea if that's even true or not, but still it colors my view of his poetry.*  So suppose there was a popular American sci-fi author who, until recently, served on the board of the anti-gay hate group the National Organization for Marriage, and who lamented in 2004 that "already any child with androgynous appearance or mannerisms—effeminate boys and masculine girls—are being nurtured and guided (or taunted and abused) into 'accepting' what many of them never suspected they had—a desire to permanently move into homosexual society."

Hello, Mr. Card.

The World's End

Mediocre summer movies getting you down?  Here is some advice.  (It's a joke about how he's British.)  From a graphic design standpoint, I hate the fact that Simon Pegg's name isn't in caps, but the online Keep Calm generator wouldn't allow me to adjust the font size, and when it was in caps it spilled off the edges of the poster.  Yes, of course there is an online Keep Calm generator.

Oh, finally 2013 gives us a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful movie!  I had almost forgotten what it was like.  This has been such a lean year for movies.  So lean that as I write this, Despicable Me 2 is still playing at the eight-screen movie theater in the tiny town in West Virginia where I live.  I mean, I like wisecracking anthropomorphic Twinkies as well as the next guy, but the title of that movie ends in a numeral and it opened in July and it is now October.  There just wasn't anything worth a shit to replace it with.  All right, so Pacific Rim was good because of Guillermo del Toro and also you can't go wrong with Ron Perlman in armored golden shoes.  And Blue Jasmine was a lovely piece of filmmaking, a sensitively rendered portrait of one woman's psychological unraveling, a Streetcar Named Desire for the 21st century,* but it wasn't a bouncing-up-and-down-in-your-seat-with-delight kind of a movie.

The World's End was.

Here's Why You Shouldn't Watch Riddick

This promotional image, which is not intended to be ironic, is downloadable as desktop wallpaper from some website somewhere.  It has a hashtag on it in case you want to tweet something like "the latest #Riddick movie is really sexist and homophobic."

 
There are quite a few things about this movie that are forgivably bad, if you don't walk into the theater expecting much, but here's why you shouldn't pay a single solitary dime to watch Riddick, directed by David Twohy and starring Vin Diesel, who also has a producer credit.

Once again, Diesel's Riddick finds himself on a heavily art-directed alien planet with venomous space-beasts and ominous weather and difficult topography and so on.  He activates a sort of beacon-y thing and some mercenaries come and try to kill him.  All of them are men.

All except one.

She is a lesbian.

She is every douchey frat bro's fantasy of a really butch lesbian.

At the end of the movie, Riddick has sex with her.  Mercifully, this takes place offscreen, but he has sex with her.

Because you see, she was only a lesbian because she hadn't found a real man.

Fuck you, David Twohy.  Fuck you, Vin Diesel.  Fuck.  You.

Elysium

For plot reasons too convoluted to explain here, Elysium found it necessary to surgically implant a really old Garmin into the back of Matt Damon's head.

I just watched Elysium.  It was vivid, original, and flawed.  It made me uncomfortable, but I was riveted.  Quite a few reviewers disliked it.  I think I know why.

So yes, there were all kinds of things to dislike about how Elysium was put together.  The plot was a hot mess, full of holes and missing backstories.  The relationships between the characters seemed to take place at a distance.  A love story between Matt Damon and Alice Braga is gestured at but never fleshed out.  One character is killed and resurrected in a cheap, cheap, cheap plot twist.  Many actions are superficially motivated by concern for a sick child, but the movie treats her as nothing more than an adorable human football, to be whisked from one place to another for dramatic purposes.  We barely have the opportunity to know her.

Also, Jodie Foster's accent is all over the place, but you know, the movie is set in like 2152 or something.  Maybe in the 22nd century there's a whole country full of people whose accents are a shifting, vaguely patrician mashup of British-y, generic European-y, possibly South African-y actor-babble.  I mean, it's the future.  They have magic beds that cure your diseases and robot servants and a space station that looks like West Egg rolled onto the inside of a bicycle tire.  One lady with forced, stilted speech patterns is probably the least odd part of this movie's world.

This Is the End

This is a picture of a corn dog.  It isn't even from the movie.

Seriously, I have nothing to say about this movie.

The Heat

As a number of feminist bloggers have pointed out, some jackass photoshopped the living shit out of Melissa McCarthy in this photo, to the point that she doesn't even look like herself.  Fortunately, she looks like herself in the actual movie, and she's very, very funny.

So some movie development person watched Bridesmaids and thought, "Melissa McCarthy is hilarious!  Why don't we have her play pretty much the same character in a really by-the-numbers buddy cop movie with two women instead of two men?"

They did that and the result is a lot of fun.  You should go see it.  McCarthy is the wacky cop and Sandra Bullock is the hard-nosed, by-the-book FBI agent who just needs to loosen up.  They're a charming comedy duo.  There are vagina jokes in place of dick jokes.  There are also dick jokes.

Until I saw this movie, I didn't realize how fatigued I'd become with a summer movie lineup full of self-serious, CGI-driven blockbusters in which zombies gnaw people's faces off, civilization crumbles to the beat of a relentless thumping musical score, sleek and muscular superbeings careen purposefully through the air, and by the end of the movie a major American city lies in smoldering ruins.

The Heat makes no such tiresome demands on the audience.  It's just a series of solid comic scenes wrapped around a plot involving crime or drug-smuggling or some damn thing that you will probably care about for forty-five seconds, total, over the entire course of the movie.  Time flew by in the dark theater, the audience all laughed together, and John and I walked out into the rainy night feeling happy, relaxed and refreshed.

Man of Steel

This is SPARTA!!!!!1

I'm really not sure whether to recommend Man of Steel to you or not.  It's very wonderful to look at, a little bit too long, and absolutely gagging on its own sincerity.  I liked looking at it more than I liked watching it.  The pictures are pretty but the plot is a mess.

Like director Zack Snyder's earlier film 300, Man of Steel brings many of the pleasures of reading a graphic novel to the big screen.  Krypton is beautiful and ancient and corrupt and dying.  There's a great version of that old sci-fi trope, the Wise Alien Council, with elderly sages in robes and elaborately sculptural headdresses sitting in really fancy chairs in a cathedral-like throne room.

Kryptonian technology is Art Deco-y and full of nods to H. R. Giger in skull-like helmets and fabulously complex alien machines, many of which really look like stylized penises and vaginas.  (I'm not making this part up.  When the Kryptonian high council or whatever it is imprisons the evil General Zod and his minions in the Phantom Zone, they first seal them into giant flying space dildos.  Seriously.  Watch the movie and tell me I'm wrong.  Also, Superman's mother is frequently accompanied by a giant flying robotic uterus that talks to her.)

Now You See Me

Mark Ruffalo and Mélanie Laurent appear baffled by this magical camera doohickey, which is festooned with fluorescent tubes for some reason.

Now You See Me, although a bit short on substance, is pretty to look at and fun to watch.  It has talented, well-known actors in it, delivering performances that are consistent with their brands.  Morgan Freeman is twinkly and avuncular and knows something you don't.  Dave Franco always smiles like he just got away with something, maybe something dirty.  Mélanie Laurent constantly looks like she's about to take a long drag on a cigarette, exhale while rolling her eyes, and then say something bored and world-weary, yet fascinating.  (I don't think she actually smokes in this film, she just always looks like she's about to.)  Woody Harrelson is once again a cute, non-threatening, stoned redneck.  And Mark Ruffalo is doughy and sweaty, yet still oddly attractive.

Anyway, the movie is the story of four magicians who get a big break from a mysterious benefactor who summons them to an abandoned apartment in New York's Chinatown using Tarot cards (each of them gets a Tarot card with an address on the back of it, and they all go to that address without questioning why they're doing it and they all arrive at almost exactly the same time even though some of them have to travel across the country.  Whatever.)  Anyway, using a rose and some dry ice, the mysterious benefactor instructs them to start doing expensively produced shows that involve magically stealing huge amounts of money and giving it, Robin-Hood-style, to the audience.  Interpol (Laurent) and the FBI (Ruffalo) end up chasing them through nicely filmed versions of Las Vegas, New Orleans*, and New York City.

The Great Gatsby

It must have been a giant pain in the ass to clean all of that confetti out of the pool.

I have a bad habit of putting things off until the last minute.  I finished Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald's* novel, which was great, about half an hour before we left for the theater to see Baz Luhrmann's new movie of the same name.

If you haven't read the book, it's about a rich guy named Gatsby who is in love with a woman named Daisy, who unfortunately is already married to another rich guy named Tom, who is an asshole.  Gatsby has a mysterious past full of secrets.  Women frequently resemble flowers.  Expensive cars are driven very fast.  Jazz is played.  Adultery is committed.  Alcohol is consumed in great quantity.  No spoilers here but... things probably aren't going to end well.

I was afraid that the movie would be disappointingly different from the book.  Instead, it was disappointingly... similar.  Luhrmann's faithful and abiding love for Fitzgerald's text is kind of the worst thing about this movie.  It was as if he took a Word file of the novel, chopped out everything that wasn't dialogue and emailed it to his gigantic and well-funded design team, then handed the dialogue to his actors and said, "say this."

Iron Man 3

Since this was a Marvel film, it should go without saying that there's an Easter egg at the end of the credits.  While my boyfriend and I were waiting for it, some dude came around handing out t-shirts that had been suction packed into those little hockey puck package things.  It was very exciting.

Ah, what a pleasant, relaxing series of witticisms and explosions!  If you've seen the previous three films featuring Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, then the world of this movie will require no explanation or setup.  If you haven't, then that's too bad as no explanation or setup is forthcoming.

Don Cheadle is still Rhodie, Gweneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts once again puts up with more romantic and professional bullshit in two hours than one person should have to deal with in a lifetime, and Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark is still the sweetest, most charismatic wealthy douchebag that anyone could possibly hope to regret having slept with.  These characters were fun to be around before, and they're still fun to be around.

Evil Dead

This is not an image from Evil Dead, but rather a picture I found by typing "tropical beach" into Google Images.  I do not recommend viewing any part of Evil Dead.  Seriously.  Stay home and do something you enjoy.  Bake some cookies.  Play with your cat.  Go for a nice walk.  Anything but watch this appalling shit-show of a movie.  Fuck.

I like horror movies.  I do.  But this one... I'd pass if I were you.

So five young people who look like models from a JC Penney catalog go to a cabin (in the woods!) and all of them die except one or two.  I can't let you in on the exact number of survivors, not only because that would be a spoiler, but also because my boyfriend and I walked out after about an hour.

Anyway, as in Sam Raimi's original, a book bound in human flesh and written in blood summons an ancient evil.  There are one or two half-assed attempts to suggest that our intrepid, generic young Barbie and Ken dolls have personalities and back-stories (one of them is even a stoner), but these are abandoned pretty quickly in favor of a descent into nonstop, joyless torture-porn.