Movies I Didn’t Review in 2014

As I previously mentioned in my Ticket Stub Archaeology posts, I save the ticket stub from every movie I see. As much as I try to shame myself into getting my act together every time I see a movie in theaters to sut down and write a review of it, even just for my own reference, some movies, for various reasons, slip through the cracks. So, at the end of the year, here, very very briefly, are some of the films I forgot to review:

Boyhood

How could I not review the movie everyone was talking about this year? The answer: laziness. Boyhood: It’s as good as everyone says, and surprisingly actually a little bit better. It’s a story about growing up, but what you don’t expect is the detail to character that’s put into the protagonist. He’s not just a boy, he’s a unique boy, and by the end of the film you really feel like you know him as a real person. Certainly worth watching, even if it does feel really long.

Top Five

Meh. I laughed a bit, but even though I’m usually a fan of Chris Rock, this one didn’t really hit the mark for me. The few places where it tries to go deeper than just its jokes are interesting, and I liked the characters, but it needed a bit more of something to really enjoy it. If you’re a Chris Rock fan, or just want to watch a comedy, I say go for it, but I’d wait for it to hit Redbox.

The President

The President is a Georgian (country, not state) film that won the top prize, the Golden Hugo, at the Chicago International Film Festival. It tells the story of a dictator of an unnamed country and his grandson as they attempt to flee the nation they once ruled after it is taken over by revolutionaries. Timely, powerful, and visually amazing. My only problem was that, in the second half, the events of the story lose some of their impact and become rather repetitive, but it ends on a strong note with one of the most striking and affecting final scenes I’ve ever seen. Simply fantastic.

Evolution of a Criminal  

Ten years after being arrested for and serving time in prison for robbing a Bank of America, filmmaker Darius Monroe returns to his hometown to examine the impact of the event on the victims, his accomplices, and his family. It’s completely unique, in that it tells the story of a teenage boy falling into crime, rehabilitation, and the impact it’s had on his life from the perspective of the criminal himself. It’s a great portrait of not only Darius, who I was lucky enough to see speak after the screening, but how criminality is created in our country. Go watch it if you get the chance.

Guardians of the Galaxy

What’s wrong with me? Seriously, am I broken? I think I’m the only person I know who didn’t like this movie. I fully understand that, when it comes to superhero movies, the plot usually is the weakest element, but in this movie the plot was so weak it managed to completely lose me on everything else. Of course I liked the characters, because who wouldn’t like the characters, but the movie didn’t add up to anything more than them, and just left me unable to enjoy it. Maybe the sequel will be better, but until I was going through my ticket stubs I had completely forgotten I even saw this movie.

Movie Review: The Guest

Hey look! A movie that hasn’t come out yet!

The Guest is about a family who is visited by a man who claims to have been a wartime friend of their deceased son. As the man has nowhere to stay, the family invites him to stay with them, but the family’s teenage daughter soon begins to suspect that this guest’s intentions may be less noble than they appear.

The first thing that comes to mind when describing The Guest is, strangely enough, the font in which the opening credits are done. The font is purple, and looks exactly like a very common font used in over the top, cheesy 1980’s horror movies. The Guest is like the font- so over the top and so genre-based, that it’s difficult to tell if its meant to be taken seriously.

The music is over the top and ridiculous, and cues dramatically a way that does less foreshadowing than it does fore-beating. The acting is slightly unnatural, in a way that’s hard to believe isn’t unintentional. The dialogue is hilariously off, and is delivered in an overly matter-of-fact tone. The violence is bountiful and frequent. The strangest thing of all is: it’s still actually pretty enjoyable to watch.

If the filmmaker was not trying to make a tongue in cheek tribute to 1980’s horror movies, then I have no idea what he was trying to do. If that is what he was trying to do, then he pretty much accomplished it. The Guest is not a good movie, but it’s a really enjoyable one. The action and the music are unbelievably goofy, but if you’re just in the mood to scream at a movie screen and laugh, this will provide that for you. Really, the only problem with viewing the movie this way is that it stops just about one step before being a truly enjoyable over-the-top genre piece. The story takes itself seriously, as many good satires do, but is too silly in some places to be a straightforward film, and too serious in others to be a complete parody. By the end, at least, you’ll know what mood to be in to watch a teenage girl dressed as a waitress be chased by an immortal villain through a Halloween maze (which is on fire) to a goth soundtrack, but the movie would have been helped by setting that mood sooner.

I won’t tell you to run out and see The Guest opening weekend, or even in theaters. Really, I won’t even tell you to rush out and rent it. But maybe, if you’re sitting around with friends with nothing else to do, or you need a movie to scream at while drinking a few beers, it will be a pretty damn entertaining two hours of your time.

I had a hell of a time watching it, what else can I say?

Movie Review: The Lego Movie

Every single weeknight for the past two months, I have had same plans: To go home, kick off my shoes, and either play Lego Harry Potter Years 5-7, or watch The Talented Mr. Ripley. I have still not seen The Talented Mr. Ripley, and I have long forgotten why the hell I was planning on watching it, but the plan remains. I have played Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7, but through a tragic combination of my being completely incompetent at even the simplest of video games and procrastination, I have owned the game for over six months and am still only in the middle of Half Blood Prince. Despite this, I do really enjoy the video games that have been produced by the Lego franchise, and so I was looking forward to seeing The Lego Movie. Now that my obligatory personal story is over, we can move on to the review.

The Lego Movie takes place in a somewhat dystopian city made from Legos where everyone lives by the approved guidelines set by their leader, President Business. One day when leaving work, construction worker Emmett falls down a crevice and finds The Piece of Resistance and becomes The Special, the one foretold in a prophecy to be the one with the power to stop President Business destroying the world with his superweapon The Kragle. Emmett gets thrown into the middle of a battle between the police and the resistance movement that takes him across the many Lego realms and introduces him to numerous colorful characters, including Batman, as he tries to stop President Business’s evil scheme.

The plot as described above seems a bit complicated, but it really just sets up great spoof of chosen one stories to use as a frame for a bunch of awesome characters and gags. The pacing of the movie is completely insane, and takes off right from the beginning. New characters are introduced every few minutes, the action scenes have a great energy to them, and there’s not a single dull moment. The fast pace also allows the jokes, which have the usual goofy irreverence as the previous Lego properties, to come flying at you really fast. For a children’s movie, a lot of the humor might be a little too fast and require a bit too much genre awareness for kids to get, but there are just so many jokes that this is still going to be a movie a lot of kids watch over and over.

Though none of the humor was inappropriate for kids, as an adult viewer I really loved the lampooning of normal movie genre jokes and references to other films. One that really stood out to me was one of the first scenes with Elizabeth Banks’ character Wyldstyle (“What are you, a DJ?”). She is frustrated with the main character immediately upon meeting him, the absurdity and tropeness of which is immediately joked about. Batman as a character has a lot for adults too with references to the recent Dark Knight movies, and scenes with a lot of Lego characters are filled with quick jokes about the properties that are directly aimed at people who grew up playing with Lego Harry Potter and Lego Star Wars.

I could just go on about what made the movie funny, but that was the main objective of the movie- the plot, the animation, the characters all come together to make something that’s just fun to watch. Besides having access to tons of separate media properties that otherwise could have never been combined in one movie (Gandalf and Dumbledore in the same shot?!) the filmmakers also had the nostalgia and the cool visual opportunities that come from the Lego brand. There are great sight gags, some of which would be spoilers, that come from the easily recognizable Lego pieces and the scale of Lego figurines. The movie takes everything available to them- genre jokes, visual humor, puns, properties, actors- and makes it all work as a cohesive and really consistently funny movie.

Though the whole movie is incredibly clever, it’s going to be the end, and especially the message of the movie, that makes it memorable. I was able to predict the end from almost the beginning, but it didn’t ruin my enjoyment of the journey there. Will Ferrell (who I enjoy most of the time) delivers both on comedy and emotions. Lego is one of the most nostalgic childhood toys for a lot of people my age, and the movie is its most endearing when the plot focuses on that element of the product. In a way, it felt less like a movie by Lego’s marketing department than a movie made by filmmakers about a beloved childhood toy.

The Lego Movie accomplished everything it set out to do, and managed to be creative and memorable while doing it. The characters are funny, the visuals are fun and interesting, and the story picks up on what anyone who’s ever played with Legos loves most about them. It’s going to have a lot of rewatch value, and is going to be hard to beat for the best animated movie of this year. Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks? It’s your move.

Movie Review: Captain Phillips

Every once in a while, I have an opinion that is completely different from the mainstream. I’ll love a movie a lot of people pan (Cloud Atlas), hate a movie a lot of people love (Thor), or care way too much about a movie most people have forgotten about (The King’s Speech). I usually sit in disbelief, with my mouth open, unable to understand what the rest of the world is missing. Zoolander is often quoted (“I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”). Whereas most things I can just chalk up to taste, there are some projects that I genuinely feel as though other people are missing some big, obvious point about the movie.

I think with Captain Phillips, I might be the one who’s missing the point.

Captain Phillips is the thrilling true story of the hijacking of the MV Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates in 2009, and the hostage taking of its captain, Richard Phillips. The movie has a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a similarly high score on metacritic. Every review hails it as one of the best performances of Tom Hanks’ career, a edge of your seat thriller mixed with a message movie, and the biopic finally done right. Did the theater I was in run a different movie by mistake?

My overall impression of the movie was that it was pretty mediocre, and didn’t do much that I haven’t seen before. That’s not the same as my initial impression, because that was to go running to the nearest trashcan, hand over mouth. I was later on the “all handheld camerawork can die in a fire” train than other people, because I do understand that, in the right circumstances (for example, in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker) it can be used to great effect. However, the entire length of a film, the majority of which takes place at sea, isn’t the right circumstance. I don’t think the use of shakeycam added anything to the story, did anything innovative, and it actually did make me nauseous when watching it.

The other big weak point for me was the screenplay, and specifically the dialogue. The film opens with Phillips and his wife driving to what I think was the airport, while they talk about the changing world and their kids futures. The dialogue in this scene, and in a lot of the scenes in the first half, sounded almost amateurish to me. Despite being from a screenwriter who’s work I’ve enjoyed in The Hunger Games before, much of the dialogue was somewhat stilted and generic. None of the way the characters spoke, at least the Americans, revealed anything about them as people, and a lot of lines seemed to consist of just generic sayings and basic lines to advance the action of the plot. I don’t mean to say that the writing was horrendous, but it was bad enough that I noticed the writing instead of just listening to the characters, which really soured the movie for me.

The true story the movie is based on is, of course, incredible, but I didn’t think the film accomplished much more than a documentary or a book could in bringing it to life. Maybe I just suffer from having seen it after seeing the high tension, edge of your seat thrills Gravity first, but I didn’t feel my heart pounding or doubt that all of the characters would survive at any point in the movie. A major part of this was the characters, or lack thereof that I mentioned when I talked about the writing: Beyond the actual, based on real events actions that each character did, I didn’t feel like I knew much about any of them. They all felt very reactionary, but not in a way that revealed their personality, which made it hard for me to relate to any of them on a deeper level.

I do really blame the writing, because all of the acting was good. Tom Hanks is, of course, Tom Hanks, though I didn’t think the material gave him much more to do than just be the fantastic actor he always is. We basically meet Captain Phillips the bare minimum of introductory time before the main action starts, and I didn’t feel like I learned much about him as a man besides that he is a really brave guy and a competent captain. I felt like I knew the most about Muse, the leader of the pirates played by Barkhad Abdi, but it was more despite the script than because of it. He probably had the most to work with, and gave a really standout performance. 

A lot of reviewers have referred to how powerful the movie is and how tense it is, but I was more bored than I was clutching my armrest. Yes, the acting is fantastic and the story almost unbelievable, but the style and the writing of the movie don’t add anything to them. Out of all the movies I’ve reviewed in the last few months, it’s probably the one that’s impacted me the least. Maybe I am just too tired of lazy handheld, or am too desensitized by big Hollywood to appreciate realism, or am too cynical when it comes to writing, but I just couldn’t like Captain Phillips. If anyone can tell me what I missed, I’d love it if you’d let me know.

Movie Review: 12 Years a Slave

I had to take some space from 12 Years a Slave before I could write about it. It’s going to be a difficult movie to write about- I can not, in any way, say it is a bad film, and not out of some misplaced obligation: I have very little to criticize about it. I also can’t say I enjoyed it, because I did not enjoy watching it. I don’t think I can say I want to watch it again, because I don’t really want to. But all of this, I believe, comes from the best thing about the movie: it is a completely unfiltered, unembellished, realistic depiction of slavery in the antebellum American south.

12 Years a Slave is an adaptation of the autobiographical book of the same name published in 1853 by Solomon Northup. In 1841, Northup, a free black man living in New York, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. He remained a slave for twelve years before returning home.

When I first heard about the movie, I was a bit cautious. I didn’t know much about the story it was based on, but I did know one thing about the movie: that the director and most of the main cast was British. This turned out to actually contribute to one of the strongest points of the movie. Rather than feeling the need to tell a story that represents the experience of an entire nation, and carries the weight of representing every slave in American history, the movie functions as an biography. Solomon isn’t every slave; he’s himself, and so his experiences and his suffering feel incredibly and harshly real. The white characters ring true in the same way. Benedict Cumberbatch’s character is a slave owner, yes, and portrayed as a terrible man for being so, but he is also portrayed as primarily that, a man, and not a caricature or a symbol of an institution. Even Micheal Fassbender’s character, who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, seems like the evil people that exist in real life rather than only in stories. Slavery happened in a different time, yes, but with the same human race. The humanity of the characters only makes the story more brutal, more powerful, because it doesn’t feel like it’s happening to characters. It feels as though it’s happening to people, and, of course, it did.

A large portion of this is due to the great acting. Chiwetel Ejiofor, who I have loved in many things but have yet to pronounce his name, absolutely nails his part. He’s the point of view character, but manages to also play a well defined and complex person. Early on in the movie, another character tells him not to “say anything or do anything” in order to survive, and you can feel the tension between this and Solomon’s desire to stand up for himself the whole movie. Micheal Fassbender is probably going to get all the supporting awards this season, for simply managing to become the craziest person I have ever seen. I have never wanted to yell angrily at any character for being such an insane asshole before in my life. He was legitimately both terrifying and incredibly realistic at the same time.

The one actor who I feel hasn’t gotten enough praise is Lupita Nyong’o, a newcomer who plays Patsey, a slave on Edwin Epps’s (Micheal Fassbender) plantation. She completely loses herself in the character, and becomes the most pitiable and most heart wrenching part of the film. Where Solomon never quiet gives up hope of making it home, Patsey has been a slave her entire life, and sees no other option but to suffer in this way for the rest of her life. Even more the Solomon, she depicts the horrors of slavery, and the actress totally embodies the performance.

Something I think some people won’t like, but I thought was a great choice, was how long the movie feels. Besides using a lot of long shots to powerful effect, Steve McQueen’s style makes Solomon’s time in slavery feel timeless. Even though you know from the title that the movie will take place over twelve years, the directing and the style does little to indicate the passage of time. I almost felt trapped, like the movie wasn’t letting itself end, which mirrored Solomon’s story really well. A lot of smaller scenes, especially one scene that felt like one, static, two minute long shot, carry this feeling as well. Generally, there’s a lot of affect that comes from the directing of the movie, elevating the story to a whole other level.

12 Years a Slave might be the best movie of the year, and it’s certainly the best movie about slavery I’ve ever seen. The affective filmmaking and the performances, as well as the power of the true story it adapts, make you experience the horror of American slavery in a way few other films can. I won’t be extremely excited to see it again, because it is too good at its job of making you horrified and uncomfortable, but I would certainly recommend it to anyone. You just may want to have the end of Django Unchained cued up for later.

Movie Review: Ender’s Game

Forgive me internet, for I have sinned.

I have never read Ender’s Game.

I know, I know. But honestly, I have no idea how I managed to reach adulthood, calling myself a science fiction fan, without reading it. I was never assigned it in class, our family copy was always in my brother’s room, and I just never got around to actually picking it up and opening it. Going into the movie Ender’s Game, this is what I knew: The main character is named Ender, he plays some kind of game, it is Science Fiction, the book is beloved and amazing, and the big twist at the end. So, besides knowing the twist (this is why you never tell me something has a twist- I will wiki it) I pretty much went into this movie cold. So what does a person, who’s a fan of science fiction and movies, think of the movie adaptation of this universally acclaimed novel?

I almost loved it.

For the few like me who don’t know, Ender’s Game is about an absolutely brilliant boy named Ender in a military training school where children are being trained to become commanders in humanities fight against a race of bug aliens. As a large part of his training, Ender plays zero gravity games with his classmates, as the adults at the school mentally manipulate him with the intent of making him the next great battle commander.

The child actors are amazing, particularly the Asa Butterfield as Ender. The big problem with kid actors is usually their believabilty- it normally still feels like a child actor saying lines written by an adult. Butterfield managed to make even the most unnatural dialogue seem like it was coming from a character rather than a screenplay. The special effects and the design, both for the alien fleet and the zero gravity games, were visually stunning without drawing too much attention to themselves and taking away from the story. One of my favorite elements was how simple they made it to follow the games and Ender’s strategies, so you could see how his techniques were growing and building. The adult actors didn’t blow me away, but all contributed to the story well.

My main issue with the movie comes with the end. The story is a little bit rushed throughout, which I assume is necessary for the size of the story it tells, but pacing really did a disservice to the end. Until the twist, it seems like each element of the plot is given the proper time for it to be digested and to have an impact. When the revelation that comes at the climax is revealed, it almost felt as though someone sat on the remote and put the movie into fast forward. The end of the story has a lot of big messages and themes to wrap up, but none of them are dwelled on long enough or established as well as the buildup before the end was. I wanted more breathing room in the last fifteen minutes to really feel the impact of the climax.

So far I’ve talked about the pacing, the acting, and the special effects, but the one major thing this review is missing is me addressing the story. Truthfully, I have no idea what to say about the story other than- I loved it. I loved every part of it, and I can completely understand why the book is so highly acclaimed. I find it difficult to talk about this in the context of a movie review, however, because this was my first experience of the story. Had I read the book beforehand, would I have liked how they told the story? I have no idea, other than second hand accounts of it being a “pretty faithful” adaptation. If this were not based on a book, would I like the movie? Yes, I think this is a great story. I am just having trouble telling if the movie makes itself anything greater than the story its adapting.

I mentioned briefly in my Carrie review that I was having trouble deciding if I liked the movie, or if I just liked the original book enough that I’d like anything with the same plot. I pretty much feel the same way about Ender’s Game: I want to say more about the movie independent of the plot, but the plot had the most impact on me from watching it. The story is incredible and mind blowing, and the movie was at least good enough for me to get that from it. The acting, the design, the special effects, and the writing all serve the story very well- but my biggest takeaway is simply damn. What a story. 

I guess I have a new book to read.

Movie Review: Carrie

To me, the story of Carrie has always been a bit hard to define. Even though it’s by famous horror writer Stephen King, it isn’t really the horror story we’re used to hearing about. The marketing for the new movie tried to make this odd story into a standard October horror flick, with taglines including, “You will know her name,” “A child raised in fear: A woman born in blood,” and the misleading, “God won’t save you.” None of these point to what makes the story unique in the genre: that the girl covered in blood on the poster is hardly the perpetrator of most of the story’s most horrific scenes,

Carrie is the story of Carrie White, a seventeen year old, highly sheltered girl who, after a horrible bullying incident when she gets her first period in the school showers, discovers that she has telekinetic powers. A large portion of the story follows one of the remorseful bullies as prom grows closer and she tries to atone for her actions, and Carrie’s relationship with her completely psychotic mother, who believes that menstruation is “the curse of Eve,” believing that her daughter, by having her period, has been taken by Satan. The most famous scene from the story is when, after one final act of bullying, Carrie uses her powers to reign destruction down on her town.

The first problem with this adaptation of the story is that it seems afraid to go too far into any extreme. The mother is played as a Christian fanatic, but never quite as unsympathetically as the story and the growth of Carrie requires her to be. The initial scene in the shower is done as rather realistic bullying, but the bullying doesn’t continue enough through the rest of the story to show how she’s been tormented her entire life.

A lot of the weakness comes from the lack of narrative build as well. When Carrie first uses her powers, she is able to accomplish large, impressive things, and it doesn’t take her long to achieve total control over her powers. In the original novel, the build of Carrie’s powers coincides with her growing internal strength and her ability to stand up for herself. This version, in her very first scene with her mother, she stands up to her. Without having the emotional journey of Carrie growing from an abused victim to a powerful woman able to stand up for herself, much of the first two thirds drag while you wait for the action to begin.

As a fan of the book, one thing that I thought this and the original film from the seventies lacked was a feeling of foreboding. The book gives hints throughout the buildup to prom night that, that night, something horrible and destructive will happen, which both fills you with dread and makes the scene at the prom intensely suspenseful. Most of the horror through the book comes from the dread, which both makes the first part and the prom scenes feel a lot more tragic, as you know, no matter how much Carrie grows, there will eventually be disaster. Without it, most of the movie is just a drama about a horribly bullied girl with an abusive mother.

I realize from this review I sound like I hated the movie, but I did think there were a few things that were done really well. Even though I didn’t think they took her far enough, Julianne Moore was a great choice to play Carrie’s mother, and Chloe Grace Moretz played the tragedy of the main character really well, making you hurt for the poor protagonist. Most of the supporting cast was rather weak, especially Sue Snell, a major point of view character, but oddly enough the actor who played Tommy, Carrie’s date to the prom (and one of the only good people in the story) really managed to stand out for me, being intensely likable and charismatic to heighten his role in Carrie’s arc. Scene by scene, everything from the writing to the mood was very good, even though when they were assembled the tone never became cohesive.

Carrie is an entertaining movie, but perhaps didn’t make enough brave choices to be a very memorable one. On a scale of one to five, it was about a three. As a big fan of the book and the story of Carrie, I thought it was an inoffensive adaptation, despite leaving out a large chunk of the book’s ending, but I’ll keep waiting for a movie that really encapsulates the emotional beating the book is. The tragedy of Carrie’s arc is done well, but becomes somewhat muddled by the straightforward horror take on the ending. Despite what blood-soaked marketing and bad taglines would have you believe, the true villain of Carrie isn’t the titular character at all: It’s bullying, abuse, and the probable executive meddling that made the tone of this movie so uneven.

Movie Review: Gravity

First, a story: Last weekend, the first weekend Gravity was open in theaters, I was tearing tickets at the door of the movie theater where I work. About ten minutes after the showing of Gravity started, a woman comes out and says to me, “That movie was terrible! They were just floating in space, talking! There weren’t no aliens or nothing!” After a moment of confusion, I called over a manager and got the woman her money back. In the next ten minutes, two more angry and disappointed moviegoers got refunds because, I quote, “There aren’t even aliens in it!”

No, there are no aliens in Gravity. Yes, most of Gravity is just about people floating around in space talking to each other (or even not speaking at all.) However, what Gravity is mostly about is DESTROYING ME EMOTIONALLY.

What Alfonso Cuarón has done is put together probably one of the most the most suspenseful, and heart wrenchingly sad movies I’ve ever seen. Sandra Bullock’s character Ryan is an astronaut that gets detached when a mass of space debris hits her shuttle. You probably knew that already if you’ve seen the trailer, but there aren’t really any more twists- I’m not not telling you anything with that summary.

What the movie carries itself on is incredible acting and directing. The music and especially the sound design give you this overwhelming feeling of dread from the first few minutes on, and don’t really let you relax until the credits. The cinematography is made of mostly extremely long sweeping spinning point of view shots that manage to move between haunting and panicked. During several scenes, I could actually feel my heart beating faster, and I pretty much had goosebumps the whole time. The directing is just that freaking good.

I haven’t even mentioned the soon-to-be-Oscar-winning special effects yet, but, well, they’re just really damn good. It was mostly shot in CGI on green screen, but what the effects team did makes you feel as though the characters are really in space more than any other movie has. I saw it in 3D IMAX, and it was completely worth it to be immersed in the floating effects like that.

The script and the actors do their part too. The movie has probably a third of the dialogue most movies have, but what’s there serves well in setting up and making you care about the characters. Sandra Bullock carries the movie mostly on her own, and even though she has to tell not show most of Ryan’s back story, she creates a lot of depth through the character’s emotions. George Clooney plays the mission captain with a lot of humor and swagger, but plays the experience and wisdom of an experienced astronaut really fantastically.

I feel like I need to fawn over movies less in my reviews, but I haven’t yet gotten the chance to something less than okay yet. Less than okay is… not how I’d describe Gravity. The effects, the script, the acting, and above all the directing are beyond amazing. Not many movies make me actually cry, but this one did. Damn you Alfonso Cuarón, and damn the Oscars if they don’t give you at least six awards.

Movie Review: Don Jon

Going into Don Jon, I had one question on my mind: What is this movie about? The previews make it look like an edgy romantic comedy, the reviews I’ve read say it’s more dramatic than that, and everyone I know who’s seen it just tells me “It’s weird.” Coming out of the theater, I can’t say I really know what the movie is about in a big, grand, thematic way. But simply: It’s about a Joseph Gordon Levitt watching a lot of porn.

The movie is also mostly a character study of the main character, Jon, as he tries to understand how sexuality, emotion, love, and actually enjoying sex all come together and balance themselves out. On one of his usual nights out clubbing he tries to pick up a girl (played by Scarlett Johansson) who is a huge, romantic comedy obsessed romantic who disapproves of men watching porn and loves the idea of the man she wants Jon to be. Jon has to figure out how to balance the love he has for her with the unfortunate fact that, even though he loves her, he prefers porn to sex.

Even though the movie isn’t often laugh out loud funny, I found Jon a really fun character to watch. He’s a kind of stereotypical New Jersey Italian-American bro, but he’s also somewhat naive and very honest, which means that even when you’re laughing at him you still want him to come out for the better- no matter what that is. A lot of it is just Joseph Gordon Levitt, who plays a character who could have easily turned into an asshole into a man with understandable flaws. Scarlett Johansson does a good job too, though, not to go into too much spoiler territory, her character isn’t necessarily that likable. She does a good job with a balancing act, especially at the beginning when her character is still painted as a savior, at always having her flaws floating just beneath the surface.

The third star of the movie is Julianne Moore, who you’d not know was in the movie unless you actually read the names on the poster or in the trailers. I can’t talk about her character too much at all, but even though her performance was good it was the part of the story involving her character that I felt fell the most flat. The movie does a very good job of slowly bringing you to realizations about Jon’s character, but in the last third with Julianne Moore’s character, it almost feels as though they ran out of page space and needed to rap things up sooner. I can kind of see what they were going for, with the resolution of Jon’s character development, but I think I would have appreciated it more if the relationship between him and Julianne Moore was a little more explored.

Joseph Gordon Levitt, along with writing and starring in it, also directed this movie. As a film geek, and a directing geek, I could tell that Levitt is probably the same way. The way the film is shot, lit, and especially edited are far from cookie-cutter, and add a lot to the story. I’d like to see how his directing style would suit a different film, but a lot of the choices he makes in this (including a lot of very fast editing including actual scenes from pornos to illustrate Jon’s obsession) show that he definitely thinks of film making as more than just a vehicle to tell a narrative, but also as an art.

Would I recommend Don Jon? Probably, but not as much as I wish I could have. As strong as a lot of the elements are, the rushed-feeling conclusion and the weaker final third really let me down, and kept me from enjoying the movie as a whole as much as I wanted to. However, the foundations the movie are standing are are strong, and the style and acting I think make it worth at least a look.

Six Movies I Want You To Watch

Miami Connection
A group of students at the University of Central Floridia, in a band called Dragon Sound, must use their blackbelt skills in taekwondo to fight cocaine dealing biker ninjas from Miami. Now that you know about this movie: Why aren’t you watching it?! (Available on Netflix)

The Exquisite Corpse Project
One half hilarious fiction film, one half (mostly) serious documentary. Before moving to central America, Ben has five of his friends each write fifteen pages of a screenplay, only letting them read the previous five pages of the last section. Besides making me tear up from laughing (while sitting next to Ben, which was awkward) it’s a great doc about the nature of collaboration. (Available for download at the film’s website)

The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra 
A spoof of 1950’s B-movies that is incredibly spot on, and had me bent over in physical pain from laughter while watching it. Quotable, (“If I didn’t want an exciting life, then I wouldn’t have married a man who studies rocks, would I?”), does the tropes of the genre perfectly, and pretty much the perfect movie to watch with your best friends and a drink. (Available on Netflix)

Pirates of the Great Salt Lake
The story of two pirates who hunt for treasure… in 21st century…on the great Salt Lake… with wooden swords and a rowboat. This one seems to be hit or miss for people, as sometimes the “wackyness” can get a bit too annoying, but for me the film wins me over when, halfway through, it just seems to go completely off the rails into some of the silliest plot twists I’ve ever seen. Pirates don’t go to heaven… they go to Pirate Heaven. (Available from Amazon for less than six dollars)

Chinese Odyssey 2002
I have an odd mission every Dragon*Con: To stumble into a dark room with six people in it at two in the morning, and see the movie I will be quoting at people who have no idea what I’m talking about for years to come. This year, that movie was Chinese Odyssey 2002. It’s a parody of a film genre I’ve never seen:  slow quiet historical Chinese dramas about feudal nobility. In this story, a Princess leaves her home disguised as a man, and is caught in a love triangle between a restaurant owner and his sister. Her brother, the King-to-be, must get her back.  It’s silly, occasionally slapsticky, and ridiculously over the top, and above all that, endlessly entertaining. (available online)