Succinct Sunday: 2014 - A Small Summary (Part Two)

And here is part two of my round-up of 2014's other films.  That way I can make a fresh start on 2015!

We left things at The Amazing Spider-Man 2, where shall we pick up from...?

Transcendence

Christopher Nolan's resident cinematographer, Wally Pfister, moves into the director's chair for his directorial début.  After he is shot in a terrorist attack, Johnny Depp's consciousness is downloaded onto a computer.  However he begins using his new omnipotent power to change the world.  

An intriguing idea behind the ethics of artificial intelligence, although it never picks up the pace to be an awesome action film, nor gets into the issues at hand to be a thought-provoking sci-fi.  It just flounders in the middle.

Pompeii

Basically Titanic with a volcano. Lower-class guy (Game of Thrones' Jon Snow) falls in love with Roman princess (Emily Browning), annoying the lady's fiancée (Kiefer 'Jack Bauer' Sutherland). 

But can their love overcome such a powerful force of nature?  

No.  It's a f##king volcano. 

Skip to the last 30 minutes for some half-decent special effects.

Godzilla

Such potential.  The director of the sublime Monsters, Bryan Cranston straight off his Breaking Bad fame and one of the most famous movie monsters in the world. What could go wrong?  Well, a lot really.

I understand why the director Gareth Edwards would want to recreate the teasing-beasty approach that worked in Monsters and apply it to the titular monster, but if you're going to push human-drama for an hour first, make it damn interesting!  My main gripe was why wasn't Bryan Cranston the protagonist?  Why was it the personality vacuum that is Aaron Taylor-Johnson?  Don't get me wrong; it's infinitely better than Godzilla (1998); the cinema literally shook when Godzilla made his entrance, with the audience cheering!  However when walking out of the auditorium, it just felt disappointing.

X-Men: Days of Future Past

By far, the best X-Men film since X-Men 2. 

It uses all of it's characters well, and paces the story well enough that you are never bored or questioning logic. An impressive attempt at joining the two X-Men film timelines with Old Magneto/Xavier communicating with Young Erik/Charles. 

 I still don't understand the sudden importance of Mystique in these new films, apart from Jennifer Lawrence being the "It Girl" at the moment.  However they have created a way of removing X-Men: The Last Stand from the film's history, and that's just fine with me. However they will never erase the memories... Fuck you, Brett Ratner.

A Million Ways To Die In The West

Seth MacFarlane follows up Ted with AMWTDITW, a comedy western, mainly based off how awful it must have been to live back in the Wild West (A joke that wears thin after around fifteen minutes)  

I expected a bit more from MacFarlane now that he is finally in front of the camera instead of voicing animated characters and he is hardly leading man material for the future.  The film relies too much on tired, crude jokes typical of current MacFarlane humour instead of the satirical, aserbic humour that I saw in early-2000s MacFarlane.

22 Jump Street

The tongue-in-cheek sequel to one of the surprise successes of 2012, 21 Jump St.  Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum return as the central cops going undercover at a college campus, being juvenile and immature but loving it. 

The film contains more nods and winks to the audience than any film I've seen in a long time and I laughed all the way through.

If you have not yet seen either of these series, you are missing out.

How To Train Your Dragon 2

HTTYD2 disappointed me. 

Not in terms of visual quality or the amount of fun I had whilst watching it. But in terms of how much story potential lay ahead of them after the first film, and they didn't utilise it at all. 

They introduced Hiccup's mother and a random bad guy wanting to control all dragons in the world, but apart from that, it was just more of the same. It should have taken inspiration from Kung Fu Panda and it's sequel, now that is how you do it.

The Inbetweeners 2

Speaking of 'more-of-the-same' sequels, here is the familiar scenario of a British sitcom taking it's characters and placing them in a foreign country, but instead of Ibiza, it's Australia. 

Cue jokes about kangaroos and boomerangs, right?  Nope, it doesn't even utilise it's setting once, apart from saying a British accent is all the qualification needed to get a job in Australia. 

It might as well have been set in England. Attempting to cash in on the most successful British comedy by making a 'paint-by-numbers' sequel has resulted in just disappointment.

The Expendables 3

Old people with guns! Run! 

Sly and the boys are back, but after a bloody and bruised mission, Sly figures he has to bring some new blood in.  However when presumed-dead Mel Gibson turns up alive and with a target on Sly's back, he has to match experience with youth. 

The most 'PG-rated' Expendables film yet, and ironically, the one I have most enjoyed.  Maybe because one of the new Expendables is the incredible and charismatic Antonio Banderas.  

I mean, he could do a Wrigley's Extra advert and I'd love it!... Wait, he's done what?

Before I Go To Sleep

This film's title almost wrote it's review for it. 

However there was a small interesting plot within that kept my attention going throughout. The film is not mind-blowing and I've been told by all that read the book that it's a must-read and a page-turner so I can only imagine that the adaptation lost something in translation. 

Colin Firth is brilliant as usual, however Mark Strong is underused and I would have loved to have seen the Nicole Kidman that I saw in Stoker, instead of the one that starred here.

A Walk Amongst The Tombstones

Liam Neeson broke his own 'dramatic leading man' mould when he starred as 'Taken' in Taken (I think he's called Brian, but I just call him Taken anyway). However, with The Grey (Taken vs. Wolves), Taken 2 (AKA Took), Non-Stop (AKA Taken On A Plane) and the upcoming Taken 3 (sorry, Tak3n), he seems to have fallen into another typecasting. 

A.W.A.T.T. is a similar set-up to those previously mentioned but this time, Neeson plays a washed-up alcholic former-lawman who has lost his family, trying to find redemption by saving a young girl. Talk about different! The film is dark and intense in places, with genuinely disturbing villains, but apart from that, just watch Taken again.

Fury

Brad Pitt, Shia LeBeouf, Michael Pena, Jon Bernthal and Percy Jackson operate a tank in the closing stages of the Second World War. But no, this is not a continuation or a sequel to Inglorious Basterds. 

The film is supposed to be about brotherhood and fraternity between men in the trenches, but when the script doesn't make the characters likeable, funny or endearing, it's destined to fail. Whilst there are many tense moments and impressive battle scenes during the film, it misses the mark when you don't really care if the characters make it through it or not. 

Although there are some dynamite moustaches in this film.  Take a bow, Mr. LeBeouf.

Horrible Bosses 2

Everything about this film told me that it was a bad sequel. The script was sloppy, the central plot ludicrous and the direction was confused throughout. 

But there's something about Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis that made me not care. Maybe it was their charm, their chemistry or my residual goodwill from their performances in shows such as Arrested Development, 30 Rock and It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, but I found them hilarious. 

Throw in a charismatic performance from Chris Pratt and I was entertained all the way through this film. Damn me.

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies

Stone-cold proof that this trilogy could have easily been confined to two films. 

I had never been bored by a Lord of the Rings film before this but the mindless action scenes that made Return of the King so spectacular and grand, just made this film seem overblown and over-long. 

The mightily impressive Smaug is restricted to the first ten minutes of the film, the boring relationship between dwarf and elf is drawn out to being half of the film, and things are left on a really confusing and contradictory note. 

I wanted to love this trilogy as much as the original LOTR, but they were just too immature, drawn out and stuffed with unnecessary filler.

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Well that's it for 2014!  Here's to 2015!  Avengers 2, Jurassic World, Star Wars Episode VII, I cannot wait!

Interstellar

There was no doubt in my mind when I was coming up with the list of 2014's Best Films.  No doubt at all that this film would be at the top.  The film just blew me away.  Completely and utterly amazed me.  I don't know what individual aspect was so overwhelming, maybe it was the music, maybe it was the imagery, but one thing was for certain, all the aspects together created a spectacle that I had rarely experienced in a cinema auditorium.

I, of course, am talking about Christopher Nolan's science-fiction, space exploration opus....

#1 - Interstellar

For those of you who didn't manage to watch Interstellar, it takes place in the near future, in which the planet is slowly producing less and less food for the population to eat.  This begins a worldwide 'dust bowl' effect, and NASA start to wonder if another world is our best bet at a potential future. Enter Matthew McConaughey, fresh off his Best Actor Academy Award win for The Dallas Buyers Club, who is just the spaceship pilot NASA have been looking for.  Alongside Anne Hathaway and Michael Caine's help, McConaughey must leave behind his two children in order to potentially extend humanity's last chance for a future.

The film is such a technical marvel, I was lost for words at its culmination.  The neighbouring couple of people seemingly disagreed, as they exclaimed: "Nolan has lost it! He can only do Batman!"  I nearly punched that man.  It is so obvious that Nolan has put so much effort into creating a science-fiction masterpiece that seemingly marries the theoretical story of Contact (which also starred McConaughey), with the visuals and imagination of 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as the action and drama of recent films such as last year's Gravity.  The end result is a thrill-ride that shocks, marvels and awes you with its grandiose, as well as its visual splendour.

A massive part of that is down to Hans Zimmer's wonderful and powerful score.  It has been known to reduce some audience members to tears in American cinemas, and rightfully so.  He has truly gone all out on this score, seemingly trying to match the grand scale with the film's ideas and visuals and it works perfectly.

The acting is top class too.  The McConaugha-sance (said like 'Renaissance') continues with everything this man touching turning to gold.  Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine and David Gyasi all provide top-notch performances.  However the plaudits have to go to two unpredicted sources, a child and a CGI robot.  The robot, TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin), is the source of most of the film's humour and has some witty dialogues with his human counter-parts.  However his design is just beautiful, being a Space Odyssey-style monolith but with the capability of being a Transformers-esque multi-legged transportation device; an inspired creation.  The child actress, Mackenzie Foy, playing Coop's daughter Murphy, provides an excellent performance as a girl who is devastated to lose her father at such a young age.  She provides wit and charm not-often-seen in a actress so young.

The film potentially could have fallen into two dreaded categories; too highbrow and technical that audiences would be uninterested, or painfully over-explaining every bit of information.  Thankfully, it treads this line perfectly.  Information is doled out by the bucket load about what McConaughey et al plan to achieve on these potential livable "new worlds", but time is spent explaining only the essential information rather than everything, leaving the audience informed and comfortable, rather than patronised or confused.

Admittedly, the film slightly over-reaches when it comes to the film's final third, with McConaughey entering unknown territory, but it is typical Christopher Nolan to aspire to pushing boundaries and I, for one, always admire him for that.  However, there is a problem when it comes to Nolan's technical achievements.  He seems so focused on providing such a visual marvel that he sometimes forgets what else cinema is known for; emotion.

Upon doing some research, I found that Interstellar was originally going to be directed by Steven Spielberg, and that was not really a shock.  With his past work with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg is no stranger to emotion-driven, thought-provoking science-fiction.  Spielberg brought Jonathan Nolan on board to write Interstellar's script, but then left the project some years later.  This allowed Jonathan to bring his brother Christopher on board and the rest is history.  However Nolan is fantastic for his technical precision and keen eye for visuals, but when it comes to the emotional core, the film feels like it doesn't know what to do with it.

All the way through, Coop (Matthew McConaughey) regrets leaving his daughter Murphy on Earth, and they grow further and further apart.  However, the film begins to argue (in typical Hollywood fashion) that love can transcend the boundaries of space-time and that it can reach further than we think.  However such an argument would have felt fine within a Spielberg film, but within the constraints of a Nolan film, it feels artificial and unnecessary. Like a robot finding out what human emotions are, you get the feeling Nolan simply said, "What is this thing you call 'love'?" and tried his best to convey it, but it ended up failing.

However, these things are trivial when it comes to the film overall.  It may fall down slightly on the emotional level, but it is right on cue with everything else.  The visuals will astound, the acting will entertain, and the music may leave a tear in your eye.  The IMAX presentation was especially incredible.

Interstellar definitely left me with the conclusion that Christopher Nolan can do no wrong.

Except poetry...

...and Superman films.

Now, bring on 2015!  Happy New Year Everyone!