Category Archives: Film Review

Academy Awards, Take Two

Inside Out (2015): Pixar Goes to Therapy

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Our Take Two column offers second opinions and alternative angles on films and TV series reviewed elsewhere on Motion State. Head here for our original review of Inside Out.

The people have spoken. Original, well-written content is what they want, and they want it now! Down with all of these cliched remakes! I speak on everyone’s behalf when I say–what’s that? Ex-squeeze me? Jurassic World, of all movies, is breaking every box office record? Well then.

It’s hard to express how that makes me feel. I could scream and gag and cry and fall into a deep depression. And there’s no movie that can fix me. What’s that? Another off-screen interjection? I should look no further than Inside Out? So there’s hope after all… Continue reading Inside Out (2015): Pixar Goes to Therapy →

Academy Awards, Featured

Inside Out (2015)

Pixar’s most recent creation, Inside Out, is not a children’s movie as it is advertised to be. The animation and young protagonist, Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), may suggest that the movie is for the ten and under crowd, but it most certainly is a movie that is better suited for an older audience. Now, this is not just a long-winded attempt at justifying the fact that I sat in a theater crowded with six-year olds to see this movie; it is a credit to Pixar for their ability to disguise an emotionally complex and subtly humorous film as a children’s movie. They have wisely used this model several times over, which has led to their vast success. Inside Out, even more so than other Pixar films, is able to not only entertain kids, parents, and everyone in between (or just me in between), but also provide a powerful message about the power and role of emotions.

It is no coincidence that Inside Out is a movie entirely about emotions, mostly centered on Joy (Amy Poehler) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith) because throughout the movie, at least the older portion of the audience goes on a journey of emotion as well, mostly between joy and sadness. As the protagonist Riley tries to adjust to her new life after moving from the comfort of her Minnesota home to San Francisco, we see how she and her emotions (Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust) handle the transition.

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Featured

Goodfellas (1990)

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What’s your favorite shot from Goodfellas? I know, I know. It’s like asking which of your children you love the most. The sheer rewatchability of the seminal mafia film is largely due to the intimate composition of each shot, the flow of one into the next, the exhilarating pace of it all. Goodfellas arguably has more flashy camerawork than any other Martin Scorsese film, but it never feels out of place or discordant with the story. It helped that the Director of Photography was the legendary Michael Ballhaus, a cinematographer who worked frequently with Scorsese. In fact, it helped that pretty much everyone on the production was at the top of their game.

So the time has come: the pick of the litter, the crème de la crème, the nonpareil of Goodfellas shots. There’s the slow-mo Tommy Gun shot, the red-lit trunk shot, the explosion as Young Henry dashes into the foreground. There’s The One Where Samuel L. Jackson’s Stacks Gets Shot Out of Nowhere. Guns are pointed directly at the camera twice, and either time could qualify for short odds in this cinematography round robin.

Goodfellas (1990)
Goodfellas (1990)
Goodfellas (1990)
Goodfellas (1990)

There’s the Vertigo shot, one of the more drawn-out examples of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous camera trick:

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Featured

Don’t Look Now (1973)

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1973 was a hell of a year at the movies. Bruce Lee kicked ass in Enter the Dragon, Roger Moore debuted as Bond in Live and Let Die, and smalltown California got its romantic due in American Graffiti. There was Sydney Pollack‘s The Way We Were, Sam Peckinpah‘s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Robert Altman‘s The Long Goodbye. Martin Scorsese and Terrence Malick announced themselves as filmmakers to be reckoned with upon the respective releases of Mean Streets and Badlands, and Michael Crichton made cinematic history with technological advances in Westworld. Then there’s The Sting, which I’m always willing to defend in a battle to the death as Greatest Film Ever. But these are more than just great movies — these are unique and fresh-seeming efforts, influential to this day because they all pushed the envelope.

And though the horror genre received more than a few landmark films that year — The Exorcist, The Wicker Man, etc. — Nicholas Roeg’s grief-stricken terror Don’t Look Now might be the scariest. It’s certainly the most engrossing. Envelope-pushing apparently wouldn’t cut it for Roeg and Company, as the incredibly intense Venice-set thriller does more to explode the envelope into a zillion tiny bloodstained pieces. The story follows John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) in the months following the accidental drowning of their daughter Christine. Paralyzed by anguish, the couple retreat to Venice. Soon, they encounter a pair of women claiming to have a connection to the deceased Christine.

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Featured

Manglehorn (2014)

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Discovered an alternate universe the other day. Stumbled upon it by accident, stayed for a while to check it out. Pretty weird. Their eggs and ham are green and Transformers: Age of Extinction won Best Picture. Hoverboards are the primary mode of travel, everyone’s wearing Air McFlys. Don’t know why, but strong suspicion that George Bailey never existed. Can’t tell which universe is good and which is evil. Met their film director David Gordon Green and discovered him to be a talentless hack who sold out after making a few good movies and now just makes big budget stuff. He did the Oscar-winning Transformers. They’ve him to thank for those Batman/Terminator crossover movies and can look forward to his upcoming Star Wars anthology film R2-D2 Rises. In their universe David Gordon Green also directed Pineapple Express and Your Highness and The Sitter…ah, no, wait, that’s ours.

Thankfully, our David Gordon Green turned away from the big budget stuff in order to make movies like Manglehorn. While Bizarro DGG turned to the dark side and never came back, the chunk of studio comedies characterized by Pineapple Express, Your Highness and The Sitter just seems like a temporary detour in our world. Even if you liked those flicks, the point stands that Green’s career has followed one of the more unpredictable paths you’re likely to find on any Hollywood résumé. His first several features were intimate character dramas, beginning with the phenomenal coming-of-age tale George Washington. Most were well-received and all were small-scale, independent features. Understandable, then, that when three green things converged — money, weed, and David Gordon — and resulted in Pineapple Express, more than a few eyebrows headed north.

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Featured

Blue Ruin (2013)

First of all, I would like to note that I constantly find myself referring to this movie as “Blue Ribbon.” Thanks, college.

Blue Ruin…HOLY F@#K!! I had heard about this movie maybe a year or so ago, and seeing that it garnered an impressive 96 percent Freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I quickly hopped over to my IMDb app to put it on my Watchlist.  I must regrettably say that I wasted that year or so of my life not watching this movie.

I thought: Ok, so this is a smaller, independent film, I don’t see any actors I really know on the cast list, nor am I familiar with the director, Jeremy Saulnier (who to this day has only helmed three features); it has to be at least decent given the reviews, and the plot looks kinda cool.  I was expecting a slower movie, that built and built to an awesome, explosive climatic conclusion. That seems to be the way most well-received indie action flicks go, right?  Well, maybe. But not Blue Ruin. Not in the slightest.

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Film Review

A Deadly Adoption (2015)

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You have to put a lot of effort in if you want to get a perfect score in anything worthwhile, and the reverse is also true: if you want to score a pure 0%, you still have to work pretty damn hard. After forgetting to put your name at the top of the quiz, you basically need to know the right answers to all of the questions in order to then select the wrong answers, which, of course, begs the question as to why you didn’t just shoot for the A+ instead. This would be nearly paradoxical if it wasn’t just a plainly obvious certainty.

A Deadly Adoption is a bit like that, except that the people intentionally flunking the exam are getting paid handsomely to do it and their classmates are zipping around the playground after the period’s over spreading the word about how cool they are. Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig have been getting pretty good grades so far, but now that the popular table has…aw, f*ck it. Extended metaphors are for the more involved. Besides, we’re talking about passing/failing something worthwhile, which is a thing A Deadly Adoption is absolutely not.

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Slow West (2015)

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These days, Westerns seem to either be smaller art-house fare or destined box-office flops. Michael Agresta’s phenomenal article “How the Western Was Lost (and Why It Matters)” touches on a few reasons why — see The Lone Ranger, Cowboys & Aliens, Jonah Hex, or don’t see them — and a few reasons the erosion of the genre marks a sad day for American Cinema. Agresta is mainly writing about the public perception of the Western and not necessarily about whether Jonah Hex is any good or not (it’s not), and so the commentary on the smaller art-house stuff is limited. He’d agree, though, I think, that the more limited platform of independent and small-studio filmmaking is where the majority of “good” Westerns are being produced these days.

And Slow West is somewhat of an interesting film to consider in the larger context of The American Western, a long-standing genre with a hugely important but slightly malleable history as outlined by Agresta. Starring Kodi Smit-McPhee as the young dreamer Jay and Michael Fassbender as the mysterious drifter Silas, Slow West is an undeniably style-heavy piece that takes full advantage of the fact that it’s not a big-budget tentpole. In doing so, the film retains a self-awareness that manages to be less wink-wink than you might expect.

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Take Two

True Detective (2014): A Man Without a Family

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Our Take Two column offers second opinions and alternative angles on films and TV series reviewed elsewhere on Motion State. See below for our original reviews of True Detective.

“Past a certain age,” advises Marty Hart, “a man without a family can be a bad thing.” This is 2012 Hart, slightly overweight Hart, reelin’-in-the-years Hart. This is the Hart that’s about to recount the majority of the events of True Detective‘s first season, the 1995 Dora Lange case that the retired detective has long since considered closed. This is also the version of Martin Hart that no longer has a family — he’s cheated on his wife repeatedly, notably in 1995 and again in 2002, and so she and the kids have long since left. After seventeen years he’s still the same person, though, as it’s very Hart-like that he should describe himself with such accuracy without even meaning to do so.

Family is a major theme at the center of True Detective‘s rookie year, and Hart’s judgement begins to reveal why. He approaches his family with more or less the same mentality he applies to his job as State Police Detective: it’s duty. His is the American nuclear family, traditional in the way that would make social conservatives nod in approval, with working father, aproned mother, two daughters, a front lawn, a white picket fence. To Marty this is very much a patriarchal nuclear family, which casts him as father in the primary role of moral authority, social privilege, property control, etc. Though our perception of this slowly erodes over the course of the eight-episode season, Marty, years later in 2012, refuses to believe anything else to be the case.

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Featured

Apocalypse Now (1979)

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Oftentimes our “reviews” here at Motion State aren’t reviews at all, really, but just tangentially-related trivia-night factoids stretched into meandering essays posing as criticism (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, among others). Think sitting down for dinner and accidentally filling up on appetizers — every now and then it just happens. This is that, essentially, except today we’re filling up on dessert.

During the grueling production of Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal Apocalypse Now, his wife Eleanor took copious notes and video footage with an eventual resolve to distill it all into a documentary about the making of the film. She never found the proper “angle” for a documentary feature, but Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now was eventually published in 1995. And the unedited, uncensored writings are probably a better peek into Apocalypse Now than a film would have been, because here there is no “angle” — there’s only the experience of being there as the film came together.

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