Nobody can fault Charlie Countryman for a lack of trying, that’s for certain. They can, of course, fault it for being a schizophrenic and ultimately useless piece of cinema, but as I cringed at the lesser merits of Fredrik Bond’s debut film, I also found myself yearning to give the whole production an “A” for effort; for every one of Charlie Countryman‘s myriad failures, there’s a palpable sense that Bond and his cast – particularly leading man Shia LaBeouf, grown up and shockingly greasy from his stint as Neurotic Human Protagonist in the Transformers series – are striving for something in every scene. Exactly what they’re striving for could remain in contention for a good…
-
-
G-S-T Review…Thor: The Dark World
The terms and ideas surrounding a character like Marvel’s Thor (Odinsleep, bifrost, Yggdrasil, etc.) whether based on Norse mythology or not, are admittedly strange. Yet Thor (Chris Hemsworth) was kind enough to put it ever so simply in his 2011 film, “Your ancestors called it magic but you call it science. I come from a land where they are one and the same“. Well if you found comfort in Kenneth Branagh’s Richard Donner-like origin story, Thor: The Dark World is like taking AP Calculus just when you think you’ve got the hang of your times tables. Not that Alan Taylor’s follow-up film is particularly smart (ambitious is more like it)…
-
G-S-T Review…Diana
As a young lad, my measure of acquaintance with Diana, Princess of Wales started and stopped with the following details: she was British, beautiful, and a hair’s breadth from sainthood. Her death in 1997 meant little to me as a sheltered American boy, and only signified that the people I saw on television weren’t immune to harm or free from danger. The vulturous ethics of the paparazzi culture that was so thoroughly alien to my thirteen year old self, of course, has become much more familiar to me since, so today, at the very least, I can appreciate the cultural significance of her demise more than a decade and a…
-
G-S-T Review…Ender's Game
We’re living in a time when the phrase “unfilmable novel” can no longer serve as an excuse for poor page-to-screen adaptations of quintessential stories on the receiving end of the Hollywood treatment. Over a decade ago, Peter Jackson shouldered the burden of that challenge by taking J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books and turning them into a trilogy of three hour and change films (or one ten hour film, depending on your perspective) whose joint success led to criminal cultural misuse of the word “epic”; nobody can so cavalierly write off their inept filmmaking based on a text’s inclination toward being transposed onto celluloid. It’s a blatant cop-out. Which…
-
G-S-T Review…About Time
About Time‘s central romance doesn’t involve Rachel “Mean Girls” McAdams or Domhnall “Son of Brendan” Gleeson; the real lovers here are Richard Curtis and the tricky notion of time travel. How else to punch up a story that’s all about the rich existential rewards we reap from living a boring, ordinary life? Curtis employed the deceptive pleasures of coincidence to achieve the same effect in 2003’s Love Actually, though admittedly there’s nothing humdrum about the personal relationships of Prime Ministers and rock gods (or divine intervention, even if that never made the final cut). Here, he overturns a similar stone by using a far more incredible narrative tool for his…
-
G-S-T Review…All Is Lost
Margin Call director, J.C. Chandor takes quite a different direction with this second film, All Is Lost, starring Robert Redford as a nameless man who is lost at sea and fighting for survival. Where as Margin Call was heavy with dialog, All Is Lost experiments with other forms of communication, from the sounds of nature to the thoughts inside the man’s head that we do not hear, but that we can imagine from the facial and physical queues Redford uses to portray them. At first this description might seem to recall the role of Tom Hanks in cast away Castaway, except Chandor’s and his crew faced the added challenge of…
-
G-S-T Review…12 Years A Slave
Steve McQueen, to put it bluntly, makes bold movies. But really that’s still a gross understatement. In just his third feature film he tackles slavery – not an easy topic in the least. Even well respected and successful directors like Tarantino and Spielberg had nearly a dozen projects/films under their belt before taking on this subject or anything close to it. True, Tarantino’s Django Unchained was more a throwback to Peckinpah’s Westerns than an essay on slavery, but even the masterful Spielberg took some baby steps with films like The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun before tackling both Schindler’s List and Amistad. An up and coming filmmaker, McQueen is already…
-
G-S-T Review…The Counselor
There are miraculous things that can happen with film. Perfectly competent directors, writers, and actors can make something that is outrageously better than the sum of their parts. In business that is called synergy. But what happens when the opposite occurs? I think it looks something like The Counselor, a raw, twisted film in need of an editor and a few rewrites. But what do I know? Whatever happened on set and in post-production resulted in a film that simply doesn’t know when to move on and is decidedly crude and cruel. Writer Cormac McCarthy, this being his first produced screenplay—we can debate later about No Country For Old Men—seemingly…
-
G-S-T Review…The Fifth Estate
Here’s the big question hanging over the head of The Fifth Estate: do we contextualize it based on content or structure? Bill Condon’s first post-Twilight film bites off more than it can chew, but it’s difficult to say whether that’s because of the subject matter – being the origins and rise of both Wikileaks and its controversial founder, Julian Assange – or because of the production’s unavoidable biopic bent; even at the tender age of only seven (which amounts to light years on the web), Wikileaks can already claim a rich, storied, complex history, so much so that two hours feels scarcely enough to scratch the surface of its conception…
-
G-S-T Review…Machete Kills
In the pantheon of Grindhouse revival films, if there ever were such a place, Machete Kills should go down as one of its stupidest but also one of the most fun times you can have in 2013. Now all you Trejo/Rodriguez fans can sheath your machetes, the term stupid is used with immense love and respect for Rodriguez and company…but this film is simply ludicrous. It goes without saying that a film like this makes no effort to be realistic. How can it when it’s a cornucopia of all sorts of genre-themed oddities, including but not limited to ray guns, clones, wacky explosions/violence, Mel Gibson as a Bond-esqe villain and Charlie…
