Crimson Peak

Funerals rarely look as funereal as they look in Crimson Peak. These are outfits that practically scream: we are going to take a dead person and bury them right in the fucking GROUND.

I would like Guillermo del Toro to design my mausoleum, please.

Man, Crimson Peak is a great looking movie. It's lean on plot, and full of characters you've seen before doing things you've seen before, many many times before, but you can't throw a rock in that movie without hitting some lovely melodramatic Gothic architectural doodad or other, and the characters constantly walk around swathed in yards and yards of dramatically swishing diaphanous translucent fabric that swishes around them, being super dramatic and translucent and diaphanous.

There is a funeral near the beginning of the movie with a black coffin processing toward a huge, elaborately carved stone monument, with men in top hats and women all in black with black netting over their faces, and del Toro loves showing us that funeral so much that not too long afterwards he needs to show us ANOTHER funeral, only this time it has to be raining so everybody can be holding black umbrellas that go with their black top hats and dresses and face-netting.

To demonstrate how simple the plot is, here is a fairly complete summary of it in only seventy-six words: a girl falls in love with a mysterious man from far away. They marry and she returns with him to his home, only to find that the home is full of secrets. For a long time, she wonders what the secrets are, and then she finds out what they are, and they are kind of fucked up. After that, some perilous things happen, but she will probably make it through the peril and be fine afterwards.

But for heaven's sake, most of the movie is set in a mansion where there's a hole in the roof that constantly has leaves or snow falling langorously through it and landing in an elegant, melancholy pile on the floor, and where blood-red glop oozes up between the floorboards and leaks down the walls and although the movie makes some bullshit excuse about how the house is built on top of a clay mine and the clay is very red, Guillermo del Toro just wants to make the house look like it's bleeding. And you might well ask, given that the house is in a barren clay field with hardly any trees, and of the few trees there are, none come even close to being as tall as the house, well then those leaves that are falling so evenly and majestically through the roof of that red-glop-bleeding house, where the hell are they coming from? FROM THE FEVERED, BAROQUE IMAGINATION OF GUILLERMO DEL TORO, THAT'S WHERE.

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.