As I’m not the biggest fan of director Alexander Payne (About Schmidt, Election, and even less of one of Paul Giamatti (Saving Mr. Banks, Straight Outta Compton), I was lukewarm, at best, about seeing The Holders, a reunion of the director/actor duo that combined for 2004’s Sideways, a beloved critic and audience favorite, but a film I suffered through for 20 minutes before deciding that it was not for me. Sideways was a movie I was sure I would not enjoy, but I attempted it anyway because of the hype. I was miserable. After watching the trailer for The Holdovers, I anticipated a similar type of dread. However, I was willing to give this one a chance after hearing from critics and audiences that this film, while heartfelt and poignant, still maintained some edge.
Category Archives: Paul Giamatti
San Andreas (2015)
Not being a guy who is really into the disaster film genre anymore (I turned off movies like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 before I was even a third of the way in), I was more than tentative to give San Andreas a chance. It’s a genre that once interested me in my younger days. I enjoyed movies like Independence Day, Deep Impact, Cloverfield while loving Titanic (my favorite movie of 1997), The Impossible (my favorite movie of 1992), World War Z (my second favorite movie of 2013), I Am Legend (my second favorite movie of 2007), War of the Worlds, The Perfect Storm and, shamefully, Armageddon.
Man on the Moon (1999)
Though we primarily know him for his slapstick comedy (The Cable Guy, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Ace Venture: Pet Detective), Jim Carrey has proved on numerous occasions that he can do very well what many other people in his genre cannot do. He can give riveting and believable performances in both light-hearted and heavy dramas. He’s done it with The Truman Show (where he was spectacular and deserving of an Oscar nomination) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He does it with 1999’s Man on the Moon, which, with all due respect to The Truman Show, is his finest performance as an actor in any genre. Carrey’s biopic of Andy Kaufman is a movie I’ve had on my watchlist to see for years, but one that I never felt “in the mood” for. It’s not that I expected to be disappointed by it (with just a 63% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I knew this movie would be hit or miss for me).
Love & Mercy (2015)
Love & Mercy, the Brian Wilson biopic that shows two time periods of The Beach Boys’ life’s most recognizable face, is one of the most underrated movies of 2015. Forget whatever you know or think you know about Brian Wilson. For me, that was absolutely nothing. I knew he was a member of The Beach 
Boys, but that was about it. After seeing this movie, I’m not really a fan of The Beach Boys, but I have a new appreciation for the band, especially for Brian Wilson. While the band is known for its carefree car tunes like Surfin USA, I Get Around, and California Girls, not all were as peachy as I thought. I’ve always considered The Beach Boys one of those bands that didn’t have a lot of substance in their songs. Not being a Mr. Happy Go Lucky type guy and having been to the beaches of California only a couple of times, I couldn’t relate to their music like I could a Tom Petty or Bruce Springsteen. Their songs, to me, were just that. Peachy. While I will not go out and buy their entire anthology, I will listen to some of their songs, which I might not have in the past. Initially, I had no intention of seeing this movie. I thought it was a documentary at first. But I’m glad I decided to see it. Every fan of the band and everyone who enjoys a good biopic should go out and see this movie.
Straight Outta Compton (2015)
Straight outta Compton and straight into the Oscar buzz. It’s early, and I guess this movie is forgotten about come Halloween time (just like most of the great films released in the first eight or nine months of each year are). Still, for right now, this movie is hot with audiences (over $100 million grossed after eight days) and critics (89% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) as just about any other movie of the year. As I will explain in my review below, Straight Outta Compton didn’t do anything (besides the music itself) that was amazing on its own, but it did do just about everything well. I wouldn’t call it the surprise hit of the year as many other movies flew much further under the radar (Ex Machina and The Gift are the two that come to mind for me). Still, it was perhaps a movie that had the potential to be very good or very bad depending on the acting, which part of the story would be told, and, most importantly, the movie’s direction. I’ll talk more about F. Gary Gray (The Negotiator, The Italian Job) later in the review, but, long story short, he nailed it. Straight Outta Compton was his most challenging work to date and his most impressive and, while I think it’s an extreme long shot based on the history of the Academy and its voting, his name could still be swirling around as a dark horse for Best Director come December.
Continue reading Straight Outta Compton (2015)