Reel Entropy

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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Some holidays, like Independence Day and Christmas, lend themselves to movies. It’s a good way to spend time with family and friends who you actually want to ignore. Other holidays, like the Super Bowl and Halloween, mean empty theaters for a significant portion of the weekend. This Halloween, that’s Friday night, probably the worst possible time. So, most major studios have bailed on the release date, leaving strange arthouse movie Nightcrawler as the only new widely released material this weekend.

Let’s get one thing straight — freelance journalists can’t afford cars like this no matter how dominant they are in their own market. Photo courtesy Open Road Films.

Nightcrawler’s release shows admirable opportunism in a couple of ways. It’s taking advantage of two gaps in the movie market — both the general lack of new material on Halloween weekend and the lack of Oscar-hyped movies in wide release in general. Fury, Gone Girl and Men, Women & Children are all old news, and this film gets in just under the wire set by Interstellar.

Sadly, in order to maximize profits, Open Road Films put together a hard-hitting, high-action trailer that covers the climax of pretty much every major scene. Any time trailers spoil a movie it’s a letdown, but Nightcrawler in particular didn’t have anything else to offer but suspense over decisions whose outcome viewers will already know going in.

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“That dog was a final gift from my dying wife, and I was still feeling queasy from that mall rotisserie chicken and I was also having a bad hair day.” Photos courtesy Summit Entertainment.

John Wick is a joke. In a good way, that is.

Early in the film, the title character (Keanu Reeves) is attacked in his home by Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen), son of local mob boss Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist). Iosef Tarasov kills Wick’s dog and steals his car, not realizing that Wick was a top assassin for his father a few short years ago, known across the city as “The Boogeyman.” Wick left the business to be with his wife (Bridget Moynahan), who had contracted a terminal illness but left him that dog before her death. As a matter of course, Wick goes on a rampage through the local Russian mafia.

Watching John Wick is like listening to a friend tell a long, untrue anecdote that everyone started out thinking was true and thought was a horrible story, but once they begin to understand is exaggeration becomes a hilarious piece of satire. Once you get it, you get it. The movie isn’t meant to be taken seriously even beyond its nature as an action movie, most of which are meant in jest. But it is also a triumph of the genre that pulls together both old, illogical action tropes and modern style and demand for continuity.

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