The Interview
Dir. Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
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Eclipsed by the news stories surrounding it, the public at large, finally able to see the seemingly "banned" The Interview in theaters and online, seems to have forgotten that this movie isn't some sort of ultra-dark, biting satire on a ruthless dictator - this is a Seth Rogen comedy. With fart jokes, dick jokes, and shoving-foreign-objects-up-your-butthole jokes. I really don't understand the strangely negative reactions towards this movie - I blame the unbelievable amount of hype. I seriously thought The Interview was sophomoric hilarity that pokes fun at, rather than digs heavily into, a truly fucked up dictator, which ends up fitting perfectly in line with the movie's tone.
TV host Dave Skylark (James Frano) and his producing partner Aaron Rapoport (Seth Rogen) are the team responsible for the TMZ-like tabloid show 'Skylark Tonight.' Hoping to legitimize their interviewing reputation however, they want to branch out of the "celebrity" sphere and gain an exclusive interview with North Korea's Kim Jong Un (Randall Park), who is apparently a huge fan of theirs. Once they actually set up the interview, the CIA steps in and tasks the guys to "take out" the ruthless dictator. The movie's currently being overshadowed by the "North Korea" angle, but The Interview is also a pretty funny skewering of celebrity culture, and James Franco is laugh-out-loud funny here. Some of his buffoonish one-liners will live in my memory for a long time (it seems the term "honeydicking" has already established itself in the popular culture). Franco is completely over-the-top (a "lovable asshole" type that few actors can really pull off), which makes him a great scene partner for both Rogen (playing the "straight man" similarly to Pineapple Express) and Kimmy Un himself, who's also crazy but doesn't have Skylark's "warm center".
When it comes down to it, rating a comedy mostly comes down to, for me, the ratio of laughter-to-non-laughter - and The Interview regularly had me giggling like a schoolgirl. It's crass, crude, and completely immature, but I can't help it - it was funny. Rogen and Goldberg write some of the smartest "dumb" comedies today, and I appreciate that instead of sticking to relatively "safe" material, they continually stray outside the box, and in this case, made a movie so controversial the POTUS had to get involved. They actually made Kim Jong Un into a three-dimensional character as well, and even if it probably could have shown a little more of his darker/crazier side, the representation of Un works well within this specific film. As a fan of Seth Rogen and Co, this was pretty much what I was hoping for.
Rating: B
Into the Woods
Dir. Rob Marshall
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I'm not what you'd call a "musical" guy. I don't mind them every once in a while, having heartily enjoyed seeing Jersey Boys and The Book on Mormon on Broadway and being a big fan of Tom Hooper's Les Miserables from a couple years back - but once you get into the arena of debating which musical number was altered for the film version, etc. etc, I tune out. I went "into the woods" with a completely blank slate. I vaguely remember watching the Broadway show starring Bernadette Peters in a class I took, but also remember not really digging it. This Disney-released adaptation of the Steven Sondheim musical is more or less, as far as I recall, the same show in movie-form. Into the Woods has some nice music, but the unnecessarily bleak tone, characters I could not even remotely give a rat's ass about (main characters' deaths are glossed over ridiculously quickly and OFFSCREEN), CGI copy-and-pasted from any number of recent Disney productions (Maleficent, Alice in Wonderland), and the cherry-on-top: robotic child actors.
Kids with fond memories of glee club may embrace this movie, but I found it completely boring. One of the reasons I absolutely adored Tom Hooper's Les Mis is that the actors actually sang live in front of the camera, without re-recording their performances in a sound booth. Of course, the risk-averse House of Mouse would never take a chance like that, so the singing, along with the costumes, make-up, set design, and performances, all feel canned, hollow, and overly-produced while somehow still coming off as "cheap." At all times, the titular 'woods' never looks like a real forrest - it looks like a stage. It looks like if you kept walking you'd fall off the set. I'd understand if it was a stylistic choice to film that way (like how Lars Von Trier's Dogville implemented a "stagey" minimalism for its setting), but here it clashes with the "epic fantasy" feel I think it's trying to go for. Into the Woods is just ugly to look at. The film opens and closes on the image of a grey, bleak, cloudy sky - which pretty much sums up my experience with this film. I left feeling emotionless, cold, and bored. Buy the soundtrack, skip the movie.
Rating: C-
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Dir. Peter Jackson
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Out of sheer obligation having sat through the other two disappointing Hobbit films, I went to see this last one, hopefully the last time Peter Jackson ever touches this damn property again. The Battle of Five Armies, I'll say right off the bat, is by far the worst of all three prequels. It's Thor 2-level bad. The action scenes are crammed with a mesh of CGI, it's overstuffed with characters we care little about, and the movie continually bounces around on inconsequential plot divergents (so much so that Bilbo, the titular hobbit, feels pretty much like a side character at this point). This prequel trilogy is just filled with so much crap it lacks any kind of focus or through-line. The movie struggles to cap off the multitude of story points established previously and it's just a mess. The title itself alludes to the clusterfuck that this finale is: FIVE armies. Five giant, robotic, lifeless CGI bodies ramming into each other for 2+ hours.
This final movie doesn't even have a stand-out setpiece as far as I'm concerned. At least the first Hobbit had the really great 'Riddles in the Dark' sequence with Gollum, and the second of course had the wonderful introduction to Smaug, but there were no "small," character-driven moments in this one. Everything was crafted to be mindlessly EPIC. I can't help but feel a strong parallel between these movies and Star Wars Episodes I-III. Both had to live up to legendary trilogies, directed by guys likely blinded by their success, misunderstanding what made the original films work in the first place. Nobody cares about your higher frame rate or how many creatures are on the screen at one time ("it's so dense"), we should care about the characters. I didn't mind the first two films as much, but Battle of the Five Armies is a doctor-recommended sedative.
Rating: D+
Rating: B
Into the Woods
Dir. Rob Marshall
Watch Trailer
I'm not what you'd call a "musical" guy. I don't mind them every once in a while, having heartily enjoyed seeing Jersey Boys and The Book on Mormon on Broadway and being a big fan of Tom Hooper's Les Miserables from a couple years back - but once you get into the arena of debating which musical number was altered for the film version, etc. etc, I tune out. I went "into the woods" with a completely blank slate. I vaguely remember watching the Broadway show starring Bernadette Peters in a class I took, but also remember not really digging it. This Disney-released adaptation of the Steven Sondheim musical is more or less, as far as I recall, the same show in movie-form. Into the Woods has some nice music, but the unnecessarily bleak tone, characters I could not even remotely give a rat's ass about (main characters' deaths are glossed over ridiculously quickly and OFFSCREEN), CGI copy-and-pasted from any number of recent Disney productions (Maleficent, Alice in Wonderland), and the cherry-on-top: robotic child actors.
Kids with fond memories of glee club may embrace this movie, but I found it completely boring. One of the reasons I absolutely adored Tom Hooper's Les Mis is that the actors actually sang live in front of the camera, without re-recording their performances in a sound booth. Of course, the risk-averse House of Mouse would never take a chance like that, so the singing, along with the costumes, make-up, set design, and performances, all feel canned, hollow, and overly-produced while somehow still coming off as "cheap." At all times, the titular 'woods' never looks like a real forrest - it looks like a stage. It looks like if you kept walking you'd fall off the set. I'd understand if it was a stylistic choice to film that way (like how Lars Von Trier's Dogville implemented a "stagey" minimalism for its setting), but here it clashes with the "epic fantasy" feel I think it's trying to go for. Into the Woods is just ugly to look at. The film opens and closes on the image of a grey, bleak, cloudy sky - which pretty much sums up my experience with this film. I left feeling emotionless, cold, and bored. Buy the soundtrack, skip the movie.
Rating: C-
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Dir. Peter Jackson
Watch Trailer
Out of sheer obligation having sat through the other two disappointing Hobbit films, I went to see this last one, hopefully the last time Peter Jackson ever touches this damn property again. The Battle of Five Armies, I'll say right off the bat, is by far the worst of all three prequels. It's Thor 2-level bad. The action scenes are crammed with a mesh of CGI, it's overstuffed with characters we care little about, and the movie continually bounces around on inconsequential plot divergents (so much so that Bilbo, the titular hobbit, feels pretty much like a side character at this point). This prequel trilogy is just filled with so much crap it lacks any kind of focus or through-line. The movie struggles to cap off the multitude of story points established previously and it's just a mess. The title itself alludes to the clusterfuck that this finale is: FIVE armies. Five giant, robotic, lifeless CGI bodies ramming into each other for 2+ hours.
This final movie doesn't even have a stand-out setpiece as far as I'm concerned. At least the first Hobbit had the really great 'Riddles in the Dark' sequence with Gollum, and the second of course had the wonderful introduction to Smaug, but there were no "small," character-driven moments in this one. Everything was crafted to be mindlessly EPIC. I can't help but feel a strong parallel between these movies and Star Wars Episodes I-III. Both had to live up to legendary trilogies, directed by guys likely blinded by their success, misunderstanding what made the original films work in the first place. Nobody cares about your higher frame rate or how many creatures are on the screen at one time ("it's so dense"), we should care about the characters. I didn't mind the first two films as much, but Battle of the Five Armies is a doctor-recommended sedative.
Rating: D+
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