Swiss Army Man (2016)

  This is the Christy pick for February, if you can believe it.  That's how far behind I am on everything.  I still have to watch her pick for March before she'll even name ones for June, July, and August.

Hank (Paul Dano) is lost on a deserted island about to hang himself out of loneliness when he sees a body (Daniel Radcliffe) washed on shore.  At first crushed that his only company is a corpse, Hank soon realizes that the gas-filled body is his ticket back to civilization.

So, when I read about this film I had assumed that Hank would use the body as a makeshift flotation device, which is gross but semi-plausible.  Nope.  He rides it like a fucking Jet Ski.  And the movie only gets weirder from there as Manny (as the body is christened) becomes a font of clean water, a compass, a grappling hook, and many other multipurpose functional tools, as well as a sincere if naive confidant for Hank to work out his many issues.

It's sweet, in a way.  Also gross and batshit insane.  It's definitely an original concept.  For pure entertainment value, it's a solid watch but I'm not rushing to add it to my collection.  Tyler wanted to rename it "Harry Potter's Hairy Butthole" because there are an inordinate number of shots of Radcliffe's ass.  Also, I could have done without the dick compass gag.  It's a little passe.  I have to give it up for the totally nuts ending and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.  She comes across as the most relatable character in the whole film and she's in it for maybe five minutes.  That's gold.

I Got Nothing

This is my last weekend before the fall semester starts and I have no time again.  I wish I could say that I spent it watching movies every night so I'd have stuff to post, but I can't.  I have been watching TV instead.

I'm rewatching Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency with the new boyfriend, as he's never seen it.  My cousin Caleb asked if it was a deal-breaker if Tyler didn't like the show.  Fortunately, that's not an issue.  The new season starts in October and I'm very excited about that, though of course I don't know when I'll find time to watch it.

Tyler and I have also finished season one and started season two of Haven, which was a Syfy show that is now on Netflix in its entirety.  I'm enjoying it quite a bit, even though it's based on a Stephen King story.  Since this is the first time I'm mentioning it, I'll give you the basic run-down:  Audrey Parker (Emily Rose) is an FBI agent on the trail of an escaped prisoner.  She tracks him to a small town in Maine but discovers that there is some seriously weird crap going on, which the locals refer to as "the Troubles," and that her own past is wrapped up in the town's biggest mystery.

I have also been attending TV and Chill Fridays with Tyler and our friends, Tom and Hollie.  We've been trying to find a show to go along with season one and now season two of Preacher.  We tried Twin Peaks, Midnight, Texas, and most recently Wynonna Earp.  I was good with Peaks, though it does start out very slowly.  Midnight is new, from the same writer of HBO's True Blood, and seems extremely campy but in a fun way.  Hollie assures us that Earp gets better as it goes along but that was a rough pilot.

On my own, I've been struggling to get through season 3 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  It's just not grabbing my attention like it did the first time I watched it.  Meanwhile, I have binged almost all of Breaking Bad season 4.  I know I'm like six years behind on that show but I have to space it out or I will burn out on it.  Oh, and I also watched the Syfy mini-series Tin Man, which was on the server.  It's the loose "reimagining" of The Wizard of Oz with Zooey Deschanel and Neal McDonough.  It's not my favorite adaptation but it's not terrible.  Alan Cumming is seriously underutilized as an actor.

I tried to watch the BBC miniseries of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy from the 70s but there were too many scenes in Romanian with no subtitle file.  I haven't started The Defenders.  I think that's next after Dirk Gently since I'm pretty sure Tyler would be mad if I watched it without him.

As always, I will try and watch stuff but posts may be thin on the ground until I can get this stupid Bachelor's Degree finished.  I appreciate all of you who take the time to read, especially the few of you who comment.

The Hitman's Bodyguard (2017)

  You know I was going to see this.  How could I not?  In addition to building me a new computer for my ever-expanding digital media, Tyler and I went to see Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson team up for some ass-kicking.

Former Belarusian leader, Vladislav Dukhovich (Gary Oldman) is being tried at The Hague for war crimes but all witnesses to his atrocities mysteriously disappear.  As a desperate last effort, leaders of Interpol cut a deal with notorious assassin Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson).  In exchange for his testimony, his wife Sonia (Salma Hayak) will be released from prison.  Unfortunately, the convoy plans are leaked and only Kincaid and Interpol agent Amelia Roussel (Elodie Yung) escape the ensuing bloodbath.  Amelia knows that she can't trust anyone on the inside so she calls on her ex-boyfriend, Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds), a former elite bodyguard who has been disgraced since losing a client, to escort Kincaid to give his testimony.

This is a pretty standard buddy comedy elevated by Jackson and Reynolds being loose versions of themselves.  Salma Hayak is surprisingly hilarious as Kincaid's equally loud, violent wife, while Oldman seems like he's playing in a totally different movie.  His character is extremely serious, just a straight megalomaniac with no exaggerated or comedic affectations.  Don't get me wrong, he's excellent in the part, like he is in everything he does, it just seems like an odd choice considering that every scene without him in it is liberally spiked with the word "motherfucker."

You already know if this movie is for you based on your level of enthusiasm looking at the poster.  It's a popcorn flick for sure, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the hell out of it.  After my recent run of Oscar nominees, I needed some empty mental calories.

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013)

  Continuing my trend of shockingly topical movies that were added years before they became relevant, here's one about overcoming a legacy of hatred and bigotry. 

Nelson Mandela (Idris Elba) is a young, hotshot South African attorney when he is approached by representatives of the African National Congress.  At first dismissive of their cause, Mandela becomes their most recognized spokesman, and eventually is jailed.  From behind bars, Mandela advocates for equal representation while his wife, Winnie (Naomie Harris), becomes increasingly radicalized.

This was very much a Cliff Notes biopic.  You better have already known the basics of Mandela's politics or you'll be pretty much at a loss to understand why anything he did was relevant.  The movie makes a lot of him as a person, not as a symbol, while somehow reducing even that to a caricature.  The most exciting person in this film is Winnie, who doesn't get nearly enough screen time.  Her character arc was fascinating and would have made an excellent feature.  Elba is a wonderful performer but I think the script let him down here.

The U2 song over the end credits, "Ordinary Love," was the only Oscar nomination for the film and won the Golden Globe in that category.  It's okay, but like this film, not the best.

Manchester by the Sea (2016)

  It's the French poster but I don't care.  It doesn't make a difference.

Remember last year when people couldn't shut up about this movie?  How they praised Casey Affleck for his moving performance?  He won a goddamn Oscar for it.  It was nominated for six, including Best Picture, and won a second one for Best Original Screenplay.

And it's not good.

It might as well have been named "White Men Not Dealing with Their Feelings" because that's all that happens in it.

Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) drops everything to rush back to his hometown after his brother (Kyle Chandler) succumbs to congestive heart disease.  This brings back a host of bad memories that Lee has never confronted on top of the current situation of having to care for his teenage nephew (Lucas Hedges), a mouthy brat and aspiring hockey goon.

Watching the older generation of toxic masculinity mentor the younger, slightly more well-adjusted generation is about as heartening as you'd imagine.  And before somebody chimes in with the "everyone grieves differently" adage, ten years of dead-end jobs and bar fights does not count as grieving.  Lee does the absolute bare minimum for his nephew because he's terrified of his personal demons.  Instead of using it as an opportunity for healing old wounds, he runs.  A+ parenting right there.

And let's not pretend that this is brave, new ground for Affleck as an actor either.  It's essentially the same character he has played in Gone Baby Gone and The Assassination of Jesse James except even less nuanced.

Fire at Sea (2016)

Yesterday all my friends got together and we celebrated my birthday, which is actually on Tuesday but who wants to go out during the week?  Anyway, we went to yoga at a winery, then to a rum bar, then another winery, then a bourbon bar, and another wine bar.  So I didn't post anything yesterday.    This is another Oscar nominee from the Best Documentary category.  It did not win and I can see why.

There's a tiny island off the coast of Italy called Lampedusa that is a major hub for refugees fleeing across the Mediterranean.  The documentary juxtaposes the conditions of these refugees with the longtime inhabitants of the island, mostly poor fishing families.

Unfortunately, it manages to do so in the most boring way possible.  After the tight focus of 13th, this felt like a torturous slog.  There's almost no context provided and the documentarians don't seem to have any sort of point or agenda they are highlighting.  They focus on one island boy in particular, following him around as he plays with friends, gets his eyes checked, and messily eats spaghetti.  Seriously, this kid's table manners are the worst.  Then they cut to boat after boat of refugees arriving, being checked by doctors, and transferred to a temporary camp.  There's no overlap of the boy and the refugees.  If it wasn't explicitly stated that they were on the same island, you'd never know from just watching the film.

I can't recommend this at all.  It's incredibly boring and does nothing to promote awareness or any kind of message.  Avoid.

13th (2016)

  This is a really good documentary.  It was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars this year but lost to O.J.:  Made in America.  Both are fascinating explorations of the legacy of racism and the on-going commodification of African Americans in this country.

The title of this film refers to the 13th Amendment which prohibits slavery or involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime.  Ava DuVernay gathered a host of well-educated, prominent historians and social justice leaders to link that last clause in the amendment to the dramatic rise the criminalization of black and Hispanic Americans for profit by mostly white-owned corporations in the prison-industrial complex.  The film explores the effect of D. W. Griffith's landmark film The Birth of a Nation on perpetuating the stereotype of black men as violent criminals and the restrictive Jim Crow laws, but quickly moves to more recent history with the Nixon administration's backlash against the Black Power movement and the Viet Nam protesters.  The War on Drugs is given more context with the revelations by one of Nixon's top aides that it was most certainly racially motivated.  The association continued through the crack epidemic of the Reagan years, seeing much harsher sentences for (mostly black) crack users and dealers than (mostly white) cocaine users and dealers.  Segueing from politics to profit, the film exposes the links between politicians and corporations in the shady network of ALEC, a nonprofit conservative organization that drafts legislation for use in state governments.  Some of their members include the Corrections Corporation of America and the American Bail Association.  These companies have a financial incentive to put people behind bars and keep them there, feeding on a system of human misery exacerbated by years of prejudice and disenfranchisement.

It's depressing as all hell, mostly because I realized as I watched it that I already knew most of what was being said.  I had heard it before but separately.  I knew about the Nixon thing.  I knew about the crack thing.  And the minimum sentencing.  And the police brutality.  I even knew about the Birth of a Nation as a love letter to the KKK.  But I had never before had it all linked together and presented as a damning indictment of our entire justice system as a way to perpetuate the use of slave labor without violating the 13th amendment.

Oh, and I didn't know that all Idaho potatoes are planted, grown, harvested and shipped by prisoners.  Now I can't look at Five Guys without being sad that my fries are the product of a sweatshop.

Here's the thing.  I'm not actually opposed to prison labor.  I think the spirit of the amendment, forcing convicted prisoners to work off their debt to society, is positive.  But I cannot condone deliberately structuring laws to target the poor, the uneducated, and the voiceless just so rich people can get richer.  Fuck that.  America is a symbol around the globe for freedom and we can't even provide it to our own citizens?  I don't accept that.

Anyway, this is a really great documentary and you should catch it on Netflix.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)

What I like about this kind of spy film is that repeat viewings generally have something new to uncover.  Watching this again at home instead of in a crowded theater allowed me to really focus on what was happening and also to pay more attention to the performances, instead of just mentally ticking off each actor as they appeared.  Mark Strong came across so much better this time, as did Tom Hardy.  Originally posted 14 Jan 2012.  Nominated for Best Lead Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score    This was the most polite, most quintessentially British spy movie I have ever seen.  We're not talking James Bond, where it's all gadgets and picking up women that Americans like.  We're talking cutting remarks and chilling silences covered in that English awkwardness.  Which is not to say that it's a bad movie.  I just think people will expect it to be something else.  My mother remembers reading the book and she told me that she hoped the movie wouldn't be too cerebral.  I don't mind cerebral and that's exactly what it is, which prepared me better than the other people in the theater.  I heard one trio remark as they walked out that it was "too convoluted".  I didn't find it so and neither did Rob but we're pretty used to being the exceptions.

George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is forced into retirement from MI6 along with his boss Control (John Hurt).  Guilt by association, it turns out because Control suspected a highly-placed mole and set up an operation to try and flush him out which turned disastrous and ended up getting an agent (Mark Strong) shot.  After another agent (Tom Hardy), thought to be defected, comes in with a similar tale of a high-placed mole, Smiley is brought back in unofficially.  With the help of only one insider (Benedict Cumberbatch), Smiley has to uncover the web and determine which of four men at the top of Britain's spy network is a Russian mole:  Tinker (Toby Jones), Tailor (Colin Firth), Soldier (Ciaran Hinds) or Poor Man (David Dencik).

Why Poor Man and not spy?  Because the names are from a British counting rhyme:  "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief."  I'm sure the book makes much more of an allusion to it than the movie.  I would put this movie on par with The Good Shepherd as far as spy films.  It's very quiet and tense with a lot of subtext and brief, but brutal, action.

The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)

  What a horrible movie.  I'm not a big Woody Allen fan anyway but this was just gross.

C.W. Briggs (Woody Allen, aged 66 at filming) is a hotshot investigator at North Coast Insurance Company, known for recovering the unrecoverable and being an inveterate skirt-chaser.  His office nemesis is Betty-Anne Fitzgerald (Helen Hunt, 38), an efficiency expert brought in to bring North Coast up the the modern standards of 1940.  At a retirement party for a co-worker (Wallace Shawn), a hypnotist (David Ogden Stiers) puts Briggs and Fitzgerald into a trance and convinces them they are in love with each other.  Unbeknownst to the audience, the hypnotist is planning to use Briggs' and Fitzgerald's positions at the insurance company in order to rob wealthy families of their jewels.  Briggs is eventually suspected after the daughter of one of the elite (Charlize Theron, 26) angrily turns him in to the police after he refused to sleep with her because he was hypnotically tranced into going out on a second robbery.  On the lam, Briggs goes to Fitzgerald's and unknowingly witnesses her also under hypnosis.  Confused by her sudden affectionate turn, Briggs confides in his retired co-worker, who recalls the hypnotist's gag.

I'm not here to bemoan the constant age gap between male and female leads that is ubiquitous in Hollywood, even though I think it's ridiculous that audiences are supposed to believe a geriatric man is the love interest of a collegiate girl unless that is a specific plot point.  I am going to discuss how blatant and disgusting it is that a 66-year-old man specifically wrote and directed a movie casting himself as the love interest of not one, but three drastically younger women.  I left out Elizabeth Berkley (then either 27 or 29, depending on which birth year is real) as the wide-eyed object of office lust because she doesn't actually figure into the plot at all.  She's literally only in the movie to fawn over a man twice her age.

Honestly, it just makes the movie unnecessarily weird.  He could have cast literally anyone else as Briggs and it would have made for a better film.  I get that Woody Allen has never shied away from making himself the butt of a joke, and casting himself as a resoundingly macho chick magnet is supposed to be funny.  It is not.  Especially not when you Google anything about him as a person.

La La Land (2016)

  This was the movie of 2016, between the Oscar controversy and the fawning over Damien Chazelle as Hollywood's wunderkind, and I have to say I don't think it lives up to the hype.

Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a struggling jazz pianist obsessed with maintaining the purity of what he feels is a dying art.  Mia (Emma Stone) is a struggling actress.  They meet in the claustrophobic world of the Hollywood scene several times before finally acknowledging their mutual attraction.  From there, it plays out like a typical romantic drama as his career takes off while hers seems to stagnate.

This film is supposed to recall the old Golden Age Hollywood musicals, which it mimics in breathless adoration.  Many of the songs fall completely flat, however, and don't fit the framework of the story.  You could cut all of them out and still have a serviceable romantic drama.  It's really only noteworthy for the subversion of the ending, which **SPOILER ALERT** sees the two main characters not end up together.  **END SPOILER**  Even still, the audience can get that same dopamine rush during the final, instrumental number which acts as a fantasy sequence.

Let me be clear, since this is starting to look like a hatchet job, there's nothing really wrong or bad in the movie.  It's just not the greatest thing since sliced bread and it's certainly not the paeon to 1950s glamour it was made out to be.

Atomic Blonde (2017)

  You should absolutely go see this movie.  Just don't go in thinking it's going to be nuanced or subtle in any way. 

Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) is an MI-6 operative sent to Berlin during the final days of the Cold War to investigate the death of another operative who had been killed trying to retrieve a list of all covert agents in the divided country.  Lorraine is immediately made by the Russian opposition as soon as her plane touches down, but manages to make contact with her liaison, David Percival (James McAvoy), who has gone slightly native in the absence of support, running bootleg jeans and whiskey to the East.  Unbeknownst to Lorraine, David is also in contact with a man known only as Spyglass (Eddie Marsan), a Stasi officer who initially created the list and memorized the entire thing.  When the list is presumed lost, the plan switches to get Spyglass and his family to the West.  Lurking around the edges are the pissed off Russians, and an enigmatic French intelligence agent (Sofia Boutella) who may know more than she's telling.

Let's face it.  You're in this for the action sequences and you will not be disappointed.  They are just as bone-crunching and high-octane as promised by the trailers.  This is a super fun summer movie.  It's not particularly smart, but it is a lot of fun.