The Grouchy Editor

Gone Girl

Screenwriter Gillian Flynn’s adaptation of novelist Gillian Flynn’s bestselling book is certainly faithful to the source material, but I don’t see that as such a good thing. Flynn’s twist-filled story – I refuse to call it “clever” because there are so many far-fetched developments – follows the plight of poor Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), who becomes Suspect A when his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) goes missing.  Unfortunately, the head-scratching plot holes that marred Flynn’s book are also present in the film.  On the positive side, this is a David Fincher project, and that means silly story or not, the movie is always watchable.  Release:  2014  Grade:  B

*****

Fruitvale Station

I have no idea how accurately Fruitvale Station depicts the events of New Year’s Day 2009, in which 22-year-old Oscar Grant was slain by police responding to a disturbance at an Oakland train station.  I suspect that the filmmakers put a bit too much sunshine on Grant, portraying him as a young man who was unfailingly kind to strangers, children, dogs, and his mother.  But as a dramatized snapshot of the disconnect between two Americas — black and white, rich and poor, law and lawlessness — Fruitvale is powerful and thought-provoking.  Release:  2013    Grade:  B+

 *****

The Interview

Critics want us to believe that when they sit down to review a film, they can be open-minded and objective.  But we all have expectations, and I’ll admit that mine were low for the notorious comedy, The Interview.  The movie, in which James Franco and Seth Rogen play TV journalists asked to assassinate North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, is actually … not bad.  Not great, but not bad.  A lot of the humor is sophomoric, and a little bit of Franco’s mugging goes a long way with me, but the film looks good, its heart is in the right place, and there are some genuinely funny scenes.   Release:  2014   Grade:  B-

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 The Babadook

This low-budget chiller from Australia is more effective as a study of the trials and tribulations of single motherhood than as an exercise in horror, mostly because the “babadook” itself – when we finally see it — isn’t especially scary.  Writer-director Jennifer Kent does stage some suspenseful scenes, and star Essie Davis is quite good, but there are too many familiar elements, and that damned babadook, an evil entity haunting Davis and her son, simply isn’t up to snuff.    Release:  2014     Grade:  B

 *****

The Lego Movie

Lego certainly got its money’s worth out of this inane commercial for building blocks aimed at children (and childish adults).  What I got was 100 minutes of flashing colors and nonstop noise, punctuated with bad puns and mildly amusing pop-culture jokes.  I also nearly got nausea as the filmmakers compensated for their clichéd, simplistic story — a toy construction worker mans up to defeat the bad guy and win the girl — by bombarding the viewer with frenzied activity.  (I stopped this movie twice, just to take a break from it.)  Sure, the computer animation looks cool.  I imagine it looks cool inside a tornado, as well, but I wouldn’t care to be there.  Release:  2014   Grade:  C-

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Snowpiercer

It’s the future (again), and what’s left of mankind is crammed into a high-speed train that endlessly circles the frozen Earth.  Will the have-nots in the back of the train revolt and seek revenge on the elite at the front?  Snowpiercer suffers badly from comic-book-movie disease:  It takes itself much, much too seriously.  The dialogue is trite and the character development nonexistent, yet the movie wants us to care about the fate of its cardboard characters.  There are, however, some cool-looking sets aboard the train.  Release:  2013  Grade:  B

*****

Frozen

It’s a cynical world, but you wouldn’t know it from watching Disney’s charming Frozen.  What’s not to like?  For starters, Kristen Bell brings spunk and humor to the heroine, a determined princess named Anna.  The animation is startlingly good and the songs are … satisfactory.  There are some lapses of logic in the story (loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”), but hey, this is a fairy tale and double-hey, isn’t this movie supposed to be for kids?  Release:  2013  Grade:  B+

*****

Nebraska

The rubes who populate Nebraska are a bit stereotyped, but it’s a pleasure to watch 76-year-old Bruce Dern and Will Forte as a father and son making a cross-country trip to claim what Dad thinks is a sweepstakes prize.  This isn’t director Alexander Payne’s best work, but his trademark gentle humor is on full display, and so is the Midwest – for better or worse.  Release:  2013   Grade:  B

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Blue Jasmine

You can take Woody Allen out of New York, but you can’t take New York out of Woody Allen – thank goodness.  Cate Blanchett shines as a society snob who takes a tumble when her husband goes to prison and her finances vanish, forcing her to shack up with a sister on the West Coast.  The setting is San Francisco, but the characters – each with his or her own idea of “the good life” – are pure New York.  Release:  2013   Grade:  B+

*****

Honeymoon

Here’s a spooky movie that’s refreshing both for what it is and for what it is not.  It is not zombies and it’s not vampires and it’s not all special effects and gore.  (OK, there is some gore.)  It is a throwback to 1950s science fiction, in which the communist threat reared its ugly head in monsters and neighbors and plants.  The story, in which newlyweds Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway find more than good sex at a secluded lakeside cottage, is a bit pokey at first, but the final act is chilling.  Release:  2014  Grade:  B

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All Is Lost

Robert Redford plays a yachtsman who struggles for eight days to survive in the Indian Ocean after his boat is punctured by floating junk.  Redford was praised for his solo performance in this harrowing tale, and deservedly so, but All Is Lost is really a director’s movie … and a sound engineer’s movie, and an editor’s movie, and a cinematographer’s movie, et al.  It’s a fine showcase for what only Hollywood can do:  dazzle us with sight and sound.  Release:  2013   Grade:  B+

*****

Il Futuro

This is one of those artsy, low-plot foreign movies that suck you in because the characters are interesting and the images are striking.  Sad-eyed Manuela Martelli plays an orphaned teen who, along with her younger brother and his shady pals, concocts a plot to rob an aging blind man (Rutger Hauer).  The ensuing romance between old man Hauer and waif-like Martelli manages to be simultaneously creepy and erotic.   Release:  2013  Grade:  B-

*****

Wake in Fright

“He was a good guy.  But then he fell in with a bad crowd.”  John Grant (Gary Bond) is a good guy, a schoolteacher toiling in the boonies of Australia’s Outback.  He goes on holiday, has a drink, does a little gambling … and then meets the menfolk of a community known as “The Yabba.”  What follows is a harrowing, graphic look at just how low the human spirit can fall – disturbing stuff, but expertly realized by filmmaker Ted Kotcheff.  Release:  1971  Grade:  B+

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The Den

Graduate student Elizabeth (Melanie Papalia) is researching online behavior at a video-chat site, but while she spends hours staring at a computer screen, the computer is secretly staring back at her.  The first half of The Den – shot entirely from Web-cam/phone-cam points of view – feels a lot more like Skype than Netflix.  But after tapping into our primal fears about invasion of privacy, the story devolves from clever and cool into a cliché-ridden amalgam of conspiracy silliness and Saw-like gore.  Release:  2014  Grade : C

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Tiny

There’s something romantic about chucking it all and adopting a back-to-nature existence, but I’m not sure I could follow the example of the young couple in Tiny who spend a year building a 130-square-foot cabin to call home in Colorado.  They filmed their project, which is part of a “tiny house” movement in which ecologically minded (or financially strapped) folk build and live in miniature homes.  It’s a fantasy with allure, but — there’s not enough room for my books.  Give me Dick Proenneke’s cabin in Alaska, or perhaps Jim Rockford’s trailer on the beach – small, certainly, but not that small.  Release:  2013  Grade:  B+

 *****

Black Rock

It’s “girls’ night out” from hell for three women whose bonding trip to a deserted isle goes sour when they encounter some Iraq war vets.  Rock asks some good questions: Is a woman ever partly responsible for her own sexual assault? Is every military veteran deserving of our respect?  But after an intriguing setup, director-writer-star Katie Aselton’s story degenerates into a silly, quite literal, battle of the sexes.   Release: 2013  Grade:  B-

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Birth of the Living Dead

The best part of this “making of” documentary is the gee-whiz good humor of filmmaker George A. Romero who, 46 years after the release of Night of the Living Dead, still gets a kick out of the fact that so many people have seen — and loved — his little Pittsburgh-based movie.  Romero is a much better salesman than some of the gassy windbags who are also interviewed and who seem hell-bent on attributing way too much cultural significance to what is, after all, a low-budget horror film.  Release:  2013  Grade:  B 

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Don Jon 

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Jon, a shallow bartender who is addicted to porn. Scarlett Johansson is the spoiled “princess” who wants Jon under her thumb, and Julianne Moore is a lonely widow out to save him from both porn and bad relationships.  The message is a good one, but unless you buy into the Gordon-Levitt and Moore hook-up – I didn’t – it falls a bit short as romantic comedy.  Release:  2013  Grade:  B

Captain Phillips

Hollywood has always been good at producing the fact-based action movie – provided the script isn’t too beholden to actual facts.  I have no idea how accurate Captain Phillips is as it dramatizes a 2009 cargo-ship hijacking off the coast of Somalia, but it’s tense and exciting – think Dog Day Afternoon on the high seas – and Tom Hanks’s captain is, as Hanks characters so often are, a man you can cheer for.  Release:  2013  Grade:  B+

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Klown

This Danish road-trip comedy recalls old-fashioned American slapstick, the type of goofiness we used to get from Laurel and Hardy – but with one big difference:  The sight gags, often hilarious, are also rated X.  Danish TV comics Frank Hvam and Casper Christensen star as oil-and-water pals who embark on a male-bonding wilderness trip that goes awry thanks to their own ineptitude and a 12-year-old boy who tags along for the ride.  Release:  2010  Grade:  B

Canadian actress Tinsel Korey plays a troubled bookseller going through hell at work and at home – but who, or what, is responsible for that hell?  Stained tested my tolerance for the “it was only a dream” school of filmmaking, in which the viewer is never quite sure if what he sees happening is, in fact, really happening, and it doesn’t help that the first half of this psychological horror-show is slow.  On the plus side, Korey is good as a woman who doesn’t handle stress particularly well.   Release: 2010  Grade:  B-

The Woman

Well, The Woman ain’t boring.   I’m not entirely sure what the movie is – black comedy, feminist revenge flick, unpleasant gorefest – because it’s a tonal mess, but it ain’t boring.  Sean Bridgers plays Henry Higgins from Hell, a country lawyer named Cleek who keeps his family in check with a mix of condescension, threats, and old-fashioned whuppings.  One fateful day Cleek spots a primitive woman in the wilds of Massachusetts (yes, apparently there are wilds in Massachusetts), decides to take her home with him, and then … I can’t explain it.  But it ain’t boring.  Release:  2011  Grade:  B

Passion

Thirty years ago, Brian De Palma was king of the erotic thriller.  Today … not so much.  It’s a shame because Passion is certainly watchable and bears De Palma’s distinctive visuals and soundtrack.  But the story, in which a corporate cat-fight between executive Rachel McAdams and subordinate Noomi Rapace turns deadly, is confusing and illogical.  In De Palma movies of yore such narrative lapses were both minor and overshadowed by the man’s dazzling direction.  Not anymore.  Release:  2012  Grade:  C+

Short Term 12

Looking for something that all of the critics love?  Short Term 12 has a 99% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and for good reason.  This little film about a handful of young counselors at a home for at-risk teens worried me at first, because it initially carries a whiff of Afterschool Special.  Uh-oh, I thought, it’s one of those earnest “good for you” movies.  But I was wrong. Unlike just about every other Hollywood release, Short Term 12 is neither cynical and snarky nor sappy and stupid.  It’s smart and moving.  And lead actress Brie Larson is a real standout.  Release:  2013  Grade: A-

Stardom puts the spotlight on vocalists who came close to the music-industry brass ring but, either through hard luck or, in some cases, because they didn’t really want it, missed out on solo stardom.  There is a lot of great music in this Oscar-winning tribute to backup singers – but not, really, all that much drama.  Release:  2013  Grade:  B-

.      

A quote in the ads for this film informs us that Jailbait is “in the vein of Orange Is the New Black.”  Uh, no, it isn’t.  It’s “in the vein” of trashy ’70s women-in-prison flicks like The Big Doll House.  Mostly it’s just writer-director Jared Cohn filming his girlfriend, actress Sara Malakul Lane, in one degrading nude scene after another. Lane, who was about 30 when this was shot, plays a “juvenile” sent to a detention center for young girls, which of course entails rape, shower scenes, more rape, and lesbian sex.  Lane does look good naked (she also looks 30),  but unlike those ’70s B-movies, this jail drama is a bore.  Release:  2013  Grade:  D

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