New Articles for the Week of March 15th: Sprang Cleanin' Edition

James Franco in Spring Breakers

Spring is coming! The snow is melting, the sun is shining brighter and longer, geese are flying back North and Long Johns everywhere are heading into laundry machines for one last spin. Best to start the season fresh by catching up on all the stuff I was writing about while avoiding the worst winter had to offer:

The Monuments Men: Clooney! Damon! Nazis! General ambivalence! Neither the film-art community or the art-art community rushed to embrace this true story of cultural capering in World War II, which isn’t terribly surprising. If you’re a fan of seeing puff himself up about art and history like a Cornish game hen, then you’ll be well served. Otherwise, you’ll find not much here of educational, or entertainment value, which is not something I enjoy saying about a movie with both Bill Murray and John Goodman.

3 Days to Kill: I’m not a big believer in so-bad-it’s-good film viewing. Unless a terrible picture is being ripped on by experts, I’ll very rarely actively seek out terribad entertainment. A lot of it has to do with the schadenfreude that comes with seeing people earnestly try, and fail miserably to do their dream project (I would probably pull a Raiders if I ever had to watch The Room), and part of it has to do with feeling weird about the commodification and ironic adoption of intentionally awful entertainment (your Sharknados et al.).

Now, if a studio with professional actors, production values, and distribution, wants to make a bad movie, and then load that bad movie up with deliriously outdated gender politics and political awareness, I’m more likely to find flecks of gold in that particular turd. 3 Days to Kill is a film I felt myself falling more in more in love with the longer its boring star and story blended with its whackadoodle subtext, and I came out waaaaay more excited about it than any Kevin Costner-starring Taken-knockoff had any right to allow.

Nymphomaniac - Volume I: Not one for the squeamish, I found a lot in Lars van Trier’s latest that will keep your interest, and that also has nothing to do with sex, of which the film has plenty. I'll also be checking in on Volume II next month, but for now it seems like von Trier has half a great little stage play about art as sex, sex as art, and a whole lot in between.

Interview with the creators of The Americans: If you're not watching The Americans yet, you really should be. It's exciting, funny, and has plenty to say about personal and political relationships. It was my 8th favorite show of 2013 during its first season, and before the second started, I got to have a little phone chat with the show's creator, Joe Weisberg, its co-showrunner, Joel Fields, and its executive producer, Graham Yost (who's the showrunner behind my other favorite FX show from last year, Justified). This was my first phone interview and I've never talked with anyone from the TV world of this calibre, so this was a real treat to do. Hopefully the first of many, but if it's the only one, at least it was good practice for an even more high-profile I did a week later, but can't really talk about now, because I haven't written it up yet. Anywho, check out the show, then check out my interview.

Banshee: Much as I've been trying to get out of the weekly recapping game, they keep finding ways to pull me back in! The reason this time: screeners, the shoddily recorded, watermarked to hell little discs that let you watch and write about a show well in advance of its actual airing. Looking to see what the experience was like, I grabbed this assignment to review the second season of the Cinemax series having seen none of the first. After powering through those ten episodes in preparation of getting those that aired over the past ten weeks, I somewhat regretted the choice, as Banshee wasn't really my bag through its first year.

But as I found with Arrow last year, it can be an enlightening experience to spend so much time thinking and writing about a show that you otherwise wouldn't make time for. And as with Arrow, I grew to appreciate the rougher edges around Banshee that didn't appeal to me at first, and liked what it wound up becoming by the time it hit its season finale that aired last night. I'm glad to be off the weekly reviews beat again so that I might have time for features again, but the break may be brief: at the risk of jinxing it, there's a strong likelihood I'll be seeing some review screeners for Game of Thrones Season 4 coming my way any day now. Much as I'm worried about trying to review one of the most popular, densest shows on TV, come on, it's Game of Thrones -you get the chance to watch it early, you take it. And that's coming from someone who's already read the books.

That's all for now. Play me out, creepy James Franco!


New Articles for the Week of January 12th: So Long 2013 Edition

71st Annual Golden Globes

A belated Happy New Years to you, dear reader. Lots to catch up on, what with this being the first update in nearly two months. Probably for the best though, as it’s been a slow start to 2014 on my end, so at least I’ve got a healthy backlog to bring to your reading attention. First, a quick rundown of a few theatrical releases I reviewed, before the big TV list promised so long ago:

Philomena: A nice little movie about a nice little old lady, featuring a nice little supporting performance from Steve Coogan. That I remember almost nothing else from this probably means I should be the one reading the review, if anyone.

Saving Mr. Banks: Ditto for this one, which I’ve only soured on more after reading about the real relationship between Walt Disney and P. L. Travers. Read Genevieve Koski’s review and analysis of “brand deposits” over on The Dissolve to understand the full ickiness I feel about this movie.

Out of the Furnace: I’d be lying if I said review scores don’t matter to me, simply because being well outside the mean distribution of critical math-ery increases your likelihood of being yelled at by people. Writing a downer review for this a full month before its release left me a little nervous to see whether I’d be an outlier, which turned out not to be the case. Part of the fun of seeing movies way before the hype machine kicks in is getting to watch them in a vacuum of buzz, which this one (rightfully) didn’t end up generating. Still love me some Christian Bale though.

American Hustle: Which is also probably a good reason why I continue to like this one a lot more than other critics. Well, reading Rottentomatoes and Metacritic scores would tell you a whole lot of critics liked this one a bunch, but since we now live in a world of Criticism 2.0, the press lifecycle of this film has accelerated faster than I reasonably would have thought.

With major awards season kicking off tonight with the Golden Globes, the widely agreed upon greatness of films in 2013 will now be boiled down to a couple of DVD box tag lines and historical footnotes, so it’s understandable why a lot of critics are upset that American Hustle is going in as a presumed favorite against the likes of 12 Years a Slave, and Inside LlewynDavis. And yeah, I’d be disappointed if American Hustle won any of the major awards (save for any acting award they want to throw at Amy Adams, who’s totally deserving, though that's not to say most deserving), but more so because of the historical backlash it would cause that turns an unworthy, but still very enjoyable film into the worst thing to happen to movies since Crash won Best Picture.

The acceleration of the awards season cycle has caused a dogpile onto American Hustle recently, perhaps in an attempt to sway academy votes. That’s a fair enough goal, but misses the larger issue that awards fever causes the film industry. Why is it that a light, empty, but wickedly fun movie like American Hustle can so easily take gold off the table of more important, timeless pictures? My thinking is that it's because voters are human, and like to be entertained. I’ve likened the film elsewhere to being The Fast & Furious of prestige dramas, in that it’s just a bunch of likeable people having a good time for no real end or purpose. And if you do that well enough, as David O. Russell has, of course voters are going to glom onto it, because there simply aren’t enough films like that, which target adult, film-loving audiences that like to have a good time at the movies.

We need there to be more films like American Hustle, not less. Its success speaks to how badly adult audiences are looking for well-acted, well-crafted entertainment that doesn’t involved superheroes or mass destruction. If there were more movies out there balancing American Hustle's same mix of mature filmmaking and immature, "let's just have some fun" attitude, then critics wouldn’t glom onto it like a life raft. Yes, 12 Years A Slave is a more important, powerful film, just as Her is a more emotionally affecting one, but if you starve awards voters of purely enjoyable film experiences, then they’re going to be absolutely over the moon when one like American Hustle comes along, and gives them the easy satisfaction wider audiences get week after week in the summer blockbuster season.

I think American Hustle is a great good movie, while the other nominees it’ll be facing off against range from good great, to simply great great films. In every case, the great film will be the one remembered by history, but there’s still room for just good, enjoyable prestige films to exist, so long as they don’t make it easier for awards voters to screw up the one thing they have to do: pick the film that best represents the year, either on a qualitative, or idealogical level.

Now, the danger of getting more films like American Hustle is that instead of proving their disposability by satiating the baser urges of voters, the nominee lists will instead be overrun by films that spectacularly clear an insanely low bar. This would be a fine result too, in my opinion, because it would offer us the last hair fiber of proof to show that, for fuck's sake guys, awards are almost never right. To quote the immortal words of TheWire'sSnoop Pearson (or Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, if you wanna be anal about it): deserve got nothing to do with it. As far as I’m concerned, the year’s best films were decided last month, when critics I love and respect made their cases for what they thought were the best movies. Look no further than Film Crit Hulk’s amazing take on the Top 10 list to see how completely arbitrary picking “bests” is, especially coming off a year as amazing as 2013.

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By the way, here’s my Top 10 list of TV shows for 2013! So as to save myself from a very severe case of hypocrite-lash, let me be upfront by saying I would have chosen to not even rank these if I had my druthers. I was wishy-washy about all the numbering from conception to posting, and don’t considered myself held to the ordering in any way. You can check out my big 10 on the link, but I also just want to take a minute to highlight another 10 series from the year that didn't make the cut, roughly in ascending order of my enjoyment of them:

Homeland: Oh, Homeland. I’d say you broke my heart, but you never really had it to begin with. You had my attention all through season one, as Carrie Matheson elbowed her way into the anti-hero pantheon, and Damien Lewis put on an acting clinic every week. And for the first half of season two, you had me by the shorthairs, what with your inspired and insane willingness to barrel the plot forward at an alarming pace.

But then the rest of season 2 happened, and like a lot of other viewers, I got nervous about what would emerge from the rubble of the show’s late 2012 implosion. What we got in 2013 wasn’t an embarrassment, but it does prove the sneaking suspicion early critics had about Homeland’s success being intrinsically tied to momentum. It still looks great, and the performances are strong, but I’m not sure I’m getting much else out of it each week.

Broadchurch: Check my mega-blog from a few months back for the full scoop, but I found a lot to like in this morbid little seaside murder mystery. Here’s to hoping the American remake, and another series of the original don’t completely throw this show’s legacy off a cliff.

New Girl: I was late to the New Girl party on both ends, as I wasn’t in time to praise the strong back end of its second season we got in 2013, and have only now caught up, when the show is seriously struggling to maintain its momentum. Jake Johnson is practically carrying the show on his shoulders at this point, so this might be the only time New Girl makes a best of list for me. But, hey, at least they’ve cut down on a lot of the ironic racism humour that plagued the first couple seasons! That’s something, right?

Archer: The fuel gauge is visibly starting to dip on one of my favorite animated comedies, though word is the quickly approaching fifth season makes for a revitalizing gamechanger. This is a show I usually like watching more the second or third time than the first, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Season 4 is a whole lot better than I give it credit for. If for nothing else though, the show gets points for collapsing the H. Jon Benjamin voiceover universe into a singularity during its Bob's Burgers crossover in the premiere, which was just fantastic.

Parks & Recreation: My love of Parks still runs deep, but it’s deep enough to know that I'm about ready to say goodbye. I still love the characters and world of P&R, but as with all comedies, what made them identifiable and relatable continues to get stretched by the increasingly cartoonish lengths needed to land a joke. I’m a Legacy-ist in a lot of ways: it’s better for a show to live fast and die young than to risk overstaying its welcome. Parks isn’t nearly at that point yet (I laughed my ass off at the touching 100th episode they just had), but the show’s 3 season golden age might be forgotten by history the longer it’s followed by diminishing returns.

Scandal: Jumping off of Parks, the best way I can describe Scandal is to say that if Leslie Knope is TV’s Superman, Olivia Pope is its Batman. Scandal is a cynical soap opera thrill ride that’s only recently shown signs of flagging. It’s a show I love for a number of reasons, chief among them being how aggressively, at times embarrassingly, progressive it is. It’s almost certainly run out of juice at this point, but considering the levels it was operating at through all of 2012 and most of 2013, can you blame it? Not since Spartacus has a surface layer of trash hidden some of the most effective and thought-provoking writing on TV.

Game of Thrones: I think I ruined Game of Thrones for myself right after episode 9 of the first season (yeah, that episode), when I decided I couldn’t wait a whole week for the finale, like some sort of impulse-control-having sucker. I burned through the first book before the first season’s finale, but felt much less excitement and enjoyment when watching HBO recreating something I had already read. The same muted feeling has persisted since reading all the books, and seeing the show adapt them. It's still so incredibly well made, and so well acted that it’s almost impossible to comprehend that something like Game of Thrones not only exists, but is one of the biggest things in TV. Still, I can’t help but feel like I love Game of Thrones more in book form, and simply appreciate and respect the TV version more than feverishly devour it like a lot of other people do.

Hannibal: God bless Bryan Fuller for not only proving that serial killer television doesn’t have to be bad, but for also showing that a remake of a known property doesn’t have to be the worst thing ever. Coupled with the best cliffhanger ending of 2013, Hannibal’s first season will give you ample reason to be unbearably excited for the quickly approaching second.

Orphan Black: I’m running out of word fuel so I’ll keep it brief: watch this show. Maureen Ryan sums up best why little shows like this are some of the most important out there, but even as pure entertainment, Orphan Black is a smashing success. If Tatiana Maslany wins the Best Actress Golden Globe, it will be deserved, and make up for any and all future snubs by the HFPA.

The Returned: The third of Sundance Channel's trio of esoteric shows to premiere in 2013, this late 2012 French series was even more frightening than Hannibal, despite very rarely giving in to horror/thriller cliché and tropes. It’s a disturbing little show in a lot of ways, capable of making very simple images incredibly unnerving, but it’s all in service of a thoughtful, emotionally balanced look at loss and grief. Don’t let subtitles be a barrier to entry, or you’ll be missing out on one of the most haunting and beautiful shows 2013 had to offer.

That’s all for now, I’ll be back with more updates, once I’ve got some stuff to update you with! Play me off into 2014, mysterious and ethereal Mogwai soundtrack!


New Articles for September: TIFF Happens Edition

TIFF 2013

Hey, TIFF happened! And I was there! Well, the festival covers almost all of downtown Toronto, and since I work in the financial district, it was kinda hard not to be there. But thanks to some writing connections, I actually wound up at some press screenings, a couple premieres, and even a press conference. Considering I've never been to TIFF, or a proper film festival, the last two weeks have been very exciting. And tiring. Tiring and exciting in equal measure. So lemme just quickly list-off the hot 'n steamy industry awards-bait I lucked my way into seeing, lest this wind up running overlong like that last post (hyperlinked titles lead to actual review).

Benedict Cumberbatch and Daniel Bruhl in The Fifth Estate

Rating: 3 out of 5

Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, and Daniel Brühl

Alternate title: The Anti-social Network

The Wikileaks Cablegate scandal represents a major flashpoint in the early 21st century's defining civil rights debate, privacy vs. security. Seeing as the site's founder, Julian Assange, only rose to public notoriety in the last few years, you might think it's too early for a biopic to be made properly. You would be right. The Fifth Estate is perhaps the most lavishly produced, best acted made-for-TV movie ever made. It's good for some soapy fun, but those looking for either a history lesson, or a look at the Wikileaks message instead of the man who started it, will have to wait.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman in Prisoners

Rating: 4 out of 5

Starring: Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal

Alternate Title: Les Miserablists

I really enjoyed, or rather, appreciated Denis Villeneuve's 2010 drama Incendies, despite the grimness of its subject matter. Understandably, some critics accused Villeneuve of hackish exploitation of war crimes, rape and incest for dramatic effect, and also understandably, those same people are not happy about the child-kidnapping drama Prisoners. I can sympathize with calling out the film for using low-hanging alarmist fruit for a premise, but the exploration of that premise makes for a well-paced, and gorgeous looking police procedural.

Kate Winslet, Josh Brolin, and Gattlin Griffith in Labor Day

Rating: 4 out of 5

Starring: Josh Brolin and Kate Winslet

Alternate Title: Love in the Time of Cobbler

Two things that automatically predisposed me to liking this one: 1) director Jason Reitman makes really, really good movies, and 2) I'm a sap. Labor Day is a rural weepie through and through, but it's a really well-acted, warmly shot and heartfelt rural weepie. To really get swept up in all the melodrama, go in with open arms, and stomach empty (not since Waitress has pie been filmed so lovingly...or frequently). I'll add an addendum later once the press conference I covered for the film is posted, which includes a couple neat little tidbits from Reitman and 2/3rds of the cast.

Mark Ruffalo and Keira Knightley in Can a Song Save Your Life?

Rating: 4 out of 5

Starring: Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo

Alternate Title: White People and Guitar - A Love Story

Photogenic movie stars playing musically talented dreamers looking for a shot at stardom/redemption? Love letters to the enduring vibrancy of New York City? Guest appearances by Cee-Lo Green and the guy from Maroon 5? Yup, this thing is pure, uncut, Bolivian-grade catnip for white people. So sure enough, me and the rest of the near-monochromatic audience I saw it with were pretty thoroughly won over by this one. The review is basically me writing an 800-word caveat, before ending with, "buuuuut, if you can ignore the core phoniness at the heart of it all, it's pretty great." I'm also one of those guys who unironically likes a bunch of Taylor Swift songs, and as we've already established, I'm a sucker for schmaltz, especially when it sounds this good.

Gravity

Rating: 5 out of 5

Starring: Sandra Bullock and George Clooney

Alternate Title: Fuck You, Space

So basically, Alfonso Cuarón decided it would be really funny if he based his next film on my biggest nightmare. Yeah, Gravity is the closest i'll ever get to becoming an astronaut, both for adding another compelling and discouraging example of the many, many ways space is a never-ending deathtrap, and for being one of the most immersive and visceral film experiences I've had in ages. Somehow, 2013 has turned out to be the year of me becoming an IMAX pitchman, because just like Pacific Rim, this one needs to be seen on the biggest screen you can sit yourself in front of. The script is nothing to write home about, but it's not insulting or problematic in the way most effects-driven epics tend to be. This was the definite highlight of the festival for me, and I'm strongly anticipating/dreading getting the chance to see it again.