MovieSet: A Single Man

True actors love having a role that is the complete driving force of the movie. We’ve seen that last year with Up in the Air and Crazy Heart, but also with more classic films like Secret Honor and Taxi Driver. I also love these chances for the same reason as the actors. It’s a challenge that has the opportunity to be really brilliant.

In this tale, Colin Firth plays George, an English professor living in the 1960s. His boyfriend abruptly died in a car crash and George finds the grieving unbearable. Literally the color in his life faded into a cruel gray. He has decided that today will be the last day of his life. He goes through his day, not expecting to see tests towards his decision.

One of the major reasons the film is effective is that his day flows by beautifully. With this fatalistic mindset, his decisions towards human interaction are slightly different. He is able to admire the natural beauty of his secretary, for example. The camera and editing match his perspective as he hones in on what he finds stunning. Color sneaks back into his palate before it can be corrupted once more. He also allows himself to be slightly more truthful to the people around him without fear of long-term consequences. However, his day evolves through these decisions towards an unpredicted path. The character is an intelligent one but he keeps trying to battle emotions with logic. One of the best scenes in the movie is where he tries to plot out his suicide. All of his possessions are delicately laid out and identified for someone to find him. He silent searches for the cleanest way to shoot himself in the head, which is considerate and absurd at the same time.

Firth is wonderful as he tries to maintain a solid persona even though his peers are seeing through the cracks. With this premise, his performance requires many layers with every frame of the film. Through flashbacks, his talent is shown again when he plays another variation of the character. This is George in a state of bliss when his former lover was alive. Since this movie is entirely his narrative, it is possible that these flashbacks are tainted with bias. I believe they are. We are not seeing how the world was on this day, but how George’s world was that day. That is a world I am now much more interested in. This movie is so concise and fully realized that it is a shock this is Tom Ford’s first film. This is a treat.

http://blog.movieset.com/movie-reviews/ticket-stubs-a-single-man

MovieSet: Legion

Movies have to make sense. They don’t have to play by the rules of our reality, but they have play fair within its own world. A great movie leaves you without any questions about its plot. A good movie could have you questioning a few things, but you allow it. A bad movie leaves you in a confused ramble as you leave the theatre. Legion is a bad movie.

In a terrible voice-over that is way too similar to the Terminator series, Charlie (Friday Night Light’s Adrianne Palicki) gives an anecdote her mother told her. It’s about how God will end it all because he’s tired of the bullshit. Okay that has the potential to be pretty cool. Then Michael (Paul Bettany) comes down from heaven and he has a collar! Wait, angels have collars? Then he painfully cuts off his wings and then his collar falls off! Wait, what did the collar prevent him from doing? Before that reasonable question could be answered, Michael gets an insane amount of guns. There is stopped by some cops who get possessed…by angels? Wait, angels can possess people and make them look like doped up sharks? Okay…

So Michael races to this diner in the middle of nowhere to protect pregnant Charlie because her baby will save mankind. So God was tired of the bullshit but He has this savior back up plan? A back up plan that, once again, sounds very similar to The Terminator? Whatever. The rest of the movie is about the characters trying to survive at the diner as hoards and hoards of possessed people attack. Of course none of the 2-D characters at the diner become possessed because…actually they never explained that. Nor did they explain how that kid will save humanity from God. Nor did they explain why the possessed people didn’t just all attack at once. Let’s focus on that one. Why in the world would the angels send waves against the diner? The best scene in the movie is one staring the wonderful Doug Jones. An Ice Cream Truck drives up creepily to the diner and then the man inside (Jones) morphs into a creeper spider hybrid. It’s creepy and cool but why did it occur? It’s insanely impractical!

This movie is all over the place in terms of tone. It wants to have silly Evil Dead-esque moments, but then has terrible monologues that beg you to care about these dull characters. Even if you try to turn your brain off, which seems like a dangerous task, the movie doesn’t work. The action is hard to decipher at times and they keep building everything up to one awesome fight. Not to spoil anything, they completely and utterly dropped the ball. In fact the whole last act is full of twists so contradicting that it could give you an aneurism. I’m not saying seeing this movie can be dangerous to your health, but do you really want to risk it?

http://blog.movieset.com/movie-reviews/ticket-stubs-legion

Film Yap: When In Rome

All right. Let’s just get through this. Kirsten Bell plays Beth who is a workaholic and afraid of love. None of this evident by the viewer, but luckily all the characters tell her this over and over again so that’s helpful. She goes to Rome for her sister’s wedding. She only met him two weeks ago but they planned a well-developed wedding. This is obviously foreshadowing the magic to come. Beth meets Some Guy who is klutzy and charming. But plot twist! Some Guy kissed someone else and Beth saw it out of context! Deciding not to interpret it as an obvious drunken stumble, Beth decides to denounce love and take five coins out of the Fontana D’Amore in order to save them from pain. As any sane person would do. Blah, blah, blah. Those five guys are now under a spell and are magically in love with her one of which is Some Guy. Of course.

This movie is very dull because everything that you think will happen happens. So I spent the movie amusing myself in my own way. The first was a mental game show called Guess What Awesome B-List Actor Will Appear Next? All hail the casting director because they gave us Wonderfalls’s Lee Pace, The Daily Show’s Kristen Schaal, Saturday Night Live’s Bobby Moynihan, Arrested Development’s Will Arnett, “Garfunkle and Oates”’s Kate Micucci, the wonderful Anjelica Huston, and the effective creeper Danny DeVito. It also had the naked chick from Broken Flowers and Clarie’s ex-boyfriend from LOST. However due to their roles on Entourage and Paul Blart: Mall Cop puts their awesome status on probation.

Since this whole plot is incredibly predictable, it also became fun to imagine it detracting from the norm. For example, during the early party scene with Bell and Pace, I grew weary of the dull back-story of them being exes so I combined their amazing but thematically different TV shows: Veronica Mars and Pushing Daisies. The DJ gets murdered for too many clichéd record scratches in one scene. Bell, as Veronica, lies and says she is a stupid curator named Beth and gains access to the internal files of the museum to look up who hired the DJ. All with a cold and sultry voice over, of course. Pace will be Ned who neurotically makes his way to the corpse and temporarily revive the DJ to question him. After about 42 minutes of word play subplots they discover that is was Austin, the cynical critic! He almost got away with it too…

I should give the movie credit. There was one scene that went against the norm, but it was so bonkers. For their first real date, Some Guy and Beth go to a restaurant in New York City. Not just any restaurant! This is one that has absolutely no lights in the place and all of the waiters wear night vision goggles. So Beth and Some Guy are bumping into everything and everyone and their waiter (The hilarious Schaal) just keeps mocking them and eavesdropping on them. None of this should work, because it’s incredibly stupid but I was heavily amused. All of the jokes in this scene were really easy and illogical, but…I have no excuse. The rest of the movie was like that for the rest of my audience. The movie is never aggravating, but boy is it stupid.

http://www.thefilmyap.com/2010/01/29/when-in-rome-2/