Category: Reviews

Jenna Ipcar on ‘Nightcrawler’

nightcrawler

Nightcrawler (2014)
Written & Directed by Dan Gilroy
117 min.

I don’t even know where to start with this one. On so many basic levels, it’s just flat out bad—Nightcrawler is what I would call a full-blooded B movie. How exactly it’s been getting rave reviews, I can’t say I particularly understand. I assume we’re just so desperately hungry for movies that aren’t based off comic books or teen romance novels that most of us will just take whatever we can get.

Yet, as I left the theater, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something deliberate about the heavy-handed execution of the whole thing.  What if these aspects that seemed like missteps were really just deliberate choices made in order to hammer the point of the film home? After all, there did seem to be a very specific point to Nightcrawler: to shine a light on the dangers of unchecked, amoral startups in an economy saturated with entrepreneurial go-getters.

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Brad Avery on ‘Birdman’

birdman

Shortly after seeing Birdman, I happened to begin reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. It was good timing as I quickly realized that both works have a strong focus on the creative process and what happens in the minds of artists. They also both share a strong disdain towards the popular works of their time. Miller writes:

“There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all which is omitted in books. Nobody, so far as I can see, is making use of those elements in the air which give direction and motivation to our lives…The age demands violence, but we are only getting aborted explosions…Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d’habitude. Nothing is proposed that can last more than 24 hours.”

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Jenna Ipcar on ‘Frank’

frank

Frank (2014)
Directed by Lenny Abrahamson
Written by Jon Ronson & Peter Straughan
95 min.

Spoiler-free.

Sometimes all you need to see is a still from a movie and you know it’s worth watching. That’s how I felt about Frank—the imagery looked so unique that I knew I’d have to give it a shot. I mean come on, Michael Fassbender running around in a papier-mâché head making off-kilter electronic music? Say no more, I’m there.

Funny enough, the concept is not actually unique to the film. The giant mask frontman character is actually based off musician and comedian Chris Sievey, aka Frank Sidebottom, cult hero of 1980s Britain. Frank Sidebottom’s weird brand of humor seems to have inspired many—there’ evens a statue of him in his hometown of Timperley– not to mention the film’s co-writer, Jon Ronson, who was part of Sidebottom’s band for a time.

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Let’s Be Real About ‘Let’s Be Cops’

ferguson

“The community that denies to a portion of its members their plain rights under the law has severed the only safe bond of social order and prosperity. The evil works from a bad center both ways. It demoralizes those who practice it and destroys the faith of those who suffer by it in the efficiency of the law as a safe protector.” – Benjamin Harrison, 1889

Let’s Be Cops (2014)
Directed by Luke Greenfield
Written by Luke Greenfield & Nicholas Thomas
104 min.

Everyone’s first response to Let’s Be Cops is to wince at the timing—a film about frat boy cop antics released the week a town is besieged by a police paramilitia. But really, when you get right down to it, when would be good timing here? What is this movie’s best case scenario? America’s toughest week in a long time is really the only time this 21 Jump Street ripoff has anything more to offer us than tepid chuckles.

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Interior. Leather Bar. “Fuck Scripts.”

franco

Interior. Leather Bar. (2013)
Directed by Travis Mathews & James Franco
Written by Travis Mathews
60 min.

Spoiler-free.

“Fuck Scripts.” – James Franco, Interior. Leather Bar.

There is no greater summation of this film than in this seemingly throwaway line, which Franco barely ekes out without smirking, in the scene from which I’ve grabbed the screenshot above. Within his delivery of it lies an acknowledgment of its hyperbolic untruthfulness, as well as its inherent truth—what he means is, ‘yes, of course scripts are important, but at the same time, they’re just scripts, and their being there or not being there isn’t worth worrying about’. And his mouth lets us know that he knows we can’t help but wondering anyway, and that this is the right reaction.

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