Kingsman: The Secret Service
Dir. Matthew Vaughn
In the classic action movie Men in Black, an older, experienced white professional man takes on a younger, hotheaded protege with a streetwise attitude, bringing him through secret training in an underground facility to test his defensive skills and class-up his wardrobe. This is almost the same exact plot structure of Kingsman, only it deals with spies instead of aliens - and Men in Black was actually well-made and entertaining. Kingsman is unfunny, cringeworthy, misogynistic, boring, and cliched. It wears its influences on its sleeve (James Bond is the obvious example), but doesn't cleverly deconstruct the genre in any way, it simply references better movies to sound smart and "meta" while being more or less a masturbatory, "dumb" action exercise for Matthew Vaughn.
Sam Jackson is so bad in this movie it hurts. He's decked out in a cockeyed flat-brimmed hat and the "urban" clothes you'd find at JC Penny (pretty much the wardrobe of a 15 year-old white "rapper" from Minnesota), and carries an unconvincing lisp that adds nothing to the character. The lead character Eggsy is nothing but a blank slate (it might as well be Sam Worthington, Jai Courtney, or whoever the young white-guy-of-the-week is right now), and I couldn't care less about his "evolution" from a car stealing hoodlum - with totally random parkour skills - to a proper "gentleman," a la James Bond.
As I mentioned before, this movie is horribly misogynistic (not dissimilar in tone to modern Robert Rodriquez, not awesome 90's Rodriguez). Mini-spoilers ahead, but at the end of the film, as Eggsy saves the day, he happens upon a hot woman locked in a cell at the enemy compound. She begs for him to release her, but he asks her for a kiss first. She then says "if you get me out of here, I'll let you do it in my asshole." Wait, WHAT!? The tone of this line in the film made it seem like an innocuous little funny moment, not even remotely pointing to how over-the-top that statement is. Plus, the only two female characters given more than 10 minutes of screen time in the movie are completely one-dimensional; one is "bad," one is "good," and neither ever questions or goes against what the men around them tell them to do.
Although the action is filmed in a fun, kinetic way, I simply can't recommend this movie. The characters suck, the plot is beyond stupid, it repeatedly and annoyingly assures the audience that it knows about other movies, the score is completely generic, and it uses decade's old cliches. Not sure why this one is getting a pass from critics, but I thought this movie was a big stinker - Razzie-worthy, even!
Rating: D+
Still Alice
Dir. Richard Glatzer
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There are few diseases as traumatic as Alzheimers. As Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) says in the film "I wish I had cancer..." It's not only being sick - with Alzheimers it's losing your dignity as well, as you start to lose your grip of reality, to the point of not recognizing loved ones or even basic language. Julianne Moore, who I'd say is among one of the best actresses working today, totally delivers a heart-wrenching, realistic performance here as a Columbia linguistics professor who develops the disease just as her career is taking off. The movie has an inevitable plot structure, where we first see the "diagnosis," then the "treatment," then the hardest part, "letting go." The problem with Still Alice is that it doesn't really try anything outside the box with that formula, and besides a fantastic central performance from Moore, this is a pretty unremarkable movie. But that performance is so damn great it saves the film.
Playing members of Alice's family are Alec Baldwin as her husband, and Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish, and Kristen Stewart (ugh) as her three kids. Granted, I haven't seen any of the Twilight movies, but I've never seen a good performance out of Stewart (the only one that comes close is Panic Room, but she was but a wee girl at that point). What should have been a powerful story of a daughter coming to terms with her mother's disease turned out to be totally emotionless (on Stewart's side), to the point of even ruining the movie. The other kids don't have nearly as big a role, they're there to cry in the background mostly, but we do get a large helping of Stewart's same dumb look. The fact that the plot is predictable actually enhances the tragedy of the film, though, in that we know exactly where this is all headed, and watching Alice try her darndest not to succumb to an inevitably debilitating disease is at times really hard to watch, but definitely powerful.
Again, the subject matter is handled with care, and Moore hits it out of the park, but I have little else to recommend about Still Alice, though those two things alone were enough to pull at my heartstrings.
Rating: B-
Song of the Sea
Dir. Tomm Moore
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First hitting it big with the Oscar-nominated The Secret of Kells, Tomm Moore is back with another beautifully rendered animated film that just oozes with the richness of Irish folklore. Song of the Sea tells the tale of two siblings, Ben and his younger mute sister Saoirse (probably the most Irish girl name that exists), who live by the sea with their father. Their mother died giving birth to her second child, but upon discovering a magical shell flute that belonged to her before she died, Saoirse uncovers a whole boatload of magical secrets of her mother's past. This is such a richly visual experience I have to recommend it, but I don't quite think it's as solid and original a story as The Secret of Kells. Some of the magical encounters Saoirse and Ben have seem to exist more as an excuse for beautiful visuals than to add any poignancy to the story, but I was so hypnotized, I often didn't care. A great, if somewhat slight, animated film that I highly recommend - but I recommend Kells even more!
Rating: B
Mr. Turner
Dir. Mike Leigh
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If Timothy Spall incessantly grunting for 2.5 hours is your idea of a good time at the movies, Mr. Turner is the film for you. Mike Leigh, the acclaimed British director known for working intensively with his onscreen talent, managed to finally feature a leading role for one of his many go-to character actors. Mr. Turner captures the last 25 years of the eccentric British painter's life as he continued to push the boundaries of art and developed a relationship with a seaside innkeeper (Marion Bailey). Beautifully shot, subversively acted (Spall plays Turner as an almost animalistic jerk, and you'll be lucky to understand half of Mr. Turner's grumblings), but painfully slow, Mr. Turner is a film that requires a lot of patience and at least a passing interest in the period to get through it. Like Topsy Turvy, this is not an "urban drama," as Leigh is most known for, but a mind-bogglingly intricate portrait of both this man and the period he lives in. Detail down to how he buys and creates his paint, the burgeoning "camera" technology of the period, the authentic costuming - history buffs and art historians will love this one. But, similar to Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, I was highly impressed, yet ultimately bored and left feeling cold by the end of this movie.
Rating: C+
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