Delayed Reaction: When a Man Loves a Woman

The Pitch: A couple tries to work through the wife's alcoholism.

How I Came Into It: I really am in that part of my Club 50 project where the movies that are left are either ones I've specifically avoided or I know absolutely nothing about. This is the latter.

Why I Saw It: (Club 50) Meg Ryan is at times very good in this. I don't know how often she's made awards plays like this, but I wouldn't mind discovering a couple more. My primary exposure to Andy Garcia is always going to be the Ocean's movies and it's very hard for me to separate him from Terry Benedict. He does well here too though, once I get past that. What most pleased me though was that the daughters are played by Tina Majorino (Veronica Mars) and Mae Whitman (Parenthood), and Philip Seymour Hoffman shows up too (in a role so small that even he couldn't steal the show with it).

Why I Wish I Hadn't: It goes on too long, first an foremost. There's too long between beats so the story never gains any momentum. So much of the conflict stems from the characters not always acting like people. If the characters would talk like real people then half the conflict, especially in the third act would go away.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

May Movie Preview

That's what I'm talking about!
April wasn't the complete bust I thought it would be. Furious 7 delivered. Unfriended was fun. Ex Machina was better than expected. It was a far cry from overflowing with options though. That's not the case this month. There's one or two movies every week that I'm looking forward to and several of those are the kind that I set my calendar around. This will not be a month for art house cinema I'm sorry to say. It's blockbuster season!

2015

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr  

2014

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

2013

Mar |  Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

5/1

Avengers: Age of Ultron
Working For It: The first Avengers is the third highest grossing movie of all time, destroyed the opening weekend box office record, cemented the Marvel brand as a force to be reckoned with, and, oh yeah, was a pretty damn good movie. The whole cast of the first is back as well as additions like my favorite Olsen (Elizabeth), Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and of course, James Spader as the voice of Voltron, which is not the Voltron I initially assumed it was. Joss Whedon is directing again as well, so that's a big plus.
Working Against It: There's nothing working against this. There's just not. The next movie I'm looking forward to as much as this is Star Wars. Good job Disney!
Interest Level: Highest available

Far from the Madding Crowd [Limited]
Working For It: A Carey Mulligan Victorian period piece about a woman choosing from three suitors is really only on my radar because of that first part: Carey Mulligan. She doesn't do enough movies, so any chance I get to see her is worth considering.
Working Against It: This does not sound like a movie that I'd like much. I haven't seen anything else from the director (notably The Hunt) so I don't know what to expect. This is certain to make a netflix queue of mine in the future. Nothing more.
Interest Level: Much lower than for Avengers

Welcome to Me [Limited]
Working For It: This is a Sundance movie I believe starring Kristen Wiig as a mentally unstable women who wins the lottery and buys her own talk show. It sounds crazy enough to be sneaky good counter programming.
Working Against It: I'm not sure when this would even expand wide enough for me to see it. As a September release, I'd consider it a lot more.
Interest Level: Slight

5/8

Hot Pursuit
Working For It: A road trip buddy cop movie starring Sofia Vergara and Reese Witherspoon as a cop who looks like she belongs in Super Troopers? I mean, sure. Why not? Shockingly, I've seen all of director Anne Fletcher's movies, liking some (The Proposal) more than others (27 Dresses). Wild reminded me how much I love Resse Witherspoon and that's the driving force of my interest in this.
Working Against It: The advertising for this has already started pretty hard. That worries me. It reeks of desperation (anyone remember Unfinished Business a couple months ago?). That could just be me. I'm pretty committed to seeing it already, so it doesn't much matter.
Interest Level: cautious, clear-eyed interest

5/15

Mad Max: Fury Road
Working For It: The trailers make this look like a god-damn masterpiece. With a core cast of Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, and Nicholas Hoult, I know it won't be lacking in performances I like. This is the Mad Max that George Miller always wanted to make, at least in terms of the budget. There's almost no way this meets the high expectations I have for it, but it sure looks like it's going to try.
Working Against It: I haven't seen any of the original movies. I'm basing a lot of excitement on reputation alone. That's dangerous, but as someone who loved The Matrix Reloaded, it would be fine with me if this is nothing but a bunch of explosions and car crashes with no other aim.
Interest Level: A step below Avengers

Pitch Perfect 2
Working For It: Pitch Perfect was a stealth hit in 2012 and its reputation has only gotten better. Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Brittany Snow, and virtually everyone else are back. Even if it's just more of the same that's good enough for me.
Working Against It: This is Elizabeth Banks' feature directorial debut (she was a producer for the first movie). That's a bit of a wild-card, but I don't think there's much to worry about there. No, the only concern should be if the alchemy that made the original work can be reproduced or not.
Interest Level: It's reaching a fever pitch.

I'll See You in My Dreams
Working For It: Blythe Danner plays a woman in her 70's who decides to start dating again. Her along with Martin Starr (Silicon Valley), Sam Elliott (any cowboy, ever), Malin Ackerman (Trophy Wife), June Squibb (Nebraska), and Rhea Perlman (Cheers) make for an interesting cast.
Working Against It: Director Brett Haley's only other feature was The New Year in 2010, which I never saw. This is already going to be a busy weekend. I don't imagine I'll have time to fit in this year's over-50 counter programming play.
Interest Level: My interest is on life support

5/22

Tomorrowland
Working For It: This is a movie based of the land in the Magic Kingdom parks. It's directed by Brad Bird (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, The Incredibles, The Iron Giant). They got George Clooney and Hugh Laurie, among others, on board. I, for one, will have just returned from a trip to Disney World. I don't see a reason to not be excited.
Working Against It: The trailers I've seen still don't really explain what the movie is. Something about an alternate world of retro futurism that needs to be saved. Being based on the land in the Magic Kingdom, there's a concern that the focus is on corporate synergy first, story second. That could be unfounded, but you can't deny that it's there.
Interest Level: Suspiciously high

Poltergeist
Working For It: I'm always up for a good horror movie. Reboots aren't necessarily bad as long as they play for scares more than nostalgia. Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Jared Harris are all interesting actors who I've liked in things before.
Working Against It: Any time a horror movie gets a PG-13 rating, that concerns me. It also concerns me how similar this feels to the Insidious movies which are already three movies in.
Interest Level: Frighteningly low

5/29

Aloha
Working For It: It's a Cameron Crowe movie with Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, John Krasinski, and Bill Murray. I don't even need to know the plot to consider seeing this based on that list. As far as I know, the plot is something about a military officer returning to a Hawaiian base for some publicity thing. That's as much of a spine of a story as Crowe needs.
Working Against It: We're ready to forgive Elizabethtown by now, right? It wasn't even that bad. It was too listless, that's all. Aloha runs the same risk though. Crowe likes gentle pacing in his movies. When it works, it's great. When it doesn't it kind of meanders forever and mercifully ends. Right now, it's hard to tell where this will fall.
Interest Level: Very curious about it

San Andreas
Working For It: It's a big ass disaster movie starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. What more do you need to know? That's either the selling point or the nail in the coffin.
Working Against It: This is director Brad Peyton's first not sequel feature, and Journey 2: The Mysterious Island and Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore don't inspire much confidence. I'm expecting The Day After Tomorrow here, not Independence Day. That's the important piece of this: expectations.
Interest Level: Low, through no fault of its own.

Movie Reaction: Ex Machina

Formula: Under the Skin + A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Why I Saw It: The preview looked interesting and the casting was on point.

Cast: Essentially, it's a three person cast. I love Domhnall Gleeson from About Time. I love Oscar Isaac from Inside Llewyn Davis. I liked Alicia Vikander's work in Anna Karenina, even if I didn't love the movie. I know what all three are capable of and they stepped up to the challenge with this one.

Plot: Caleb (Gleeson) wins a contest that sends him to a remote research facility of billionaire genius Nathan (Isaac). Caleb is assigned to test the A.I. of a robot, built by Nathan called Ava (Vikander). Rather quickly into this, Caleb realizes two things: 1) Nathan isn't telling him everything and 2) Ava is one hot robot. It's a slow burn story and it doesn't try to do too much in the relatively short run time. I can say that it ending up surprising me and also going where I expected at the end. I'm still not sure how that happened.

Elephant in the Room: But is there any dancing? Of course there's a dancing scene! All I can say about it is that it comes out of nowhere, cuts the tension better than just about anything I've seen in a movie, and is pretty glorious. Oscar Isaac's got some moves.

To Sum Things Up:
I liked this movie a lot. It's simple. The story is clear and interesting. The actors are all doing good work. It ends up feeling a little familiar by the end, but it has a couple good gut punches that kept me engaged regardless. It's rather violent at times and it has some pretty stark nudity. I guess that should be noted. Beyond that, I can't think of any big deterrents about the movie. Don't let the slick visuals confuse you. This is a SciFi movie but with a more meticulous, indie movie feel. Kind of like the inverse-Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

The Pitch: The first movie made enough that we need to have a sequel, even if we don't have any ideas for it.

How I Came Into It: I remember seeing the first movie and thinking that it was the closest to pure "by the numbers" superhero movie making it gets. The cast was right. The characters and conflict were there. It felt like it was there out of requirement more than anything. Part of this is unfair hindsight from a Marvel Cinematic Universe present where it's all big picture as opposed to the "one movie at a time" world when it was made.

Why I Saw It: (Club 50) I really do like the Fantastic Four casting for these movies. Chris Evans needed to get this out of his system before becoming Captain America. I'm just not going to protest Jessica Alba no matter how much of a non-character she's given. Michael Chiklis is smart casting. I still don't know where Ioan Gruffudd came from or where he's been since, but I assume it's the same factory that Brandon Routh was developed in. Where Dark Knight was dark, Spider-Man was camp, and X-Men was political, Fantastic Four tried to be the light-hearted franchise. Oh, and I should also mention that supporting actors Kerry Washington, Andre Braugher, and Laurence Fishburne makes for the best TV cast of 2015.

Why I Wish I Hadn't: I'm not sure how, but a movie about the world being destroyed didn't feel like it had any stakes. It takes way too long for anything non-wedding to happen, and when something does happen, it's all an afterthought. The Surfer shows up and spends almost no time as the bad guy. I'm pretty sure this is the closest I've ever come to watching a movie where the antagonist was a Macguffin. Seriously, I have no idea what they were fighting or why Johnny Storm had to take everyone's powers. It's very clear why they opted to reboot this.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Sommersby

The Pitch: It wasn't the pitch at the time, but I'm going to go ahead and sell it as "A Civil War veteran pulls a Seymour Skinner/Don Draper with an aim for redemption".

How I Came Into It: Luckily, I knew nothing about this. I even avoided the Netflix blurb. I didn't know who was in it or what time period it was set in. There's a certain thrill to being about to say "Is that Richard Gere?" when a movie begins.

Why I Saw It: (Club 50) This is a really interesting idea. I've liked it on The Simpsons and Mad Men (or the excellent documentary The Imposter) and it's even more plausible here with the amount of time and the time period. Richard Gere and Jodie Foster are very solid in this and really sell the emotion of the characters.

Why I Wish I Hadn't: I wasn't a huge fan of the angle they chose for this. Sommersby is pretty much a saint. He has no believable darkness left in him and that makes the overall debate kind of boring. As a result, I wasn't nearly as engaged by the trial as I should've been. The movie really does get bonus points for my lack of awareness of it allowing me to be genuinely surprised once or twice.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Mo Money

The Pitch: Think, The Secret to My Success but played by a Wayans brother.

How I Came Into It: Pretty blindly. Here's the thing about Damon Wayans that I've learned from several seasons of My Wife and Kids: he's likable. No matter what he's doing, I'm going to like that he's the one on camera.

Why I Saw It: (Club 50) I was surprised by how direct and simple the movie was. Wayans likes a girl, gets a job to work with her, commits some credit card fraud, cons his way out of it, happy ending. No, it didn't actually make me laugh, but I like Wayans and whichever brother he got to show up (Marlon). Pre-Clueless Stacy Dash is there too. I'd certainly watch it again.

Why I Wish I Hadn't: At the same time, I won't go out of my way to watch it again either. The aim of the movie looks to be comedy, so not laughing at it isn't a good thing. It's a little hard to root for Damon Wayans' character when you really think about it, which only affirms the wiseness of the casting decision.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Out for Justice

The Pitch: Take the Steven Seagal movie formula (and believe me, by his fourth movie there was a formula) and make him a Brooklyn cop.

How I Came Into It: I'm only recently becoming acquainted with Seagal's movies having never had a reason to seek them out before this list. I think there is an importance to seeing these movies to understand what was trending at that time in movies.

Why I Saw It: (Club 50) Seagal has some good moves and he certainly likes to show them off. Part of me can't help but appreciate how transparent his movies are both in why he wants to make them and how he tries to play the characters. And, there is a puppy. No matter what else happens there is a puppy, although I can't think of a more obvious way to try to trick an audience into caring about a character. The dog adds nothing to the plot. It's there only to soften Seagal.

Why I Wish I Hadn't: I'm going about seeing Seagal's movies in the wrong way, watching them out of order and often edited for TV. The latter is especially a problem since the super violence is what he's about. I am a firm believer that the cream always rises though. Even bad cuts of good movies work well enough to make me want to seek them out otherwise. I will not be seeing this again. Seagal is simply too limited as an actor to carry my attention, the story is too heightened to be tenable, and the action scenes did little for me. I still have a number of Seagal movies left on my list, so this is only going to get rougher.

Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Flushed Away

The Pitch: A house rat becomes a sewer rat...and  it's British.

How I Came Into It: There's that awful title. That's most of what I knew. Then there were the immediate Ratatouille comparisons. That wasn't going to work in its favor.

Why I Saw It: (Club 50) I like Aradman Animation in theory. There's not a lot of animation that makes its way to the U.S. from other countries in a big way, so the Dreamworks deal was nice. I can't remember the last movie with a climax revolving around a soccer game. There's some good jokes peppered in and the soundtrack is pretty good (Nice to hear some Dandy Warhols).

Why I Wish I Hadn't: I like Aradman Animation in theory. I don't prefer the movies I've seen of theirs (although I need to see Curse of the Were Rabbit still). I'll admit, I set a higher bar for animation. They have to be VERY good for me to think much more of them than watchable.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Movie Reaction: Unfriended

Past Movie Reactions

Formula: That One Episode of Modern Family * I Know What You Did Last Summer

Why I Saw It: This is in my horror sweet spot. Young, attractive people. Some sort of found footage gimmick. A blender. C'mon. You had me at blender.

Cast: As works best with most found footage movies, I didn't recognize anyone in the cast. Ok, I knew Renee Olstead from back in her Still Standing days but she's nearly unrecognizable (puberty will do that). The gimmick of the movie masks a lot of the acting. Any of the actors could be giving Oscar-worthy performances (they weren't) and it would've been hard to tell through the webcams. I think there's a girl from Teen Wolf (Shelley Hennig) who is the most likely draw here. She's essentially the lead (it's her computer we see) and she's fine throughout. Again, no one is going to impress you.

Plot: Six friends in high school get on a video chat one night. A year ago, that day, a classmate committed suicide after an embarrassing video of her was posted online. They have varying levels of involvement in what went down before her death. There's a mysterious person in the chat who they can't get rid of, signed into the account of the dead classmate. You've seen a horror movie before, so you know the rest. Ghosts. Revenge. Reveals. Death. The story assumes that just because the characters are on screen though that we're supposed to care about them. That's problematic. The movie doesn't give me a reason to care about any of the characters. It also fails to make them awful enough to root for their demise. They're just characters on the screen and I'm not even sure why the spirit of the dead girl [oops...spoiler alert?] is going after more than two or three of them.

Elephant in the Room: 80 minutes on a computer monitor? I'm going to use the word 'gimmick' a lot because that's what the movie is. A different way to look at it is it's an experiment. Whatever word you use for it, the goal was to tell a story through a computer screen. That's a tough thing to do and they do it as well as could be reasonably hoped. The main girl, Blaire (whose computer we're watching) moves between Facebook, video chats, web searches, and all that in a way that seems natural enough and drives the story. The main drawback is that the director relies too heavily on the same tricks. Specifically, the webcams cut out or lag at especially tense moments too much. A few times is fine, but it leans on that same trick every time it needs something to be scary. There's also the limitation of needing to follow everything on the screen. Unlike subtitles, there's things to read all over the screen and more than once, I missed some valuable information because they didn't keep it on the screen long enough to notice it. The gimmick of the movie is a hard one to pull off.

Movie Theater LVP (Least Valuable Patron): The guy who made comments to his girlfriend at normal volume throughout the movie? Yeah, you know all those people who started clearing their throats after you started talking? That wasn't an accident.

To Sum Things Up:
This needs to have one of two things: good writing or good direction. It either needs to be populated with characters that I'm invested in with a smart story or it needs to be told in a visual way that keeps me at the edge of my seat and scared (preferably more as the movie continues). Ideally, it would have both, but at least one is needed to bolster the other. This lacked either. It was at times fun and in the beginning, there's a real tension to it that had me wondering what kind of craziness I was about to see. The scares stopped being effective when they got lazy with the tricks and I never developed a reason to care about the characters. This movie fell short of being anything other than another disposable horror movie.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Halloween H20: 20 Years Later

The Pitch: It'll be Halloween, 20 years later. Seriously? How did you not get that from the title.

How I Came Into It: I have something to admit. It's a little shameful but I feel safe here amongst my faithful Stumble button pressers and people who haven't figured out how to take me off their Facebook news feed. I haven't seen Halloween. Any of them. I'm not sure how that's happened and ideally, I would've gotten to the originals first rather than starting with this pseudo-reboot of the franchise.

Why I Saw It: (Club 50) Halloween is rightfully an iconic horror franchise. Michael Meyers is one of the great antagonists. You better believe that when the Halloween music started playing, I got chills. Jamie Lee Curtis had a big enough career by the time this movie came out that her return wasn't simply for continuity (unlike, say, putting Ralph Machio in a Karate Kid movie would be). The younger cast has some gems like Oscar nominee Michelle Williams, "one of these days we'll find the project to make him an A-lister" Josh Hartnett, and even "that girl from those 90s teen movies" Jodi Lyn O'Keefe. It's so short too - not even 90 minutes - that it's over before it can get tedious. 

Why I Wish I Hadn't: All the things that people normally complain about horror movies still apply. Characters continually make dumb decisions. Everyone is always sneaking up on everyone else. The fakeouts. All that. Also, since they are trying to service both the old generation (Curtis) and the new (the kids), the whole thing feels pretty limited. I feel like the body count should've been higher, right? I should've started from the beginning rather than this. They didn't gain any points by killing off Joseph Gordon Levitt off in the beginning either.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend