Saturday, June 20, 2015

Dope (USA, 2015)



Nine Things About the Movie Dope.




1. This is a unique film. It's intelligent, funny, and socially relevant. It's hard to describe in a way that really captures the essence (or brilliance) of the film.

2. It's about a high school senior named Malcolm, and his best friends Diggy and Jib, living in a tough neighborhood in LA. They are all hopeless geeks. When Malcolm gets invited to a drug dealer's birthday party, he gets accidentally thrown into a world he knows nothing about.

3. On the surface, this is a "comedy of errors" movie - no matter what Malcolm does, his situation gets worse. Honestly, the plot is not very realistic. But the plot is not the point. Underneath the comedy and satire, there are some very serious statements being made about race, self-identity, sexuality, and social expectations.

4. The movie is a crazy mashup of cultures - black, white, academic, thug, and musical; it could have ended up being just a messy train wreck that made no sense whatsoever. But writer-director Rick Famuyiwa manages to keep a consistent thread running through it that keeps it together. It also helps that the young stars are very charismatic and believable.

5. While the setting is the low-income, low education level of black ghettos, some of the humor is surprisingly refreshing and intelligent, and will go over the heads of some audience members.

6. The ending of the film could be seen as a little preachy, but it works. They basically summarized the lessons of the film, for those people who couldn't figure it out for themselves.

7. This is the first film I've seen that treated the darknet and bitcoin in a basically realistic way.

8. This is cutting edge popular culture - in 20 years, a lot of kids probably won't understand half the things they're talking about in this movie.

9.  This is a special film that both celebrates, satirizes, and examines contemporary society. Smart and stinging, it doesn't confronts serious issues, but also doesn't make them so sacred that it kills discussion. And trust me, you will want to discuss this film.

Saturday, June 13, 2015

Jurassic World (USA, 2015)

Nine Things About the Film Jurassic World


1. This is what I call a “recipe” movie. It blindly follows a predictable and overused formula without even trying to hide what it’s doing, or attempting to spice things up. This is a blatant cash-grab, capitalizing on bored summer kids and the tendency for parents to want to show their children things that they liked growing up. The fact that the movie was written and directed by a guy (who nobody has heard of) that has only made one film before this (which nobody has heard of), just makes my point.

2. Let’s jump back in time to 1993: Jurassic Park is about an island that was turned into a cloned dinosaur theme park by a millionaire. The millionaire wants to make sure everything is safe, so he gets a couple of experts to look around. The millionaire’s grandkids are there; one of them knows a lot about dinosaurs and talks too much. There’s a subplot about an employee that wants to take dinosaur embryos for a corporation. The dinosaurs are smarter than the humans realize, and they escape. The kids are stranded in the park, and the dinosaur expert has to go rescue them. There’s a pack of velociraptors that chase them, get into a building, and have a fight with a T-Rex. The T-Rex roars at the end.

Now come back to today (if you are really worried about spoilers, skip to #4): Jurassic World is about an island that was turned into a cloned dinosaur theme park by a millionaire. The operations manager wants to make sure everything is safe, so she gets a dinosaur expert to look around. The operation manager’s nephews are there; one of them knows a lot about dinosaurs and talks too much. There’s a subplot about an employee that wants to take dinosaurs for the military. The dinosaurs are smarter than the humans realize, and they escape. The kids are stranded in the park, and the dinosaur expert has to go rescue them. There’s a pack of velociraptors that chase them, get into a building, and have a fight with a T-Rex/velociraptor hybrid. The T-Rex joins the fight. The T-Rex roars at the end.

3. As if just repeating the plot of Jurassic Park isn’t enough, when the movie isn’t sure what to do, they actually go to the original Jurassic Park. Literally. Luckily, the young teenagers know how to fix an abandoned 1992 Jeep, so they can drive a car from the original movie around the island.

4. There are a few differences between the movies. In the original, they were just cloning dinosaurs. In this one, they are creating new ones, hybrids that have never actually existed. This is useful for the filmmakers, since they had no intention of following science, logic, or reality anyway.

5. In the first movie, the soaring theme music reaches its peak when the kids see real live dinosaurs on the horizon. In this movie, the same soaring theme music reaches its peak when the kids enter a Hilton hotel and look out the balcony to see the rides on the horizon.

6. Chris Pratt is actually a good actor. But in this movie, he has the emotional range of a dinosaur egg. Seriously, the computerized velociraptors show more feeling than Pratt does. It seems like Pratt is only in the park (and in the movie) because he’s getting paid.

7. There are cheap, meaningless scenes where characters struggle with romance and divorce that don’t have anything to do with anything. I think they were supposed to be there for character development, but they were clearly added in just because the film’s recipe said “add character development”.

8. Not only is the climax unoriginal, it’s actually stupid. It breaks all the rules it set up for itself previously in the film. It makes no sense. I actually, physically, facepalmed myself.

9. There are a few clever and funny moments in the movie. And it’s kind of a game to catch all the references to the first movie hidden throughout this one. But bad cooks can ruin good recipes, and that’s what happened here.

However, it doesn’t matter. There are plenty of people that will like this movie just fine. After all, it has all the necessary ingredients - even if they’re stale.

Saturday, June 6, 2015

The Nightmare (USA, 2015)

Nine Things About the Movie "The Nightmare"


DISCLAIMER:
 It was hard to write these "Nine Things". I've had sleep paralysis more than once, and my experiences fit right into this movie. It's naturally going to bias my thoughts on the topic, no matter how hard I try to separate them.

So it goes.

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Nine Things About the Movie "The Nightmare"

1. I'm not sure if you can call documentaries "scary", but this is the scariest documentary I have ever seen.

2.  It was directed by Rodney Ascher. He's the guy that made "Room 237", the documentary about conspiracy theories behind "The Shining".  I wasn't so impressed with "Room 237", but it was perfect practice for this movie, which also consists of interviews with people who have strange ideas. This movie has people talk about their experiences with a phenomenon usually known as "sleep paralysis", or "night terrors". Then the movie recreates those experiences.

3.  This movie is a great illustration of what sleep paralysis is and what it feels like. You get a good sense of the common universal themes behind the phenomenon, as well as the individual differences.

4.  For people that do have sleep paralysis, this movie should probably come with a trigger warning. Seriously.

5.   The movie sometimes brings up a scientific explanation for what's going on, but that's not really the point. The point of this movie is not to convince people what sleep paralysis actually is. There are no interviews with scientists or spiritual leaders, just regular people. The point of the movie is simply to make the viewer understand what it's like to be in one of these insane episodes.

6.  Ascher does this clever thing where he shows "behind-the-scene" glimpses of the film set sometimes, to remind the viewer that it's all fake - and yet it's all happening.

7. A fascinating segment of the film ties night terrors to horror movies, and suggests that they may come from the same place in the human psyche... and maybe even create a feedback loop.

8. The people interviewed in the film all have their own ideas of what sleep paralysis is, and they all have their own reasons for it. No matter what they think is the cause - biological, psychological, demonic, Jungian, alien abductions, a disease, or something else - you can understand why these people come to the conclusions they do.

9. This is a strange movie. Then again, this is a strange topic. Sleep paralysis is not talked about very much, but it is a very real and psychologically traumatic part of many peoples' lives. And in order to properly capture such an extreme phenomenon, you've got to be willing to go there. This movie is willing to go there.