Film Review: Magic Mike XXL (2015)

Magic Mike XXL is nominally a sequel to Magic Mike, but may be closer to a sequel to Magic Mike's trailer. Although the Steven Soderbergh-directed original was sold as an outrageous good time, it was actually a fairly downbeat examination of what a grind it is to escape the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder. It featured a lot of stripping, obviously, but that was a somewhat incidental part of a story about someone (Channing Tatum) trying to scrape together enough crumpled ones to get his custom furniture business off the ground. There were dramatic stakes in the first film which allowed it to explore ideas of masculinity and the impact of The Great Recession, and these ideas were at the heart of the film, while the stripping providing an interesting milieu for them to play out.

Film Review: Jupiter Ascending (2015)

Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is just your average, everyday Russian immigrant trying to make a life for herself in America. She cleans apartments alongside her other family members, admires the jewelery and clothing of the people she works for, and plans to sell her eggs so that she can buy a telescope like the one her murdered English father (James D'Arcy) once owned. Unbeknownst to Jupiter, she is the heir to an intergalactic fortune, something which puts her squarely in the middle of a centuries-old rivalry between  Balem (Eddie Redmayne), Titus (Douglas Booth) and Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), three siblings from the Abraxis family, all of whom want to kidnap or kill Jupiter to advance their own agendas. Pursued by various alien bounty hunters, Jupiter falls under the protection of Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a disgraced space cop who also happens to be half-wolf. Together, Jupiter and Caine try to navigate the complex political maneuverings of the Abraxis, as well as the myriad explosions that keep interrupting their halting romance.

Film Review: Foxcatcher (2014)

If Foxcatcher wasn't based on real events, it'd work great as an inventive restaging of Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. Like the earlier film, Foxcatcher deals with the increasingly strained relationship between a young man (in this case Channing Tatum) and an older patron (Steve Carell) which sees the former being more or less confined to the home of the latter in pursuit of shared glory. Swap out screenwriting for Olympic wrestling and the stories match up so well that you could imagine Wilder and Charles Brackett manipulating the real-life figures behind the scenes.

Film Review: 22 Jump Street (2014)

One of the main issues I had with 21 Jump Street, Phil Lord and Chris Miller's (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, The LEGO Movie) first revival of the '80s cops-pretend-to-be-teenagers series, was that it used a veneer of post-modernism to justify its existence without really doing anything else with it. By pointing out the presumed creative bankruptcy that leads studios to green light remakes of ephemera from decades ago, Lord and Miller, working from a script by Jonah Hill and Michael Bacall, were able to position 21 Jump Street as a critique of revivals of old properties, then use that as a springboard to make a really entertaining buddy cop comedy that wasn't really critiquing anything because it was too busy delivering a lot of great jokes. It started with an interesting idea, then tossed it aside once it had served its purpose. It was able to get away with that purely by being incredibly funny, but it still felt like a missed opportunity.

Film Review: Side Effects (2013)

Steven's Soderbergh's retirement from filmmaking - something which, considering his commitment to directing an entire television series next year, should probably be viewed through huge sceptical quotation marks - has had two distinct yet symbiotic consequences. Creatively, it seems to have reinvigorated him, giving an urgency to his work that suggests that he is trying to work through as many genres and styles as he can before he leaves film behind forever (again: sceptical quotation marks). When you look at the disparate films he has made since he announced he was walking away - from the throwback action of Haywire to the lurid kineticism of Magic Mike - as well as the speed at which they have been produced and released, there is a definite sense of an artist trying to get everything out of his system before it's too late.

Film Review: Magic Mike (2012)

This picture is the end result of a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to find a decent image from the film that did not feature a shirtless Channing Tatum.

Steven Soderbergh has always been a mercurial talent, able to move smoothly from making mainstream films with big name stars to off-kilter experimental films without losing step, all the while maintaining his own style and voice on every project. Within the last twelve months alone, he has made a bleakly realistic disaster movie and a minimalist action thriller, both of which were vastly different in scope, but which were unmistakeably his own. He even found time to squeeze in some second-unit work on one of the most successful films of the year. Even given how varied his workload has been, it says something that Soderbergh's latest film, set amongst the lives of male strippers in Florida, is probably the strangest prospect of them all.

Rethinking Matthew McConaughey

I feel bad for using this ridiculous image as the main one for the article, but if he's going to continue to make artistically interesting choices, then I might no longer get to make fun of him anymore, DAMMIT!

If you're anything like me - and why wouldn't you want to be? I'm grrrrrreat. And a cartoon tiger, apparently - then you probably don't think all that much of Matthew McConaughey, if you think of him at all. For the best part of the last twenty years, he's been a blandly charming presence in a succession of slightly rubbish dramas and extremely rubbish romantic comedies, most of which, if their posters are to be believed, seem to revolve around him leaning on things:

I choose to believe that the level of commitment he brings to any given role can be determined by the angle at which he leans and how few clothes he is wearing on the poster. So we see that he is putting a lot of effort into Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, could give a shit about Failure to Launch, and is super-committed to his work in Surfer, Dude.

Film Review: 21 Jump Street (2012)

Much as James Bobin's The Muppets sought to make its characters relevant again by trumpeting their irrelevance, 21 Jump Street takes what should be its greatest weakness - that it is an update of a barely-remembered TV series based around an incredibly dumb premise (albeit one that isn't so dumb that real police departments haven't used it in real life) - and turns it into probably its greatest strength. Rather than taking the idea of sending young-looking Police Officers undercover as high school students even remotely seriously, the film's script, co-written by star Jonah Hill and Michael Bacall (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) seeks to undermine it mercilessly and frequently, using the disconnect between the stupidity of the central premise and how important the characters think it is to great effect.