My holiday week movie grades: -- (edited)
Posted by
David (aka David)
Jan 4 '16, 10:00
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In the Heart of the Sea: C. Utterly pointless. It's like they wrote an entire script to justify a couple of minutes of whale CGI.
Joy: C - Kim said it best during the film. The parts involving QVC were a true A and the skeleton of a better movie. Virtually everything else was an F, and that goes triple for the half-sister character, one of the worst written in recent cinema.
The Hateful Eight: C+. Even by QT standards, it was overly indulgent and slow. If it had been an hour shorter, it could have been solid. The more I think about it, the less I like it.
The Good Dinosaur: B-. This is down there with A Bug's Life for worst Pixar movie. It's remarkably straightforward and lacking in the storytelling whimsy I've come to expect from them. I simply cannot imagine what this film looked like 18 months ago if THIS was the good version.
Minions: B. Oddly, this felt more like a Three Stooges movie than the actual Three Stooges movie. While it was slapstick and targeted toward five-year-olds, it's still charming enough. I laughed quite a bit.
The Revenant: B. I liked it a lot more than I expected based on the ads, but it's still not really my kind of movie. This one could go up to a B+ on re-watch. I don't have any real complaints about it beyond the bear attack looking ridiculous. Pioneer stuff has never done much for me.
The Danish Girl: B+. For all the praise Redmayne's received, Vikander was the star of this film. So, that's the second straight awards contender where a woman carried him. I very much liked them as a passionate, adventurous couple at the start of this film, which is what makes the entire story so heartbreaking to watch unfold. Even if the ending is telegraphed, it's told extremely well. This is the first Tom Hooper production I've truly enjoyed.
The End of the Tour: A. As much as Kim has talked about David Foster Wallace over the years, I was kind of stunned to see how much this particular portrayal of him reminded me of myself save for the self-confidence issue. He has this air of innocence and a driving need to make people feel better about themselves yet he gets angry and petty once threatened by a writer of similar stature.
I greatly enjoyed Jason Segel in this role, and it's the closest thing he's done to Freaks and Geeks in many years. I hope he gets more dramatic work from this, because he's a revelation here. Out of all the movies I mention here, this is the one I think ST would enjoy the most. It's the literary successor to Almost Famous in terms of exploration of what it means to be a gifted but self-destructive artist.
Steve Jobs: A. For all the behind the scenes intrigue over this production, I was stunned by the impeccable quality of it. I understand why Sony would take the easy road by not supporting it, but this is one of their best releases of the 2000s. It deserves a better fate.
Bridge of Spies: A. After about a half hour, I asked Kim who the actor is that portrays the KGB spy. At this point, she laughed since I've been making jokes about Mark Rylance for a while now. I totally get it now. This is clearly the best supporting performance of the year, and the chemistry between Hanks and him is ridiculous given how little screen time they actually share.
The Big Short: A+. If you're not hooked by the first celebrity cameo, you're nuts. Given the brutal fate of The Brink, this is the closest we're going to get to another episode of the series. It's precisely the same tone, only in cinematic form. And it's sublime. I don't know exactly when Adam McKay got this good, but I'm in awe of how well he implemented actual dialogue from a book about economic malfeasance into hilarious, engaging storytelling. This is the most vibrant directing job in recent memory.
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