Movie Reviews #4…
#11: Tricked. Although it’s Friday the 13th, there’s nothing supernatural here. Far from it. As Michael Moore points out (he’s a bit biased, of course), documentaries just aren’t shown in theaters anymore (our loss). So, every year, I look forward to seeing some of the best in our Montclair Film Festival. Tricked caught my attention this year, maybe because it provided valuable background material for my new novel The Collector (scheduled for release later this year—an excerpt is in Aristocrats and Assassins). Directors John Keith Wasson and Jane Wells provide yet another glimpse at the sordid underbelly of our society found in the sex trade and sex trafficking. I seem to remember this was scheduled for some cable channel (HBO?), so look for it, but it’s not for people who bury their head in the sands. Highly recommended.
#12: The Railway Man. I’m surprised that this gritty movie hasn’t done better in the box office. Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky and starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, who make excellent performances, this is the autobiographical story of Eric Lomax (Firth), who discovers his tormenter in World War II is still alive and returns to pursue him. Lomax was a member of captured Brits who were beaten and starved as POWs struggled to build a railroad for the Japanese in Southeast Asia. Some gruesome scenes make this film not one for the squeamish, but this is history, folks, real life crap that has happened. And I love movies based on books! Screenplays are OK, but when there’s a good book behind them, good things often happen. Firth is better here than in The King’s Speech. Highly recommended.
#13. A Million Ways to Die in the West. Seth MacFarlane’s venture onto the big silver screen is hilarious, crude, gross, and extremely politically incorrect! I loved it. Filled with big names in title roles along with dozens of cameos by other big names, this film requires your attention or you’ll miss all the great historical references and nods to pop culture, in words and pictures. The actors were clearly having fun; I had fun too. Like Railway Man, not for the squeamish (in a different way, of course), this farcical film also has a decent plot with some great subplots too. It might be trying to kill the western genre (or, is it dead already), but I thought that happened awhile back with those spaghetti westerns, so maybe this will revive good westerns by way of a backlash. MacFarlane also does a great acting job, as do Theron and Silverman. You’ll probably either love this—but don’t injure yourself rolling in the aisles—or you’ll hate it. I recommend it.
#14. Chef. This movie in pre-release was featured in the Montclair Film Festival too. We missed it, so we went out of our way to see it after its release. Not funny crude, like the last movie, but good for a whole bunch of laughs. The plot is great: it was like an excellent albeit extended situation comedy, funny road trip, and poke at critics everywhere (I couldn’t help thinking of the analogy between food critics and book critics). There are laughs galore, but you’ll probably leave the theater hungry. My kind of food, by the way—paticones, fried yucca or yucca fries, Cuban sandwiches, Poboys, and so forth, not to mention the great-looking slow-cooked Texas BBQ beef. The protagonist, played by Jon Favreau, imitating MacFarlane’s shtick above, is great as the Chef who tells the food critic off online. It goes viral (maybe a bit predictable, but extremely amusing, because the Chef is a wee bit of a technophobe). Other big-name stars, including easy-on-the-eye Vergara and Johannson (yeah, this is a sexist movie, but in a good way), make valuable contributions. (Fellow authors out there: take this as a warning to never fight with your reviewers—we don’t have a food truck to fall back on!). Recommended.
#15. Not recommended. Maleficent is yet another boring addition to the recent rash of fractured fairy tales, maybe initiated by ABC’s Once Upon a Time—or Bullwinkle and Rocky, in cartoons (their versions were better). Edge of Tomorrow is maybe Tom Cruise’s comeback bid after showing what a lousy husband he is, but I didn’t see anything interesting about it. X-Men? OMG, yet another of these potboilers showing mutants are either bad-asses or caricatures (they’re from a comic book, after all). When are we going to see a mutant who’s a Swiss Army knife—lots of powers, instead of just one, and yet still human. (Oh, yeah, in my “Clones and Mutants Trilogy,” that’s where.) All three of these films are heavy on the special effects, so, if that’s your gig, go for it. I only saw the trailers, I’ll admit, but they were enough to convince me that special effects are the true stars. Jolie and Cruise can’t act worth ___ (fill in the blanck) and X-Men wastes the acting talents of Stewart and McKellen (in the case of Stewart, it’s not as bad as Star Trek, The Next Generation, but what is?).
And so it goes….
