My Top-10 Films of the Year (So Far) Part 2

This is Part 2 of my favorite films of 2015. For Part I, please click this link to read it.  Thanks.

As before, where I've written a blog entry of the movie, the title will be linked so you can go there. Thanks again.

5. Tie: Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part II and The Martian

Far better than Part I, because this one has a sense of fate, of finishing up, of ending a war and moving on with life. Its themes and messages are more mature than the other films, on purpose. And it makes a point to choose humanity over war, of even winning a war, which is dubious to me, but carried out well here. It asks: How barbaric are we willing to be to win a battle, or a war? That depends on the war, I suppose, and it's easy to make sweeping platitudes, but it all works here, anyway. It's directed better, too, though all the Hunger Games movies have the same director. A minor bone to pick is how Coin was situated right behind Snow at the end; I didn't read the books, but I didn't have to in order to know what was going to happen there. It couldn't have been telegraphed more than it was. But it all wraps up well, and meaningfully, and I'll repeat here what I said in the blog: Kudos to the filmmakers for making an action movie where a woman is the main character, the one kicking ass, and the one who has to save the rather short-sighted and dim-witted (or tyrannical) men. And for showing that a woman can be just as tyrannical, just as cold and evil. Not a single stereotypical female role here. That's rare.

The Martian is a very gung-ho, optimistic movie from Ridley Scott, who's not known for being that way. Like, at all. An astronaut gets marooned on Mars, and is forced to grow food from his feces and to listen to bad disco music before he's saved by his crew, which comes back for him, thereby sacrificing another year of their lives in space. The martian, for his part, loses a ton of weight and endures a few catastrophes, but never loses his smile or his extremely positive outlook. A friend of mine found this excessively unrealistic and therefore didn't like the movie. I disagreed, saying that the movie was purposely optimistic about space, space travel, and our role in space. It was Ridley's way of saying, "Let's fund NASA more, because Earth is screwed and sooner or later we're going to need to leave." Ridley is known to be fascinated by space, about living in space, about the optimistic and positive attributes of being in space. This despite Alien and Prometheus, very pessimistic movies about the horrors of space--though both do end with an optimistically intellectual attitude about space, and about our ultimate creation. Well, Prometheus does, anyway. So IMO The Martian has to be seen with this in mind. It's not unrealistically positive, exactly, because it's whole point is to be very positive about humans in space. Think, Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

4.  Jurassic World

Extremely exciting and hyper-visual movie that was lightyears better than Jurassic Park 2 and 3. In some ways, this even exceeds the original. Yes, it's still what David Letterman infamously called "mechanical lizards," but here there are flying ones with razor-sharp teeth, and the gigantic whaleshark, and the velociraptors and T-rex are back, plus one more...All of them very scary, and very real. These all existed in the past, unlike a few of the original movie's lizards, especially that annoying fan-shaped thing. Real danger, real menace, and a couple of characters--especially Bryce Dallas Howard's--who might also exist in real life.  It doesn't focus on the kids as much as the first one did, which worked better for me. So, yes, again, just a romp with CGI lizards, but an exciting, eye-popping one, guaranteed to please and make you wish for popcorn. An almost perfect summer action / special effects popcorn-chewing visual experience, that must really be seen on the big screen.

3. Mad Max: Fury Road

About this film I ca say almost the same thing as Jurassic World, but without the dinosaurs. An unbelievably awesome action romp, it's basically two very long action sequences, or a movie-long car chase. The most inspiring thing about it is that it's NOT CGI-heavy. George Miller wanted all the stunts and all the cars to be real, and they all look it. There are Cirque du Soleil performers, real cars on top of tanks, explosions and sand and jumping and so much precision it'll make your head spin. It's perhaps the best action movie ever made. That's not just me saying so, but most of the critics, too, all of whom have put it on their own Top 10 of 2015 lists. And the National Board of Review named it the Best Picture of the Year!!!

Perhaps as equally impressive is the message. First, it's an action movie with a message, a rare thing in of itself. That the message is of female empowerment and freedom is even more rare--in all of film, never mind in an action film. But don't lose sight of the fact that the cargo driven in the movie's War Rig is not gasoline, but the five women who are escaping with Charlize Theron's Furiosa to a better place, a world of green where they are not slaves, where they can be free. Think of the women worldwide, who live in cultures where they are not free, where they are subservient to men in absolutely every way (and I do mean every way) and I think you'll agree that this is no small thing.

2. Sicario

I have misgivings placing this here instead of at #1, and went back and forth about it. My reason is simple: It has hardly any special effects to speak of, and is all acting, writing and directing. It excels at all three, plus the score to boot, which I listen to on YouTube all the time, and will probably buy soon. Benicio del Toro gives a performance that is memorably chilling, and Emily Blunt gives a performance that is easily the best of her career. I hope they're both remembered at Oscar time--and Mark Rylance should be, too, for Bridge of Spies. (His performance was as quietly nuanced as del Toro's was loudly menacing, so it's tough to know who should get it. This shows the Oscars are often a crapshoot.) Anyway, this movie is exceptional in every way, and relevant, and a dirty little corner of America's politics and its (failed) War on Drugs. It's an important movie done dirty, menacing and well.

1. Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Of course. A huge movie that makes it all relevant again, and it sets the mark for the remaining movies. Makes you wonder why George Lucas went for the prequels and Vader, rather than the sequels, and Skywalker / Leia / Han Solo, plus the newcomers. My only caveat, as mentioned above, is that Sicario is all about acting, writing and directing, and does not count a lick on special effects. This movie has very good acting and directing as well, but it of course counts very heavily on its technical side--but how could it not, since it all takes place in space? Having said that, I don't know what else I have to say about it that I didn't say in my blog entry, so without further ado I'll direct you there.

Well, thanks for reading my two Top-10 Movie List blogs! What movies did you like the best this year? How would you rank the ones I mentioned?

Bridge of Spies

Photo: Movie's poster, from its Wikipedia page.

First, before you read this review, go to YouTube and see Hanks and Jimmy Fallon acting out some short scripts made for them by kids, and about what kids know about spies.  The last script, about binoculars and friends, is a classic, and the kid who wrote it should get a prize.  Let the record show that the end of the movie is indeed about friendship.  And lots of the spies use binoculars on that bridge, too.

Okay, now...

Bridge of Spies is a film that is hard to rate and critique, since I can't say anything bad about the main actors or the directing (Spielberg hasn't been very bad since...Hook, maybe), cinematography (Janucz Kaminski is always very good), writing (the Coen Brothers!), or anything else.  It's all very good.

Yet I can't also recommend it with excitement, as I did with Sicario.  It's a Spielberg film, so you have to see it, and it's written (actually, re-written) by the Coen Brothers, so that's really good, and Tom Hanks is in it, and he and Spielberg haven't made a bad film together (though The Terminal took a little patience)--and yet, I found myself shrugging my shoulders on the way out, though not in a totally negative way, and I can't really explain it any better than that, though I'll try.

The acting is very good.  Mark Ryman probably performs the best, as the Russian spy.  He'll make you want to re-think your unnecessary worrying, at the very least.  (I'd say "Would it help?" to most people, about most things, but I'd get hit.)  Tom Hanks is typically outstanding in a role he's done many times now, and could perform in his sleep.  He doesn't here, but he could have and little would've been lost.  This is a step-by-step sort of movie.

And maybe that's part of the problem, though you know Spielberg will work with Hanks, and it is good casting here.  But there's no doubt that his character will get what he wants.  It's not set up as a mystery, exactly, nor is it exactly a thriller (another problem, maybe), and his character is so straight-up, so verbally astute, so good at selling, that you know he'll get his way.  The men he talks to are not idiots, either, but their hands are tied by bureaucratic nonsense, and politics, and Hanks' character has so much common sense and good ole American forthrightness that you know it'll all work out.

You can't have a thriller if the ending is never in doubt.  Also, if you remember your high school or college history classes at all (I can't remember where I learned about Gary Powers), you know he will be traded for the KGB guy.  Whether the college kid will also be dealt is the movie's greatest "mystery," but it's never in doubt, for the reasons I gave above.  I didn't remember him from wherever I learned about Gary Powers (as I remember that the U.S. thought he'd divulged everything, and that he was roundly frowned upon, but still wanted back, since he was an All-American Boy), but you know he's coming back or the Hanks character would have nothing to be smartly smug about.

Hanks's character is smartly smug, all movie long.  Normally, this would grate, but one of Hanks's abilities is to pull this off time and again, and not annoy.  It doesn't annoy here, and even seems appropriate to the film.  Believe me, if it didn't annoy me, it won't annoy you.  Those who know me will attest to this.

The movie ends with the note that Hanks's character was sent to Cuba by Kennedy to negotiate the release of 1,000 or so people, and that he walked out of Cuba with several times that many. That may have made a better movie, since nobody besides screenwriters of historical movies and History majors know anything about that, and I wonder (a little cynically) why that wasn't made instead.

The message is also very good, and maybe should have been highlighted more.  As Hanks's character says to Powers at the end, we--and only we--know what we do and why we do it.  Only we are in our own heads.  That's what makes good character, I guess, or a real man, or something along those lines.  (Though I know some real A-holes, as I bet you do, and these A-holes somehow manage to get along with themselves just fine, and undoubtedly sleep much better at night than I do.)

At any rate, that's the reason the KGB guy comes across so well.  He's just doing his job, after all, and he's doing it--patriotically--for his country.  He's fully aware of what may happen to him when he returns (though, according to the print at the end, it doesn't, and all was well), and just doing their job for their country is probably what some SS guys said at Nuremberg, but whatever...The point of most Spielberg-Hanks movies lately is that this is the way an upright man will behave, and in essence that's what we have here.

Maybe my biggest caveat here is that I felt like I shouldn't like or appreciate this movie, but I do, and I suspect you will too.  I also say this because I know it's gotten a 90% approval rating, and universal acclaim, as it should.  It's very solid, if not spectacular--and maybe that's yet another misgiving. From Spielberg, we expect spectacular.  I've been waiting for another Munich, another Saving Private Ryan, another Schindler's List, for a long time now. But he seems to be in another phase--let's call this the Moral American / U.S. History phase--and he seems to want subtlety, and behind-the-scenes manners that result in dramatic and important history.  This is what Lincoln and Bridge of Spies have in common.  Neither is a bad film, though Lincoln had Daniel Day-Lewis to hang its hat on, and Bridge of Spies doesn't.  That's not a slam against Hanks.  The movie simply isn't a tour de force, with that kind of central character and a performance necessary to carry it.

Anyway, you should see this, especially if you feel, like I do, that one really ought to see every Spielberg film, if you like movies at all.  But if there's a lot that you want to see out there right now (as there is for me, with The Martian and Crimson Peak still in the wings), and if you can't see them all, then wait to rent this one, or see it on cable.  But it is worth seeing, so don't miss it.  You probably won't want to see it again, though.  (I own every Spielberg movie, so I'll get this one, too, but I doubt I'd re-watch it.)

A very strange review, I know, but my reaction to it was a bit different than usual.  Still, see it.

P.S.--It seemed for awhile that this movie would be about how all Americans, or anyone embroiled in our justice system, deserve a fair trial, which the KGB guy certainly never gets, as the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling (against him) suggests.  It reminded me for a moment of Kevin Costner in JFK, where he tells his wife and crying kids that he's simply fighting for What's Right, or for Truth, more than anything else.  A very good film can still be made of this, with maybe this part of Bridge of Spies as its starting-off point.

Sicario

Photo: Sicario's movie poster, from its Wikipedia page.


A pulsing soundtrack, tense you-are-there direction, a fact-filled, dramatic screenplay and great performances--especially by Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt--all make this a great movie you just have to see.  The cinematography by Roger Deakins is an unbelievable plus.

Modern political topics like the U.S. / Mexican border, violent drug cartels, and free-wheeling cops all converge when Blunt, a specialist at knocking down doors in prototypically suburban Chandler, Arizona, is asked to join some federal operatives as they try to interrupt the drug cartels.

It's some very serious stuff, handled stylishly and seriously by French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, who I've never heard of before.  (The screenplay is also by guys I'm not familiar with.)  There are a lot of helicopter shots--which actually deserve a special mention.  These shots are not only beautiful and tense, but also weaved smartly into the plot and screenplay so they're not drawing attention to themselves.  How's that done?  By frequently having the characters talking to cops in helicopters "tracking" the bad guys via heat sensors and long-range video.  Good stuff, but still things that can be done from the ground, or in advance.  You'll see what I mean during the tunnel scenes; surely the drug traffickers can hear, if not see, a helicopter in the distance.  But you don't think of that at the time, because everything's so tense and beautiful.  There are some other nice directorial touches in those tunnel scenes.  They grabbed me so much that I ate much less popcorn than usual.

Emily Blunt's character works very nicely as the audience stand-in figure.  The movie has a you-are-there feel because she's there.  She's always tense, scared, and confused--and so you are, too.  The ads may make you think she's in almost 100% of the scenes.  She's not.  She's the main character, but quite a few scenes happen without her, especially those with Del Toro--who's the real scene-stealer of the movie.  I've never seen him in a role like this.  By the end, you'll be wondering who the real "bad guys" are.  (But don't forget what the guy at dinner had hiding behind the walls in that house in Arizona.)  Josh Brolin also does a good job in a small role.  He's had many such roles before.

The music is so pulsating, so tense, so grabbing, that it almost transcends the film.  (Currently I'm listening to it on YouTube.  I'll probably buy it.  It's that memorable.)  It makes the tense scenes even more tense, almost unbearably so.  It's very good.

Notice I've used the word "tense" a large number of times here.  It's not necessarily lazy writing; the movie is, in a word, tense.  Everything about it is tense: the acting, the action, the direction, the music.  It may be the most tense two hours you spend at a movie.  If you like that, go see it.

And let me know here who you thought the bad guys really were.

P.S.--On a side-note, kind of, ask yourself why Judas Iscariot had a last name in the Old Testament when nobody else did.  Even Jesus was called Jesus of Nazareth, or The Nazarene, in His lifetime.  (And he was called Joshue, or Joshua, of course, as well.  Christ, for those who don't know, is a Greek word that means "Anointed One" or "The Lord."  He was never known as Jesus Christ in His lifetime.  Neither the first name, nor the last, was ever his own.)  I mention all this because this movie begins with a definition of the word "sicario."  Compare it with the word "sicarii."  I'm just sayin'.