Reel Entropy

That’s Steve Carrell. Seriously. Photo courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.

It’s looking like all the major awards this year are going to be between Foxcatcher and Birdman, and Birdman should win every single one, but Foxcatcher is still pretty OK.

The third biopic of director Bennett Miller’s career, after following writer Truman Capote and general manager Billy Beane, follows Olympic gold wrestlers and brothers Mark and Dave Schultz (Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo) after billionaire philanthropist John Eleuthère du Pont (Steve Carell) sponsors their training for the upcoming world championships and next Olympics. The characters are set up in a battle of mentors, with du Pont and Dave Schultz battling for Mark Schultz’ soul.

Miller is a masterful filmmaker who has demonstrated time and time again the ability to find the human element behind the real-life events that he recreates in film, though the reproductions do need to be taken with a heavy grain of salt. Foxcatcher is much more Capote than Moneyball, driven by acting and constructed mostly of long shots in which not much happens.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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