Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster is one weird movie. I don’t often do well with movies that I find to be strange. Some movies that have gotten high ratings with the critics are so utterly dreadful that they are virtually unwatchable. The tone is simple, the dialect is weird, and the actions are peculiar, but the overall strangeness of these movies makes the experience a chore. I know some love Wes Anderson, and to each his own. The Lobster feels similar to one of these Anderson movies, but oddly enough, it interested me. While I didn’t understand why a strange movie needed to be made, I found it engaging, and it didn’t feel like I was watching it to say that I watched it. While I wouldn’t say I liked it and would never watch it again, there were parts of it.
Category Archives: Fantasy
Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Captain America: Civil War is perhaps the greatest superhero movie that Christopher Nolan has not directed. My two favorite superhero movies (The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises) belong to him. As of this post, my third favorite is a toss-up between Batman Begins, Iron Man, and Captain America: Civil War. Others (such as The Amazing Spider-Man, Iron Man 2, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, etc.) are up there, but there is clearly a distinction between the top 3 or 4 and all of the others. I hope superhero movies continue to improve, but unfortunately, we get 3 to 4 bad ones for every good one. So when we get a film like Captain America: Civil War, it’s important to take pause, see it, praise it, and encourage more movies like it because we know that poor movies will continue to be made because all of them seem to gross over $100 million easily. And the reason they do is our fault. We continue to see these terrible movies. But that is a different story for a different day.
Midnight Special (2016)
Midnight Special. First, the good. The tone was incredible. It was seductive. It was menacing. It was creepy. It was engaging. It kept you on the edge of your seat. Finally, it had the right director. Jeff Nichols (Mud, Shotgun Stories) is still pretty new to the game. This is just his fourth directorial effort, and, once again, Nichols teams up with Michael Shannon as his leading man (99 Homes, Revolutionary Road) for the first time since the incredible Take Shelter, a movie that was nothing short of a thing of genius. In addition to the amazing Take Shelter, Mud, and Shotgun Stories were both fantastic movies. Midnight Special was supposed to be the next great chapter in the Nichols/Shannon book of greatness. Unfortunately, this was the furthest thing from the truth.
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)
What do you need to know about Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice that you haven’t already been told? This has easily been the most hyped movie of 2016 so far. In fact, there may not be another movie that receives this kind of publicity all year. And rightfully saw. This film pits arguably the most recognizable superheroes in the world against one another for the first time. If you saw a movie in the theater between November 2015 and March 2016, you likely saw a preview of this film. The preview does a great job of not letting us know who the good and bad guys are. When we think we figure it out, we see a trailer portrayed in a completely different light. Marvel is doing the same thing with Iron Man and Captain America for the trailers of Captain America: Civil War (maybe even more effectively than the movie being reviewed today). It is interesting. It’s even more interesting that these two rival companies are releasing these movies so close. You could argue that Marvel could have waited until Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice was released and then learned from any mistakes made while capitalizing on what the Warner Brothers movie did well. However, we have delayed production and would have probably pushed this movie to a release date at the beginning of 2018 as soon as possible.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
In a day and age where it seems like a new superhero movie is getting released every other week, it is hard for an average mainstream moviegoer to know which ones are worth watching, which ones to skip, and in what order you should watch these movies. This is particularly important with the Marvel movies and even more important with The Avenger movies. I have done my best to see The Avengers movies as they’ve been released, but I haven’t always been successful. It certainly has not helped that Marvel characters who aren’t Avengers (like Spider-Man) are starting to appear in movies featuring The Avengers. It’s only a matter of time before all of these other Marvel characters (Ant-Man, Deadpool, etc.) start appearing in each newly released movie. At that time, it might be time to give up. Don’t even get me started about the future when either Marvel or DC buys the other out, and we get characters like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Iron-Man, Thor, Captain America, Flash, Wonder Woman, The Green Lantern, Hulk, etc., all end up in the same movie. It won’t occur for a while, but when this market becomes stale many years from now, there will be too much money sitting on the table not to do it. Of course, the purists will also be upset by those who write the comics (though they most likely already are), but if I’ve learned anything, it’s that money speaks.