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.

06 Apr 2014

The Inn Crowd: "The Grand Budapest Hotel," "Captain America: The Winter Solider," and "Veronica Mars"

By Mike Schulz

Paul Schlase, Tony Revolori, Tilda Swinton, and Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest HotelTHE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

Generally speaking, I'm not one to argue for the inclusion of more foul language and bloody violence in a director's oeuvre, and feel especially awkward doing so a mere week after being bored silly by the endless profanities and exploding squibs in the latest Schwarzenegger flick. But I'll happily make an exception in the case of Wes Anderson, at least based on his most recent outing, The Grand Budapest Hotel. Like all Anderson efforts, this one, too, could be filed in the "precious comic bauble" category, given its deliberately artificial production design and obsessively controlled compositions and overall suggestion of an improv-free zone. Yet this endlessly inventive and funny new work might boast more interior life than any of the writer/director's other live-action achievements, and for that I'm afraid we have to thank the forcible removal of Jeff Goldblum's fingers, and Ralph Fiennes' tendency to drop the F-bomb into every other sentence.

01 Jul 2012

Sunshine Strip: "Magic Mike," "Moonrise Kingdom," "People Like Us," and "Ted"

By Mike Schulz

Channing Tatum in Magic MikeMAGIC MIKE

Walking into the auditorium for a nearly sold-out, mid-afternoon screening of Magic Mike - "nearly sold-out" and "mid-afternoon" being phrases that rarely go together at the cineplex - I gauged the audience of obviously ecstatic patrons and said to my friend, "This is gonna be fun." Man, we had no idea.

29 Nov 2009

The Fox and the Hounds (and the Aliens): "Fantastic Mr. Fox," "Old Dogs," and "Planet 51"

By Mike Schulz

Fantastic Mr. FoxFANTASTIC MR. FOX

Film scholars widely agree that 1939 remains the strongest year ever for American movies. But I'm starting to think that, as the decades pass, 2009 might be seen as a comparable year for animated movies.

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