War Machine

War Machine (2017)

Starring Brad Pitt, Emory Cohen, RJ Cyler, Topher Grace, Anthony Michael Hall, Anthony Hayes, John Magaro, Scoot McNairy, Will Poulter, Lakeith Stanfield, Josh Stewart, Meg Tilly, Tilda Swinton, and Ben Kingsley

Directed by David Michôd

Written by David Michôd

***This film is currently streaming via Netflix***

Summary (in 500 words or less):  Four-star General Glen McMahon (Brad Pitt) heads to Afghanistan to figure out how to bring an end to the war in this subversive piece.

Click here for my Letterboxd review

The RyMickey Rating:  C

Movie Review - Lamb

Lamb (2016)

Starring Ross Partridge, Oona Laurence, and Jess Weixler

Directed by Ross Partridge

***This film is currently streaming on Amazon Prime***

I don't even really know what to say about this one.  How do you write a review about a movie that, at its conclusion, made you feel so wildly uncomfortable, disconcerted, and unsettled?  Lamb begins rather innocently with fortysomething David (Ross Partridge) dealing with the loss of his father.  Following the funeral, while sitting in a parking lot, David is approached by seventh-grader Tommie (Oona Laurence) who asks him for a cigarette.  Tommie looks like a burgeoning prostitute, adorned with high heels, a hot pink purse, and a short skirt and David decides to take it upon himself to help the young girl out of the inevitable hole she's going to slide down if she continues on this path.  They form an odd friendship that then morphs into a kidnapping situation (albeit a voluntary one on Tommie's part) as David takes Tommie to his father's farm to show her the beauty of the world outside the slummy and slimy part of town in which she lives.

Ultimately, I have no clue what Lamb is trying to convey.  David is fully aware that his actions could be construed as those of a pedophile, but he's not one...or is he?  In the film's final moments, the "L" word gets thrown around and when you bring "love" into this equation it starts to make things a bit gross.  I understood what Tommie was getting from the relationship -- a chance to escape her lazy parents and her untrustworthy friends with someone who seems to genuinely care about her well-being -- but what was David's reasoning to embark on this adventure?  It's still unknown to me.  This odd relationship never gelled and only succeeded in making this viewer highly uncomfortable.  In what is essentially a two-hander, Ross Partridge and Oona Laurence are both fine, but Partridge who also directed and adapted this film from a novel is never really able to define why his character does what he does.  With the protagonist's motivation for his increasingly odd actions left unexplored, the film feels unbalanced.  Maybe your mileage will vary and I will admit that I wasn't ever bored watching this odd piece, but I simply can't recommend Lamb.

The RyMickey Rating:  C-

Movie Review - Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

Starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Jeremy Irons, Holly Hunter, Gal Gadot, Scoot McNairy, Callan Mulvey, and Tao Okamoto

Directed by Zack Snyder

***This film is currently streaming via HBO Now/HBO Go***

Questions I had while watching Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice:

• Why does the voice of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) when in the Batsuit sound like he's speaking through some voice box that amplifies his voice, making it echoey and deeper than normal?  This amplification makes it utterly obvious that all the vocals were completed in post. (I guess technically there is amplification device in his mask, but considering that the lower half of his face isn't covered by the mask, it just makes Affleck's performance laughable...even moreso than his depressing melancholy already was...)
• Why do all of the fight scenes look as if they were created by a video game manufacturer instead of looking like creative visual effects?  Zack Snyder isn't exactly known for realism, but it's utterly ridiculous-looking.
• Why is this movie so long?  And considering how long the title already is, why not add the 's' after the 'v' in the abbreviation of the word 'versus?'
• Why is Zack Snyder allowed to continue to reign his ugly directorial aesthetic over any films anymore?  His dark, dreary, heavy-handed nature creates an utterly depressing feel throughout, carrying nary a modicum of charm, hopefulness, or pleasantness that even the worst Marvel films contain even if just for a moment or two.
• Amy Adams' red hair adds at least some color to the muted grays and blacks that permeate the screen.
• Despite the criticism of Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor, at least he's hamming it up in a amusingly crazy way as opposed to the dreary hamming of Affleck.
• When one of your main characters -- Bruce Wayne, in this case -- gets his motivations because of scary dreams he has, that's just cheap storytelling.  
• In my Man of Steel review from a few years ago, I mentioned that Henry Cavill carried some charm.  That's not present here at all as he's just an angry superhero the whole time.
• I admittedly appreciated that they at least tried to explain away the ludicrousness of Man of Steel's destructive finale in which much of Metropolis was destroyed. 
• And at least the finale of this one was a little less ludicrous.  The post-script of the plot after the final battle was actually oddly resonant and upped my grade below by a spot.
• I should have stopped watching this at the fifty-minute mark when I first contemplated the idea.  
• Why will I inevitably subject myself to Suicide Squad and Wonder Woman after this atrocity?  I should know better...

The RyMickey Rating:  D

Movie Review - Our Brand Is Crisis

Our Brand Is Crisis (2015)

Starring Sandra Bullock, Billy Bob Thornton, Anthony Mackie, Joaquim de Almeida, Ann Dowd, Scoot McNairy, and Zoe Kazan

Directed by David Gordon Green

***This movie is currently available on HBO Now***

Savaged by critics and completely ignored by moviegoers, Our Brand Is Crisis was one of the biggest bombs of Sandra Bullock's career when it was released last October.  Quite frankly, I'm a bit surprised because I found the film to be an amusingly lighthearted political comedy with an engaging cast who create an atmosphere that's a lot more fun than I expected.  Bullock is Jane Bodine, an American campaign manager who is hired by an American consulting who in turn was hired by Bolivian politician Pedro Castillo (Joaquim de Almeida) to run his floundering campaign for the presidency.  The film rather simply covers a several-months period in which Jane and her crew (Anthony Mackie, Ann Dowd, Scoot McNairy, and Zoe Kazan) try to create reasons to sway the public vote to Castillo.

The performances really make Our Brand Is Crisis click with Bullock in particular offering up a strong-willed, sarcastically biting role that lifts the piece higher than I'd imagine.  Unfortunately, the film falls apart a bit towards the end with its political election proving to be highly anticlimactic and its subsequent repercussions off-putting and too dramatically out-of-place with the rest of the feature.  Still this film (a fictionalized account of a documentary of the same name) isn't nearly as bad as its lukewarm reception would have you believe.

The RyMickey Rating:  B-

Movie Review - Black Sea

Black Sea (2015)

Starring Jude Law, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, and Bobby Schofield 

Directed by Kevin Macdonald

Maybe I've just hit the wall with submarine movies.  In the past year, I've watched Pioneer and Pressure, and perhaps unfortunately Black Sea is hitting many of the same notes as those previous flicks.  In fact, and I'm spoiling the lede here, Black Sea ends up getting the same grade as those prior pics -- it's perfectly average.

Much like those other flicks, we get a group of men who head down in a submarine (or some submersible) -- here, the group headed by recently unemployed Robinson (Jude Law) are searching for a German U-boat that sank decades ago and is rumored to be filled with gold.  Robinson's crew is a joint venture between some Russians and some Brits and the tension between the two groups comes to a head once Robinson announces that the gold will be split evenly amongst the crew once they surface.  The theory arises, though, if there are less people alive when they surface that means more gold per individual and this notion leads to some deviance.

Black Sea is probably the best acted of the trio of submarine flicks with Jude Law giving a well-balanced performance, but the film itself feels slowly paced and oddly unexciting considering the premise of men starting to turn on one another.  Kevin Macdonald does a nice job of making the film feel as unclaustrophobic as possible, but by the time the film finally starts rolling about an hour in, I was in the process of checking out.  Fortunately, Law's performance and the story kick up a few notches and the flick becomes more captivating, but it's a shame it's not a fully well-rounded film.

The RyMickey Rating:  C

Movie Review - Frank

Frank (2014)

Starring Domhnall Gleeson, Michael Fassbender, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Scoot McNairy

Directed by Lenny Abrahamson

***This film is currently streaming on Netflix***

There was something so promising about the quirky (yet not too quirky) and whimsical opening thirty minutes of Frank that I was hoping the inner smiling that was going on in me would continue as I watched director Lenny Abrahamson's film unfold.  That was not to be, however, as the second thirty minutes of Frank felt simply like a rehash of the first thirty minutes (with no real significant changes) thereby causing me to check out of the film as a whole just as it decided to get serious during its final thirty minutes.  Unfortunately, Frank only works a third of the time -- and that just doesn't cut it.

Domhnall Gleeson is Jon, a struggling young artist who wants nothing more than to have a successful career in music.  While walking along the British shores one afternoon, he sees a man attempting to drown himself in the ocean.  The saved man happens to be a keyboard player for the weird alternative band The Soronprfbs and Jon is invited on a whim to join them for the evening and replace the suicidal pianist.  When Jon arrives at the gig, he discovers that the lead singer is a guy named Frank (Michael Fassbender) who wears a large papier-mâché head which he never removes.  While certainly odd, Jon joins the band as they embark on an odyssey of creating their next album.

Gleeson is one of the decade's most promising rising stars for me and he doesn't disappoint here either.  From the very beginning of the film, he exudes a natural charm that makes it impossible not to root for his character.  Taking a more comedic turn than we're used to seeing from him, Michael Fassbender also proves to be compelling as the title character, bringing a surprising amount of heart, humor, and expression to a role that hardly ever allows us to see his facial expressions at all.

Unfortunately, despite these two rather good performances, Frank flounders as it progresses which is a shame because it starts so very promisingly.

The RyMickey Rating:  C

Movie Review - Non-Stop

Non-Stop (2014)

Starring Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, Michelle Dockery, Corey Stall, Scoot McNairy, Nate Parker, and Lupita Nyong'o

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

As loyal readers are well aware, it took me quite a while to get through 2013 movies this year which admittedly put a crimp in my 2014 movie-watching.  "Let me hold off on 2014 movies until I finish 2013," I'd say.  In the back of my mind, however, I'd look forward to watching things like Non-Stop for the shear inanity of it -- I wanted something without substance to sink my teeth into.  Whether that set up unrealistic expectations for Non-Stop, I don't know, but this Liam Neeson actioner felt like a rehash and conglomeration of every other Liam Neeson picture since his star turn in Taken.

This time, though, Neeson's character federal air marshal Bill Marks is not saving his family, but an entire plane's worth of people as some crazy nutcase attempts to blow up an aircraft over the Atlantic on a non-stop flight from New York to London.  Or is Bill the one who's actually doing the terrorizing?  Someone appears to be setting him up as the terrorist, but is that just a clever cover for Bill to extort money from the US government while holding a plane's worth of people hostage?

The film's twists and turns ultimately just feel like a screenwriting team attempting to contort things just for the sake of movie-making and I found myself growing tired of the script's attempts to pull the rug out from under me.  Neeson's character is interchangeable with any one of his other characters from Taken or Unknown or Taken 2 or even The Grey -- his problem is all his roles as of late simply have "gruff" as a defining characteristic.  It's not that he's ever bad, it's just that he's become so predictable even in better films.

Non-Stop throws in some "I know that person" faces in the form of Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery, House of Cards' Corey Stall, and Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong'o (who has about three lines and obviously completed this film before 12 Years a Slave was on anyone's radar) as well as the bigger name of Julianne Moore, but none of these people or their characters really add depth to the script -- they just add to a seemingly unending list of red herrings that are thrown our way.

The RyMickey Rating:  C-