Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Frank Review

frank

I’m not quite sure that the movie “Frank” is about any one thing, in particular. It engages with a lot of ideas that struggling and aspiring musicians deal with, such as inherent genius, hard work, tragic beginnings, and what it takes to be creatively successful, but it doesn’t have anything specific to say about any of them. Unlike most films, though, Frank doesn’t suffer from its shotgun approach to the complexities of the creative process. Instead it feels like an artist venting about said frustrations through a quirky, compelling yarn centered around a man in a paper mache mask.

Despite the marketing focus on Frank (the masked man) himself, the protagonist of the film is actually Domhnall Gleason’s Jon Burroughs, a struggling keyboardist who lives with his parents and spends much of his free time “writing music,” or more accurately, people-watching on the beaches of Ireland. The film’s first act is strangely similar to another Domhnall Gleason movie, actually; like in Ex Machina, his every-man character is swept away to a remote location with a genius figure who hand-picked him as a collaborator. From there, though, Frank takes a much different path.

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Captain America: Civil War Review

 

civil-warSomebody at Marvel must have sold their soul to the devil.

That’s the only way I can explain how a movie like Captain America: Civil War, which juggles enough characters to make Batman v Superman and the previous Avengers movies look quaint, works so beautifully. Civil War isn’t just good, it’s the best team-up movie Marvel has produced to date, and possibly the studio’s best film yet. Despite running for two hours and twenty-six minutes (just slightly longer than the Avengers movies), Civil War never ceases to be entertaining. Just about every scene is enjoyable in its own right.

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American Ultra Review

american-ultra

If American Ultra is a failure, then at least it’s a noble one. The film, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, is about a West Virginia stoner who finds himself the target of a CIA hit operation, suddenly able to fight and shoot guns and basically behave like an action-movie hero. Most notably, though, it is NOT a comedy. The storytelling is completely straight-faced, there’s great care put into the action sequences, it can be mercilessly violent at times, and the screenplay is genuinely interested in making us care about Mike (Eisenberg) and his girlfriend Phoebe’s (Stewart) relationship.

The approach to take such a ridiculous concept and weigh it down with the central character’s fear, confusion, and relationship worries is certainly attention-grabbing, at least for a while. Eisenberg and Stewart are both great in their roles, sharing a strange chemistry that worked for them in Adventureland and continues to work here. Their performances and the movie’s undeniably-strong style make for a pretty engrossing first act, as we wonder what exactly the film intends on being.

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The Visit Review

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If there’s one thing that’s worn out its welcome in Hollywood, it’s the found-footage horror genre. If there’s another, it’s M. Night Shyamalan. The latter started out incredibly strong, with The Sixth Sense still being regarded as a classic, and fizzled out so spectacularly that he hasn’t directed a good movie since 2004 or 2002, depending on your thoughts on The Village (mine aren’t very positive).  So you can’t blame people for writing off Shyamalan’s return to horror, a found-footage horror/comedy about a couple of kids visiting their grandparents. But somehow 2015’s The Visit isn’t only Shyamalan’s best film in over a decade, it’s probably his best since The Sixth Sense.

Maybe it was the low budget ($5 million, according to Box Office Mojo). Maybe it was the focus on family dynamics, which drove some of his best work in The Sixth Sense and Signs. But The Visit successfully operates on so many levels that it’s hard to see how the same man could have created a travesty like The Last Airbender.

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Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Review

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The sequencing of scenes in a narrative is one of the most important and oft-overlooked elements of storytelling. As South Park’s Matt Stone and Trey Parker have talked about, one of the best ways to form an engaging narrative is to look at your consecutive scenes, and if the only way they’re linked is that one happens “and then” the next happens, rethink things so that they are linked with the words “therefore” or “but.” For a storyteller, it’s a simple way of reminding yourself that causality matters, and that if your story is just a series of things happening with no obvious relation, then, in the words of Trey Parker, “you’re fucked.”

Of course, in complex narratives, it is not always possible to do this with every single scene transition, but it should always be a goal. The biggest problem in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’s laundry list of issues is that it so seldom manages any sort of connection between its consecutive scenes. While you can look back at most of them and justify their necessity in the story, they’re so haphazardly thrown together that it becomes nigh-impossible to care about anything going on onscreen. It’s just scene after scene of shit happening, “and then” more shit happening for completely different reasons.

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