Tag: movie review

Steve Jobs (2015) movie review

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Grade: A

For all the “buzz” Steve Jobs had around it last winter the movie failed to live up to expectations at the box office. Written by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, The Social Network) and directed by Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire) Steve Jobs made on a relatively small budged made a relatively small haul at the box office.

And that’s a shame because I think that Steve Jobs was one of the best movies of 2015.

Told in three acts, Steve Jobs follows the titular character behind the scenes at three important product launches including the original Macintosh in 1984, Jobs’ NeXT Computer in 1988 and the original iMac in 1998. Which is one way Steve Jobs differs from just about every other biopic out there — it makes no attempt to tell the entire story of the subjects’ life. We only get to see Jobs in the high-stress behind the scenes environment minutes before he is about to stand on stage and deliver the next big thing. But because these events happened at different points in his life, when he was 29, 33 and 43, we see measurably different versions of the man.

In the first act, Jobs is this perfectly made organism almost built for the sole purpose of creating what he sees as the most important piece of technology in the modern age; the Macintosh. He doesn’t care about the feelings of his employees, denies that a little girl is his daughter and is willing to do almost anything if it means his vision will be represented in the final product. In the second act, a more mature Jobs is still pushing boundaries and burning bridges yet now has a relationship with the girl he now sees as his own. And in the third act Jobs’ is almost completely different then the man from 1984. He’s still driven and focused but not to the point of destroying the lives of those around him though he can still be extremely caustic.

But Jobs relationship with his daughter, played by three different actresses at three different ages in the acts, is what becomes key to his story. What starts out as someone he won’t recognize as his own slowly becomes someone so important to his life that he’s willing to change for her.

I’m not sure why the movie did as poorly as it did at the box office? One reason I can think of is that Jobs has always had such a polarizing personality. Either you loved or hated him. But I doubt that there was anyone who didn’t know him. And maybe people had already formed an opinion on him either pro or con and that’s why they stayed away? Also, there was talk about the movie being more fiction than fact, which after having read Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs which this movie is based on I’d say it’s probably more fact than fiction.

On the other hand — show me the biopic that is 100% factual and I’ll show you one boring movie.

What amazes me about Steve Jobs is its structure of the three acts in three different time periods. Other than a few flashbacks both Boyle and Sorkin keep the movie in its kinetic present, with Jobs at the center of the storm as they get ready for the impending product launch while at the same time dealing with various people needing his time for various business and personal reasons.

It’s the way the movie’s told that keeps its forward momentum at a breakneck pace. And for a genera of movie that’s known for being anything but “breakneck,” I think it’s something future biopics can take note of.

X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) movie review

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This is a repost of a review I originally wrote back in 2006.

In yet another case of a movie not quite living up to the hype, X-Men: The Last Stand (aka X-Men 3) mostly delivers on the visuals but underperforms on the story.

In X-Men 3, a “cure” has been found for the “mutant gene” dividing the mutants into two camps. One camp, lead by Magneto (Ian McKellen), wants the cure destroyed and the mutants left as-is. The other, lead by Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), wants to take a “live and let live” approach, allowing the mutants themselves decide their own fates.

Whereas the fight scenes between the mutants are awe inspiring, the story is paper thin with major holes and dialogue that’s shoddy/cliché. Characters motivations/actions seem to be driven by moving the plot forward rather than how those characters would normally act.

One would suspect that when a movie costs a reported $200 million to make at least some of that money would be spent on developing an excellent script, but apparently not.

Most frustrating of all, many of the major twists and turns in the movie seem to be driven more by contract negotiations with the actors than by servicing the plot.

Back in 2002 I called X-Men 2: X-Men United one of the best movies of the year and lamented that I couldn’t wait for X-Men 3. Unfortunately, X-Men 3 wasn’t worth the wait. (7/10)

The Proposition review

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This is a repost of a review I wrote back in 2006.

In The Proposition (2005), the brother’s Burns are some of the most wanted criminals on the Australian Outback. When Charlie (Guy Pearce) and Mikey (Richard Wilson) are captured after a shootout, they’re presented with a ghoulish “proposition” by their captor Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone). If Charlie goes out into the wild and kills their older and more vicious brother Arthur (Danny Huston), both he and Mikey will be released. If he refuses or cannot carryout his task, Mikey will be hung on Christmas day.

The Proposition has great cinematography, good acting and a good story. But what hurts the film is a second act that drags on a bit too long. I’m not sure if it’s the script or editing, but The Proposition almost comes to a complete stop during that second act and doesn’t start back up again until the near the end of the movie.

The Australia in The Proposition is something I’m not sure has ever been seen before on film. The stagecoaches are lead by camels and Aborigines have replaced the Indians. And though the brother’s Burns look and act much like outlaws we’ve seen before in other westerns, they speak with Irish accents and follow Irish traditions.

At once this Australia is one of the most violent places on Earth (people die in some of the most inhumane ways) while at the same time people like Captain Stanley are doing their bit for “Queen and Country” to bring a bit of “civilization” to the place. (Even if while at the same time he murders Aborigines while flying the British flag.)

It’s a familiar and alien world at the same time.

The Proposition is worth seeing. It seems to me that writer Nick Cave and director John Hillcoat tried to push the bounds of the western to the next level. And for the most part that’s exactly what they’ve done, though just be prepared for the movie to drag a bit. (8/10)

Direct Beam Comms #28

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Movies

MI–5 aka Spooks: The Greater Good Grade: C-

635823553900970690-STGG-LD-2005I finally caught up with this movie based on the British TV series MI–5 or Spooks, depending on where you live, from 2015. This film stars Kit Harington of Game of Thrones as Will Holloway, an ex-secret agent brought into the fold when things go wrong, people die the head of MI–5 Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) goes on the run.

Or something — I was never quite sure just what was going on.

I have a complicated relationship with the MI–5 TV series (2002–2011). That show was a sort’a UK version of the TV series 24 and shared both its strengths and weaknesses. Both shows were fast movie and action packed but didn’t have much depth. I remember watching the first season of MI–5 with a lot of interest, but I didn’t watch much of the series after the second season when the episodes started blending together to me. (Though I would argue that the second season episode of MI–5 entitled “I Spy Apocalypse” is a great hour of TV.)

That being said, I was interested in the MI–5 movie when it came out in 2015, though apparently not interested enough to go to the theater to see it or actually pay money outside my cable subscription to watch it.

The MI–5 movie is a lot like the MI–5 TV show, there’s a lot of action, a lot of things happen that if they didn’t happen in exactly the right order would mess up someone’s plan — and they always happen in the right order — and a whole lot of plot holes too. Which makes me wonder, with the MI–5 movie feeling essentially like an episode of the TV MI–5 that stars the guy from TV’s Game of Thrones why was did this need to be a movie at all?

It seems to me that when TV shows become movies that share most of the same cast and crew those movies tend to have a bigger, more expansive story than the TV series or go to places a single episode of TV on a budget couldn’t. Look at something like The X-Files movie from 1998 that featured a bigger story and bigger special effects or even the second Sex and the City movies that took that cast to Abu Dhabi.

The movie version of MI–5 does seem like it has a slightly larger budget than a comparable episode of the show but not much and all of the locations are shot around London, where the TV series took place, or London doubling for some other European local. The movie MI–5 does have the requisite story point of knocking off some of the TV characters in the film. Which now that I think of it, they did a lot of in the show too so even that’s not unique.

Still, even if MI–5 was a good episode of the TV series on the big screen that would have been good enough. But it wasn’t. The story here was absolutely a mess and I was never sure just what the characters were trying to do most of the time. And the end features a plot turn that’s so utterly insane it made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Everest Grade B+

700x394Another movie from last year that I just caught up on was Everest. And, unlike MI–5, I thought Everest was really good.

Everest tells the real story of an ill-fated climbing expedition of Mt. Everest in 1996 where eight climbers were caught in a storm and died. The movie plays out as a disaster film where we’re introduced to characters based on real people at the start of the movie and get to know them as the story progresses. Which means that when things start going wrong in Everest at about the half way mark we feel for them.

When the 1996 event happened I remember hearing about it on the news and watching documentaries based on it years later. So I felt going into Everest that I had a good grasp for what was going to happen. What I didn’t realize was exactly how the disaster unfolded, how conditions kept getting worse and worse as little mistakes that alone probably wouldn’t have amounted to anything started adding up and costing lives.

Like the group trying to summit Mt. Everest getting stuck waiting for ropes to be installed to help them get over a difficult part of the mountain. Or a limited supply of oxygen at the top of the mountain. Or a mountaineer having vision problems waiting for a person to come down and meet him rather than simply going down the mountain with another group…

Alone these issues probably wouldn’t amount to anything. But here, together, and with a blizzard raging over the mountain would lead to all those deaths. Which makes me wonder how many times other groups going up Mt. Everest get into the same kinds of situations, but are able to get out of it without anyone dying since things go their way instead of against them?

The first half of Everest is an introduction to the characters and life on the highest mountain in the world. The last half is essentially the ill-fated climb. The climb starts at midnight the day of the summit, then goes until around noon when the actual summit’s supposed to take place with everyone heading back down by 2PM. Except here, with all these mistakes holding the group up then the blizzard tearing across the mountain ends up causing havoc as the group splinters, some of the climbers becoming lost and others trapped in a place where they literally can’t breath.

And as rescue attempts are mounted, it slowly becomes apparent that for some of the climbers, still very much alive, rescue simply isn’t possible.

I think what helps and kind’a hurts Everest is that since it’s based on a true story there’s never any one big “Hollywood” moment where a team of heroic climbers are able to rescue the lead characters and bring them down alive. Since that didn’t happen in real life, it doesn’t happen here. Especially since where you’ve reached a certain altitude on Everest that kind of rescue is impossible since the air’s so thin that it takes all a person has just to get themselves down, let alone another.

I do think it’s that realism that ultimately benefits the movie since the story never ever has that moment of the climbers emerging out of the storm unscathed unlike what happens in most fictionalized mountain climbing movies.

BTW — I was surprised just how full Everest was of movie stars — or at least a lot of recognizable faces from Josh Brolin, John Hawkes, Kiera Knightley and Jake Gyllenhaal to name a few.

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1954: Them! premiers in theaters
  • 1958: Bruce Campbell of The Evil Dead films and TV series is born
  • 1976: Logan’s Run premiers in theaters
  • 1981: Superman II opens
  • 1983: The movie Twilight Zone premiers
  • 1987: Spaceballs opens in theaters
  • 1989: Tim Burton’s Batman is released
  • 1991: The Rocketeer premiers in theaters

Direct Beam Comms #25

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TV

Liquid Television

Aeon Flux
Aeon Flux

The MTV series Liquid Television aired its first episode 25 years ago this week, but if you’re under the age of 35 you’ve probably never heard of Liquid Television. I take that back — if you’re under the age of 35 AND you weren’t interested in things like animation back then you’ve probably never heard of this show.

Liquid Television was an anthology half-hour animated series that featured several different animated shorts in each episode. Some of these shorts were traditionally animated and others used puppets with some live action thrown in for good measure. Liquid Television was highly experimental and felt very much of its time of the early 1990s.

Now that I think about it, I didn’t care for most of the shorts that aired on Liquid Television. But at the time to get to the good stuff you had to watch a lot of episodes of Dog Boy.

When I say “good stuff” I mean shorts like ones for Beavis and Butt-Head and Aeon Flux.

Beavis and Butt-Head, one of the defining series for a generation that came of age in the 1990s, began “life” on Liquid Television as one of these shorts. I remember seeing “Frog Baseball” for the first time and not quite getting it. Looking at Beavis and Butt-head now it’s so crudely done and so gross and so over-the-top…on the one hand it seemed to be glorifying the stupidity of teens, but on the other hand it was so funny it was hard to not turn away.

After Liquid Television Beavis and Butt-Head was spun-off to its own series that ran for a whopping eight seasons, 222 episodes and a feature film. I remember teachers complaining about students doing the Beavis and Butt-Head laugh in class and for a while it seemed like everyone was replacing their The Simpsons t-shirts with Beavis and Butt-Head ones.

And Aeon Flux. I remember the first time I saw this show about a woman wearing dominatrix gear armed to the teeth in a futuristic setting with a seemingly unlimited supply of ammo (that so perfectly captured the aesthetic of The Matrix but was created nearly a decade before that movie) I was enthralled right from the start of the animated intro of Aeon’s eyelashes catching a fly ala a venus fly trap.

Aeon Flux was so good it made watching Liquid Television worthwhile on its own.

The story of Aeon Flux is hard to describe. It may take place in the future — on some far off planet. Or it may take place on the Earth. Aeon is trying to get something and is willing to shoot as many people who get in her way as it takes to get it. There’s not much dialog so the story is told through action.

Oh, and at one point Aeon is killed and goes to heaven where she gets her feet licked.

Aeon Flux did find some success after Liquid Television with a feature film version of the same name in 2005 that starred Charlize Theron, though honestly I could never bring myself to watch that.

Preacher

Dominic Cooper as the Preacher
Dominic Cooper as the Preacher

The first episode of Preacher on AMC aired last Sunday and it was…interesting. I think. I read the comic book just before I watched the show so I went into it knowing certain things about the Preacher story. But even after having read the comic I wasn’t totally sure on what was going on in the TV show.

Now that I think about it I’m not sure there was a coherent story in the first episode at all.

There’s this preacher named Jesse (Dominic Cooper) who’s having a crisis of identity and a guy named Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) that sure seems to be a vampire and a woman named “Tulip” (Ruth Negga) who’s good at killing people. And all these characters have interesting “moments” from Jesse trying to lead his flock and failing to Tulip preparing for a big fight with two prepubescent helpers and Cassidy battling, what I’m assuming are, vampire hunters at 30,000 feet.

But as to an actual story to hang these interesting scenes off of — there simply wasn’t one here.

Maybe in future episodes there will be. But after having watched the first super-sized episode of Preacher with all it’s weird heightened reality glory — I’d have to say if it doesn’t develop some story quick I’m going to be done with Preacher in a few weeks.

Grade: D+

Movies

The Hateful Eight

Hateful-EightIt took me quite a while to catch up with Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie The Hateful Eight but last week I was finally able to do so. And after watching it, I’m glad I saw it at home and not in the theater, though maybe not for the reason you’d think.

The Hateful Eight follows eight stranded stage coach travelers snowed in by a blizzard at a rest stop in the mountains that’s equal parts classic western with bits of a snowy outpost where you’re never sure just who’s who ala The Thing (1982) and bloody projectile vomiting and something’s in the basement ala The Evil Dead (1981) thrown in for good measure. One of the travelers, John Ruth (Kurt Russell doing his best impersonation of John Wayne since Big Trouble in Little China) is transporting Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the leader of a vicious gang who Ruth’s delivering for a $10,000 reward to the authorities. But at the stop he becomes suspicious of the other six travelers also stranded there when things seem amiss and becomes convinced that someone at the stop is part of Domergue’s gang and is there to free her and kill everyone else.

Much of The Hateful Eight follows Ruth along with another bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) trying to figure out just who’s who.

I really enjoyed The Hateful Eight. It’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in quite sometime and yet another great film by Tarantino. It was great to see Kurt Russell back in action in a snowed in outpost like in The Thing, Russell even looks a bit like his character MacReady did in that movie with shaggy hair and a mustache and beard, and the movie kept me guessing right up until the end as to who’s who.

That being said, I’m not sure I would have liked The Hateful Eight as much as I did if I saw it in the theater. It’s nearly three hours in length and like much of Tarantino’s films features characters in rooms talking to one and other without a lot of action. And with how Tarantino shot the film in lots of medium shots without a lot of camera movement meant that it felt like I was watching a stage play.

And while The Hateful Eight does feature some time-jumps that Tarantino’s known for, it doesn’t have that many. So the great bulk of the movie takes place with these eight characters interacting within the rest stop/haberdashery. Which at home being able to pause the movie at certain points so I could get up and stretch my legs and even splitting the movie over two nights made what I would have assumed something that would’ve had me squirming in my seat ready to bolt to the exit by the start of the final credits in the theater to something much more enjoyable.

Grade: A

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1982: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan premiers
  • 1985: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock opens in theaters
  • 1990: Total Recall premiers
  • 1991: The TV series Liquid Television debuts on MTV 25 years ago
  • 1996: The last episode of Space: Above and Beyond airs 20 years ago