Tag: 2014 movies

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Edwards, Ficarra and Requa, Levy, Stoller, Wyatt

Dan Seeger

Focus (Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, 2015). There are a whole lot of film folks trying to pivot their careers with this strangely aspirational con job drama. Star Will Smith is clearly trying to put After Earth completely behind him by staking a claim on the territory of smart movies for adults that George Clooney has made his whole grain bread and artisan butter. At the same time, filmmaking partners Ficarra and Requa endeavor to demonstrate they can do more than comedies with a slightly twisty edge. Everyone fails in their attempt to stretch. The film is notably tepid, even as … Continue reading Edwards, Ficarra and Requa, Levy, Stoller, Wyatt

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Amirpour, Asante, Dobkin, Glatzer and Westmoreland, Roskam

Dan Seeger

Belle (Amma Asante, 2014). Based ever so lightly on real history — the only real source is a 1779 painting — this period drama tells the story of Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a young woman who is the offspring of a British naval officer (Matthew Goode) and an African-born slave. She’s raised among the British gentry by her grandparents (Tom Wilkinson and Sarah Gadon), treated as a beloved member of the family but also relegated to diminished status in her own home because of the conventions of the day. If the unconventional story elevates the film a bit past its restrained … Continue reading Amirpour, Asante, Dobkin, Glatzer and Westmoreland, Roskam

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Bendjelloul, Bobin, Boone, Lee, Stiller

Dan Seeger

Muppets Most Wanted (James Bobin, 2014). Once the cinematic franchise is revived, the next task is to prove it can be prolonged and maintained. Muppets Most Wanted is agreeable but oddly inconsequential. Lacking the fanboy passion that Jason Segel seemed to inject into The Muppets all by his lonesome, this new installment is drab and prone to drifting. The plot manages to evoke The Great Muppet Caper, the original Muppet sequel, while also playing around with a mistaken identity gimmick that takes full advantage of the pliability of the characters’ identity. Yes, it’s amusing at times, and the celebrity “guest stars” are … Continue reading Bendjelloul, Bobin, Boone, Lee, Stiller

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Burton, Limon, Melfi, Segal, Tyldum

Dan Seeger

The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum, 2014). One of the great frustrations of the Oscar season was watching Selma and, to a lesser degree, American Sniper battered by criticism over supposedly terrible transgressions in their depiction of historical record while The Imitation Game, the “true life” story receiving the phoniest treatment among the Oscar contenders, sailed along unperturbed. The story of Alan Turing’s secret, indispensable contributions to the Allied effort in World War II is fully deserving of big-screen veneration, just as his own government’s cruel retribution against him a decade later because his “lifestyle” was considered illegal is the stuff of … Continue reading Burton, Limon, Melfi, Segal, Tyldum

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In a town that was like a wishing well, you were cast in like a stone

Dan Seeger

As if often the case when a film is the subject of back-and-forth, hyperbolic, politically-minded screeds, American Sniper is more of a litmus test of the predisposition of the viewer than a film making fiercely argued points on either side of the argument raging in its wake. As best as I can tell, those who decry it as a patriotically-blinded, neocon agitprop are ignoring the film’s undercurrent consideration of the way recurring wartime military service tears apart a life and a psyche. Interestingly enough, the film’s more fervent defenders’ common penchant to paint it as a sterling testament to the unyielding … Continue reading In a town that was like a wishing well, you were cast in like a stone

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You scream and everybody comes a running

Dan Seeger

Shortly after Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz was shot in killed, in 1996, a spokesman announced at a press conference, “John du Pont is a marksman, and he has an arsenal. We don’t know how many guns or how much ammunition he has.” This man pushing sixty, unbelievably wealthy thanks to a family fortune that stretched back generations, had taken one of the weapons from that arsenal and written an ugly, lurid story with the pull of a trigger. Back before stories celebrity freak shows and rampant gun violence seemed to arrive with the regularity of the tides, the twisted tale of … Continue reading You scream and everybody comes a running

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You think you’re alone until you realize you’re in it, now fear is here to stay, love is here for a visit

Dan Seeger

I’ve had a couple different conversations by now which involved listing all the other filmmakers that come to mind when watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. The director has already acknowledged a surprising influence from the early nineteen-eighties oeuvre of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, especially Top Secret!, and the film does often play like one of their outlandish comedies dragged through a heavy Anderson filter in much the same way that Punch Drunk Love is a standard Adam Sandler comedy given the same transformative treatment. There’s also the clearest echo of Robert Altman since Anderson’s Magnolia, if only in a clear resemblance to … Continue reading You think you’re alone until you realize you’re in it, now fear is here to stay, love is here for a visit

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Ford, Hancock, Huston, McDonagh, Robespierre

Dan Seeger

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948). Huston’s famed exploration of greed tainting a slapdash partnership of aspiration gold miners in the Mexican mountains is so deviously ingenious that the director booming cackle virtually echoes through the most feverish scenes. The best Tim Holt can do as the most upstanding, straightforward member of the trio is stay upright against the buffeting winds of Humphrey Bogart, all sweaty paranoia and flash fire intensity, and Walter Huston, delivering a just Oscar-awarded turn as the weather-beaten old-timer whose the one member of the party who’s not a neophyte. The film is … Continue reading Ford, Hancock, Huston, McDonagh, Robespierre

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Just try to do your very best, stand up and be counted with all the rest

Dan Seeger

In the immediate aftermath of watching Selma, I was one of those many people who marveled at what a leap forward it was for director Ava DuVernay, considering the perceived degree of difficulty in shifting from small, intimate dramas to a period picture on a wide scale depicting a signal moment in recent American history. Then I revisited my own review for DuVernay’s prior film, Middle of Nowhere, and I realized the resounding inaccuracy of that perception. Yes, the scale of Selma is very different, most evident in the scenes recreating the various attempts at mounting a protest march the fifty … Continue reading Just try to do your very best, stand up and be counted with all the rest

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Besson, Clooney, Gilroy, Jarmusch, Jones

Dan Seeger

Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014). Though based on a half-baked idea from the rambunctious mind of its director rather than anything that originally appeared on a printed page, Lucy can make a claim on being one of the best comic book movies of the past year, in that it establishes and locks in on its own suspicious and imaginative logic and then lets all other rules fall away in favor of what’s most thrillingly entertaining in any given moment. Scarlett Johansson plays the title character, a young woman whose scruffy boyfriend gets her ensnarled in a situation in which she’s an … Continue reading Besson, Clooney, Gilroy, Jarmusch, Jones