Massive film roundup…

I’m way behind on this little blog, though not sure many would notice. With that, I’m skipping the full 200-word counts and running fast. These films deserve much more consideration, but such is life…

The Judge (2014) has a cast to make any film fan swoon:  Robert Downey Jr., Billy Bob Thornton, Vincent D’Onofrio, Vera Farmiga, and Robert Duvall. RDJ is the hotshot Chicago attorney who goes home to the farm to bury mom and war with dad (Duvall), the small town, big stick judge. 

When pop gets busted for homicide, guess who must save him? Every moment is preset and staged, most painfully when City Boy gets out his old bike for a country road ride for no other reason than to crash said bike so he can get saved by – just happening to be passing by – his old love. Boring. 

Worst bit: RDJ’s autistic brother who’s treated as a comic relief dolt who pops out his Super 8 camera from childhood at every inopportune time, just because the script needs it. Give the man dignity. Maybe he uses digital? Second worst bit: RDJ pisses on a colleague in a men’s room. That exact scene was in “Wolf.” Twenty years ago. Letdown. C+

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies (2014) has some great moments at the end with sacrifices and heroics, but really it’s the overlong third chapter in Peter Jackson’s gonzo, throw in nine kitchen sinks adaptation of the slim children’s book by J.R.R. Tolkien. 

By the time Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and his dwarf pals make it to the battle, not even after, I stopped counting armies or caring. Dig those giant worms that knock over a mountain and then quit the film back to, what, “Dune”? “Tremors”? “Battle” soars in large chunks –- I love Freeman –- and yet it is uncomfortably exhausting, a perfect example of a great filmmaker pouring on the sauce not because he needs to or should, but because he can, with his never-ending budget and line of CGI-world crunching supercomputers. I desperately want Jackson to think small next time. B-

If “Hobbit” is all excess, A Most Violent Year (2014) is asparse, smart crime saga about a non-criminal. It’s a cinematic treat. Again proving he may be my generation’s Al Pacino, without hooting and hollering, Oscar Issac (“Inside Llewyn Davis”) plays Abel Morales, a NYC oil delivery businessman convinced he’s the lone good guy in a corrupt, mafia-run market. The catch: He is exactly that. 

But is that move –- calm and peace amongst threats and violence –- wise, streetwise? When everyone around you is crooked or comes from such, including a quick-to-anger wife (Jessica Chastain)? Director/writer J.C. Chandor (“MarginCall” and “All is Lost”) is fast becoming one of my favorite filmmakers, focusing on good, vulnerable men thrown into caustic situations, and seeing how they fall or rise. Abel’s path pops. 

Even when Chandor serves up genre tropes (the chase through narrow streets, the flailed man with a gun), he makes choices that surprise. The final scenes leave open the door for more of Abel, and I cannot wait to watch. A

Interstellar (2014) is Christopher Nolan’s science fiction head trip and ode to “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but it is crucially, beautifully personal. It defies explanation and its own major faults which threaten to topple the whole affair again and again. 

Through sheer will power, Matthew McConaughey keeps the film on track as Cooper, a one-time engineer/astronaut now living as a farmer and widowed father of two children on a future, dying Earth where food is scarce. I cannot give too much away lest I spoil plot and the mystery. But some detail: Coop is tapped to lead a last-ditch expedition to a possible new planetary home, the last mission of a crumbling NASA (led by Michael Caine). 

More so than the alien worlds and spacecraft, “Interstellar” is about a father’s love defying all barriers to touch his daughter, here played by Mackenzie Foy. Love it, hate it, fall for the finale, or reject it, Nolan’s film demands payment, a strong immediate reaction, and then multiple viewings on the largest screen possible. This is no pedestrian film. It grabs the viewer. High point: A powerful score by Hans Zimmer that rattles and breaks the soul. A-

Selma and American Sniper (both 2014) demand more attention than I can give here, but such is life. “Selma” follows the 1965 marches led by Martin Luther King Jr. that riled Alabama, and shocked a nation from its false American dream. 

“Sniper” follows Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL sniper with the most confirmed combat kills ever, himself killed by a gun not in Iraqi but at home on a gun range. King and Kyle died before age 40. For all the bluster that “Selma” dare distorts history, it is “Sniper” that more severely ignores truths by giving Kyle a Hollywood adversary in the form of a Syrian sniper that is his equal. The two men never crossed paths. Clint Eastwood’s film makes this face off the linchpin of Kyle’s service and worship of war. Why add drama to an already startling life story? 

“Selma,” directed by Ava DuVernay, is the far better film because it dares peel back not just the ugliness of America, but the strife and troubles within the Civil Rights movement and King’s own life. And our own troubles today. Brit David Oyelowo embodies King as a man not the dream. 

And as Kyle, Bradley Cooper astounds as a very troubled man swallowed whole by war. Marvel how Eastwood and Cooper lay out scenes that could be patriotic rah-rah-rah, or be viewed as anything but. Eastwood cunningly uses silence during the closing credits to leaves us in the uncomfortable void of our own voices, discussing what we just witnessed, if we dare talk. Points off the scene where a Kyle is played, creepily, by a creepy doll. 

Selma: A,Sniper: A-

I recently came across an online column where great director Martin Scorsese once listed The Uninvited (1944) and The Innocents (1961) as two of the scariest films ever made. OK. 

“Uninvited” is amusing, not frightening, to my eyes. Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey play London-born siblings who move into an abandoned house along a rocky English coastline. They pay cash. Cheap. Against the pleas from a young woman (Gail Russell) with a past hidden in those old bricks. Soon moans wail at night, rooms chill cold, and the cat runs away. 

We know it’s haunted. But in 1944, haunted house flicks never had a ghost. I guess religious concerns? Whatever. Between night frights, the siblings get mixed up with Russell’s gal, a local doctor (Alan Napier), and a lesbian hypnotist (Cornelia Otis Skinner) who cringes offensive stereotype. The women scream. The men get brave and yell to the ghosts, “Go away!,” and the ghosts go away. I laughed. 

I freaked out, though, at the scary-as-shit “Innocents,” because it’s never clear what is going on. This is horror. We first see heroine Deborah Kerr, hands clutched, praying for a good boy and girl to love and care for. Then we cut to Kerr interviewing for a job as a governess of a boy and a girl, orphans of a philandering uncle (Michael Redgrave) who frankly tells her he has no love for the children. 

Kerr, now knowing the children need love, takes to their rural estate and serves attention in droves. Oh, but these children (Pamela Franklin and Martin Stephens) are quite odd and possibly haunted by two of their previous caregivers, who died mysteriously, possibly after inviting the children to watch and join in on their violent sexual meet-ups. 

Disturbing stuff for 50-plus years ago. Directed by Jake Clayton and co-written by Truman Capote from Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw,” this is as good movies get. Watch it once, remain bewildered and shocked by what you have seen. Ghosts? Voices? Did that boy really just tongue Kerr? “Innocents” is an epic mind fuck for the ages. Where does that first scene fall? 

Both are shot with gorgeous black and white film stock that makes one wish every horror movie were filmed as such. 

Uninvited: B Innocents: A+

Not many films got my blood pumping in 2014, but Whiplash – seen finally on DVD – took hold and had me near inches from the screen as its tale of a first-year prodigy jazz drum major (Miles Teller) falling under the spell and doom of an abusive teacher (J.K. Simmons) plays out. 

This is riveting filmmaking, even if it is well trod territory with the oft-told tale of the perfectionist obsessive who will destroy themselves to perform. Think “BlackSwan.” The trick here is we’re not sure how genius our prodigy Andrew really is, and any of his talent is put off by sheer smugness and petty boasts. Andrew is, in short, an asshole. 

Writer/director Damien Chazelle, in his debut feature, has crafted a film you cannot look away from. He plays with audience reaction: Ae we rooting for Simmons’ bullying monster? See it. The music -– Chazelle tells more with notes than words –- is brilliant. It’s not perfect. 

If “Swan” derailed gloriously in the end, so does Whiplash” with a car crash that seems random. But it recovers quickly with a musical showdown that cuts like razor blades. Simmons owns the film and our souls. A

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