47 Ronin (USA, 2013)

Nine Things About the Movie 47 Ronin

1. This Keanu Reeves fantasy action movie was misnamed. Instead of “47 Ronin”, it should have been called “47 Things Wrong With This Movie”.

2. Spoiler alert: The biggest problem with the movie is that it's a trick. While it’s supposed to be about 47 renegade warriors on a mission of vengeance, they only appear in like the last 10 minutes.

3. To be fair, it’s not complete crap. It’s visually stylish and has great special effects. But… that’s about it.

4. The 47 Ronin actually did exist in real life. But I don’t think they fought witch dragons or magical swordsmen.

5. This big-budget movie was entrusted to a brand new director, and he is clearly out of his depth. This movie is inconsistent in every way possible. The pacing is terrible. And while it’s interesting visually, the style seems to compete with itself, like two different movies were being made.

6. The whole movie feels like it’s on fast forward. It rushes through the plot, so that you don’t have time to learn or care about the characters. Then it suddenly slows down for some stupid love story or discussion about honor.

7. For a movie about rage, vengeance, and doomed love, there is surprisingly little emotion in the film. It’s fairly cold and one-dimensional. It’s also not all that violent.

8. Sometimes the characters speak Japanese. Sometimes they speak English with a Japanese accent. Sometimes they speak English with a British accent. Keanu Reeves just sounds like Keanu Reeves.

9. The movie was supposed to have been released Christmas 2012. But they kept pushing it back to Christmas 2013 so they could re-do parts of it. That's always a bad sign, and the results are right on the screen. It’s a nice try, but it ends up collapsing under its own weight.

The Wolf of Wall Street (USA, 2013)

Nine Things About the Movie The Wolf of Wall Street

1. This is a raunchy, foul-mouthed tale of American greed based on the memoirs of Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker convicted of market manipulation.

2. I think this movie contains more drugs, sex, and swearing than all the other movies I saw this year put together. Of course it’s gratuitous – this guy’s whole lifestyle was gratuitous. So it works.

3. This movie is also an acidly funny satire on Wall Street.

4. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Jordan, a money-hungry young man with more ambition than brains.

5. Jordan hires his knucklehead weed dealer friends to start a small semi-legal stockbroker firm. As they get more successful, they get less legal.

6. DiCaprio has always been an excellent actor – but this may be his best performance ever. And Jonah Hill is also great as the douchebag friend.

7. Jordan’s schemes were complicated and hard to understand for us regular folk, but the movie does a good job of dumbing it down – mostly by telling us that all we need to know is that he’s doing really illegal things.

8. The scene where Jordan overdoses on Quaaludes is a minor masterpiece of physical comedy and is one of the single best scenes of the year. I didn’t know DiCaprio had it in him.

9. The movie is three hours long, so, like the stock market, this movie is an investment of your time. But it’s worth it.

American Hustle (USA, 2013)

Nine Things About the Movie American Hustle

1. This is a masterful film of American ambition woven into a gorgeous tapestry of 1970’s style, fashion and music.

2. It is about ego, honor, self-improvement, and the necessity to re-invent oneself in order to make it in this dog-eat-dog world.

3. The story centers on Christian Bale, who plays a petty con artist named Irving. The movie starts off by detailing Irving’s criminal career and his reluctant involvement with federal law enforcement.

4. Irving is also having problems at home, which leads him to fall for his partner in crime. While Irving wants to keep his professional and personal lives separate, they inevitably end up on a collision course with each other, and Irving ends up playing for much higher stakes than he ever wanted to.

5. For all the sleaziness of the story and characters, the movie has no nudity or blood. This is storytelling magic that doesn’t rely on sex or violence to keep you interested.

6. This means that people who need sex and violence in their movies will likely be kind of bored.

7. Everything in the movie, from the fashion, to the hairstyles, to the story, to the actor’s performances, are slightly exaggerated, just a little bit larger than life. Not enough to turn into a caricature, but just enough to make everything seem to vibrate. The fact that the actors can actually pull this all off is amazing – the acting is uniformly brilliant, and there are no weak links in the cast.

8. The movie takes the old American concept of being a self-made man and cranking it up a notch. The characters are always looking out for themselves, and soon nobody knows who is on what side… or if there are even any sides at all.

9. This is a movie not only about how we fool each other, but how we lie to ourselves, which is the biggest con of all.

Post Tenebras Lux (Mexico, 2012)

Nine Things About the Movie Post Tenebras Lux

1. This is one of the most abstract films I've seen in a long time.

2. The director, Carlos Reygadas, made this film based partly on things that happened to him in his life. 

3. The movie is really not much more than a random collection of scenes from a man's life in the hills of Mexico, mixed with a contemplation of desire and fantasy.

4.  So we have scenes of a girl wandering in a field, a demon moving into a house, a rugby match, a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, a sex spa, and other disconnected events.

5. Reygadas said he wanted to make a movie where you feel life experiences more than understand them rationally. That's an understatement. Not very many scenes in the movie make much sense or seem to have a point.

6. Reygadas is onto something; there are some individual scenes that are very well done, and fascinating to watch. They touch on such deep life truths that you can only stare in awe.

7. But then there are other scenes that are pretty damn boring.

8. The movie is so "artistic" that it almost implodes. It is filmed in a 4:3 aspect ratio, like an old-fashioned TV. There is also a distortion effect around the edges of the screen, like you're looking through a window or something.

9. In the end, the only person that can really relate to what's going on is probably the director himself. And he's not explaining anything.

The Bling Ring (USA, 2013)

Nine Things about The Bling Ring

1. Directed by Sofia Coppola, this is based on a true story that made the news in 2009 (note: This is not the TV movie by the same name).

2. It’s about a group of disaffected, self-absorbed, privileged kids that rob celebrities’ houses while they are gone.

3. This is a stylish, hip black comedy that was better than I expected. As the kids’ capers escalate, so does the visual style of the film.

4. Paris Hilton was robbed by them multiple times in real life, and she makes a cameo in the film. Parts of the movie were filmed in her house - which is beyond description.

5. Emma Watson gives a great performance as a bitchy, drugged-out brat. She has definitely left Hogwarts behind.

6. This movie is basically about rich people robbing richer people, so it’s really hard to feel sorry for anybody.

7. Coppola doesn’t really take a stand on the morality of what happened. She kind of lets the kids give their own interpretation of what they did. This is an interesting choice, but she also loses the opportunity to really dig into the deeper issues, which is kind of disappointing.

8. You still can pull a few lessons from it, such as the eternal truth that kids are always looking for acceptance, no matter how much money their parents make. Cool is relative.

9. In the end, this is a testament to conspicuous consumption, and the idea that no matter how much you have, it’s never enough.

Prisoners (USA, 2013)

Nine Things About the Movie Prisoners

1. This is a dark psychological thriller about two fathers whose girls are kidnapped.

2. It starts off like one of those typical “I must find my daughter!” films. I was afraid it would be boring.

3. It eventually turns out to be closer to “Silence of the Lambs”. It wasn’t even close to being boring.

4. Hugh Jackman plays one of the fathers and Jake Gyllenhaal plays the detective. Each of them follows different leads to find the girls, with different results. The audience is left to decide for themselves which man – if either of them – is doing the right thing.

5. I’ve always been a fan of Gyllenhaal, and he is right on point here. He’s intense, layered, and commands the screen every time he’s on.

6. I’ve always been kind of “meh” about Jackman, but he surprised me with this. He has a fiercely raw emotion that makes you believe the lengths to which he’ll go to find his daughter. This is the best, most mature role I’ve ever seen him in.

7. The movie is almost two-and-a-half hours long, which gives plenty of time for the story and characters to marinate and come together. It repeatedly takes turns that I wasn’t expecting.

8. It is well written, not only as a thriller, but as a psychological examination of two complicated men and the demons who drive them.

9. It was originally rated NC-17 for being extremely violent. It was edited down to get an R-rating, but it’s still disturbing.

Beyond the Hills (Romania, 2012)

Nine Things about the Movie Beyond the Hills

1. This movie is based loosely on an actual incident that occurred at a Romanian Orthodox Catholic monastery in 2005.

2. It’s a quiet but gutsy tragedy of faith vs. doubt, of hanging on to your convictions past all reasonable boundaries.

3. It’s about a young woman named Alina. She goes to visit her secret ex-girlfriend, Voichita, who has joined a small convent of nuns that has partially broken away from the Orthodox Catholic Church. Alina is hoping to reconnect with Voichita, and is severely disappointed that Voichita has dedicated her life to the convent.

4. Alina is slightly mentally ill, and during her stay at the convent, she begins to break down. The nuns and the priest, who have deliberately broken most ties with modern society (they don’t even have electricity) aren’t sure what’s going on.

5. Full of religious superstition, they interpret Alina’s anger, broken heart and subsequent breakdown to possession by Satan.

6. The momentum and sense of foreboding slowly builds, and the last 45 minutes is a pretty distressing account of an attempted exorcism of Alina.

7. The cinematography and sound of the film are very well done – you really feel like you are in a little isolated corner of the world, tucked away from modern life.

8. The movie reminds us that when superstition clashes with science, nobody wins.

9. Hollywood likes to remake European movies, but I don’t think they have the guts to do this one. It would offend too many people.

Elysium (USA, 2013)

Nine Things about the Movie Elysium

1. This is a gorgeous, relevant science fiction film from Neill Blomkamp, the guy that made “District 9”.

2. It’s set in the year 2154, when all the rich people have moved off Earth to an orbiting space station called Elysium. Matt Damon stars as an ex-con car car thief on Earth, living in the slums of LA.

3. Jodie Foster plays the secretary of defense of Elysium. Her main job seems to be to get rid of illegal immigrants that try to force their way into the rich world.

4. After an industrial accident infects Matt Damon with lethal radiation, he joins forces with a group of hackers trying to steal valuable financial information.

5. I always admire actors that aren’t afraid to look like crap. Damon spends most of the movie dying from radiation poisoning and getting beat up. He does well. On the other end of the appearance spectrum, Foster is excellent as the fashionable, icy bitch that really runs Elysium. The way she enunciates words is so startlingly cultured that I had trouble paying attention to anything else when she talked.

6. Blomkamp seems to be obsessed with slums and favelas; this movie has a very similar look and feel to District 9. It could easily be occurring in the same world.

7. The lead role was first offered to a South African rapper named Ninja, but he didn’t want it. Then it was offered to Eminem. But Eminem wanted to film the movie in Detroit, and Hollywood said no. So it was given to Damon.

8. There are definitely a few plot holes, but they don’t take from the overarching story. The pacing and look of the film help distract you from paying too much attention to the problems.

9. It’s not a particularly original film. It’s about rich vs. poor, overpopulation, immigration, and the human condition. But the story is told well, the art design is delicious, and the acting is above average. Like Blomkamp’s first film, this is social commentary disguised as science fiction.

The Purge [USA, 2013]

Nine Things About the Movie The Purge

1. Despite how it is advertised, this is not a horror movie. The sooner you realize this, the better.

2. This is a dark, violent, well-acted, and uncomfortable allegory about the American class system.

3. The movie takes place over a span of 13 hours. Ethan Hawke plays a well-meaning, but rather rigid, father that lives in a very wealthy gated community with his family. They settle into their home for the evening behind their state-of-the-art security system to keep out of The Purge. The Purge is a night where all crime is legal. This is designed to let Americans vent their frustration, anger, and violent impulses, so that the rest of the year everyone can get along better. Anyway, the two kids end up compromising the security of their house, and the family must defend their lives from psycho college students who want things the family has.

3 There are some parts of the movie that, at first, seem dumb or unrealistic. But if you look at those instances as metaphor, the whole movie unlocks and begins to make sense.

4. This movie is less concerned with telling an actual story, and more concerned with examining issues of entitlement, envy, the dangers of using God as a foundation of patriotism, and the deep dehumanization of others (as well as the self) that is required to keep those things going.

5. The home-invasion thriller part of the movie is well-acted and has some surprises.

6. There is a lot of violence in this movie, but not like some people expect. It is not about showing rampant carnage so that the audience can experience their own Purge vicariously. The epic idea of the movie is scaled way down to become an intimate experience. This disappointed a lot of people.

7. This movie is not about the Purge, but about the reactions and consequences to living with such a system as The Purge.

8. It's about the self-deception that the wealthy engage in when they say "Things like that don't happen in our neighborhood". It's about the intrinsic instability that roils under the calm surface of the upper class, and how they really are like piranhas, tearing apart anything they see as prey - even if it is each other.

9. The Purge is a suspenseful and thoughtful morality tale that makes a depressing case about human nature. The more you think about it, the more impressive it is.