Quick takes on 5 films

A disclaimer up front: I’m not a big Amy Schumer fan. Her jokes are meant to shock you because we aren’t used to female comedians talking like that, but if a male comedian were to make the same jokes, most people wouldn’t laugh. That being said, Trainwreck is a pretty funny movie, and towards the end, it has a lot of heart too. Amy plays the typical “guy” role, in that she sleeps around and is deathly afraid of commitment. When she meets Bill Hader’s character, her rules are tested, as she geniunely likes him. Hader is great and seriously underrated as as serious actor (go find last year’s The Skeleton Twins). I almost gave up on this film halfway through, but stuck it out and the second half is definitely worth it.

The newest Terminator movie, Genysis, kinda sucks. I wasn’t expecting much, so it’s not like it disappointed me or anything. It’s half sequel and half reboot, so I’m not sure what the next movie will do, if there is another one. It is pretty heavily a rehash of the previous films in the franchise and brings no new ideas to the table. Die hard fans alone should bother with this one.

The Gift is an interesting movie. Simon (played by Jason Bateman) accepts a new job and moves his wife Robyn into a nice new house. They run into one of Simon’s old school friends, Gordo. Gordo starts stalking the family though, creating tension between Simon and Robyn. Robyn however finds that perhaps Simon is at fault too. A pretty thrilling and quietly tense movie, with a couple plot twists that you do not see coming.

No Escape is another thriller, but there is nothing quiet about this one. Jack (Owen Wilson) moves his family to a tiny city somewhere in southeastern Asia, very remote and very much a “developing country.” He is there for his job as a contractor, but they are only there for a day before a city wide riot breakes out, with citizins angry at Americans for perceived wrongs. When a gang starts going hotel to hotel killing Americans, Jack must take his family and hide. The movie is full of eye-rolling coincedences, but not a horrible film, and definitely gripping to the end.

Infinitely Polar Bear got some pretty rave reviews, but honestly it is a better acted movie than a movie by itself. Mark Ruffalo plays a man diagnosed as bipolar (his young girls at the time pronounce it “polar bear”) in the late 1970’s. He refuses to take his medicine, leading to a rift with his family. His wife has to go back to school to hopefully one day earn enough money to support the family, leaving Mark’s character at home to raise the girls. The movie is a year in their life together. The acting is truly superb. Ruffalo is in my opinion one of the most underrated actors around, and he shines here again. Truly not a memorable or profound movie, but definitely worth seeing for Ruffalo’s skill alone.

The background of death surrounds in White Noise

White Noise by Don DeLillo is an interesting book. It is written in a playful, wry style. For instance, the main character Jack, is a Hitler studies expert and professor in a small, prestigious university (famous for Jack’s studies, since he was the first in the country to promote this course), yet he doesn’t speak German. The book follows Jack in his everyday life, and his dealings with quirky family members and work associates. As a modern family, the tv is always on in one room or another, so you think the title refers to the constant stream of commercials and background sound (the author does intersperse a line regularly into the novel from the tv), but really it is about the death all around us. The backdrop of the novel is Jack’s obsessive fear of death. He thinks about it often, such as when he will die, how he will die, etc.

Jack’s fear grows exponentially when there is a waste spill just outside of town, and the residents must evacuate for a time for safety. Jack is exposed, and the response team (again humorously, a “fake” response team that is meant to practice for calamities is instead having to do the real thing first, and practice later in the novel) tells Jack that his life has almost definitely been shortened. When Jack finally tells his wife Babette about his real fear, she says she has the same fear, but while it is a nagging obsession with Jack, it is a paralyzing fear for Babette. She has gone so far as to find a black market pill that is supposed to subdue the fear of death, and she has been having an affair with the drug-maker to keep a steady supply coming. Jack takes this news in stride; with his own increasing dread he realizes he would do just about anything to rid himself of the fear as well.

In the end, something snaps in Jack, and he wants to get the medicine his wife has been taking, to see if it will help. He goes to the sleazy motel where she has been meeting the drug maker, and confronts him with the intent to rob and kill him. It goes astray though, and both end up at a local religious hospital, being cared for by nuns. Jack turns to a nun, looking for some faith to ease his troubled mind, and she admits she isn’t even religious and doesn’t believe in God or an after-life.

Funny little stories about death fill the book, such as Jack’s son’s friend who wants to sit in a pit with 70 deadly vipers to get in the Guinness book of records, or youngest son Wilder, who Babette is always checking on, but manages to find himself in the middle of a busy interstate at the end of the novel (he doesn’t get hurt). There are many more. Even the local grocery store where Jack and his friend Murray shop can be a metaphor for death. This book was much different than most of the other classics I’ve been reading lately, and a good, if somewhat unsettling, change of pace.

Farm and family struggles in O Pioneers!

O Pioneers! is the second novel of Willa Cather’s I’ve read in this list of 100. Written many years before Death Comes for the Archbishop, it is a softer story but is still very moving. It tells the story of Alexandra Bergson, an independent strong-willed woman struggling to build a farm in rural Nebraska in the early part of the 20th century.

It starts when Alexandra is a young adult. Her father brought their family to the USA from Sweden to start a new life, and after struggling for years to get something to grow in the strange Nebraskan soil, he is dying. Alexandra is the eldest child and must now look after the farm and her three younger brothers. Brothers Lou and Oscar are similar in that they lack the foresight for grander schemes, and want to sell the land and settle on a smaller farm by the river where farming may be easier. Alexandra wants to further her father’s goal of the kids having a better life, so resists their efforts, while grooming youngest brother Emil to go to university one day and move on to bigger and better things. She puts her personal life on hold, keeping her only male friend Carl at a distance.

From these beginnings, the novel shoots forward from chapter to chapter. Sometimes a week or month will go by, sometimes years. Over time, Alexandra is able to turn her small farm into a sprawling plantation. Lou and Oscar still pine away for an easier life, Emil has gone to school and come back for a short time, deciding what to do next, and Carl is having is own adventures around the country, but always returning from time to time hoping Alexandra is ready to settle down with him. Emil ends up falling in love with Marie, a neighbor who is all ready married to a burly farmer named Frank. Emil struggles with his feelings, finally deciding to leave before anything comes of it, but when he goes to say good-bye, the two give in to their feelings. Frank finds them and shoots them both in a crime of passion. Alexandra’s hopes of Emil being the one sibling to go off to a new life are shattered, and she realizes that has been the big goal of her life, more than the farm or prosperity she has brought to the area. Now in her 40’s, she finally allows herself some personal comfort and agrees to marry Carl. She knows that no matter how hard she tries to hold on to something, whether it is Emil or the land, all things fade and time keeps moving on.

This is a quiet, unassuming, “little house on the prairie” kind of book, but a good one. In fact one of the more moving books I’ve read in a little while. Much of the book is told in dialogue, and the descriptive background writing is sometimes sparse, leaving much to the imagination. Cather does a fantastic job of writing just enough to give you a sense of the open land they live on and the life it holds there, and lets your mind fill in the rest. Alexandra is a different kind of feminist. She doesn’t stand on a soapbox shouting for equality, but she does her work quietly, as well as any man could, and doesn’t even listen when her brothers try to move her to do something she doesn’t think is right. An enjoyable, quick read.

Tropic of Cancer ground-breaking in its day, has not held up

I sincerely hope Tropic of Canceris on the list of 100 greatest 20^thcentury novels based on its history and not for Henry Miller’s actual writing. The novel was banned in the USA for nearly 30 years, for being obscene and vulgar. When it came out in 1934, I’m sure the language in it was eye-popping, but in today’s generation it doesn’t stand out from the latest stand-up comics. I have to think all of the critics, who raved over this novel, loved it for breaking down barriers and bringing an underground culture to the mainstream, but on its own, again, I don’t think it is much of a novel.

In it, the main character “Henry” is living a wasteful life in Paris, France. He is about the worst human being I can imagine. He is intelligent and introspective, is well versed in all the great authors and painters and artists, but doesn’t use his knowledge for anything that can further the human being. He sets himself up above other authors, deriding their work as irrelevant, but never writes anything of his own. He feels entitled and wishes to live a life of luxury and opulence, but refuses to get a regular job. He mooches off his other bohemian-living friends where he can, spends his nights floating from one prostitute to another, and wastes any money he does happen to come across. For awhile he manages to scrape by off the money his wife in America sends him, but when she stops, he basically becomes homeless. By the end of the novel, he has even started stealing from his friends, the only way he can survive at that point.

If that were all there was to it, it would just be a dirty novel, but Miller spends whole sections of the novel rambling on about ideas and philosphy, or nothing at all. For instance, “I look again at the sign but it is removed; in its place there is a pane of colored glass. I take out my artifical eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief. A woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk; she has a snake around her neck. The entire room is lined with books and strange fish swimming in colored globes; there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossos and Carthage, of Carthage before and after the salting. In the corner of the room I see an iron bedstand and on it a corpse is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse from the bed and absent-mindedly throws it out the window. She returns to a huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from the bowl and swallows it. Slowly the room begins to revolve and one by the one the continents slide into the sea; only the woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography…”

What is that even supposed to mean? It sounds like the ravings of a madman, and all I did was flip to a random page. There are huge portions of the book that are worse than that. If that is brilliant writing, maybe I’m not as much of an intellectual as I thought I was. Again, props to Miller for breaking down walls. I’m all for free speech and no censors in literature or art, but I didn’t get this book at all.

The force is alive in the new Star Wars

Yes, I saw the new Star Wars on opening night. I’m that big of a nerd. The Star Wars films were integral to my childhood, being born in 1980, I really grew up on them. I’m not going to write anything here that you won’t read anywhere else, so in the interest of not leaving any spoilers, all I will say is I loved it. Even my wife, who generally hates sci-fi movies, really liked it (enough to go back and re-watch, or in some cases watch for the first time, the first 6 movies). It fires on all the right cylinders. I’m sure Disney is counting on this film to reboot the franchise, and with all of the new Star Wars films coming over the years, they have at least started on the right course.

Early science fiction in War of the Worlds

Lets get something straight. War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells isn’t a great book by my definition. It is definitely ground breaking for its day, but I can’t call it profound literature. Everyone knows the story: Martians come to Earth to enslave, they cause a ton of destruction in a small amount of time with no resistance to their technology, but quickly die off, in deus ex machina fashion, when their bodies can’t fight the bacteria present everywhere on our planet. It is an interesting read from the point of view of seeing how much our perspective and knowledge has changed in the 115ish years since it was published, as Wells writes about big societies on the rich, vibrant Martian planet. Despite being a science fiction novel, Wells glosses over the science parts of the book, focusing more on the narrator’s (the book is told in the first person, and we never get his name) interactions with others around him. Probably known best as the radio drama (that historically is probably a bit overblown), or for young-ins, for the movie adaptation, the novel itself is a quick, short read.

Quick takes on 5 films

I’m not sure what all the fuss about Dope is. I saw one early review call it “the Clueless of a new generation.” It is a cute little movie, but not very well acted and not even really all that memorable. It is about a good high school kid who goes to school in a rough inner city school. He has aspirations for Harvard, but even the teachers don’t give him much of a chance with his background. All of his future plans get in jeopardy when he ends up with a backpack full of drugs, which he needs to sell to pay to the dealers, or they will hurt him and his friends. It is a mad dash to the end of the movie, and finale is well done, but the rest of the movie can be kind of a mess at times.

Just Before I Go is better than you might think, with the goofball lead actor of Sean William Scott in a more serious role, but the film is hampered by shtick comedy that hurts an otherwise good story. Scott plays an adult whose life has not turned out the way he had hoped, so he decides to end it. Before he does though, he returns to the small town he grew up in, which he had left right after graduation, to settle some scores and say his good byes. Things don’t go the way he had planned, since the high school bully has turned out to be a good person, “the one that got away” is now married with a house full of kids, and the teacher that bullied him doesn’t even remember him. Not a terrible movie despite the bad reviews online, but ultimately a good script doesn’t reach its potential.

I have little to say about Jimmy’s Hall. It is about an Irishman who returns home after years in exile in America, and tries to teach the new ideas of jazz, free thinking, and modern dancing to the locals, to the chagrine of the church and other conservatives. Based on a true story, there really isn’t much to remember about this one, and it gets dull by the end. You never feel attached enough to the main characters to really care all that much.

Paper Towns was written by the same guy that did Fault in Our Stars, but Towns isn’t nearly as good as Stars. Quentin is a bit of an outcast at school, keeping to himself and his small group of friends. He has a crush on his neighbor Margo, who is the popular girl in school. The new spin on this old tale is Margo doesn’t really care for the attention, and instead runs away. Quentin spends the rest of the film tracking her down. The film is teen drama at its best (worst?) and any viewer over the age of 17 or 18 can’t help but ask a “Really?” by the end.

Self/Less holds an interesting concept, but in the end is really just a decent action film. A group has learned how to move conscienceness from body to body, so old, dying rich people can move to a new younger body and all is well. However, when one man does it and fails to take the drugs perscribed, he sees visions and realizes the body he is now in has a past. The rest of the film is just fist fights, gun fights, car chases, and all that goes with it. Not bad action scenes, but ultimately you wish for more exploration than action.

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.

Quick takes on 5 films

Z For Zachariah is about as slow of a movie you can find, it will test your patience. Not to say it isn’t good, because it is, but I think a lot of viewers will struggle with the pace. It features just 3 actors, all good in Margot Robbie (from Focus), Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Chris Pine. Margot’s character is living alone in a valley untouched by a vast nuclear war that has killed just about everyone. One day Chiwetel’s character arrives, he has been looking for a safe place to live and traveling around in a hasmat suite and relying on meds to keep him alive. He survived the war in a bunker but ventured out when loneliness got to be too much. He and Margot settle in together and are just starting to get comfortable with each other when Chris’s character shows up, a brash young man who seems to have secrets. Live is now a little unsettled and Chiwetel clearly does not trust the new man. I love post-apolyptic movies, so I admittedly probably like this film more than the average person, but it is very well acted and tense, if quietly so.

There is nothing quiet about Furious 7. These movies are ridiculous from the beginning, and this one rachets up the craziness to a whole new degree. When cars are driving out of planes, or crashing through windows from one high-rise building to the next one, subtle is not a word that comes to mind. The whole team is back together again, for Paul Walker’s last ride, with a new villian in Jason Stathum. It is eye-rolling worthy, but it is a glorious action packed film. Not sure how they are going to top themselves in the next one, they are going to have to go to the moon or something. The ending is well worth the ride too to say goodbye to Paul.

Testament of Youth is another movie not for everyone. It is a British period drama, so it is quiet, slow, and well acted, with beautiful cinematography. Mostly a dialogue-driven drama, it is based on the memoirs of Vera Brittain. It is a rare woman’s look at World War I, at a time when women were struggly to be heard. Vera struggles to get into Oxford, but no sooner is she there that she leaves to follow her fiance and brother to the war, to be a nurse and do her part. Nothing seems to go as planned though, and instead of saving British lives, she ends up in a unit saving wounded enemy Germans, which gives her a unique perspective on the war and humanity in general, ideas that will stay with her throughout her life. Again, you have to patient for this one, but worth it for film lovers, and especially those like myself that like biographical films.

Digging for Fire includes a who’s who of actors that love doing small indie films, including Jake Johnson, Brie Larson, Anna Kendrick, and Sam Rockwell. In it, Tim and his wife Lee are house-sitting a huge mansion for a couple weeks, and on one particular weekend they split up to do different things. Lee takes their daughter and goes to her parents house, and ends up at a bar flirting with a stranger. Tim stays at the big house and invites a bunch of friends over, who bring girls along, and Tim ends up spending the day with one of the girls. The basic premise of the film is each other’s weekend-long emotional affairs, and where that leaves them in the end. A weird film, with some of the quirky strange dialogue that some indie films are known (infamous?) for. Can’t say I didn’t enjoy, but not sure I’ll remember much about it a year from now.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is another indie release, with a bunch of unfamiliar faces. The “me” is Greg, and the film is told from his perspective. About to graduate high school, he has spent his life hiding from real relationships. He doesn’t get close to any one “group” (drama club, nerds, dope heads, jocks), but instead offers passing greetings to everyone and doesn’t piss off anyone. He even goes so far as to each lunch alone rather than in the lunch room, so he doesn’t have to pick a table to sit at. His one friend is Earl, with who he makes silly home-made movies. When a girl at school, Rachel, is diagnosed with cancer, Greg’s mom forces him to go over to her house and spend time with her. He does it reluctantly, not because he is weirded out about the cancer, but just because he doesn’t want to get close to anyone. The movie is the rest of the trio’s story, with Greg doing a lot of growing up along the way. I really enjoyed this film, and you just have to watch it to see how it ends!

Quick takes on 5 films

Two remakes that couldn’t be more different. Annie is a true attempt at a modern redo, moving the setting up to the backdrop of a present day big city. Everyone liked the old original, but the syrupy, overly cutesiness of that film does not hold up today, and it is challenging to watch. There was so much sugar dripping from this one I had to start fast forwarding to see the highlights. If ever a film that shouldn’t have been made, this is it.

Cinderella on the other hand is supremely enjoyable. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel like Annie, and sticks mostly to the known script with only minor changes, but it is done extremely well. The actors are charming in their roles, the scenes and costumes are brilliant, and I’m not ashamed to admit I was fairly enthralled. Whereas I knew what was coming in Annie and couldn’t wait for it to be over, in Cinderella I knew what was coming and still enjoyed the ride along. This one is a great family film.

Even having just finished Inherent Vice, I’m not exactly sure what I saw. I can’t decide if this a deep, engrossing film or just a thorough mess from the opening scene. The film follows Doc, a drugged out hippy played by the talented Joaquin Phoenix. He is pulled into a convulted plot by his exgirlfriend, to find out what happened to her missing current boyfriend, a rich real estate developer, someone who had a lot of girlfriends, whose wife had a lot of boyfriends, all while Doc is constantly harassed by a local LAPD detective, followed by a drug ring kingpin, and somehow trying to avoid entanglement with the Aryan Brotherhood, a black guerilla group, and others. If it sounds like you need a map to get through it, you sort of do, or just watch it when you are really high as the lead character is throughout. A very strange movie, with more plots and subplots that many seasonlong tv shows. It is chuck full of great actors in all roles from main to supporting to cameos, but I’m still not convinced it is worth the effort.

The Water Diviner stars Russell Crowe, and is also his directorial debut. He plays Connor, an Australian man who has lost his sons to World War I and his wife to her subsequent grief. He takes a trek to presentday Turkey to find his sons’ bodies. Though the war is over, there is still major conflict between the local Turkish people, the British, and the Greeks, all fighting over land as the Ottoman Empire is falling apart. Connor pleads, threatens, and begs his way onto the site of his sons’ final moments, only to find his journey doesn’t stop there. It is heartwarming if a bit (or more than a bit) predictable. Crowe is fantastic as an actor, but the movie is a little choppy. Good for a single watch for sure, maybe not the kind of movie you’d watch more than once though.

Tomorrowland had a ton of potential, but it never pans out. It takes place in modern day with flashbacks to 40ish years ago. In the movie, a city was built in an alternate dimension, a place called Tomorrowland, where the world’s best minds could come together and invent, just for the pure joy of working with other like-minded people, without interference from politics, nation rivalries, race, or religion. Now in present day, something is wrong in Tomorrowland (I can’t say what without giving away the “twist”) and they reach out for help to George Clooney’s character. He “grew up” in Tomorrowland inventing things, but was banished years before for some transgression. The idea of the film is really good, and visuals are there as well, but the directing and story are pretty awful. I *think* it is supposed to be a family film directed towards kids, who might like the quirky dialogue and action, but some of it is very violent and might be scary to young kids, and some of the plot elements would be hard to grasp for many adults! The ending is good enough, if a little abrupt.