Reel Entropy

The Amazing Spider-Man’s poor direction and over-the-top script combines with Spider-Man 3’s overcrowded, clustered feel to form…

Electro (Jamie Foxx) adds a great current of cool and a subtly dark undertone of sadness to the film. Photos courtesy Columbia Pictures.

…a surprisingly decent movie.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2’s story threads (ha ha ha, spider-man threads) are almost endless. The movie is way too long because it features way too many different plot points. Among them: Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) and Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) reconcile their inability to keep their hands off each other with Parker’s fear that his presence endangers her; Harry Osborne (Dane DeHaan) has a blood disease; Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx), a lonely electrical engineer who becomes obsessed with Spider-Man after the webslinger gives him a self-esteem boost, has an industrial accident involving electric eels and becomes Electro; and Richard Parker (Campbell Scott) does some weird governmenty-sciencey stuff in the past as part of the reboot series’ cheap gimmick where he’s somehow an important character. Also, Rhino (Paul Giamatti*) is in this movie.

Normally what happens when a movie is this crowded is none of its aspects are allowed to breathe and they all fall flat, but this movie is mostly saved by sterling performances. Garfield and Stone have palpable chemistry, and context provided by the first movie is helpful. Foxx displays the acting range of a fixed-wing bomber in this movie, coming fresh off strong action leads in Django Unchained and White House Down to play an insecure, bumbling nobody in this film. He’s lonely, he’s sad, he’s angry, he’s schizophrenic and he’s the very epitome of cool after he becomes Electro.

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Overtly Sexist Media Inc. presents The Other Woman.

Leslie Mann, an actor, Nicki Minaj, a singer, Cameron Diaz, an actor, and Kate Upton, a model, star in The Other Woman. They’re wearing heels. They’re always wearing heels. Photos courtesy 20th Century Fox.

The movie follows Carly Whitten (Cameron Diaz), the main character, Kate King (Leslie Mann), the dumb one of the group, and Amber (Kate Upton), the other dumb one of the group, as they avenge themselves on Kate’s husband, Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who had been sleeping with all of them and others. This starts about an hour and a half in — there’s a lot of bonding first.

The film is a Lifetime movie with a bigger distribution. It’s the kind of movie that pulls models and rappers for major roles instead of real actors. It’s extremely skewed toward women, one of those movies  that assumes the target demographic doesn’t know anything about movies, so it ends up being a montage of actors from the demographic being vaguely stupid on camera.

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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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