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Mar. 31st, 2014
WALL STREET TO BUDAPEST, NON-STOP
Mar. 31st, 2014 12:05 pmBack from the cinemas. Amateur review time for you now.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Wes Anderson’s latest film, which tells the story of how refugee lobby boy Zero Moustafa became the owner of the Grand Budapest Hotel, which has fallen on hard times. It’s also the story of his mentor, the legendary concierge Gustave H, who steals a painting and is framed for murder. It’s a comedy. And it’s a damned funny one.
The film is full of Anderson trademarks – episodic storytelling, snappy dialogue, snappier camera pans and tilts, and deliberately obvious use of miniatures, all of which somehow manages to mix madcap humor and melancholy without going overboard on either. It’s also got a great cast to carry it along, with Ralph Fiennes topping the bill as Gustave.
The whole package is so well done and so much fun to watch, you’ll barely notice some key plot holes that are so wide that they’re quite possibly intentional.
Non-Stop
Slightly badly-timed airplane thriller with Liam Neeson playing an alcoholic air marshal on a transatlantic flight who has to deal with a mystery passenger sending him text messages demanding $150 million or someone on the plane will die every 20 minutes.
It’s somewhat better than it sounds, thanks mainly to director Jaume Collett-Sera’s skill at building the suspense and keeping you guessing who the culprit is, as well as creating well-designed visuals for all the texting that goes on. It also helps that Neeson is very good at this sort of role by now, and he carries the film well.
On the downside, the film is full of too many of the typical characters you get in these kinds of movies, and the story gets more patchy and implausible as it goes along.
The Wolf Of Wall Street
Martin Scorsese’s film version of the memoir of Jordan Belfort, the stockbroker who bilked people out of millions of dollars, spent a ridiculous amount of it on drugs and hookers, eventually went to prison, and became a successful motivational speaker.
The film is a bizarre spectacle of unhinged greed and debauchery. And as such, it’s been pilloried by the kind of people you’d expect to hate a movie like this – i.e. conservatives who complain it misrepresents Wall Street culture, liberals who complain it glorifies it, and conservative Christian groups who complain about all the naked women in it. Complicating things is that while the movie is actually more or less true to Belfort’s book, there’s no way to know to what extent Belfort himself is embellishing his own narrative to sell books.
All of which ignores the fact that this is a strikingly well-done film – great dialogue, great acting, great soundtrack and great Scorsese. It’s also so obviously a critique of the perils of unabashed greed and the disproportionately small punishment the system imposes on people who go over the line that I’m amazed anyone could think that Scorsese’s intention was to make Belfort look cool. If there’s anything wrong with The Wolf Of Wall Street, it’s the length – at three hours, it’s at least a half-hour too long, and that’s at least partly due to Scorsese including more drug/orgy scenes than was probably necessary to get the point across.
Still, that’s a minor complaint. This is Scorsese’s best film in a long time, probably since The Aviator.
24-hour party people,
This is dF
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Wes Anderson’s latest film, which tells the story of how refugee lobby boy Zero Moustafa became the owner of the Grand Budapest Hotel, which has fallen on hard times. It’s also the story of his mentor, the legendary concierge Gustave H, who steals a painting and is framed for murder. It’s a comedy. And it’s a damned funny one.
The film is full of Anderson trademarks – episodic storytelling, snappy dialogue, snappier camera pans and tilts, and deliberately obvious use of miniatures, all of which somehow manages to mix madcap humor and melancholy without going overboard on either. It’s also got a great cast to carry it along, with Ralph Fiennes topping the bill as Gustave.
The whole package is so well done and so much fun to watch, you’ll barely notice some key plot holes that are so wide that they’re quite possibly intentional.
Non-Stop
Slightly badly-timed airplane thriller with Liam Neeson playing an alcoholic air marshal on a transatlantic flight who has to deal with a mystery passenger sending him text messages demanding $150 million or someone on the plane will die every 20 minutes.
It’s somewhat better than it sounds, thanks mainly to director Jaume Collett-Sera’s skill at building the suspense and keeping you guessing who the culprit is, as well as creating well-designed visuals for all the texting that goes on. It also helps that Neeson is very good at this sort of role by now, and he carries the film well.
On the downside, the film is full of too many of the typical characters you get in these kinds of movies, and the story gets more patchy and implausible as it goes along.
The Wolf Of Wall Street
Martin Scorsese’s film version of the memoir of Jordan Belfort, the stockbroker who bilked people out of millions of dollars, spent a ridiculous amount of it on drugs and hookers, eventually went to prison, and became a successful motivational speaker.
The film is a bizarre spectacle of unhinged greed and debauchery. And as such, it’s been pilloried by the kind of people you’d expect to hate a movie like this – i.e. conservatives who complain it misrepresents Wall Street culture, liberals who complain it glorifies it, and conservative Christian groups who complain about all the naked women in it. Complicating things is that while the movie is actually more or less true to Belfort’s book, there’s no way to know to what extent Belfort himself is embellishing his own narrative to sell books.
All of which ignores the fact that this is a strikingly well-done film – great dialogue, great acting, great soundtrack and great Scorsese. It’s also so obviously a critique of the perils of unabashed greed and the disproportionately small punishment the system imposes on people who go over the line that I’m amazed anyone could think that Scorsese’s intention was to make Belfort look cool. If there’s anything wrong with The Wolf Of Wall Street, it’s the length – at three hours, it’s at least a half-hour too long, and that’s at least partly due to Scorsese including more drug/orgy scenes than was probably necessary to get the point across.
Still, that’s a minor complaint. This is Scorsese’s best film in a long time, probably since The Aviator.
24-hour party people,
This is dF