Weekly Movie Reviews: Nov 12-18, 2017

Favorite Movie of the Week

The Beguiled (2017)

During the American Civil War, a young student at Miss Martha Farnsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies in Virginia finds wounded Union soldier John McBurney and brings him back to the school. Miss Farnsworth’s first thought is to turn him over to Confederate troops but she is persuaded by her students to nurse him back to health first. As he recovers, tension in the school reaches its boiling point as various women start to compete for his attention.

I am an unabashed fan of Sofia Coppola’s work though and I was not disappointed. I read a a few reviews that claimed that it was boring and I can see why people would think that. There is not much overt drama, the movie relies on the subtle interactions between characters and how they shift and change as McBurney’s presence affects the women. It is not Sofia Coppola’s slowest work though (that would be Somewhere) and it is positively action-packed at the end. I haven’t read the book or seen the previous movie adaptation so I don’t know how this film compares to those.

The cast is brilliant – the women at the house include Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning, and Colin Farrell plays McBurney. The setting is haunting and its isolation and atmosphere seems to drive the plot as much as any of the characters. The pacing seems slow at first glance but every scene has its purpose and I thought the movie had a tight focus all the way through.

Other Movies Watched

Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

Daniel Hillard (Robin Williams) is a recently divorced and out-of-work actor who is heartbroken that he doesn’t get to see his kids every day anymore. When his ex-wife mentions that she’s looking for a housekeeper, he disguises himself as a prim old lady and gets the job. He can’t keep it up forever though, and his double life eventually catches up to him.

Mrs. Doubtfire is a classic for a reason, it is a fantastic comedy backed by tons of heart. I don’t think anybody but Robin Williams could have pulled off these role, he switches effortlessly between his two personas and stays extremely sympathetic throughout it all. The other characters have integrity as well and aren’t just played for laughs even when it is easy to do so (such as Pierce Brosnan’s character who plays the ex-wife’s new beau). Despite the ridiculous hijinks, this movie has enough realism to make it seem grounded overall.

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

Everybody Wants Some!! follows a group of college baseball players over the course of the two days before the semester officially begins. It’s a Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise, Boyhood) movie and as is often the case, it’s primarily slice of life and doesn’t really have an elaborate narrative. The only thing resembling a plot is that the protagonist, freshman pitcher Jake, settles in at college.

I read that this movie was intended as a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused (which takes place on the last day of high school) and that made complete sense to me; it has a very similar feel. As with Linklater’s other movies, it doesn’t feel like you’re watching people act, it feels like documentary footage of real people (albeit ones that are slightly more interesting than average). It is set in 1980 and the characters and the locations actually seem like they’re from a different era unlike most other movies set in the past. I’m not sure what else to say about this movie except that if you like other Linklater movies, it’s everything you hoped it would be. I love this genre and I wish more directors made slice-of-life movies like this.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

Will Rodman (James Franco) is a scientist working on a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, which he tests on chimpanzees. One of the drugs has the inadvertent effect of greatly increasing the chimpanzee’s intelligence, but before this can be fully explored, Will’s project is shut down and he ends up rescuing a baby chimp who he names Caesar. Caesar is incredibly intelligent but he is still an animal and treated as such by most people. Eventually he gets taken away from his family and placed in an ape sanctuary, where he figures out how to empower himself.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is an origin story for how Earth came to become the Planet of the Apes, so I had a rough idea of where the movie was going. I didn’t expect it to have great characters that I was emotionally invested in, though. This isn’t just a good science-fiction movie, it is a good movie. Caesar does not feel like a CGI character; he shows as much depth of feeling as any of the humans (Andy Serkis’s performance is a large part of this, of course) and makes for a compelling protagonist.

Midnight Run (1988)

Robert De Niro plays Jack Walsh, a bounty hunter given an assignment to locate Mafia accountant Jonathan “The Duke” Mardukas (Charles Grodin) who has jumped bail. Finding him is easy, but getting him back to Los Angeles from New York is next to impossible with the Mafia, the FBI and a rival bounty hunter all wanting to get their hands on Mardukas.

I had never heard of this movie until recently and I’m not sure why it’s not very well-known, it’s surprisingly good! The plot is like Planes, Trains & Automobiles except with the addition of a bunch of baddies chasing the main characters (who don’t want to be traveling with each other anyway). It doesn’t take itself too seriously but by the end of the movie, you realize the characters are really memorable and you care about them. Robert De Niro is excellent as usual, and he has terrific chemistry with Charles Grodin. I’m already looking forward to seeing it again.

Bring It On (2000)

Torrance Shipman can’t wait to start the school year as the new captain of the Toros, her high school’s championship-winning cheerleading squad. Her plans fall apart when she realizes that the previous captain of the squad stole their routines from an inner-city school and they have to start from scratch in order to have any hope of making it to the nationals.

Bring It On sticks to all the usual teen movie stereotypes but I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. Despite the fluffy content, the characters seem like genuinely nice people and I thought the movie had heart. Kirsten Dunst is one of my favorite actresses and she is great as the protagonist Torrance. Her love interest, Cliff, is played by Jesse Bradford and unlike most love interests in this kind of movie, he actually had a personality. I did wish that the actual cheerleading was a bit more interesting, though; the process of the Toros coming up with their final championship routine is completely glossed over so it was hard to fathom why they couldn’t choreograph those as soon as they realized their current routine would not work.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-poster

Ten years after the events of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar has become the leader of an ape colony hidden in the Muir Woods and humanity has been nearly wiped out by the Simian Flu virus. When a group of human survivors from San Francisco start to encroach on ape territory, at first Caesar is able to establish peace with them. But, there are rogue elements on both sides that hope to provoke a war and destroy the other side for once and for all.

A lot more main characters are apes now and they are just as compelling as the human characters, which is pretty amazing given that they are all CGI and motion capture. Andy Serkis as Caesar steals the show as always. The human characters do a fine job with the material they have but they are clearly not the stars of the show. I was hoping to see Caesar’s human family again, but this franchise seems to be telling the larger story of the downfall of humanity and the rise of the apes.

My Own Private Idaho (1991)

Mike (River Phoenix) is a narcoleptic street hustler living in Portland. When his narcolepsy ruins his latest assignation with a client, his friend and fellow hustler Scott (Keanu Reeves) takes care of him as he often does. The two of them decide to go on a quest to find Mike’s biological mother, taking them across the country and all the way to Italy.

My Own Private Idaho is poignant and intense, it feels like a modern epic. Scott’s character and arc are based on Shakespeare’s Henry IV and V plays and the dialogue involving him is often Shakespearean. Mike is a wholly original character (and the main protagonist of the movie), and his story reminded me a lot of Jon Voight’s character in Midnight Cowboy; they’re both street hustlers with screwed up pasts that they haven’t reconciled themselves with. This weird juxtaposition of Mike and Scott’s stories somehow works very well; River Phoenix’s phenomenal performance is definitely a big part of it.

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

This is the third movie in the new Planet of the Apes series, set two years after Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Caesar’s apes are at war with the human military and are not doing very well. As the apes flee in an attempt to find sanctuary, Caesar finds that he can no longer push aside his anger and sets out on his own quest for vengeance.

I enjoyed this series far more than I anticipated, but War for the Planet of the Apes was my least favorite because, as the title suggests, it’s a war movie and there isn’t a lot of character-based drama or interesting worldbuilding compared to the earlier ones. It is still very good, though. Andy Serkis continues to do an excellent job playing Caesar and holds together the emotional center of the movie admirably. I knew what the ending had to be, but the movie made me feel genuine tension about what was going to happen and how the apes would survive.

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