Reel Entropy

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.

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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.

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It’s a huge cop-out that Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is both tied into a love triangle and actually takes a husband from it, but it’s nice that the movies de-emphasize the drama and keep Gail’s (Liam Hemsworth) whining to a minimum. Photos courtesy Lionsgate.

Just when I start singing their praises…

Part one of Mockingjay, the third installment of the Hunger Games series, is a major disappointment, primarily because it is abundantly clear how much the adaptation is stretched in order to split the release into two parts because that’s what Harry Potter did.

The movie follows Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) as she adjusts to life in the once-secret District 13, a fascist military district dedicated to overthrowing the totalitarian Capital. Everdeen struggles to make the adjustment, partially because she is being used as the main subject of the district’s propaganda films to incite further riots in the other districts, a series of uprisings which started after she broke the Hunger Games in Catching Fire. She is also worried for Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), who is forced into similar propaganda by the reigning government as part of a psychological war President Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland) wages on Everdeen personally.

The film ends a little less than halfway through the plot of the book going by page number, but about a fifth of the way through going by plot points. The first two movies did an excellent job of only filming what was filmable and not trying to allot every individual chapter the same amount of attention. Mockingjay makes a major misstep here.

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Photos courtesy Walt Disney Stuidos Motion Pictures.

Three things Hollywood consistently tramples are other art forms, science and non-American culture, and Big Hero 6 steps over all three in grotesque, inexcusable fashion.

The movie follows Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter), a 14-year-old San Franciskyo genius who wastes his life bot fighting. When his brother, Tadashi (Daniel Henney), shows him the robotics lab at the university and his inflatable healthcare robot, Baymax (Scott Adsit), Hiro decides to turn his life around and work for a living. Tadashi soon dies in a fire, however, sticking Baymax and a severely depressed Hiro together.

The movie itself isn’t even worth talking about — it’s awful, it’s derivative, it’s clearly just trying to sell toys. But it’s not just a bad movie. This film’s very existence is extremely offensive.

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Gargantua, Interstellar’s black hole, as seen from the other side. Black holes are the scariest things in the known universe. Photos courtesy Paramount Pictures.

Interstellar tries to be several different movies at once, and it’s long enough that it succeeds.

The movie follows pilot-turned-farmer Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) through a journey spanning more than 90 Earth years. The planet has become plagued by a nitrogen-breathing organism called blight that has destroyed all crops and wealth, and a second Dust Bowl has followed in its wake. Fortunately, mysterious beings from another galaxy have opened a wormhole to a potentially more hospitable galaxy orbiting Saturn. Cooper is drafted – without much vetting – to pilot the last expedition through this wormhole.

After an emotional parting with his daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), Cooper sets off with Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) and a refrigerator full of test-tube babies to explore the three most promising planets. Murph (Jessica Chastain after a time-skip) stays behind to try and get discover the science required to get the existing population off-planet.

The thing with writer/director/producer Christopher Nolan has always been his desire to make movies that reward subsequent viewings, and he’s found a cheap way to do that in making the movie really obtusely long. This isn’t the puzzle box that Memento was or the layer cake of The Dark Knight, but it will reward second viewings simply because of how long and involved it is. Viewers will miss things purely because of exhaustion.

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