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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The Interview is at the center of a developing international story with multiple players and several layers of morality. The hackers and terrorists are 100 percent in the wrong, but they’re the only ones whose ethical standing is clear. The film, about the assassination of a standing world leader, is obviously in poor taste, and Sony and the theater chains who dropped it because of terrorist threats are in the strange ethical territory that kind of threat induces. There’s a good movie to be made about the release of this movie.

There’s a lot of poop jokes and butt stuff. Outside of a marked obsession with Katy Perry and the phrase “honey dick,” the comedy is exactly what people expect from a Seth Rogen movie. Photos courtesy Columbia Pictures.

For those that don’t know, Sony, the parent company of distributor Columbia Pictures, suffered a large-scale hack that released five movies, four of which weren’t in theaters yet, as well as several emails that contained potentially damaging secrets. In the leadup to The Interview’s release, theater chains received threats of a “9/11 style attack” against any house screening the film. Major theater chains backed off and Sony pulled the film, but reversed their decision due to public outcry just two days before the Dec. 25 release. The film was released in 300-someodd theaters belonging to a handful of chains that value freedom, that are willing to take a stand against terror, that are too small to turn down the monumental economic opportunity the film quickly became. Cynically speaking, this whole thing may just be an elaborate marketing tactic.

Boxofficemojo seems to have taken Christmas off because they’re just not as dangerous as me, so the actual numbers will have to wait, but this movie could easily be looking at records in per-theater averages.

The film follows celebrity talkshow host Dave Skylark (James Franco) and his producer, Aaron Rapoport (Seth Rogen). A Columbia Journalism School graduate, Rapoport’s classmates laugh at him and call him names because they think he’s sold out. This motivates him to set up an interview with the reclusive Kim Jong-un (Randall Park), supreme leader of North Korea, who is coincidentally a big fan of Skylark’s show. Soon after news breaks of their score, the CIA (Lizzy Caplan) enters to ask the duo to assassinate Kim.

I wouldn’t start a nuclear war over it, but The Interview is a funny movie.

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12:19 a.m. After a particularly long set of previews that seem to be actively trying to delay the inevitable, The Hobbit’s 10 minute parade of logos begins. The Battle of Five Armies picks up right where Desolation of Smaug left off — just before it was going to actually show the desolation of Smaug. The dragon (Benedict Cumberbatch), in his weak-ass wyvern rendering meant to draw in the Game of Thrones crowd, delays for another few moments of CGI aerobatics before finally settling in for his attack run.

Apparently, Rule 34 applies here. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Motion Pictures.

12:23 a.m. Having been given ample warning of the dragon’s coming because he circled the city several times like an idiot, the Master of Laketown (Stephen Fry), also known as the third coming of Jar-Jar Binks, makes off with all the gold. Our hero, Bard (Luke Evans), left imprisoned during the cliffhanger, conjures a gigantic rope out of his prison cell, the kind of thing that makes you stop and wonder why it only takes up one slot in your inventory, and, in the kind of showy display of tying and throwing accuracy and rope materialization that Tolkien never, ever would have written, wrangles the master from behind bars and uses him to break free, a moment of poetic justice not just within the plot, but for viewers, as it seems they are momentarily free of the porky, forced comic relief.

1:40 a.m. After several minutes of strafing, Smaug lands to have a personal interaction with Bard, who has climbed the bell tower to take the dragon down, out of respect for Bard’s irresistible Main Character Powers. Smaug taunts the archer, mocking him for the bow which, as Smaug can see from halfway across the ruined city, is broken. However, his plot-driven telescopic vision fails him when Bard turns the broken pieces, the bell tower itself and his own inexplicably present son into a makeshift weapon of even greater power and accuracy than the original bow. In yet another indulgent, kitschy display of McGiverism that would have Tolkien spinning in his grave, Bard slays the proud dragon with the improvised weapon.

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