It took me two watches, some 12 months apart from one another, for me to be able to say emphatically that Alex Garland’s (Ex Machina) Annihilation isn’t a great movie. While I completely appreciate its ingenuity and ambition, the overall execution, delivery, and continuity could not be overlooked. For as much as I completely was in awe of Garland’s 2015 directorial debut Ex Machina, I was even more disappointed with Annihilation, a movie for me that came and went as it felt, broke its own rules, left me bored at times and hoping for more, while knowing it was never going quite to deliver. With a critics’ score of 88%, but an audience score of just 66%, I am comfortable saying that, after watching it twice, maybe there was some artistry that I was missing that made this movie so likable by those who review for a living. I couldn’t help but be taken out of critic mode and, even after taking off that hat, couldn’t get behind Annihilation to come close to recommending it.
Category Archives: Oscar Isaac
Triple Frontier (2019)
One of the early tragedies to the Netflix distribution line has to be the J.C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year, All Is Lost) Triple Frontier, a movie that which you can decide after watching and/or reading this review whether you like it or not. And this is not a review that is going to talk about the merits and faults of Netflix (by one sentence 2019 stand is Netflix is amazing with their shows, but I wish they would stay away from movies…done and done), but rather whether this movie should have been kept from being seen on the big screen…where it was meant to be seen…where it was designed to flourish. I’ve probably seen over 1500 movies in a movie theatre in my life at the time of this post. I’ve probably seen 1500 other movies for the first time on my television screen as well. For each movie that I’ve seen and loved on my television, I can’t help but wonder what the movie must have been like in the atmosphere in which it was designed to be view. I can’t make the same claim the other way around. Sure I’ve said, “Man, I wish I would have saved my cash and watched this at home…or not watched this at all” when I see a terrible movie in the theatre, but that is a different conversation and, hopefully, one I don’t have to have on a different day. Beasts of No Nation was the first of the original Netflix films that draw the public’s interest. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said then that for a movie to be considered for Oscar nominations, the film must have at least a limited theatrical run. I don’t know all of the details about how long a movie needs to be in the theatres, locations, etc., but Beasts of No Nation was a film that had to adhere to those standards as it was thought that it might get some Oscar recognition. This movie ultimately got shut out from nominations this year, but it set a precedent for sure. Netflix has continued to produce some AMAZING television shows as well as movies, its crowning achieving being 2018’s Roma, a movie that not only earned but won multiple Academy Awards, nearly winning Best Picture. It was not my favorite movie by any means, and for each person I met who liked it, I’ve met five who disliked it. I will say that it was a difficult watch at home. Roma was black and white with subtitles and much more difficult to see on my 42″ television than on a massive theatre. Roma was a not-so-great movie for me that suffered even more on the small screen. Triple Frontier was a better-than-average movie that suffered the same fate. I mean, come on. A big-budget heist movie with three of the top leading men out there, and you’re reducing it to a tiny rectangle into the corner of my family room apartment. Convenient. Sure? Worth it? Nope.
Life Itself (2018)
Perhaps the most pleasant surprise of all 2018 movies was Dan Fogelman’s (Danny Collins) little-seen gutwrenching Life Itself. Not to be confused with the Roger Ebert documentary of the same name, this chapter-style movie is best viewed if you know as little about it as possible going in. I read this in the first paragraph of a review site I respect, and it was enough to get me to stop reading the review. I didn’t research anything more about it until I had finished watching the movie and was completely shocked to see that it had just a 13% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes (78% fresh with audiences based on 981 ratings at the time of this review). While the drama was thick and all of the tie-ins between the stories a little too coincidental and convenient to believe that all of the connections truly happened by chance, I was able to suspend that portion of the movie because A) I didn’t see everything coming ahead of time (naively perhaps) and B) because the raw emotions of this film felt so thick and real to me that I couldn’t help but be wrapped in the folds of each character. Continue reading Life Itself (2018)
Operation Finale (2018)
Operation Finale, a film that chronicles the 1961 top-secret raid to capture the notorious Adolf Eichmann, the highest-ranking living Nazi official from World War II, is probably the best movie of 2018 that you’ll never hear about. Under-publicized and just a little north of neutral on Rotten Tomatoes’ aggregate film rating site, Operation Finale was released during a period (late August) when quieter movies don’t do so well at the box office. Plus, this movie doesn’t have an A-List headliner. While it is true that Oscar Isaac (Ex Machina, A Most Violent Year), who, in 2018, is one of our finest working actors, is not quite a household name…yet. Sure he plays the recognizable Poe Dameron in the latest Star Wars trilogy (episodes VII, VIII, IX), but a truly respectable actor has to be more than that. And Isaac is that in the actor circles but isn’t quite well known enough to the public. And while he stars opposite a widely respectable actor in Ben Kingsley (House of Sand and Fog, Gandhi), his elder counterpart’s best years are far behind him. At 74 years of age, who knows how much longer his career will continue. If this is Kingsley’s final role, it’s a heck of a good one.
Continue reading Operation Finale (2018)
At Eternity’s Gate (2018)
Though he was playing a man who was about 25 years younger than his actual age, I could not imagine an actor doing a better job portraying the Dutch Post-impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh than Willem Dafoe (Platoon, The Boondock Saints). It’s a performance that will net Dafoe his third Best Actor nomination (he also has a Best Supporting Nom for 2017’s The Florida Project), and it could be the one that nets him his first Oscar win. While I don’t think it will happen (and I don’t have a particular reason why in this year’s wide-open field), it will be a movie that many people will see who might not otherwise be interested in a biopic on this person. At Eternity’s Gate worked for me. I am often willing to give a biopic a chance unless I find many of the film’s portrayals fictionalized. I don’t think anything upsets me more than a story claiming to be true that turns out to be anything but factual. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case with Julian Schnabel’s (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Lou Reed’s Berlin) stylistic character study of one of the most famous and mystifying artists of all time. Filmed as artistically as Van Gogh lived his life, Schnabel exceeded the confines of a conventional biopic and created something that felt new and refreshing, regardless of the darkness in which Van Gogh lived.