The Movie Guy

If “Southpaw” was one of those frozen blended concoctions you drink to keep cool in the dog days of summer, it would be a blended punch- it’s a film that lifts its story, scenes and characters directly from other boxing movies and only manages to stay fresh because of the juice of formidable actors who manage to keep it potent despite the familiar mix.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Billy Hope, the undisputed and undefeated light heavyweight champion of the world. Raised in an orphanage in NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen, we meet Billy as he defends his title a few blocks away at Madison Square Garden. His loving wife, partner, fellow orphan and street-smart business confidant Mo (Rachel McAdams) supports him a few rows from ringside. Billy is the kind of fighter who the more he is hit, the harder he fights back. What concerns Mo is that Billy’s fights are lasting longer, meaning he’s getting hit more. While Billy manages to retain his title in the 10^th round of this particular 12 round fight, Mo’s concern is that if this prolonged fight time trend continues, their young daughter Leila (Oona Laurence) will know her father only as a punch-drunk former champ in just a few years time. Continue reading →

“Terminator Genisys” reminded me a lot of last month’s “Jurassic World”- take an original movie you loved, reboot it after a couple of forgettable sequels, provide it with a decent-enough story to make your experience not a complete waste of time, and then reduce all of the action to a comic book form of rock ‘em-sock ‘em robots.

On paper, I guess the synopsis actually reads worse than it is, but as summer movies go, “Genisys,” like “World,” fits your summer movie-viewing bill. However, for these reboots to hang their interest and appeal on your love of the original films, my grievance where both movies are concerned is that they replace the scares and suspense that made the originals endearing and deliver reboots that reduce your viewing pleasure to watching a baseball game where every batter gets a hit versus the suspense that the batter may actually strike out. Continue reading →

“Jurassic World” misses an opportunity to be better than what Michael Crichton envisioned when he wrote his novel “Jurassic Park,” a terror ride through a theme park where genetically-created dinosaurs run amok attacking the very tourists who came to see them. What “World” could and should have been is a scathing satire and indictment of the corporate greed that gives people what they want regardless of safety- what it does instead is narrow its vision and settle for being just another standard B-monster movie sequel. Continue reading →

You don’t walk into “Spy” without wanting to see Melissa McCarthy, especially when she’s being directed by Paul Feig. Director Feig and McCarthy work well together, as evidenced in “Bridesmaids” (which earned her an Oscar nomination) and “The Heat,” which paired her as a tough, acid-tongued detective opposite Sandra Bullock’s straight-laced FBI agent in the cop-buddy film we’ve all become accustomed to seeing yet were nonetheless able to enjoy through their characters’ genuine comedic chemistry. Continue reading →

Like the title itself, Cameron Crowe’s film “Aloha” presents a conundrum: does the word Aloha mean hello or goodbye? The answer is both, depending on the context in which it’s used. For the film “Aloha,” the viewer is given a similar question: should the story define its characters or the characters define its story? Given the context of “Aloha’s” comedic melodrama storyline, you might think the former and you might be right. However, the beauty of Cameron Crowe’s writing and films has always been the latter: richly-drawn characters that seem to define its story. The fault of “Aloha” is that it holds onto too much of the former, overlooking the latter: Crowe forces “Aloha’s” characters to hit designated conventional plot points along a familiar rom-com context that ultimately gives them a lesser depth than what you would want or expect him to deliver. Continue reading →

Concerning remakes, director John Huston once remarked, “They should only remake bad movies.” I’m sort of in the middle myself: if you’re going to remake a movie, at least add something new and let the remake be a reimagining. If you’re really interested in seeing a movie, its first imagining is usually best and you can’t mess with an original that was good enough to draw attention to itself by making people want to capitalize on its success by staging a remake.

In short, the cardinal sin for people making a remake is not adding anything new. Such is the case with this year’s “Poltergeist,” the remake of Tobe Hooper’s 1982 film that commits this cardinal sin- while keeping the story intact, it misses the mark by thinking its story is enough. Adding nothing to the special effects of the original (save for an interesting look at the otherworldly dimension the youngest daughter of a suburban family is sucked into via a portal in her bedroom closet), it pares down what made the original “Poltergeist” compelling by not drawing out the characters in the family enough to allow you to care and not creating special effects that ‘wow’ you more than the effects in the original did. Continue reading →

It’s been thirty years since we’ve last seen Max, ‘Mad Max’ for fans of the film trilogy from director George Miller, so it seems fair that a reboot was in order. If you’re a fan of those films, “Mad Max: Fury Road” is a welcome return. If you weren’t a fan, this probably won’t change your mind. However, if you’re new to ‘Max’ and enjoy non-stop live-action car chases involving steel-spiked souped-up cars that bounce on monster truck tires driven by maniacal punk-rock-dressed ruffians who hurl flames, harpoons, and crossbow and spear-induced mayhem upon their prey across a post-apocalyptic wasteland, then this film is for you.

Like any new viewer of the Mad Max films, my introduction to Miller’s films came through late-night cable and 1981’s “The Road Warrior,” the second installment of Miller’s Mad Max trilogy. While the appearance of a post-apocalyptic desert setting and weirdly-theatrical punk-rock clad baddies seemed daunting, what won me over was the live-action scenes- they were some of the best I’d ever seen, on par with any good James Bond film action sequence or even the chariot race in “Ben-Hur”- I found them surprisingly well-choreographed and executed. Continue reading →

A good sci-fi movie poses a thought-provoking question that allows us to reflect on our humanity and place in the world; a great sci-fi movie allows that question to challenge our thinking and perceptions while entertaining us in the process. To say “Ex Machina” is a great sci-fi movie almost feels like a slight- it’s a movie that transcends its genre by being such a smart psychological thriller that you’re not likely to see a better film this year.

The story of “Ex Machina” centers on Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a computer programmer at the Web’s leading search engine Blue Book, who wins an office lottery to spend a week with Blue Book’s creator Nathan (Oscar Isaac) at his remote mountain estate: in layman’s terms, imagine working for Google if it were owned by Walt Disney and you won a week to spend with Disney behind-the-scenes at Disney World. Caleb is whisked away by helicopter to Nathan’s vast compound and a home that is more like a subterranean fortress hewn into the rock-something more akin to what a Bond villain would live in while he hatches his plan for world domination. And that’s not far from the truth in what Nathan is doing, as Caleb discovers. Continue reading →

If you’re a college basketball fan, you’re in the midst of March Madness; if you’re a ‘70s and ‘80s horror movie lover, the real March Madness ‘shots’ and ‘scores’ come in the form of David Robert Mitchell’s horror film “It Follows-” a movie that incorporates the tracking ‘shots’ and musical ‘scores’ you’ve come to love from the early horror films of directors such as John Carpenter and David Cronenberg and uses their cinematic techniques and styles to create a film worthy of these directors’ earlier works.

Usually, if you see a director copying the film techniques of another director in a genre, it can more often than not feel like a cheat or dull your senses because you’ve already seen it done- and done better. However, there’s such a love and care in Mitchell’s crafting of “It Follows” that it blows right past the homage moniker one could easily dangle on this film. Just as you’ve experienced watching Quentin Tarantino bring back the style of ‘60s martial arts films with “Kill Bill” or Brian DePalma turning Hitchcock movies like “Psycho” into his own “Dressed to Kill” or using “Vertigo” and “Rear Window” as templates for his “Body Double,” Mitchell takes and uses past directing styles to create a film for horror fans that only a horror movie fan himself could accomplish. Continue reading →

I firmly believe that you can’t appreciate the good without experiencing the bad. So, in the annual dog-and-pony show between the announcement of the Academy Award nominees and the actual ceremony, I like to watch the worst newly-released film I can. While it’s a long shot I’ll be surprised, I need to bet on a movie that’s a nag to satisfy my own “checks and balances” during the Oscar race.

While everyone scrambles to watch the thoroughbreds of Oscar-nominated films they’ve missed to discover their own cinematic winners, I like to slink into a theatre and settle back with a movie that I think will be absolute celluloid trash- an also-ran that makes me appreciate award-worthy films and performances even more by watching evidence of how badly-made a movie can be. My choice of what to watch isn’t easy; I’ll usually gravitate toward something that has lofty ambitions or, at the very least, has a lot to live up to- my reasoning behind this being the higher the expectation, the harder the fall. Following the enormous literary success the book trilogy experienced, I thought “Fifty Shades of Grey” might be the right horse to bet on. In picking the worst new release I could find, ‘Grey’s’ a winner. Continue reading →