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Arts and Entertainment, Opinion

Holiday 2015 Movie Reviews: Hunger Games, The Night Before & More

 

The holiday movie season is here, and that means a flood of great (and not-so-great) film entertainment for your viewing pleasure. I’ve done my best to sort the tripe from the treasure, hand-picking one film each from four different genres — action/adventure, animation, comedy and drama — to check out on your days off.

“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2”

Action/Adventure

This fourth entry in the “Hunger Games” series sees Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) take the war for Panem to the Capitol itself, gaining an opportunity to confront the diabolical President Snow (Donald Sutherland) at last.

The higher focus on action does mean we see less of our favorite characters, like unflappable Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) and clever Plutarch Heavensbee (the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman), but the greater focus on Katniss and brainwashed beau Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) allow Lawrence and Hutcherson to turn out their deepest and most affecting performances as these beloved characters.

Perhaps best of all, this unflinchingly grim, mature portrait of war — and its willingness to venture into tense political territory — doesn’t pull punches for the sake of its target audience, a thing to be savored in this era of diminishing returns.

“The Good Dinosaur”

Animation

It’s not even in the same stratosphere as “Inside Out,” which came out earlier this year, but director Peter Sohn’s contribution to the Pixar catalog is a good-natured and gorgeous little Western.

The story reverses the roles of human and beast, following young Apatosaurus Arlo (Raymond Ochoa) and caveboy Spot (Jack Bright) as they attempt to find their way back to the mountain where Arlo’s family lives. Along the way, they find ways to bridge the communication gap between species (Spot, as part of the role reversal, is the one lacking language) in the movie’s best tearjerker of a scene, and discover they have more in common than they might have otherwise thought.

The movie’s thin plot and intermittent exchanges of dialogue might make this a bit of a slog for adults in the audience, but at least they’ll have plenty of eye candy to look at in the meantime — Pixar renders their most stunning, lifelike scenery yet here.

“The Night Before”

Comedy

HHH

You’ve got to hand it to him: Seth Rogen may have played the chubby, druggy slacker-dude a few too many times in his career, but he hasn’t exhausted the laughs he can get with his lovable loser character. This time around, he’s Isaac Greenberg, the oafish BFF to two other goofballs by the names of Ethan Miller (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Chris Roberts (Anthony Mackie).

Ethan lost his parents in a car accident fourteen years ago, so to cheer him up, his friends created an annual Christmas tradition of silly slackerdom: Chinese food. Intentionally bad karaoke. The piano at FAO Schwarz made famous in Tom Hanks’ “Big.” But now, with Roberts taking care of a superstar career in the NFL and Greenberg with a baby on the way, it may be time for Ethan to face the music: his friends are growing up.

Oh, all right, so the premise is unoriginal and the quality of the jokes is uneven, but there are too many belly laughs here for anyone to care. One particular sequence, involving a series of explicit photos sent to Rogen via text message, had me seeing stars and gasping for air.

“Creed”

Drama

Who’d have guessed that this de facto “Rocky VII” could be not only good, but the best in the series since John G. Avildsen’s 1976 original? Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) quits his white collar job just after getting a promotion, and his mother senses the reason why: he’s going to fight. She knows this obsession with violence well, because she’s the widow of the late Apollo Creed — Rocky’s rival-turned-pal who died in the ring with Ivan Drago in the absurdly schlocky “Rocky IV.”

But the movie spares us flashbacks and plays it straight, which allows us to believe in the characters — for the most part, anyway. Although we’re never quite convinced of Johnson’s (later Creed’s) motivation, his camaraderie with Stallone’s iconic boxer — who, naturally, trains him to take on his father’s legacy — is surprisingly poignant, and the relationship he nurtures with quirky singer-songwriter Bianca is a worthy match for Rocky’s decades-old romance with Adrian. Yeah, “Pretty” Ricky Conlan isn’t up there with the original Creed, Mr. T’s Clubber Lang and Drago as a great over-the-top villain, but this is one movie that can survive on the virtues of its heroes alone.

Opinion

‘Spotlight’ celebrates journalistic integrity

 

Last week, in the wake of people’s hateful reactions to a number of tragedies and events, I found myself questioning the purpose of journalism as a profession. Taking a rare opportunity to step up on the Social Media Soapbox, I wrote an impassioned tirade on Facebook: “Sometimes I wonder what the point of being a journalist is,” I said. “Why bother relating the facts when so many readers are a) too ignorant to understand them in the right context and/or b) too caught up in their own emotions to even bother with empiricism?”

This is a question I’m sure many people in the field struggle with from time to time. After all, when wagging fingers come to rest on the public’s chosen scapegoat for any given issue, it is “the media” in general that gets lazily blamed for the world’s problems. Indeed, it often feels like people would rather not know the truth at all, lest it come into conflict with the version they’ve imagined for themselves.

“Spotlight” is an important film, because it reinforces a key point about journalism’s ability to combat ignorance: it’s not about telling the public what they want to hear, it’s about telling them what they need to hear. In a city with such a large Roman Catholic population, The Boston Globe took enormous risks to tell the truth about corruption within the church’s ranks — let alone corruption dealing with child rape and molestation. But in doing so, they uncovered a global problem that challenged people’s beliefs and forced people to look at things from a different perspective. The story may not have the most satisfying resolution, but it reminded me why journalism is such a crucial service — especially at a time when emotions seem to trump facts.

The movie takes us back to 2001. The Spotlight team consists of Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery) and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James). They’re a bit on edge because a new editor has been hired, an outsider from the Miami Herald named Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber). Baron wants to redirect the Spotlight team’s efforts, which includes requesting that they pursue information on Catholic priest John Geoghan, who has been accused of molesting several young boys.

As the team scatters to the corners of the city to begin putting the pieces of the puzzle together, it never dawns on us that we’re watching “performances,” as these actors completely embody the journalists they’re playing. It bodes well that none of them are glammed up in stereotypically Hollywood ways; their frumpy, grizzled appearances lend a lot of believability to the recreation of the events here — and unlike other movies set in Boston this year (“Black Mass”), director Thomas McCarthy’s film accomplishes the striking feat of actually feeling local.

As the plot thickens, with more and more revelations being uncovered, the memorable moments pile up: unforgettable, heartbreaking scenes of the victims recounting their abuse at the hands of the priests they so admired; any scene with Stanley Tucci as Mitchell Garabedian, a frazzled but deeply concerned lawyer knee-deep in cases involving the Church; and a late montage set to an eerie youth-choir version of “Silent Night,” which sent chills up my spine. To merely describe the events is to do the filmmakers an extreme disservice; like the outrageous events that fueled Rezendes’ original immense, multi-page expose, “Spotlight” has to be seen to be believed.

This is one of the best films of the year. It’s not just a heartening reminder of what journalism can do, it’s a captivating story in its own right: a portrait of hard-working people absolutely committed to doing the right thing — going up against a monumental institution with a lot to hide, and plenty of places to hide it.

Arts and Entertainment

Crimson Peak Review

 

crimsonpeak1
Photo courtesy of Legendary Pictures
Viewers who go into Guillermo del Toro’s “Crimson Peak” expecting straightforward horror will be disappointed. This is not a horror movie in today’s sense of the word, filled with cheap jump scares, computer-generated ghouls and dying teenagers. This is a gothic romance in which most of the horrors happen offscreen — a tragedy of taboos that revels in melodrama and repressed emotion.

It takes place in the steam-powered world of the Industrial Revolution, of course, because what better time is there to set a movie about repression? Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) and her father, Carter (Tom Beaver) are visited by the Sharpe siblings, Thomas (Tom Hiddleston) and Lucille (Jessica Chastain). Thomas has come all the way from Britain, hoping to earn Carter’s investment in his invention. He’s unconvinced, so Thomas remains in town… just long enough to fall in love with Edith.

Oh, and Edith keeps getting a mysterious warning from her mother — who, by the way, is a ghost — to “beware of Crimson Peak.” So naturally, when she marries Thomas and heads to England at his side, where does he happen to live?

If you figured that brain-buster out, you’ll have no trouble solving the rest of the mysteries well before the movie does. But don’t despair, that’s part of the fun: del Toro has created a magical Hammer Horror tribute, complete with operatic emotion, iris wipes and a spectacular manor.

This may be one of the most beautiful and haunting movie sets ever constructed. The mansion’s foyer has a hole in the ceiling that lets autumn leaves — and later, snow — fall freely to the center of the room. Having been built on a clay pit, there are scarlet trails running down the walls. And the very architecture of the place is sometimes more creepy than the ghosts that inhabit it: spiky archways and a rickety elevator give plenty of chills.

In the end, though, it’s the big emotions that provide the major thrills. Edith finds more than she bargains for in the old house, and tension escalates to the breaking point. Wasikowska, Hiddleston and Chastain all contribute wonderfully to the melodrama, staying committed to their roles even through dialogue that borders on the ridiculous. One late scene, featuring Chastain slamming a kitchen implement down, is so gleefully absurd that it has to be seen to be believed. And that feeling carries through the rest of the movie, which is over-the-top in all the right ways.