Adam McKay’s (The Big Short, Anchorman – The Legend Of Ron Burgundy) Vice almost suffered from a trailer that depicted a movie that looked like a spoof. With The Killers’ hit song Who’s The Man playing in the background and a nearly unrecognizable Christian Bale (Hostiles, American Hustle) almost dancing to the beat in between intermittent lines of him hyping himself up or talking about how he’s going to break all the rules when he becomes Vice President of the United States, McKay’s latest movie plays more like the Will Ferrell/Zach Galifianakis underrated comedy The Campaign that it does a biopic in the realm of Nixon, Lincoln, or Thirteen Days. Its nomination category at this year’s Golden Globe awards was “Comedy.” But while Vice is constantly entertaining and is filmed in a way that, at times, feels like a mockumentary, it is very much a drama, one that you’ll sometimes feel guilty laughing at even during the moments that are meant to be humorous.
Continue reading Vice (2018)
Category Archives: Steve Carell
Welcome to Marwen (2018)
Meh. I hide decent hope for Robert Zemeckis’s (Cast Away, Allied) Welcome to Marwen. Parts of the trailer looked kind of corny, but so did parts of his trailer (as well as the movie) for Forrest Gump, the Oscar winner for Best Picture in 1994. Zemeckis has also achieved success with unique movies like Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her, The Polar Express, and more. Combine that with the special talents possessed by Steve Carell (Beautiful Boy, The Way Way Back), and I thought that there was a legitimate chance that the pair could make this odd story work. I don’t think either can be at fault for this rather mediocre film. Sure, there is a story here, but I think it was probably better told in the 2010 documentary Marwencol. Perhaps Zemeckis got a little cocky and thought he could further dramatize a story and turn it into a Lars and the Real Girl type of movie, a film which, despite my original reservations, I ended up loving and a film that I can’t recommend enough. Comparisons between these two movies were made from the first trailer and continued all the way through the movie. Unfortunately, in the end, Zemeckis and Carell could not achieve the same mastery that Craig Gillespie and Ryan Gosling could eleven years earlier. The problems with Welcome to Marwen were numerous and far exceeded most of the positives brought to the table.
Beautiful Boy (2018)
I love a good story about drug or alcohol addiction. And I love great actors who constantly bring it in their roles. So I had super high expectations for Felix Van Groeningen Beautiful Boy, the true story of the relationship between an 18-year-old son (Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name, Hostiles) battling drugs and his father (Steve Carell – Foxcatcher, Battle of the Sexes) who is willing to do anything to fix the problem, but is unsuccessful in all of his attempts. The trailer definitely made it seem like my type of movie. I should have been wary of the 67% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, but I was encouraged by the 77% audience score. But as I watched this from the lens of a critic, I kept circling back to the same question. If you had these actors in place, you could have done hundreds, even thousands, of different stories about addiction. So why did they pick this story? It wasn’t anything special. It lacked vision. Van Groeningen, as a novice director, was completely in over his head, and he wasted the performance of both of its leads by telling a story of a story that wasn’t unique, was stale in its delivery, and left us feeling unattached to its characters. In a word, Beautiful Boy underwhelmed.
Continue reading Beautiful Boy (2018)
Battle of the Sexes (2017)
2017 will go down as a year of very underwhelming movies. The nine films nominated for Best Picture were, by far, the poorest collection since 2009, when a decision was made that up to 10 movies could be nominated for Best Picture if they got enough votes. My Top 10 list has three of the nine movies for Best Picture (#5 The Shape of Water, #6 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, #10 Get Out). So it’s hard for me to make a case for my Top 3 (Wind River, Hostiles, Life) receiving a Best Picture Nomination. While great, these movies differ from what the Academy is looking for. But Battle of the Sexes (co-directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris) has everything the Academy looks for in a Best Picture nominee. It’s a period piece that looks very much like a period piece. It’s based on a true story and follows that story extremely closely. It has a definite protagonist and a definite antagonist. It has fantastic acting by its leads. It has a strong ensemble cast. It has a little bit of comedy, quite a bit of drama, and quite a bit of unexpected suspense. And its true story changed the course of history. It’s easily the most deserving movie that was not picked by The Academy (most say I, Tonya was the biggest snub), and it’s better and more deserving, in my opinion than all of the selections.
The Big Short (2015)
Completely flying under the radar in an otherwise crowded December release schedule (Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, Concussion, Joy, The Hateful Eight, The Revenant) is Adam McKay’s (Step Brothers, The Other Guys) The Big Short, a movie that is neither short on star power or storytelling. While most will find this movie riveting, it will, unfortunately, hit a little too close to home for many viewers. This movie, while at times challenging to understand, will leave you dumbfounded that what happened actually happened not in some far-off land in a time long ago, but right here in our own backyard just a few years ago. I promise not to explain this movie and then talk about some of the pros and cons. I will do my absolute best not to provide spoilers in this review.
Continue reading The Big Short (2015)