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.
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