#2,096: The Imitation Game

You Only Live Twice - ★★½☆☆
I'm sure I've got a few 007 movies I haven't checked off on my list because I can't really tell them apart. I watched this one because I wanted to see one with Blofeld, who doesn't turn out to spend much time on screen here. What I took away from You Only Live Twice is that it is a ridiculous movie. Large plotless expanses based on shiny things the filmmakers heard about somewhere. Atrocious spying. And a case study in why Bond was originally described as someone who does not use disguises. On the other hand, at least 007 does stuff in this one, so it's still a cut above Goldfinger.

Rampage: Capital Punishment - ★☆☆☆☆
The original was sensationalist, but kind of interesting and had a fun turn at the end. The sequel is smaller in every way. Early on I wondered if the director imagined he was making a real point or was just hiding behind one in order to have some fun with casual violence. Luckily, he included 45 minutes of preachy filler to put an answer to that one.
     
Big Eyes - ★★★☆☆
If not for the famous actors, this would have been made-for-TV. It's basically fine, but you'd never guess Tim Burton was behind it. Come for the scenes of Christoph Waltz as he Christoph Waltzes around with his deliberate diction and slightly unbelievable angry faces, stay for Amy Adams' collection of crazy wigs!
     
The Imitation Game - ★★★½☆
I liked this better than Big Eyes, and had to think about why. It's probably less authentic to its source material, but it certainly has grander ambitions, with the intertwined time periods. It might just be that I prefer espionage to paintings of sad children. (Although, this movie -does- have sad children...) I understand that folks are upset with what this movie gets wrong about Turing's life, and the 'present day' bits do feel like they're lacking something, but I guess I got by on this one by enjoying the abstraction of code-breaking and problem solving and the doing of secret things. Abstraction, of course, because taken literally, the mechanics of what they're doing don't make a lot of sense.

San Diego!

This Saturday, 5pm, the San Diego Comedy Festival, where I will be telling 8 minutes of jokes!

Also Sunday, mid-day, the San Diego Zoo, where I will be looking at various animals!

This is Rad!

I was an emergency guest this week on the hit podcast THIS IS RAD. I was there to help talk about The Land Before Time, which I have not seen. However, I have seen a lot of other movies, and it probably shows in our conversation. Have a listen, won't you? And then book me on YOUR podcast.

Conversely, If you're visiting because of the show, then hello to you. It seems I was wrong about the Die Hard sandwich board (it was blank) but right about the British billion (it used to be a million millions), and I don't have a theory about photographs of Stanley Kubrick. I am a standup comedian, video editor, occasional animator (which might explain one reference I made on the show), and I thought Guardians of the Galaxy was not at all rad.

Rock-a-Doodle.

#2,093: Witness for the Prosecution

The Last Stand - ★½☆☆☆ 
I watched this because I thought it was Sabotage, which I'd heard was better than people think. But it wasn't. This would be made-for-TV if someone hadn't hoodwinked Arnold into a role.
      
The Ghost Army - ★★½☆☆
I knew these guys existed, so I jumped on this movie as soon as I saw it in the endless netflix scroll. There's interesting stuff in it, but I kind of blundered right into a doc that feels like every WWII doc. The best part is seeing the art the troops made during their service.
     
TINY: A Story About Living Small - ★★½☆☆
This is a fun topic for a movie, even if the movie might not be very good. Everything about the main characters is kind of confusing, which sort of makes sense when the credits come up and you see that they made the movie too. Seeing the range of tiny homes other people have made is neat. I think I might be a little too tall for one of these myself.

Murder by Decree - ★★½☆☆
It was a shrewd move, writing "the best Sherlock Holmes movie ever made" on the poster of this movie, but it is not true today, if it ever was. The opening, which checks off items on a laundry list of Holmes references, felt as forced and silly to me as every direct Lovecraft adaptation that tries to work in every Arkham-related proper noun the writers can think of. The interesting part was seeing Sherlock statted up very differently than we usually see him today – contrast this version, who is just awful at fighting of any kind, with Guy Ritchie's version, a master of hand-to-hand combat. Even if the plot wasn't especially original, the characterizations of this version seem to be their own.

Witness for the Prosecution - ★★★★½
This one's a lot of fun. Of course, because the announcer asked me not to, I won't discuss the ending with you, but just knowing it was an Agatha Christie adaptation meant I was going in with my eyes open extra wide, suspicious and looking for clues.

#2,087: Interstellar

The Kid Brother - ★★★½☆ 
A lot of my viewing experience with silent comedies is with Buster Keaton, so I was not expecting the sheer volume of acting Harold Lloyd does, all over this movie. So much acting! I think a lot of movies like this (including other Lloyds, like The Freshman,) show the hero as put-upon, reacting to crazy circumstances and overwhelming odds, but in The Kid Brother, although Lloyd's character is nominally the underdog, he seems incredibly clever. He's always one step ahead and so much of the humor here is about the sleights of perception he pulls on other characters and the audience. Another movie would have made a whole scene out of outsmarting a guard dog, but clever Harold Hickory's got that one in the bag. I also thought it was interesting that there is almost no set dressing in this movie. If an object is in the scene, it's almost certainly a prop, waiting on its mark to support another gag.

The Freshman - ★★★☆☆
In contrast to The Kid Brother, this felt a lot more like what I've come to expect from a silent comedy: the low status hero, the structuring to accommodate what's mostly a series of sketches - where it differs from, say, a Keaton, is that it's pretty wordy for a silent movie. There are stunts and sight gags and physical jokes, but Lloyd doesn't really compete on physicality, so he makes up for it with the sheer volume of jokes of all sorts. The Freshman isn't so jaw-dropping as Sherlock Jr, but it packs in more laugh-out-loud moments.
     
Feast - ★★★★★
Pretty great! Right up there with Partly Cloudy as a lovely, funny, and touching short film.

Big Hero 6 - ★★★☆☆
I didn't like this as much as I expected to. I still liked it, just, less than my twitter feed did. It seemed like there were a lot of setups that didn't bother with payoffs, and the supporting cast was pretty thin. (Does TJ Miller ever play another character?) I thought it was interesting that Hiro makes everyone's supersuits and doesn't give himself the biggest best and baddest.

The Q&A after my screening had one of the writers talking about how a superhero movie is only as good as its villains are bad, but this movie isn't really driven by its villain. The bad guy here is doing his own thing and mostly can't be bothered with or isn't aware of our heroes. I think the writer was correct, but not in the way that he meant.
     
Interstellar - ★★★★★
I bought my IMAX ticket out of something like obligation - the ads looked lousy, but it's Nolan, and shot in IMAX, so I went - and it turned out to really work for me.

The Filmically Perfect podcast used to say that a perfect movie defines the world it inhabits, and then sustains that world, and on those fronts, Interstellar delivers. I think a lot of the folks that walked out unhappy have been upset that the movie did not live up to ideals it never actually promised us. Sure, there's more science explained in here than in Star Wars, but it's no surprise the reviewers sticking it with the 'hard sci-fi' label are tearing it down for not actually being hard sci-fi. I wouldn't even give this a regular 'sci-fi' shelving. Ideally, I'd label this as a movie in the 'weird fiction' genre, but since we're a century too late for that, my second choice would be 'horror-fantasy.' Even though we're in space a lot (and that's a big plus: if you're going to make a movie about being in space, actually be in space!), I think Interstellar has just taken a place among my favorite lovecraftian horror movies. I really liked the sanity-blasting effects of the adventure upon the investigators. We also see man's infinitesimally small place and stature among the stars, and an ending that fits right in with every other movie in this narrow genre.

I can award a few demerits for the first act, where Cooper gets saddled with all those lines they wanted in the trailer, but there's even something a little bit satisfying to me about how easily he finds himself on the ship's crew. An adventure had to begin, otherwise it's not going to be much of a movie. As a technical aside, I thought there were some moments that were just amazing visually, regardless of whether or not that's the IMAX talking. I don't know what the audio problem folks are complaining about actually is, but it was kind of nice to hear the whirring of the projector in some of the film's silent moments.