Reel Entropy

Her is a terrific movie, not because of how it makes viewers feel, but because of how many different ways it can make viewers feel. But many will find it boring, and they’re right to.

In a subtly high-tech future, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a professional letter writer who spends his days feeling and expressing other people’s emotions. Naturally a very lonely man, Twombly begins to see the light when he downloads an artificially intelligent operating system, Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). She and Twombly quickly fall in love, despite Samantha being a huge creeper. Twombly’s ex-wife, Catherine (Rooney Mara) is the only one in the entire movie who thinks this is just a little awkward.

A brief list of things this movie could be about-

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The more Paranormal Activity movies come out, the more distressing it is that they made any sequels at all.

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones follows Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) as he is marked and possessed by a demon. The demon is summoned by the same coven of witches associated with causing the events of the main storyline, and this film is intended to be something outside that storyline. Filmmakers have called it a “spin-off” or a “cousin” or an “excuse to pander to the Hispanic audience that this series has always had a bizarre affinity for.”

The Marked Ones, like every other movie in the series, is shot in found-footage style, and you have to ask — why? Why couldn’t this movie be shot from a regular, third-person perspective? Found footage horror has, in 15 short years, gone from borderline-revolutionary to mainstream to a cheap, cliché-filled gimmick, and the Paranormal Activity movies are almost solely responsible.

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It starts with a shot of Leonardo DiCaprio snorting cocaine out of a hooker’s anus. For anyone over the age of 20, subtitles meant to be read in Ray Liota’s voice flash across the screen, reading, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”

It never slows down.

The Wolf of Wall Street is the true story of noted New York Islanders fan Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio, who also produces), a stock broker who started a billion-dollar company that pumped and dumped stocks — basically, they acquire stock for worthless companies, then sell them to clients who don’t know any better for a profit. Though he was indicted in 1998, this is the same tactic that was made famous after the 2008 economic collapse. The script, written by Terence Winter, is adapted from memoirs he wrote in prison.

Director Martin Scorsese, who also produces, has used his own history as a filmmaker to equate Wall Street greed with the cocaine-running films of yesteryear. The Wolf of Wall Street is really a remake of Goodfellas. It’s Scarface for the 2010s. Whether or not that’s a good thing is up to the viewer.

The film brilliantly uses flavor narration and all kinds of montage sequences to tie its meanings together. Early in the film, Belmont equates money to drugs. Montages of many brokers learning and plying their craft gives the scheme a grand scale. Belmont and his minions pause for a scene to abuse dwarves in a heavy-handed display of what they really think of the little people. In a broad sense, the entire three hour experience is a thesis-worthy montage fetishizing gluttony.

It’s cut from the same cloth as traditional crime epics, and it has the same problems. The dirty secret about this kind of movie is it’s not perfect. It’s way too long. It dances with misogyny — all though The Wolf of Wall Street never holds sexism as something the viewer should aspire to and never out right says women are worthless, it features a lot of sexism from its main characters and a lot of women who are only there for sex. No one should idolize Belfort, but then again, no one should idolize Henry Hill. People will see his wealth and prosperity onscreen and idolize him, despite the obvious fact that he’s a terrible person.

These movies never do a good job of making clear that large-scale crime has large-scale consequences. In Scarface, for instance, we see Tony Montoya grow into a powerful drug lord but we rarely see the violence and destitution involved in drug smuggling. I still don’t know why the feds were after Michael Corleone. The Wolf of Wall Street is no different. Belfort is a real person who took real people’s life savings for nothing, and still owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to more than 1,500 victims as of last October. But all we see is all the sex he had.

The Wolf of Wall Street is cinema at its finest and a tour de force by DiCaprio, who is a keystone like no other. Sometimes grotesque, sometimes thoughtful and sometimes side-splittingly funny, the film is everything right and everything wrong with American moviemaking wrapped into a gigantic, topical package.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a senior staff writer for the NT Daily. Seriously, the Islanders in the mid-90′? The Mark Messier guarantee, and you pull for the Islanders? Really?  For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back here for reviews of Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones and various oscar-bait morsels as they come to Denton.

If Ben Stiller and assorted executives got less than half of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’s $90 million budget from eHarmony, they should probably take a few years off from filmmaking and re-think some life choices.

Stiller stars (and also produces and directs) as Mitty, Life Magazine’s photo manager. Mitty has humongous daydreams, but starts out to scared to send a wink on the movie’s patron dating site.

In the film, Life is shifting to online-only and downsizing. Renowned photographer Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn) has sent in a photo that he wants to be the magazine’s last cover, but Mitty can’t find it. Despite working with him for 16 years, Mitty has no way of contacting O’Connell other than tracking him down in person. Spurred on by his cheerful and always helpful eHarmony customer service representative (Patton Oswalt) and his very creepy crush on coworker Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig), Mitty crosses the globe tracking O’Connell.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a confused, tangled mess of scenes, though almost all of them are delightful and heart-felt.

It’s easy to split the film into three distinct categories: scenes where Mitty is fanaticizing, scenes where he’s acting out his fantasies and scenes where nothing much is happening. One of these scenes is wonderful and the reason to watch this movie. One of them is empowering, but still carries a tinge of cartoonish wish-fulfillment that dilutes the effect. In the other, not much is happening.

The movie is frustrating and inconstant. Parts of it feel like the whole thing should have been made a short story, and other parts of it feel like pieces of a movie that needed to be split in two. But this can’t be born of inconsistency, because the feeling it gives is remarkably consistent — at the end, it feels like you watched a fluffy rom-com out of one eye and a sprawling adventure epic out of the other. The experience is unique, though not entirely pleasant.

Secret Life runs into its biggest problem when trying to figure out its target audience. It is clearly a kids movie, with a PG rating, a kid-friendly star and a refusal to look into its themes in any real detail. Mitty is driven far out of his comfort zone trying to impress a woman he barely knows who is half a world away most of the film. Attaching that level of significance to a crush isn’t unheard of, but this instance is creepy and unhealthy and the film seems to condone it.

The movie is a coming of age party for a man in his late 40s, but it doesn’t explore the regret inherent with going through that process so late in life. Like so many kids movies, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty only dances around the darker emotions and is too scared to dive into them.

It is also a functional eHarmony commercial, so someone had to expect an audience of people over 40. Maybe the key demographic for this Christmas Day release is single parents?

The film is mostly delightful and appropriate for any of its potential demographics, but I have to wonder if a given audience member wouldn’t be better served by a more tailored film.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a senior staff writer for the NT Daily. All kidding aside, it’s a travesty that Neil Clark Warren doesn’t have a producer credit on this thing.  For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Keep reading, the data-dump isn’t over yet.

American Hustle is all about terrible haircuts, but that doesn’t matter. The movie is hilarious and everyone should go see it.

The movie is based on the Abscam FBI sting which took place over the late ’70s and early ’80s. To get out of a confidence scam indictment, Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) set up a deal with agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) to help him convict other con artists. The scam escalates quickly. Though they initially go after small-time con artists, the objective soon becomes entrapping local politicians and, eventually, organized crime heads with an Arab sheik (Michael Peña) that doesn’t exist.

American Hustle is, more than anything else, magnificently, outrageously funny. As the sting grows more complicated and DiMaso gets more out of control, an absurd tension mounts in each audience member. There’s no telling when, how often or how hard, but you will laugh and something in this movie.

The hilarity is equal parts writing and acting. Original writer Eric Warren Singer’s script was one of Hollywood’s 10 best that weren’t produced in 2010, and director David O. Russell added a great shine when he took the project. The two share writing credit.

American Hustle’s all-star cast performs like one. Bale, Cooper and Jeremy Renner have great fun in their roles. Adams gives her subtlest, nastiest, sexiest performance to date. Jennifer Lawrence takes her oddball character to dimensions only she can. It seems like every year she does even more to separate herself from the rest of Hollywood.

The movie backs itself up with rich identity themes, which are tacked onto characters’ hair of all things. The opening sequence is three minutes of silence as Rosenberg applies a sloppy comb-over, which is promptly removed. He and Prosser introduce themselves and each other as people who become what they need to in order to survive, and spend much of that introductory sequence dealing with clothing and appearances.

Make-up and costume becomes both a running gag and a way to express the movie’s themes. American Hustle is constantly talking about the disguises we wear, and it backs that up by having its actors in the most elaborate disguises they’ve worn in a long time.

Oscar season is usually boring and filled with pretentious, calculated efforts, but American Hustle starts 2014’s off with a very funny bang. It deserves at least best actress for Adams and best costuming, and isn’t unworthy for best picture.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a senior staff writer for the NT Daily. There need to be more JFK assassination exhibits that are on the first few floors of buildings, instead of up high where he was shot from.  For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Keep reading, the data-dump isn’t over yet.