American Ultra

Jesse Eisenberg spends much of American Ultra absolutely looking like shit on toast, and he really makes it work.

Movies with stoner protagonists risk devolving into a series of cliches. You know. Smoking marijuana makes you hungry, it makes you laugh at things that aren't really funny, and it interferes with your short-term memory in ways that make you comically bad at performing simple tasks. Amirite?

American Ultra is none of that. It's original, ecomomical, and visually and formally beautiful. It isn't really a stoner movie for stoners. It's surprisingly dark and smart, and it doesn't suggest that being a stoner is a lot of fun. From the beginning of the movie, Jesse Eisenberg* appears to be trying to self-medicate, and it doesn't seem to be working very well.

And then, as you will know if you saw any of the previews, Jesse Eisenberg turns out to be a trained and conditioned secret agent so secret that he didn't realize he was one, and then a lot of people try to kill him and his girlfriend Kristen Stewart a lot, I mean, seriously, a LOT, and I won't tell you exactly how it ends, but it becomes clear enough early on that this is not the kind of movie where the good guys die, or even lose, at the end.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Tom Hardy takes over the title role in 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road. Unlike his predecessor in the part, Hardy has probably never addressed a female police officer as "sugar tits."

Perhaps you didn't realize that you needed to see Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron spend 120 minutes driving a giant war-semi covered in pointy things across a blasted and poisonous hellscape with literally one tree in it while they're being hotly pursued by a sort of mobile homicidal Burning Man Cirque du Soleil show on wheels, but trust me, holy crap you need to see that immediately and when you do you will not be able to believe your eyes.

A lesser movie would have just shown us a gearshift knob made out of the head of a human femur. Mad Max: Fury Road gives us a gearshift knob made out of the head of a human femur that pulls out of the gearshift and reveals itself to be the handle of a stiletto.* I really respect that kind of attention to detail.

If most action movies are advertising, then this one is poetry. Oh, Reader, this one is savage, glorious, blood-spattered poetry, full of explosions and piercing war cries and unlikely objects flying through the air in every direction. That's right, Reader. Shit in this movie gets so real that I can only convey the intensity of my excitement by addressing you directly. As soon as we got home, my boyfriend John plopped down on the couch in front of his Xbox, and, with glazed eyes and a dreamy tone in his voice, simply said: "I need to shoot things."

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1

Who the hell is that woman on the right? I think maybe her name is Johanna or something. It basically doesn't matter.

I've been getting over a cold lately, and shortly after John and I sat down at the Regal Morgantown Stadium 12 to watch the latest installment of the Hunger Games tetralogy, I covered my mouth with my arm to cough, but ended up accidentally hawking up a giant, moist loogie right onto the arm of my sweatshirt. Have you ever done that in public by accident? It suddenly feels like everybody is watching and judging you, even though in reality it's likely that nobody noticed. I took off my sweatshirt and put it under my seat with the fabric of the arm folded so no errant blobs of loogie would escape during the film.

And if that anecdote seems wandering and pointless to you, wait until you see the first 35 minutes of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1.

If you do go to see it, persevere through the awkward intro, for beyond it you will encounter several nuggets of young-adult movie goodness unfortunately suspended in a larger, amorphous plot-slurry during which our heroine Katniss Everdeen sometimes cannot play her critical propaganda role in a civil war because she is very busy trying to decide which of two boys she likes more. One of them is a vampire and one of them is a werewolf.

Lucy

This is Lucy, a female Australopithecus who lived around 3.2 million years ago. Lucy has a brief CGI cameo in Luc Besson's new film of the same name, in which the titular character is played by an extremely distant relative of hers named Scarlet Johansson.

There is a certain tight kind of unity a film can have when it's directed by the person who wrote it. The intention of the language and the intention of the direction marry with each other to illuminate the film's subject matter in pleasing and surprising ways. Luc Besson, who directed Lucy, also edited it. His direction and his editing go together beautifully and carry the story of the film, which is fortunate because he also wrote the script and man, that guy cannot write for shit. Oh, the clunky dialogue and tiresome, interminable, faux-philosophical, pseudoscientific exposition. Oh. My. Goodness.

The first forty-five minutes or so of Lucy take place in Taipei. Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, an American expat who gets tangled up in a drug-smuggling operation run by brutal gangsters. During this portion of the film, many of the characters speak Mandarin to one another, and as Lucy does not understand what they are saying, and we see the movie from her point of view, there are no subtitles. The visual storytelling of the movie, the physical performances, and the wonderful editing come together so well that it's always clear what's going on.

A short while later, Morgan Freeman lays out the central idea of the movie in pretty much the worst TED talk you've ever heard. Remember that debunked theory that some people had in the 1990's that we only use a small percentage of our brains and if we could only manage to use the whole thing we'd be capable of amazing feats of intelligence? In this movie that theory is true and is described by Morgan Freeman in a speech so excruciatingly poorly written that by the end, hell, by the middle, you wish he was giving it in a language that you didn't understand.

The speech is accompanied by a Powerpoint presentation that includes video of Rhinoceroses having sex.

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.