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.

Looper

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (with a brand new Bruce Willis nose) and Bruce Willis (with his existing Bruce Willis nose) in "Looper."

"Looper" was great.  You should go see it.

I mean, unless you're a small child or something.  If you're a small child, don't go see "Looper," you'd find it disturbing.  Also, stop reading my blog, it contains bad words that are only intended for grownups.

Finally, we have a time travel movie that's smart enough to stop wanking about the deep paradoxical ramifications of what it would mean if you could go and become your own damn grandfather or something, and instead recognizes that time travel, among other things, is a plot device that can be used well or poorly.  "Looper" uses it well.  The rules are clearly explained, and then they end up being important in terms of difficult choices the characters must make.  Butterflies flapping their wings and setting in motion cascades of events that alter the course of human history are not mentioned, because who gives a shit, really?

So it's 2044, and time travel hasn't been invented yet but it will be soon.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a looper, which means that organized criminals in the near future send victims back through time to a prearranged location where he's waiting with a gun.  He shoots them and disposes of the bodies.  Nobody in the present is looking for them, and nobody in the future can find them.  The victims arrive hooded and unrecognizable, with the looper's pay strapped to them in the form of silver bars.  The hood is important because eventually the victim will be an older version of the looper himself, loaded up with a big final payday in gold instead of silver.  By shooting himself, in the terminology of the movie, the looper "closes his loop."  After that, he's rich and he has thirty years until the mob finds him and sends him back to be executed by himself.  Why send loopers to themselves?  There are several possible answers to this question and one is that it makes quite an interesting premise for a movie.

Resident Evil: Retribution

Milla Jovovich and some other chick stride purposefully from one place to another, wearing impractical shoes.  Soon they will shoot some things, exchange a few lines of wooden dialogue, and then shoot some other things.

Resident Evil: Retribution is fine if you like that sort of thing.

It's also full of examples of that phenomenon in which the heroine is wearing very high heels until she does a demanding action sequence and then at the beginning of it they cut away for a second and suddenly she's wearing flats.

The ending implies yet another sequel, and with five of the damn things knocking around out there already, why stop now?

The Possession

As you saw in the preview, spunky young Natasha Calis stabs Jeffrey Dean Morgan in the hand with a fork because she's all possessed and everything.  What you did not see in the preview is that throughout the rest of the film Jeffrey Dean Morgan does not have a bandage or a wound or a scar or anything even though she stabbed him so hard that the fork was sticking out of his hand like it was a baked potato.  The reason for this is that the filmmakers pretty much didn't give a shit.

If you saw the previews, you already know that there’s an ominous box, and a little girl, and a bad supernatural thing in the box that gets into the little girl, and also some Hasidic Jews.  If you didn’t know that, now you do.  Let’s take it from there.

Horror movies are allowed to be bad.  More than any other kind of movie, a horror movie can suck and still be kind of enjoyable, if you like horror movies.  In a few years, this movie will probably be played on cable TV on a Sunday afternoon, and if you’re feeling lazy perhaps you will lie on the couch in your sweatpants eating those little cheddar cheese goldfish crackers and then 92 minutes later you’ll watch the credits go up the screen and think, “well that happened,” and then, as is the case with such movies, it will be later in the day and you will have little cheesy yellow crumbs on your t-shirt.  Which is totally fine, if you like that sort of thing.

Premium Rush

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his bike are in one place, but they must go to another place very fast.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a bike, and he also has a valuable piece of paper that a bad man wants.  He can ride his bike really fast, but the bad man chases him.  During the chase, the bad man is very bad, a lot. The piece of paper needs to get from Columbia University to Chinatown.

How few parts can a film or a bike be made of and still function?  Gordon-Levitt’s bike-messenger hero rides a fixed-gear bike with no brakes through a movie made only of a 91-minute chase with a few flashbacks.  Amazingly, it almost never gets boring.  (We’ll just forget about that gratituitous race through Central Park.  Don’t worry, it’s not too long.  They ride fast.  Go to the bathroom or buy some Runts or something.)

Other than that, there’s lots of balletic, gritty, hard-earned bicycle stunt work, a concerned lady whose role is to be super, super concerned about whether or not her valuable piece of paper reaches its destination, Aasif Mandvi, and an ex-girlfriend who manages to be a love interest while barreling all over Manhattan on another bicycle.  There is also a bike cop.  One of the rules of the movie is that when the bike messengers fall down, it’s serious and dramatic, but when the bike cop falls down, it’s hilarious.

“Premium Rush” is a good-natured, economical, oddly pure movie.  It contains no long speeches or elaborate theories.  It’s just a fun, fast ride.