Tag: Viola Davis

Suicide Squad

SuicideSquadPosterIf “Suicide Squad” is supposed to be fun, kill me now. It’s as much of a mess as “Batman v. Superman,” the other entry in the DC Comics Cinematic Universe this year. Director David Ayer’s film has no attitude, no wit, and though it’s a movie about bad guys, does not even have the pleasure and fun of bad taste.

As the story of a team of screwball, misfit villains teaming up to save the world against their best interest, “Suicide Squad” wants to be an anti-hero remix in the vein of this year’s “Deadpool.” But it also has the irreverent, pop sensibilities of “Guardians of the Galaxy,” the overstuffed dream team burden of “The Avengers,” and why not throw in some “Fast and the Furious” or “Scarface” for good measure?

Reports have surfaced about studio meddling that resulted in a shortened writing period, expensive reshoots and versions of the film edited by a company that makes movie trailers. And it shows. “Suicide Squad” patches together story threads, cinematic styles and even a classic rock soundtrack pulled straight from a Spotify playlist, and it never comes together into something coherent or compelling. Continue reading “Suicide Squad”

Prisoners

“Prisoners” floors you by depicting the unclear nature of evil.

There’s a woman in Denis Villeneuve’s “Prisoners” who lost her son 26 years prior to this film’s events. She shows Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) the one tape she watches of her missing son each morning and dejectedly declares, “No one took him. Nothing happened. He’s just gone.”

Detective thrillers and crime procedurals have conditioned us into always expecting an answer and motivation behind the terrible things that happen in the world. We’re left unsatisfied when we don’t get the answer we were looking for, if the puzzle pieces don’t paint a complete portrait or if the ending isn’t nice and tidy.

Rarely in life is this ever the case, and like David Fincher’s cryptic “Zodiac,” “Prisoners” attains intense thrills and gravitas through scattered clues that seem to be everywhere and answers that are nowhere. It’s a studio film that minimizes on the action set pieces, the family melodrama and the pretentious psychology to show that evil is not only omnipresent, but it’s the real mystery.

The two young daughters of the Dover family and the Birch family go missing much like that first boy 26 years earlier; they just disappear. On Thanksgiving Day the two girls go across the street, we get a close-up of a barren tree outside their suburban home, and they’re gone.

Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) suspects the timid loner Alex Jones (Paul Dano) swiped his daughter. With flat, stringy hair, thick glasses belonging to another decade and a junker RV, he certainly fits the description, but when Detective Loki is brought in to interrogate, Alex is clean and seems incapable of anything so sinister. When Alex is let go without charge, Keller intervenes and abducts Alex himself, demanding the answer he knows must be there.   Continue reading “Prisoners”

2012 Oscars Recap

Image courtesy of guardian.co.uk and Getty Images

We love the movies. That’s why we watch the Oscars.

Did I mention that we love the movies? And did I mention that Billy Crystal loves the movies? Oh yeah, we love the movies, the old classic ones that aren’t all really classics, but some new ones too that definitely aren’t classics but people might actually recognize.

But rather than show you how much we love the movies with actual funny jokes or parodies, we’ll just tell you how much we love the movies and play it real safe all night. That way you’ll watch next year so long as you didn’t completely hate us, right? And how could you hate us when we all love the movies so much?

Sunday night’s Oscars were eye-rollingly mediocre, and part of the reason for that was an adamant position on not doing anything that might be too risky, too offensive or even too gaudily awful of a joke or skit that might alienate people from changing the channel. Continue reading “2012 Oscars Recap”

Oscars 2012: Will Win (Part 2)

See my picks for the remaining categories along with analysis, here.

Movies are an art, not a science. And yet The Academy, save for a few eye rolling hiccups each year, operates like clockwork. Predicting the winners at the Oscars is as simple as playing the horses at the track, so here’s your betting form for the big race on Sunday night.

Best Picture

The Artist: 80%

I was once in the camp that a silent film, no matter how good, could never win Best Picture in 2012. But now my odds hardly reflect how one-sided this race has become. Even though it’s a French film, “The Artist” is universal. It’s a crowd-pleaser, a star-maker, and the only Best Picture nominee filmed in Los Angeles. From the Golden Globe to the Director’s Guild to the surprising BAFTA win, the question is not if “The Artist” will win but how many Oscars it will win.

Hugo: 8%

Actually trumping “The Artist” in nominations and taking its cinematic nostalgia trip one step further, “Hugo” and a sweep of technical awards may propel this film to a Best Picture win.

The Descendants: 7%

Be it “The Social Network” or “Up in the Air,” critics and Academy voters respond to the 21st Century darling of the year, and Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants” is that film.

Midnight in Paris: 1.5%

The Help: 1%

The Tree of Life: 1%

Moneyball: .75%

War Horse: .5%

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: .25%

To address the remaining nominees, I don’t want to say they don’t stand a chance, but who am I kidding? If you had five nominees this year, your contenders outside of the top three would be “Midnight in Paris” and “The Help,” maybe “Moneyball.” So that says something for their chances. The other completely outside chance would be “The Tree of Life,” an important film that a number of critics have made a case for to win the Oscar based on how significant such a victory would seem in terms of cinema history. I don’t want to make any sort of case for “Extremely Loud,” but being here was its first big surprise, and winning could be its second. Continue reading “Oscars 2012: Will Win (Part 2)”

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

On the heels of a much-undeserved Best Picture nomination for “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” I began to wonder how it could’ve appealed to so many Academy voters. On paper, Stephen Daldry’s film is total Oscar bait, but in execution it feels more genuinely hurtful than exploitative, melodramatic and weepy.

Much of that has to do with “Extremely Loud’s” extremely unlikeable lead character, the 9-year-old Oskar Schell. Oskar is portrayed brilliantly by the first time actor Thomas Horn, who carries the film and has a strong assertion over this character’s mannerisms, but Oskar’s irritating characterization, either stemming from Jonathan Safran Foer’s popular novel of the same name, or from Eric Roth’s (“Forrest Gump,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) screenplay, does the movie wrong. Continue reading “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”

The Help

“The Help” isn’t really a drama about racism but about snobby, white Southern socialites.

 

What’s the real evil in civil rights era Jackson, Mississippi? Is it racism or controlling, white female socialites? “The Help” thinks it’s the former but the film is simply an entertaining movie about the latter.

It tells of how the budding young journalist Skeeter (Emma Stone) returns from college to find she is more enlightened and intelligent than her prejudiced housewife friends and that the black maid that helped raise her as a child is gone from their home. She’s embarrassed by a rule that would force black servants to use a separate bathroom outside the house and decides to write a book from the perspective of the help.

Skeeter’s two most animated subjects are the life of the film. Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minnie (Octavia Spencer) are fun, sassy, strong and complex individuals with a lot of stories about one of their employers, Hilly Holbrook. Bryce Dallas Howard plays Hilly with spunk and whiplash tartness, but her character is a one-dimensional, bitchy control freak who determines who’s in and who’s out in her middle class WASP social circle of women. Continue reading “The Help”