A Movie Blog About Movie Logs, plus SPECTRE and INSIDE OUT

Another of my New Year’s resolutions at the start of 2015 was to keep a movie log. This was (is) primarily inspired by Stephen Soderbergh’s meticulous log of both things he’s seen and read with dates and number of episodes watched, etc. But surely other critics whose work I read keep similar logs and it seemed like a good habit to get into.

For the record: I saw 92 movies last year, 17 of which were released in 2015. I saw the majority of them before June, then I really fell off, so I hope to set a good pace and keep it going for 2016. I wrote about 28 movies, which is more than I’ve written about anything ever before. I surprised myself by how much I had to say about Guardians of the Galaxy and Age of Ultron and superhero movies in general. I surprised myself by some of the movies I didn’t plan on writing about, but after watching decided I had to write about such as A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. I surprised myself by how quick 1000 words goes and how long 5000 words is (too long).

Anyway, I kept things pretty straightforward and rigid with my movie blogs last year because I wanted them to look and feel like any film writing you might come across on your casual stroll through the internet looking to read about a movie. But this year one of my goals is to blog more along the lines of my train of thought (we’ll get to Inside Out in a bit) to hopefully strike more of a balance between personal and professional. Maybe you’ll learn something about me and maybe I’ll learn even more about myself. Thanks for reading and I hope you will continue to do so.

Movie Log Movie Blog: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

I like to take my time with these superhero movies because, what’s the rush? I get why one would be excited; if you consider comics a central part of your life and have been waiting years to see your favorites come to life on screen then sure, get in line and check it out first weekend, or throw on a costume and attend a screening. But for me, at this point, I know that one is just a building block for another, and there will be more to come all the way into 2020 and beyond.

Early confession: I liked Zack Snyder’s 300, and I liked Watchmen even more, but maybe Man of Steel was the one that ruined seeing superhero movies in theaters for me. I was excited to see a visually stunning, detailed, and expansive Superman come to Earth and find his roots in Metropolis with the Kents, the Daily Planet, and Lois Lane (shouts to Amy Adams, even if her filmography has been all over the place lately). But what we got was too much: a movie whose innovative action, world building, and subsequent world destruction spreads far but doesn’t dig deep, resulting in a lot of sound and fury merely setting up a series of sequels. So now I’m cynical, skeptical, and in no rush to see the next one, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Ben Affleck as Batman doesn’t help either. I could go for more Gone Girl Ben Affleck, but keep getting them superhero checks while the getting’s good. Anyway, where some 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros. and DC Comics adaptations have misstepped, the Disney/Marvel productions have shown why they’re the kings of this superhero reboot machine by delivering consistency and reverence while expanding the scope of their universe.

Before I sat down to watch Guardians of the Galaxy over a year later, I didn’t know anything about the Guardians of the Galaxy, and I’m thankful for that because it allowed me to enjoy the movie for what was put on screen. I try as much as I can to talk about these movies (the same is true, but to a lesser extent, with music) as just about what happens on screen, mostly because I’m ignorant of what happens in the source material. It’s not that the source material is irrelevant, but not enough critics assess the movie as a thing in and of itself.

What I did hear about Guardians was mostly good; that it was surprisingly entertaining for old folks and youngins alike, with a solid soundtrack top to bottom, and that Chris Pratt had ascended to the top of the action movie mountain with his turn as Star-Lord (solidified by the success of Jurassic World, which I haven’t yet seen). Still, even after hearing decent to good words about the next Marvel installment, Avengers: Age of Ultron, it wasn’t until after a long run of 70s movies and other iconic American films that it was time to take off my serious movie watching glasses and settle in for some movies made for our mass consumption and enjoyment — and that meant catching up with some superheroes and villains.

Movie Log Movie Blog: BLUE VELVET

I didn’t write about any movies in July, but it was the month I watched the most movies in so far this year. That’s partly because the BBC released a 100 greatest American films list, which is interesting on a number of levels, but more so gives me a new list of movies to watch.

I caught up with Robert Altman via McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the epic Nashville, the weirder than expected 3 Women, and the L.A. detective noir The Long Goodbye. I also went back and watched Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather just so I could watch The Godfather Part 2 for the first time, and I marathoned them back to back (for the record,
Part 1 is better). However, I didn’t feel like writing about any of them until I caught up with David Lynch and finally watched his acclaimed 1986 film Blue Velvet — currently streaming on Netflix.

Blue Velvet concerns Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who has returned home from college to Lumberton, North Carolina to visit his father who has suffered a sudden stroke. Passing through a nearby field, Jeffrey happens upon a human ear, riddled with ants and slightly decomposing. Rather than carry on with his day the endlessly curious Jeffrey bags the ear and heads down to the police station.

Movie Log Movie Blog: WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE?

Even though I’ve been on some no new blog ish lately, I have been trying to get back into the swing of watching lots of movies. For instance I finally went out and saw Mad Max: Fury Road at an Alamo Drafthouse (I suggest you do the same while you still can), and streamed
Edge of Tomorrow on HBO GO (I wonder how many times Emily Blunt had to do the cobra pose as a bewildered Tom Cruise — is there any other kind? — approached).

Also, oddly enough, I’ve seen a few good music documentaries over the last few months. In April I made it through the 4 hour, 2 part
Sinatra: All or Nothing documentary produced by HBO and directed by Alex Gibney; and the other day I revisited Shut Up and Play The Hits, the LCD Soundsystem documentary of their final show at Madison Square Garden. However, this post is about Nina Simone and the new documentary directed by Liz Garbus, produced by and now streaming on Netflix, What Happened, Miss Simone?

Movie Log Movie Blog: A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

New to Netflix this week: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) is a movie with a real sense of style, which I think is the most important aspect of the vampire genre. I’m usually dismissive of vampire films because they tend to be campy, trite, and largely predictable, but
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is none of those things. Setting the black & white aside for a minute, Director Ana Lily Amirpour makes some nice stylistic choices I haven’t seen in many, if any other films.

The film opens with a wanna-be James Dean we come to know as Arash (Arash Marandi), apparently stealing a cat before heading home in his cool car. We quickly learn he’s not quite that cool when the drug dealer his junkie father (Marshall Manesh) has become indebted to shows up to collect and leaves with Arash’s car. The dealer, Saeed (Dominic Rains), takes the car and picks up a hooker (Mozhan Marnò), presumably his hooker, as she hands him cash and refuses to give back her cut without a free blowjob. While enjoying himself, he sees a figure in the rearview mirror, but when he turns with a start The Girl is gone.

Movie Log Movie Blog: EX MACHINA

Ex Machina, the first feature film from British Director Alex Garland, is an accessible and engaging modern science fiction film I’m glad to have seen in theaters.

Though contained to the enclave of unfathomably rich tech CEO, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), Garland takes us to and through a mountain lair with many laboratories and mysterious rooms, each of them well designed to look both natural and modern. To that end the film is lit with natural light during daytime recreational bonding between Nathan and Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), and flooded with pristine white and occasionally delirious red artificial light at night. Light chats along sounds of a running stream and nature for miles are as arresting as the opposing terse dialog in dense, claustrophobic rooms.

Caleb, a computer engineer at Nathan’s social media company, finds himself at Nathan’s home as a sort of prize. What Caleb has won is an opportunity to perform a Turing Test on the latest prototype of the company’s latest top secret project, Ava (Alicia Vikander); an artificially intelligent android of Nathan’s creation, harnessing the whole of our social interactions around the world. Nathan has chosen Caleb as he feels he’s finally ready to introduce his Ava to another human to see how real she seems, how humanly she behaves with a stranger.

Movie Log Movie Blog: THE GUEST, A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES

Let the record show that if you recommend I watch something, it may take up to two months for me to get around to it (you should also know that if you lend me a book you might not get it back for up to six months, I know, worst possible person).

Earlier this year my friend Caponio recommended The Guest (2014) starring Dan Stevens. True story, a few weeks before that I was looking at Dan Stevens’ filmography to try and see what he’d been up to since leaving Downton Abbey to pursue other interests and randomly joked about The Guest out of all of them. I don’t hate Dan Stevens, I just have a strong feelings of resentment for how things went down on Downton Abbey.

Anyway, now that the Oscars have passed I have time for some action thrillers, and I’ll be honest I enjoyed The Guest featuring ‘Merican Dan Stevens as an unnerving veteran come to pay respects to the family of a fallen friend more than I expected.

Movie Log Movie Blog: SELMA, CITIZENFOUR

I watched Selma (2014) and Citizenfour (2014) last week, however since then House of Cards Season 3 and other TV shows have sucked up all of my attention. But I haven’t watched any other movies so they’ve both sort of stuck with me, and it’s never too late to get one’s thoughts out.

I didn’t expect to write about Citizenfour or Selma, and I definitely didn’t plan on writing about them together, but after seeing both over the past week it’s clear that they’re both movies about America’s history that deserve a wide audience. Interestingly enough, Citizenfour is a documentary that plays as a dramatic thriller; while Selma is a drama that plays as a fictionalized PBS documentary.

Selma begins with an explosion in which four black girls are killed known as the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, which I didn’t know happened. In school we’re told the stories of Emmett Till who was killed for flirting with a white girl in Mississippi in 1955, and of the Greensboro Four who staged a sit in at a whites only lunch counter at Woolworth’s in 1960, which is all well and good, but why not more? Why the same stories year after year?

Soon thereafter Oprah appears as Annie Lee Cooper, a black woman humiliated and denied in her umpteenth attempt to register to vote in Selma, Alabama when she couldn’t come up with how many county judges there are in Alabama.

Those two events set the stage for the type of film the director
Ava DuVernay intends to make, one that will present the true events of our history in a way that they haven’t been told before.

She does this in two ways: literally in that the story of the attempts to march from Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and on to Montgomery in the name of Voting Rights is rarely fully told, and cinematically in that DuVernay presents the truth with a dramatic approach, through a black lens.

Movie Log Movie Blog: WHIPLASH, BIRDMAN, BOYHOOD

The 87th Academy Awards ceremony takes place tonight so this weekend I re-watched my top three Best Pictures of 2014: Whiplash, Birdman, and Boyhood.

That’s no disrespect to Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel either. On first viewing I thought it ended too abruptly. It’s such a complex plot buried in multiple memories, stories, and journeys wrapped up quickly and ended even quicker; but it was better the second time around knowing where it’s all going. It’s also easier to appreciate how Ralph Fiennes as Monsieur Gustave H. carries the hotel concierge’s air of panache through the muck and strife that goes along with being named heir to a very valuable painting by an abruptly deceased Madame D. (Tilda Swinton) over other loved ones, principally her son Dimitri (Adrien Brody).

Anyway, let’s start with Whiplash and Birdman — two of the most engaging movies released last year. They’re also the only two of the eight nominees I’ve seen in a theatre, which matters and is something I should do more of in 2015. I also watched them back to back which worked out because of their similarly drum heavy scores; but with Birdman drums are a nice device for the pace, with Whiplash drums are the only thing.

Whiplash debuted at Sundance 2014 where critics were taken by surprise by director Damien Chazelle’s first feature. The film begins with a long, slow tracking shot, creeping up on a room playing the hell out of a set of drums. Behind the door is Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller), a first-year jazz student trying to emulate Buddy Rich in the hopes of becoming someone at the acclaimed Shaffer Conservatory in New York. It turns out that creeping up to the door is being done by conductor Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), a man whose reputation precedes him, who is capable of making or breaking Andrew’s career, and who eventually invites Andrew to join his award winning studio band.

One random Summer in college I took Jazz Appreciation as an elective, that’s about the extent of my formal music education. It’s also one of the only classes that accomplished its goal by the end, but that’s a whole different conversation for another day. I imagine Whiplash is even more exhilarating to the music nerds out there who can read music, but it was equally exciting to watch Teller, a drummer since age 15 who still took lessons 4 hours a day 3 days a week for the role, bare his heart and soul and blood over Andrew’s drum kit. It’s another disappointing move by the Academy to not give Miles Teller a Best Actor nod for Whiplash. He’s in every scene (the Academy loves that!), and is a force in every scene, but he’s young (the Academy’s old) and no doubt has more great performances ahead of him.

Movie Log Movie Blog: 21 JUMP STREET, 22 JUMP STREET

To balance out all that romance I needed some comedy featuring an all time bromance. Is it too soon to call Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum an all time bromance? Maybe there’s a Buzzfeed listicle to be made there.

Confession: until this weekend I hadn’t seen 21 Jump Street (2012). I revealed that to my roommate who is used to me putting off movies but insisted I put it (and 22 Jump Street (2014)) at the top of the list so here we are. I don’t know why I put it off. Maybe it’s just that I never feel like paying to see a buddy cop movie in theaters so I wait until it’s convenient. I put off End of Watch (2012, was on Netflix), I put off 48 Hrs. (1982, still on Netflix), and I put off these Jump Street movies.

Confession two: I still haven’t seen Magic Mike (2012) (or 10 Years (2011) or The Vow (2012) or Haywire (2012), but I have seen the last 45 minutes of White House Down (2013)). I did like Channing Tatum in Side Effects (2011, it’s on Netflix), so it’s not like I hate him, I guess he just doesn’t tickle me in the way that, say, Loretta does. But he’s in Tarantino’s upcoming The Hateful Eight (2015) as well as the Coen Brothers’ upcoming Hail, Caeser! (2016), so he’s not, not killing it. It’s just that for every Foxcatcher (2014) he’s got a Jupiter Ascending (2015), unfortunately.

Jonah Hill, on the other hand, I’ve seen everything he’s done. Dude’s hilarious, maybe someone I’d pick as one of the five people I’d like to have dinner with, and becoming an excellent actor. If he’s in a movie I’m down to watch it.

I’ll admit, after watching 21 Jump Street followed closely by 22 Jump Street, I feel like I owe Channing Tatum a binge watching session. He’s obviously got the chops to do more than dance around and look charming, even if he gets to do it a lot in these two movies.