Tag: 3 out of 4

White God

White God is another foreign film, complete with subtitles, which continues to make Gorgon Reviews a place where people can come to learn about other cultures.

It is Hungarian, and actually came out two years ago. That’s right, it attempted to get a nomination for Best Foreign Film for movies in 2014, not the most current one. The last one had Son Of Saul take the award, also Hungarian. However, White God didn’t even earn the nomination.

You see, White God is a dog movie. You know, like the recent shitty Max. Or My Dog Skip. Or Marley and Me.

Although this contradicts what I just said, White God is not your typical dog movie. On IMDB it lists one of the genres as horror! I disagree with that, despite some slightly scary scenes. But it isn’t the level of Cujo. It is a strange mix of everything.

Dogeat
It’s a dog eat dog world out there. Literally at some points.

In Hungary, they have a stray dog problem. Roaming the streets, doing bad things. So they have recently gone stricter with their laws. More dogs are being caught to be killed. If you have a mixed breed / mutt dog, they assume it was one from the streets and you have to pay some sort of heavy fine to keep it. That part seems fucked up, but I don’t want to research everything about it.

Lili (Zsófia Psotta) has a mutt dog, Hagen, and she loves him so much. She has had the dog for awhile when she lived with her mom, but her mom is going away for three months so she and Hagen have to live with her dad (Sándor Zsótér).

That’s right, dog too. Well, her dad hates his ex-wife, but likes the daughter enough. However, he doesn’t like the dog. Nor do the neighbors, who claim the dog bit them despite no problem. He refuses to pay the fee when it isn’t his dog. Presumably the ex-wife paid it, but no one would know that. It makes sense that this would make him angry, but I would assume she would pay him back when they get back. Oh well. Needless to say, the dog causes issues, so despite what Lili wants, her dad throws the dog in the street while they are driving around.

Sure Lili goes back for him, but he is already gone. He ha joined with other stray dogs. He eventually gets adopted by a homeless man, who sells him to a dog fighting circuit. Yeah, that is shitty.

Not to spoil it, but it is important. Some bad things happen to the dog, but eventually he escapes. He escapes with a hundred or more other wild dogs, who then roam the streets, causing mayhem. But they aren’t like a riot, they are like a well organized army, and Hagen has some people to get some revenge on. Just hope he remembers it wasn’t Lili’s fault he was left on the street.

Also featuring Lili Monori, Lili Horváth, László Gálffi, and Szabolcs Thuróczy.

Dogrun
“We like to have a lot of laughs on the racetrack, but today we wanna talk about something serious: Packs of stray dogs that control most of the major cities.”

Look at that above picture. Look at it. That is a whole lot of dogs! Over a hundred! And every single dog in this film is real. There are no dog puppets, or dog CGI, or dog special effects. Each dog, a real dog, and the filmmakers really let lose all these dogs to run the streets for the incredible shots. That is fascinating and risky, but it pays off wickedly.

And our main dog Hagen is played by two dogs in the film. It is incredibly hard to work with animals, so I cannot imagine how many takes some of these takes took. But Hagen did a lot on his own, before wild pack leader, and it is still a sight to be seen.

In case you couldn’t tell though, these dogs kill people. So a few times there are very unsettling attacks, and one scene in particular alluded to it being like a zombie attack. Citizens were just trapped inside, but for the truly bad guys, the dogs found a way.

And really, the film is about a girl and her dog. Both of them outcasts, both lacking love in their lives and feeling like no one cares about them. It is their connections that bring everything together by the end, while also allowing a lot of uncertainty to keep this in the non-typical dog film territory. Or terrier-tory, if you will.

Above all, it is just all sorts of weird. I think I wanted more dog story than Lili story by the end. Her tale (tail?!) felt a bit repetitive and was a much more expected arc. But mostly I just want to remind you to spay and neuter your pets.

3 out of 4.

Mustang

And here we are, the day before the Oscars, and I have just but one more film to plug before the big ceremony. It is unfortunate that I was only able to check out 2 of the 5 films nominated for Best Foreign Film, but 2 is better than none, and roughly on par with my average over the last few years.

I picked Mustang because it came highly recommended from a number of people I know, and hey, it seemed like an interesting story. Not to throw any stones at eventual Oscar Winner Son Of Saul, but ever since three years of middle school crammed every single Holocaust story down my throat, I have cared very little about the events of 70 years ago.

I like fresh original ideas, even if they are based on true events of the directors life. The director of Mustang is a woman as well and the fact that I find that notable shows the general problems with director diversity.

Mustang is a dual French-Turkish film, although filmed in Turkey, spoken in Turkish, and only about Turkey. It makes it my first Turkish film review ever, even if it is only “half Turkish.”

Car
Every hair on the heads of these ladies is Turkish as well!

Set in modern-ish times in a small village in Turkey, this is the story of five sisters relatively close in age. All of them are pre-teen or teenager. Also known as the scariest time to be a woman. It starts with the last day of school before summer, where one of their favorite teachers is moving away and so they are all a bit sad.

Lale (Günes Sensoy) is our youngest and the most tomboy-ish and also our narrator. Her sisters are played by Doga Zeynep Doguslu, Tugba Sunguroglu, Elit Iscan, and Illayda Akdogan.

So to cheer themselves up, they end up playing in the beach waters with other classmates. They play chicken, which involves them getting on boy shoulders and trying to knock each other off. Fun times. However, when they get home their grandmother (Nihal G. Koldas) scolds them. Inappropriate touches with boys!

They are all orphans living with the grandmother and uncle (Ayberk Pekcan). And due to the talk of the conservative town on their morals, they are now forced to stay in their house. It slowly becomes a prison. They aren’t allowed to leave and play with friends. Or return to school. No, they need to learn how to be wives, no more freedom, so they can be married off and become someone else’s problem. One girl at a time.

Circle
Look at all these happy smiling faces at one of their weddings!

Chemistry! These girls aren’t sisters in real life, and I don’t think they knew each other out side of the film. But if you had told me they were sisters in real life, I would have definitely believed it. Most of them have no acting credits. They were just acting natural, like repressed teenage girls, and it fucking worked.

Mustang tells a simple story (and honestly, no idea why it is called that. Maybe a car brand or something?), but it is an interesting story and one that many people could relate too. Being a teenager and feeling like you aren’t in control of your life? Well, these ladies actually weren’t in control. Super oppressive and backwards, but hey, that is what it is like in other parts of the world.

Without going into a lot of details about the film, it is clear why it was nominated for Best Foreign Film. Every scene has a purpose, not every scene needs dialogue, and it is a roller coaster ride just like life. A realistic portrayal of life on the other side of the world.

3 out of 4.

Son of Saul

Foreign films are always the hardest to watch before the Oscars. Not as hard as the documentary shorts, but one step below them.

So just like last year and the year before, at most I can see is one or two of them. So I might as well watch the one that will win everything this year: Son Of Saul.

If you have heard anything about the foreign movies nominated for any of the ceremonies, you would know that Son of Saul is going to win. It has already won everything it has touched, and it just has one grail left to go. Usually there is an obvious favorite, last year was Ida and this year is Amour. It is almost like they should just get rid of the nomination aspect and just give it to the one we all already know will win.

Gun
You don’t have to put a gun to voters heads to decide. It should all come naturally.

Get ready, this is a Holocaust movie. Sonderkommandos are the worst units in a concentration camp. They are a group of strong prisoners who have to clean the gas chambers. You know, pick up and dispose of the bodies. Clean the showers of grime and blood. It is the worst place you could end up, outside of dying right off the bat.

And that is where Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig) finds himself working. He is a Hungarian-Jewish prisoner and has given up on life. But while cleaning the chambers he finds a body that is still breathing a little bit, and Saul is pretty sure it is his son. No one knows if Saul actually has a son, and the whole situation seems sketch, but Saul is certain of it. Because of the breath situation, the body is sent to the doctor for an autopsy and not immediately burned.

So now Saul has a mission. He wants to get the body out of the camp, bury it himself, AND find a Rabbi to make it a proper Jewish burial.

Also, the next day there is a planned revolt. The prisoners are going to try and fight back and escape. Saul has a lot to do in the next day and a half, and you know, he is a prisoner who isn’t supposed to do any of this.

Starring Todd Charmont, Kamil Dobrowolski, Urs Rechn, Sándor Zsótér, and Levente Molnár.

Mask
The bandanna is used to keep in all of his secrets.

There is nothing fun about the Holocaust, and much like Les Miserables, this is a very bleak film. A lot of bad things happen to Saul on his path, and he is surrounded by people getting slaughtered and with no one really wanting to help him out. It sucks. Shit sucks. Life sucks.

The film is also shot in a visually unique way. This isn’t the story of a group of people trying to escape and a lot of people dying. This is literally a story about Saul and what Saul wants to do. The camera is always on him or from his point of view. It rarely goes away from head head and shoulders. When people are dying or afraid or running around, they are not focused, just Saul on his mission. It really helps amplify the point the film wants to make and let the viewer know how determined he is.

It is also a bit slow and not a movie you will want to see again and again. It could feel like a chore to get through, and it certainly isn’t going to provide entertainment. Personally, I don’t think it really hit its stride until the second day, of the planned escape/riots and when Saul’s plans were maybe, finally, starting to come together. The ending was packed with sorrow and hope. It was incredibly well done.

And it will again, win all the awards. But hey, I haven’t seen any of the other nominees, so I have no reason to complain about that.

3 out of 4.

Boy & The World

Not all animated films are created equal. Disney and Pixar make a shit ton of content now, but for the most part, none of it anyone would really describe as experimental. The closest main stream somewhat experimental film I could come up with is Wall-E, just because of the lack of dialogue for a large chunk of the movie.

So for the most part, we have to look to other smaller companies to try and break the mold on the story front. And some times those other companies come from different countries.

That brings us to Boy & The World, a film that technically first came out in 2013 in Brazil as O Menino e o Mundo, but took awhile to get to the US and other parts of the world. It was however nominated as Best Animated Feature for this latest Academy Awards ceremony, and the last one on my list to watch. Despite its language being Portuguese, it has almost no dialogue and is entirely an 80 minute story for those visual lovers out there.

Simple
It goes from extremely simplistic, to slightly more than extremely simplistic.

This is a story about a boy named Cuca. They don’t say it in the movie, but you know, the the info about the movie lets us know. He is a small kid living in a small village in a weird world. It isn’t Brazil, this isn’t a real place, but if you want it to be in Brazil I won’t stop you.

Cuca likes to dream. He has a lot of imagination, because you know, he is a kid. He lives with a mother and a father, but times are tough, and the dad has to leave the village to go to the big, emotionless city to find work. Once he gets paid, he could return maybe. But for now, Cuca feels like his whole world has come crashing down.

So, fuck it. He decides to go on a journey and find his dad. And he meets a lot of people and friendly strangers along the way. And a dog! But the further he journeys, the more corrupt and crazy things get. Simple village life is definitely preferred. More fun, more imagination, more love.

Color
And less depressing colors.

Boy & The World is rated PG, but you know what? Kids might not enjoy it. Both of my kids who are old enough to see things and think only watched it for a little bit as I did, then wandered off to do something else. If it was a typical movie, they would usually never do that, because they have simpler story structures to follow. To a kid, this will look like a lot of moving pictures but they won’t know why anything is happening and easily get distracted.

That is me saying that this is not the type of movie you can half ass watch and get anything out of it. You have to pay attention, to see the details, to see the changes, and if you put in the effort, you probably will still be a little bit confused at times. So many characters, but basically no names and dialogue. Just people interacting and living and working.

The art style in this movie is fantastic. It is all quite simple, but it has a lot going on at the same time. It feels like I every frame is taken directly out of a children’s book. We haven’t had a unique art film like this since The Tale of Princess Kaguya, which felt like a moving painting.

The film also goes into some pretty deep stuff. Pretty anti-capitalism and wasting your whole life at work. It isn’t subtle about any of this, especially when it brings in the government oppression. And yes, this is still a PG movie, it just has a lot to say about the world (coughAndBrazilcough).

A fantastic film, one definitely worthy of its nomination.

3 out of 4.

99 Homes

If I had 99 Homes, I’d either sell at least 94 of them, or desperately look for one more home. It’s so fucking close to a cool number. Just think, 100 homes.

You know what you could do with a 100 homes? No? Exactly. I’d realiz it was stupid within a week and then try to sell at least 95 of them.

99 Homes is released by Broad Green Pictures, a new company as of 2015, but they had a productive year. However, I am happy to announce this is their first film I have actually reviewed! Hooray! I had no interest in seeing Learning to Drive or A Walk in the Woods or the other few films I never heard about before.

Deals
And I will review it without making any Spider-Man / Superman crossover jokes.

Remember the 2008 Financial Housing Collapse thing? No, well, go watch Margin Call and The Big Short. Come back to this review in like 4 hours.

People lost their homes. Loans and bubbles, bad stuff. Very bad stuff for Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield), a single dad, raising his son Connor (Noah Lomax) and also living with his mother, Lynn (Laura Dern). You see, they are about to lose their family home. He is a contractor, but he lost his job and is up to his ears in bills and lawyers and what not.

But no. The home is no longer his. It belongs to the bank and they have to leave immediately and move into a hotel room. The man to deliver the message is Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), a real estate agent who has turned into the guy people hate to kick them out of their houses. No one likes Carver, especially not Denis.

Then Dennis starts to work for Carver. What? Exactly. A shitty job needed to be done on a different foreclosed house, and Dennis has the tools, skills, and really needed the money. Dennis slowly gains more and more responsibility, doing terrible things for pay, hurting others who used to be just like him. Just so he can get the house back.

Sad
It isn’t even that great of a house.

There is only so much sadness one person can feel due to a single event. Right? That is why they don’t make as many Holocaust movies as they used to. People are tired of those events.

I apparently am not over these types of movies yet. The beginning of 99 Homes is compelling and really gets you on the train to sadtown real quick. It is a bullet train. Garfield gives a pretty compelling performance, Dern not as much as I had hoped.

Shannon is the big bad guy here. A seemingly uncaring man who just wants people out of houses so he can move on to the next house to fuck up more lives. But as Garfield’s character begins to work and deal with him, part of him gets redeemed. Just kidding, dude is terrible and all money hungry and exactly the right kind of antagonist to go with a movie about the economy tanking.

The ending was good too, a lot of tense and morally dark choices had to be made, but I feel every character got what they deserved and was not disappointed.

3 out of 4.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared

I have to type it out at least once, so here I go.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared (whew) is a movie actually recommended to me sometime last summer. Except it was a foreign flick and I had no way of watching it. But it has a lot of acclaim over in Sweden, and I like Sweden so I hoped I would like it too.

Hell, it is Sweden’s third highest grossing film of all time. Right after The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire. I have no idea how much money The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest made, but I assume they all hated it as much as I did and it wasn’t actually third before this.

Seemingly out of nowhere though, this movie was nominated for an Academy award. No, not for foreign film, and not for cinematography. It was nominated for Best Makeup! It is competing against Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant. Technically I shouldn’t be surprised because those two films were nominated for everything, I just expected a bit more diversity.

Oh well, let’s see what this very specific movie title is about!

Window
Look! There he goes! Disappearing out of a window! Now you know!

Allan Karlsson (Robert Gustafsson) is old. He is about to turn 100, and thus, our man with the plan. Well, plan isn’t true either. His plan is to get away.

You see, Allan is cooked up in a nursing home, because he was found unsafe to be living by himself after he used dynamite to blow up his chicken coop to get a fox. So he jumps out of his window and goes to a nearby bus station, with only a bit of loose change.

However, some angry skin head (Simon Säppenen) comes in and tells Allan to hold on to his bag while he hits the toilet, because the suitcase won’t fit in the room. Just as he does, the bus arrives to take Allan to the middle of nowhere. So Allan takes the suitcase with him.

And what happens is a brief adventure, where Allan runs into a very diverse group of people, some violence, and of course man hunt to find him from the local authorities and a biker gang. At the same time, we learn about what Allan did throughout his long life in a series of anecdotes. Anecdotes!

Also starring David Wiberg, Iwar Wiklander, Jens Hultén, and Mia Skäringer.

Group
What a ragtag group of so-and-sos.

Let me save time. Did you like Forrest Gump? This is the Swedish Forrest Gump. Sure, he isn’t mentally slow, he just lacks a lot of formal schooling. But he goes around the world, joins the military, and becomes a big player in a lot of events over the last 100 years. He meets Stalin! He helps with the Manhattan project! And more!

The good news is that the stories of his past are only 35-40% of the film. The rest is of him being 100 and doing his little adventure thing. The cast of characters are diverse, the situations are funny, and I didn’t know how it will end.

It was nominated for best make up because our main actor, Gustafsson, is not actually 100 years old, but they made him look super old for the film. He is only 50 ish, and plays Allan through all parts of his life outside of being a little kid. So it is pretty good. I just wish, again, the category was a bit more diverse. The other two films will win enough awards. So I hope this one pulls off the upset.

A pretty good movie, probably a really good book. And hey, Sweden everyone. Sweden.

3 out of 4.

Touched With Fire

Just like you, I didn’t know a lot about Touched With Fire before watching it. (Okay, I guess for most of you, you probably haven’t seen it either). Virtually no advertising, a super limited release, and well, that is all that I need to say.

It is of course based on a book, and some people thought the book was good enough to be a movie. [Editor’s note: The movie isn’t the book, they just use the real research book with this title. Check it out!]

According to some article on the internet, this whole movie might be a big fuck you to Scientology from Katie Holmes, some how. So let’s go in with that excitement!


Space
I didn’t read the article. I don’t know how to read.

Carla (Katie Holmes) once ran out into the desert with some friends in college, and forced herself to stare at the sun. This is technically not relevant, but it is a good starting off point. She is a poet, and she is manic depressive. She has been living on her own, but she went off of her meds again and accidentally checked herself into a psychiatric hospital.

But at the hospital, she met Marco/Luna (Luke Kirby), who also finds himself checked in on the same day. Not to make light of his situation, but he is obsessed with the moon and believes he comes from another planet. He is also a poet, but more of a rapper, and he understands that most of the great artists and poets of the last hundred years have been manic.

Needless to say, they fall in love. Kind of. They escalate each others conditions to a point of extreme mania, so they then find themselves separated, depressed, and longing to find each other again.

Carla’s parents are played by Christine Lahti and Bruce Altman, and Marco’s dad is Griffin Dunne. Also Maryann Urbano plays their doctor.

Night
Stars. Moons. And this painting. Alien theory checks out!

When they first introduced Luna, I hated him immediately. I thought the movie was trying too hard. The camera kept moving like someone had just run up a flight of stairs and couldn’t keep it straight. I assume to show his current state of mind, but it just pissed me off and I was hoping he wouldn’t have a big role.

But as the film continued, he grew on me. Carla grew on me. The two embracing their condition, not seeing it as an illness or a crutch, but living their lives without drugs or help. I was right there with them. I was thinking “Man, fuck these doctors. Fuck their parents for trying to ‘help!’ Just let them love each other, damn it!” And thus, the movie had me right where it wanted.

I got caught up in the emotions and was cheering for ill people to not get help. It was a weird position in retrospect to be in, but damn, the acting from Kirby and Holmes came out strong and I was left unprepared. Hell, Kirby reminded me of a young Mark Ruffalo, but I don’t know if that is just his general look or because he was recently bipolar in Infinitely Polar Bear. It was a roller coaster. Because they were manics, they were constantly going to extremes and it perfectly captured everything for the viewer.

And yes, there are some disturbing scenes as well. This is a drama, not a happy comedy.

It is well acted from the leads, a good job from everyone overall.

3 out of 4.

45 Years

Surprisingly this year I am far more caught up on Oscar nominated films than the years prior. Of the major categories, I am only missing two films, Trumbo and of course 45 Years for Best Actor and Best Actress.

Best Actress and Supporting Actress are almost always weaker categories for me. And so, damn it, I swore I would see 45 Years before Trumbo. The only sad part about that is thanks to release dates, my review of 45 Years will still come out after Trumbo, but I did see 45 Years first!

I am a bit excited about 45 Years because I only ever heard of it when it was announced as a nominee! I love surprises! Except for surprise parties. No one likes those.

Think
Surprise love letters are also frowned upon.

45 Years is about three people, but only two of which have a person playing them.

Kate Mercer (Charlotte Rampling) and her husband, Geoff Mercer (Tom Courtenay) have been married a long time. Specifically, 45 years! They have no kids and mostly live by themselves in a loving marriage. They planned on having a big party for their 40th Anniversary, but a surgery came up and wrecked their plans. So instead they are going all out for 45. After all, they don’t know if they can make it to the next milestone

But then Geoff received some news. They discovered Katya’s body. Katya was Geoff’s girlfriend before Kate and she died 50 years ago. It involved mountain climbing and she fell off into a river or mountain or something. It was very tragic, but her body has finally been found and it is perfectly preserved.

That is weird and strange. It has been so long and it was so tragic, but Geoff has mostly forgotten about her. Obviously Kate never knew her, but she really doesn’t want to know her either. This is the week before their big party and they should be taking it easy and planning. But now Geoff wants to go and see the body for closure, at his age despite his health.

And that is only the first problem that comes up. Kate is noticing a change in her relationship and Geoff’s behavior over this knowledge, one that makes her feel like second fiddle despite their many many years together.

Time for awkward old people talk.

Talk
Shit, is he friend zoning her?!

Movies about old people are weird for me. I am still a relatively young adult male and so I haven’t necessarily had enough adult experiences to relate to everything. The passing of family and loved ones, for instance, is one thankfully I have yet to experience.

This one is still a bit different. This is about a death before a marriage occurred. Before the couple even met. And something that normally wouldn’t come up again so much later in life, but a missing body brings it to the for front. It is a unique occurrence and one that rarely anyone would ever experience

Thankfully, the two actors here do a phenomenal job together conveying years of anguish and loss over these events, almost entirely through their facial expressions and tone of voice. This isn’t a dialogue heavy film. It is a strict drama and it is slow (painfully at times).

If you want to see 45 Years, you will want to see it for its great, subtle and realistic acting. But as I just mentioned, it is slow and I question how much of some of the middle parts ended up being relevant to the plot. I can’t just watch a movie of people being old and sad. I do need changes to occur and plot to develop a bit more than what ends up happening.

The final scenes in the anniversary party are good though. Some long scenes of just straight up speeches and acting and it stays incredibly sad. Not a film I would ever want to watch again. But still sad and if it wasn’t such a stacked year for Best Actors, Courtenay probably would have been nominated too.

3 out of 4.

Kung Fu Panda 3

Animated films can take a long time to make. It takes years to get all of the CGI right, and pretty. It does not take a lot of time to record dialogue, or figure out the plot (Unless you are The Good Dinosaur). But all the technical work making sure every frame is wonderful and all the characters are as you had hoped. Years and hundreds of people at work.

Technically it only takes years if you care about the final product. That is why we had Planes and Planes: Fire & Rescue less than a year apart. The animators didn’t care.

There was a five year gap between Kung Fu Panda 2 and Kung Fu Panda 3. And you know that is not because the voice actors were too busy for lines. Kung Fu Panda 2 in 2011 was the prettiest film of all the CGI movies. Prettier than Rango and Puss In Boots. If they wanted to not just recipricate the second movie but surpass it, you can bet your ass it would take them years of work.

I am rambling. All I am trying to say is I expect this film to shit rainbows and make my eyes bleed in wonder. A sweet villain would also be delightful.

Kai
Creepy and promising! Me likey.

As we know from the end of 2, there is a secret panda village somewhere and Po (Jack Black) doesn’t know about it. He won’t care about it until a mysterious panda, Li (Bryan Cranston) shows up to the valley. He is looking for his lost son. Could it be?! Yes, yes it could be.

Great news! Now Po can show his dad all the cool dragon warrior stuff, and make his Foster Dad, Mr. Ping (James Hong) feel incredibly sad and jealous. Also Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) plans on retiring so he can focus on himself and find his Chi to do even better Kung Fu, leaving Po in charge of training the five (Angelina Jolie, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, David Cross, Jackie Chan). But he can’t teach.

Even worse? Well, Kai (J.K. Simmons) has escaped from the Spirit Realm! Who? He used to be a friend of Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim) 500 years ago, even saved his life! But he got jealous of Oogway when he was taught to harness Chi from the mystical Panda village and wanted the power for his own, so he had to be put down in a jealous fury. Well, he eventually figured out how to steal Chi in the spirit realm, defeating all former masters and now he is back to the real world to defeat any and all would be challengers.

Jeez. Now Po has to learn Chi to defeat Kai. But it took Oogway 30 years! And Shifu can’t! Time for Po to go to his homeland. To determine how he can be the most Panda he can be, to learn what he has been missing all his life. To really become the Dragon Warrior.

Also featuring Kate Hudson as a ribbon dancing Panda.

Armor
And of course this rhino panda bird metal hybrid warrior! Don’t forget about him!

This part of the review is actually really hard to write. How many times can I say how beautiful this movie is? I don’t want to look in a thesaurus but I believe everything I say about the CGI and art style will just sound repetitive. Gorgeous, detailed, beautiful, wonderful and wunderbar, eye orgasmic. The best part that this Kung Fu movie is animated is they can show amazing fight scenes and nothing gets lost to blur or shaky camera. We can see every punch and kick. Every fantastic movement. And it is awe inspiring. Just like the previous films, the entire thing isn’t just CGI, they have other art styles to show within back stories which give it more traditional feels.

Fuck its so pretty.

Okay. Sorry. I will stop.

Kung Fu Panda 3 is sadly not perfect. A lot of the early film is wasted. Part of the charm of sequels for action films like this is that we don’t have to waste our time with origin stories. But this film has us sit through Po being bad at teaching, then he is has to do the long Panda training. The Panda training in particular, discovering his family and friends, just takes so much time and makes me lose interest in Po. The twists that show up during the village are also quite obvious, so we don’t even get the benefit of a nice shock.

The villain is awesome, although we don’t get to see enough of him doing bad things. The spirit realm was awesome and allowed the film to add more magical components to the franchise. Making “Chi” the big new thing feels a bit strange. I think KFP2 added that he needed Inner Peace and the Chi concept just feels like the same thing again. I don’t want each film to be Po learning something bigger to defeat a new threat. That isn’t original. Although I don’t know if there will be any more films after this one, given the ending.

Oh well. Pretty franchise. Pretty good. Not perfect.

3 out of 4.

Trumbo

Trumbo! The great white buffalo! Of the main acting awards, this is the final film I needed to see to complete the categories.

I missed it when it came out in November, because, I dunno, I was busy or something. I didn’t care to see it. I figured it wouldn’t get nominated, no matter how much I like Bryan Cranston.

But hey, he did get nominated for best actor. And with a mustache! It is basically what Johnny Depp was doing with Mortdecai. That is the movie in 2015 he wanted to win Best Actor for right? I can’t think of any other film.

Erm. Trumbo! True story! Communists! Time to party! Red Party.

Bribe
That’s a communist joke and damn it, that is probably a communist dress too.

Back to Trumbo, or Dalton Trumbo (Cranston) as everyone everywhere calls him. He lives a good life. He is one of the most successful writers in Hollywood. He has contracts with movie studios to write exclusively for them, meaning that his family can live a nice life. That is of course his wife (Diane Lane), main daughter (eventually Elle Fanning) and two other kids who we don’t care about.

But he has a secret. A very vocal secret. He cares about the rights of the workers. Any workers technically, but specifically the Hollywood workers who don’t make money and should make more instead of the Hollywood fat cats. He is a…a…a…COMMUNIST. And there are a bunch of them too. This is now the late 40s and people are starting to get afraid of the Commies, thanks to the Russians and the coldness of their threats. So they try and round up all the communists in Hollywood and KILL THEM! No, not kill them, but black list them. Refuse to let them work in movies ever again. After all, if they are writing their movies, they could be putting subliminal communist things into mainstream America and fuck us from the inside! That would be terrifying.

And Trumbo is about how this man and his friends decided to try and fight for their first amendment rights. And to work despite the blacklist through aliases, friends, or by boldly ignoring the threats of others. Guess how many Oscars Trumbo won while black listed? Three. He was basically penning the “Fuck The Police” song well before the boys in Straight Outta Compton.

And of course we have more people in this movie: John Goodman and Stephen Root are brothers who make a shit ton of B movies. David James Elliott plays JOHN WAYNE. Louis C.K. is a fellow writer commie, Alan Tudyk is a fellow writer, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is a prison man, and Helen Mirren and Michael Stuhlbarg fuck some shit up.

Press
It is rumored that Cranston was able to grow out the ‘Stashe in just 3 minutes.

Despite my wildly successful movie watching lifestyle, I am super behind on almost everything before 1990. I only barely have the 80’s covered, and everything before that is pitiful. So if I can watch a modern movie telling me about movies back in the day, I consider it a win. I have never seen Roman Holiday or The Brave One, but you bet your ass I have seen Spartacus. Getting to hear behind the scenes stories of how these films were written and what they had to do to hide Trumbo’s name was fascinating. It is probably the sexiest thing I have ever heard of when talking about 1950’s Hollywood writers.

Cranston gave a pretty good performance. I am not willing to call it incredible. I saw a lot of Cranston that I have seen in other roles, and I never really saw someone other than himself. I didn’t feel like he ever fully transformed into the man he was playing, not even when he was sitting in the bathtub. I can say it was my least favorite of the Best Actor nominee performances, and would probably rather someone like Steve Carell or Mark Ruffalo from Infinitely Polar Bear.

C.K. and Lane both did excellent jobs with their supporting characters, although Lane wasn’t given a lot to work with.

Story wise, again, there were a lot of interesting moments, but I will say I got confused a few times at a lot of the extra characters, who they were supposed to be, whose side people were on, and just why they were relevant. There are a lot of extra characters here with important roles, too many to list and name, and yeah. I can’t remember most of them. Thankfully it was only small bits of confusion and I could still easily grasp the main points of the story.

3 out of 4.