Tag: 3 out of 4

Sigh, my first review of an Alan Rickman film since his passing.

Unlike other stars, Rickman only had two films in post production at the time of his death. This film, Eye in the Sky, and Alice Through the Looking Glass, which he is just the voice of the caterpillar.

That makes Eye in the Sky his last live action role, so arguably his last film ever. Such a shame, because these films tend to be a bit stinky, and not knowing anything about the plot, I doubt it will have a good send off for his character like they had for Robin Williams in Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb. Heck, or even anything like Paul Walker in Furious 7.

No, this will probably just be a normal role, nothing fancy, but hopefully not forgettable. Because screw the Alice movie.

Rest in peace you beautiful bastard.

Drone warfare. A lot of problems with it, morally, ethically, and so on. It basically can turn war into a video game, where we have no one on the other side getting hurt, and we can hurt them without impunity. Terrorist in a house? Bomb the house! If the house had civilians in it, then whoops! And then we move on.

Eye in the Sky is about one fictional attack.

Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) is a British agent who has been leading a task force looking for Ayesha AL-Hady (Lex King) and a few other people on their East African most wanted list. Ayesha is actually a British citizen who has gone against her country to become a terrorist in Nigeria. They hear about a meeting between her, her husband (also in the top 5 wanted list), and a few others taking place. So they get the local Nigerian police force to help them set up a sting, with their “eyes in the sky” coming from an American drone, piloted by Steve Watts (Aaron Paul).

But things don’t go as they have planned. A few of them get in a car and change meeting location to a heavily militarized neighborhood, so the Nigerians cannot enter without starting a huge battle with many casualties. This was supposed to be a capture mission for these people to stand trial. A local Jama Farah (Barkhad Abdi) has to go undercover with a tiny bug drone to see inside the new house, where they find the members of their list, and material for suicide bomb vests. Shit. This changes everything. If they are setting up to go blow up a shopping center, maybe hundreds of lives are at stake. And since they cannot get a force in their easily, they might just have to bomb the building.

Can they do that? Can they go from a capture to a kill mission? Do they have clearance? Does the fact that American and British citizens in the house change things? Or, how bout the presence of a little neighborhood girl, selling bread right outside of the house? Well, jeez. I wouldn’t want to have to make these decisions, and apparently most other people in this film agree.

A lot of people are in this. On the British soldier/bureaucrat side we have: Iain Glen, Babou Ceesay, Alan Rickman, Monica Dolan, Jeremy Northam, and Richard McCabe. Some of our Americans are played by Phoebe Fox and Gavin Hood (the director)! And our locals on the ground crew and its citizens are: Ebby Weyime, Armaan Haggio, Aisha Takow, Faisa Hassan, and Vusi Kunene.

His gamer tag has to be “CaptainNow,” just look at him!

Yes, this really is a film just about a single fictional drone strike, and a whole lot of people talking about it. In terms of action scenes, there is really only one actual scene. It had running and guns firing and lasted mere minutes. The rest of the film was talking, and people waiting to talk.

And it was somehow the most intense feeling ever. I was literally on the edge of my seat throughout the film, only leaning back when I had to laugh nervously or get a small “whew’ in before something else went wrong. A rollercoaster of words.

You will get mad at characters, cheer certain ones on, and then quickly change your mind five minutes later. They really examine this whole situation, and every time a wrench is throne, it is unbelievable.

But the best part of Eye in the Sky, is that it never really says that one way is right and the other is wrong. Yes, a decision is made, and the decision affects dozens of people, not including those who are actually in Nigeria. It gave a lot of respect to both arguments for drone strikes, way more than say, London Has Fallen, who just hamfisted its opinion into us with a scream of “FREEDOM!”

Good news Alan Rickman. Your last live action film didn’t suck. Now if you will excuse me, I am going to go marathon Harry Potter and cry everytime.

The oil industry is a fickle little bitch. I know quite a few people who are currently jobless as a result of a price crash and international disputes. But this documentary, The Overnighters, isn’t about the oil crash despite how easily it could have been. It was about the oil boon.

The only reason people would volunteer to move to North Dakota is for work. There are thousands of thousands of oil workers doing manual labor, working 12 hour shifts, non stop, oil rigging, hard work fun. And they make money. They get OT every week and have no free time, but they get paid and if they can keep it up, they can get rich quick.

Some people go out there because no jobs at home, some because they want to get away, some to support family back home, and some because they have no other alternatives. They might have had felonies or other law trouble and getting a regular job just isn’t going to work. So they hear about all the jobs up in North Dakota and just drive up there and think they will get lucky.

But a lot of people cannot find work right away. Not only that, but in all of these small towns, there are not many places to stay. Sure there are some apartments, but thanks to the boom and supply/demand, the rent is extremely high. Places like Williston, ND aren’t going to build a lot of apartment complexes, because they know it will eventually come crashing back down, then they will have virtual ghost towns.

So we have people living in cars, living in RVs, and an increasingly annoyed small town that is afraid of them for being strangers. For being people with potentially violent pasts.

But one man, Pastor Jay Reinke, opened up his church to some of these people to sleep on their floors. And the parking lot to others. Just so they could stay overnight somewhere warm as it is the Christian thing to do.

See, now you understand the title!

Pastor Reinke seems to be a genuinely good guy. He wants to help others when everyone else turns their back. He helps them find jobs, let them know about other places that can help out, and gives them advice on whether they should even try to stay and tough it out.

During the documentary, there is also a local ordinance wanting to ban people from living in RVs. If they find someone is staying in it for more than 28 days in a year, they can be fined or arrested. This will seriously ruin a lot of lives of people who are just trying to survive and get by, not hurting anyone. So Reinke even goes door to door with flyers, inviting the towns people to meet these men and get over their fears. To see that people can be helpful and more Christ-like. Hell, Reinke even opens up his home occasionally to a few people.

But Reinke has his own demons from his past that also affect his family (wife and two daughters), more so than anyone would realize. Just typing that sentence made this sound like a thriller, so forget that.

The Overnighters is a powerful documentary. You get to hear stories of many individuals, including Reinke himself. He seems to be a guy who wants to help, but still he ends up making enemies. It is a reminder that life can fucking suck, and makes one wonder how much worse it is up there given the oil crash.

And it affected me emotionally as well. It was easy to imagine myself in the position of some of those individuals, willing to do anything just to support the family. It is a harrowing documentary that might make you feel like shit.

So why not a 4? Well, I have some issues with the way they presented some information at the end. And also the questions that they didn’t answer in the documentary by the end. They seemed to focus more on the pastor and less on the men who were homeless and potentially about to be spotless as well, when it comes to a place to sleep. But it still didn’t take away from the power that most of the documentary had on someone watching for the first time. Those stories are the real power here. Sure, the pastor has his own unique journey, but I just care less about that.

Cloverfield was a very polarizing movie back in 2008. Most people you would talk to had strong feelings one way or the other, but if you went on the internet you will find almost universal praise. Time changes everything.

Now imagine everyone’s surprise when the first trailer of 10 Cloverfield Lane appeared a mere three months before the release date. No one knew it was coming, nor did they know what it was about. Produced by J.J. Abrams, he described this film as a “blood relative” to the original Cloverfield. Again, a vague statement.

Needless to say, this is not a sequel to Cloverfield. The Director admitted just days before release that it technically didn’t even take place in the same Universe as the first film. No relation at all. Unfortunately, these quotes aren’t plastered on the commercials and posters. I predict a lot of people going into this film and being upset at the lack of monster. Abrams also said he intended for the Cloverfield name to be a sort of anthology of similar-esque films, but each unique and on its own. Like a Twilight Zone movie franchise, without a narrator.

However, I’d watch all three of these actors play board games for two hours and rate it a 5 out of 4.

Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winston) is leaving her fiancé/husband Ben (Bradley Cooper). You don’t need to know why, but she is moving out, grabbing only a few things, and hitting the road. Hell, you don’t even have to know about the weird power outages affecting the coast. You just need to know that Michelle is now alone and driving off somewhere that no one knows about. Which is why when she gets into an accident and ran off the road, her friends and family will have a hard time finding her.

Especially when she wakes up in a room, full of scratches and hurt knee. She is down to her underwear and handcuffed to the wall in a mostly barren and locked room. Shit.

Her captor is Howard (John Goodman), a gruff man who claims he saved her life. They are in a bunker because something bad has happened on the surface and the air is toxic. So he claims. He wants her to treat him with respect, saving her life and all. He is totally the best guy right? And he just so happens to have a shelter with tons of locks, food for years and a social room, just in case anything goes down. Surely he isn’t a bad guy. He just luckily found her in the wreck and helped her, for sure, right?

Well, there is another guy in there too. Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), who claims he helped build the shelter and broke his arm trying to get in. He was not kidnapped like she might have been.

Either way, the dynamic is fucked up, lots of secrets, who the fuck knows what is going on outside, we just know that they will be together in there for some time.

So better get used to staring at Howard’s fat ass dancing.

10 Cloverfield Lane, as I already mentioned, with upset a lot of people because it won’t feature the monster from Cloverfield in any way, and that is appropriate backlash given the secrecy and vagueness of it all. That should only affect this film, and not any future planned movie in this franchise-lite universe thing they are planning.

The movie on its own is tense as fuck. Twists, turns, and maybe even a pitfall or two. It traps the viewer in this bunker along with our main character, creating a dense atmosphere of hopelessness and confusion. Our heroine is particularly fun to watch because she isn’t just a held captive. She is resourceful, smart, and takes an active part in her own life, attempting to both escape and figure out what the hell is going on.

Winstead does a fantastic job of carrying the film as the main protagonist, but almost equally important is Goodman. He acts the fuck out of this movie, walking the fine line between concerned father figure and potential sociopath. The viewer can never really determine with any certainty just what he is thinking, as the whole film is generally from Winstead’s point of view. He is unnerving and also a bit sympathetic.

It is important to not overlook the third member of the bunker, Gallagher Jr. His character provides some comic relief and sense of hope. This movie would be much darker and a horror film if his role wasn’t in it.

Finally, what helped amplify the movie into complete crazy territory was the sound effects. Everything was loud and jarring and the sound made every scene ten times better. The people behind it in this movie were outstanding and deserve a lot of the praise into making this film feel so unsettling.

10 Cloverfield Lane is good thriller/drama/sci-fi (maybe!) film that leads the viewer on a strange journey. Monsters do come in all shapes and sizes after all.

2016 has a sizable collection of animated movies coming out this year. I’d list them, but that makes for a boring read.

A common theme I see is the classic “Animals doing human people things.” We technically had it with Kung Fu Panda 3, but it was at least set in the past. This year there are at least three major films with this theme in modern times. Zootopia, The Secret Life of Pets, and Sing. It seems excessive, so it probably is.

Needless to say, this made me worried for Zootopia. I had only seen the first teaser trailer, and a lot of posters. It looks un-original. It looked like last year’s The Good Dinosaur. Something they slapped together after a few years, but instead they are anticipating their other film to win awards. That one being Moana.

But then again, Walt Disney Studios hasn’t let me down since The Princess and the Frog. Clearly I should just shut up and watch the movie.

Obligatory Non-Animated Sloth Related Clip.

Despite most of the advertisements I have seen, our main character is not the fox, but actually a bunny! A female bunny, Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), with big dreams and aspirations. She wants to leave her farm and small village and become a cop! She wants to work in Zootopia, the main mammalian metropolis where so many life forms come together to live and work together to build something great. Of course there has never been a bunny cop before and her parents (Bonnie Hunt, Don Lake) will miss her a lot, but she wants to help other animals!

You see, in this world, humans never happened, all the mammals evolved to be human-esque and resist those primal urges to kill or be killed. Somehow still, despite the hundreds of years, stereotypes still exist for predators and animals. Go figure.

Well she makes it, but Chief Bogo (Idris Elba, an Ox) doesn’t care and makes her a meter maid. After getting herself into trouble and being extremely pushy, she is eventually able to join the big case. Quite a few animals, all predators have gone missing and no one has any leads on any of them. So Judy has only 48 hours to try and find Emmett Otterton, or she will resign from the job. Sucks.

To help her, she blackmails a fox named Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) to help her follow up on some leads. And of course, they become a completely opposite duo that is able to miraculously solve the case and do what no one imagined they could do.

And of course this is a big cast. So let’s not ruin it by talking about who does what and just give the list of names: J.K. Simmons, Jenny Slate, Kristen Bell, Raymond S. Persi, Maurice LaMarche, Nate Torrence, Tommy Chong, Octavia Spencer, Shakira, and of course Alan Tudyk,

And this guy is our new Olaf/Baymax/Horse from Tangled.

Somewhere, a little cartoon mouse with ears as as big as his head is slowly lighting a cigar, laughing to himself. Walt Disney Animation studios has been in the game for eons at this point and they know what they are doing. Sometimes their advertising may be suspect, but their current main line of films since the CGI era has not had a bust yet, and it was apparently wrong for me to think otherwise.

Zootopia for the most part was a very well done and enjoyable film. Scenes were incredibly detailed, especially during a night time rain storm in the jungle. There was incredible detail put into the streets of the main city and from what it looks like, they may have gotten an accurate scale of all the animals big and small. That is a huge undertaking in a film, instead of everyone just being of similar height ranges to human, a rhino or ox or giraffe appear much larger than our normal bunny point of view. In fact, I first thought something was wrong and things were being exaggerated by the animators because the reality is quite jarring.

Better yet, Judy Hopps is an awesome character. She is inspiring, she is funny, she does more than what anyone expects of her. And hey, Nick Wilde ends up being a complete character as well. A great dynamic duo, both with their own dreams and goals and neither being a cheap stereotype (although, yes, a lot of characters are cheap stereotypes).

Your mom’s a cheap stereotype.

And the movie is funny as well, it had jokes for everyone. Meta Disney jokes were there, especially when it came to Alan Tudyk’s character, movie/TV references (Breaking Bad!) and clever puns. I was almost dying during the Sloth scene, but apparently they turned 80% of that entire bit into a trailer. I’d suggest not watching that and letting it happen naturally during the movie.

It also happens to be about racism/prejudice or even a poor/rich sort of dynamic. It handles the topic with care and kids will be able to understand what is going on and the consequences of these sorts of actions.

Despite how much better it was than my imagination, it did still have some annoyances. The Gazelle played by Shakira, named Gazelle, felt incredibly cheap every time she was on screen or playing the new song just for this movie. More of a money grab than the Trolls from Frozen, but they were mostly just boring. The twists in the plot are relatively easy to catch far in advance. Not the minute small details, but figuring out who is behind the disappearing animals. A disappointing amount of time is spent pre-reveal, when an earlier reveal would have done wonders for building up the bad animal.

CGI movies take a long time to make and come out. But I don’t want to wait a long time to see more of these characters. They should turn this into a TV show, but not a cheaply done one. And fast. It easily works as a police procedural, and they’d have great content for years. Zootopia on its own is definitely recommended, and gives me a small amount of hope that maybe some of the other animated films this year won’t suck too much.

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.

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.

“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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.