Chasing Oscar Nominees With A Digital Notepad Hoping For An Interview: 'American Sniper' (R - Warner Bros. - 2 hrs, 13 mins)

Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Jason Hall

Alo Party Peoples.

Regardless of its actual artistic merit, whether or not you will enjoy American Sniper is likely dependent on your political affiliation, that is if "enjoy" is the proper word for a movie about the War on Terror. That's probably not by design, despite what some on the left have said about it, this is not a fascist propaganda piece disguised as an awards season biopic, but I don't blame them for feeling that about it. The film takes so little if any stance on either the war it depicts or the life it places at its center that the audience is left to insert their own meaning where the film makers have either failed or chosen not to do so.

In case you had never heard of him, Chris Kyle was a rodeo performer in rural Texas that joined the Navy SEALS after 9/11 and was stationed as a sniper in the Iraq War. Over the course of four tours of service he racked up a series of impressive long range shots eventually becoming the most lethal sniper in American military history. In 2009 he retired from active duty to become a life coach for fellow veterans and was starting to recover from implied PTSD, where he was tragically shot by an unstable client whom he had taken to a gun range for stress counseling.

Now that you know those facts, or are intrigued enough to read the autobiography the film is based on, there isn't really that much incentive to see American Sniper unless your'e intending to use it as either an effigy of the right to be scorned or as a pep rally for the GOP. All the film offers is recreations of a series of events happening to and around Chris Kyle presented matter-of-factly without any sort of commentary on either the man himself or the war he served in. He makes shots, he loses shots, he gets into a rivalry with an equally skilled sniper on the enemy side, he gets into arguments with his wife over constant re-enlistment, he retires and then dies off-screen, all presented in clear detail without comment. In fact, if the film takes any perspective, its that of the late Chief Kyle himself. It captures that he was driven by the moral obligation to use his marksmanship to protect his fellow soldiers from harm, and that once he left the battlefield he transitioned from protecting them from experiencing trauma to helping them recover after it's already happened. I can see the line of thought involved, I.e. feeling that imposing some sort of message upon Chris Kyle's life story that he isn't around to comment upon would be disrespectful, but choosing not to hurts the film in a big way.

That sort of 'just the facts, man' presentation works in the context of an autobiography, but as a scripted movie it doesn't quite. It would be one thing if this were a documentary, but the only documentary footage in American Sniper is footage of his memorial service played over the end credits. Everything else, regardless of how much it sticks to the text, is fictionalized to some extent by its very nature. Since a film inevitably has to choose what to depict and what not to in order to craft a narrative, it becomes less about facts and becomes about story, and stories generally need a point in order to be worth a damn. It has the same problem that Boyhood has, in that it moves from scene to scene with no real purpose since the story it tells isn't quite finished, in this case due to the movie starting production before Chief Kyle's death. That's by no means the fault of the film makers, it's just unfortunate. Unlike Boyhood however, which was a slow meandering slog, American Sniper rushes through its story so quickly that there isn't much time to absorb the impact that the war had on this man.

That's not to say that American Sniper is exactly bad, a film with this sort of subject matter can't help but be quietly powerful on an emotional level, but it isn't Best Picture material and I feel that it would have worked better as a documentary.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Chasing Oscar Nominees With A Digital Notepad Hoping For An Interview: 'Boyhood'

Alo Party Peoples.

So, last Thursday the nominees for the 87th' Academy Awards were announced. How many of you actually saw any of them? I saw one of the nominees for Best Picture, and despite it being absolutely worthy of the honor, I can't shake the suspicion that it only got in because if it didn't this would look even more like the whitest Oscar lineup in decades. Lindsay Ellis recently called the early year deluge of awards shows "fantasy football for film buffs", and I can definitely see where she's coming from. At the end of the year, many of us put together our best of the year lists and our prediction lists, and yet many of these shows are not taken very seriously as actual appraisals of artistic merit. 

The Oscars in particular have the problem of being seen as out of touch with the movie going public. They romanticize themselves and their show as "a group of seasoned experts nobly gazing down from on high at the world of cinema and carefully selecting the best of the best". Whereas many people see them as more of a bunch of retired film snobs looking for the best middle brow dramas they can find while instinctively looking down on the fantastic, rarely taking animation seriously, and taking an apathetic attitude to the technical side of film making. Whereas much of the online film press is made up of film students and geeks in their thirties for whom the idea of a serious film about super-chimps or Lego or built around some crazy camera trick isn't some insane alien concept. When you add all that to most people getting their movie news online and/or saving their disposable income for big exciting spectacle, the Oscars look more and more like an excuse for insanely rich people to give each other gold statues all night while the entire world watches.

Yet, there's something to be said for the pageantry of it all, and at the end of the day I'm sure its nice to be given a trophy and told that you did better than everyone else. For me it provides something to joke about with friends and on social media, so before I go off on how Selma was inevitably robbed of it's tiny golden man, I've decided to watch every film nominated for Best Picture, so my opinion is an informed one.

Directed and Written by Richard Linklater

Nearly three hours later...

I halfway regret starting this little series off with Richard Linklater's Boyhood. On one hand, it's likely going to take home Selma's Oscar (along with several others) because Linklater is well liked by the industry, especially among the snobs that make up much of the Academy's voters, and they can't help but be impressed by him taking so much sweet time to make it. On the other hand, it should not like it takes over a decade to actually watch the results.

In telling the story of a child growing up in suburban Texas in the early 21st' Century, the closest Boyhood comes to a hook is that rather than casting a different actor for any age he wishes to represent, writer/director Richard Linklater picked his cast in 2002, shot for a couple of months, and then did that again annually for twelve years as the cast aged in real time. I'm impressed that he was able to pull that off, I'm impressed that he got twelve years of funding to make it, I'm sure that he and all those involved poured their blood, sweat, and tears into making this movie, I just wish that it added up to anything more than just a pretty decent pseudo-biopic.

Do any of you remember me saying that The Best of Me was like a really good Lifetime movie? If that's true, then Boyhood just is a Lifetime movie, and that's probably being too nice to it. The Best of Me is far from a good movie, but at least things happen in it, and there was that scene with the shotgun where it briefly came to life. In Boyhood, there is no gradual progression of audience investment as we spend time with this family and get to know them, instead we get Richard Linklater showing us his vacation footage going "and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened..."

"But wait!?", I can hear some of you saying. "It's like that because real life is like that, and Linklatter was trying to capture real life by not having a finished script." Here's my answer to that. This is not a documentary, this is not a vlog, this is not a real-life version of The Truman Show. This is a piece of narrative storytelling in the form of video, and stories generally need to have a point in order to be worth a damn. If anything, Boyhood is a clear example of why you finish your script before starting production, because when you don't you end up with a dull, tedious, and meandering slog.

I realize that this comes off like I hated Boyhood, and I'd like to think that I don't. I wanted to like this, although that might have been because I grew up in the time and place it was made, but even that aspect of it did nothing for me. It will likely become background fodder on cable once the Oscars have come and gone, and that makes it almost definitely taking Best Picture from Selma even more infuriating.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: 'Selma' (PG-13 - Paramount - 2 hrs, 7 mins)

Directed by Ava DuVernay
Written by Paul Webb

Alo Party Peoples.

Is it just me, or has there not been a Martin Luther King biopic before this? The story of his life is chock full of big dramatic set-pieces, it makes for an actor's showcase, it can't help but be a powerful work of cinema, so why is Selma the first big production to tackle this subject? Maybe it's because the man's speeches are under copyright, and it's nigh impossible to do anything with his legacy without the I Have A Dream speech. Or maybe its because there aren't that many black name actors that are known for dramatic work. Or maybe it's because of the monolithic stature that Dr. King and his legacy still hold in American culture as the embodiment of the idea that peaceful protest can actually change things.

Selma is a film about that legacy, and how, as hard as it can be to believe sometimes, that protest can work. That this country and the ideals it was founded on can work. It's also an amazing film that comes incredibly close to being perfect. If it had gotten a wide release then, it would have easily been on and possibly topped my best of 2014 list, and it is likely the only one of this year's Best Picture nominees that will be remembered once the Oscars have come and gone. Because it is the only one of them that, for better and for worse, is fueled by the emotions of the time in which it was made.

The film opens in 1965 with Dr. King attempting to convince President Johnson to put a voting rights act up for vote in Congress that would bring the hammer of federal oversight down on certain Southern states with a history of denying the franchise to their black populations. He's unwilling to do this because, or at least the film implies, doing so would cost him the votes of Southern states that would resent the increase in federal power, so he turns down Dr. King's request. Frustrated by Johnson's apparent lack of concern for the well being of his citizens over his political clout, he and his supporters plan a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, moving through one of the most notoriously segregated states in the union, and that's a part of his plan. 

Selma strips away the romanticized version of Martin Luther King that we all learned about in history class to show us the imperfect human being underneath - as impeccably played by David Oyelowo - and show that he was much more of a radical than we usually think of him as being, which serves to infuse this biopic with much more weight than is usually expected in the middle of Oscar season. It also takes a different one of those aforementioned values, a free and independent press, and shows how Dr. King was able to manipulate it to boost the reach of his protests and speeches. He doesn't choose Selma as a starting point just because it's the right thing to do, he chooses it because it's one of the most egregious offenders, he knows that his celebrity status will bring the press there, and that as a result the American public will see the bloody reality of the Jim Crow South for the first time and be appropriately outraged by it.

Said reality is another place where Selma doesn't waste any time with the sanitized version of civil disobedience. Depictions of the protests, marches, and subsequent police actions against them are uncompromisingly brutal and don't shy away from that brutality for a second. I'm sure that there will be, if there hasn't already, much wringing of hands and shouting over how there are almost no Southern whites in this movie that aren't portrayed as bigoted bloodthirsty monsters, and I'll admit that detail sticks out in what is an otherwise incredibly uncompromising depiction of this time and place. With the killing of black men by police almost perpetually in the news for the latter part of 2014, these scenes cannot help being quietly powerful, but this would have been a great film no matter when it was released, because it is a seriously impressive piece of cinema with fantastic direction and a solid cast.

Ava DuVernay's Selma is hands down, no caveats, the best film currently playing in theaters, and gets my wholehearted recommendation.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Coming Soon To A Theater Near You: Upcoming Releases of 2015 That The Archivis' Is Looking Forward To

Alo Party Peoples.

And a Happy New Year. That means its list making time, because that's how the Internet marks the beginning and end of things. You've already seen my favorite and worst lists, so today I'll be giving you a list of films that I'm looking forward to this year, but first there's something I have to clear up regarding how I date films on this site. I mentioned in my 2014 best list that to qualify a film had to have gotten a wide release by Christmas so you can have a chance to see it by the end of the year. That leaves a whole week in limbo, which is why as far as my dating is concerned the 26th' of December is the -6th' of January. Anyways, lets get to the movies, in order of release date...

• Selma (Jan. 9) This could not be a better time to release a biopic of Martin Luther King Jr. With recent events in Ferguson and New York City and the nationwide protests in response calling the achievements of the Civil Rights movement into question, what better way to remind the country that we have made progress, as hard as it can be to believe sometimes.
• Jupiter Ascending (Feb. 6) What's that? The Wachowskis are doing a big over the top space opera? And it looks like it jumped straight out of the pulp adventures of the 1950s' and put on a coat of state of the art effects on its way out the door? I'm on board, albeit hesitantly since this was pushed back from July of last year. 
• Insurgent (Mar. 20) I'm not joking, I'm actually looking forward to Divergent 2. Yes, the first one ended up on my worst of the year list, and I stand by that decision, but have you seen the trailer for this thing? Sure, it looks bad, but it also looks hilarious. They have a dude jumping over a train track and they slow it down like it's the most epic thing ever. The production design still looks like a TV movie from 2004. Shailene Woodley gets into a fight to the death with herself. Maybe this one will embrace the absurdity of its teenage melodrama and become something worth watching in a so-bad-it's-good way. 
• Avengers: Age of Ultron (May 1) So far Marvel Studios has yet to produce something I would call truly bad, and I doubt that the second Avengers film will. I like that it seems to be continuing the vein of post-9/11 allegory set by Iron Man 3 and Winter Soldier by using the robots as not-drones. I like that writer/director Joss Whedon is almost a big name now, and his talent for handling ensemble casts and writing natural banter has served him well with this section of the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far.
• Paper Towns (June 5) Oh, look. Another movie based on a book by John Green. It looks like a lot of the same actors from Fault In Our Stars are returning, and Green himself worked on the screenplay. Awesome. Though I do wonder if his tendency to write all sorts of debauchery can be carried over on what will almost definitely be a PG-13. Then again, The Fault In Our Stars got away with underage drinking and sex with a PG-13, so Paper Towns will probably be just fine.
• Tomorrowland (May 22) The idea behind this film from Pixar veteran Brad Bird seems to be "What if there was a place where the vision of the future of the Sixties became reality? Wouldn't that be so much better and less depressing than the future that actually came to pass?" It looks kind of like a more optimistic take on some of Interstellar's posing the death of the space program as the death of human ambition. That sounds like a party to me, enough that I can ignore basing a movie on a theme park ride.
• Inside Out (June 19) Is it just me, or has Pixar declined from its old position as the gold standard of American animation? I'd say that since Toy Story 3 they've been turning out noble misfires, toothless fluff, and straight up bad movies, coincidentally at the same time everyone else started to catch up to their golden age. This looks like they might be able to make a comeback, I hope they do.
• Ant-Man (July 17) After their embarrassing breakdown in relations with Edgar Wright, I'm surprised that Marvel Studios is still going through with their Ant-Man project, but it looks like they've found a friend of his to make it instead. I'm really interested in seeing what the final result of this troubled production looks like.
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Dec. 28) How could I not be interested in a new Star Wars project. I was as skeptical as anyone else when Disney bought Star Wars. I was just as irritated as anyone else when J.J. Abrams was given the director's chair. But now that we've actually seen some footage from it, I think this project might actually be in good hands. I especially like that he seems to have found a middle ground between the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy in terms of visuals.

I hope these turn out well, and I still realize that most of my choices have a fanciful/fantastical bent to them. Part of my New Year's resolution is to broaden my horizons in that respect.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: 'Into The Woods' (PG - Disney - 2 hrs, 4mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

Directed by Rob Marshall
Written by James Lapine

It looks like Broadway musicals may soon become the new YA phenomenon. This holiday season we already had a remake of Annie (it was a pretty decent kids movie), and the spectacular disaster that was NBC's Peter Pan Live!, which came off as an unintentional adult spoof of itself. Now we have Into The Woods, which starts out as an upbeat light hearted comedy musical mash-up of various fairy tales, and for what it is, it isn't bad. In fact, it comes pretty close to getting a reccomendation, until it falls apart.

But first, our story. There's a town on the edge of the woods, in which James Corden and Emily Blunt live as a childless baker's family. One day they are approached by Meryl Streep as a witch that offers to give them a child in exchange for a cow, a cloak, some golden hair and a slipper. Fortunately for the baker, the stories of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Jack and the Beanstalk are all going on at the same time as they embark on their little quest. Surely enough, hi-jinks ensue as their stories start to intersect.

If that sounds like an excuse for comedy bits involving a fairy tale mashup, that's because Into The Woods is exactly that. The whole thing plays out less like a feature film and more like a series of short scenes, this is probably a holdover from a medium-shift from the stage play, along with incredibly constrained cinematography hiding the more fantastical elements in the shadows. It seems to want to be a Monty Python movie, in fact this is probably something they could have hit out of the park, but the filmmakers are unable to stick that landing and instead of being intriguingly surreal, it comes off as a meandering slog.

Fortunately, the cast is pretty damn excellent. Meryl Streep is fantastic at hamming it up as the witch, James Corden and Emily Blunt are great at making the Baker family look in way over their heads, Johnny Depp and Lilla Crawford have bizarre chemistry as the Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood respectively, Mackenzie Mauzy plays Rapunzel as a bit of a floozie to hilarious results, and they all elevate this to more than just a tepid musical.

Unfortunately, they can't save it from its meandering nature making the whole thing drag on, and on, and on. There is no reason for this to be two hours, it very easily could have been taken out in 90 minutes, and if it was I probably could have recommended this. Maybe this will one day become a cult classic ala Newsies or The Room, but for now Into The Woods suffers from a creative collapse and can be safely ignored.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: 'Night At The Museum: Secret of the Tomb' (PG - 20th Century Fox - 1 hr, 38 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

The Night at the Museum franchise is one of those properties that I feel, in ten or so years when the Nostalgia Wave reaches the 21st' Century, will likely be one of the first things rebooted, and I would be all for it because the series isn't really all that special. The first one is a pretty good family film and has its moments, but it isn't the kind of story that lends itself to serialization. The sequel, Battle of the Smithsonian on the other hand, falls into the usual Would-Be-Franchise Trap of inflating the scope of the first one without any new perspective or interpretation being taken on the concept.

Said concept involves Ben Stiller as a night watchman at the Museum of Natural History in New York. The hook is that a magical Egyptian tablet housed there makes the exhibits come to life at night, and that should clue you into why this series shouldn't be a series, its the kind of idea that only works once before becoming stale. See also, Men in Black, Paranormal Activity, Final Destination, and a lot of other horror properties.

Anyways, the premise of Secret of the Tomb is that the magic bringing the exhibits to life is starting to break down, and that's a problem because it makes them go haywire in front of guests. Each installment of this series moves the action to a different museum, the Natural History museum in the first one, the Smithsonian in DC for the second one, and now the British Museum where the only person that knows how to fix the magic is one of the exhibits. Naturally, shenanigans ensue as the ensemble from the last two films, Stiller, the late Robin Williams as Teddy Roosevelt, Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan as minatures of a frontier cowboy and a Roman soldier respectively, Rami Malek as an Egyptian king, Mizuo Peck as Sacagewea, a Capuchin monkey, and Patrick Gallagher as Atilla the Hun head across the pond with the tablet causing those exhibits start coming to life for the first time.

As you may have guessed from that lineup of characters, the thing this series exists for, or at least what some would find interesting about it, is getting a free-for-all mashup of various parts of history in one place, and figuring out what stuff like dinosaur skeletons, model aircraft, and statues would look life moving around and doing stuff. Unfortunately, they don't do anything with the various personalities on display. Take the cowboy and the Roman, both of their cultures were out on the frontier of Western civilization, and they were both operating to expand it. In the first film that led to conflict, but here they've managed a sort of bromance with eachother. As for the visuals, they do a good job, but nothing that the first one was able to do better.

It also keeps interrupting that mash-up with failed attempts at comedy via awkward dialogue exchanges that are trying to be Monty Python but come off more like bad public access improv. I probably wouldn't be talking about this if it wasn't Robin Williams' last performance, and that aspect of it doesn't really provide much for me to talk about. He isn't especially good or especially bad, he's just sort of okay, exactly like the movie he's acting in.

As a fun distraction for your kids, Secret of the Tomb is nothing special. If your'e a parent with kids to entertain, take them to see Annie or Big Hero 6, or just save yourself some money and rent the first Night at the Museum instead.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (PG-13 - Warner Bros. - 2 hrs, 24 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

Directed by Peter Jackson
Written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens,
Peter Jackson, and Guillermo del Toro

When I first heard that the subtitle of the final Hobbit movie was changed from There and Back Again to The Battle of the Five Armies, I feared that meant that said battle was all this movie would be. These movies have been a weird experiment. After having made fantasy viable blockbuster material with Lord of the Rings, could Peter Jackson and company live up to those monumental expectations while adapting Tolkien's much smaller and simpler earlier book?

The results have been, interesting. An Unexpected Journey worked fine as a fantasy adventure in its own right, and left me semi-hopeful as to the state of things to come. Desolation of Smaug on the other hand, was on average mediocre and downright bad in a lot of parts. I'm sure many of you who care about this series have seen or at least heard of the barrel scene by now, and it also stops in the middle of the climax. Seriously, you could not come up with a better joke about how drawn out this series is than the actual ending of Desolation of Smaug.

The Battle of the Five Armies opens with that climax (which, incidentally, is nowhere near long enough to justify tacking it onto this film) and the plot proper begins with its aftermath. Now that the dragon Smaug has been killed, the massive amount of gold he has been hoarding for sixty-odd years in the Lonely Mountain is now up for grabs. The company of dwarves we've been following during this series, or really just their nominal leader, claim it as their birthright. The human survivors of Smaug's attack on Laketown need it to finance rebuilding their community. An army of elves shows up to check dwarven power in the area and keep an army of orcs from taking the strategically important position, a different army of dwarves shows up because the dwarven leader happens to be the cousin of their king, all of these people end up coming to blows over the mountain leading to the battle of the title, which is drawn out over the entire movie.

I'll give Jackson this, he definitely knows how to make things look amazing, you can say that about all of these movies. He clearly at least cares about what he's making, and every frame becomes a painting under his direction and a crack team of set designers, costume and prop makers, and the best rendering software Hollywood money can buy. Unfortunately, all the visual panache in the world can't hide the fact that, at the end of the day, this series is what it always looked like, Peter Jackson taking a three movie victory jog after the monumental achievement that was Lord of the Rings by doing a studio financed fan film version of The Hobbit. I never expected these movies to measure up to what is probably still the best work of fantasy in film of the 21st' Century, even if it is possible to "top" that, you don't do it by adapting a simple story for children at bedtime, but there simply is not enough story there to stretch over a grand total of nine hours running time.

The Hobbit film trilogy has ended with a whimpering bang. I'm not exactly angry with these films, mostly I'm disappointed. I'm disappointed that Jackson doesn't seem to know how to quit when he's ahead, that so much capital and talent went into a series, that in the end, is little more than a Middle-Earth themed amusement park ride. That being said, if all you want to see a huge fantasy battle manned by a cast of actors giving it their all, I suppose its worth a matinee.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B