We’re in prestige picture season now, folks, when the studios bust out their big guns. While TV is putting the axe to a few shows that faltered, the movie theatre is the place to be as the Oscar-bait roll-out begins. This week Jake Gyllenhaal grabs at the gold with a manic performance, Disney lets us meet Baymax who wants to meet Oscar, and Amanda Seyfried takes a spin on the shorter side of cinema. Plus Two and A Half Menreturns minus the half-man for one final season and three shows don’t make it past there first.
Movies: Can a film be both dazzling and terrifying? Disturbing and yet somehow droll? Prophetic and preposterous at the same time? It can, and 1976 taught us that with Sidney Lumet’s dark news satireNetwork. It’s bleak and bizarre skewering of 70’s television by imagining an absurd future for network news proved to be an oddly accurate depiction of the cable news era, and now Dan Gilroy attempts to do the same by crafting Lou Bloom, a sick obsessed loner who plays like Travis Bickel with a camera and a Horatio Algier sense of the American Dream.
In the wake of the 4Chan murder photos, we can feel the creeping chill of Nightcrawler’s prescience much sooner than even Gilroy could have imagined, and I’d imagine for those seeing the film with both that and the Farmingdale beheading burned into their brains, Gyllenhaal’s Joycian named journalist’s Homeric journey into the seedy world of L.A. night-crime and the people who cover it might be all the more unsettling. Within this brooding mood piece are the finest works of both Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo, who give Oscar worthy performances as the haunting Lou Bloom and Nina Romina, the news director who indulges Bloom’s lust for glory by any means necessary.
To dissect the twists and turns in this Michael Mann-esque neon blue chiller is, like many great films, diluting the impact of the startling, unsettling imagery. This dark thrill ride is like a tone poem of obscenity, or perhaps a Swift-ian eulogy for journalistic integrity. Either way, while not for the faint of heart, Nightcrawler is a remarkable piece of cinema that dares its viewers stare deep into the blackest heart of the American Dream.
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Wanna take the kids to the movies this weekend, but think Interstellar might be too complicated (it is, but more on that next week) and Nightcrawler might be too dark (Might be? Might be?!?! Dude, get your head in the game, man)? They wanna see a cartoon, but you wish instead that there was another Marvel movie coming out so you both could enjoy? Well, Disney’s served up a nice compromise with this rousing animated take on one of Marvel’s more obscure properties. Sure, there’s no Thor or Iron Man to be seen, but Big Hero 6 takes you to the streets of San Fransokyo to meet a whole new team of heroes, including the adorable, highly merchandisable Baymax that will have you and your kids both quoting the film to infinity and beyond (or all the way to Disney Infinity, the video game tie-in your kids will likely demand after watching the surprising amount of ass these animated heroes kick).
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TV: Well, by this point in the year there aren’t too many premieres, save this Halloween themed season debut for the once top-rated comedy, so lets dive in to the kick-off of what will be the final season of Two and a Half Men (and as someone just tuning in after dropping out years before Charlie Sheen did, I’m thrilled to see this bloated behemoth of laugh tracks collapse). The season opens with an in-joke as Jon Cryer’s Alan chooses to dress as Ducky from Pretty in Pink for Halloween (ya…ya get it? Cause Jon Cryer played Ducky) and that’s about the smartest joke we get as this premiere trudges through lame, easy joke after lame easy joke, the insipid CBS laugh track like a cruel mockery, or a surrealist commentary on the blandness of sitcoms, where after a while, the stereotypes and misfire zingers are seemingly taunted by the canned laughter like something from David Lynch’s Rabbits. By the end, we’re introduced to the season-long story arc where Ashton Kutcher’s billionaire needs to be married in order to adopt a baby because the in shape, healthy guy conveniently has a heart attack which changes his life and blah blah blah homophobic humor he wants to marry Alan. There, I just spared you a half-hour of drivel and indeed an entire TV season of dreadful humorless episodes before we all inevitably turn on the curio of a series finale, perhaps out of nostalgia for the CBS distraction we once turned to in its early days of adorable Jake and Oshikuru the Demon Samurai, or perhaps just to see if Charlie Sheen really does return. But for now, avoid it like the plague it is.
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News: Well, folks, you knew it was time. NBC killed Community in hopes that a new show would take its place, yet here we are in a year of Mysteries of Laura (which somehow got picked up for a full season). So another year of peacock misfires means another year of forgettable shows on the chopping block. Hope you weren’t too fond of NBC’s newest cutesy comedies, then again, if anybody were they probably wouldn’t have been canceled in the first place. That’s right, folks, say goodbye to the rom-com where the dead mom fromHIMYM hooked up with the nipple-less ad exec from Mad Men entitled A to Z, and send an extra bon voyage the way of Bad Judge; well, that’s assuming you know where they are, what channel, what day or what time, though I assume most readers don’t even know what either show it about (we don’t blame you). More surprising to some would be the loss of the much publicized Utopia over on Fox, as they’d actually likely heard of it, and maybe even watched the premiere. Of course, that’s likely where they stopped as ratings for the reality experiment dropped exponentially, proving some shows can be too dumb for even Fox to let live.
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Short Film: A reader recently got in touch with me and expressed a sentiment of frustration that I rarely negatively review a short film. Of course, I hadn’t noticed this myself. I felt I’ve reviewed some films in a less than stellar fashion at times, some that felt disappointing, or cliched. Admittedly, there hasn’t been a short film upon which I’ve spewed hate and vitriol the manner in which I did for, say, No Good Deed (though may I point out how little joy I took from The Little Mermaid), and perhaps that’s because I do view the shorts before selecting one for the column, and perhaps unconsciously felt like avoiding those which were just painful to endure, sparing our readers seven days of wondering what went wrong in the brain of that Buzz guys just so I could round out the week with a Ebert’s North review style rant. However, I’m always interested in responding to feedback, and therefor have decided not to pre-view the short films prior to their selection for the column, so as to be certain to give a wide range of opinions in my final weeks here. And with that, this week’s selection, the first selected in this new approach, was Dog Food, a short that boasts many a festival laurel and Les Miserables star Amanda Seyfried to boot.
Well, with an introduction like that, you can’t be expecting all sunshine and butterflies, can you? Not to rely on another man’s words, but allow me to quote the aforementioned patron saint of cinematic hate: “I hated this movie. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.” Yes, Dog Food is a failure which telegraphs every insipid twist well before it occurs, concluding with a moronic, first-year-in-film-school attempt at a clever ending, and one marvels that an actress with enough clout to get real work would stoop to something so childish and inane. it’s characters are ill-defined, so much so as to make every action every one takes be inexplicable rather than unpredictable as the director intended, as nothing that happens in the previous scene justifies anything that comes to pass in the next one. The fact that it received as many screenings as it did speaks volumes to the current state of the film festival and its favoring of star-power over storytelling, and confounds any who still believe in the future of small films with new ideas and good hearts being able to triumph over Hollywood money and big names.
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