Review: Vice (2018)

* 1/2
Director: Adam McKay
Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams

132 minutes is a lot of time to spend saying absolutely nothing. While Vice may mock the post-Nixon Republican party for believing in nothing but the power of power itself, the film is just as intellectually, emotionally, and morally empty. Dick Cheney, pulling the strings of the Bush II administration, stripped away many of the checks and balances that are meant to keep American democracy from slipping into tyranny, destabilized the middle east by invading a country knowing that the reasons for invasion were specious, and just generally left the world in a worse place than he found it when he became Vice President. These are things that we already know, though I suppose it may be worth the reminder given the recent trend towards taking a softer view of the Bush II years in light of the mess that's now in power. Vice says nothing new, nothing insightful, and actually laughs at the idea that there is an insight to be had. "What do we believe in?" a young Cheney (Christian Bale) asks his mentor, Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), who can only burst out laughing in response. But nobody believes in nothing. Even the Joker believed in chaos, which is the absolute freedom of the individual to do as he or she pleases. A film that is content to argue that its protagonist believes in nothing is a film without a narrative rudder. It is sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Review: Red Sparrow (2018)

* 1/2
Director: Francis Lawrence
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton

Red Sparrow is a film that dares to ask: how many rape scenes is too many? If you've heard the term "male gaze" but aren't sure exactly what it means and would like to see a visual example, then this is the movie for you. Ostensibly a spy thriller, albeit of the most predictable, slow-moving, and needlessly convoluted kind, Red Sparrow is really just a perfunctory means of festishizing violence towards women, even though it seems to see itself as an empowerment narrative. It's a 140 minutes which would be reduced to about 15 if you excised all the scenes demonstrating, suggesting, or referencing sexual assault, coercion, harassment, or what the film characterizes as prostitution but which more closely resembles slavery. Hollywood: you can do better than this. You can do better with respect to films and you can do better by someone as talented as Jennifer Lawrence.

Review: Free Fire (2017)

* 1/2
Director: Ben Wheatley
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Brie Larson, Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer

There's a line in Frances Ha, where the best friend of the title character walks into the home of two hipster guys and declares that the apartment is "very aware of itself." Free Fire is like that apartment; it's very aware of itself. The problem is that it's trying very hard to be cool, and one of the key components of coolness is a lack of visible effort. Reservoir Dogs, the film this one very much wants to be, is such an enduring work of cinematic cool in part because it doesn't feel like Quentin Tarantino is trying to impress anyone with it; Tarantino, as ever, does things in a way that will entertain himself and if others are also entertained by it, all the better. Free Fire, by contrast, works very hard to engineer the kinds of moments and dialogue exchanges that become touchstones to a cult following. The result is that it all feels very manufactured, which isn't aided by the fact that 90% of the cast members look exactly the same with their facial hair and generally unkempt '70s styling. If you're in the mood for what amounts to a 70 minute shoot out, Free Fire might appeal to you, but be forewarned that the film runs out of ideas to make that shoot out interesting after about 20 minutes.

Review: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

* 1/2
Director: Zack Snyder
Starring: Henry Cavill, Ben Affleck

So it's come to this. I liked Wonder Woman so much that I decided to finally check out Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice so that I could see her first onscreen appearance. That was my mistake and boy did I pay for it. It's not that I didn't expect this movie to be flawed, I had heard and read enough about it to know better than to have very high expectations, but I still didn't expect it to be quite such a ramshackle affair. I'm genuinely baffled - how do you screw something up this horribly? And why, if you're trying to compete with what Marvel is doing, would you sink $250 million into making this before you have a script that functions to tell an actual story? One can only hope that those who need to learned from the mistakes made here, because otherwise Justice League has the potential to be an even bigger mess.

Netflix Recommends... Basic (2003)

* 1/2
Director: John McTiernan
Starring: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Connie Nielsen

I'll give Basic this much: it lives up to its title. It's so basic that it appears not to have been developed beyond its very ideas for the plot and the characters, let alone beyond the first draft of the screenplay. Basic is the cinematic equivalent of a kid who gets to school and realizes that he has a project due, so he throws something together in the five minutes before the bell rings just to have something to hand in. It's bad. It's not even bad in the "so bad, it's entertaining" way. It's bad in the "so bad it's a total waste of time" way. But thanks to the new algorithm launched by Netflix, it was recommended for me with an 90% match - which isn't to say that Netflix hasn't always recommended bad movies for me, it's just that it used to recommend movies even as it acknowledged that it didn't think I would rate them highly. Anyway, on with the show:

Review: The Bronze (2016)

* 1/2
Director: Bryan Buckley
Starring: Melissa Rauch, Sebastian Stan

Can a comedy be so nasty that it ceases to be a comedy at all? There are plenty of R-rated comedies that have come out in the last decade and a half and have built themselves around the simple fact of their protagonist being a mean piece of work (some even get straight to the point by putting "Bad" in the title, like Bad Santa or Bad Teacher; this one might have been called "Bad Olympian," except that that would imply that she wasn't a successful athlete), some on the assumption that all you need to make a comedy successful is a character who acts like an asshole in every situation for no discernible reason. The first half hour of The Bronze is relentlessly unpleasant for this very reason. After that, it settles down a little bit and stops trying so hard to prove its "edginess," though it doesn't get significantly better or funnier. It does, however, feature a sex scene that has to be seen to be believed and which is almost entertaining enough to make the rest of the film worth watching.

Review: Zoolander 2 (2016)

* 1/2
Director: Ben Stiller
Starring: Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Penelope Cruz

As a wise man once said, "Sometimes dead is better." Sometimes, even if a movie is really funny, and even if it has gone on to become one of the defining pieces of pop culture of its era, its quotes instantly recognizable, its protagonist iconic, it's best to just leave it in that cultural moment and be happy with what you've got. Some movies are perfect just as they are, their endings the perfect cap to their stories, and even if those movies grow in popularity as the years go on, finding and expanding their audience, it's best to just let things be rather than try to recreate the magic more than a decade after the fact, when tastes have changed and the finger is no longer quite on the pulse. Anchorman is a great comedy. Anchorman: The Legend Continues? That's only okay. Zoolander is a perfectly funny movie. Zoolander 2? Hot garbage. Bad Santa better hope the third time's the charm.

Review: 30 Minutes or Less (2011)

* 1/2
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari, Danny McBride, Nick Swardson

There are plenty of movies that leave you wondering how they ever got made, they're so ill-conceived and poorly rendered. Somewhat less common are movies that leave you wondering why they got made, as everyone in it seems so disengaged from and disinterested in the material. I mean, I can speculate as to why each of the principal actors showed up for this - Jesse Eisenberg to reteam with his Zombieland director Ruben Fleisher, Aziz Ansari because it's not like Hollywood makes a ton of roles available to actors of color, Danny McBride because the character he plays is basically the "Danny McBride character" so why not?, and Nick Swardson because the character he plays here is marginally less grotesque than the ones he usually gets to play in Happy Madison productions so this must have been a nice change of pace - but that still doesn't explain why anyone paid to make it happen. Even if 30 Minutes of Less didn't have strong similarities to a real life incident that ended tragically, this would be an oddly joyless comedy, and one that doesn't even seem to know what its actual story is, let alone what tone it ought to be aiming for.

Netflix Recommends... Nailed! (2015)

* 1/2
Director: Stephen Greene
Starring: Jessica Biel, Jake Gyllenhaal

It was like a perfect storm: Netflix's spotty history with recommendations, a film famously disavowed by its director and then brutalized by critics, and a prediction that I would give this "recommendation" a low rating. I couldn't resist, I had to watch Nailed!, which remains the Canadian title of David O. Russell's orphaned political comedy, though elsewhere it is known as Accidental Love, a title that is approximately a million times too generic for something that is this much of an oddity. Was it worth the time? Not really. Nailed! is a bad movie, but it's not the epic boondoggle its storied production and post-production history would suggest. To be honest, it's kind of dull.

Review: Get Hard (2015)

* 1/2
Director: Etan Cohen
Starring: Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart

Premise: wealthy white man gets convicted of a white collar crime and turns to the only black person he knows, who he assumes has experience in prison based almost solely on his race, and hires him to train him so that he'll be able to survive in prison. There are very few ways in which this couldn't end up being racist. At first it seems like Get Hard might, might, have found that way by using the premise to critique white privilege and the cluelessness of the 1%, but fairly quickly it reveals itself to be toothless and uninterested in doing anything by picking the lowest hanging fruit. Granted, once in a while the lowest hanging fruit turns out to be funny, but Get Hard's reliance on it also condemns it to be an utterly forgettable piece of work.

Review: Lost River (2015)

* 1/2
Director: Ryan Gosling
Starring: Iain De Caestecker, Christina Hendricks, Saorise Ronan, Matt Smith

A flaming bicycle speeding past. A door shaped like a demon mouth, making it look like those who enter it are being devoured. The head of a dinosaur crashing through a windshield. A girl riding high above the ground, perched atop an easy chair set up in the back of a convertible. Ryan Gosling's directorial debut Lost River is full of dynamic images, but the film itself fails to live up to them. Emotionally and narratively inert, and confusing "weird" for "compelling," Lost River is a film that unfolds without any real sense of purpose and instead plays more like a fan tribute to Gosling's favorite filmmakers, with heavy emphasis on David Lynch and Nicolas Winding Refn. Gosling will no doubt make another movie as a director someday, but hopefully by that time his sense of identity as a filmmaker will have developed as much as his eye for strange beauty.

Netflix Recommends... The Other Woman (2014)

* 1/2
Director: Nick Cassavetes
Starring: Cameron Diaz, Lesley Mann

Oh Netflix. You know that when you "recommend" a film to me and then guess that I'll give a low rating, I just can't resist. I wish that I could. I wished that a lot while watching The Other Woman, a comedy of such strange and confused gender politics that it almost seems like it was written in one language, translated into another, and lost all meaning somewhere in between. It also appears to be only half-way written, given the way that plot threads just sort of peter out, resolve themselves off-screen, and sometimes only announce themselves after they've been resolved. One might be inclined to give the film credit for not only being headlined by women but starring two women over 40 at that, but consider this: despite being a movie ostensibly about women and without question marketed towards women (not to mention written by one), The Other Woman still manages to fail the Bechdel test even though passing it would literally only require that the two women at the center of the story have one conversation that isn't about a man.

Netflix Recommends... Runner Runner (2013)

* 1/2
Director: Brad Furman
Starring: Justin Timberlake, Ben Affleck, Gemma Arterton

I've mentioned before that whatever algorithm Netflix uses to create its recommendations is basically incomprehensible. A while ago Netflix "recommended" The Canyons for me, even though its best guess for how I would rate it was 1.5 stars. This time Netflix recommended Runner Runner despite assuming that I would rate it 1.5 stars (good guess!). Now, I learned a lesson with The Canyons, but I was intrigued by the fact that Netflix was recommending Runner Runner to me based on my having watched Orange is the New Black. What on earth, I wondered, could a gambling thriller headlined by Justin Timberlake and Ben Affleck have in common with a comedy/drama series set in a women's prison? I won't leave you in suspense: nothing. There is absolutely nothing that Runner Runner and Orange is the New Black have in common, unless you count the fact that every once in a while characters in each speak a little bit of Spanish.

Review: Girl Most Likely (2013)

* 1/2
Director: Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini
Starring: Kristen Wiig, Annette Bening

Girl Most Likely to... what, exactly? Certainly not to be the protagonist of a movie that carries itself like its screenplay has been through more than one draft. I'm not sure how so many talented people ended up joining forces for such a bizarre mess of a movie, but here it is. If you're thinking of checking this one out, I highly recommend just watching the trailer because all the funny jokes are there and you get them without having to suffer through the nonsensical and shapeless plot, which is less a cohesive narrative than it is a series of ideas for potentially funny scenarios that never really develop into anything.

Netflix Recommends... Rendition (2007)

* 1/2
Director: Gavin Hood
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep

This time my Top 10 recommendations included the following movies: Get the Gringo, Listen to Your Heart, Rendition, Retreat and Down Periscope. I went with Rendition, a film featuring a trio of talented actors, and which I vaguely remembered as one of several "war on terror" themed prestige films to come out in 2007 without making much in the way of a lasting impact (the other films were Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, and Charlie Wilson's War). Having now seen it, I understand why it didn't make much of an impact. This is a film that presents as a work of political import which aims to hold the US government accountable for dangerous and ugly policies, but which, on close inspection, does quite a bit to uphold the values which it supposedly abhors.

Review: The Iceman (2013)

* 1/2
Director: Ariel Vroman
Starring: Michael Shannon

It's hard to believe that a film about a man who killed more than 100 people could be so dull, but here's The Iceman to prove it possible. Based on the true story of Richard Kuklinski (played here by Michael Shannon, and marvelously despite the film's shortcomings), a sociopath who eventually became a mob hitman and managed to keep his murderous double life a secret from his wife and children for twenty years, the film is a long shuffle through dates and events, never gaining anything resembling momentum and too scattered to even develop as a theme its ostensible purpose of showing that even monsters are people.

Review: The Big Wedding (2013)

* 1/2
Director: Justin Zackham
Starring: Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro, Susan Sarandon, Amanda Seyfried

Don’t RSVP. That joke probably seems easy, but I assure you that it’s funnier than about half the supposed laugh lines in The Big Wedding, a largely hollow enterprise with gender, sexual, and racial politics that would have seemed quaintly out of date when Stanley Kramer was still at his well-meaning best, and seem utterly alien today. I’m guessing that the cast is the only reason this thing wasn’t relegated to straight-to-DVD purgatory, but agreeing to appear in this clunker doesn’t exactly bode well for the state of any of their careers.

Review: Identity Thief (2013)

* 1/2
Director: Seth Gordon
Starring: Jason Bateman, Melissa McCarthy

When in doubt, just throw in a throat punch. At least I assume that that was the strategy behind Identity Thief, an occasionally funny film that has the curious misfortune of being both over and underplotted. This is not a good film, nor is it a particularly good use of the talents of either Melissa McCarthy or Jason Bateman. What it is, is the very definition of a first quarter movie, the sort of thin, diversionary effort that will be forgotten before the next season even begins.

Canadian Film Review: 2 Frogs in the West (2010)

* 1/2
Director: Dany Papineau
Starring: Mirianne Brule, Dany Papineau

If nothing else, Dany Papineau's 2 Frogs in the West demonstrates that it's possible for a film to be bad, while still showcasing the positive potential of its writer/director. I realize that that probably sounds strange, but hear me out: the deficiencies of 2 Frogs are so glaringly obvious that I think it will take little for Papineau to mature out of them as an artist, and the strengths of the film are such that they demonstrate that Papineau has a solid enough base as a filmmaker to make the necessary improvements. Does that make 2 Frogs worth seeing? Probably not, but should Papineau continue to write and direct, it'll make for an interesting starting point when tracing the trajectory of his work.

Review: The Iron Lady (2011)

* 1/2
Director: Phyllida Lloyd
Starring: Meryl Streep

I'll get it out of the way right off the top: Meryl Streep is fantastic playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Unfortunately, revelatory as the performance may be, it is the only reason the film exists. Written by Abi Morgan and directed by Phyllida Lloyd, The Iron Lady is a frustratingly shapeless film that tries to disguise the fact that it has nothing to say by telling its story in an elliptical way and leaving it to Streep to do all the heavy lifting - well, her and the makeup crew. At least they received Oscar nominations for their trouble.