Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Eight down, one to go. My quest to see all nine of the Academy Award nominees is drawing closer to its end, and now I get to scratch Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close off the list. Based off the book of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer, it's the story of a boy who is searching for a lock that fits a key he finds among his father's belongings after his father dies in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. I went into the movie expecting it to be a little dependent on its link to 9/11 and bracing myself for two hours of the emotional exploitation of a national tragedy, but I came away from it pleasantly surprised.

Don't get me wrong: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close really had no place being honored as one of the best movies of the year. It's good, but there were plenty of other films that had more going for them. This movie is all about playing your emotions like a fiddle and making you feel extremely sorry for the main character. Thomas Horn plays Oskar Schell, an eccentric boy who idolizes his father (Tom Hanks). When his father dies in the World Trade Center, Oskar tries to cope with his loss, and while looking through his father's possessions a year later, comes across a mysterious key to a lockbox and a single word written on the envelope. This launches a citywide adventure for Oskar, who uses the adventure as an opportunity to combat his own social awkwardness and connect with people from all walks of life. If that brief description doesn't scream "emotional roller coaster" enough for you, factor in a mute old man and a grieving mother as his accomplices and tell me that doesn't sound like one of the most bittersweet movies you'll ever watch. And I'll tell you you're right.

The saving grace in this movie is the acting. It's easy to ride the emotional wave of the story alone, but the actors in this film really do sell the movie and make it seem a little more real. Horn does an amazing job, especially since this is his first role in a feature film. Add in Tom Hanks as the father, Sandra Bullock as the mother, and supporting roles by Octavia Spencer, John Goodman, and Max von Sydow (who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as the mute Renter), and you have a very strong group of talent that takes an otherwise forgettable movie and makes it something worth watching.

All in all, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is an okay movie, but not too much more than that. I see the appeal, and I compare the feeling you get from watching this to watching The Blind Side, but just because it made me feel warm and fuzzy inside doesn't necessarily mean it was great. It kind of drags, and the story just seems a little too warm and fuzzy to be believable. I recommend watching it, but don't get your hopes up for it being fantastic. I give it 6 1/2 heartwarming connections between racial and economic barriers out of 10.

The Rum Diary

It seems a little odd, but sometimes I really love a movie even when it's not good. I'm not talking about so-cheesy-that-you-must-watch-how-bad-this-is movies, I'm talking about movies that are, on a critical level, not so great or so terrible, but at the same time they're so fun that you can't help but love them anyway. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was not, in my opinion, a great film, at least by many of the standards that I usually gauge movies with, but I had a blast watching the exploits of Captain Jack Sparrow anyway. The same goes, at least with me, for 2010's The A-Team remake or the Men in Black series. Well, The Rum Diary is definitely another film I can add to that group.

In Johnny Depp's second role in a film adaptation of a Hunter S. Thompson piece, he plays Kemp, a journalist based largely on Thompson's early career. Kemp is a struggling author who moves to Puerto Rico to work for The San Juan Star, and The Rum Diary is largely the story of all of the shenanigans he gets into during his short stay there. Sure, there's a story involving shady land deals by a sleazy land baron (Aaron Eckhart), a love affair with his fiance (Amber Heard), and the eventual climax of the movie involving real journalism and cockfighting, but honestly, you're not going to watch this movie for the plot. If you are, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

The good part is this: everyone, on and off camera, really sells this movie. It's incredibly absorbing. From the second he arrives in his dump of a newspaper office to the ending montage, I felt very drawn in to the world they were creating. The acting was solid, the scenery was beautiful, and the escalating amounts of trouble that Kemp finds himself in is incredibly fun to watch. Unfortunately, the story is an absolute pain to try and figure out. The film is set up to where we will see two or three different scenes, only one of which will actually be important to the plot later. The other two will be throwaway scenes involving Kemp and his associates getting themselves into trouble over some sort of cultural faux-pas or drunken misadventure. While fun to watch, it makes the flow of the story incredibly disjointed and hard to follow. Also, Amber Heard has the acting capacity of a cardboard box. Enough said about that.

I obviously cannot stress enough how much fun this movie is to watch. Yes, the flow of the story is almost frustratingly askew (and not in a good, Tarantino-ey way), but I almost didn't care at all. The Rum Diary is one of those movies that can, despite its glaring misgivings, still draw you in by just being incredibly fun, and that is what saved it from an abysmal score. I give it 7 misadventures involving Puerto Rican moonshine out of 10.

The Avengers

I just want to preface this by saying that it's really exciting to be up at 3:30 in the morning writing a review for a movie that I just saw the midnight premiere of. Now, on to the regularly scheduled review.

It's now May, and that means one big thing for moviegoers: summer blockbuster season is upon us. And this year kicked off with a bang: The Avengers. Since Marvel created its own studio and debuted with Iron Man in 2008, their pet project was tying together all of their subsequent movies (The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger) into one climactic mega-film that will generate a lot of hype, a lot of excitement, and a lot of cash. Well, their efforts have finally come to fruition, and, for all of the legendary hype surrounding it, it did about as well as anyone could expect.

It's very hard to live up to the expectations that The Avengers was burdened with. All of the aforementioned movies (with maybe the exception of Iron Man 2) were greeted with both financial and critical acclaim, and so a movie featuring all of these iconic characters was bound to have a lot of pressure riding on it. Well, I feel that it fell a little short of the mark, but it didn't miss completely.

Let's start with the good: The Avengers does not short you on laughs or action. The movies leading up to The Avengers had a trademark wit to them that made them much more enjoyable than many of the droll, terrible Marvel films that preceded them (I'm looking right at you, Daredevil). The Avengers kicked it up a notch, though, and I found myself laughing a lot more than I expected to at a superhero movie. It's not a comedy by any means, but it has enough witty one-liners sprinkled throughout to keep you on your toes. If the comedic timing doesn't keep you on your toes, however, the action sequences certainly will. As the Marvel superhero movie to end all Marvel superhero movies, The Avengers does not skimp on fight scenes. Every  major character has his or her time to shine, and all of them rocked. As far as edge-of-your-seat action is concerned, this movie has some of the most spectacular and well-choreographed/animated sequences out there.

With the good highlighted, there must come the downsides of the movie. For starters, it's 2 hours and 23 minutes long, and the time isn't always put to good use. I would understand the long runtime if a lot of the time was spent developing characters past where we left them in the prequels. Instead, we get a little more development out of Captain America and Loki, and the rest is spent blowing things up and listening to Iron Man spout one-liners. While certainly entertaining, it grows old after a while, to the point of predictability. I was never expecting The Avengers to have an award-winning script, but I certainly wished that it had a little more originality to it.

Overall, The Avengers is certainly not a bad way to kick off a summer blockbuster season. With a few almost certainly terrible films on the horizon (i.e. Battleship, G.I. Joe: Retaliation), it's nice to start off with a movie that can be entertaining visually and not be an absolute pain to sit through. I give it 7 HULKSMASH's out of 10.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

I'm not going to lie, I really hyped myself up for this movie. When I heard that Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Mark Strong are all going to be in the same movie, and that movie is going to be a 1960's spy drama, I became insanely excited. My heart sank a little when I learned it was going to only be a limited release in theaters and come nowhere close to here, but the DVD release came around and I soon found myself sitting on my couch and eagerly pressing play on my Xbox to begin the movie. What happened next was something I was completely unprepared for: mediocrity.

Don't get me wrong: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is not a bad movie. It has some really fantastic performances by all of the aforementioned actors, some of which really compelled me to respect them more as actors. The movie's protagonist is George Smiley (Oldman), a retired spy who is called out of retirement to find a mole that has infiltrated the head of MI6. His investigation takes him through a recollection of events by other spies and uncovers a plot that weaves intricately through the East and West. Oldman was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, but I honestly don't think he gave the best performance in the film. The real talent in this movie lies with Tom Hardy and Mark Strong, two of the spies whose stories comprise the backbone of Smiley's investigation. Hardy, who is known by many as Eames from Inception and his upcoming role as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, plays a young spy who is in way over his head. Considering that the majority of roles I've seen him in are fairly confident characters, it's pretty cool to see that he can play characters that are shaken and haunted just as well as he can pull off cool and confident. Strong, whose famous roles are typically  no-nonsense, villainous characters (Sherlock Holmes, Kick-Ass), takes a unique turn in this film as a repatriated spy whose endearing, fatherly bond with an outcast in his elementary French class sets a stark contrast with his former life as a deep-cover agent in Hungary, and he does a really great job. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy's greatest strength is that everyone in the cast gives an excellent performance, but Hardy and Strong were by far the most powerful and effective.

If acting is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy's strong suit, then its weakest link is in its pacing. Despite what the past 20-30 years have conditioned you to believe, a "spy drama" does not equal an "action movie," but that's not what my complaint is. Rather, I really enjoyed that fact. The problem is that the story that is told moves at a snail's pace. Some of it can be explained away as character development, but much of the detail shown in the movie slows it down more than it helps with immersion into the world of the film. It sounds like a relatively minor complaint compared to the fantastic ensemble of actors, but the pacing is really bad enough to keep it from being a great movie.

As an actor, I really loved Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The performances by everyone in the cast were absolutely astounding, and it's very rare that you will find another movie with the same caliber of talent. As a movie-watcher, however, that sense of amazement was tempered by a frustratingly boring pace that kept the  great acting and bay and sucked all of the suspense out of an otherwise suspenseful tale of international espionage. I give Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 7 and a half haunting flashbacks to the Eastern Bloc out of 10.

50/50

One of the things I like the least about the Academy Awards is that they can sometimes overlook some really great movies. Certainly there are some movies, such as Midnight in Paris or Hugo, that deserve all of the recognition they got. Other movies, like Moneyball or especially Bridesmaids, don't deserve nearly as much attention as they were given, if any at all. I will go ahead and say that it is one of the Academy's greatest injustices that Bridesmaids was nominated in two categories (Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress for Melissa McCarthy) while 50/50 was nominated for absolutely nothing. They overlooked one of the best movies of the last year, and I'm kind of disgusted with them for it.

50/50 is the fifth movie by director Jonathan Levine and stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Anna Kendrick. Gordon-Levitt is Adam Lerner, a radio journalist who develops a rare form of spinal cancer, of which he has a 50% chance of survival, at the young age of 27. As he learns how to cope with his condition, we're brought into his life as well as the lives of his girlfriend (Howard), therapist (Kendrick), and best friend Kyle (Rogen). Gordon-Levitt and Rogen are both absolutely amazing. Gordon-Levitt has cultivated quite a reputation for himself over the past few years as one of Hollywood's most promising young talents, and I expected that he would give the good performance that he did. The actor that really blew me away with this one was actually Seth Rogen. While his character is not really a stretch for him, he brings a certain level of humanity to this character that is often is missing from his other roles, and I feel that if Jonah Hill, who was incredibly unimpressive in Moneyball, could have been even considered for Best Supporting Actor, then they really messed up by not giving Rogen the credit he deserves for what is easily the best performance of his career to date.

One of the things I love the most about this movie is how quickly it moves without rushing through anything. Clocking in at only 100 minutes, it takes us from the introduction of the characters, through the stages of dealing with cancer and psychological effects it has on not just Adam, but on his friends and family as well. This is often done through subtle scenes where much of the emotion is implied, but it's done in a way that makes it way more effective than a drawn-out, possibly tedious scene, while also making it feel much more realistic. The most powerful moments of the entire movie are largely the most subtle ones, and that is one of this film's greatest strengths.

50/50 is a stark and unforgiving film, but at the same time sweet and cheerful. It's soul-crushing and uplifting all at the same time. Much like the duality of its name implies, 50/50 is a roller coaster of emotions through good times and bad times. But unlike so many other movies that aim for that effect and fail miserably, it maneuvers through the triumphs and pitfalls with a deftness that is very rarely found. I give it 9 oddly sweet bro-out moments out of 10.

Bridesmaids

Up to this point, I've never really written a negative review. A few people have complained about it, actually. I've found redeeming qualities in every movie I've watched so far, and even when I gave The Tree of Life a low score, I still spent a fair amount of time highlighting what was good about the movie. Well, the streak is finally broken. After much hype, I sat down and watched Bridesmaids, and man, what a mistake that was.

Bridesmaids' biggest problem is that it's a day late and a dollar short. A raunchy comedy revolving around a maid of honor's misadventures, it's essentially the female version of The Hangover. Kristen Wiig plays Annie, a failed entrepreneur-turned-jewelry store worker that has been asked to be the maid of honor at her best friend's wedding. Standing in the way of her duties is a series of increasingly-outlandish pitfalls surrounded by an equally-outlandish cast of characters, from snobby rich-girl Helen (Rose Byrne), to vulgar sister-of-the-groom Megan (Melissa McCarthy). Shenanigans ensue, the age-old cliches surrounding marriage are lampooned, and I couldn't have been more bored. The jokes were predictable, the characters were all two-dimensional, and the storyline was nothing special at all.

I really feel like I'm missing something. This movie was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress for Melissa McCarthy, who admittedly was the funniest part of this movie. I get that there aren't that many raunchy comedies featuring a strong female cast, and I'm glad that they were able to make a successful one, but it doesn't excuse the fact that the movie simply wasn't very good. It's terribly cliche and boring, and I expect so much better out of the cast that was assembled. They could have made a great movie, but they just didn't. I give this movie 3 ruined bridesmaids activities out of 10.

21 Jump Street

Movie remakes are typically a tedious and formulaic affair. Studios get the rights to an old TV show, turn it into a comedy/action/action-comedy movie, throw a couple of famous actors into the mix, and voila! Instant money. While they're almost always successful, remakes are typically lacking in sustainable quality. They may be entertaining and make you wax nostalgic for the original. Or they could be flat-out horrible. But the universal thread that binds them together is that they're also typically forgotten a few months after their DVD release. Movie remakes of classic TV shows are flashes in the pan of the movie industry. The best we can hope for is that the ones we watch are at least entertaining.

Fortunately, 21 Jump Street is captivating enough to be classified as a good remake. One of the better ones, in my opinion. Actually a continuation of the television show, 21 Jump Street follows Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill), two cops who are assigned to the recently-reopened Jump Street program and tasked with bringing down a synthetic drug ring. Tatum and Hill, while surprisingly good at playing off each other, are character archetypes for action-comedy buddy cop movies. Tatum plays a dumb, handsome jock while Hill is the smart and nerdy outcast who falls for a girl way out of his league. On the other hand, one of the things that I appreciated about this movie the most, and what makes the movie fresh, is how the writers flip the high school caste system on its head. I won't go too far into it, but it's a novel approach that makes it stand out among other high school comedies.

There's another very good reason for you to go see 21 Jump Street, and it's only two words: Channing Tatum. Normally, this would be a deterrent for me, but I could not stop laughing every time he was on screen. Part of the humor does come from the fact that he's breaking from his typical cheesy romance-novel heartthrob role, but part of it is also because he's genuinely a funny guy. I gained a little more respect for him. The rest of the cast plays their tried-and-true characters: Jonah Hill plays Jonah Hill, Rob Riggle plays Rob Riggle, Elle Kemper plays Elle Kemper, and so on and so forth. It's an R-rated action comedy. It wasn't meant to be a challenge.

At the end of the day, 21 Jump Street is funny, raunchy, and entertaining. If you're looking for an R-rated comedy to pass the time, there are a lot of worse options than this. But it is still a TV movie remake. I enjoyed it, but I know that I'll have a hard time remembering it a year from now. I give it 7 misread Miranda rights out of 10.