Liam Neeson (Schindler’s List, Taken) continues his one great movie, one terrible movie, one great movie, one terrible movie streak with the intense Non-Stop, perhaps the second most exciting airplane movie ever made (and no, I’m not ranking it behind Snakes on a Plane). I think Air Force One set the standard back in 1997, but Non-Stop is precisely that…nonstop. It’ll keep you glued to the screen for its 1 hour 47 minute running time. Is this movie plausible? Absolutely not. Does that deter from the experience? Only if you’ll let it. Are the coincidences totally out of control? Of course, they are. But if you want to be entertained with an action-oriented whodunit, you could do much worse. I wish I had seen this movie on the big screen. So far, 2014 has been terrible for film, but Non-Stop is the best movie of the year’s first half.
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The Internship (2013)
The most overlooked movie of 2013 may have been Shawn Levy’s (Date Night, Night at the Museum) The Internship. The film reunited Vince Vaughn (Dodgeball, Old School) and Owen Wilson (Hall Pass, Midnight in Paris) for the first time since 2005’s box office mega-hit Wedding Crashers. Fans had been asking for the two to reunite for a movie. Many were calling for a Wedding Crashers 2. It was one of those scenarios where no matter what the pair decided to do, it was destined for failure because it would not be able to live up to the hype. In a way, it’s as if The Internship never got its fair chance, and I include putting myself in that lump sum. I remember when I first saw the trailer for the movie. I was utterly disappointed at the end of the trailer when I saw that the film was only PG-13. I was ready for some R-rated comedy between the duo. I wanted it to be as raunchy as Wedding Crashers. Unless the reviews for the movie were incredible, I knew I was unlikely to see the film in the theater, if at all, because of a rating that I deemed unacceptable for a Vaughn/Wilson comedy. However, I did decide to give it a go when it came on HBO, and I’m so glad I did. It’s a comic gem.
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22 Jump Street (2014)
A comedy sequel that is better than the original is rare to find, if not impossible. I’ve had this conversation with some of my friends before. The example that we agreed upon was National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. It’s debatable if this is even really a sequel, though. We couldn’t find another sequel that was even really comparable to the first in terms of hilarity. The Hangover Part II was funny but offered nothing new, and the first The Hangover was hilarious. After watching The Hangover Part III (which I found absolutely terrible), I liked the first two even less. Many great comedies (Old School, Wedding Crashers, Groundhog Day, There’s Something About Mary) certainly made plenty of money to warrant a sequel but went the smart route (at least to me) in not making a movie to make a movie. A couple of franchises did the original proud by being *almost* as funny (the American Pie franchise comes to mind). Then there were other franchises that waited so long to make their sequel and had such high expectations that they were bound to fail (Meet the Fockers wasn’t anywhere close to as funny as Meet the Parents, while Little Fockers was more of an embarrassment than was The Hangover Part III). Likewise, The Naked Gun is an all-time classic, but The Naked Gun 2 1/2 and The Naked Gun 33 1/3 are worth watching but are not nearly as funny). So there wasn’t a massive precedent for 22 Jump Street being as funny or funnier than 21 Jump Street. But, if it wasn’t more humorous than the original, it was darn close and worth the admission price.
Boyhood (2014)
The first movie of 2014 likely to earn a Best Picture Oscar nomination, save for perhaps The Grand Budapest Hotel, is Richard Linklater’s (Before Midnight, Before Sunrise) Boyhood. Boyhood is unlike any movie ever made or likely to be made again anytime soon. It had been quietly filmed for over 12 years and only recently (six months or so before its release) started making noise and getting people talking. Linklater shot scenes for this movie once a year for the last 12 years and let the fictional character of Mason (Ellar Coltrane) literally grow up before our eyes in the span of two and a half hours. This film’s uniqueness and the way it perfectly captures the story of one American boy growing up in the state of Texas during the first 12 years of the 21st century. He responds to both world events, and his life’s predicaments are breathtaking. The story itself is not one that I think would wow anybody if it were shot like an average movie. But the story isn’t the movie. The story is about about Mason and how he ages from a 6-year-old to an 18-year-old.
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What Maisie Knew (2013)
What Maisie Knew was a movie that I accidentally watched twice. I couldn’t remember if I had seen it and was not entirely convinced until I was about 30 minutes in. But since I had already made it that far and I couldn’t remember anything that happened in the movie, I decided to stick it out. Now I remember why I had forgotten it all. It was worth forgetting. It’s not that it’s a bad movie. On the contrary, I would consider it to be a slightly above-average movie. The main problem with it is that it had much more potential than it lived up to, and the story that was trying to be told at the beginning of the movie was very different than the movie that was shown at the end. Continue reading What Maisie Knew (2013)