Friday's Top 5... Western Comedies

#5: Rango
Westerns don't get made very often anymore and western comedy hybrids get made even less, so Rango was a breath of fresh air in addition to being a playful celebration of the genre.

Review: August: Osage County (2013)

* * *
Director: John Wells
Starring: Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Margo Martindale, Julianne Nicholson, Juliette Lewis, Dermot Mulroney, Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Misty Upham

As Tolstoy said, happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Few have been as intensely and vocally unhappy as the Weston clan, forced together against their will and then stuck in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the family home. With its heavy subject matter, a cast stacked with familiar names (and a few Oscar wins between them), and a theatrical release date that was smack in the middle of prestige season, August: Osage County is a film that has a lot of built in expectations, perhaps too many not to sink at least a little bit. I skipped this one when it was in theaters, as mixed reviews made it seem non-essential, and end of the year movie fatigue started to set in, but had I seen it in the theater I expect I wouldn't have liked it as much as I did seeing it now, without having to look through the "Oscar lens" that gets applied to almost every film released towards the end of any given year. Don't get me wrong: August: Osage County is not a great movie. But it's a solid, good movie.

Review: Grizzly Man (2005)

* * * *
Director: Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog is no stranger to stories of men battling against the world itself, trying to harness the power of nature and remake it according to their own design, which makes him uniquely suited to tell the story of Timothy Treadwell. For 13 summers Treadwell camped out in Katmai National Park to be near the grizzly bears he loved so dearly, filming them and, to his mind, protecting them from poachers and safeguarding their environment. This came to an abrupt end in the autumn of 2003, when he and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were killed and partially eaten by a bear, Treadwell's omnipresent camera catching the audio of the event, but not the video as the lens cap was on. Using the footage collected by Treadwell over his years in Alaska, Herzog creates a stunning portrait of madness and beauty.

Summer Not-Busters: The Watch (2012)

Director: Akiva Schaffer
Starring: Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, Richard Ayode
Domestic Gross: $34,350,553

Sometimes timing is everything. On February 29, 2012 the first promotional materials for a science fiction comedy called "Neighborhood Watch" were released, just three days after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin would make terms like "neighborhood watch" and "stand your ground" key words in countless articles, and make race relations in the United States the most hot button issue of the day. On March 27th, posters and trailers for the film would be pulled from theaters in Florida as the controversy around Martin's death intensified, and by May 4th the film's title would be changed to simply The Watch before being released on July 27th, seven days after another tragedy in the form of a mass shooting at a midnight showing of The Dark Knight. The Watch had a lot of outside forces stacked against it before finally being released and promptly disappearing from theaters, and it would be tempting to call it a victim of circumstances except for one thing: it's original title isn't the only thing that will bring the Martin case, and the issues surrounding it, to mind.

Review: Filth (2013)

* * *
Director: Jon S. Baird
Starring: James McAvoy

The current pop culture landscape is so littered with a certain type of "complicated" protagonist that repetition has made it difficult for that character type to remain remotely interesting. The angry white male whose assholery masks deep wellsprings of pain is a character type that has been bled dry in film and television in the years since Harvey Keitel perfected it in Bad Lieutenant, so it takes a particularly great story, or a particularly brilliant performance, to make such a protagonist seem anything other than utterly derivative. Jon S. Baird's Filth, based on the novel of the same name by Irving Welsh, has that brilliant performance courtesy of star James McAvoy, and it has a story that, while not necessarily great, is solid enough when it isn't wallowing in the familiar or careening wildly off the rails.