Best Picture nominee? Don’t Look Up? Really? This movie had a wide December release. It earned less than one million dollars at the box office and was out of the theaters in under two weeks. Its 56% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes further suggests that this is different from a film one would deem to be selected by the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences as one of its ten best films of 2021. Yet (sigh), here we are. The biggest tragedy might be that this isn’t a bad film but is unfairly getting bashed for its affiliation with the other nine movies up for Best Picture in arguably the worst collection of films for any year.
Category Archives: Jonah Hill
Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018)
What a year for Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line, Her) is set to have. With four movies set for release in 2018, Phoenix is an early favorite for a Best Actor Academy Award for the critically acclaimed and still under-appreciated You Were Never Really Here. Say what you want about that movie if you’ve seen it, but you can’t knock on his amazingly even performance. And the highly anticipated The Sisters Brothers (fall release) is also receiving some early Oscar buzz. As good as he was in You Were Never Really Here and as good as he probably will be in The Sisters Brothers, his performance of the year will be as John Callahan, the quadriplegic cartoon artist in the biopic Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, a movie that many moviegoers will forget because of its title, but not because of its story or the performances of its lead. I admit that I was skeptical of the title and the trailer because you never really know if a Phoenix movie will be great or terrible these days. But I have trust in director Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester). If nothing else, I knew the movie was not going to be f***ing suck (Alex Ovechkin Stanley Cup quote…my team’s average is a combined one win a decade, so I’m going to milk the Washington Capitals championship for a long, long time). And the movie certainly didn’t suck. In fact, people often ask me if I watch movies through the eyes of a fan or of a critic. And more often than not, it goes back and forth, but I feel like I’m always analyzing the movie. However, when a movie is great, the critic’s lens gets taken off, and I’m in it for the ride as much as the persons sitting on my left and right. And that was the case with this movie. I was just really invested in the story and the characters. It reminded me a lot of The End of the Tour, a movie which, admittedly, I enjoyed slightly more than Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. But it had that same sort of vibe with me.
Continue reading Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018)
22 Jump Street (2014)
A comedy sequel that is better than the original is rare to find, if not impossible. I’ve had this conversation with some of my friends before. The example that we agreed upon was National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. It’s debatable if this is even really a sequel, though. We couldn’t find another sequel that was even really comparable to the first in terms of hilarity. The Hangover Part II was funny but offered nothing new, and the first The Hangover was hilarious. After watching The Hangover Part III (which I found absolutely terrible), I liked the first two even less. Many great comedies (Old School, Wedding Crashers, Groundhog Day, There’s Something About Mary) certainly made plenty of money to warrant a sequel but went the smart route (at least to me) in not making a movie to make a movie. A couple of franchises did the original proud by being *almost* as funny (the American Pie franchise comes to mind). Then there were other franchises that waited so long to make their sequel and had such high expectations that they were bound to fail (Meet the Fockers wasn’t anywhere close to as funny as Meet the Parents, while Little Fockers was more of an embarrassment than was The Hangover Part III). Likewise, The Naked Gun is an all-time classic, but The Naked Gun 2 1/2 and The Naked Gun 33 1/3 are worth watching but are not nearly as funny). So there wasn’t a massive precedent for 22 Jump Street being as funny or funnier than 21 Jump Street. But, if it wasn’t more humorous than the original, it was darn close and worth the admission price.
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
The Wolf of Wall Street is the fifth collaboration between Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull, Taxi Driver) and leading Hollywood man Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic, Revolutionary Road). With apologies to Gangs of New York, this is arguably their most daring work together. I would rank this as the third-best movie the duo has combined for. 2010’s Shutter Island is in my all-time top 15. This movie was magnificent in its storytelling and captivating ability to draw you in and keep you hooked for its duration. I think Shutter Island is Scorsese’s best work and, arguably, DiCaprio’s too. I know I am in the minority, and many people laugh at this notion, claiming that Shutter Island doesn’t even come close to cracking Scorsese’s all-time top five. I would rank The Wolf of Wall Street slightly below the departed and slightly above Gangs of New York. In my opinion, The Aviator is the worst of the bunch. Scorcese has eight Best Director Oscar nominations and one win (2006’s The Departed). The Wolf of Wall Street could earn him a ninth nomination, but it will not earn him a second win.
Continue reading The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
21 Jump Street (2012)
The odds that a movie comedy remake of a television drama that, while critically acclaimed, ran for just five full seasons could be a blockbuster movie you think would be rare. I would think the same thing. And when I first saw the preview of Chris Miller’s (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Shrek the Third) 21 Jump Street, my first thought was why. After finishing the preview, I thought this would be a disaster. I was wrong. While I hadn’t heard a single person say this movie was bad, it still sat next to my DVD player for over two weeks after its Netflix envelope arrived. Channing Tatum (Stop Loss, Public Enemies) and Jonah Hill (Moneyball, Superbad) are decent actors. I’m certainly not going to go out of my way to watch a movie because one of these two is the star of it. As a duo, I thought they wouldn’t work. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed this movie.