Tag Archives: Film Review

Review: Bridge of Spies

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When is a spy movie not a spy movie? Bridge of Spies has all of the trappings of a spy movie, espionage, hidden communications, interrogations, secret identities, a race against the clock, and worldwide consequences hanging in the balance, but it’s as far from a “spy movie” as you can get. Instead, Bridge of Spies is a film about spies. Steven Spielberg has teamed up once again with Tom Hanks (with a script by the Coen brothers) bring us a true story from the height of the Cold War, a story of subtle legal and political maneuvering with the fate of not only two spies but two nations hanging in the balance. The result is a tense, thrilling, yet beautifully quiet film that focuses on the human element of international espionage, and the way the lives of those who only wish to serve their country are used or discarded as situations change.

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Review: The Martian

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Every movie critic wants to stand out from the crowd. There’s a joy that comes from trashing a highly popular film, and a righteous pleasure from praising a film that was critically panned or generally ignored. But lauding a film that’s cheered by both critics and moviegoers feels a little superfluous, as we’re telling people what they already know. Nevertheless, here I am to tell you that The Martin is just as good as critics and audiences alike have proclaimed. It’s a tense, dramatic story of human ingenuity and the will to survive that feels like a mashup of Apollo 13, Gravity, and Cast Away, but funnier and generally more fun than any of its predecessors. The result is a film that takes tried and true storytelling tropes and makes them feel fresh and entertaining, all anchored by a standout performance from Matt Damon, making The Martian director Ridley Scott’s best film in over a decade.

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Watching Aladdin with a Fresh Set of Eyes

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IMG_6059We all have movies we know by heart, that we’ve seen so many times they become akin to comfort food. Perhaps you pop in the DVD when you don’t know what else to watch, or when you’re doing something else and want it to play in the background. When you’ve watched something enough, the experience of watching turns into one of remembering, tuning out the present and filling the time with your memories of the very thing you could be experiencing. Aladdin was one of those films for me which I’d watched so many times I no longer needed a TV; I could just close my eyes and replay it perfectly in my head. (I distinctly remember watching the VHS three times in a row once when I was home sick from school many years ago.) But I recently got the chance to see it on the big screen for the first time in 23 years and it felt like I was seeing it with a fresh set of eyes. Time and experience can change our perspective or deepen our understanding of a film, but we so rarely take the opportunity to come at things from a new angle and recapture the sense of magic that has been softened by familiarity.

As a way to mark the upcoming Blu-ray release of Aladdin, Disney’s D23 fan club allowed people to vote on which cities would get to host a one-time screening, and luckily for me Phoenix was selected (along with Seattle and Sacremento). Continue reading →

Review: Ant-Man

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Ant-Man shouldn’t work.  Just from a conceptual standpoint, a hero who can shrink and who hangs around with insects sounds a little goofy when compared to the exploits of the Avengers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  This isn’t Asgard or SHIELD and there’s no army of alien invaders or HYDRA soldiers with which to contend, so how could it ever feel as important or impactful as other recent Marvel films?  Add in the drama over the loss of the film’s original writer/director (and strongest advocate) Edgar Wright, and the resulting film could have been an inconsequential mess, throwing a goofy idea together with a handful of jokes and some cheesy action just to be another cog (about a straight, white male, of course) in the Marvel/Disney machine.  That Ant-Man succeeds at all is a testament to the creativity of Marvel’s storytelling and the strength of its cast, but more than that it’s perhaps Marvel’s most flat-out fun film to date.

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Review: Inside Out

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Why do we think what we think and feel what we feel?  What determines who we are and how we respond to life’s circumstances?  How can the same memory be joyous sometimes and sad at others?  Where do ideas come from?  What happens to the things we’ve forgotten?  Why does the jingle from that chewing gum commercial always get stuck in your head?  Why are dreams so weird?  Just what, exactly, is going on in people’s heads?  These are some of the many questions Pixar’s latest film, Inside Out, sets out to explore.  The result is one of the most charming, heartfelt, and poignant films the studio has ever created, as well as one of the most creative movies of all time.  It will not only make you laugh and cry, but then it’ll make you stop and consider why you just laughed and cried.

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Review: Jurassic World

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Jurassic World PosterJurassic Park is one of my all-time favorite movies, but I also believe it’s one of the most important films in the history of cinema.  It ushered in a new era of filmmaking and box office blockbusters, where anything an artist could envision could appear convincingly on the screen, while setting a standard for visual effects that is still unmatched.  It was also one of my most memorable moviegoing experiences, and to an entire generation of people my age it was our Star Wars.  It inspired us and filled us with wonder, while delivering a story, characters, and a universe that captured our imaginations and dominated the pop culture landscape.  It also had dinosaurs.  Jurassic World was seemingly inevitable, particularly in today’s nostalgia-obsessed world.  Take one of the most popular franchises of all time and update it, bringing the most modern visual effects and most popular stars to the series, and the result has been the biggest box office smash of all time.  It’s also a mess.

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Review: Mad Max: Fury Road

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In Mad Max: Fury Road, Max drives a tanker truck through a desert wasteland in order to help rescue a group of women from the psychotic warlord who is pursuing them.  That’s pretty much the entire plot of Fury Road, but it fails to capture the essence of what is one of the most intense, full-throttle, and absolutely insane action films of all time.  But to reduce Fury Road by calling it an “action movie” is to ignore the craftsmanship, storytelling mastery, and the scale of what had to go into this film.  Writer/Director George Miller has returned to his original creation 30 years after Max was last seen on the big screen and has managed to build something that feels unlike anything we’ve seen before, yet entirely at home in the universe of Mad Max combining elements of all three previous films.  On the one hand, Fury Road defies description; it’s the sort of film that must simply be experienced, preferably on the big screen.  But on the other hand, it also provides so much to talk about, from its strong feminist tendencies to its impeccable stuntwork to its brilliantly crafted visuals to its surprisingly clever storytelling.  Fury Road is simply one of a kind.

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Review: Tomorrowland

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Teenager Casey Newton spends her days in school listening to her teachers tell her over and over that the world is doomed, that war, injustice, and climate change will be the end of us, but never answering Casey’s question of how we fix it. She spends her nights breaking into NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in order to sabotage the demolition equipment poised to destroy one of their launch pads that is no longer in use, hoping to save both the space program that has inspired her as well as her dad’s job at NASA. Things start to change when, upon having her possessions returned to her after being arrested for trespassing, she’s given a mysterious pin that, when touched, seemingly transports her to another world. The vision only lasts a brief while, but it shows her a future where humanity is united in the pursuit of expiration, led by dreamers and optimists for whom Enstein’s quote “Imagination is more important than knowledge” is a guiding principle. The pin’s vision fades, and Casey is left with the unyielding need to find out more. Her quest will lead her from her home to a bizarre science fiction shop to a mysterious young girl who knows more than she’s letting on and finally to Frank Walker, who might have been able to take her to this Tomorrowland if only he hadn’t given up a long time ago.

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Review: Pitch Perfect 2

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According to the assumptions by which Hollywood usually operates, Pitch Perfect should never have been an success.  It was a musical about nerds, a film about women made mostly by women, with no box office stars to its name.  It wasn’t a sequel, a remake, a superhero movie, or any of the typically bankable films that Hollywood regularly pumps out.  Its eventual success happened not in spite of the things seemingly stacked against it, but because of them.  It was a film that celebrated women the way it celebrated music, and served not the stereotypical male “geek culture” that movies like The Avengers cater to, but instead it embraced the nerd inside of us.  The one that’s sometimes awkward or embarrassed, that hides from the world around us, but is immensely passionate about whatever it is that we love, music or otherwise.  And in the end it made big stars out of its cast of familiar faces.  There is no other movie among my friends and acquaintances that is as universally loved as Pitch Perfect, and it is always one of the first answers given to the question, “What should we watch?”  Its passionate fanbase meant that a sequel was inevitable, and the only question was whether they could recapture lightning in a bottle and make something as special as the film that captured so many hearts.  The answer isn’t quite so simple, but Pitch Perfect 2 is still a lot of fun, and it fills a niche that is too often ignored by Hollywood.

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Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron

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If there was one criticism that could be leveled against 2012’s The Avengers, it might be that the film was just a little too perfect.  I know that sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but bear with me.  The second highest grossing film of all time was almost universally beloved and forever changed the landscape of the film industry with its success, but it was perhaps a little too polished.  The action was too slick, the one-liners too well-timed and well-written, the effects too impressive, the heroes too heroic and the villains too villainous.  For Avengers: Age of Ultron, the second Avengers film, the eleventh movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Joss Whedon’s second and final outing in the MCU, that perfection is intentionally avoided and the result is a film that’s messier, dirtier, more complicated, and ultimately a richer and better film than its predecessor.

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