(Spoiler alert: spoilers ahead)
It takes a lot to make me intensely dislike a movie featuring Anna Kendrick; she's one of the few people for which i'll watch a movie just to see her. That makes it all the more disappointing that Mr. Right is such a colossally inept film. Nobody should waste money on this trainwreck. The plotting is inane, the characterizations are inconsistent at best, baffling at worst. Several moments in the film made me audibly groan, or throw my hands up in bewilderment. This is one of the rare times where you wonder how exactly someone greenlighted a script this misguided.
Saturday, April 16, 2016
Monday, March 28, 2016
On Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice
(Spoiler alert: Spoilers ahead)
There's a moment in the titular fight scene of Batman vs. Superman in which the camera pauses on Superman's face. It briefly appears as if he's had a moral realization and might try to reach for something deep. Instead he returns to his pointless, CGI-filled fight with Batman. That scene more or less summarizes my frustrations wit Dawn of Justice.
There's a moment in the titular fight scene of Batman vs. Superman in which the camera pauses on Superman's face. It briefly appears as if he's had a moral realization and might try to reach for something deep. Instead he returns to his pointless, CGI-filled fight with Batman. That scene more or less summarizes my frustrations wit Dawn of Justice.
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
On Zootopia
(Spoiler alert: Spoilers ahead)
There's a scene in Zootopia in which red fox Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) wants to join the animal equivalent of the boy scout troop. He shows up for his first meeting, only for them to tie him down, put him in a muzzle, and taunt him mercilessly. The other animals are prey, whereas Nick is a predator. In this scene, the supposed prey verbally assume the worst in the supposed predator, but their actions paint the prey as the true aggressors. The bullies are accusing the bullied of being too dangerous. It's a metaphor for the some of the ways minorities are oppressed in America, and a nice encapsulation of the movie's central conceit that outside appearances rarely tell the whole story.
There's a scene in Zootopia in which red fox Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) wants to join the animal equivalent of the boy scout troop. He shows up for his first meeting, only for them to tie him down, put him in a muzzle, and taunt him mercilessly. The other animals are prey, whereas Nick is a predator. In this scene, the supposed prey verbally assume the worst in the supposed predator, but their actions paint the prey as the true aggressors. The bullies are accusing the bullied of being too dangerous. It's a metaphor for the some of the ways minorities are oppressed in America, and a nice encapsulation of the movie's central conceit that outside appearances rarely tell the whole story.
Sunday, March 13, 2016
On Hail, Ceasar! and Deadpool
(Spoiler alert: spoilers ahead)
Hail, Caesar!
In an act of not so subtle foreshadowing, Hail, Caesar! opens with crisis-management "fixer" Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) giving confession, followed by driving through heavy rain to put out a fire involving one of the actresses at the studio for which he works. The rest of the movie bathes in the resplendent Southern California sun, but raindrops keep falling on Eddie's head.
Hail, Caesar!
In an act of not so subtle foreshadowing, Hail, Caesar! opens with crisis-management "fixer" Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) giving confession, followed by driving through heavy rain to put out a fire involving one of the actresses at the studio for which he works. The rest of the movie bathes in the resplendent Southern California sun, but raindrops keep falling on Eddie's head.
Saturday, February 27, 2016
On the 2016 Oscars
The Pics
(Spoiler Alert: Spoilers Ahead)
Concussion
Spotlight
In high school, I remember reading about how when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle he aimed for the public's heart and instead hit it in the stomach. To me, Concussion suffers from the opposite problem - it makes the viewer feel heartbroken when it should've tried to make us feel queasy. I badly wanted Concussion to be a great movie, because the it covers a story that has deserved more attention for a long time. Unfortunately, Concussion is an absolute mess of a movie. On a micro scale, Will Smith's accent is all over the place, and its bizarre obsession with super close ups of the characters' faces is downright claustrophobic. On a macro scale, I was disappointed because the movie is more focused on being a character study of a quirky outsider than on blowing the whistle on institutional atrocities. It only pays lip service to the NFL's biggest villains - from the film alone you would never know that Paul Tagliabue and Roger Goodell were zealous participants rather than passive onlookers in suppressing concussion research. The film wastes time on subplots about Dr. Omalu's personal life that could've been spent taking the NFL to task for its ruthless internal workings - and even when it tries to do this, the dialogue is too woefully subdued to match the real life stakes it aims to depict.
(Spoiler Alert: Spoilers Ahead)
Concussion
Spotlight
In high school, I remember reading about how when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle he aimed for the public's heart and instead hit it in the stomach. To me, Concussion suffers from the opposite problem - it makes the viewer feel heartbroken when it should've tried to make us feel queasy. I badly wanted Concussion to be a great movie, because the it covers a story that has deserved more attention for a long time. Unfortunately, Concussion is an absolute mess of a movie. On a micro scale, Will Smith's accent is all over the place, and its bizarre obsession with super close ups of the characters' faces is downright claustrophobic. On a macro scale, I was disappointed because the movie is more focused on being a character study of a quirky outsider than on blowing the whistle on institutional atrocities. It only pays lip service to the NFL's biggest villains - from the film alone you would never know that Paul Tagliabue and Roger Goodell were zealous participants rather than passive onlookers in suppressing concussion research. The film wastes time on subplots about Dr. Omalu's personal life that could've been spent taking the NFL to task for its ruthless internal workings - and even when it tries to do this, the dialogue is too woefully subdued to match the real life stakes it aims to depict.
Saturday, February 21, 2015
On the 2015 Oscars
The Pics
(spoiler alert: spoilers ahead)The Theory of Everything
The Imitation Game
Whiplash
As a STEM graduate student, I was pretty excited that not one but two movies were coming out this year about famous scientists. It's always fun to see attempts at portraying genius in any form, especially so in a field as minimally represented on screen as theoretical physics. Unfortunately, The Theory of Everything neuters Stephen Hawking's mesmerizing accomplishments and vibrant personality down to its most bland version possible. Instead of taking a tour through Hawking's mind, we get to hear Eddie Redmayne reduce Hawking's results down to layman's terms as window dressing for an overwrought chronicle of his marriage and his virility. It's sentimental, and perhaps humanizing, but hardly a satisfying character study given the depth and complexity of the subject matter.
Thursday, October 2, 2014
On 30 Rock and Character Development
30 Rock was indisputably one of the greatest comedies of all time. It might not have been as avant-garde as Arrested Development, as culturally/linguistically timeless and influential as Seinfeld, as deconstructive as Community, as relatable as The Simpsons, as stylistically groundbreaking as The Office, or as incisively satirical as South Park or Chapelle's Show. But 30 Rock blended elements of all of the above while redefining the limits of meta-humor and churning out high-quality jokes at a breakneck pace unparalleled in the ghosts of television past and present. It's my favorite show of all time, which makes it all the more irksome to hear the common refrain that the show "lacks character development". Now, the importance of character development to a sitcom's value is debatable (see: Seinfeld vs. Friends) - and there's no doubt that 30 Rock was more concerned with making a work of comedic art than a character-based comedy. But is it even true that the show lacks conventional character development? Is it really fair to characterize 30 Rock as a pure joke machine with static characters? I would emphatically argue otherwise.
Friday, September 19, 2014
On New Girl's Winston dilemma
On Tuesday, New Girl debuted its fourth season with an episode that gives the impression of a re-pilot attempt; the show has made a clean break from its failed Nick&Jess romance and returned to the show's template of humorous hijinks that serve to ultimately re-emphasize the familial (decidedly non-romantic) relationship between the roommates. Ideally this show would give equal time to all of its characters, but since the start of season 3 the show seems to have firmly strapped Winston into the passenger seat of the car driven by Jess/Nick/Schmidt. This would be fine if this hierarchy accurately reflected the characters' relative value. I am, however, of the opinion that Winston is clearly the funniest character on the show. Season 3 systematically morphed Winston into a veritable maniac, one who combines George Costanza's neurotic, volatile insecurities with Cosmo Kramer's oblivious eccentricity. Lamorne Morris's superb acting and commitment to the bits allow Winston to steal every scene by aggressively subverting the expectations of both the other characters and the audience.
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