The Imitation Game (2014) comes in with the annual rush of awards contenders, and it has all you would expect: a great actor playing an eccentric genius, a high stakes plot involving WWII, and an angle on contemporary social issues. You'll laugh! You'll cry! Yes, it's a very well done film, but it is just as much a genre picture as all the superhero movies that come out every year-- there's nothing terribly ground-breaking here. But it's nice to see one of the great minds of the 20th Century, Alan Turing, get his due. If it looks like your cup of tea, I'm sure you'll thoroughly enjoy it.
I was a bit upset with the second Hobbit movie,
The Desolation of Smaug... mostly because they ended the film with such an ill-timed cliff-hanger. Now seeing the latest film,
The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), I'm even more pissed off, because what would've been an awesome ending to the second film was an anticlimactic prelude to the third film. Though I understand why
Peter Jackson did it-- the scenes with the dragon are, by far, the best in the trilogy, and the rest of the third film couldn't help but be a let-down afterward. There are some great sequences in this third and final entry, but like the other films, it feels a bit padded. Don't get me wrong, this is a good film and it's a good trilogy, it's just easy to be disappointed when it doesn't match the majesty of
The Lord of the Rings. Maybe we'll get a fan-made edit culling the best parts of the three movies into one 3-hour film... I can dream, anyway.
I love a good romantic comedy; unfortunately, not many get made anymore (not good ones, I mean). Maybe I'm not in the right demographic, but it used to be that Hollywood knew how to make rom-coms that appealed to guys as well as gals.
Definitely, Maybe (2008) really got me, though.
Ryan Reynolds plays a dad on the cusp of divorce who's beseeched by his daughter (
Abigail Breslin) to tell her the story of how he and her mom met. Instead of giving a straight-forward account, he tells her about three women he was involved with before getting married and challenges her to guess which one was her mom. It's a neat premise for a film, and it plays out wonderfully; all the characters are well-drawn, their lives are layered-- it felt like this was a story about real people living in a real world with real complications. I adored this film; highly recommended.
After seeing
Nightcrawler a few weeks ago, I wanted to check out some other
Jake Gyllenhaal films. Unfortunately, I rented
Enemy (2013), a metaphysical thriller based on the Nobel Prize winning novel
The Double, by Jose Saramago. Now, understand that I have a bachelor's degree in Philosophy-- I like Philosophy, I read Philosophy, I enjoy having philosophical discussions. But I don't like how films like this get all portentous and what-not. We get it: your film is pondering meaningful, important questions; just,
please, crack a joke once in a while. It doesn't help that this is the second doppelgänger film I've seen this year (the other one being the coincidentally titled
The Double), which was similarly dour. Go see
John Dies at the End instead-- it's a much more entertaining way to bend your mind.
***
That's probably the last set of movie reviews I'll do in 2014. But be on the lookout for my year end Top 10 list later this week!
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