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RaymondKoepsell
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American Sniper (2014)
Harrowing emotional blockbuster
Clint Eastwood has long been one of my favorite directors. Although a fine actor in his own right, Eastwood six-decades in front of the camera seems to give him the ability to pull out the very best from his actors when he's behind the camera. Bradley Cooper gives a career-highlight performance as Chris Kyle, and this is an absolute must-see for any American.
Most negative reviews all seem to include a negative assessment of our nation's moral imperative to engage in the war on terror in Iraq, which has absolutely bearing with the artistic merits of this or any film. Since this approach has dominated the vast majority of the negative User Reviews, I feel compelled to offer a moral defense of this movie.
Many negative reviews object to the portrayal of jihadists as as "savages," but that argument serves as compelling evidence of how political correctness has corrupted public dialog. Any organization or nation who perpetrates war by hijacking planes and flying into skyscrapers in NYC is acting savagely. Any organization or nation who beheads journalists and civilians and posts a video on Youtube is acting savagely. Any organization or nation who uses women and children as human shields or human bombs is acting savagely. Detractors of this film suggest that Abu Deraa ("The Butcher") is a fictional contrivance invented to give this movie traction, but those same detractors are either ignorant or willfully ignorant of history.
*********SPOILER ALERT*************
Any organization or nation who uses power drills and (worse, if that's even possible) hand-held drills to torture and murder perceived political enemies is acting savagely. A harrowing scene featuring a power drill is the moral linchpin of this movie. In the months immediately following 9/11, we were united in our grief at the gruesomeness of the attacks in NYC, the Pentagon, and the passengers of United 92 who bravely died preventing more carnage.
In the 14 years since 9/11, the shock, grief, outrage, and horror we shared about the depravity of the attacks have been homogenized into a polite remembrance of 3,000 American dead. Certainly, 3,000 families will never recover, but our left-leaning culture is attempting to sanitize the events of that day by attempting to force the rest of us into a historical perspective by demanding we are tolerant of or at least empathetic towards their motivations. The drill scene serves a stark reminder that al Queda, ISIS, and other terrorists will use any means necessary to carry out jihad, and it gives Bradly Cooper a moral imperative to serve his country using his unique skill set. We are lucky as a nation that there are and have been sheepdogs like Chris Kyle to watch over us all, even those who use their First Amendment rights to criticize his heroism.
Love (2011)
Possibly the most amazing $500,000 movie EVER
I stumbled across "Love" on Netflix knowing nothing about it. Evaluating it on its own merits - a $500,000, 83 minute indie-film by a first time director - it succeeds well. It gets very high marks for lead Gunner Wright as well as the cinematography, editing, set design, and especially the score.
The IMDb users giving scores of 2/10 and 3/10 are being pretentious. "Love" doesn't set out to be one of the great sci-fi films of all time, it comes off as a well-made, low-budget homage. The movie fawns all over bigger budgeted, better-made sci-fi classics such as "2001," "Solyaris," "Silent Running," "Apollo 13," and especially 2009's much under-appreciated "Moon." In spite of its obvious affection for these films, "Love" actually has more in common with 2010's stunning Rodrigo Cortés thriller "Buried," than it does to its sci-fi predecessors. I just learned (thank you IMDb) that "Buried" was shot in 17 days, and I'm betting a good chunk of its $3 million budget went to pay Ryan Reynolds. "Love" succeeds brilliantly when viewed in that context. During the film, I found myself intrigued, empathetic, lonely, claustrophobic, curious, anxious, and ultimately satisfied.
Is it perfect? No, of course not. The filmmakers didn't have the tens of millions of dollars needed to make the space station zero gravity. But Star Trek ignored the lack of gravity and got away with it for decades. My hats are off to the "Love" editors for clocking this movie at 83 minutes. Had this been 103 or 123 minutes as many of the mega-budget sci-fi blockbusters Hollywood is churning out in 2013, it would have lost its charm and intrigue. But all in all it is concise, inspiring, and a solid entry into the world of micro-budget indie films.
As 2013 plays out with mega-flop after mega-flop, Hollywood will swing the pendulum to the other end of the budget spectrum, and I expect to see more films down the road like "Love," and if/when those days arrive - filmmakers would do well to follow "Love"s lead.
The Lorax (2012)
Envirogandist infotainment for the 21st century
This movie is insipid. No wait, this is a slick, musical, colorful, big-budget family-friendly animated feature. No, this is the lying lunatic left run amok, unhinged and unchecked, reeducating the great unwashed so we don't have to think for ourselves. No, wait, this is just a fun, earth-friendly popcorn movie, an easy way to kill 90 air-conditioned minutes in the dark and emerge with a happy memory. No, I was right the first time. This movie is insipid.
The psychic hammer blows are delivered relentlessly - easy to spot but hard to feel or care about because of the sticky coating of smiles, rainbows, and cotton candy. The environmental propaganda can distilled down into a few themes: corporations bad, earth good, mankind selfish, nature forgiving, the environment is a victim of human greed, western consumer culture is evil, our sacrifice is the key to our salvation.
Behind the pretty colors, this is a playbook propaganda piece – information disguised as entertainment and created to line the wallets of the self-appointed intellectual elites among us while simultaneously indoctrinating the target audience to vote Democrat in 2024. If you spit out your Skittles and take off your 3D glasses, you can almost sense the creators, cast, and crew getting whiplash patting themselves on the back for executing this masterstroke: "let's trick the great unwashed into paying us for telling their children what to think, expanding our individual and corporate wealth and influence in the process, and advancing our political agenda."
Hey man, paranoid much? Lighten up, it's just a cartoon. What are you getting so worked up about anyways? Here, have a Jolly Rancher.
El ángel exterminador (1962)
Underwhelming
Perhaps I was born too late to appreciate this film; perhaps I was born on the wrong side of the Atlantic. In 1962 (three years before I was born), this may well have been scintillating, cutting-edge film making. By 2012 standards, "The Exterminating Angel" holds up only as a period piece. It represents its era well much the same way George Melies' "A Trip to the Moon" represents its era. I selected the Melies film for comparison because it is widely regarded as a watershed achievement for 1902. I can think of no other reason why "The Exterminating Angel" should be heaped with such praise by modern audiences - because it shaped what followed it. That alone does not make it a great film.
Other better and more enjoyable watershed films include "Lost Horizon," "Metropolis," "Citizen Kane," "2001," "Nosferatu," and "Casablanca." "The Exterminating Angel" is an unfinished thought, too conventional to be considered much of an experiment; it wants to be a thought-provoking message movie, but it doesn't have anything to say and the only thought it provoked for me was "how much longer until I begin to care about what's happening?" Is "The Exterminating Angel" a bad movie? No, but nor does it represent the best that cinema has to offer and deserve to populate so many the top 50 or top 100 lists.
My review may very well be derided for being too narrow-minded, ethnocentric, and corrupted by CGI. Trying to learn about the history of film, I looked forward to "The Exterminating Angel" and was more than willing to view it in its own terms. Days after watching this film, however, I still can't shake my conclusion that, even this agonizingly overlong movie was trimmed by three-quarters, the storyline and resulting tele-play wouldn't even make a memorable Twilight Zone episode. Hoping to see a bit of film history, I could find little reason to care about the characters or their plight, its causes and resolution. The film seemed less like a movie than an exercise. In what I have no idea.
2016: Obama's America (2012)
Liberals will hate it, Conservatives will not
Dinesh D'Souza's literary biography of Barack Obama gave away the ending in the title: "The Roots of Obama's Rage." It was meticulously researched and provides numerous straight-forward yet compelling arguments that allow readers to make sense of our President's policy decisions which are largely incomprehensible when examined using traditional means or by traditional measures. "2016: Obama's America" has a less incendiary title, but that doesn't mean D'Souza's views on Obama have softened. While the book provides the details, the documentary does a fine job of laying out the broad strokes for D'Souza's arguments on why Obama governs as he does. Had I not also read the book, I believe the film would have left me feeling dissatisfied with some of the the arguments; time constraints of the movie format rather than a lack of material prevented D'Souza from making and fleshing out each argument on film to the extent he did on paper. The only way to make the film better would be to make it longer, but I give props to the editor for keeping the film from getting bogged down under the weight of its own magnitude. The film has extremely high production values, is well-paced, and gets points for an innovative, propulsive score. Anyone who intrigued but ultimately unconvinced by the film owes it him/herself to invest the time and energy into Mr. D'Souza's source material. "2016: Obama's America" is recommended for anyone interested in our President and willing to take an objective, penetrating look at his background.
The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Tremendous
Cast aside all doubt that TDKR can't live up to the expectations and the hype; this movie is amazing. Nolan and company solve the obvious dilemma of Hardy's Bane comparing unfavorably to Ledger's Joker by not even acknowledging it. Ledger's performance is one of the finest in the history of cinema - menacing, broken, manic, sociopathic, and yes even sympathetic at times - so Hardy created a relentlessly evil character of bold strokes. Where Ledger was nuanced and complex, Hardy is the movie's unstoppable force, furious and foreboding with a singularity of purpose. Bane's mask, resembling something out of Alien, prevents us from seeing him speak. More than anything else, this prevents any legitimate Joker/Bane comparisons from being made. The movie is intelligently scripted, superbly acted, and proves that Nolan had not yet reached his creative peak with The Dark Knight. The newest characters - Hathaway, Cotillard, Gordon-Levitt, and Modine, are all fully realized. This leaves less screen time for returning characters played by Caine, Freeman, and Oldman but Nolan makes their scenes count. Full of unexpected twists and turns along the way, TDKR soars highest at the end, pulling off the impossible task of leaving us hungry for more while at the same time providing a completely satisfying conclusion to the trilogy. Bravo!