Reel Entropy

It’s difficult to walk away from Oculus. Not in the sense that it’s difficult to walk out of the theater — that’s outright impossible — but in the sense that it is, literally, difficult to walk away from the arena after the credits roll. You don’t rightly know which way is up.

The movie takes place in two simultaneous timelines. In one, Alan and Marie Russell (Rory Cochrane and Katee Sackhoff) and their children, Kaylie and Tim (Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan) have moved into a new house and brought new furniture with them, including an antique mirror, the kind of thing that is so obviously and voraciously possessed it could only exist in a nightmare like this movie. After shenanigans, Tim is institutionalized after killing his father, who had killed his mother.

Eleven years later, Tim (Brenton Thwaites) is discharged. Kaylie (Karen Gillan), now an auction house logistics employee, has brought the mirror back to their old home to, against Tim’s better judgment and every shred of rational thought, force the mirror to perform its shenanigans on camera to clear her family’s name before she destroys it.

Things get freaky in Oculus. Really, extremely, disturbingly sleep-with-the-lights-on-for-a-couple-weeks freaky.

Oculus only makes any traditional form of sense for about 20 minutes, then the mirror takes sway and there’s nothing for the audience to hold on to. Time, reality, flashes of powerful love and long stretches of abject terror fold into and on top of one another. In the film’s waning stages, it gets to the point that there’s genuinely no way to know if events are unfolding in the present or the past.

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Captain America (Chris Evans) finally gets a new, spiffy, non-garrish outfit in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. He will ditch it for an out-dated garrish one during the film’s climactic sequences. Photos courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Marvel has a terrible habit of making trailers that are more original and intellectually intriguing than the films they go with.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the latest film to fall into that trap. The trailer promised an examination of freedom versus safety, having Captain America struggle with his own desire to protect personal liberty when the organization he works for is more interested in security. The proposed plotline has distinct parallels to Barack Obama’s domestic spying practices, and, in the trailer at least, Marvel had the balls to take the issue head on.

After Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) flexes his muscles for a bit, he guilts Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) into showing him SHIELD’s top secret and highly illegal project — three new heavily-armed helicarriers that will seek out and kill terror threats where they live using a network of spy satellites. Before they get too deep into whether or not this is truly the path of the righteous man, Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford), a SHIELD higher-up, puts a hit on Rogers and sends him racing to stop the helicarriers and their true, sinister purpose.

All the while, Rogers battles the ephemeral Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), an assassin with a bizarre affinity for hype men who handle his rifles.

The movie very much gets off on the wrong foot with its first two scenes. In the first, Rogers is running laps around Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackle), understating his powers for comic relief. In the second, he’s running laps around a captured boat, dismantling a cadre of pirates. These first action sequences are similarly understated and dull. Though Rogers dispatches all the other pirates, his steroid powers suddenly don’t apply to the boss pirate (Georges St-Pierre) when producers wanted a longer boss fight.*

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Russell Crowe plays the eponymous Noah in Darren Aronofsky’s take on the biblical legend. It gets weird. Photos courtesy Paramount Pictures

Noah is the most surreal movie of the year so far on several different levels.

The movie is split into two distinct halves. The first half, as advertised, features Noah (Russell Crowe) following the word of God, building an ark to survive a global flood while wicked men, led by Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone), attempt to storm it.

The second half was entirely left out of the advertising campaign and paints a much darker picture of Noah. Chaos ensues below deck on the ark when Noah finds out Ila (Emma Watson) is pregnant. Believing God’s mandate is to wipe out all of mankind, including himself and his family, Noah threatens to kill Ila’s child, should it be a girl who could propagate the species.

Cinematically, surreal doesn’t begin to describe Noah. Director/co-writer Darren Aronofsky’s fingerprints are everywhere on this movie, from the constant repeating refrain to the visual tying all militaries in human history to Cain and Abel to the high-speed montage from the Big Bang to the first human which Crowe reads the Genesis myth overtop of.

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Set in Chicago, supposedly post-apocalypse but really not that different, society in Divergent is extremely caste-based. The five castes are divided by key personality characteristics, and each group has a role in running the city — the brave ones are the military police, the selfless ones govern, and so on. At age 16, children are given a fucked up Myers Briggs test to determine which caste they should go into, then told to completely disregard the results and “Choose who they really are” with absolutely no do-overs or take-backs. If the children have more than one personality trait — because really, who needs depth of character? — they are deemed “divergent.”

“Divergents” are a threat to “the system.” Don’t ask why.

The film follows Beatrice “Tris” Prior (Shailene Woodley) through this process and into the Dauntless, the military police caste. Prior’s test indicated she had three, count em three! strong personality traits, which is apparently a bad thing. Prior goes through naturalization into Dauntless society, watched over by Four (Theo James), who just won’t stop singing “Somehow I’ll Make a Man Out of You.” While a real movie would make this into a montage, Divergent takes this as its main body and shoehorns a big-kid plot in at the end.

There’s also a bit of the standard romance between Four (Theo James) and Tris (Shailene Woodley). Despite being the film’s most tired storyline, this romance contains the most departures from standard young adult procedure. Photos courtesy Summit Entertainment and Lionsgate.

Divergent is proof positive that a bad first act can render the rest of a movie worthless. The first 30-to-45 minutes of this movie are biblically awful.  Narration is used extensively, not as a storytelling device but as a replacement for acting, dialogue and other key subjects of theatre 101. It is confusing jumble of images and simple sentences that might begin to make sense if the viewer read the book. Even if the viewer hasn’t read it, it’s easy to tell how much information is being glossed over and when.

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Remember this, Hollywood? A man who can pull this look off with a straight face doesn’t need to prove himself a movie star. Photo courtesy AMC

Need for Speed’s function is to help Aaron Paul transition from Breaking Bad to movie stardom, and like most vehicle movies it’s destined to be thrown on a pile of the star’s better work or grouped with other poor showings in a quadruple-feature package of outdated home movie technology. That’s all it was designed to be, and that’s all it is.

This one is particularly sad to see. Paul always had the movie-star good looks and already demonstrated sufficient range in the series where he made his name. He doesn’t need vehicles to pump his tires. He’s a talented, popular, recognizable actor. Put him in a regular movie that seems to have genuine effort put into it and the audience will come.

The reason Need for Speed is so sad is this movie makes that less likely to happen. Paul initially tried out for the villain role, a spot where he actually could have showcased talent and was better suited for than the man who eventually got the part (Dominic Cooper, a fine actor in his own right). But the producers put him in the lead role to better sell the movie on the strength of his popularity, and after a poor marketing campaign, the movie opened in third place after the week-old Mr. Peabody & Sherman and 300: Rise of an Empire.

According to boxofficemojo.com projections, Need for Speed will end up about $16 million in the red. Producers will blame Paul and it will become much harder for him to find work, despite none of this being his fault or anything he even remotely controls.

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