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In some alternate universe where this postmodern filmic collage was released about ten years ago, it’s my favorite film. Now, in 2014, it’s pretty great anyway.
I was supremely hesitant about The Lego Movie before seeing it. Not only is it pure corporate branding, but the trailers were sort-of awful. Of course, it’s hard for me to ignore a 95%+ on Rottentomatoes for any film, so fate intervened and held I was to see the movie.
The film, as it is, starts off well enough, cleverly poking fun at society through its Lego-microcosm by having its lead character, an everyman, take genuine joy in a life he has self-policed to fit with the produced, constructed life social elites want him to have. The initial jokes are pretty obvious, but I’ll run with it, especially when it introduces a character as brilliantly named as President Business in its first minute of existence. I also really liked the directorial duo of Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s first animated film, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, so I’m willing to give them a chance. Continue reading
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Maniac is a difficult film to review. As a remake of a notorious Video Nasty from 1980 of the same name, this film sets out to drag us through the mud and generally make its audience feel not just uncomfortable but nasty. It is a relentlessly, oppressively difficult film to watch, but it also extremely, even uncomfortably, well made. Maniac sets out to do something that favors a pure lurid affect over anything else, and it succeeds entirely at meeting and even possibly exceeding those goals. Many viewers, however, will be so fundamentally turned off by the goal they won’t care.
Director Ti West has become something of a cult sensation in recent years among the horror film-going crowd, beginning with his 2009 genre pastiche The House of the Devil. That film was consummately effective, if less than ethereal or skin-crawling. Nonetheless, it worked, and a film that takes all of its skill and put it out on the screen simply for the purpose of working these days is rare. But with The Innkeepers, West really proves his credentials as a horror filmmaker worth following, emerging out of his shell of repackaging horror to truly creating it.
Update (and edited score) 2018, on the eve of Roma’s release: It’s impossible as ever to ignore Cuaron’s signal audio-visual achievements with Gravity, but I find myself even colder on the film’s ability to connect the dots between charting our outer space, which it does so well, and truly destabilizing our inner space, a task on which it essentially punts entirely.
The Master is many things, but the only safe and sure descriptor I can come up with is “mis-marketed”. Explored pre-release, it was a film about L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. Indeed, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd is a facsimile of L. Ron Hubbard, and one can certainly draw comparisons to the much-maligned religion (some would not agree with calling it that). But Anderson’s film is not only about Dodd or the “cultlike” group he leads. It’s a much more ambitious, confounding affair, highly impersonal, yet enrapturing. Technically it centers around a religious cult, but focusing on this controversial aspect of the film does it a grave disservice. On the plus side, it allows me this one measly paragraph to save myself from not saying anything I feel confident about throughout the review. This comment about the mis-marketing of the film ends the part of the review where I’m relatively sure I agree with what I’m writing – the rest of the film, as I think Anderson wants, is me entering the wild and hoping to come out the other side. 
The Social Network proves one thing clearly: the internet is a dangerous place. Many people are aware of the dangers which afflict people using the internet, but few are aware of the consequences of creating an internet site, most of which derive from the simple fact that many sites, like seemingly everything else in the world, are businesses. And like many businesses, they’re prone to be run by egotistical, asocial madmen in human clothes who desire, above all, to shape society to their own terms when they may have had trouble fitting in to its. Due to this, the internet can lead to great riches as well as a number of far more devastating and de-humanizing effects, and The Social Network, the excellent David Fincher-directed adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires, deals with both sides of the coin in a fascinating, invigorating, and often scary manner. 
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Fundamentally, I like The Raid more than the The Raid 2. The former film was more assured and confident in achieving its stated goals. It was lean, mean, efficient, and it boiled action filmmaking down to its brutal basics while elevating the genre to a ballet of human motion and brutality. It was about construction, form, filmmaking, and camera movement above any conception of character or narrative, and it was entirely aware of this.
One would suspect that all a romance needs to do to succeed is give you two characters who are likable, giving the audience a reason to care about them so that, in the end, the audience’s interest lies in seeing them come together and decide they were meant for each other, or something as gushy as all that. Most romances can’t even accomplish this, and, unfortunately, many of the ones that can aren’t capable of taking those characters and moving us from sympathy for them into empathy. This is what truly moves romance beyond good and into the realm of greatness, and this is what Blue Valentine has in anguished, blood-and-dirt-covered spades. Because of this, the two central characters and the problems they face ache with life-blood, and the movie is a powerful, effective and affecting, if profoundly intense to watch, experience. 
