Reel Entropy

The Gambler is an incredible, emotionally transformative experience… for me, personally. It is difficult to say how anyone else will react.

“I want a real fucking love and a real fucking home and a real fucking thing to do every day, and if I can’t have that I’d just, I’d just rather be dead.” Photos courtesy Paramount Pictures.

The title character, Jim Bennett (Mark Wahlberg), is entropy incarnate. He enters the film already several thousand dollars in debt to Lee (Alvin Ing), who has been sponsoring his nasty gambling habit. Bennett is a lean, mean bad decision machine, going down another $60,000 and adding another dangerous collector, Neville Baraka (Michael Kenneth Williams), in the film’s opening sequence after Lee had given him a seven day ultimatum to settle. A failed novelist turned college literature teacher, Bennett also fosters inappropriate relationships with several of his students.

The Gambler is the most cathartic portrayal of depression I’ve ever seen. Bennett isn’t addicted to anything — he’s severely depressed, cutting himself with blackjack cards instead of a razor. His defining characteristic is his refusal to live a life he’s unhappy with. He hates teaching, he resents his family and he’s actively trying to bring himself to ruin.

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47 days at sea — with a skilled barber, apparently. Look at those smooth cheeks. Photos courtesy Universal Pictures.

When real life is more interesting than its fictional adaptation, that fiction has a big problem.

Unbroken tells the least interesting parts of the very interesting true story of Louie Zamperini (Jack O’Connell), an Olympic distance runner who joined the Army Air Force in World War II. Zamperini crashes and is stranded at sea for 47 days and four million hours of hilariously over-acted screen time, and is then captured an imprisoned by the Japanese, a culture not known for its kind treatment of enemy combatants. Mutsuhiro “The Bird” Watanabe (Miyavi), an especially cruel prison camp commander, takes special interest in Zamperini.

Everything about this movie is boring and flat and grey and, just, boring. The conflict in this movie is muted. From the plane crash onward, Zamperini has very few choices to make, and with few options comes little drama. Trailers spoil everything all the way to the climactic sequence, but even without them, there’s never any real danger to Zamperini’s various situations.

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Into the Woods is an awful movie. Well, it could just be an awful musical.

The story is set around an unnamed baker (James Cordon) and his wife (Emily Blunt). The baker is sterile because of a curse set by the next door neighbor, a witch (Meryl Streep). To break the curse, the witch sends them into the woods — roll credits! — to collect ingredients in a journey that that sets them across the path of Jack (Daniel Huttlestone), Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), Cinderella (Anna Kendrick) and Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy).

Meryl Streep looks like she has more fun in the hag makeup. Photo courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.

The initial reaction to the movie — like, within the first few seconds of it starting — is, “stop fucking narrating.” The baker’s awful, completely redundant narration is woven intrusively into the first song, and he continues to narrate throughout the film and it continues to be awful and annoying and useless because anyone can see what’s going on. But that’s exactly how the song goes in the stage production.

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