Quick takes on 5 films

Dwayne Johnson seems to be the king of mindless action films. San Andreas is another in the long line. You won’t want to see this film for the “story,” but you will want to for the amazing computer-enhanced graphics. Not a deep film, it is about a major earthquake in California, the largest ever on record, tearing the various cities apart. Johnson’s character is a rescue helicopter pilot who is trying to locate his family and get them to safety. The movie is chuck full of buildings collapsing and mass chaos, beautifully done, so it is a great movie to watch if you just feel like kicking back and not thinking.

Southpaw could have been great, and while Jake Gyllenhaal is terrific as boxer Billie “the Great,” the film gets bogged down in overdone cliches and an almost paint-by-numbers kind of feel. Billie is an undeafted boxer when his wife is killed and he falls into depression and alcoholism, having his daughter taken away in the process. He ends up as a janitor in Tick’s gym (played by Forest Whitaker), where he starts the long road to recovery and redemption. Gyllenhaal took the role very seriously, putting a lot of muscle on his normally wirey frame, and his acting is fantastic too, its too bad the movie’s plot and direction don’t follow suite.

If you do want to think a little bit, Mr Holmes is a solid choice. Ian McKellen plays the great Sherlock Holmes, who while still attentive to detail, has started to lose his memory and has thus retired to a quiet countryside to live out his days. The movie is told in 3 parts, the present day where he lives with his live-in housekeeper and her son, the somewhat recent past where he traveled to Japan to try to find an herb to help his failing memory, and his last big case from a few years previously, which he is trying to remember correctly to prove to himself that his mind is still sharp. The ending if clever and sentimenal at the same time, and it is a moving film.

Spy on the other hand, is just for pure laughs. Melissa McCarthy’s most recent escapade, she plays a “desk” spy that helps those in the field, until she is thrust into the field herself. Also staring Jude Law, Rose Byrne, and Jason Stathum, who is hilarious as a bumbling but energetic spy, the film follows McCarthy and she hunts a nuclear device out in the world, before it can get sold to terrorists. It was written and directed by the guy that did McCarthy’s The Heat last year, so more of the same kind of laughs, and very well done. Starts a little slow, but really hits its stride in the second half, and stays funny to the end, not always easily done in the today’s comic fare.

I saved the best of the batch for last. End of the Tour is one of my favorite movies in recent memory. Semi-biographical, it tells the story of a weekend long interview of author David Foster Wallace (played by Jason Segel) by Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg). In the mid-1990’s, Wallace has just written a break-through novel that has propelled him to the limelight, and Lipsky is out to see what he is all about and question him about rumors that have circulated about him and his book. Segel is absolutely brilliant as the private-life loving Wallace, in a serious role in which he shines. Wallace, as any creative mind would, loves the recognition his novel is receiving, but at the same time is not so caring for the new attention being shown him, and is deathly scared that none of it is real, that people will somehow realize his book isn’t as good as they’ve said it is and he is just a fraud. Lipsky on the other hand, himself an author who seems to only be working at the magazine because his novel career hasn’t gone anywhere, wants to find the hole in the wall Wallace has surrounded himself with, and refuses to believe Wallace doesn’t like the accolades. The film is an endearing look at the human mind, what makes us tick, and how success can mean very different things to different people. I can’t recommend this one more, every film lover needs to see it.