John Krasinski’s IF is something of an imaginary creature in today’s cinema landscape. Paramount’s aspirant blockbuster is a full-on big budget children’s film with no attachment to established intellectual property. Compare this to essentially every other family offering coming up this summer: Despicable Me 4, The Garfield Movie, Inside Out 2, Harold and the Purple Crayon. The big purple elephant in the room is the weird imaginary friend movie that is a big studio risk in desperate search for an audience. This audience, one imagines, is families. The kids come for the colorful creatures that are wholly unrecognizable to them, and the parents stay for…potentially life threatening heart surgery?
The shame is that the diverse array of computer-generated imaginary things (they prefer to be called “ifs” for whatever reason) are mostly great visual effects, and they also are occasionally characters with personality. The potential for this to be Continue reading IF (2024) Movie Review →
Space Force, the new comedy series from Steve Carrell and Greg Daniels, is the second television show with inaugural seasons in 2020 to feature a fictionalized space program run by professionals whose expertise range from semi-competent to entirely incompetent. The Armando Iannucci-created Avenue 5 deals in, with a farcical flavor, the struggle to maintain civil stability when people are essentially stripped of civil society and placed in an insulated environment.
Space Force, on the other hand, is about a fictionalized version of America’s Space Force (the President wants “boots on the moon”). Newly promoted four-star General Mark Naird (Carrell) is appointed to head Space Force, and he soon learns Continue reading Space Force (2020) Season One Review →
Adam McKay likes to show. And show. And show.
As he moves further from straight comedy and more toward a dark comedy examination of political America, McKay’s showy style becomes more apparent. In a way, it is more permissible to have a broad comedy film be brash and in-your-face. While such a style is not destined to fail in a more dramatic setting, it is harder to grapple with tone in that setting.
McKay’s The Big Short shows some signs of this tonal problem. Largely a depressing subject, the comedy flourishes in that retelling of the housing crisis don’t translate well. The non sequitur cutaways to celebrities are jarring and ineffective. What shines in that film are the performances, showing that the director understands the import of Continue reading Vice (2018) Movie Review →
In 1930s Hollywood, Phil Stern (Steve Carrell) is a high profile film agent. His nephew Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg) is a neurotic New Yorker who moves to Los Angeles after becoming tired of life in the Big Apple. The extended family also includes a gangster (Corey Stoll) and a Communist intellectual (Stephen Kunken).
The film is, in essence, a wandering tale of cinephilia, writer-director Woody Allen exercising his vast knowledge of classic Hollywood whenever possible. It is also a romantic melodrama: Bobby wants a woman named Veronica (Kristen Stewart) who is Continue reading Cafe Society (2016) Movie Review →
Note: I have covered the four acting categories in depth here.
The Nominees:
- Steve Carrell — Foxcatcher
- Bradley Cooper — American Sniper
- Benedict Cumberbatch –The Imitation Game
- Michael Keaton — Birdman
- Eddie Redmayne — The Theory of Everything
Continue reading 2015 Academy Award Predictions — Best Actor →
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