Movies Watched The Week of 6/14 - 6/20

Welcome back gang.  I managed to get a decent amount in this week, and one of the movies I had to cover at the other site.  Speaking of which I’m almost done with, thank Christ.  But luckily the choices this week weren’t awful.  Some forgettable stuff in there, but all of them interesting in various ways.  So give it a look and open your mind man. 

Lucy (June 14th, 2015)

Director: Luc Besson

Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Min-Sik Choi, and Amr Waked

It’s nice to see Scarlett get the chance to kick some butt in a movie on her own, with the Marvel name brand or some A List boy toys propping the movie up.  But the sad thing is to see it in a movie that doesn’t really work all that much.  It’s got a nice visual style and is fast paced as all hell, never letting up when it hits the pedal.  The pace is part of the problem though. Sure, it makes it easy enough to swallow, but it makes it really hard to connect to the movie at all.  You don’t really know who Lucy is as a person, just that shes a college student who parties.  Real specific characterization.  And then she pretty quickly gets transformed by this magic drug and she just becomes a machine.  No emotions and does everything right and is God essentially. She becomes God and there’s no drama in the movie.  At all.  Forget the silly science and philosophical mumbo jumbo. It’s stupid, sure, but it fits in the world of the movie and the logic is consistent.  But by turning her into this all powerful, magical being that just faces no problems makes the movie inert in face of it’s breakneck pace. If they even powered her down for a chunk of the movie, it could have worked.  But she starts overpowered and just gets more powers. The movie is crippled from the go, but it serves as a decent enough distraction for one viewing.  It’s in one ear and out the other.  Scarlett is fine but doesn’t really have much to pay.  Freeman is there for a paycheck and manages to make the mumbo jumbo he’s only there to spout come out easily enough.  Can’t really recommend it, but I’m not irritated I saw it. 

Rating: 7/10

Fast Company (June 17th, 2015)
Director: David Cronenberg
Starring: William Smith, Nicholas Campbell, Claudia Jennings, and John Saxon

I haven’t seen every David Cronenberg movie but I think it’s safe to say that there is nothing like this in his entire filmography.  He’s a man that doesn’t make awards bait movies (usually), but he’s a man with more on his mind and tries to infuse his movies with heady ideas and themes, usually of the body horror variety.  But there is nothing on this movies brain at all.  All this movie wants is to be a silly, thrilling time with some goofy rednecks driving some fast cars.  Yeah, Cronenberg made a movie in the same vein of Smokey and The Bandit.  This is a straight up grindhouse flick, a B movie straight from an iconic horror auteur just having a little fun.  What’s even crazier is that this came out the same year as his iconic horror movie The Brood.  Now, this isn’t the greatest movie in the genre.  It has a light enough tone and is fun, but it doesn’t have the same exact thrills that other car flicks have.  But you can tell a high class director worked on this because there are some of the shots in the movie are great, some real unique shots of fast cars doing their thing.  I’d suggest this mainly because anyone interested in cinema history or David Cronenberg should take a look at the most out of left field entry in the mans history. 

Rating: 7/10

The Ninth Configuration (June 19th, 2015)
Director: William Peter Blatty
Starring: Stacy Keach, Scott Wilson, Ed Flanders, and Jason Miller

This is a nice little gem, a movie that could have disappeared into the sands of time if genre fans didn’t keep beating the drum for this flick, keeping it alive long enough for it to make it’s way to blu ray, readily available for consumption.  This is a very odd, singular movie.  It’s really hard to classify what this is, since it is a hodgepodge of many different things.  But what it mainly boils down to is a movie about two men debating about faith.  It does it in the guise of a mental health movie, about men dealing with the fallout of Vietnam.  Stacy Keach plays an army therapist who is brought into an experimental mental health facility for members of the armed forces.  While there, he gets hung up on the case of Scott Wilson.  Wilson is an astronaut who was seconds away from launching to the moon when he had a breakdown and Keach wants to know why.  The movie plays as a bit of an oddball comedy until it builds to the crux of the movie, these two men.  There’s a lot more to the movie than that, some really cool surprises and a subtle hint at a less than grounded reality.  The first 3/4’s of the movie is decent enough, a nice little movie.  But by the end, the whole thing is torn asunder and you get a new appreciation for what had come before it.  I won’t say more, but to say that it is a nicely written conversation about faith that takes some dark turns but ends in a hopeful place.  The cast is great, Keach and Wilson in particular knocking it out of the park. They had to carry the flick and they really nailed it.  Some of the comedy doesn’t land and you can see that Blatty isn’t the greatest director in the world.  But it all comes together at the end to make a really good, surprisingly beautiful movie.  The fact that it has a really brutal bar fight scene is just icing on the cake.

Rating: 8.5/10

Stripes (June 20th, 2015)
Director: Ivan Reitman
Starring: Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Warren Oates, and John Candy

It’s kinda surprising that I haven’t seen this movie until now.  It’s got Bill Murray and Harold Ramis, who have been comedy icons of mine for a long time.  And as my movie fandom has been growing, I’ve become very fond of Warren Oates.  And all three of these men are in it as main focuses, so I was kinda destined to dig the movie.  And I did.  It’s not the greatest comedy in the world, but I dig it.  For one, it’s too long and runs out of steam by the end.  The mission to rescue the men is just a dead end essentially, padding this thing out way too much.  Also it isn’t really a movie, mainly a bunch of scenes strung together, which doesn’t help the flow of the thing.  In terms of the bare bones slobs vs snobs narrative in there that was a trademark of the Reitman camp at the time, it doesn’t really work.  That’s due to the fact that Murray is an absolutely repugnant asshole, a selfish scumbag who doesn’t care about anyone and puts those around him in mortal danger constantly.  His action could be generously described as treasonous and Oates is totally in the right for hating on the smug prick.  So the slobs really don’t get the work they should for them to be the heroes of the piece.  Ramis comes off much better, despite a nonexistent reason for him to join the army with Murray.  While there, he has an attitude about it but isn’t gonna go AWOL or ruin it for the rest.  Murray is funny enough in the role but hasn’t settled completely into his schtick that he would perfect in Ghostbusters.  He can be a bit too broad at times.  The MVPs are Ramis and Oates.  Won’t even really mention anyone else, since they kinda barely exist, and the women only exist to fuck these silly assholes.  It’s a fun enough ride, with a decent amount of dry spots that haven’t either aged well or just weren’t funny in 1981 to begin with.  It’s a good history lesson to see the beginnings of some comedy legends. But mainly it's funny and that's all that matters.  

Rating: 8/10







Top Movies

1. The Ninth Configuration
2. Stripes
3. Fast Company
4. Lucy

- Tom Lorenzo