Some thoughts on some recent movies (warning: some mild spoilers):
I'll start with the movie I saw most recently: Gone Girl. I view Gone Girl as a comedy more than anything else, although David Fincher's movie is aggressively lit and structured like a dark procedural crime movie. It is a parody of marriage anxieties - or more specifically, the anxieties one has entering into marriage. Do you really know the person you are about to commit your life to? Are you going to change into the kind of married person you hate? More importantly, are they going to change into that? The film's message to these questions appears to be: no, yes, and yes. And the solution is that you will come to dislike - maybe even despise - your spouse but, in the end, you'll realize that no one else really is as perfect for you as your spouse, so you might as well just resign yourself to that hell.
If I was putting together a double feature titled "The Hell of Marriage," I'd pair Gone Girl with This is 40, a film that is lit and structured like a comedy but is mostly a nasty commentary on marriage. Both Apatow's film and Fincher's film are deeply cynical takes - ultimately concluding that marital bliss is more about accepting hopelessness than anything else. Perhaps since I am not married and never have been, I just don't get it. I could do without ever watching either film ever again, although I'd argue - in a shock to critics that swoon for Fincher - that This is 40 is actually the more important film, if perhaps unintentionally so (if nothing else, you can screen it for your newly engaged friends to scare the hell out of them). Gone Girl is a little sillier in terms of plotting and leaves gaping plot holes and logical problems behind in order to continue with its amusing story of a psycho wife going to extremes to screw over her philandering husband. I found the first hour a bit boring and thought Fincher worked too hard to create a sense of foreboding. His perfectionism seems to smother the fun. The best scenes are with Neil Patrick Harris, who really for the first time drops genuine unease and a sense of unpredictability into the film. His scenes with Rosamund Pike were great and it was the only time my brain kicked in with questions about what might happen next. Perhaps no coincidence: those scenes also seem to be the most playful in the film. Once that situation is resolved, however, the rest of the movie is coda, but it goes on forever and just pushes Pike's character ever further over the top until she becomes less frightening than funny. Again, since I view the movie as mostly comedy, and a send-up of marriage anxiety, that doesn't seem entirely unintentional. Alas, if only the movie had been more entertaining and had a tighter plot.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was better than its immediate predecessor in the series (I movie I did not like at all), but it still left me non-plussed. Sure, the apes looked great, but they didn't look real. And the human characters are given short shrift. There's too great a commitment to the effects and not enough to crafting a meaningful science-fiction or fantasy commentary on modern humanity. The story felt predictable and cliched. It is OK as far as big action tentpoles go, but it was pretty forgettable as far as the cinema goes.
On the flip side, Snowpiercer might have been my favorite movie of the summer precisely because it was more than just an action tentpole. It is always nice to see that a movie featuring dozens of people getting hacked to death on a train can have something more on its mind than blood, guts, and/or effects. I view the movie's ending rather bleakly, although there is a racial dynamic to the ending that I feel gets a little unexplored. It's interesting how the rich white man and the poor white man fight their struggle and derail the train, leaving behind only two children, an asian girl and a black boy, as the last vestiges (hopes?) of humanity. Is the polar bear a sign of hope for humanity at the end, or a last fuck-you to humans from the world in the form of letting them know that life will go on without and in spite of human beings?
The Expendables 3 was trash. Better than 2 but still not good and making yet another case that the first Expendables, an enjoyable throwback action movie, was just a fluke.
People seem to love Guardians of the Galaxy, and it was alright, but it was just OK. I've noticed some people comparing it to Star Wars and I've called it Star Wars for Idiots - a movie that tries to have all of the fun of Star Wars without putting any of the work into building characters and plausible stakes that made Star Wars something that still really hasn't been approached in the fantasy entertainment field. There were absolutely no stakes at the end of Guardians because the movie had so thoroughly botched building up the enemy or what was at stake, and put no effort into sowing even the smallest seed of doubt that it would end up in anything but triumph. In a way, Guardians is the perfect Marvel movie: decent fun, but completely empty inside.
Speaking of mediocrity, maybe the most aggressively mediocre film of the last few months is The Equalizer - well, at least among those films I saw. The film is watchable thanks to a bankable revenge plot so familiar any adult audience member can fill in the plot blanks themselves, and the always charismatic Denzel Washington, in full-on Man on Fire mode. Director Antoine Fuqua seems to want to channel Michael Mann and Tony Scott, but his attempts at stylistic flourishes almost never work. There isn't much of a role here for Chloe Moretz, although the casting of an up-and-coming star makes sense given that the script expects us (and Denzel's character) to fall in love with her at the drop of the hat. Unfortunately Moretz isn't quite able to pull it off, but it doesn't matter all that much because Denzel is able to imbue his character with the unstated sense that he's trying to right some moral wrongs from his own past, and that is what is motivating him, rather than outrage at a teenage prostitute being beaten (why it takes that, rather than her being obviously forced into prostitution in the first place, to raise his hackles is something left unexplored). The third act features an interesting premise of the action hero essentially becoming a horror movie slasher, using various tools in a hardware store to inflict grisly death on the bad guys. Unfortunately, Fuqua doesn't quite bring this interesting little genre switch to life and so it does not pay off as well as it might have in better hands.
On a different end of the spectrum, an interesting little movie worth seeing is Calvary, which stars Brendan Gleeson as a good-hearted, if imperfect priest in a small Irish village. The film explores the question of what happens to a community when the institutions that supported them spiritually do more than just crumble, they become despised. A bit of a stage-play adapted for screen, the film involves a group of recurring characters in spiritual and moral crisis, desperately in need of the kind of spiritual guidance that Gleeson's priest could provide. But even though the village ritualistically still attends mass every Sunday, the townsfolk all despise the Catholic Church, either for its general hypocrisy or for its massive moral failure in the priest pedophilia scandal. The filmmakers seem to argue that there is a place for religion in our lives, in spite of the moral failings of the religious leaders, but that until we find forgiveness for the church, we will continue to lose our moral center and have nowhere to turn. While the film does not apologize for the church's failures, and indicates that there are still major problems in the hierarchy, the filmmakers do indicate that good priests are being discarded with the bad, to the detriment of all. It is an interesting, mildly pro-religious film that also does not shy from the problems of organized religion. Worth checking out.
I've saved probably my favorite film of the last few months - and certainly the one at which I had the most fun - for last. The Guest is not an entirely original film - it is basically Shadow of a Doubt spun as an homage to John Carpenter. Filmmakers Adam Wingard (director) and Simon Barrett (writer), however, know how to have fun and know how to pay homage to other filmmakers without becoming buried in un-originality. This little action film - about the plot I will say little - is a must see for anyone that enjoys thrillers and that has a sense of humor. Great fun. Go see it.
All films discussed above and identified in bold were screened in the theater.
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