Delayed Reaction: What We Do in the Shadows

The Pitch: Mocumentary about vampires.

I'll admit that I was skeptical about this film. I just didn't believe all the praise I'd heard for it. There's two reasons for this.

1) I'm not a big fan of what I've seen of Flight of the Concords. Jemaine Clement's involvement in this film had me looking at this as an extension of show.

2) Housebound was another New Zealand horror comedy from 2014 with a great deal of praise and I was completely unimpressed by it.

I've heard enough praise for Taika Waititi's other films though and his hiring to direct the new Thor* movie made it so I really had to give the movie a chance. It became an inevitability. And I'm glad it was. This is a very enjoyable movie. The mockumentary style is used perfectly and consistently. It's packed with jokes without getting repetitive. There's even a real story to it. Best of all, it's packed into an efficient <90 minute runtime. I'm not sure where exactly it ranks among Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (a film I adore perhaps too much) and Cabin in the Woods in the best horror comedy rankings, but it belongs in the discussion. I have no complaints about the film. It's an excellent execution of a well thought out premise. And very funny.

*You'll notice that I wrote this before Ragnorok came out. Well before, actually. I could've updated this, I suppose. I really don't like rewriting this long after the fact though. 

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Maze Runner: The Death Cure

Formula: (Allegiant * Maze Runner: The ScorchTrials) / Insurgent

The Maze Runner franchise is in a unique position. It was made is direct response to The Hunger Games as another Young Adult dystopia with a high concept pitch. There were a lot of these movies. Divergent hit bigger initially and got two sequels with massively diminished returns. Most of these movies (The Fifth Wave, The Host, and you could argue Ender's Game and The Giver) failed to catch on and died after a single film. Maze Runner did just well enough to warrant a sequel. The sequel did just well enough on a moderate budget to warrant another sequel. Maze Runner is conveniently the minimum threshold for how successful a YA dystopia needs to be to keep going.

I've seen nearly all of these YA dystopias because I like dystopias and I think it's fun to see the big idea they are built around. Inevitably, they all look the same by the end. Part 1 has some cool idea around it - a deathmatch, a sorting algorithm, or yes, a giant maze. Part 2 may try to retread the original idea. But, by part 3, it's inevitably about taking down the powers that be, normally located in a big tower in the middle of the only big city left. So, forgive me when I say that it's hard for me to tell The Death Cure apart from other 3rd and 4th installments. I'm assuming that anyone reading this has either already seen the first two movies or doesn't care much about the plot, so I won't bother with an extended recap of this film. Basically, Thomas (Dylan O'Brien) and company find out that there's a big city and go to rescue Minho (Ki Hong Lee) there. Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), Brenda (Rosa Salazar), Frypan (Dexter Darden), and Jorge (Giancarlo Esposito) are still with Thomas. Teresa (Kaya Scodelario) is still with Ava Paige (Patricia Clarkson) and Janson (Aidan Gillan), working for WCKD. A familiar face from ealier in the series returns. I won't spoil that moderate surprise, but it is who you are probably thinking of even though it doesn't make much sense.

For a modestly budgeted action movie (~$62 million), I have to say, the action sequences were pretty well done. The opening sequence (one that Dylan O'Brien got injurred shooting, which set the production back nearly a year) is an impressive train heist. The end of the film is complete mayhem and looks the part. It's not a banner example of how to stage action - it still relies way too much on convenient staging and timing and none of the villains can aim for shit - but it's competent and uses its budget well.

Maze Runner wasn't the star vehicle for Dylan O'Brien the way other films were for Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games), Shailene Woodley (Divergent), or even Chloe Grace Moretz (The Fifth Wave), so the series has always relied a lot on a deep ensemble. There's almost too many people. Someone like Nathalie Emmanuel is barely even in this movie, for example. I'm pretty neutral on O'Brien. I would've like more Rosa Salazar and less Kaya Scodelario, although I'm not sure how much of that is performance vs. one actress having a more interesting character than the other. It's always fun to compare a franchise you love with one that you tolerate. I'm not very invested in this series. A lot of the character moments or call-backs that felt unearned to me probably worked for bigger fans the way that the same thing in, say, a Harold and Kumar movie works for me more than non-fans.

Considering what this film is - the January release of the final installment of a franchise that peaked at #30 for the year it was released in the box office, has no bankable stars, and never had too much money thrown at it - it's hard to complain with the result. I could savage it about plot holes and contrivances if I wanted to, but what's the point? It's exactly as good and bad as the first two films and ends the series well. That's enough for me.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Movie Reaction: Hostiles

Formula: The Searchers / (Dancing with Wolves + Unforgiven)

I think I get the appeal of westerns. It's not really the cowboys and Indians that keep people coming back to the genre. It's the open and unexplored country; the seemingly endless frontier. A man can get on a horse, go to a new town, and become a new man. It's the beginning of civilization out there. When I think about it, the appeal of the Western hasn't really gone away. It's just moved to another genre: the zombie apocalypse movie. Think about it. Both genres are about trying to survive a harsh and unforgiving world without the comfort of civilization. In Westerns, they are navigating the perils of gangs of bandits or Native Americans. In Zombie movies, it's, well, zombies that are after them. The overall appeal is the same. These films are about testing your mettle and the triumph of the human spirit (or the collapse of it). Too bad that realization wasn't enough to get me to like Hostiles.

Hostiles takes places in the 1890s. Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale) is a particularly ruthless Army captain, known for his ability to track down Indians. As his last job before retirement, he's tasked with transporting an equally notorious and now freed Indian chief and his family from New Mexico to his homeland in Montana. This chief is responsible for killing several of Blocker's friends over the years. Needless to say, Blocker is not excited about this job. He accepts it because it's the only way he'll earn his pension. During this long journey, Blocker and company find a woman (Rosamund Pike) who's family was recently killed by an even more ruthless Indian tribe. The woman, Rosalie Quaid is in shock. Blocker convinces her to join their convoy until he can get her to safety. The film is episodic. The through line is this journey to Montana. There are many smaller stories though like fighting the Indians who killed Rosalie's family, transporting a murderer played by Ben Foster, and a late run in with some Montana homesteaders. That structure works for the film.

Despite a really spectacular cast, the performances are what I had the most trouble with. Really, it's a great cast. Jesse Plemons and Timothee Chalamet are soldiers under Blocker's command. Wes Studi and Adam Beach are the Indian chief and his son. Bill Camp and Scott Wilson have blink-and-you'll-miss-them roles. There's a number of other actors I'm less familiar with like Rory Cochrane, Jonathan Majors, and Ryan Bingham with significant roles. All this in addition to Oscar winner Christian Bale, Oscar nominee Rosamund Pike, and consistent Oscar snub Ben Foster. By and large, no one is used all that well. It's dispiriting to see Chalamet with such an insignificant role after seeing what he did in Call Me By YourName. Bale gets some good stiff upper lip moments and not much else. Plemons plays his his first remorseful killer in his career, which is nice to see after years of playing cold-blooded monsters like neo-Nazi Todd in Break Bad and Landry "Lance" Clarke in Friday Night Lights. Ben Foster is picked right out of a half dozen other movies I've seen him in (3:10 to Yuma and Hell or High Water come immediately to mind). The person who comes off looking the worst though is Rosamund Pike. She is a terrific actress, however she's asked to do things throughout this film that I'm not sure anyone could pull off. The film begins with the slaughter of her family. It's too early for us to have any attachment to the characters and it's almost comical how only she is able to survive the attack. I'm thinking of one perfectly placed gunshot that has "convenience" written all over it. She then has to be hysterical for the next 30 minutes and plays it BIG. Maybe with an actress who I didn't associate so much with strength and steely resolve, it would've come off as more authentic. As it is, it felt like director Scott Cooper just went with her most exaggerated take for each of those scenes. She eventually levels out and is much better, although I'm not sure I buy the character transformation.

This film hasn't made me that excited to catch up on Scott Coopers other films (Crazy/Heart, Out of the Furnace, Black Mass). Hostiles is more of an amalgam of other westerns than something all its own. Too often is tells rather than shows (Bale has several conversations with characters who are relative strangers to the audience about all the years they've worked together as if I'm supposed to care. I'd rather they let the audience figure out the history from the performances). It captures a decent amount of the beauty of the Western frontier, although a lot of the sets looked like sets on a movie. They didn't feel lived in, although I'll accept that some of that is a choice made to reflect the impermanence of life in the West. The end of the film forces Bale into a decision that doesn't even make any sense: whether he should be on his own or be with Rosamund Pike. There's only one choice that makes any sense. Beyond some of the genre thrills, there wasn't enough in Hostiles for me to enjoy and the thematic elements never hit hard enough to make an impact.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Phoenix

The Pitch: A holocaust survivor reunites with her husband who doesn't recognize her after extensive reconstructive surgery.

The bigger the conceit, the bigger the payoff. That's the basic principle to a lot of movies. And technically, it's a different way to talk about the one big leap I always refer to. By that, I mean, the more a movie has to strain itself to set the story up, the better the payoff better be. If a movie like Before We Go has to contort itself so many ways to get to strangers talking to each other all night, then what Chris Pine and Alice Eve say and how they interact better be very engaging. Or, if Serendipity is going to have all these near misses between Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack, then when they finally meet, it better be spectacular.

Phoenix relies on the same idea. There's a lot of set up. Nelly (Nina Hoss) has to need and get the facial reconstructive surgery that makes her hard to recognize. It needs to be a situation in which she doesn't know if her husband betrayed her to the Nazis. The husband (Ronald Zehrfeld) needs to not recognize her even after getting to know her. Nelly has to be able to find her husband in the first place. The audience has to believe that he would ask a complete "stranger" to commit this fraud. That's a lot. So, it better be building toward something great. I quite like where it all went, so I had no problem with it by the end. While I was watching it though, I had my doubts. It's a little slow and exposition-heavy in the beginning. I want to call it suspenseful, but that would be overstating things. I was always curious where the story was going, although I was never "on edge" about what would happen next. It's a good watch.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Apartment

The Pitch: Everyone falls in love with Shirley MacLaine, but Jack Lemmon does even more.

I didn't realize it before I start it, but I was all but guaranteed to love The Apartment. It's not for any of the obvious reasons you'd think, like Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, or Billy Wilder. No, it's because I love the movie Loser. Loser is by all accounts, a bad movie, or at least a poorly received one. I like it for Amy Heckerling's writing and direction as well as charming performances from Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari. But, most people look at it as a very poor follow up to Clueless that tries to mooch off American Pie's success. To each their own.

Well, Loser is, I now realize, kind of the same movie as The Apartment. There's some differences in the details and critical response, but the films are very similar in structure. So, I like Loser. I like The Apartment. It only makes sense.

Now, unlike Loser, I don't have to convince anyone that The Apartment is a great movie. It won 5 Oscars including Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay. It's widely regarded as one of the 2 or 3 best films of the legendary director (Billy Wilder). I really like how the story turns midway through with MacLaine's suicide attempt. I've always liked Lemmon, but I hadn't seen MacLaine in enough films to really have an opinion about her until now. I guess you'd say I'm "pro-MacLaine" now. I feel if I go on any longer about this film, I'll dip back into Loser discussion, which no one (except me) wants.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend

Del;ayed Reaction: The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Pitch: But really, how the hell did that experiment escalate to where it did?

This film made me think a lot about Compliance. Both films are dramatizations of actual events that I wouldn't find plausible if they hadn't really happened. Because, this story is bonkers. If you are somehow unaware of this experiment, here's the Wikipedia article. In short though, in the 70s some volunteers were arbitrarily named guards and prisoners in a simulated prison setting and things escalated quickly. So quickly that the experiment was shut down 6 days into the planned 14. 

This film has a similar tone to Compliance. Both films are pretty cold. Everything is happening at an arm's length. The filmmakers seem to be aware that the story is already crazy enough, so any attempts to embellish it cinematically would be rejected by the audience. That does lead to the problem of this feeling more like a simulation than a film. I'm not sure what options director Kyle Patrick Alcarez had though. However, the movie still has some great moments. I especially like the recreation of the interviews with the men after the experiment was over, because it got in their heads more than we got in the film while it was all happening.

This is a terrific cast. It's one of those that in a decade or two, you'll wonder how they got so many big names together in a small indie movie. Billy Crudup is already quite established. James Wolk and Gaius Charles are recognizable to some. But, check this list out. Among the guards and prisoners, there's Micheal Angarano (Sky High), Moises Arias (The Kings of Summer, Ender'sGame), Nicolas Braun (The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Sky High), Ki Hong Lee (The Maze Runner, Dong from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), Thomas Mann (Me & Earl & The Dying Girl), Ezra Miller (The Perks of Being a Wallflower, We Need to Talk About Kevin), Logan Miller (The Good Neighbor, A Dog's Purpose), Keir Gilchrist (It Follows, The Good Neighbor), Tye Sheridan (Mud, Joe, The Tree of Life), and Johnny Simmons (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)*, who make for a murders row of young indie movie and supporting role talent. And I almost forgot to mention Olivia Thirlby. She's only 31, but she's been around since United 93 (2006) and Juno (2007), so it's hard to remember how young she still is. No performance blew me away, but they are all pretty good. That's a lot of actors to juggle for a film that's barely 2 hours long.

*As a 2012 release, Perks deserves even more credit for excellent casting.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Call Me By Your Name

Formula: Lady Bird / Carol

Lucca Guadagnino's latest film can be looked at in a lot of ways. It's an LGBT romance. It's a coming of age story. It's about first love. It's about forbidden love. It's a love letter to the Italian countryside. Depending on how exactly you look at the movie there's a lot to love about the film and plenty to be frustrated by.

The film takes place in the early 1980s. Except for some clothes and music, it could be just about any year though. Seventeen year old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) lives in his family's Northern Italy estate. He has to give up his room for a few weeks when his father, a professor (Michael Stuhlbarg), brings in a research assistant for the summer. The assistant this year is a handsome American named Oliver (Armie Hammer). Elio is attracted to Oliver, although it doesn't appear that he's accepted that about himself yet. Oliver is oozing with confidence and hard to read at first. Eventually, they do admit their feelings to one another and have a brief relationship.

I'm pretty sure I'd adore this movie if I was more in love with the Italian countryside. Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom adore the Northern Italy location and shoot it like a heavenly Eden, shielded from the ugliness of the world. If there was a filter called "rose colored glasses", they'd use it for this film. The film has a very relaxed pace, so it can soak the nature and architecture up. Accordingly, the stakes in the film aren't higher than they need to be. Not every story about coming out has to end with the person getting beat up or shunned by everyone he or she knows. Sometimes it can be more of an internal struggle, which is the case with Elio. There wasn't a lot that he was dealing with that I couldn't relate to. I may not know about the fear of coming out, but I do know the fear of opening yourself up to someone you like when you aren't sure if they like you back. I can easily recognize his search for identity. Call Me By Your Name is actually a pretty conservative movie that's hard to dislike. I reminded me of Lady Bird a lot in that way.

It is a pretty idealized movie, and that can be a bit of a problem too. It's almost too easy. I don't think there are any hurt feelings in this movie. Elio's parents always know the perfect thing to say. Every other scene looks like it should be on a postcard. The girl Elio strings along still wants to stay friends. He doesn't just get to say goodbye to Oliver. He gets a dream vacation as a sendoff. He definitely comes from money. Like, old money. This ease didn't ruin the movie for me or anything, but it's probably why I didn't fall harder for it.

A trio of performances carry the movie. Timothée Chalamet is deserving of all the awards attention he's receiving. His non-verbal acting in particular is terrific throughout, although I feel like I'm the only person alive who didn't care for his four minute single-take scene during the credits. My short take on that is that it felt like they were trying too hard to have some "capital A"-Acting. It's good work. I just preferred his less obvious stuff.  Michael Stuhlbarg gets a tour de force scene reminiscent to Michelle Williams in Manchester by the Sea last year. He doesn't do much in the film outside of that scene, but it's a helluva scene. I'm more mixed about Armie Hammer. Beyond the fact that he's a very old 24, he just seems too sturdy. He can't turn his confidence down enough for what some of the scenes require.

I've been going back and fourth on how I feel about this movie. Working for it is the relaxed pace and light plotting. Working against it is that it sidesteps every controversial thing it can. It feels more like a snack than a meal. Maybe a dessert. I think the Sufjan Stevens music ultimately tips the scale in its favor though.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Phantom Thread

Formula: Gone Girl / The Devil Wears Prada

Here on this blog, I have a good-sized imposter complex. My credentials to write about movies are that I write a lot about movies. I haven't formally studied anything. I don't have an eye for the technical elements of a film and I rarely drill down beyond the names that make it on the movie poster. I'm getting better (just look at my early Reactions. Oy vey), but where I'm still the most self-conscious is when I don't "get" a filmmaker. There's a long list of guys (hopefully one day women too) who I bring up a lot because I either don't understand what they do or why they are considered so great. Wes Anderson, Terrence Malick, Quinton Taratino, Yorgos Lanthimos, David Lynch. In all of these cases I haven't figured out if I disagree with the proclamations of greatness or if I'm missing something. Lynch is more of an enigma, Anderson is a stylistic clash, and Lanthimos bewilders me. Normally, I hedge my bets on all of these guys and say things like "I'll need to see that a second time to really form an opinion on it". It's a stall tactic and I admit it.

One guy that isn't a stall tactic for is Paul Thomas Anderson. I really do need to see his movies at least twice. Think of movies like a puzzle you are putting together. Sometimes you already know exactly what the completed puzzle is supposed to look like. Normally you at least know what it's supposed to look like broadly (a sleeping puppy in a basket, a sandy beach, The White Album, etc.). A PTA film is more like putting the puzzle together on the reverse side then flipping it over when it's done or if you were told it's suppose to be a duck and it turns out to be a tree. They don't reveal themselves early enough for once to be enough. That's almost explicitly the idea behind Magnolia. I spent all of Punch-Drunk Love trying to figure out if it should really be called a comedy. There Will Be Blood's cinematography dominated my first viewing of that. I was too busy being transfixed by Joanquin Phoenix and Phillip Seymour Hoffman's performances when I saw The Master to consider anything else. The LA noir mystery had all my focus in Inherent Vice. Only Boogie Nights seemed at all straight-forward and only just barely. Well, now it's happened again with his latest, Phantom Thread: a warped, comedic romance masked as a period drama that I'm going to need to rewatch.

Phantom Thread is set in 1950s England. Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an enormously successfully dressmaker with a rigid and unyielding lifestyle, mostly maintained by his sister, Cyrile (Lesley Manville) taking care of everything for him, including dumping his most recent mistress/muse. On a visit to his country estate (while Cyrile was dumping his latest girlfriend for him), Reynolds meets a waitress named Alma (Vicky Krieps). She falls hard for him, moves into his house, and finds it very difficult to keep his attention. It's hard to describe the rest of the film without giving the wrong impression. Alma proves why she's more worthy of sticking around than all Reynolds' past muses and it goes in some twisted places.

The one thing I wish someone would've told me going in is that it's OK to laugh. This is a funny movie, but the tone makes it seem like you shouldn't be laughing. When Reynolds is being obstinate, you can laugh. When Alma seems to be poking Reynolds just to irritate him, you can laugh. When Cyrile has had enough of Reynolds' shit and lets him know it, you can laugh. Put simply, this a RomCom from the guy who made There Will Be Blood. Or perhaps it's better to call this funny in the way that Punch-Drunk Love is. I was in a theater full of people (myself included) not prepared to find any of the film funny and that hurt how well it played.

The buried, uncomfortable comedy is one of the many PTA trademarks in the film. It also looks gorgeous. I've rarely cared so much about dresses in a movie. The elegance of the clothes and the Woodcock house offer eye candy throughout. Daniel Day-Lewis is very good, although he almost feels like a prominent supporting character. Krieps is the star of the movie. I worry that a lot of her character will be misunderstood. I certainly didn't get it at first. Part of the fun of the movie is seeing how she reveals herself in different ways over time. It's a deceptively layered performance. And, Lesley Manville is just delightful. She has one scene in particular (and you'll know which one when you see it) that is probably the highlight of the film for me.

PTA has a way of coming up with endings that appear to be out of rhythm with the rest of the movie. Frogs falling from the sky isn't something I expected from Magnolia, for example. I still maintain that the final act of There Will Be Blood is skips a phase in Daniel Plainview's development/deterioration. Phantom Thread also has an ending that made me say, "Wait.What?". In this case, I kind of loved it. It rejiggered my understanding of the rest of the movie but not in a twisty way. While I didn't love the movie overall - PTA's thematic choices never hit me quite right - it guaranteed that I'll be seeing it again for the new perspective on things.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: And the Band Played On

The Pitch: But what about the science of AIDS.

Covering the entirety of the story of AIDS throughout the 80s is a herculean task, even just shifting the focus to the research of it. In that respect, And the Band Played On does a commendable job. It attempts to take a more sober perspective on AIDS than, say, The Normal Heart, which is more about the victims. And the Band Plays On looks into the researchers trying to figure out what the disease even is then get the correct information about it to the public. It does this efficiently in two hours. The story has so many phases that the film is very disjointed and the pacing is never quite right. It manages to avoid histrionics and also explain a lot of very technical things in ways that are pretty easy to understand. It's definitely more intended for those who are unaware of the history of AIDS than people who already know all about it. For someone already well researched on it, I imagine the movie will feel like it is missing too much to even be worth it. I know a little, not a lot, and I found it informative to the extent that I bookmarked a bunch of Wikipedia articles as I watched it. For a TV Movie, it's pretty good. Not as good as Cheaters or Something the Lord Made, but good.

I'm a little baffled by the end of the movie though. It ends with a collection of clips of different people, events, and places and doesn't give them much context. That's fine and all, but it starts with a bunch of people who had AIDS before moving to people who, I guess, helped raise awareness but definitely didn't have AIDS. That got confusing. While watching, I was like, "Will Smith doesn't have AIDS. I'm pretty sure Princess Diana didn't...I don't think." I wish they could've edited that in a less confusing way.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend.

Delayed Reaction: The Prestige

The Pitch: Magicians are petty assholes.

Currently, I have three types  of film reactions. There's the Movie Reaction for any new film I see in a theater. I have the Delayed Reaction, for any film I'm seeing for the first time by any other means. Finally, I introduced My Favorite Movies a few months ago (I've only done one for Stranger Than Fiction, but I promise more will come eventually). There's this large group of movies that I've seen before but barely remember that I'm trying to figure out what to do with. So far, I just call them Delayed Reactions and own up to having seen the film before in the body of the reaction. I wonder if I should come up with a new label, like Delayed Revisit. It might explain my perspective more efficiently. Then again, I doubt too many people are tracking my naming conventions that closely.

I mention this because I've seen The Prestige before, and it couldn't've been that long ago. Certainly in the last decade, because I didn't see it in theaters. The funny thing is, despite liking it when I first saw it, I remembered almost nothing about it. Even as I watched it again, very few parts were familiar. Perhaps I blocked it all out because the scene with caged bird trick that Christian Bale ruins which maims an audience member's hands still makes me queasy. It's hard to say.

A few posts ago, I asked if anyone had a better decade than Francis Ford Coppola in the 70s (Godfather I & II, The Conversation, ApocalypseNow). I suggested Spielbergs from Jaws through Temple of Doom, which also included Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.: Extra-Terrestrial. Nolan should be in the discussion as well. After all, 2005-2014 includes the entire Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, The Prestige, and Interstellar. Not all of these are all-time classics (so Coppola still probably wins out), but that's a great run.

The Prestige is pretty terrific. The story is basically "What would Amadeus be like if Salieri actually stood a chance?". The film is nominally rooting for Hugh Jackman as the protagonist or POV character, but by the end, I'm genuinely not sure if there is a correct side to take between him and Bale. I won't argue with the assessment that Jackman and Bale's characters are thinly drawn, but it's partly excused because their obsession to be the best overpowers everything else. Piper Perabo, Scarlett Johansson, and Rebecca Hall all disappear for long stretches of the movie, which is a shame. I love casting David Bowie as Tesla and Michael Caine gets a lot of use.

I'm still deciding if I like the final act or not, when the film moves into outright science fiction. Before the Tesla device, everything is grounded and explained. The Tesla device abandons that and opts for magic (or the magic of unexplained science). I like it as a literal device to show the level of their dedication and obsession, but the way it fundamentally changes the film does bother me.

Regardless, the film looks great, the production design and costuming feels authentic, the performances are strong, and the direction is measured and controlled. Definitely better than The Illusionist.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Gambler

The Pitch: I wonder what it would look like to have Mark Wahlberg play a James Caan role.

The most important disclaimer I can begin this with is to say that not only have I never seen the 1974 The Gambler, I didn't even know that this 2014 film was a remake. That's important because, when I went back to look at some reviews of this film, it was hard to come by a response to the film that didn't begin with a comparison to the James Caan movie. So, like with most adapted or remade films I see, I'm going to respond to this as though it is a completely stand-alone film.

I didn't care for this movie. I gave it a chance 90% for Brie Larson, 5% for Mark Wahlberg, and 5% because there's always a chance that an unassuming movie could be really good. That hope did not pay off. The only way I can describe it is that some movies are too generic to function. You know what I mean? It's when a film is about a specific topic, but it doesn't feel like the screenwriter researched the topic at all. The world of the film doesn't feel like it exists one inch beyond what's the camera shows. That's how I fell about this movie. I think it's best encapsulated by all the basketball in the film. Walhburg is watching a game that is "Wildcats" vs. "State". That makes no sense. That's a mascot vs. a generic school name. At least "Tech" vs. "State" would show the smallest amount of effort. The school for the Wildcats, where Wahlberg works isn't even named. When Wahlberg goes to talk to the basketball player in the practice gym, the banners are for regional championships in badminton and table tennis. The degree that the basketball player who is rigging the game controls everything on the court is video-game level unrealistic. This is a little more in the weeds, but the player also mentions that his coach told him it would be better for his future in the NBA - I'm sorry, they just say 'professional'. Saying "NBA" would be far too committal for this movie - to stay for his senior year. That's not a thing in basketball, not really. Also, the player talks about going pro during what seems like the middle of the season like that's a thing that commonly happens (It's not). All of this is is a fairly minor part of the movie. I point it out because it's emblematic of the film as a whole. No attempt was made to make this fit how the world actually works today. I could just as easily pick at how unbelievable this money loaning underworld is or Wahlberg is as a professor. I don't believe this world at all. 

It's way too much 'tell' and not nearly enough 'show'. Walhberg tells us that Larson is the only writer in his class with potential*, but do we ever get proof of that? Walhberg tells people a lot of times about his gambling addiction, but I never believe it in the moment. Nothing about his performance when he's gambling screams "compulsion". It just seems like he's irresponsible, which makes it really hard to root for him. I'm not sure if I believed Walhberg and Larson as an romantic item or Walhberg as a Hank Moody-esque self-destructive literary genius less.

*Btw, is this the beginning of the semester or most of the way through? And isn't this a 100 level lecture class? Of course no one is actually a gifted writer in that class.

...I just need to stop here. I don't have anything positive to say. This is the most thinly drawn film I've watched in a while. It's lazy in the details and repetitive in the larger story. Beyond Jessica Lange, who uses every trick she has to carve a real performance out of the little bit she's given, none of the characters are interesting enough to root for or even want to follow. The fact that it's actually pretty easy to watch belies all the problems it has. It's almost like this story was written in the 70s then never updated to fit modern times.

Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Rebel Without a Cause

The Pitch: Teens do stupid things.

If you haven't picked up on this by now, I'm filling a lot of holes in my viewing filmography lately, and most of those holes are older films and stars. So, this is my first James Dean movie. There's only three, and I decided to watch the only one that he didn't get an Oscar nomination for. I think my motivation to bump it in the Netflix queue was La La Land-related. That sounds like something I'd do.

James Dean didn't blow me away. He played the role a little too big. Just about everything in this movie was played too big though. Dean's reaction to being called "chicken" is almost comically overblown. Still, it's hard to resist his undeniable charm. Natalie Wood was quite fetching herself too.

I really want to know if knife play and stealing cars for racing purposes was really a thing back then. I assume there's some cases of this, but was it actually a common thing? Every generation does dumb shit, but this seems especially dumb. Or maybe I just don't buy those kids as being that intimidating.

If I'm being honest, I couldn't get into this movie because in the first 10 minutes, one of the supposed protagonists (or at least, a sympathetic character) is in trouble for shooting puppies. Not cool. That torpedoed the rest of the movie for me.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Apocalypse Now

The Pitch: It's time that people know about Vietnam...again.

When it comes to movies, one way you can define influence is being able to watch a movie for the first time and feeling like you've seen it before. Film is a medium that builds off what's been done before. Almost nothing is actually new. Most films are just a new concoction with familiar ingredients. I say this because I'd never seen Apocalypse Now until the other day, but my brain couldn't be convinced of that. Everything about that movie was familiar. I've internalized so many references to the movie that I don't specifically remember any one thing I've seen that references back to it. It's not like watching the Master of None episode "The Thief" then recognizing what it pulled from The Bicycle Thief when I watched that or seeing My Dinner With Andre after "My Dinner with Abed". I'm sure I've seen direct parodies of Apocalypse Now without even realizing it at the time, but it's the collection of smaller beats too that seemed familiar. More than "I love the smell of napalm in the morning".

Speaking of that scene though, I think it's a great capper to an impressive sequence. What made it especially impressive is the mix of the scope of the battle scene, the futility of the attack, and the senseless overkill of doing it essentially for the surfing opportunities.

This is a terrifically-made movie. If I liked it just a little more, I'd be tempted to track down Apocalypse Now Redux, which includes even more footage that didn't make it into the original cut. I liked the film more in moments than for the story as a whole. Martin Sheen impressively holds this together at the center, while supporting performances from Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Albert Hall, and others populate the world nicely. The cinematography is stunning. If only all troubled film productions could result in something this impressive. That would be nice.

While this was better than I expected, I still mostly saw it to give context for when I inevitably seen Heart of Darkness. Apocalypse Now is the best case scenario of the bloated productions the became emblematic of that era. It's still a troubled production and the end result feels pretty scattered. Or maybe I've just had my fill of Vietnam movies already, so this felt like more of the same rather than something unique.

As a side thought, is there any director who has had as solid a decade of work as Francis Ford Coppola in the 1970s? The Godfather 1 and 2, TheConversation, and Apocalypse Now. Maybe Spielberg 1975-1984 (Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Twilight Zone: The Movie, Temple of Doom), but that had a lot of lows.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Top 10 Movies of 2001

I've only been doing these top 10s for a few months. My first Delayed Reaction wasn't until 2013. I didn't start doing Movie Reactions in earnest until 2012. My first year-end list was 2011 and the blog didn't start much earlier than that. It turns out that movies go back a lot further than that. So, I figured this month, I'd start with my earliest eligible year for a top 10: 2001. This also -- probably not coincidentally -- is one of my favorite movie years. This is a year with 2 easy All-Time top 10 movie's of mine and a couple more that are top 50 if not top 25. It gets a big fringier after that, but I'm not sure if any other year is that strong at the top.

What makes 2001 the earliest eligible year? I've seen over 100 movies released that year. As always, that 100 movie cutoff is required for me to bother making a top 10 list. Anything less than that won't do. If more than 10% of the applicable movies make the list, that's a pretty weak superlative, in my opinion. Also, as always, I'll include the list of the 2001 movies that I've seen. So, when you wonder how In the Bedroom didn't make the top 10, you'll be able to figure out that I haven't seen it. I'm defining the movie's year based on BoxOfficeMojo, or, if it wasn't released in U.S. theaters, I'll go by IMDB. I can't think of any movies that would be in dispute because of this, but it's worth noting.

Of course, feel free to tell me how I'm under-appreciating some movie. My aim isn't to make some objectively indisputable list. Rather, it's to express what left an impression on me. Many of these movies I haven't seen in over a decade. I fully accept that some of these deserve another shot. I love rediscovering movies almost as much as discovering new ones.

1st Cut

Time for some cuts. I started with a list of 108 movies. I had to use some Disney Channel original movies to push me over the edge, but they count, dammit. To whittle down the list, I started by pairing each movie up and ranking those pairs. I combined those ranked pairs with another pair and ranked accordingly to give me groups of 4 ranked. I kept combining until they got to ranked groups of 10 from pools of 16. The first cut is from the 6 or so that first got eliminated from each set. I go into this level of detail to point out that not all cuts are created equal. Scary Movie 2 and  The Animal are among the worst movies I've ever seen. Tomcats and From Hell made no impression on me. America's Sweethearts and Black Knight just had to make room for something else. A few of these I probably even like better than some of the second round cuts, but my focus was only on the top 10, not making sure all the cuts were equal.

Along Came a Spider

Crazy/Beautiful

Rock Star

Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius

Saving Silverman

TheOne

Evolution

The MummyReturns

The Score

O

Tomcats

Scary Movie 2

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Dr. Doolittle 2

Planet of the Apes

Black Knight

Driven

From Hell

Head Over Heels

The Animal

Down to Earth

American Outlaws

The Mexican

SpyGame

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

Angel Eyes

America's Sweethearts

Joy Ride

Cats & Dogs

Corky Romano

Don't Say a Word

Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy

Novocaine

Ginger Snaps

Zebra Lounge

ExitWounds

Hounded

Jett Jackson: The Movie

2nd Cut

The second cut gets rid of the last of the Disney Channel movies, although I'll note that Motocrossed does have a special place in my heart. I think most of these cuts explain themselves. There are a couple that I should explain though. I've never been much of a Wes Anderson fan, so that + the 13 years since the one time I saw The Royal Tenenbaums all but guarantees it would be cut. I respect the hell out of the anarchy of Wet Hot American Summer and the brilliance of the cast, but that humor simply doesn't work for me.  Made, The Majestic, and A.I. could've all made it a round further if the pairs broke a different way. And, I associate Jurassic Park III with the day I got my braces put on, so it's amazing it even made it to the second cut.

Not Another Teen Movie

Bridget Jones's Diary

Shallow Hal

3000 Miles to Graceland

Original Sin

Rush Hour2

Summer Catch

Save the Last Dance

Atlantis: The LostEmpire

Motocrossed

K-PAX

The Luck of the Irish

Valentine

Big Fat Liar

Zenon: The Zequel

The Majestic

Monster's Ball

Jurassic Park III

Riding in Cars with Boys

The Fast and the Furious

Made

Enemy at the Gates

Wet Hot American Summer

The Royal Tenenbaums

Lost andDelirious

Swordfish

Sugar & Spice

Say It Isn't So

The Wedding Planner

Antitrust

Blow

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Thirteen Ghosts

The Glass House

Domestic Disturbance

The Others

Two Can Play That Game

Vanilla Sky

SpyKids

Joe Dirt

3rd Cut

At this point, the list has narrowed to the point that you can assume I have some level of affection for all the movies listed. I was surprised to see Mulholland Drive last this long because, thus far, I haven't been that impressed with David Lynch's work. The movie is a big puzzle, which has made it hard to forget, and perhaps, that will be the key to finally figuring him out.

Moulin Rouge!

Behind EnemyLines

Mulholland Drive

Training Day

PearlHarbor

Hardball

Hannibal

American Pie 2

The Princess Diaries

Monsters Inc.

Next 10

That gets it down to 20. I like all of these movies quite a bit. I think they are all 4 star movies on my Netflix. Only one or two were strongly considered for the top ten. To give some context though, the gap between my 4th and 5th rated movies is larger than the gap between 5th and 20th.

Note: These are alphabetized, not ranked. Think of them as the honorable mentions.

Ali - Will Smith's first and arguably best bid for an Oscar. It probably put the idea in Jamie Foxx's head too. It falls for a lot of the standard biopic trappings, like trying to fit too much of Muhammad Ali's life in, but it's a very entertaining mix of biography and boxing.

Amelie - I'll be honest, I've only seen this once and remember it more in images than as a whole. And that poster was ubiquitous while I was in college. If I finally got around to seeing it again, I'm sure my good feelings about it would solidify into a greater appreciation.

Black Hawk Down - First of all, that cast. Terrific, nail-biting, intense direction from Ridley Scott. It's another one that would benefit from me seeing it again. It definitely hits the spot if you're in the mood for a war movie without Nazis.

Donnie Darko - I loved the movie in high school. I've cooled on it significantly since then, especially as I've realized how many of the more enigmatic elements that I thought were profound at the time were actually plot holes or bad writing. That said, I'd be lying if I said Gary Jules' cover of "Mad World" at the end doesn't have an effect on me. Oh, and that's a helluva cast that's only gotten better over the years.

Ghost World - This is a fun, weird little comic adaptation by the director who went on to make Bad Santa. It's got a pre-Lost in Translation Scarlett Johansson and post-American Beauty Thora Birch. Steve Buscemi plays a fine sad-sack. It's not the most hopeful movie in the world, but I'm ok with that.

Heartbreakers - Several of my spots at the top belong to HBO favorites that I caught a half dozen times one summer which burned their way into my memory. This Jennifer Love Hewitt/Sigourney Weaver comedy is certainly one of those. It's a funny movie in a polite chuckle kind of way.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back - The first time Kevin Smith got a real budget, he made a crazy biblical film that was surprisingly well received and made him a director a lot of people wanted to work with. The second time he got a real budget, he invited everyone with a pulse who was interested to make a cameo in this crazy chase movie about two side character who should probably never be the lead characters in a movie. It was a whole lotta fun.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - There's two ways to look at this movie. 1) Christopher Columbus made a slavish adaptation that came out too soon and robbed the series of a thematic throughline and consistent vision. 2) It's an uneven movie that brought together an impressive group of big name actors, assembled arguably the best collection of mostly unknown child actors in history, and set a visual template that has become iconic. I choose to look at it as the latter.

Shrek - Beyond being clever, funny, and efficiently entertaining, this was actually a pretty big deal, when you think about it. This was the first computer animated competitor to really push back on Pixar's dominance and opened up a lot of studios to the idea of competing on that front.

Zoolander - No movie that's quoted as much as this one should be allowed to fall too far down the list.

Top 10

10. Joe Somebody

I have no explanation for this. It's another HBO favorite that I watched countless times. Tim Allen is fine. I sympathized with his character a lot. This was the first time I'd seen Julie Bowen since Happy Gilmore and she's even more charming in this. Hayden Panetierre cemented herself as my favorite child actor of the era by following up Remember the Titans with this. I even enjoy how unapologetically Target spnsored this movie. I'm kind of scared to rewatch it, because it's been at least a decade and I currently have nothing but fond memories of it.

9. A Beautiful Mind

It won Best Picture that year and it's easy to see why. I don't really care if it's all that accurate to the true story. Ron Howard's direction is great, as are the performances by Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly.

8. Serendipity

This is when the movies start getting really near and dear to my heart. This Kate Beckinsale/John Cusack romcom is sloppily high-concept, but it's a high concept I really dig. All the close calls throughout the movie are the kind of thing I literally developed my One Big Leap principle because of. It so earnest about the conceit though, that it doesn't bother me. And who doesn't want to see Beckinsale and Cusack end up together?

7. Legally Blonde

90% of the world's love of Reese Witherspoon comes from this movie. Sure, Election, Cruel Intentions, Pleasantville, and Walk the Line help, but imagine Reese Witherspoon without Elle Woods. Your life just got a lot sadder, right? This movie is emblematic of the post-teen comedy, pre-Apatow style of comedy from the early 2000s -they arent' quite romcoms and aren't quite adult comedy -  that I have, perhaps, an unearned affection for (also see Miss Congeniality, Sweet Home Alabama, or anything else starring Witherspoon or Sandra Bullock).

6. Get Over It

Any movie with Sisqo should be buried and labeled as an artifact of that pop culture moment, never to be seen again. Somehow though, I still love this movie. It's massively dated thanks to people like Sisqo and Vitamin C being prominently featured. The humor is that safe, PG-13, pretends to be raunchy but isn't really style that the turn of the century was lousy with (and I was young enough to still love almost all of them). The cast has a young Kirsten Dunst, Ben Foster, Shane West, Colin Hanks, Zoe Saldana, and Mila Kunis are being bubbly and fun to watch. Martin Short  gets to be weird in a supporting role out of a completely different movie. And, the music for the Midsummer Night's Dream musical is surprisingly catchy.

5. Rat Race

Dumb, dumb movie. Big, entertaining, gung-ho cast. There's nothing sophisticated or subtle about the comedy of this movie, but it's willing to go anywhere and everywhere to get a laugh. It's like someone wrote about 50 sketches for Mad TV then fit them all into a single movie. Somehow it works as a whole.

4. Memento

OK, this is when it gets really serious. A lot of the movies below this I've added all sorts of qualifiers to, because I know that a healthy bit of nostalgia is driving them. That stops here (...well, mostly). Memento announced Christopher Nolan as a director to watch. Many people lament his move away from small indie movies like this. I'm not one of those people, because I think he's just as good with a $100 million budget as $100,000. If you wanted to call this his best movie though, I wouldn't stop you. This is an all-time great script (inventive, clever, layered) that relies on some equally exceptional editing.  You'd think a movie with such a big twist wouldn't hold up with rewatches. That's not the case with Memento. It's a puzzle that even after you know what it looks like, you enjoy putting the pieces together.

3. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

It's absurd that this isn't #1 because no one movie has ever blown me away like this one. Sure, the scope of Titanic was impressive. The Phantom Menace really awoke my understanding of movie fandom (which is why I'll defend it to my dying days). The Fellowship of the Ring was the first, and possibly only (along with Two Towers and Return of the King) time I've ever watched something that felt really epic. I've never felt so small in a theater as when I was introduced to Middle Earth. This must've been how people felt the first time they watched Gone with the Wind or The Ten Commandments back in the day.

2. A Knight's Tale

I've moved way past thinking of this as some HBO guilty pleasure*. It's a stone cold classic in my book. This brazenly anachronistic tale of a servant pretending to be a medieval knight somehow mixes Heath Ledger at peak charm, a 70's rock soundtrack of the most obvious needle drops imaginable, and a potentially preachy story of the haves vs. the have-nots into something that works completely. This is tied with my number #1 for the closest I've ever come to being able to quote an entire movie. That starts with Paul Bettany as Geoffrey Chaucer and his bombastic speeches. I particularly like how the film shows off just enough historical knowledge of Chaucer to revel at how inaccurate their interpretation is. Career best roles for Mark Addy and Alan Tudyk too. Watching this movie is the closest comparison I can find to the feeling of getting to have dessert before dinner.

*Besides, I don't believe in guilty pleasures.

1. Ocean's Eleven

I feel like any time I see a movie that assembles a cast full of alphas who should be leading their own movie instead, they are chasing this high. Steven Soderbergh assembled a bunch of A-listers, got them to agree to smaller roles, and filmed a movie during their down time on a Vegas vacation. I know they treated the movie more seriously than that, but I kind of like the idea of a bunch of pals joining up to make a movie. It's why I never fully dismiss what Adam Sandler's doing with his career. It helps to explain my love of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's movies. It's even why I liked the Miami Heat circa 2010-2014. It helps that the finished movie is as confidently slick as anything you'll see. It's so overflowing with great one-liners, that they're often thrown away at the end of scene or drowned out my the music. The convoluted heist actually holds up under inspection far more than it really needed to. There's a group of movies I love that I describe as "People doing their damn job" movies. These are movies about people who are good at what they do doing that thing well. It's normally reserved for more mundane jobs or straightforward tasks (Denial and Eyein the Sky are good examples). Ocean's Eleven is a "People doing their damn job" movie, only about glamorous thieves. It is one of the few movies I've ever watched twice in a row. I'm not sure how exactly that bakes into my ranking, but it must be a big plus.