Weekly Movie Reviews: Jan 29-Feb 4, 2017
Favorite Movie of the Week
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), a young man in New York City in the 50s, is struggling to get by on small jobs. He is given the opportunity to travel to Italy to convince Dickie Greenleaf, a wealthy industrialist’s son, to come back home and take on some responsibility. When he gets to Italy, he falls in love with Dickie’s lifestyle, and ends up taking extreme measures to ensure that he doesn’t lose it.
I absolutely love this movie, and it’s probably Matt Damon’s best performance ever. You can see echoes of his character in The Good Shepherd, The Informant! and even Interstellar, but none of those roles beat Tom Ripley. He’s clearly a monster, but you can’t help but sympathize with him, especially given Dickie’s cavalier attitude towards the feelings of other people (Jude Law does a brilliant job of being an absolute cad) and the casual attitude that Ripley’s acquaintances have towards their privilege. Matt Damon makes Ripley seem tragic, not despicable – how could you hate someone so consumed, but only looking to preserve themselves?
The ending of this movie is brutal, but it’s the only ending that makes sense. I highly recommend this movie.
Other Movies Watched
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
This is probably the third or fourth time I’ve watched this movie (although not all of them have been the extended edition like this one was.) It’s a big time investment – it’s over four hours long, but it’s amazing.
This is the Gondor movie, it’s where we first see Minas Tirith, and the Battle of the Pelennor Fields happens. There are some seriously good moments – Eowyn battling the Witch-King of Angmar, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli descending upon the Corsairs with the Army of the Dead, Sam carrying Frodo up Mount Doom, Aragorn’s response to the hobbits bowing to him, and so on. I’m always a tiny bit miffed that the Scouring of the Shire didn’t make it to film, but given how long the ending of this movie is, I understand why they cut it. I love this movie!
The Insider (1999)
The real-life story of Jeffrey Wigand, a former top executive at a tobacco company turned whistleblower, and Lowell Bergman, the producer at 60 Minutes who helped him tell his story despite enormous pressure not to. This is an excellent movie, and Russell Crowe and Al Pacino do an excellent job as the leads. It’s directed by Michael Mann (who did Heat) and I don’t think he can make a bad movie – he pays meticulous attention to every detail. The first half of the movie has the feel of a thriller (as the tobacco company tries to silence Wigand), which is not usual for biopics, but apparently all the details of the story are real.
The Beaver (2011)
A quirky movie about a severely depressed man, Walter (Mel Gibson), who discovers that he can turn his life around by inventing an alternate persona using a talking beaver puppet. I thought this would be just another fluffy movie, but it takes on the realities of mental illness straight on, which takes it to some dark places, although the ending is upbeat. It’s directed by and stars Jodie Foster, and she’s great in everything she does. Walter’s son’s story is probably the weakest part of the movie, although Anton Yelchin does an excellent job. It was weird to see Jennifer Lawrence playing an average high school girl, I’m used to her playing an outlier.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
For a Star Trek fan, I’m ashamed that I haven’t seen all the movies yet (well, maybe not Star Trek V), so I’m glad we’re starting to watch them. After watching this one, I just have Star Trek III and Star Trek V to go, although we will be watching the movies in order and rewatching the ones I’ve already seen. I’d heard bad things about this movie, but it’s actually pretty good. It’s definitely slow, and feels more like a high-budget and long episode of the show (in terms of plot), but it’s good. It’s filmed like it’s trying to be a serious science fiction film, and not just a Star Trek movie, and I thought that was cool. I wish the most recent Star Trek film series would take some cues from this and be more thoughtful.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)
We’ve only watched the first two movies of this series, and only the theatrical editions, but we recently bought the extended edition set, and now that we’ve finished rewatching Lord of the Rings, we’re watching through The Hobbit.
I wish they had made the tone of these movies similar to the tone of the book (a more light hearted adventure), but once I got past that feeling, this is a pretty good movie. After all, Bilbo and the dwarves’ actions do hobble Sauron for a while, and Sauron is a pretty fearsome enemy, so I guess the epic tone makes sense. The first movie tells the story of the dwarves’ quest to reclaim Erebor from the Shire to when they finally arrive within sight of Erebor, with some flashbacks along the way.
I thought it was a little too fast paced (it is three hours long, but it seems like they’re constantly running from danger with no pauses.) It’s also really hard to tell most of the dwarves apart – I wish there had been more of an introduction to each character. It was great to see Frodo and Gollum again, though… and Galadriel and Saruman and Elrond and old Bilbo, and even Lindir (Bret McKenzie from Flight of the Conchords, who became a meme in the early days of internet memes.) And Martin Freeman is really great as Bilbo.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
The second movie in The Hobbit series, this tells the story of the dwarves quest until Smaug leaves the mountain to destroy Esgaroth (Lake-town.) I liked this movie more than the first one because it slows down a little. The wood elves of Mirkwood have a completely different temperament than the nice elves of Rivendell and Lothlórien, and Lee Pace plays King Thranduil (who happens to be the father of Legolas) chillingly. Legolas is in this movie quite a bit too, and he isn’t quite the friendly and laid back elf we know so well from The Lord of the Rings.
Martin Freeman as Bilbo continues to be marvelous – he’s really the heart of this series, everyone else is only interested in their own concerns. Benedict Cumberbatch is great as the voice of Smaug (and the Necromancer) too, you can tell he’s having fun hamming it up. I’m really looking forward to the third movie because I haven’t seen it yet, and because I’m curious to see how it all turns out since it needs to lay the groundwork for The Lord of the Rings. Everyone in this movie is entirely too suspicious and skeptical of each other – I don’t see how a fellowship of different races could have even come together in the political climate depicted in these movies.