Reel Entropy

Lionel Higgins (Tyler James Williams) refers to his hair as a black hole for white people’s fingers. Higgins is supposedly an author avatar for writer/director Justin Simien. Photo courtesy Roadside Attractions.

In January, Paramount Pictures publicity coordinator Justin Simien entered his racial satire Dear White People into Sundance, coming away with the Breakthrough Talent Award. In October, the film starts releasing across the U.S. to critical acclaim.

In November, two grand juries in different parts of the country announced that two police officers who killed black men they were trying to arrest for barely ticketable offenses would not even be tried, despite multiple eyewitness accounts and, in one case, video evidence of the incident. These decisions have led to widespread sometimes violent protests and demand for police reform across the country.

Dear White People is a comedy about the new face of racism in the U.S., but that face has rapidly regressed to its old, violent self since the movie’s release, and it’s suddenly unclear whether the subject is funny anymore.

Continue reading →

Scumbag wife (Felicity Jones) marries man quickly losing the ability to control his legs (Eddie Redmayne) THEN BUYS A HOUSE WITH STAIRS. WHY DID THEY BUY A HOUSE WITH STAIRS. Photo courtesy Focus Features.

Stephen Hawking reportedly cried at a screening of his biopic and lent his own voice to the production.

The man is a physics wizard, but given this information, he might not know very much about movies.

Theory of Everything is a boring, standard, blow-by-blow breakdown of Hawking’s Wikipedia biography. Hawking, played by Eddie Redmayne, studies at Oxford while coming down with Lou Gehrig’s disease and meeting Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones), whom he marries after, like, one date. Then, later, they have children. Then, later, Hawking gets a doctorate. Then, later, some other stuff happens — it’s essentially a highlight reel of the man’s life from diagnosis to the knighthood he declined in ’89.

Director James Marsh might have never put down his copy of “Filmmaking for Dummies” while shooting this. There’s a lot of conventions in here that filmmaking textbooks say are good, but nothing is ever good just because that’s how the filmmaking textbook said it would be.

Continue reading →

Obviously jazz drumming is extremely difficult, nuanced work, but Whiplash never establishes that beyond loud noises the characters make sometimes. It takes more than yelling and grunting to make something seem as difficult as the drumming needs to be for the movie to work. Photo courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.

Whiplash, a movie about how hard drumming is, is so bad it actually makes drumming look kind of easy.

Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) plays an aspiring jazz drummer who wants to be the very best, like no one ever was. Neiman gets into Shaffer Conservatory, hailed in the film as the best music school in the U.S., and is quickly admitted into the top jazz band conducted by Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), who is the kind of teacher that only got the job to justify his own anal-retention, cruelty and severe bi-polar tendencies. The kind of guy who genuinely laments the decline of corporal punishment. The movie is about Fletcher’s castigation of Neiman and Neiman’s increasingly insane attempts to earn his approval.

Whiplash has admirable focus, which is another way of saying it has tunnel vision. Jazz drumming is the most important thing in the world to Neiman, and being a huge, irredeemable ass to his students is the most important thing in the world to Fletcher. But there is no entry point for anyone who doesn’t share those interests. There is only this pair of awful, one-dimensional characters butting heads over auditory details few in the audience will even begin to understand.

Continue reading →

Mr. Rosewater (Kim Bodina) accuses journalist Maziar Bahari (Gael García Bernal) of spying for the CIA, MI6, Mossad and Newsweek Magazine. Photos courtesy Open Road Films.

Movies dominate the public consciousness. Sometimes, that power is used for good.

Rosewater tells the story of Maziar Bahari (Gael García Bernal), a journalist who was imprisoned for 118 days after covering the 2009 Iranian presidential election, which was widely believed to be rigged.

Writer/director/producer Jon Stewart has become one of the most powerful men in the world through a long career of thorough, hard-hitting journalism thinly disguised as entertainment. As with his other material, the real-life story is the most important part of Rosewater.

Continue reading →

Birdman is the best goddamn thing and if you haven’t seen it yet you are a loser who deserves scorn and ridicule.

#betterbatmanthanbenaffleck. Photos courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures.

SCORN

AND

RIDICULE

The film follows Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton), a washed-up former superhero actor trying to earn legitimacy on Broadway. After a lead co-star is hospitalized, he’s able to cast Lesley’s (Naomi Watts) boyfriend, Mike Shiner (Edward Norton) to the orgasmic pleasure of the New York Times and ticket buyers. Thompson, who develops psychic powers over the course the film, comes to grips with the fact that he’s the only one in the world who cares about his play.

The movie is the meta-est meta movie that ever metad a meta movie. Thompson is adapting Raymond Carver’s short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, in which four friends discuss crazy ex-partners and what forms love can take, with the conversation centered around Teri’s ex-boyfriend who abused her and killed himself after she left him. But the movie itself is an elaborate adaptation of this same play. Throughout the film, characters reflect on the roles they played within the story, with Thompson taking on the role both Mel, Teri’s boyfriend whom he plays in the film, and Ed, her abuser. There are several layers of reflection between the backstage drama and the on-stage story.

Continue reading →