#2,111: Project Almanac

Locke - ★★★☆☆
Maybe I like real time and confined space gimmicks in movies because they present a challenge? I always want to see someone pull off a great magic trick. On the continuum, this is perhaps not as much fun as Buried, but a lot better than Phone Booth. Good concept, good actor, but a story with an ending slightly more inevitable than surprising.

Cheap Thrills - ★★★½☆
This feels like the real American remake of Funny Games, not Haneke's. If only they'd actually hit rewind when it came up in the dialogue. I was sure hoping.

Zero Charisma - ★★★☆☆
I heard of this one from Nerdist employees who found it strange that the company would buy and distribute a movie that sets their boss in its crosshairs. I watched with a little bit of voyeuristic curiosity because of the nebbishy main character's similarity to an ex-roommate.

This is a movie about a loser. It seems harsh to put it that way, but then you see him lose in every encounter. Even when he turns out to have been right about his rival, or about his mom, it doesn't keep him from losing. Who's side is the movie on? Who's side is the audience supposed to be on? And why? (Show your work for full credit.)

Project Almanac - ★★☆☆☆
At first I thought that someone named their time travel movie after a Back to the Future reference, but after I saw it I did some hunting around online to see if this was in some way intended as a spiritual sequel to Project X. (As far as I could tell, it is not.)

Although it's presented with a thick veneer of fun, this is a pretty flabby movie. A lot of the scenes in the incredibly long 'time travel is great' section cover the same ground without addressing the parts I was curious about. I can only assume that there are just piles of dead Davids stacked up beyond the edge of the shaky frame.

As a found footage movie, all the mistakes are made: wildly unmotivated filming, "wait who's holding the camera?" moments, privileged shots where there's clearly no camera in the room. I like found footage as a technique, but it didn't help anyone here.

Hopefully whoever goes back to undo this mess will start their script right about where this one ends.

#2,107: Blackhat

Selma - ★★★½☆
So many biographies in the Oscar field this year. I think this one might have been ripe for more acting nods than it got, but I bet it's not Best Picture. Also, I have no idea how someone decides what the best acting or movie is in order to award a prize. This movie as a whole is like a long slow zoom in from a panorama of the civil rights movement to King himself.

I thought this movie stood in contrast to American Sniper or Imitation Game in its appropriate use of captions to summarize how the characters would turn out.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 - ★★½☆☆
This is the first 3D movie I've seen in ages. Lots of fun flying, but not as good a movie as the first one. Very happy that it wasn't a standard 'lost powers' plot, but it felt pretty paint-by-numbers, marking time until it's a trilogy. The supporting cast of dragon riders is completely wasted.

There was a Q&A afterward where it was fun to see Djimon Hounsou politely express his surprise that his character turned out to be white.

Lone Survivor - ★★½☆☆
It's weird, the different versions of realism. Like American Sniper, in which gunshot victims generally fall down and require medical attention, this is a story based on a biographical book and an actual soldier. Except these characters withstand action hero levels of punishment and press on, perhaps more damaged mentally than physically. Neither one is exactly crammed full of plot, but this one felt more visceral, and therefore a little harder to watch.

Also, I wondered while watching this if every SEAL class does identical training exercises, or if the makers of Sniper just watched this movie for research. The scenes seemed remarkably alike.

Blackhat - ½☆☆☆☆
This movie hit me like a wind turbine hits a bird. There's just nothing in nature to prepare you for how boring this movie is. It's like a 70s movie that squeezes every bit of action into the trailer because they know you're not going to go see a movie that advertises hours of embarrassing dialogue.

Luckily, it's not just boring, it's also really long, featuring multiple trips into a deep visualization of the information superhighway and a completely nonsensical gun battle. I don't remember it now, but there was probably some kind of long car chase too.

Also interesting: apparently this is not this cinematographer's first movie. That probably means that the weird shutter stuff is on purpose, as is that scene in the emergency trailer that looks like it was shot on a phone. I laughed out loud when the first fight scene began and we kicked into Intense Shaky Cam mode.

No wonder the ticket taker had such concern in her eyes for us...

#2,103: American Sniper

Wingsuit Warrior - ★½☆☆☆  
You should probably just watch 45 minutes of wingsuit videos on YouTube instead.

Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings - ★★☆☆☆  
You should probably just watch 45 minutes of Jake Shimabukuro performing on YouTube instead. Good soundtrack.

Jimmy Carr: Laughing and Joking - ★★★☆☆  
Compared to a lot of the comedy I see, it's kind of refreshing to see someone saying horrible things on purpose. There were more than a few lines that I hear a lot, which I would have assumed were just hacky street jokes, but for all I know they were his in the first place.  

American Sniper - ★★★☆☆
The first half of this (at least) was like the opposite of movie magic to me. I just couldn't stop seeing it as footage of actors walking around on different sets. I've read the reviews that said this should have dealt more with a) the enemy sniper or b) the wife, but I thought that a) they actually did a nice job showing Mustafa's parallels without beating us over the head, and b) Miller couldn't carry the scenes she had; more would have been terrible.

One one hand, I think it was too soon to make this movie. Too close to the life of the actual man. I never thought it was going to be a particularly subtle or nuanced portrait, but the movie still lays it on pretty thick with what an unimpeachably wonderful person he was. And then it introduces a half dozen characters to verbally confirm his wonderfulness.

On the other, The Hurt Locker is six years old and better in every way. The biography here gets in the way of the movie.

Media Monday: iOS Games

This week, let's look at a bunch of games. All played on the iPhone and iPad. 

Star Wars Commander - ★★★☆☆
A Star Wars take on Clash of Clans. I made it to Level 6 before it lost me. The biggest takeaway I have from this game is how not worth playing it feels. And, since I've stopped playing, I've racked up way more points (medals) than I would have by working at it, since waves of randos throw themselves on my well defended but mostly abandoned base.

INGRESS - ★★★★☆
Google does a great job of hitting the facets of freemium games that make this addictive, but it's basically capture the flag with flags that dissolve even if nobody's actively destroying them, as a front for a big data mining operation. I don't regret playing, but there's no end, and I know I'm not going to get as involved as the people hacking the system to do brilliant and impossible things, so level 8 is going to have to be my victory condition.

Defuse Dbomb - ★★☆☆☆
I figured there had to be a game in the app store about bomb disposal, and after trying a bunch of demos, this was the one that seemed the most similar to fun. I thought there would be lockpicking games too, but there's not much.

Smash Hit - ★★★★☆
This is a game about breaking glass things with marbles. Or ball bearings, maybe? Anyway, it's pretty satisfying to smash things, and because I didn't buy the IAP unlocks, I got good enough to play the whole game in single sittings. 

God of Light - ★★★★★ (iTunes)
A really well done puzzle game. I got 3 stars-or-whatever on every level and found all the fireflies. The core game is about reflecting beams of light around, but new mechanics and units are added regularly to keep things interesting. Really nice.

Space is Key 1 and 2 - ★★★☆☆
A port of a simple-as-can-be flash platformer, in which you make your square jump over the rectangles at the appropriate times. I didn't think much of it at first, but I played through all 100 levels (between the game and it's included sequel), and then the next night I did it again.

Forbidden Island - ★★★★☆ (iTunes)
This is a port of a board game to iOS, but that makes it a video game, and I did win several rounds of this game. I beat it playing two characters on my own, and in two player games where we played one and two characters apiece, on various difficulties. Have yet to beat the toughest modes or buy the additional island setups. A solid adaptation.

80 Days - ★★★★☆
I was genuinely surprised to find that I successfully navigated around the globe in only 77 days. I thought all was lost! This seems like a huge game, with so many more possible cities to visit, routes to take, or even things to do in the cities I've already been through. The sheer difficulty of seeing everything makes this seem like the kind of game that would drive me crazy, and might even somehow slow me down from playing more in the future. I have a lot of exploring to do here..

#2,099: Birdman

The Godfather - ★★★★★
So great. So much detail. So much that appears to be window dressing that, to the careful or repeat viewer is actually expertly laid groundwork for later use. Even the little things utterly incidental to the plot are perfect, like some of most realistic children I've seen on film. The construction of a consistent world is amazing, and ten times moreso given the conditions under which Coppola was making it.

I think this movie's famous scenes and lines do it a disservice. It's too easy to fall into the lazy pattern of knowing how it all turns out and watching for the famous bits, instead of taking in the suspense that should grip the first-time viewer or the depth available to the returning viewer.

Please Subscribe - ★★☆☆☆
I think these filmmakers made the wrong thing. This isn't a movie, it's a YouTube playlist. A dozen or so profiles of YouTubers that have nothing in common except that each subject was asked the same list of questions. No themes are explored or connections made. The best of the characters get just enough time to hint at larger, more interesting stories that go unexplained, and the worst soak up the screen time that could have been used to tell them.

The One I Love - ★★★½☆
I think I liked that everyone's lying to each other. If anything, I wish they'd been more direct and immediate in going behind each other's backs, but I was happy they strayed from the completely safe into something that challenged the premise. The characters promise to keep their behavior dialed down to a 5, proceed at an 8, and I would have liked it even more at a 10. But maybe that would have tipped us from a kind of light dramatic horror to horror-comedy? I've begun to suspect that every movie is a horror movie.

Birdman - ★★½☆☆
I like a real time or continuous shot gimmick in a movie. Or, at least I think I do. Part of what makes it impressive is the sense that a feat is being undertaken by the performers to make it happen, but this is so openly jammed full of tricks that I'm not entirely sure what the point of it is. Sometimes I think filmmakers might not always be using their powers for good...

I'm in favor of making a weird movie, but I think it might be bad form to include scenes expounding on why you can't criticize a weird movie.

The floating camera, the view of what's going on in Rigand's head vs. reality (which I did like), the repetitive sequencing of scenes, the tendency of people and things to appear and disappear, an occasional flying sequence, it all adds up to one impressionistic, dreamlike couple of hours. But, that doesn't mean it's much fun.