Monthly Archives: April 2016

Featured

Dope (2015)

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As the Academy Awards have shown us, there are a lot of important elements that go into a great movie: costumes, acting, production, story, etc. In the case of Dope, the most standout category is certainly the soundtrack, featuring killer mixes from the best in the ’90s hip-hop game to current hip-hop and R&B rockstars. Busta Rhymes, Santigold, A Tribe Called Quest, and Public Enemy are just a few of the radio masters that come to mind, but trust me — if you see this movie for nothing else, see it (or I guess hear it) for the soundtrack.

Beyond the soundtrack, Dope delivers on being a fun movie with some important messages about what it’s like growing up as an outsider, and defying the expectations of your neighborhood and culture. The film starts off by introducing us to Malcolm, a straight-A student in Inglewood, California working towards the end of his junior year to get into his top college selection. Malcolm, joined by his best friends Jib and Diggy, struggle to get by as the “nerds” of the school, often falling victim to bullying, petty robbery, and of course, verbal abuse.

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News

Film & TV News: April 8

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News

  • The first trailer for the Star Wars anthology film Rogue One took the internet by storm yesterday, providing the first glimpse of the hotly-anticipated pseudo-spinoff. Two new Star Wars movies within a year of each other, both reinvigorating the franchise after years of dormancy and prequel strife — both Force Awakens and Rogue One are led by tiny gutsy British women, and you’re trying to tell me they’re not related?
  • Cillian Murphy has joined Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, marking the fifth collaboration between actor and director following the Dark Knight trilogy and Inception. He’s joining an impeccable cast that includes Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance and a handful of newcomers. If any team can turn a fresh eye onto a very famous part of history, it’s this one.
  • World’s Most Perfect Human Charlize Theron has been cast in the eighth installment of the Fast & Furious franchise, but for some strange reason they’re not calling it Fast & Furiosa.
  • Relax, you guys: Sherlock Season 4 is now filming.

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TV Review

Daredevil – Season 2

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It’s incredibly tempting to write two completely separate reviews of the second season of Daredevil. The most superficial reason for this urge is simply because that’s more or less the way the season is divided: Part One, the first five or six episodes, focuses on the gun-toting, villain-slaughtering Punisher. Part Two focuses on Elektra, the long-ago flame and now-returned firestarter of Matt Murdock. Not long after the second season received the greenlight after a rollicking first season, these were the only two words you needed to mark your excitement: Punisher and Elektra.

The former was exciting mostly because the three preceding attempts to bring Punisher to life — the 1989 Dolph Lundgren version, the 2004 Thomas Jane version, and the pitiful 2008 movie War Zone with Ray Stevenson — all pretty much sucked. Marvel Studios hoovered up the rights to the character and soon announced that he’d appear in a supporting role in Daredevil, signifying an understandable hesitation to give the dude yet another full-length feature after three straight misfires. The latter inclusion was exciting because Elektra is an inextricable part of the Daredevil mythos, per Frank Miller’s incredible must-read run on the comics series in the early ’80s and, yeah, okay, fine, per Jennifer Garner in two movies. Basically this was a time for redemption for both characters, just as the Daredevil series itself is a redemption for the title character.

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Face Off

Face Off: Hercules (1997) and Superman I/II (1978/80)

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Motion State Face Offs pit two films, franchises, or television series against each another for no reason other than because we can.

As the leading voice in movie reviews, we at Motion State Review judge films based on a wide variety of factors — dialogue, acting, cinematography, whether or not Nic Cage is in it, etc. But perhaps the most important quality a movie can have, in this contributor’s humble opinion, is originality. Sometimes, we do not recognize a movie’s level of originality unless it is noticeably unoriginal (Avatar rehashing Pocahontas, to name one; seriously they are the same movie). Other times, you can see a movie a dozen times before realizing that maybe you have seen the same exact thing somewhere else. Such was the case as when I traveled to Athens and watched the Disney movie Hercules for the first time in several years, because a true movie critic travels thousands of miles just to watch an animated movie that takes place there. I expected to get a heavy dose of nostalgia while watching; instead I got a heavy dose of…Superman?

In the same way that Avatar and Pocahontas are similar enough that any high school teacher would claim plagiarism, so, too, I found, were Hercules and the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies. Heck, they’re about one Superman solo song away from being the same movie (which would be awesome in the next Man of Steel flick, as long as Henry Cavill’s singing voice is as fantastic as his acting). But, let’s make one thing clear about who’s stealing from whom: the myth of Hercules came just slightly (a few thousand years) before the character of Superman was invented.

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TV Review

Better Call Saul 2.8 – “Fifi”

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It’s endlessly entertaining watching the montage — an old-fashioned, familiar, nearly-cliched storytelling device — and the cold open — a sort of newfangled, disorienting, “edgy” storytelling device — used to such loving and sincere effect throughout Better Call Saul. Both were hallmarks of Breaking Bad, too, from the “Crystal Blue Persuasion” cooking montage to the pesky little housefly of that third season episode. But here in Saul they’re more frequent and often more ambitious, and in “Fifi” there were multiple examples to this point.

Before we dive into those devices it’s worth noting that this is the home stretch of Saul‘s second season, and the arc has become superbly focused and compelling in ways that the earliest episodes of Season 2 (“Switch” and “Cobbler” in particular) hinted at ever-so-subtly. For a show about a guy who wears orange suits and wails on the bagpipes at the office, for a show built on flashy devices like the montage and the cold open, for a show peopled by characters as bombastic and iconic as any of the Salamancas…if the writing were equally outlandish we’d have an entirely different show. Instead, the character arcs intersect with intricacy and propel forward in subtle ways, lending no small degree of unease to the thematic undercurrent.

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Featured

Emelie (2016)

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With the release of The Witch in 2016, it seemed that the title of “best scary movie of the year” was already settled. However, the recently released Emelie could give any frontrunner a run for its money as far as I’m concerned. Clocking in at just under 90 minutes, this limited release film is equal parts familiar and unsettling, leaving a lasting discomfort within viewers long after the credits roll.

Emelie is the story of the Thompson children and their unfortunate night in with a new babysitter, Anna, as their parents go out for an anniversary dinner, unaware of the horrors that await their precious threesome. Anna, as it turns out, is twisted and disturbed, forcing the children to participate in antics that become increasingly more perverse as the night goes on.

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TV Review

Better Call Saul 2.7 – “Inflatable”

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I knew while reviewing “Bali Ha’i“, last week’s episode of Better Call Saul, that I’d be eating my words not long after the following episode hit the airwaves. “Bali Ha’i” wasn’t at all a bad episode; on the contrary, it was full of tension and character development and that special Saul mix of humor and meaningful symbolism. But for the first time the Jimmy McGill storyline felt like second fiddle to the Mike Ehrmantraut storyline, mostly because the latter was about a highly personal slow-boil turf war and the former was about a file audit at a law office. Doesn’t take much to discern which one of those will be more gripping.

“Inflatable” did much more than put the focus back on Jimmy. After a cool flashback cold open showing some of the elements of the youthful genesis of Slippin’ Jimmy, “Inflatable” finally seemed to push Jimmy over the invisible threshold at the heart of the series itself. The conceit was always this: we watch Jimmy become Saul. In the same way that Walter White’s Mr. Chips becomes Scarface, Jimmy’s sensibilities are leading him toward a particular version of himself. One could argue that “Inflatable” is the episode where Jimmy finally becomes Saul.

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