Oscar Round:Up: American Sniper, Boyhood, Selma

Just under the wire with this one! TO THE REVIEWS!

American Sniper

Disclaimer: I didn’t really follow the news about this movie as much as I could, and I’m not in a position to judge what is or isn’t true or realistic with this movie. This is biopic for Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), the “deadliest sniper in US history,” and follows him from his youth to joining the Navy SEALS, through four tours in Iraq and then back in the US, leading to his death. I thought the combat was great in this movie, obviously you knew that Kyle would survive the firefights, but pretty much everyone else was fair game. This, combined with the tense landscapes of the Iraqi cities where they took place, makes the action scenes incredibly tense and suspenseful. These tense scenes are punctuated by the periods Kyle is back home, and we see how battle has changed him. An interesting portrait of a skilled soldier who might not have been the best person ever, I thought it was pretty good.

Boyhood

I wonder if because I don’t have any children myself and am pretty removed from my own boyhood I’m out of the demographic to “get” this movie. The selling point of Boyhood is that it was filmed over 12 years and follows the life of one character from being a kid to heading off to college. The process here is indeed really interesting, it’s cool to see characters grow up and change as time passes. The problem is the movie that’s built around these characters, because nothing really happens in this movie. Sure, there are events, the boy’s mother gets divorced a few times, the boy’s father settles down, and so on, but there’s no real conflict, it’s just a bunch of things that happen. And for all that we see characters in multiple years in their lives, there’s only really one situation of “remember this random thing from a few years ago? Now it has developed,” which to me would seem to be the whole point of making a movie this way. In the end I guess there wasn’t enough about the characters to make it seem worth spending a few hours watching them get older, especially when the later years often just feature one or more characters giving speeches about random stuff (I’m sure it’s a big deal that you’re quitting Facebook dude, I don’t think I need a five minute monologue about your theories on the singularity). Definitely my least favorite of the Best Picture movies, I’d suggest missing it.

Selma

The story of the historic march, in my opinion this is the best movie in the category.David Oyelowo is electrifying as Martin Luther King, he does a great job of portraying him both as an icon and as a mortal, full of doubt and worry. Some of my favorite parts of the movie aren’t the big marches or speeches but private moments between King and his compatriots as they plan and make jokes among themselves, these scenes do a lot to humanize these characters. These smaller moments make the bigger ones more striking, and this movie definitely has some very big, emotionally effecting moments. Selma is a sad movie, but also a hopeful one, and I definitely recommend seeing it. 

Oscar Round-Up: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything

So I saw a bunch of movies over the last few months, and I’m going to compact some of the reviews so that there isn’t a horrifying backlog constantly nagging at me. Plus I can get these objectively good movies out of the way in favor of my preferred fare of action movies, bad movies, and bad action movies. First up is about half of the Best Picture nominees. As well as these ones feel free to check out my reviews for Birdman and Whiplash. Today, the “THE” Movies!

The Grand Budapest Hotel

This is a Wes Anderson movie, so there is a lot to like, but also a lot to be annoyed by. In a series of flashbacks we learn about the adventures of a dashing hotel concierge and his bellboy sidekick as they have adventures in a fictional inter-war European nation. I guess I want to describe the movie as “mannered,” everything is done in an extremely stilted and precise way. For me it really called to mind early screw-ball comedies, with lots of door slamming and farcical elements, though combined with an odd undercurrent of violence and darkness. Whether those combine for a fun experience or a deeply unpleasant one really comes down to the viewer. I enjoyed it quite a bit, though did get weary of the constant cameos by the usual suspects from Anderson movies.

The Imitation Game

The bulk of The Imitation Game felt very familiar to me. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: There’s a genius, he doesn’t get along with people, his plans are audacious and he’s given a chance to carry them out but will lose everything if he fails, there is a building stuff montage, the plan fails, there is a failure montage, some seemingly innocuous comment suddenly spurs inspiration, the plan is a success. Be it Val Kilmer building a laser in college, the Scorpion team trying to overcome the villain of the week, or Alan Turning building the first computer to crack Nazi codes, the foundation of The Imitation Game is a very familiar set of beats. A familiar plot could be saved by excellent acting, but for me Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing exactly the same as he plays Sherlock Holmes, its fine work but not particularly revelatory, I mean there are basically nine full length Sherlock movies on Netflix right now. I wish this movie had been better, because of the importance and tragedy of Turning’s story, but it’s simply a middle of the road movie.

The Theory of Everything

Of the two, this is the superior tragic English genius movies. It’s the story of physicist Stephen Hawking and his wife Jane, how they deal with his debilitating disease and both eventually find new love. It’s also got a pretty standard story (boy meets girl, they fall in love and are happy, terrible stuff happens, the pieces get picked up), but in this case the performances really elevate the subject matter. Of course the big news here is Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking, seeing him transform from able-bodied to wheel-chair bound is heart breaking, and he does an amazing job portraying Hawking. Though less flashy, Felicity Jones is also very good as Jane Hawking, being sad and bearing up as the film wears on. A movie isn’t really the best forum for it, but I wish the movie had done more to explain what Hawking was actually proving and accomplishing, instead of explaining things metaphorically. I’m sure it would have made the movie extremely dry, but as it is there are definitely parts of the movie that feel like when they describe how they’ll beat the alien in a Star Trek episode (“Reroute the tachyons and reverse the polarity! OF COURSE!”). Still on the whole a nice sad movie.

Project Almanac

So I saw Project Almanac, and I felt déjà vu even before the kids started travelling through time. This movie is basically either a remake or a sequel to the 2012 movie Chronicle. Both are found-footage movies about groups of teenagers that gain genre-movie powers and have a really great time until the other shoe drops and everything goes bad. In Chronicle the kids got super powers, in Project Almanac they can travel through time (also there are two female team member to go along with the core three guys).

I was pleasantly surprised by a few parts of the movie. I found the characters to be fun and funny, with pretty good chemistry and ability to play off each other. To me they actually felt like actual friends doing stuff, instead of just reciting lines. I also liked how they do a bunch of time travel stuff that’s fun and seems like things smart kids would try to do if they could actually go back in time, they’ve actually seen a bunch of time travel movies and have an idea of what the obvious pitfalls are, so they don’t even try to get into it. It’s light and amusing, not crazy Primer stuff. It was also pretty surprising how long it takes before the other shoe to drop, things don’t get particularly menacing until the very end of the movie.

On the other hand, be aware that this is one of those found footage movies. The camera is shaky, and the explanations for why a character has a camera on and recording at any given moment can be tenuous at best, though it is generally clear who is filming at any time and where the camera is. It’s also a time travel movie, so some plot holes do appear towards the end, though they didn’t slow me down that much personally. Also, for a movie with a main cast of five people, several characters felt extremely underdeveloped, and there’s a fair amount of telling instead of showing in some parts. Finally, at the end of the movie they have to go back to the distant past, 10 years ago, and being reminded that that's 2004-a time that I was an actual grown up person during-is pretty terrible. Stop being young you rotten kids!

Project Almanac is a fun time travel adventure with a decent cast, despite the motion-sickness you might get from the camera work and some weaknesses in the script. Not a masterpiece, but a perfectly agreeable movie.