With his scraggly beard, yellow teeth, foreboding scowl, and deliberate limp, Matthew McConaughey’s (Amistad, A Time to Kill) portrayal of Newt Knight, a poor white farmer who led an extraordinary rebellion during the Civil War, is a far cry from the same man who was pigeonholing his career a decade earlier by playing the same character over and over in hit or miss romantic comedies like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Failure to Launch, The Wedding Planner, Fool’s Gold, and The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past to name a few. McConaughey reinvented himself three or four years ago and re-established himself as a dramatic leading man with the likes of The Lincoln Lawyer, Interstellar, HBO’s True Detective, Killer Joe, Mud, and Dallas Buyer’s Club, for which he won Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role at the 2014 Academy Awards ceremony. While he’s had his misses recently (has anyone even heard of 2016’s The Sea of Trees?), he has continued to have the ability to pick and choose his movies, and, unlike his string of romantic comedies, he continues to branch himself out further and further.
All posts by bryanbuser
The Hunt (2013)
Mads Mikkelsen is most notably known as a villain. Whether you recognize him more as the man opposing James Bond in Casino Royale or as Hannibal Lecter on NBC’s hit show Lecter, he’s adept at playing the bad guy. But, in the most poignant performance of his career and one that earned him praise across the globe, Mikkelsen stars as Lucas, a kind and gentle daycare employee falsely accused of molesting one of his students in the Danish film and Academy Award-nominated foreign language film The Hunt.
I struggle with movies that are subtitled. My philosophy often is if I can view a good film in English or one that is in another language that will force me to spend a couple of hours reading while also trying to pay attention to the visuals on the screen, why wouldn’t I pick the movie in my native language? Unless a film (or one of its leads) is nominated for an Academy Award (Amour, Maria Full of Grace), is recommended by a friend (The Lunchbox), or doesn’t have an English substitute (North Face), I’m probably not going to give it a chance. It’s not because those movies will be bad. Like everyone, I have a job and many other hobbies, and time is limited. However, when a foreign language film does break through, and it is well made, it is a film that I will likely remember for a long time, if not for the rest of my life. This was certainly the case with The Lunchbox, North Face, and The Hunt.
The Shallows (2016)
Congratulations to all those associated with what will be the biggest surprise moneymaking movie of 2016. Jaume Collet-Serra’s (Non-Stop, Run All Night) The Shallows will have used a highly successful marketing campaign (which included showing its terrifying trailers during sporting events and popular primetime television shows) along with positive scores from the critics (75% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) on its way to making, my guess, more than $300 million worldwide by the time everything is said and done. This will make The Shallows the biggest non-superhero, non-G-rated movie to be released in the first half of 2016. Of course, it’s exactly everything you would expect it to be, and that will be perfectly fine for most of its audience. If you want an escape from reality fare, this could be the movie for you. This could be the movie if you want to take your thinking cap off for an hour and a half. If you want a movie that builds upon every scene in its quest to terrify you, this could be the movie for you. Even if you want a film with beautiful cinematography, this could be the movie for you. But if you are looking for something the slightest bit believable or care about the quality of acting in your lead or sub-characters, The Shallows is not your movie.
Daddy’s Home (2015)
With apologies to the extremely funny The Campaign, first-time co-director John Morris and Sean Anders’s (Horrible Bosses 2, Sex Drive) Daddy’s Home is, ironically, Will Ferrell’s (Old School, Step Brothers) best-starring comedy role since 2010’s The Other Guys. It’s not a movie I thought I would particularly like and one that I had serious doubts about as much as 20 minutes in (I hadn’t laughed, but maybe one time), but as the movie progressed, it got funnier and funnier. By its conclusion, it became a somewhat memorable movie I wouldn’t put on the “A-shelf” comedy list but might find itself just a notch below. What made the movie work was the dynamics between Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg (Lone Survivor, The Fighter), who didn’t have the same chemistry they had when they teamed partners in the buddy cop, The Other Guys, but were still pretty close. While Daddy’s Home was 100% entirely predictable, it didn’t make it any less fun, and while Ferrell and Wahlberg weren’t exceptionally fantastic in the scenes where they weren’t together, it more than made up for the scenes where they shared screen time.
Triple 9 (2016)
Suppose you watched season 1 of HBO’s True Detective, and you were as much of a fan of the six-minute single-shot shootout scene that ended episode four (titled Who Goes There) as I was. You might like John Hillcoat’s (The Road, Lawless) underappreciated Triple 9 in that case. Likewise, if you watch Game of Thrones and found the intense battle between the Jon Snow-led wildlings and the white walkers at the end of season five, episode eight (titled Hardhome) as the best single scene in the history of the show, you might just very well like the star-studded Triple 9. If I had trusted my instincts and not those of the critics, I would have been able to appreciate this gem of a popcorn flick on the big screen. Instead, I let the movie pass through the theaters, knowing I would see it eventually at home, but convincing myself that, despite the awesome previous, I would be disappointed by this movie.