Did you know that the Disney villain Maleficent isn't a bitch? I didn't know that Maleficent isn't a bitch. I went to the movie bearing her name expecting to watch a bitch. I did not get a bitch. Life, though, for those 97 minutes was a bitch. I guess that's something.
"Did you know that it was an openly gay Englishman who's responsible for winning World War II?" asks Mark Ruffalo's Ned Weeks during one of many emotional high points in Ryan Murphy's HBO movie adaptation of The Normal Heart. "His name's Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans' Enigma code. After the war was over, he committed suicide because he was so haunted for being gay. Why don't they teach any of that in schools? A gay man is responsible for winning World War II. If they did maybe he wouldn't have killed himself and you wouldn't be so terrified of who you are."
Jim Mickle's moody, genre-skipping film Cold in July opens on a terrifying home invasion and only gets crazier from there. Dexter's Michael C. Hall plays Richard, a man who's thrust into a situation he's in no way prepared for, and then finds himself seduced by it. He ends up pursing a path that blurs the line between vigilantism and wanton criminality.
I saw Godzilla earlier this week and have thought about it on my own precisely zero times since then. Gareth Edwards' take on the classic is as great-looking as it is dumb. It conveys enormity extremely well, as well should a movie that stars monsters who dwarf skyscrapers. For all of his twitching, nostril-flaring, and saliva-string-producing, Godzilla has never looked more life-like (or zaftig—check out that thick neck, bro). His nemeses, a pair of giant cockroaches called MUTOs, looked real enough to mildly nauseate me.
Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin spends its 92 minutes tightening itself around your neck and intermittently striking like a snake. Part genre flick, part meditative indie, Blue Ruin follows protagonist Dwight (Macon Blair) through mostly backwoods Virginia in his attempt to avenge the death of his parents after their murderer is released from jail. Dwight, though, isn't exactly built for vengeance as his bumbling and repeated fuck-ups show. The result is a brutal, sometimes darkly funny exercise in suspense that reminded me of Breaking Bad and the Coen Brothers.
Kate Upton's character in The Other Woman, Amber, is at one point referred to as "the boobs" by Cameron Diaz's Carly: "When you put the lawyer, the wife, and the boobs together, you have the perfect killing machine." The movie, in which a man's wife and two mistresses team up for imprecise revenge, treats Kate Upton the actress that way, too.
Going into Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini's debut feature Mala Mala, I wondered if I was about to watch 2014's answer to Jennie Livingston's controversial classic Paris Is Burning.
The premise of Ira Sachs' sixth feature, Love Is Strange, recalls a type of story we read in the news with increasing frequency: George (Alfred Molina) marries his husband Ben (John Lithgow) and loses his job teaching at a Catholic school as a result. That sounds like a recipe for a heavy-handed message movie, but the beauty of Love Is Strange (and it really is a beautiful movie – hands down my favorite I've seen so far this year) is its subtlety.
Last year, Gary Poulter, one of the stars of David Gordon Green's new movie Joe, died in a homeless encampment in Austin. For Joe, Green had mixed non-professional actors with stars like Nicolas Cage (as Joe, a hero in his rural community who's this close to snapping) and up-and-comers like Tye Sheridan, as Gary, the 15-year-old boy that Joe takes under his wing. In that sense, the casting was along the lines of other modern poorsploitation cinema like Winter's Bone and Gummo. Poulter plays Wade (aka G-Daawg), Gary's abusive father, a drunk who is as limber, and coherent, as Charles Manson. Gary and Wade join Joe's crew of tree-killing manual laborers, who prep forests to be cleared for the planting of valuable pine trees. Only the kid can hold onto the job.
Do you know who Bucky is? Do you remember a woman from the 2011's Captain America: The First Avenger movie who, now that we've shifted in time to present day, is deteriorating from old age and bad movie makeup?
Jennifer Kent's Australian thriller The Babadook is of the big success stories from this year's Sundance Film Festival. The story seems standard enough: A boogieman character named the Babadook terrorizes a single mother, Amelia (Essie Davis) and her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who's so poorly behaved, he's a bit of a monster himself. But the film has surprising depth.
Legendary director Alejando Jodorowsky's Dune has built up a multi-decade reputation as a great production that never was. Now, thanks to Frank Pavich's documentary on the subject, we can see as complete a picture as possible of what could have been—a brilliantly insane undertaking.
"You've come a long way to stroke your cock watching real men train," says Sparta's Queen Gorgo (Game of Thrones' Lena Headey) to Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton), the Athenian protagonist of 300: Rise of an Empire. This serves as a quick lesson in how to watch this thing, director Noam Murro's not-quite-sequel to Zack Snyder's 2006 movie 300. ("What do you call it? A prequel? A sequel?" Murro said to the L.A. Times. "It's an equal, hopefully. It's a different perspective of the same time. Thematically, that's an interesting place to be." Yes. Innnnnteresting.)
It is a particular treat to see a Hayao Miyazaki movie on the big screen, and the Japanese animator's latest is no exception. The Wind Rises is as gorgeous as any Studio Ghibli production, crisp and pastel, soothing and stunning. Rife with dream sequences of impossibly layered aircraft against perfect skies dolloped with clouds, Rises reaches the fantastical imaginative heights we've come to expect from Miyazki. And when it isn't wowing you with what you've never seen before, it's wowing you with what you have. There's so much pleasure to be taken from the tiny details that the big screen amplifies: the moths that flock around an outside lantern, the incandescent halo of the moon shining through translucent nighttime clouds, the wildly unnatural colors that sneak in and out of the sky during the final moments of daylight.
"Cultural appropriation" is usually understood as a one-way street: A privileged outsider steals from a disenfranchised group and eats the profits. This is an easy enough narrative, but the truth is generally more complicated—see Little Richard's gratitude for Elvis Presley as an "integrator." Or take James Franco and Travis Mathew's new film Interior. Leather Bar, a fascinating instance of cultural "appropriation" that feels like cultural exchange.
Sometimes during the course of a year, pop cultural objects end up slipping through Gawker's cracks. Sometimes I see a movie late. Sometimes I don't have a whole review's worth of a response in me. Sometimes I need a minute to digest, and then once that minute passes, it feels like I'm too late. Sometimes it's really fucking hard to write about things you like, especially when they hit you on such a visceral level. "This is great" is not the most compelling argument.
G.B.F. is a good-natured teen comedy about prom queens in search of gay best friends. Its depictions of affection are chaste and its language is clean. So why does it have an R rating?
I have never seen anyone cry so openly and in such volume as I did when I attended a press screening of The Best Man Holiday earlier this week with my coworker Caity Weaver. (Given our shared love of all things Christmasy, cheesy, and Christmasy cheesy, she was the natural choice to be my +1.) Malcolm D. Lee's follow-up to 1999's The Best Man simply destroyed her. Her outpouring of emotion was a beautiful sight to behold.
Frederick Wiseman is a master of the art of documentary. Since 1967’s sensational Titicut Follies, the 83-year-old has made films, focused on American institutions, that don’t use narration, interviews, or identifying chyrons to tell their stories. These stories, in fact, are only implicitly narrative. They are often associative assemblages of scenes that favor portrayal over dictation.
A few years ago, I was idly talking to a group of friends about Andrew Holleran's 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance. The book elegantly describes the gay culture of Manhattan and Fire Island at the time it was written, and in doing so shares some sentiment that reads less than politically correct to modern sensibilities. I lamented this—specifically some race jokes, which I think are supposed to be taken as straightforward humor—to the people that I was talking to, and one of them gently challenged my complaint. "I think that you have to take what you can from any piece of pop culture and ignore the bad stuff," she said with a shrug.
