The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

This is the first time I re-watched this since the theaters.  It makes me sad that Sony scrapped the franchise just when it was really starting to show progress.  The Sinister Six idea is apparently still in the works, but without Spider-Man.  There's also a Venom movie starting production soon, I think.  Tom Hardy is attached to it.  We'll see if that pans out.  Otherwise, this is just a once-promising experiment gone to seed.  Much like Spider-Man himself.  Originally posted 04 May 2014.    Rob and I saw this on Friday but I wanted to give it a couple of days before I decided if I liked it or not. 

I totally did.  I may even like it more than the first one.  There's a lot more in the way of character development for Peter Parker this time and I liked seeing how he handles the guilt of breaking his promise to Capt Stacy (Denis Leary) and the strain that puts on his relationship with Gwen.  Sure, I felt like the movie was rushed in places, but I don't think it suffered overmuch.  Also, they did some cool audio effects within Electro's score that I really appreciated.  I don't usually notice such things but that was very nice.

Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) loves being Spider-Man but hates the danger that puts the people he loves in, like his Aunt May (Sally Field) and his girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone).  Finally tiring of his namby-pamby bullshit, Gwen dumps him.  Now he's left with just 99 problems, one of which is Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx).  Max was just a lowly electrical engineer at Oscorp with a Spider-Man fetish until an industrial accident turned him into a living battery, which is apparently not covered by Oscorp's workman's comp.  He is locked up in Ravenscroft, an insane asylum, to be experimented on by Dr. Kafka (Marton Csokas).  Meanwhile, Harry Osbourne (Dane DeHaan), Peter's childhood friend, returns home for the death of his father (Chris Cooper) and to try and find a cure for his genetic disorder.  He believes Spider-Man's blood is the key.

This movie does do a lot to set up the Sinister Six project that's supposed to be coming out next year or so but I didn't feel it was at the expense of the story.  Sony seems to be taking a page from the Marvel playbook by seeding references to future characters throughout the film.  It does lend itself to world-building without seeming too heavy-handed, a lesson DC films could use. 

Alien: Covenant (2017)

  I can't completely say that I'm on board with the new entries in the Alien canon.  I think I would prefer to keep them in a separate category.  But that's just me, personally.

The colony ship Covenant is bound for Origae-6 to start new lives.  During their hyper-sleep, they are watched over by Walter (Michael Fassbinder), a synthetic.  An unexpected stellar flare disrupts the ship, causing the death of the captain (James Franco) and leaving his unsure second (Billy Crudup) in charge.  While making repairs, a crewman (Danny McBride) picks up a faint radio transmission from a previously undiscovered but seemingly habitable planet nearby.  The captain decides to check it out, over the objections of his second (Katherine Waterson).  There they find the downed ship Prometheus and David (Michael Fassbinder), the original synthetic, and things start to go horribly wrong for the crew.

I'm not sure it was intended to be, but this movie was hilarious.  It's unfortunately also very predictable, which added to the hilarity but detracted from the suspense.  Nothing here should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with any of the other movies, so it really comes down to execution.  Imma still buy it, let's get real, but it doesn't reach the heights of the original quadrilogy.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

  I hated this movie.  I know it won like all of the awards and Daniel Day Lewis is amazing, but I hated this movie.

Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) was a moderately successful gold miner until he became an incredibly successful oil prospector.  A young man named Paul (Paul Dano) comes to him with a claim that his family's farm is sitting on top of a huge oil reserve, so Plainview moves out to investigate.  He finds that Paul's family is run by Eli (also Paul Dano), a religious fanatic willing to trade the oil rights for cash so he can build his church.  Eli and Plainview develop a somewhat symbiotic if hate-filled relationship.

Every character in this movie is so unsympathetic you'll actually be relieved when they do awful things so you can hate them properly.

I have never been a fan of character dramas, although I have made exceptions if I really felt a connection with a particular plot or character.  Not here.  This goes in the same category as The Social Network of "Movies Critics Loved That I Found Inexplicably Awful and Boring."

Superman Returns (2006)

  I didn't hate this the way I thought I would.  As many of you know, Superman is my least favorite superhero.  I find him obnoxiously smug.  This wasn't horrible, however, which might be the nicest thing I've ever said about a Superman movie.

After leaving Earth for nearly a decade to chase down fragments of his lost planet, Superman (Brandon Routh) returns.  He's even able to get his old job at the Daily Planet back.  Unfortunately, time didn't stop and Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) moved on to a new love (James Marsden) and a new kid (Tristan Lake Leabu).  His archenemy, Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey), has also returned with a new plan to turn the crystals from the Fortress of Solitude into a new landmass.

Yeah, the villain's plan is kind of stupid, but it's not really the point of the film.  This might be the only Superman story that actually showed any sort of emotional consequences.  For once, his superiority to mere humans was challenged.  If it did nothing else, that alone would make it my favorite adaptation.  The fact that it was a spiritual successor to the Christopher Reeve films was just icing.

Of course, that being said, it's still not a very good movie.  The dialogue is crap, Parker Posey is annoying as balls, and Routh has zero chemistry with Bosworth.  He still makes for good eye candy (not as good as Dylan Dog, but whatever) and James Marsden makes everything better so on the whole, I'm calling this a win.

The Lobster (2015)

  Christy and I watched this last Sunday as part of our new thing.  Having seen a previous work by the director called Dogtooth, I was slightly more prepared for the ungodly amounts of weirdness in this film.

David (Colin Farrell) has just gotten a divorce after twelve years of marriage.  He now has 45 days to find a new partner or he will be turned into the animal of his choosing.  His brother Bob did not find a match and was turned into a dog.  He decides on a likely woman (Angeliki Papoulia), despite her lack of any and all empathy.  It doesn't work out and David is forced to go on the run.  He is taken in by the Loners, people who have rejected the forced pairings and live in the woods.  There he meets a woman with the same astigmatism (Rachel Weisz).  It's kismet.  Except that the Loners have just as strict a policy against couples as the rest of the world has for them.

I cannot stress enough how weird this film is.  It is funny and way more accessible than Dogtooth, but I would caution casual film fans to prepare themselves.

The film does have some interesting perceptions on the ideals of relationships in society wrapped in its absurdities but I'm not sure it's worth sitting through just for that.  It was also nominated at this year's Oscars for Best Original Screenplay.  It didn't win but it is certainly original.

Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 (2017)

  I actually saw this last weekend with my friend Hollie but I'm just now getting around to posting about it.  It was my last official week of school this semester and I just quit my job so it was a busy week.  I start a new job on Monday and a new semester in two weeks so don't get your hopes up just yet that I'm going to be able to start posting five or six reviews a week like I used to, before school.

Hopefully, all of you have seen this by now.  For you few holdouts, get on it.  This movie is awesome.

On the run from the Sovereign, Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and the Guardians crash on a distant planet.  They are met there by Ego (Kurt Russell), a celestial being who reveals that he is Peter's father.  Gamora (Zoe Saldana) is not entirely convinced, but knows that Quill needs the closure one way or another.  She, Quill and Drax (Dave Bautista) go to Ego's planet and meet Mantis (Pom Klementioff), an empath raised by Ego.  Meanwhile, Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and Baby Groot (Vin Diesel) work on repairing the ship.  Splitting the party is bad news, however, as Yondu (Michael Rooker) and the Ravagers are closing in.  Nebula (Karen Gillen) also has an axe to grind against Gamora.  And the High Priestess of the Sovereign (Elizabeth Debicki) is also hunting them.  Some days you just can't catch a break.

This was much more emotional than I expected.  There are a lot of daddy issues, as you might have guessed, but it never feels cloying or like a sad Hallmark movie.  In fact, some of the most powerful emotional moments come either during something funny or tense.  And then funny things happen during tense or sad moments.  It's like a roller coaster in the dark.

And yes, there are five post-credit sequences.  Stay for all of them.  A couple probably won't make sense if you're not a comic reader but you can Google them afterwards (I know I did).

Toni Erdmann (2016)

  And so we come now to the end of our journey through German cinema with the submission for Best Foreign Language film from this year's Oscars. I was going to watch this one anyway (because Oscars) but I wouldn't have had the wealth of background knowledge if I had seen it back in February.

The poster looks super weird but it is actually a still from the movie.  You'd just have to see it.

Winifried Conradi (Peter Simonischek) is a part-time teacher who dotes on his aging dog and his aging mother with the same care.  He doesn't get to see his daughter, Ines (Sandra Huller) much as her job is based in Bucharest, Romania.  After his dog dies, Winifried decides to surprise Ines with a visit and learns that the life she had spoken of in glowing terms is actually filled with professional disappointments and personal emptiness.  He doesn't know how to reach out to her and his corny practical jokes just push her farther away.  So he decides to pretend to leave, don a horrible disguise, and break into her life masquerading as Toni Erdmann, a life coach.  Ines is furious and decides to give her father exactly what he wants:  an unfiltered view of her life.  But the more ridiculous things get, the more she realizes that maybe he has a point after all.

This is kind of a comedy but it's a very German comedy.  Maren Ade, the director, is a graduate of the Berlin School style of filmmaking, which swings the pendulum back from pure commercialism towards art films.  As a result, there is a distinct lack of snappy editing and closure, and more of a focus on long takes, stationary characters, and unflinching views of cringe-inducing moments.  I'm not a fan of cringe comedy so I can't say that I enjoyed watching this film as much as I have others.  It's an interesting film and certainly a good film, but I didn't like it.  Enter with caution.

Or wait for the inevitable American remake currently set to star Kristen Wiig and Jack Nicholson.

Terminator: Salvation (2009)

This was supposed to go up on Friday, but I ran out of time.    This was a really terrible movie that just goes to prove that you can have a beloved franchise chock full of stars and still suck.

The future is now.  John Connor (Christian Bale) works within the Resistance against the machines, struggling with the knowledge that was given to him out of time by his mother (Lady Not Appearing in This Film).  He captures a terminator that doesn't know it's a terminator (Sam Worthington) and learns that teenage Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin, RIP) has been captured by Skynet.  Then he must decide whether or not to trust the existentially-conflicted robot.

I'm telling you people, this is bad.  It is not worth watching.

The sad part is that it tried so hard to tie in to the other three movies.  Canon doesn't equal good.  I don't have Terminator Genysis but I've heard it's even worse.  At this point, I am willing to disavow knowledge of 3 and 4 and pretend the first two are the only ones that exist.  And the Sarah Connor Chronicles TV show.  That's can stay.

Head-On (2004)

   It's time to talk about transnational cinema.  Also, sex, drugs, and punk rock.  Welcome to Fatih Akin's Head-On!

Institutionalized for attempting suicide, Cahit (Birol Unel) meets Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), a young Turkish-German woman desperate to escape the controlling ways of her family.  She propositions Cahit with a very simple plan:  they get married in name only and both continue to do precisely whatever the hell they want.  After a period of consideration, Cahit agrees.  Newly freed, Sibel indulges all her appetites and Cahit finds himself unwillingly drawn out of his misanthropic depression by her sparkly optimism.  And also her staggering hotness.  But can their relationship of convenience survive actually falling for each other?

Have you ever seen someone that was physically unattractive but you just knew they could fuck you into the ground?  Birol Unel looks like the weird laboratory-grown love child of Mick Jagger and Javier Bardem.  When you first see him, (if you're me) you're like "Gross.  Who let that hobo on set?"  Then, over the course of the film, he somehow gets progressively hotter.  It is a very strange experience.

Akin was influenced by Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese as well as Ranier Werner Fassbinder's Ali:  Fear Eats the Soul and it shows.  This is violent, fast, and bloody, filmed both in Hamburg and Istanbul with dialogue in Turkish and German.  It fixates on the experiences of German residents of Turkish background and their alienation from both worlds.  (Up until 2000, German citizenship did not automatically confer on people born in Germany if their parents were not German citizens, meaning that if your parents came to Germany as guest workers from Turkey, then stayed and had you, you were considered a Turkish citizen, not German, and were not conferred any of the rights of German citizens.  It's called jus sanguinis.  The reform makes it easier to naturalize but is still not automatic.)

This was my favorite film of the whole semester.