Even though this weekend had one less hour to watch movies I still managed to watch four films that ranged from truly great to mildly annoying. I started with Argentina’s entry into this past Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film, Wild Tales, followed up with the American period piece, Serena, featuring now frequent collaborators Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Then was a trip to the theater to see Neill Blomkamp’s under appreciated and under seen Chappie, and then finished with last year’s Pam D’Or winner at Cannes, Turkey’s Winter Sleep.
Instead of my typical long reviews I’ll just say if you should watch it or not.
Watch it. This movie will be out at the Oriental this coming weekend and can be seen at other art house cinemas in the area. This comes highly recommended and is comparable to Borgman in it’s morality tale short stories and themes of economic and moral justice. Argentina is just the country to give us this movie given the complicated real life political drama occurring there.
Don’t see this. Don’t be fooled by the stars involved or the romantic time period involved. This movie is as exactly uninspired as this poster. There are almost no sympathetic characters. They aren’t really even characters but just traits and tired metaphors played out in an uninteresting and disjointed narrative. It’s a shame because Cooper and Lawrence have obvious chemistry, but they got too comfortable here. Serena is a real let down.
Chappie is the sort of movie that I’m going to like no matter what. This is really just for fans of Neill Blomkamp. I’ve been following him from his days of making short films. And Chappie is a direct spinoff from one of those shorts. This is basically an update on Short Circuit which is totally ok with me. Blomkamp’s visuals and big ideas matched with the South African rap group’s Die Antwoord’s debut as fictional versions of themselves was great for me. I realize how this could be cinematic territory that has been retread too often for some, but for me I enjoyed it. Check it out.
It’s hard to decide which I liked more, Wild Tales or this, Winter Sleep. If Wild Tales was brethren to Borgman then Winter Sleep, the 2014 Palme D’Or winner at Cannes, was the spiritual companion to Leviathan from Russia. Leviathan was one of my absolute favorite films from last year and Winter Sleep with it’s very limited 2015 release so far could rank up there this year. It’s a beautiful epic at over three hours long that is incredibly heavy with dialogue and interesting layered characters. It examines society with a fine tooth comb and delves into real philosophical topics with a rare honesty. If Leviathan examined the individuals relationship with the Russian state then Winter Sleep examines Turkey’s march towards modernity and reconciles its history with its growth and puts on a pedestal a local dignitary only to knock him down. Watching all four of the aforementioned foreign films all together will give you a great update on the state of world cinema from the Netherlands to Russia from Argentina to Turkey. With the rut the current box office is in you should reward yourself with great foreign films. Oh and go see Chappie too, because Blomkamp is one of the better voices in modern sci-fi. And because it’s just cool.
midwestmovieman 