Weekly Movie Reviews: Jan 15-21, 2017

Favorite Movie of the Week

Captain Fantastic (2016)

Disillusioned with the standard American lifestyle, Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife Leslie have made the unusual choice of moving to the middle of the woods and homeschooling their six children, teaching them survivalism and critical thinking in addition to the usual curriculum. The kids end up being ridiculously smart and athletic, but know very little about the world. When Leslie (who has been hospitalized for bipolar disorder) kills herself, the rest of her family is forced to reintegrate into society in order to attend her funeral.

This is very much a quirky comedy drama (think Little Miss Sunshine) about a “weird” family that is still very close to each other. It reminded me of the movie The Mosquito Coast, except that unlike Harrison Ford’s character, Ben Cash isn’t a raging egomaniac and so it didn’t all end in tragedy.

Captain Fantastic is a great movie, but it is very much constrained by the genre that it aspires to be. The first half of the movie explores the uniqueness of the Cash family, but it soon hits some predictable notes of emotional drama that’s clearly just an impetus for the character growth it’s trying to get to, and it doesn’t quite ring true. It devolves into a more formulaic movie after that, culminating in a disappointingly conformist and saccharine ending. The ending also felt inconsistent – earlier scenes in the movie emphasized the good things about Ben and Leslie’s decisions on how to raise their kids (the scene where Zaja talks about the Bill of Rights, for example), but the ending seems to imply that they would have better off being normal all along. If it wasn’t trying so hard to be a feel-good inoffensive movie, Captain Fantastic might have actually had something unique to say.

That being said, I think this movie was very good – I’m only complaining about it because it was so close to being extraordinary. The acting in particular is amazing – the child actors help carry the film just as much as Viggo Mortensen does, which is saying a lot.

Other Movies Watched

The Revenant (2015)

I was really not looking forward to watching this movie (despite it winning so many awards) because it just looked so bleak. A faithful look at the things that humans had to do to survive in the wilderness in the 1820s seemed like it wouldn’t be very pleasant to watch, either.  And both of those things are true – the movie is excruciating to watch at times, and it is indeed unrelentingly bleak. But it’s also very good, and it’s a satisfying revenge story. Leonardo DiCaprio is phenomenal as the protagonist Hugh Glass, who is abandoned by his companions far from civilization after being mauled by a bear. It’s based loosely on a real life story, but the grimmest elements are all completely fictional. Tom Hardy is terrifying as the villainous Fitzgerald, he made me physically uncomfortable sometimes. It’s definitely worth watching, especially for the cinematography – it has some incredibly stunning shots of landscapes.

The Phantom of the Opera (2004)

I don’t usually enjoy musicals very much, so I wasn’t enthusiastic about watching The Phantom of the Opera. I saw it on Broadway a few years ago, so I’m familiar with the story. It was actually a pretty good movie, though. The music is probably the best part – it’s haunting and beautifully sung. Emmy Rossum (who I like from other things) does a great job as the wide-eyed and innocent Christine Daae, and Patrick Wilson (as Raoul) has a great singing voice as well. I didn’t really like Gerard Butler as the Phantom, though. I thought he had the weakest voice, and he didn’t come across as very sympathetic.

Deepwater Horizon (2016)

I didn’t know much about Deepwater Horizon except that there was an oil spill, I had no idea that it was an oil rig that exploded and people lost their lives. This was a pretty standard “real life disaster” movie, starting off with things being normal, showing the main character’s loving wife and cute kid, and then recreating the day of the disaster. I enjoyed it because I didn’t know much about the world of oil drilling so I learned a few things, plus I like Mark Wahlberg and Kurt Russell.

Æon Flux (2005)

In 2415, most of humanity has been wiped out by a plague, and all of the survivors live in the futuristic city of Bregna, ruled by the Goodchild dynasty. The Monicans are the resistance against the Goodchilds, and Æon Flux (Charlize Theron) is the most deadly of them. When she is assigned to kill Chairman Trevor Goodchild, in the course of completing her mission, she realizes that there’s a lot she doesn’t know about the world and now she has to figure out what the right thing to do is. I really wanted to like this movie – it’s stylized and slick sci-fi and the set design is gorgeous. It lacked something, though – it either didn’t succeed at being stylized enough to be good, or maybe it’s just that the world seemed implausible and not lived-in, and the characters were fairly emotionless and it was hard to relate to them.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

We weren’t really looking forward to this movie because it doesn’t have any of the usual The Fast and the Furious characters, but we committed to watching the series in order, so we had to get to it. Going into it with absolutely zero expectations, it wasn’t that bad. It follows American teenager Sean who gets into trouble for racing cars and causing property damage a little too often, so instead of going to jail, he gets sent to Tokyo to live with his dad (not sure how that works.) Of course, he ends up racing cars again, but he’s taken under the wing of Han, a garage owner who apparently doesn’t care about how much damage Sean does in his quest to actually learn how to race well. Eventually Sean figures out how to race well, beat his Yakuza-connected rival, and get his girlfriend. Because this movie is about teenagers, it’s a little bit less fun than the other movies, but exactly what you’d expect otherwise. There is a Vin Diesel cameo, which was nice.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)

We enjoyed the first Jack Reacher movie so I was looking forward to this one, but unfortunately it was a disappointment. Tom Cruise reprises his role as former Army military policeman and lone wolf Jack Reacher, this time unraveling a conspiracy that has his military contact Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders) accused of espionage. Jack Reacher is an unusual protagonist, but his uniqueness is neutered by having to partner with a love interest and an annoying teenager for the entire movie. The acting, especially by the actress who plays his potential daughter, wasn’t that great either. Rotten Tomatoes calls it “monotonously formulaic”, and that’s a great way of putting it.

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