Knight of Cups - DVD Review

KNIGHTS OF CUPS (R) Starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Wes Bentley, Antonio Banderas, Brian Dennehy, Freida Pinto, Isabel Lucas, Teresa Palmer and Armin Mueller-Stahl.
Written & Directed by Terrence Malick.

★½

Malick's still determined to make stream-of-conscientious plot-free movies. He has a really beautiful eye, but his movies are like fuzzy memories as you watch them. Images, voice-over whispers, ocean waves drowning out dialogue, suggestions of a story without really telling one. They're dreams.

This one centers around Christian Bale's Hollywood player, who visits sets and attends parties but doesn't seem happy. Some familiar faces pop up and I don't know if they're a character or they're playing themselves. At one party we see Jason Clarke, Joe Mangianello and Nick Kroll, but that's it. I suppose you could say they're cameoing like many did in Robert Altman's The Player, or they could have had bigger parts that Malick just cut out.

After a while, I was like "Quit moping, rich man!"

I loved Badlands. I still hope someday Malick will tell a story again in one of his movies, but every new one has less plot than the one before. What can I say? If you thought To the Wonder had too much story, you'll love this.

2013 Academy Award Winners

BEST PICTURE - 12 Years a Slave
BEST DIRECTOR - Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity
BEST ACTOR - Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club
BEST ACTRESS - Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR - Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS - Lupita Nyong'o, 12 Years a Slave
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY - John Ridley, 12 Years a Slave
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY - Spike Jonze, Her
BEST ANIMATED FILM - Frozen
BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM - 20 Feet from Stardom
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM - The Great Beauty, Italy
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY - Gravity
BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN - The Great Gatsby
BEST COSTUME DESIGN - The Great Gatsby
BEST MAKEUP & HAIRSTYLING - Dallas Buyers Club
FILM EDITING - Gravity
BEST ORIGINAL SONG - "Let It Go", Frozen
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE - Steven Price, Gravity
BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT - The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life
BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM - Mr. Hublot
BEST LIVE-ACTION SHORT FILM - Helium
BEST SOUND EDITING - Gravity
BEST SOUND MIXING - Gravity
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS - Gravity

Total Wins:
Gravity - 7
12 Years a Slave - 3
Dallas Buyers Club - 3
The Great Gatsby - 2
Frozen - 2

The Monuments Men - Movie Review

Starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Hugh Bonneville, Bob Balaban and Dimitri Leonidas.
Directed by George Clooney.

★★½

This is an odd movie. All the ingredients are there to make a classic, a WWII heist thriller, a race-against-time, Over the Hill Gang type yarn. It just felt like key developmental elements were missing.

The Monuments Men was a real group but it was much larger than what the movie portrays. I understand narrative purposes for narrowing it down to eight conglomerate characters, but somewhere in there, director and co-writer Clooney forgot to make most of them characters.  Sure, Bill Murray, John Goodman and Jean Dujardin are good actors, but it's as though those men were told to just show up and "act" without anything to work with.

"George, what's my motivation?"
"Be more Bill Murray-ish."
"Thanks. Thanks for that note."

The opening scenes play like a "We're getting the band back together" montage like this is a sequel to something. Things like this made me wish someone besides Clooney had directed it, someone who could have stepped back and noticed these little problems.

The actual quest of the men is something we grow to care about.  Watching Nazis set fire to art brings the same visceral reaction of the books burning in The Name of the Rose, or the scrolls burning in Agora. Some much history lost.

The actors that come off best, mostly because they have something to work with, are Cate Blanchett as a French secretary working for the Nazis but really helping the underground resistance, and Downton Abbey's Hugh Bonneville as a recovering alcoholic who sees this mission as a redemptive chance to do something with his life. Kind of cool to see Lord Grantham hanging out with two of the Ocean's 11.

Blue Jasmine - DVD Review

Starring Cate Blanchett, Sally Hawkins, Alec Baldwin, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Dice Clay, Louis C.K., Peter Sarsgaard and Michael Stuhlbarg. Directed by Woody Allen.

★★★

Woody Allen may be a pedophile-scumbag, but he's a good writer. It'd be nice to see if he's capable of writing a movie that doesn't have infidelity.

Cate Blanchett is the star of the show here as Jasmine, an upper-crust wife whose life is shattered after her philandering multi-millionaire husband (Alec Baldwin) goes to jail for his Bernie Madoff-level of fraud. The movie goes back and forth between two times, before the fraud was discovered, and how Jasmine's trying to piece her life together now. She goes to move in with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), whose own life (and marriage) were ruined when they put all their money into one of her husband's schemes.

Blanchett earned her Golden Globe and SAG wins for this role. It's a great part, but she also makes the most of it. Sometimes good parts float other boats, and all the other actors play well off of her.

Seriously, is there a Woody Allen movie that didn't have infidelity in it?

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - Movie Review

Starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, James Nesbitt, Ken Stott, Aidan Turner, Sylvester McCoy, Cate Blanchett, Ian Holm, Hugo Weaving and Andy Serkis.
Directed by Peter Jackson.

★★★

I decided to read The Hobbit last month. I've made it through six chapters, approximately 120 pages.  That covered this 170-minute movie.

I don't mind at all being transported back into the world of J.R.R. Tolkein by way of Peter Jackson, and it's nice to be a lighter adventure than the broody end-of-the-world Lord of the Rings.  Here we meet a younger Bilbo Baggins, played here by Martin Freeman (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Love Actually).  Gandalf shows up on his doorstep one day and volunteers him for an adventure.  Bilbo will join the wizard and thirteen dwarves on a quest to help the dwarves reclaim their homeland from a greedy dragon.

I wanted to be able to name all the dwarves and tell them apart, but unfortunately it'll probably take a couple viewings and seeing Part 2 before I'll be able to do that.  We're given all their names; we're just no introduced to half of them as distinctly as some others.  For instance, within the first hour I could tell you who Thorin, Balin, Dwalin, Fili, Kili, Dori, Bofur and Bombur were.  It's taking me going through the IMDB pics to put the names with faces of the other dwarves.

Once the fourteen set on their quest, it becomes a series of one darn thing after another.  They run into trolls, goblins, orcs, storm giants, elves, eagles, etc.  They're in danger, they get out. They're in danger again, they get out.  Any time a dwarf gets injured, he shakes it off for the next scene.  Even for dwarves, half of them would need weeks to just rest in a hospital somewhere and let their bones mend.

The highlight of the movie is deep into the movie, when Bilbo meets Gollum.  I don't remember if he shows up again in the book, but it wouldn't surprise me if Jackson didn't find a way to get him in a sequel or two somehow.

Looking forward to Part 2. Curious to see how Jackson's going to stretch it out.  But I think most folks are going to feel like this could have been a half-hour shorter without losing much.