Big Short

A training movie for a business school staffed by A-list actors (R. Gosling, S. Carell, C. Bale, M. Tomei) and celebs. Why? There is no human story. Also, the Wall Streeters are shown as social misfits, Xanax and Zoloft babies, etc. If you are on a Wall Street, you are fitting in very well, thank you.

Sisters.

The movie is late about 20 years. In 2015, divorced medical nurse (Amy Poehler) is not a middle class living in a nice suburbia of Atlanta.  A real estate agent (Maya Rudolf) is an office drone, not an accomplished career woman with a Mercedes. Hollywood (see my reviews of Yellow and Gone Girl) still has a strange idea of the lives of ordinary Americans.

Bridge of Spies.

 

Patriotic, feel-good movie by Spielberg. All characters except Col. Rudolf Abel (W. Fisher) wonderfully played by Mark Rylance of the "Wolf Hall" fame and, to a lesser extent, Wolfgang Vogel, are cutout puppets. Shame on you, Br. Coen! Despite a brilliant cast (Tom Hanks, Alan Alda, etc.) they all play formulaic versions of what is expected of them. Especially cheesy is the scene when Amy Ryan, recognizing that her husband--not having an affair, G-d forbid, but wasting his time on a fishery in Ireland--weeps at his prostrate, sleeping and drunk body when he is revealed to be on an important Government mission.

P.S. Spielberg decided that the Cold War somehow moved East Berlin to Siberia. It is shown in deep snow when orchards bloom in New York City. Equally bizarre are the scenes of Abel-Fisher's fake family in the Soviet Embassy. His wife was a concert harpist and definitely would dress in a gown rather than babushkas. East Berlin in 1963 looks like a WWII ruin. Did Spielberg or Coens ever looked at the photos of the DDR? Probably not, otherwise our Ministry of Truth Commissariat (Samantha Power, Vicky Nuland, Cristiana Amanpour, etc.) would make a cheese sauce out of person even with Spielberg's stature.

Ridley Scott, The Martian

The creators, unlike Interstellar and Gravity, carefully avoided illogical twists. All the stretching of technical/physical/biological facts has been performed accurately, without obvious violence done to the plot or elementary logic.

Yet, the author(s) forgot that all movies (or novels, for that matter) is about human conflict. It takes an enormous talent and ingenuity to infuse one-man show with the conflict sufficient to drive complex narrative, such as in the "Life of Pi." A few well-designed jokes as in "Martian" are not enough. While Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain are forever wed to sci-fi, another master actors such as Jeff Daniels, Sean Bean and, especially, Kirsten Wiig are being lost as the screen savers with little characterization. In these stock roles it would work better to cast relatively unknown, aspiring starlets such as McKenzie Davis ("Mindy Park").

P.S. Compare descriptions at http://mars2044.blogspot.com/

Black Mass

Johnny Depp got his acting grove back. Yet, with all his wealth he does not choose more deep roles with top directors preferring stock roles, which he plays excellently but which will not be remembered. Supporting cast is terrific, especially enigmatic Benedict Cumberbatch, playing his university president brother but the movie is just another well-made crime thriller.

Ricky and the Flash

It is easy to dismiss this movie just as a vehicle for Meryl Streep and her daughter.

The movie is subtly subversive with its overthrowing of the stereotypes and could not be made 20 years ago. That is, an indie rocker from California is a Tea Party-style conservative. She is shunned by her gay son. Her former husband, a corporate shill from Indiana masterfully played by Kevin Kline is a liberal and lives in a multiracial family. 

Ricki's lover, a much younger Latino man, is a sensitive and supportive guy. On the contrary, her son's future bride comes from visibly upper middle class, culturally conservative Hispanics disapproving of their future mother-in-law and rock in general. 

Too bad, that the rest is just a vehicle to showcase Meryl's fantastic capabilities. 

Inside Out

Perfect movie. Would be genial if it were not so emotionally detached and scripted.

Game of Thrones II

As an astronomical joke, I describe the world(s) of the Game of Thrones in my "technical" blog.

Seriously, one of the main attractions of the "Games" was its slow, "realistic" pace [GoT]. When the producers ratcheted it up more in line with the tempo of feature-length movies, it became more visually comprehensible but the charm is lost.

Mad Max

Mad Max: The producers thought (probably, correctly judging by 90%+ approval even on rottentomatoes) that scantily clad Charlize Theron and Rose Whiteley jumping around on moving vehicles can exculpate an absence of the plot.

Ex Machina vs. Her

Ex Machina is a retell of Dr. Frankenstein story for a new robotic era. It is stylish and well shot but it endows robot with human motivations and logic. Her is endowed with the strangeness of human-software relationship. Operational system is not so unhuman as to be totally opaque to human understanding, yet significantly different in its behavioral motivation and patterns. Furthermore, the Vicander-Gleeson duo does not stand up to the brilliance and subtlety of the Phoenix-Johansson duo.

P.S. There are also two bloopers in Ex Machina. When the mad billionaire-scientist's villa is out of juice, all doors must open, not shut down because they were reprogrammed that way. Second, the robot girl did not acquire autonomous source of energy to function in a human environment.

Leviathan, by Zviagintsev

A Mexican soap opera with lots of Russian expletives and vodka.

Inherent Vice of Maps to the Stars

Two movies essentially about the same thing: that the rich people are perverted and vapid and their actions wreak havoc with lives of simple people, the "Great Gatsby" for our times. The difference is in perspective--the "Inherent Vice" sees it from the perspective of the ordinary Joe--while the "Maps to the Stars" deals with the trials of the rich people themselves.

Talented P. T. Anderson seems to be physically unable to make a short, i.e. normal-length movie. He even adds a prolonged sex scene between protagonists for no obvious reason. But, helped by T. Pynchon, his dialogue is smart and well organized. PTA's characters are weird but totally believable in their weirdness.

Same thing cannot be said about Cronenberg's "Map to the Stars." Primitive dialogue and stock characters do not support his movie's pretense of sophistication. Even Oscar-bound Julianne Moore and Mia Wasikowska do not save the movie. Furthermore, it is branded as comedy for unspecified reasons. It is as ponderous as a lead block.

Strange Magic of Paddington.

The previous subject--an inability of American critics and public to tolerate any degree of ambivalence--manifests itself in the widely diverging reactions on "Paddington" (98% of approval on rottentomatoes,com) and "The Strange Magic" (20% approval). While Paddington is superficially cute, Magic has ugly and self-destructive male lead and her female lead, the warrior princess, does not transform in the end into anything else. Likewise, is her air-head sister. This is intolerable.

Sniper vs Hurt Locker

I did not bother to watch Sniper and my comment is only an educated guess why Sniper was such a success and Kathryn Bigelow's Hurt Locker was a flop. For the Americans there is intrinsic impossibility to understand moral ambiguity. Here are heroes; and there are enemies. That's what the public wants.

Hurt Locker shows a deep deformation of psyche in course of the war up to complete inability to adapt to civilian life and code of conduct. Poor Kathryn overestimated intelligence of American viewing public and its ability for compassion. What is needed is a perfect gladiator who entrenches in the viewers in their comfortable seat the fundamental righteousness of their cause and worldview.