United States
There is a right way and a wrong way to tell a gangster story. Some of the very best have utilized inventive camera techniques, are fueled by impressive acting talent, and are backed by an engaging, well-written screenplay. Black Mass attempts to be something great; yet, when thinking back to it, it’s likely only the acting that will be remembered.
Among the final moments of The End of the Tour, author David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) pulls his interviewer David Lipsky aside and says: “I don’t think you wanna be me.” Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) objects with the same how-could-you look I’ve returned incriminating but sensible remarks.
To put it bluntly, Ricki and the Flash is a film which feels unfinished. It’s not a poorly made film, everyone involved seems to be at least putting in some effort, it’s just that between the script and overall editing, large chunks of the film seem to be missing and the film feels like it doesn’t deliver a full story. This is quite surprising, as the cast and crew behind the film are quite talented.
In Britain we have only just heard of Amy Schumer. But even having seen none of her work and only the rare interview I knew I would love this lady, and when I spotted Trainwreck on the horizon I got very excited. Then, I backtracked.
Near the conclusion of The Bourne Identity (2002), we find our hero, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), taking refuge in a country farmhouse belonging to Eamon, the ex-boyfriend of Bourne’s hostage/lover/sexy barber Marie (Franke Potente). Bourne’s shadowy employers have dispatched a rival Treadstone assassin – known only as The Professor (Clive Owen) – to eliminate the threat posed by their malfunctioning asset. When Eamon’s son notices the family dog has gone missing, Bourne (preternaturally perceptive, as always) recognizes the portent.
Ted 2 is exactly what you think it is. Seth MacFarlane is an entertainer who infuses all of his work with the same pop-culture heavy and juvenile abundant humour, from his roots in Family Guy to this, his third cinematic effort. The first Ted was a cinematic surprise, over-performing at the box office to become (at the time) the highest grossing R-Rated comedy of all time.
Paper Towns is an adaptation of John Green’s book of the same name. You may already have read or watched his highly successful The Fault In Our Stars, and have come back for more. Why wouldn’t you, he’s John Green?
Although not without empathy, it is hard to argue against the statement that teenagers are some of the most self-centred people alive. I know this from being a particularly self-centred teenager, who at thirteen regularly made statements of self-loathing in order to gouge sympathy and attention from my peers. It was an attention seeking phase that I mercifully grew out of very quickly, but I can at least be forgiven for it for being young and stupid.
Well, this was inevitable. After the huge success of Despicable Me 1 & 2, (both films generating a combined total of over 1.5 billion dollars at the US domestic box office) further expansion of the Despicable Me franchise was bound to happen.
Director Noah Baumbach has become synonymous with “hipster cinema”- which in his case, means character studies of self-obsessed, over-privileged big city dwellers, who he tends to love, even if audience members are more likely to find their company unwelcoming. Yet he is a far more complicated director than that; weirdly, in his most recent movies, he’s been rationing out the abrasive commentary of the hipster community (the raging members of Generation X and the fresh-faced millennials) with something approaching empathetic humanism. His previous film, While We’re Young, was the most empathetic portrayal of hipster culture we are ever likely to see in modern cinema – something even the sharp left turn into trademark Baumbach cynicism in the film’s third act couldn’t overwrite.
Unfortunately, in March of this year, we lost the great documentary film-maker Albert Maysles. With his brother David (who died in 1988), they made some quite important and influential documentaries such as Grey Gardens, Salesman and Gimme Shelter. Their style was using direct cinema; following a subject and shooting a ton of footage without any agenda or plotline planned and creating a documentary in post production.
A great director can elevate a movie that is nothing short of trash cinema into something masterful. Throughout his career, Orson Welles repeatedly chose projects (most notably Touch of Evil) as a challenge to see whether he could make a good movie out of source material that was far closer to the gutter than the stars. A cursory glance at some of the best directors of all time, from Welles and Alfred Hitchc*ck to David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh more recently, reads like a list of directors who enjoy cinema at its silliest, yet are such technically skilled filmmakers with a clear love for genre filmmaking that their movies are only ever laughable in a knowing way.
Entourage is an extremely puzzling film. Keeping in mind that the TV show giving rise to the film is superficial in nature, I don’t mean puzzling in the way you’d describe an Alain Renais film as puzzling. No, it is the reasons and decisions around everything to do with the film that I don’t quite understand.
I’m not now, nor have I ever been, a teenage girl. I’m not even a teenager anymore, and chances are if you’re in the UK and tried to see The Diary of a Teenage Girl, you won’t be either. Thanks, BBFC.
Fantastic Four is a film that people wanted to hate from the start. First, there was the controversial casting of Michael B. Jordan as the traditionally white character Johnny Storm; shortly following this was the discovery that Victor Von Doom was a computer hacker instead of a brilliant inventor; finally, there was the casting itself, which involved younger characters just finishing high school, whereas most adaptations of the story present the Fantastic Four as adults.