Sage Cortez
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Any movie that opens with a GSP cameo sounds great to me, and the film as a whole certainly lived up to that. Surprisingly, I liked this the best of the Marvel movies. Wasn’t quite expecting for that to be the case. Robert Redford played a great villain, and one of the only real negatives in the movie was that he’d obviously be such right from the start. I don’t watch previews or anything like that, so it was just a guess. The Falcon’s flying scenes stole the show. The Bucky Barnes reveal was great, and I’m glad they didn’t go too far overboard with flashbacks. The reveal that Nick Fury was still alive was good too, but to be fair anyone could have seen that coming. If my handicapped cousin could figure it out, so should everyone else.
Of course, as anyone who’s seen this movie would know, the movie is quite low on dialogue and high on action. Some prefer that and some don’t. I think I am slightly in the minority that don’t. After watching this, I’m very confused as to why they haven’t made a Black Widow movie. The character is in need of a little fleshing out, but now that Ghost in the Shell flopped, I can’t see Marvel putting a green light on that one. The movie also nearly went overboard in terms of doing too much and introducing too many characters. Arnim Zola probably was not the best introduction, but at least it was short and they immediately killed the character off.
I have to go back and watch Thor 2 because I never paid attention to it, but that’s all the capeshit I’ll be watching for the next two weeks.
8/10
The Nice Guys
I genuinely do not know where to start with this. Between the gratuitous nudity, 1970’s setting, buddy cop story, and Ryan Gosling’s shtick, there was a lot here to carry the two hours. The movie started off very slowly and I’m sure a lot of people don’t give it their time as a result of that. I was surprised during the party scene by how much time was remaining in the movie. To me, it felt like it flew by pretty fast. I certainly wasn’t expecting there to be a child involved in the story, but the chemistry between Russell Crowe, the aforementioned Gosling, and Angourie Rice pulled that off pretty well. The plot wasn’t spectacular by any stretch. A guy who beats people up and a private investigator teaming up to find a woman who made a porno where the plot is more important than sex is a strange plot that doesn’t sound particularly great on paper. The villains in the movie were by no means spectacular. Yet, the movie is immensely watchable as a result of the chemistry between the leads. I couldn’t stop laughing at Gosling’s drunk behavior. It was very well acted.
With anyone other than Gosling and Crowe in these roles, it’s likely the entire thing falls apart. Kim Basinger’s role as the big bad was neither memorable nor noteworthy. Matt Bomer’s hitman who couldn’t shoot someone unless they were four feet away was somewhat amusing and not in a good way. None of these things are to say I didn’t like the movie, because I did. It’s just clear where the focus of the script and budget went. The trope of a Shane Black movie ending at Christmastime made me laugh extremely hard. This is way past a joke at this point. One thing I do somewhat regret about movies like these is that they never seem to do big business, which is going to lead to the eventual end of them. People would rather watch some CGI shit break through fake buildings for the 5th or 6th time rather than watch a movie with a setting like this, and that’s a shame. Movies like Transformers 4 where people go see the movie repeatedly even though it’s a pile of trash, to the tune of it doing over $1 billion are a good example of that.
7.5/10
Dr. Strangelove
With our current political situation being what it is, it may not have been the best time to watch this film. While AFI ranked it 3rd on their list of funniest movies, it wasn’t particularly funny to me at all. I didn’t dislike it, but it’s hard for jokes like the ones in this movie to be funny at this time. The character of Dr. Strangelove I found grating. Unfortunately, the character seemed very dated.
That being said, many of the main characters were quite intriguing. George C. Scott’s role as General Turgidson was the best of them. I found everything he said to be very interesting and in a movie where I had to pause it a few times to deal with a few things, I was sure to finish his monologues before doing so. Peter Sellers as Captain Mandrake was one of them. I didn’t realize that he also played the President, and finding out that he did so was quite a surprise. His attempts to persuade the also amusing Jack D. Ripper were enjoyable. Ripper was one of the things that bothered me the most about the movie, in fact. I tried to put my political views to the side, but you could substitute a few words in place of just two or three things he said and find those views well represented in our current government. Lastly, Slim Pickens playing the chucklefuck peckerwood flying the B-52 was both enjoyable and disturbing given how many people would sign right up to do such a duty.
That’s the overall point of the movie of course, and it certainly wasn’t lost on me. Perhaps I’d have liked the film more had these satirical aspects exposed any truths to me rather than reinforce things that I already believe. It was a very good movie, of course. At 94 minutes, it was sure to be finished before any of the gags had gone too far south. Some movies should take the message. I thought the cinematography was great and I believe I’ve read before that the movie helped popularize some of the more familiar camera shots and set pieces that were in it.
8/10
