Movie Journal: August

Mostly due to work commitments, this was a fairly quiet month for me in which I watched a mere 20 films, though at least they were all first time viewings. The only real thread in my viewing came towards the end of the month when, after recording a load of their films from TCM, I watched a string of Marx Brothers movies in a row. Through that, I have come up with a grand unifying theory regarding how to judge the quality of a Marx Brothers movie:

• If it has Zeppo (very much the Xander Harris of the group) in it, it's probably going to be a good one.
• The quality of a Marx Brothers film correlates precisely to how quickly Groucho shows up. If he isn't introduced in the first couple of scenes, then you're off to a bad start.

I didn't watch any legitimately bad films, but the least interesting was The Past is a Grotesque Animal, a documentary about Kevin Barnes and Of Montreal. It's a perfectly fine documentary and a good primer for the band, but it's a great example of a documentary which does little more than tell the story of an artist without offering any insight into why they are all that special. There's no sense that the film is offering more information than Kevin Barnes' Wikipedia page would.

It actually makes for a good contrast to the best film I watched this month...

Film Review: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Tom Cruise has spent so long playing action heroes that it's jarring to see him play a coward. In Doug Liman's Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise plays William Cage, a recruiter for the United Defense Force who has convinced millions of young men and women to sign up to battle an alien race known as the Mimics. When the leader of the UDF (Brendan Gleeson) presents Cage with the chance to report from the front lines of the final assault on the Mimics' stronghold in Northern France, he declines, saying that he became a recruiter specifically to avoid combat. His refusal isn't accepted, so he is knocked unconscious. Upon waking, he discovers that he has been sent to a training camp where his commanding officer (Bill Paxton) has been told that Cage is a deserter. Against his protests, he is strapped into a mech suit so that he, along with thousands of others, can fight the Mimics on the beaches. Unable to even turn off the safety on his weapon, Cage is killed within minutes. Then, he wakes up back on the training camp, meets his commanding officer again, and realises that his whole day has been reset.

Film Review: Oblivion (2013)

In the year 2077, Earth has become a wasteland, ravaged by a war between humanity and alien invaders. The humans won, but the cost was immense. The devastation wrought on the environment as a result of the invaders' destruction of the moon and Earth's use of nuclear weapons forced most of the survivors to leave for a colony on one of the moons of Saturn. Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) is one of the few who remains as part of an operation to harvest the planet's remaining resources and send them to Titan. Jack is nearing the end of his contract, and while his partner Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) is excited about leaving, he has mixed feelings. He's plagued by dreams of a woman he's never met (Olga Kurylenko) and uncertain why the last surviving aliens, known as Scavs, continue to attack the remote drones and harvesting machines he maintains. What could it all mean, and how does his off-world commander, Sally (Melissa Leo) factor into everything?

Film Review: Rock Of Ages (2012)

"I sense that Xenu is near..."

Adapted from the hit show, Adam Shankman's Rock Of Ages sets itself out as a rowdy, debauched entry into that venerable cinematic tradition, the jukebox musical. Based largely at the the Bourbon Room, a dingy rock club which, despite apparently being the home of rock and roll within the universe of the film, is always on the verge of financial collapse. Over the course of a few days in 1987, the film follows the stories of people whose lives revolve in some way around the club; the girl fresh off the bus from Oklahoma (Julianne Hough) who dreams of making it as a singer; the bartender/aspiring rock star (Diego Boneta) who falls in love with her; the owner (Alec Baldwin) and his second-in-command (Russell Brand) who are trying to keep the club alive; and the puritanical busybody (Catherine Zeta-Jones) who wants to shut it down.

Film Review: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Ever since Brian DePalma almost silently dangled Tom Cruise above a pressure-sensitive floor in the first Mission: Impossible, each subsequent film in the series has come to be defined by its most exhilarating and audacious set-piece. Whilst the series has added a fair deal of comedy and something resembling emotional development for Ethan Hunt (Cruise) since coming under the eye of J.J. Abrams, who directed the third film and serves as a producer on Ghost Protocol, those are still little more than spice. The meat of these films lies in their ability to deliver breathless spectacle. It's no coincidence that Mission: Impossible II, directed by the once-brilliant John Woo, was both the weakest film in the series and the one with no single standout action sequence. Without those wow moments, these films are little more than lumps of exposition broken up by running.