17 Jan 2015

Tickler, Failure, Soldiers, Spies - Notes on a Quadruple Feature: "Blackhat," "Paddington," "The Wedding Ringer," and "American Sniper"

By Mike Schulz

Wei Tang and Chris Hemsworth in BlackhatFriday, January 16, 10:05 a.m.-ish: My first and final quadruple feature of 2015 (yeah, right) begins with the Michael Mann thriller Blackhat, which opens with the camera racing within a computer module and deeper and deeper into the internal workings of binary code, like a burrowing reverse of Robert Zemeckis' introductory shot in Contact. At its climax, we discover that we've been watching the process by which a faraway cyber-terrorist sets off an explosion at a Chinese nuclear facility, and it's a juicy, unsettling prelude - so good, and so promising, that it probably takes longer than it should to realize the movie is goofy as hell.

18 May 2014

Godz Not Dead: "Godzilla" and "Million Dollar Arm"

By Mike Schulz

GodzillaGODZILLA

To get the inarguable out of the way, director Gareth Edwards' new take on Godzilla is an incalculably stronger piece of work than Roland Emmerich's woebegone 1998 version. Its visual effects are superb, and occasionally stunning. Its supporting cast boasts some obscenely gifted actors. It has been crafted with professionalism, confidence, seriousness of purpose, and obvious respect for its cinematic forebears. And taken overall, I found the experience so deathly boring that in the midst of its incredibly loud, debris-strewn action finale, I actually fell asleep. On two separate occasions.

25 Aug 2013

Darling, I Love You, but Give Me Park Avenue: "Blue Jasmine," "The World's End," and "You're Next"

By Mike Schulz

Cate Blanchett in Blue JasmineBLUE JASMINE

Woody Allen's new drama Blue Jasmine is modeled, both loosely and very specifically, on Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, and if you're familiar with that stage classic - or, really, with Williams' oeuvre in general - you can correctly presume that the movie will not end on a note of cheer. Yet for the life of me, I couldn't convince my face of that, because Cate Blanchett's almost impossibly fine performance in the writer/director's latest left me smiling so contentedly you would've thought the screening came with an open bar and complimentary full-body massage. Catching up with me on the way out of the auditorium, a friend, regarding Blanchett's portrayal, said, "I think I'm gonna be high for a week." I'm pretty sure I vocalized my agreement but was feeling too high to be certain.

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