The Wolf of Wall Street

This was not a good film. The story of a self made Wall Street stock broker who knows no bounds (including laws) to achieve wealth. The result is a story of excess that is not even fun to watch, but instead is disturbing. As a genre, I might put this in a "horror-realism" category. Maybe I was expecting too much to get entertainment. That said, Leonardo Di Caprio is good, in that he is fully into this role. He is legitimately a money and power crazed narcissist who cannot release himself from the high he gets from power. But you can still tell that it is Leonardo having fun being crazy. I think the voyueristic possibilities of wealthy debauchery were supposed to make up for the not-so-subtly depressing commentary on wealth. It didn't. Depressing won.

2 stars (out of 5)

The Guardians of the Galaxy

Appreciate it for what it is. The 13-year-old in me loved this film. A bunch of misfit criminals (human, green girl, tree guy, raccoon and muscle guy) are thrown together and end up becoming a group charged with fighting a bad guy intent on destroying the universe. Noting unusual here for a comic based film. What makes this work is a relatively straight forward plot and great characters. Each of the guardians has a distinct quirky personality that is both sympathetic and grating at the same time. Throw in some cheeky humor and everyone wins. The most fun I have had at the theater this summer.
4 stars (out of 5)

Bad Words

Jason Bateman is a 40 something guy who has found a loophole in the rules of the National Quill societies Spelling Bee competition. He enters, and he intends to win. A goofy premise, to be sure. Bateman personifies the Bad Words of the title in his portrayal of a crass, entitled, A-hole. He is foul mouthed and foul tempered and the comedy is in the sheer inappropriateness of his interactions. Pair this with his meeting of a 10 year old contestant who is a slight, cheery, endearing Indian kid. Bateman pulls no punches in his racial and junior high quality bullying of this kid, but the kid just smiles and loves the fact that he has a 'friend'. This is a film you are not sure you are supposed to laugh at. Couple an inappropriate, racist, ass with an endearing kid. Does one outweigh the other? While I laughed throughout, and the relationships wound up in the hollywood happy ending, I found myself somewhat unsettled afterward. Maybe that was the point?
3 stars (out of 5)

Fighter

The 2007 film by this name starring Semra Turan. Turan plays Aicha, a turkish girl living with her family in Copenhagen is a Kung Fu fanatic. She has been training with a local girls club when her instructor suggests she get serious. The problem is, with joining a serious club she will need to fight boys, which is strictly taboo for her muslim family. So taboo, in fact, that it affects her brother's arranged marriage, her father's job, and everything else you can imagine. So while using the Kung Fu as a narrative device, this is a really good exploration of what it means to be part of an isolated immigrant community, part of a family with explicit family expectations, and a woman in a patriarchal system. The pressures on every member of the family are evident, and the resulting interactions are both dramatic and honest in their intensity and difficulty. Very well done.
4 stars (out of 5)

Robot Stories

A collection of 4 shorts which explore the relationship between machines and people. While this was released in 2003, it seems to be set sometime in the 1980's, based on both the sophistication of the machines and the sophistication of the filmmaking. The shorts can be summarized as follows: Robot Baby - a couple must successfully take care of a baby robot (shaped like a large egg) before being allowed to adopt a real baby; Robot Fixer - a mother becomes fixated on repairing her son's action figure collection while he is in the hospital; Machine Love - two humanoid robots in the workplace endure bullying by humans and fall in love; and Clay - apparently about the downloading of a human intelligence into a machine to gain immortality. In this last short, I say apparently because I fell asleep. The ideas here are all interesting, but for a 2003 film, I expect more. Even 1977 Star Wars had better machines and machine interaction. Think about what we are already experiencing in 2003: Matrix trilogy, T2, X2, and Lord of the Rings. And yes, this is low budget, independent, short film-making, but an egg shaped robot baby?
1 star (out of 5)

Lucy

The most anticipated movie of the summer for me. I suppose that is never good. Lucy is an innocent traveler in Taiwan who is pulled into an underworld scheme to be a drug mule. The drug package, that had been surgically inserted into her, ruptures and causes new neural pathways to develop in her brain. This allows her to learn languages quickly (1 hour to learn chinese), see EM radiation (cell phone feeds, etc.) and affect the material world around her. This has possibilities. Unfortunately, they are not realized. Instead of a drug induced, Bourne-like action film, this comes across as a combination of Wanted (also with Morgan Freeman in a god-like, wise sage role) and What the #$*! do we (K)now!? (with its excellent description of bio-chemistry devolving into new-age, self-actualization blather). This film completely missed...

2 stars (out of 5)

Boyhood

Richard Linklater puts together great character movies. He is not necessarily worried that something must happen, but is worried that we as viewers know who the characters are, and what they think and feel. Often, this manifests in long dialogues and metaphysical discussions between characters (as in the Before... trilogy). This film has its own device for how to portray character and remarkably it works (and doesn't feel like a gimmick is pushed on you). Linklater filmed his cast every summer over the course of 12 years, and put together a fantastic story of a boy growing up. Our first scene is Mason at the age of 6, and we end with Mason going off to college. The transitions between capture life for this one boy in this one time. It is not universal, but there are universal themes for adolescence and family that everyone can connect with. And even though there is good supporting work, this film is definitely made excellent by the performance of Ellar Coltrane in his role as Mason. 

5 stars (out of 5)