Movie Review: Captain America: Civil War

CapAmericaPosterBy all rights, Captain America should be the lamest, worst Avenger. He came of age decades before the topic of segregation was even entertained. Rock & roll hadn’t been invented yet. If Steve Rogers is a real person, he’s likely a racist crank, yelling at the other Avengers to get off his lawn.

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Movie Review: The Jungle Book

jungle_bookThere was much ado when Disney announced that they were going to make live action versions of some of their most beloved animated films, but so far, the results are a far better than what the naysayers were predicting. “Cinderella” was a lovely, if safe, first step, and while “The Jungle Book” doesn’t quite hit the same highs that “Cinderella” does, it’s packed with thrills, and it has the courage to go about the material in its own way. It should be noted, though, that this ‘own way’ may scare the hell out of young children.

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Movie Review: The Boss

boss“The Boss” is pitifully lacking in self-awareness. It’s a film that wants to live in Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s universe, where there are real-life news anchor gang wars that end in people losing limbs. To be fair, it’s easy to see why they thought the audience might view the films the same way. “Anchorman” and “Talladega Nights” both feature pompous shells of a human being who are humbled on a grand scale, much like Melissa McCarthy’s character here, but that is where the similarities end. What “The Boss” gets wrong is the meanness factor. Will Ferrell’s characters in the aforementioned films are dim and shallow, but harmless, while McCarthy’s character is an unrepentant, hostile sociopath from birth. Worse, the film treats this as a virtue.

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Movie Review: The Divergent Series: Allegiant, Part I

Allegiant_PosterAs the “Divergent” series unfolds, it feels more and more like a giant bluff. Now in the homestretch, Veronica Roth’s not-too-distant dystopian nightmare is slowly devolving into a needlessly complicated metaphor for high school. There are factions, they keep to themselves, and once you switch factions, you cannot visit anyone from your previous faction. There is melodrama by the truckload. One boy does not like the special attention his girl is getting from the grown-ups, who are grooming her for Bigger, More Important Things. He is jealous. High school, high school, high school.

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Movie Review: Zootopia

Zootopia“Zootopia” might be the cleverest bait-and-switch Disney has ever pulled. All of the teaser ads and promotional materials are pushing the adorable Judy Hopps and her very funny encounter with the sloths running the DMV. What they conveniently leave out is that the movie is an on-point commentary about prejudice and racism, their origins, how they’re used as a weapon for political gain, and how we’re all guilty of them in one form or another. In fact, it’s tempting to resent the film a little, because it explains these subjects to children better than most parents ever could.

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Movie Review: Risen

Risen_PosterThere is a scene in the Coen Brothers’ latest film “Hail, Caesar!” where a movie exec has a meeting with four clergymen of different denominations to see if any of them takes issue with how Christ is portrayed in one of their upcoming films. It’s one of the funnier scenes in the movie; it’s also why most Biblical retellings reek of focus groups and compromise, because the last thing a studio wants is to be perceived as insensitive when it comes to religion. “Risen” manages to avoid those trappings by doing the simplest thing: it focuses on one specific event – the Resurrection, along with the subsequent two weeks or so – and in the process sets a ceiling on the audience’s expectations. This sounds like damning with faint praise, but it turns out to be a very shrewd move.

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Movie Review: How to Be Single

Single_PosterDon’t let the dirty talk and rampant sex fool you: “How to Be Single” is as safe as kittens. It might be the most harmless raunch-com ever made, a mash-up of several other mediocre relationship films (and one baby film) rolled into one profane package. The four leads sell it as well as they can, but this film was going to be a nonstarter regardless of whom they cast.

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Movie Review: The Good Dinosaur

Good_DinosaurAn unsettling trend is starting to appear in Pixar’s work. When the visuals are more eye-popping than usual, it’s a sign that something more important is lacking (see: “Brave”). “The Good Dinosaur” is visually breathtaking, featuring the most lifelike water that has ever graced an animated film. The story structure, however, is one of Pixar’s weakest, feeling more like old-guard Disney than the kind of thing Pixar normally produces. There are valuable lessons for children to learn here, but there is also a fair amount of trauma. Little Arlo gets his ass handed to him early, then spends the rest of the movie trying to survive.

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Movie Review: Inside Out

Inside_Out“Inside Out” has a sweet, entertaining story at its core, but it requires one of the characters to act like a complete idiot in order to set it into motion, and no matter how enjoyable the rest of the movie may be – and thankfully, it is – those acts will linger in the back of your mind, which, come to think of it, the filmmakers might find ironically funny. It’s not, though; it’s a shortcut, the kind of thing Pixar steadfastly avoided in their storytelling for well over a decade, and now that they have been getting their asses kicked by their peers at Disney Animation (“Frozen,” “Wreck-It Ralph,” “Big Hero 6”) for the last three years, you’d think that they would come up with a better story than this. And to be fair, they came up with a good concept; it just has a bad setup.

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Movie Review: The Finest Hours

It’s easy to see why studios are drawn to stories like the one behind “The Finest Hours,” where four Cape Cod Coast Guardsmen braved impossible weather to rescue the 33 men trapped on a severed oil tanker. By all rights, every one of them should have died a cold, miserable death that night in early 1952, but they didn’t, and it is still considered one of the greatest rescues in Coast Guard history, which is why someone thought, “We should make a film about this.” That in itself is not a bad idea. The bad idea is when the film they make about this incredible story looks like every other film ever made about a similar story. This is a pity; the water sequences are breathtaking, but it’s hard to get emotionally invested in any of the characters, not for a lack of effort on Casey Affleck’s part.

Coast Guard Boatswain Mate First Class Bernie Webber (Chris Pine) is about to meet, for the first time, the girl he has spent the last four weeks talking to on the phone. He’s nervous about how she’ll feel about him, even though a) she’s taken his calls for four weeks, and b) he looks like Chris Pine. The girl, Miriam (Holliday Grainger), likes him just fine, and a few months later, unsung feminist pioneer Miriam asks Bernie if he’ll marry her. Almost immediately after he says yes (in the most awkward, bumbling manner possible), Miriam gets a taste of life as the wife of a Guardsman.

A nasty Nor’easter splits two oil tankers in half off of the Massachusetts coast. Bernie, who works in nearby Chatham Station on Cape Cod, is instructed to look for the SS Pendleton, even though there has been no contact from the Pendleton, the Chatham office only has an educated guess where the Pendleton is due to a malfunctioning radar, and there’s a good chance that Bernie’s crew will get stranded on a sand bar before reaching the deep blue sea. The de facto captain of the Pendleton is Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck), an unpopular engine room lifer who knows the ship better than anyone on board, and must convince the crew that he can lead them, or at least keep them alive the longest.

For those who wish to debate the authenticity of the Boston accents: don’t. Just don’t, please. The actors are trying their best to do a damn hard accent, and in the end, it has no impact on the movie’s overall quality. Heck, Casey Affleck is from Boston, and he doesn’t even use his Boston accent. That says it all, right there. But beyond that, Affleck is committed to making this movie great on a level that no one else can touch. Pine might be the headliner, but Affleck is the star.

There are several familiar beats and tropes in those two synopsis paragraphs, and that is by design. The film covers the lives of over three dozen men, but the audience only gets to know one of their love interests. (To be fair, even the great “Apollo 13” is guilty of this.) There is manufactured conflict between Ray and an outspoken defeatist who dismisses everyone else’s ideas. There is the commanding officer (poor, poor Eric Bana) who lacks his subordinates’ respect and is out of his depth, but won’t admit it. Even the forthrightness of the determined Miriam feels like a cheat, even though it’s actually true to life. Heck, everything here could be exactly as it happened, but because it’s been done so many times before, it feels fake.

And then they cut back to the ocean, and the movie comes to life. The interior shots of the SS Pendleton falling apart are nerve-racking, but it’s the underwater shots that make the biggest impact, because they manage to create the effect of underwater currents, something that is difficult to do on the movie studio water tank stage. (There is also one bone-chilling underwater shot of the SS Pendleton’s sole casualty.) Bernie’s crew starred in some equally impressive technical achievements, as their relatively puny boat ascended wave after wave that were just a notch below the big one in “The Perfect Storm.” And sometimes, they didn’t ascend them, and still somehow carried on. How the Guardsmen didn’t all die of hypothermia shortly after reaching land is astounding.

Hats off to “The Finest Hours” for documenting a decades-old act of brazen selflessness that deserves to live forever. Hats back on for making the same damn rescue movie that has been made dozens of times before. If this is indeed one of the greatest rescues in Coast Guard history, then its cinematic equivalent deserves the same.

2.5 out of 5 stars (2.5 / 5)
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