Category: Movie Reviews

Pixar has proven over the last decade that they can consistently deliver all-ages movies that are both popular and emotional. A major part of their power comes from Pixar’s mastery of the bittersweet. In their best moments, Pixar overloads its audience with powerful feelings both positive and negative, intertwined in a way that makes it difficult for the viewer to rationalize. In Up, we see the entirety of Carl and Ellie’s life together in a short montage, taking the viewer through a beautifully executed sequence of extreme highs and lows. In Toy Story 3 we watch Andy give away the toys that the series has focused on for all three films, a moment of loss, abandonment, and a new beginning rolled into one. Both moments require a herculean effort on the part of the viewer to hold back tears.

Given Pixar’s history and proven skill with mixing joy and sadness into potent cinematic moments, it makes perfect sense that their newest film, Inside Out, takes the concept of complex emotional entanglement and makes it the subject. The film attempts to tackle the psychological drives that power us all on a day-to-day basis. In addition to characters representing fear, anger, disgust, joy, and sadness, the movie also tackles the imaginary, our core values, abstract thought, the subconscious, dreams, and long-term memory.

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As I’ve mentioned on this site before, I am a huge supporter of physical media. Simply subscribing to a service like Netflix and being at the mercy of whatever licenses they decide to renew does not interest me: I want to be able to view the movies that I love whenever I want, not whenever it was lucrative for a third party. I’ve never understood people who look at movies and television as mere diversions, all equal as long as they can keep you from boredom for a couple of hours.

What I DO love about the digital subscription model, however, is having the ability to find something you are completely unaware of and watch it on a whim. In a world where major film releases are accompanied by massive ad campaigns intent on spoiling every aspect of the movie in question (see: Terminator Genisys), it can be a joy to just pick out a movie (possibly one recommended to you by Netflix’s scarily-accurate prediction algorithm), not read anything about it, and enjoy the narrative the way that the writer(s) intended. This was the experience I had with The One I Love, a film that I would highly recommend to others.

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Walking out of the theater where I had just watched Jurassic World, I tried to figure out what, exactly, the movie wanted to be. In its marketing, everybody involved tried to stress that this was the true sequel to Jurassic Park, the first to fully capture the spirit of that initial film. This claim did not gel with the movie I saw, which seemed to have little to no understanding of what made that first film truly special.

First of all, the sense of wonder instilled in the original Jurassic Park is completely gone here. Dinosaurs often litter the landscape, or show up as holograms in visitor information centers, but the camera seems wholly unimpressed with them.  This admittedly mirrors the feelings of many of the characters in the world, who have known dinosaurs to exist for over twenty years now, but it is jarring in a film so hellbent on recreating the splendor of the initial film.

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(This review contains spoilers. I think you should read it anyway)

One of the few complaints I remember seeing about Breaking Bad, while it was still on the air, was that it was too flashy for its own good, resorting to fancy novelty shots from time to time. Personally, this never bothered me about the series, and was something I quite enjoyed about it. Nobody was arguing that Breaking Bad didn’t have the depth of character, story, and theme to back it up, so why not throw some style into the mix? Stylistic flourishes should be used like a spice, adding a tiny bit more flavor to an already-satisfying dish.

Where it does become a problem is with a film like Lucy, in which there is nothing compelling for the visual flourishes to spice up. Every chance he gets, filmmaker Luc Besson tosses in cutaways to further emphasize already obvious points. While Morgan Freeman is explaining the drive for organisms to reproduce, he cuts away to multiple shots of animals having sex, just in case we had a momentary lapse in knowledge and needed to have the method of reproduction re-established for us. Earlier, when Lucy (played by a very game Scarlett Johansson) is being tricked by her boyfriend so that she’ll do a dangerous job for him, we’re shown an image of a mouse almost taking cheese from a mousetrap. Then, when she is captured by the bad guys for attempting to deliver her boyfriend’s package, we see a cheetah killing its prey. But wait, isn’t Lucy wearing a cheetah-fur jacket? Oh ho ho, dear viewer, a reversal of fortune is afoot!

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George Miller is not a man who grew up in today’s climate of shoot-first-and-CGI-everything-later. This is a filmmaker who took less than half a million dollars in 1979 and turned it into a classic of vehicular action and destruction, and, with more than ten times that amount for a sequel, created the enduring spectacle that is Road Warrior only two years later. He knows better than anybody that the appeal of those films was the sense of actual danger and destruction, a feeling that can never truly be recreated solely through the use of computers and animation. So, going behind the camera for the first time since 1998, George Miller looked at modern technology and, instead of a crutch, he saw a toolset.

The most immediately apparent modern element in Mad Max: Fury Road is in its attention to color correction. Unlike the earlier films, Fury Road is set in a world oppressed by oranges and yellows, a deserted hellscape its inhabitants are eager to get away from. This is visually portrayed by the cultists’ otherworldly white-colored skin, which contrasts strikingly with its surroundings. The same can be said of the enormous geyser of water Immortan Joe temporarily showers over his followers at the start of the movie. The water is not only refreshing to the thirsty commoners, but to the viewer, replacing the red hues with cool whites and blues. There is a real sense of contrast here.

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