nico-hvi Reviews

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Macguffin the movie

[5/10 · 7 September 2014]

Hey, lets get this thing because we want to sell it. No wait, let's totally sell it to this other dude. Aw man, his secretary totally went nuts for some reason and tried to destroy the universe, bummer - luckily no one from our group called an army on us.

Aw man, this other guy totally has the thing now - and, since he's evil incarnate, wants to use it to destroy everything. We should totally stop him by flying a spaceship into him, and if that doesn't work we'll just shoot him twice with the same gun, because the second time it will totally work.

Chris Pratt's pretty funny though.

Blue Jasmine (2013)

Insightful movie about unlikeable people

[6/10 · 12 January 2014]

A Woody Allen film which gets everything right is a fantastic experience (Midnight in Paris), though even with a few misses here and there a film can still be very good (Match Point, Vicky Christina Barcelona) which is why I had very high expectations for this film. Unfortunately, I was unable to enjoy it due to the unlikeable cast of characters, which seemed to be a (somewhat interesting) randomly thrown together group of broken people - some more broken than others.

Obviously Blanchett's performance is amazing - my only gripe with it is that I could not muster a shred of empathy for her character, due to her utter pretentiousness and shallow nature. Apparently I need to be able to empathise with a character in order to be properly invested in the movie (which I realise is more of a personal problem than one of the movie - but hey, movie reviews are subjective) and I could not for the life of my find one likable person in this entire movie.

All in all the film is very well directed, has some lovely scenes showcasing San Francisco and there're some interesting social situations which arise, but ultimately they didn't matter much to me personally because I was halfway through a season of Football Manager 2014 for the dramatic finale because I had lost interest and was mostly phoning it in.

The Spectacular Now (2013)

Shallow to a fault, yet with some redeeming features

[6/10 · 19 December 2013]

Common adjectives used in reviews of this film were words like "charming", and "charismatic" - adjectives used to describe the main character, Sutter Keely (played by Miles Teller). I will use neither, because quite frankly I found Sutter's character to be neither charming, nor charismatic. In fact I felt he completely lacked depth and character (ironically enough), and thus found it extremely hard to empathize with him - which, for a film relying heavily upon empathy to get its message across, does not bode well.

In the early stages of the film you're told (by Sutter himself) that he is the life of every party, that he has tons of friends etc., but you never really see any evidence of this. The only time I ever saw a resemblance of friendship was during his conversations with Ricky, which sort of undermines the entire point of Sutter being 'popular'. At one point in the film it's noted that Sutter is thought of as a 'joke' by several people, but we never see any mention of this so it's hard to make sense of this comment, because we're not given any context. His mom also claims that 'everybody loves him', but again we're shown no examples of this and, hey, what mom doesn't say that to her kids?

The love interest is played very believably by Shailene Woodley (what a weird name), and is a redeeming feature of this film because she makes the main character realize what a complete douche he is (even though it takes a while). However, their relationship feels extremely like a case of "Hey, I can get with this girl - though I don't really want to, but there's no one else around at the moment - so why not?', and I don't really see that lasting, even though Mr. Neustadter and Mr. Weber insist in the final scenes that 'common, why not? Stranger things have happened, right?'.

Sutter does finally realize that he's a total tool by always keeping things shallow, and literally being buzzed all the time as a defence mechanism (which I thought was a nice touch), and tries to turn things around. This final realization was good, but the film had yet to show any redeeming qualities of Sutter's personality to make me really care for the guy (I mean they did try to shove it in our face by saying "Hey, he totally carried this kid's books when he was in third grade and really didn't have to", but that's just lazy storytelling). In the end, it just felt like too little too late.

In my opinion this film comes off as too shallow to truly pack the emotional punch needed for it to work (though there are some nice scenes here and there), and as an example of a better coming-of-age story combined with personal drama I'd strongly recommend the fantastic Mud (2012) instead.

Thor: The Dark World (2013)

... but it sure is entertaining!

[6/10 · 3 November 2013]

Those words were uttered quite often by myself (also to myself) as I walked home from the theatres after watching Thor: The Dark World. The story makes little to no sense and incorporates all the tropes one would expect: the monster of the week (Dark Elves this time around, the Frost Giants seem to be a distant memory), some enemies become friends and Chris Hemsworth takes of his shirt.

However, even though I've never been a fan of 'accepting something for what it is', that is exactly what this movie forces you to do. It doesn't attempt to make any sense, nor does it even slightly attempt to take itself seriously. I think the last time I laughed out loud so much during a movie was watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and that says a lot.

This movie truly is a stellar example of an action comedy, but could benefit greatly from a slightly more coherent plot. All in all though - well worth the watch.

Frances Ha (2012)

An 86-minute insight into the life of a pretentious, shallow group of people

[2/10 · 8 September 2013]

I had high hopes for this movie, I really did. We ended up seeing it because Blue Jasmine wasn't showing anymore, which seemed like a natural choice since Frances Ha was being touted as a a'modern Woody Allen-movie' http://goo.gl/0sHCY2 (which in itself is a stupid classification since many of Allen's movies are timeless, but whatever).

What I expected was a thoughtful display into the inner life of an interesting person dealing with existential dilemmas (who am I when I'm all alone? How do my friends define me? How can I decide on which values in life broaden rather than cheapen it?), but instead found a group of pretentious people talking past each other.

Seriously, I couldn't find a single honest conversation in this entire movie, which sort of ruins the whole emphasis on dialogue. By 'honest' conversation I mean the actual investment of feeling into the words coming out of the mouths of the people maintaining the conversation, a good example of the opposite is this:

"You're my best friend"

"Totally"

"I'm moving out"

"I can't get this ring off of my finger"

Which is more or less taken directly out of a scene on the subway in Frances Ha. People might say this movie is 'quirky', 'fun' and 'well-written', and it might have some trace of all those characteristics, but in the end (for me, anyway) none of that matters when there isn't a trace of honesty left - who would want to watch a shallow, uninteresting, self-centered person experience random stuff for 1 hour and 24 minutes?

Warm Bodies (2013)

An insult to intelligence

[2/10 · 13 April 2013]

I came into the theatre expecting a coherent ("It's based on a novel so there has to be some consistency" I thought, stupidly) story set in a post-apocalyptic world (it's a zombie movie, after all) with some dark humour thrown into the mix for good measure. What I discovered was an inconsistent, bland, badly acted attempted romance-movie with ridiculous (not in the good way) dialogues.

In short: We meet a zombie (R) who has incredibly coherent thought processes for a zombie, yet chooses to eat brains for sustenance. If this garish action is really necessary we never truly find out, after all he doesn't eat for a week after meeting Julie (the bland, berating love interest badly played by Teresa Palmer), but the movie dismisses this rather vital part of information with the following mind-blowing dialogue.

Julie: Do you have to eat brains? R: Yes

Seriously.

The movie then goes on about how R is changing, yet the characters seem to ignore this fact - no one seems taken aback in the least that zombies suddenly can talk, even though it's been established that such a thing is impossible. Hell, the fact that they run seems very implausible to me seeing as how the entire intro sequence is dedicated to R telling us how he shuffles around all day and when he goes out to feed he literally says: "this is going to take a while", but I digress.

This is figuratively literally the tip of the iceberg, and just to illustrate this point, this is the way the movie handles the love interest losing her initial boyfriend (whom the movie then tries to turn into a douche bag by making him act like one in a dream sequence so we wouldn't be so creeped out when she makes out with the zombie who ate his brains).

R eats boyfriend's brain. R rescues Julie (by smearing what appears to be poop on her - I guess it was supposed to be blood) through some unexplained process several times. Julie NEVER mentions her ex-boyfriend. Suddenly, in a throw-away line, she explains that it's not that she's not sad - it's just that she prepared for this. Yeah, that's how emotions work.

There are still loads of things to point out (for instance how rotting zombies become super-human monsters once they totally flip out and become 'skellies'), but I hope my point has gotten across. The only reason I give this movie more than 1/10 is the way Analeigh Tipton says 'Sup?' to the zombie R when he (successfully) wins Julie back after having explained to her that he ate her boyfriend's brain, but has now walked a couple of miles so it should be okay.