What’s the last thing you remember?

X-Men: Days of Future Past - 3.5/5

There’s always been a cheapness to Bryan Singer’s X-Men. Bigness on a very small scale. The action scenes, despite cool uses of power and despite people dying and despite them being people that I have an immediate relation to (despite zero character development), feel television-sized. "A lot" does not equal "weight" and there is no density to them outside of “hey, I know him!” Fortunately (and surprisingly), then, that the majority of the movie focuses on a small handful of people. It manages to work all its flaws into a perfect plot for the person making the movie: a small battle wrapped up in a bigger one. Indeed, indeed, the true action scenes take place between Magneto and Mystique and Professor X not as they trade punches with Sentinels but as the two males try to talk their way into the girl’s heart. There’s a tenseness and, because of past entries and the unpredictability of a time travel movie, a genuine sense of not knowing what she will decide. Additionally, a lesson learned from ‘First Class’ (and the Marvel Studios movies) is that Bryan Singer’s X-Men can be serious without being dour. It’s free to be a comic book movie. There’s a fun-ness, even if all of the jokes aren’t exactly functional. Characters appear because they’d be a blast, not because they have any real bearing on the plot. Quicksilver is great, and then disappears. Wolverine, a plot instigator, is literally tossed aside at the end, a final realization of how unimportant he is. It’s not a tight movie and it’s a movie that can’t help winking at the audience, but when it focuses on the genuine battle of philosophical differences that can decide the fate of the world, it’s damn fine.

Murder-suey.

Obvious Child - 4.5/5

Jenny Slater’s got this beautiful, expressive face and physical body. She’s inviting. She welcomes you in. Which is good, you know, because it’s a movie about following through with your abortion plans. Despite its potential heaviness, it doesn’t really wave a flag or have a message except to say that people can handle a difficult situation with an appropriate amount of maturity and immaturity. Bad things can be both serious and a joke. It’s not pro or con, it just is, and that’s all it need be. Her opposite, her lover-man, threatens to be a nice guy, but he turns out to be a nice guy with jokes. A _____ with jokes will always be better than a _____, solo. He’s a nice guy, but also worthwhile. Jenny Slater does this wincing thing at the end when she holds his hand. It just about killed me. 

I wish I didn’t know you, but I do.

Edge of Tomorrow - 4.5/5

It is a video game movies in all of the obvious ways, but also in the more subtle ways that you learn at 3am when trying to beat the final boss in Metal Gear: Solid. It’s fun, it’s repetitive, and it’s frustrating. So fucking frustrating. This movie is funny, interesting, and its repetitions rarely feel repititious, but more than anything, it captures that frustration of having to beat the game. You can’t go to sleep until you beat the game. You lose so many times but you just can’t not win. Beyond that, it does most everything else right. Tom Cruise’s relationship with Emily Blunt isn’t romantic, though she is beautiful and strong and worthy of some romance, but built on the bonds of fighting next to someone over and over and over and over again. Their one shared kiss isn’t even romantic; it’s more of respect and kinship. “Thank you for fighting next to me.” “Thank you for believing me.” A kiss of shared reality. And all of it rests extraordinarily well on Tom Cruise’s shoulders. He gets to be the coward, the hero, the pawn, the mastermind, the shat upon, and the shitter of upon. The ending has this extraordinarily large chance to turn cheesy, but Tom Cruise smiles this dumb-shit smile and all is forgiven. He’s a goddamned movie star. This is how they do, bay-bee. In terms of flaws – with a few lines and odd wardrobe choices, it make its secondary characters bigger than they ever needed to be, but it doesn’t follow through with giving all of them a moment to live or die. The biggest, though, is that fucking title. “All You Need Is Kill” is an all-time great name. I hope they retroactively go back and fix it. 

A sentimentalist

is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.

The business of

irrationalizing the rational.

The business of

rationalizing the irrational.

Even stupidity

gets assigned meaning.

Hush up, little girls, a lot of cats have that name.

Black Dynamite - 4/5

It was funny. Not by being intentionally bad, which it may be sold as, but by being intentionally funny. I loved this shit, yo.

I don’t want to add my name to that list.

Layer Cake - 2.5/5

Feels like a copycat. A copy of an entertaining thing, yes, but a copy. It was like someone learning to draw by tracing. 

In heaven, everything is fine.

Eraserhead - 2/5

More than anything, I think David Lynch just has a bunch of thoughts. Pictures pop in his head and he wants to see them play out. Sometimes those pictures are whole stories. Sometimes they’re just vignettes that hope to be a whole story. This one’s like waking up with a vague memory of a dream but not being sure what it’s about and having forgotten how it ended. To his credit and discredit, I’m not so sure he cares if we see what he sees or saw. He’s unburdened by us. It’s less about our own enjoyment as it is about opening a window into his own head because he thinks it’s worth peeking inside. And he’s such a genuinely weird dude, I’d hate to ruin it by calling it self-indulgent. But it is a chore. 

Relaxed fit.

Neighbors - 2.5/5

The movie likes all of its characters too much to define any one person as the bad guy. The frat guys are too much fun. The parents are the least funny and perhaps most evil but they are the oppressed fighting back against the Youth Trend. This seems like it could have been handled with a deft ‘maybe we’re the bad guys…??’ but it instead just amps up the evil of the frat. So who do we root for? The fun evil guys or the less fun evil parents? They’re better together than fighting each other, so we just end up rooting for them to stop being idiots and just, you know, fucking hang out together. The movie seems like it could have had multiple feasible ‘abouts,’ but it would rather make a gross-out joke than string together a story logic. When jokes land, they land hard, but the story just kind of falls to the floor. 

Never fail to do what’s right.

The Rescuers - 1.5/5

It feels like a Don Bluth movie. Dark and rough-edged. The cute voices are cute. Shit, I don’t know. I didn’t feel anything, so it must’ve sucked. 

If nothing ever happens here, why does it always happen to me?

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape - 2.5/5

Trapped in a small town-type shiz, except the trappings are “responsibility to others.” He’s got shit to do. Too much going on to risk running off. Can’t leave his fat mama or his skinny-brained brother. Gilbert wants to be a good person, but it comes at the cost of being himself. Like if Superman didn’t give himself permission to be Clark Kent. When you’re a good person, your choices are made for you – doing the right thing – and that’s the eventual problem with the movie: his mama dies, so he doesn’t have to deal with the heroic feat of making a choice for himself, of himself. The gates are open and he’s free to roam, but he didn’t have to pry them open. So that’s flat, much like Gilbert himself through the duration of the movie. It’s nice when he gets mad, because that’s a spark and there’s way too much of stamping out the flames. It’d be nice to see something burn. 

It was always going to be someone else’s way.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - 3/5

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life - 2.5/5

It’s that special breed of movie – the market research cool. Wisecracks without a smile and no visible weaknesses. Badassery as decided by a committee of teenage boys. A kiss-less make-out session on dirt bikes and a bungee-swinging kung-fu fight that almost so close has the potential to slip a booby. It’s weird and stupid and glorious. The second installment goes down a notch because it takes itself a pound-and-a-half more seriously. Did people say the first was too campy? We need more gritted teeth and shooting of the man you love? I don’t know. People, man. 

A world without Spider-Man.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 - 2.5/5

What a frustrating movie series. Its Spider-Man *looks* great, he *moves* great – but it’s all on the surface. He’s a superhero, but he’s not a very good person. Manipulative, flaky, a promise-breaker – those things he was supposed to fix after his Uncle Ben got shot, yo. He’s a borderline-abusive boyfriend, holding back a clearly better woman. (And I think there’s been an unfortunate byproduct of the end of ‘Batman Begins’ which implies that superheroes cause more trouble than they stop – “escalation” – which may be true, but it’s a dangerous line of thinking when the ultimate end result is to continue being that hero.) I think the recent trend in blockbuster movies is to use likability as a spackle to fill in holes in the story. ‘Say a funny joke’ replaces ‘fix inherent problem with story.’ It’s smart – it creates a sheen, a surface-level cleanliness. If you’re not trained in the art of writing increasingly long movie reviews on your personal blog, you may miss it. But still – there’s enough there within that likability to make me desperately want it to be good. Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are so good. They should go off and make a million movies together. Her ending has meaning not because of the story, but because the one thing worth salvaging about this franchise is now dead.