The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou - Revisited it for the first time in a quite a while. Still really like it. Until Moonrise Kingdom, this was my favourite Wes Anderson film. Now it's number 2.
Have you seen Grand Budapest Hotel yet? My husband and I loved it. Just a charming movie with wonderful performances. (Moonrise Kingdom is still my favorite Wes Anderson joint, though.)
Grand Budapest Hotel is a pretty fantastic movie. It's missing the heart that Moonrise Kingdom had, I find, but it makes up for it with the excellent humor and Ralph Fienes absolutely killing it. All that said, though, I'm still the sort who has Life Aquatic and Fantastic Mr. Fox tied for my Favorite Anderson slot.
Meanwhile, a brief summing up of other movies I've watched lately:
Guardians of the Galaxy: What more can I say about this one? I've ended up seeing it three times at this point, and it's probably my favorite movie of the summer. Sure, it's got the traditional Marvel issues with a familiar plot coupled with a forgettable bad guy (he’s after the shiny McGuffin, it’s going to destroy someplace-or-other if our heroes don’t stop them in time), but it so perfectly nails the characters, the humor, the tone, and all the details, that it comes out ahead as a genuinely fun and exciting sci-fi action movie. Plus, it’s about time talking raccoons got their due in movies.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Pretty much the exact opposite of the above movie. This was just generic garbage. Crummy characters, incoherent plot, dull action scenes, so on and so forth. Perhaps the only noteworthy thing about it is its commitment to squeezing every single cliched, overused, and generally hackneyed line of action dialogue/beat possible into a single movie (it's even got a record scratch!).
Lucy: Pretty disappointing, frankly. I'm not one of the ones to decry the film solely for its factually-incorrect thesis about brain usage (far be it from me to slam a film for stepping outside the bounds of proper science, since if I did, I'd probably hate most great sci-fi films), but this movie just gets increasingly goofy with the idea to the point where I can't even try to take it seriously. Which is too bad, since the film seems to treat the whole concept as some great mystical stage of human development that deserves to be revered. That I was reminded of
Transcendence as things went along is definitely a bad thing, as is anything that reminds me of that movie. This movie's real sin, though, is that it's just too dull to really get into. Scarlett Johansson does the best that she can, but she's given very little to work with, and the switch between "scared foreign student" and "emotionless hyper celestial being in human form" is too abrupt to really work. Plus, there's actually not a lot of action in this movie, beyond a choppy, overly-CGI car chase and a few dull hallway shootouts. Essentially this movie was both too crazy and not crazy enough the same time, and just comes across as forgettably dumb.
A Most Wanted Man: There's something of a dividing line when it comes to John Le Carre adaptations, since for many, the glacial pacing and low (if any) amount of action involved is just too much of a turn-off. Not me, though. How he treats the world of spycraft -with its long, tedious investigations, its best-laid plans that look out into the big picture, and its being totally filled with jaded older spies who no longer seem to have any real idea as to why they do what they do- is like the finest of sugar to me. Here is no different, with the whole movie essentially being a meticulous procedural into how one goes about figuring out whether someone's really a terrorist or not. It doesn't reach the same levels as
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy did a few years ago (but that movie's something of a masterpiece, so that's a high bar indeed), but it still works itself out quite well. This is chiefly thanks to Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the starring role, where he once again delivers one of those performances that is equal parts nuanced, vulnerable, jaded, and professional. It's not his best work, but then, most things never quite were, but were instead just him being great and making everything around him even better because he was there. The depressing places the movie goes only adds to what he has to offer, and makes me all the more bitter that he's gone (something I still cant quite wrap my head around, to be frank).
Into the Storm: Disaster porn, nothing more. Which is what I expected, and the movie seems pretty aware of this, since, to its credit, things to get pretty nuts when it finally starts ignoring the paper-thin characters and just lets the massive weather displays do their stuff. Still, the movie suffers from not going far enough in this (hardly any deaths doesn't help either; this sort of movie needs a busfull of nuns getting sucked into the sky to really come together), and at the end of the day, it's just pretty bland. And also an example of the latest form of found-footage, which seems to go long stretches in forgetting it's supposed to be found-footage at all (although that means considerably less shaky cam, which is always a good thing).
Party Monster: This is, and I mean this on every level, a queer little movie. I'd never heard of the incident behind the film until watching it, or had any idea of the whole Club Kids scene in New York in the late 80s/early 90s. This is a
super low-budget affair, and shows it more often than not, but I thought it managed to sustain itself rather well. You get the sense that Seth Green and Macaulay Culkin (yup) are actually putting in far more of an effort than one might expect, and it goes a long way. As do the rather incredible costumes that pop up, most of which (apparently) were donated or recreated from the real Club Kids. Now, a side story: this was shown to my by a buddy of mine who went to college in Jersey around this time period. He was surrounded by many people who were at least tangentially involved in this culture, including going to the main club in NY where it all happened (though everyone was still too on the fringe to have any dealing with the murder case at hand for the film), and he was equally baffled by it all. It wasn't until this movie that he realized just what was going on. Heck of a thing to live though, I imagine.
Mood Indigo: How whimsical can a movie get? At least this whimsical, apparently, since Michel Gondry's latest swings for the fences with its use of crazy effects (practical and CGI) to create a world that seems to exist only in some fantastical dream within a dream at all times. It's such a hodgepodge of design ideas hurled at the screen from every angle that one can almost forget there's a movie buried under there. A simple film, even, about two people in love and how it starts happy and goes on to be... not. The trouble is, the movie seems more concerned with being as absurdest as possible than actually giving any weight to the emotional proceedings at hand. So, while I liked the movie (because really, from a visual standpoint, it truly is something special), it definitely is no
Eternal Sunshine, where Gondry at least gave the real world points room to breath between all the fantasy.
Begin Again: This one struck a chord with me (...heh), moreso than the director's previous effort, Once. It's one of those almost-but-not-quite-a-musical sort of films, which is fine, mostly because the idea of why and how the singing happens is so ingrained with the plot. That I really enjoyed all the songs is a big help, and a good chunk of them are now on a solid rotation on my iPod (particularly the tracks by Keira Knightley, because she's got a mighty fine singing voice). What really pushes this one for me, though, is how well it handles being what is, in essence, a romantic comedy. In this day and age that is the most cliched of genres, and it would've been rather easy for this movie to slip into the usual trappings and get by on the music alone (which, again, is quite nice). But this movie took the time to actually properly frame growing relationships, and was smart enough to realize that "I love you more than anything" *cue final kiss in the rain* isn't nearly as effective as "My life is better with you around" *cue not actual romance and just good friendship*. Much respect for that.
Topic: What was the last movie you watched? (Read 1537086 times)
