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 appreciate its ingenuity and ambition, the overall execution, delivery, and continuity could not be overlooked. For as much as I 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, some artistry I was missing made this movie so likable by those who review movies for a living. I couldn’t help but remove myself from 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 of the Netflix distribution line must be the 
J.C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year, All Is Lost) Triple Frontier, a movie you can decide after watching or reading this review whether you like it or not. This is not a review that will talk about the merits and faults of Netflix (by one sentence, the 2019 stand is that Netflix is unique with its shows, but I wish it would stay away from movies). Still, Triple Frontier deserved its viewing on a big screen theater, where it could have flourished. I’ve seen over 1500 movies in a movie theatre at the time of this post. I’ve seen 1500 other movies for the first time on my television screen as well. For each movie 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 viewed. 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.
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 until I 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.
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. At least not yet. Sure, he plays the recognizable Poe Dameron in the latest Star Wars trilogy (episodes VII, VIII, IX), but a respectable actor must be more than that. And Isaac is in the actor circles but isn’t 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, who knows how much longer his career will continue? If this is Kingsley’s final role, it’s 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 might not otherwise be interested in a Van Gogh biopic. 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. Nothing 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 ever. 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.