Gone Girl - 4 stars

Based on the book by Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the screenplay), Gone Girl is directed by David Fincher, who is probably my favorite director working today.  Almost every movie he’s directed has ended up as one of my favorite movies of the year.  Zodiac, The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Game, Fight Club, and Se7en are movies I can watch over and over again.  Those movies are so well cast, the performances are all great, the stories are interesting, but my favorite element is hard to explain.  It’s something about the look and atmosphere of those movies.  Fincher just has such a great eye for cinema, and every shot looks great.

Anyway, enough about the director, let’s talk about this movie.  Ben Affleck stars as Nick Dunne, and Rosamund Pike plays his wife, Amy Elliott-Dunne.  As the movie begins, Nick doesn’t look happy.  He goes to the bar he owns with his twin sister and hangs out with her for a while.  When he returns home, there are signs of a struggle and his wife Amy is missing. 

As the police and volunteers start searching for Amy, we see flashbacks of how Nick and Amy fell in love.  Their marriage seems almost too perfect for a while, then things start to bad.  See, Amy’s from New York City but Nick is from Missouri.  He’s living in New York when they meet and get married, but two things cause them to move back to Nick’s home town.  First the recession hits and they both lose their jobs.  Then Nick’s mother gets cancer and he wants to move home to take care of her. 

As their story progresses, we see Nick and Amy grow further apart.  She’s not happy living in this small town and he starts changing.  In her eyes, he isn’t the same guy she married in New York.  By using her diary as narration, we get a pretty good picture of a marriage falling apart.  Add to that the fact that she’s rich, owns the bar he and his sister run, and Amy made Nick sign a prenuptial agreement. 

The movie cuts back and forth between the history of their marriage and the current investigation into Amy’s disappearance.  The movie does a great job of keeping us guessing.  Nick may have snapped and killed his wife, or he may have had nothing to do with it.  There are other surprises as the movie goes along, but the less you know about that, the better.

This is the best work Ben Affleck has done in a long time, but even better is the performance by Rosamund Pike.  She’s been in quite a few movies, including Die Another Day, An Education, Jack Reacher, and The World’s End.  But she didn’t really stand out in any of those.  In Gone Girl, she gives a career making performance.  There’s a lot to this character and she does a really good job.  I wouldn’t be surprised if she got an Oscar nomination for this movie.

Besides the two leads, there were a lot of other really good performances.  Carrie Coon plays Nick’s sister Margo, and she’s kind of the conscience of the movie.  Neil Patrick Harris is an ex-boyfriend of Amy’s and he’s surprisingly creepy.  Kim Dickens is the detective investigating Amy’s disappearance, and she was a lot of fun.  I think my favorite scenes were when she was on screen.  She’s a feisty woman with a southern accent, and she reminded me a lot of Holly Hunter’s detective character in Copycat.  She’s always in control of a crime scene and ordering all the other cops around.

But the biggest surprise is probably Tyler Perry as Tanner Bolt, the most famous and expensive lawyer in the country.  Perry has already made a name for himself with his Madea movies.  I haven’t seen very many of his movies, but he was really entertaining here. 

This is a great movie.  It’s a really interesting who-done-it crime drama, but it’s so much more than that.  It’s satirizing the media and our obsession with reality TV.  It’s commenting on post-recession America and how that affected people.  It’s making a statement about the complexity of marriage.  And as of early October, it’s the best movie of the year.

Annabelle - 2 stars

Annabelle is kind of a prequel to The Conjuring, which was a really good horror movie from last year.  I say “kind of a prequel” because the doll Annabelle wasn’t a big part of The Conjuring.  If you remember that movie, when we first met paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), they had just finished the case involving Annabelle.  The doll was kept in Ed’s room full of cursed objects for most of the movie.

Set before the events of The Conjuring, Annabelle starts with John Gordon giving his pregnant wife Mia a creepy looking doll.  Scary stuff starts happening, the couple moves from their house to an apartment, and scary stuff keeps happening.  So it isn’t the house that’s haunted but something else.

The story of this movie is very predictable.  If recycles ideas from better horror movies, including the wise old lady who owns a vintage bookstore.  The store just happens to have just the right book to explain demons and possession, and the old lady just happens to be an expert.  Another problem is the characters John and Mia are really boring.  All Mia does is sit around the house all day waiting to be tormented by a demon.  All John does is go to work, come home and disbelieve his wife.  The performances aren’t bad, but the script gives them absolutely nothing to work with.

The only things this movie has going for it is its connection to a far better horror movie and some good scares.  And I admit those scares are pretty good.  There’s a sequence in the basement of their apartment building that really freaked me out.  Some creepy stuff happens, Mia gets in the elevator, the doors close, and when they open she’s still in the basement.  This continues for a few minutes, and it was really effective.  There are some other good scares that made me jump, but that’s it.  When nothing scary is happening, I was just waiting for the next scary thing to happen.  Nothing else happens in this movie. 

So overall, the movie is boring with a few good scares.  And that doll is really creepy.

The Equalizer - 3 stars

Denzel Washington plays Robert McCall.  Robert follows the same routine every day.  He gets up, goes to work at the hardware store, then at night he goes to a local diner where he reads The Old Man and the Sea.  We can see that he’s got OCD because of the way he arranges his napkin and silverware just so, and he brings his own teabag to the diner.  While there, he chats with Teri (Chloe Grace Moretz), a young call girl working for Russian gangsters.  He doesn’t approve of the way they treat her, and eventually he’ll have to get involved.

We’ve seen this kind of movie before.  McCall is a guy everyone thinks of as a mild mannered nice guy, but he has a secret past, and he has a very special set of skills.  You can tell right away that when he’s pushed and has to start fighting, he will have no trouble kicking some ass.  

What makes this work is Washington’s performance.  In the hands of a lesser actor, this could have been a boring character.  But Washington is so good that he’s even interesting when he’s doing nothing but watching others.  It takes a while for the action to start – it was a good 20 or 30 minutes in before he has his first confrontation with the Russian gangsters.  And the confrontation is a bloody one.  He uses whatever is in the room, including corkscrews, to dispatch half a dozen of his attackers.  

One problem I did have was that he never seemed to not be in control.  We never see him get hurt or make a wrong decision.  At some point, it loses the excitement when every time he encounters some more bad guys, he dispatches them without hardly batting an eye.

On the other hand, that’s part of the fun too.  We watch in slow motion as he looks around the room and sizes up the threats.  Then he goes to work.  The climax of the movie takes place in the hardware store, and I may never look at a drill the same way again.
The movie is too long, and I started to get bored in the second half.  For a while, the movie has nowhere to go and we spend a lot of time watching the main villain, Teddy (Martin Csokas) looking for McCall.  They could have easily cut a good 20 minutes out of this movie.

But that aside, I enjoyed it.  It’s always fun to watch Denzel Washington in ass kicking mode, and the story was compelling enough to recommend the movie.

The Maze Runner - 2 1/2 stars

It’s been a month since we had a dystopian movie based on a young adult fantasy novel.  Based on the book by Utah author James Dashner, The Maze Runner is a pretty good story idea.  

The movie opens with sixteen year old Thomas waking up in The Glade, a forest area surrounded on all sides by massive stone walls.  He has no memory of who he is or why he is there, but there are about 30 other boys in the same state.  Once a month a new boy arrives, and they have established a community in The Glade.  

It turns out they are in the center of a giant maze.  Every morning the door to the maze opens, and every night the door closes.  Runners are sent into the maze to try and find a way out, and they have to return before the door closes because there are dangerous creatures in the maze.  The creatures are called Grievers, and no one has ever seen them and survived.

That’s a pretty simple setup for a story, and the movie keeps us guessing until the end about why they are there and what’s going on.  Are they being punished?  Are they part of some experiment?  They know someone is in control, because every month supplies arrive along with a new kid.  

One thing that was surprising was the level of violence in this movie.  It’s PG-13, which means we don’t see any blood, but there are still quite a few deaths in this movie.  When the creatures from the maze attack, it’s reminiscent of Starship Troopers.  Those things are quite vicious, and we see a number of the boys stabbed by their deadly tails.  

There were things to like in this movie, but I was disappointed by the lack of character development.  All the characters were flat and two-dimensional.  Thomas is the hero of the story, but we don’t learn much about him other than he is more anxious than any of the others to explore the maze and get out.  And Gally (Will Poulter from Son of Rambow) is the antagonist.  At first, he seems distrustful of Thomas and always walks around with a scowl on his face.  He doesn’t seem to have a problem with the runners trying to find a way out of the maze, but he does have a problem with Thomas fighting the Grievers.  By the end, his motivations don’t make sense, and he’s causing trouble just because the movie needed a villain.

Another problem is the lack of humor.  It doesn’t matter what genre a movie is – every movie needs a little bit of humor.  The characters were so serious all the time, and it got tedious.  Also, the dialogue isn’t bad but it does nothing other than serve the plot.  It would have been nice to see these characters have some fun or have an interesting conversation.  And there are too many scenes of the characters talking earnestly to each other.  The movie is chock full of earnestness.  

The other big problem is that this is going to be another franchise.  Like every other one before it (Twilight, Hunger Games, Divergent), this is the first of a series.  Instead of being a standalone movie, it mostly serves to set up the rest of the series.  The finale is a real letdown because of this.  When we find out why the kids are in the maze, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  But it’s also trying too hard to set up the next movie in the series.

The story would have made a good Twilight Zone episode, but it doesn’t quite work as a movie.  It’s almost good enough to recommend, but not quite.  If you’re a fan of the books, you’ll probably like it better than I did.

This Is Where I Leave You - 2 stars

When their father dies, the Altman siblings come home for the funeral.  They are Judd (Jason Bateman), Wendy (Tina Fey), Phillip (Adam Driver) and Paul (Corey Stoll).  Their mother is played by Jane Fonda.  Once they’re all gathered at the family home, their mother informs them that their father’s dying wish was for all of them to sit Shiva.  This means they all have to stay at the house for seven days and mourn while friends come by to offer condolences.

Each of the siblings has some drama going on.  Judd recently discovered his wife has been having an affair with his boss.  Wendy is dealing with the guilt of leaving her ex-boyfriend who suffered a brain injury years before.  Paul and his wife are having trouble conceiving, and Paul’s wife used to date Judd.  And Phillip is the black sheep of the family.  He shows up driving a Porsche and dating an older woman who also happens to be his therapist.

This is a dysfunctional family comedy that isn’t really much of a comedy.  All the best jokes are in the trailer, but they work so much better in the trailer.  When I saw the same scenes in the movie, they didn’t make me laugh.  The timing was all wrong, and I wish that whoever edited the trailer had also edited the movie.

The lack of jokes wouldn’t be so bad if the movie wasn’t trying so hard to be a comedy.  I got tired of the jokes about Jane Fonda’s boob job, or the kid who’s potty training, and always carrying his little potty around to different areas of the house to poop.  And there are so many stories going on with these characters that it takes the movie a long time to develop them.  I was bored for probably the first hour of the movie.  After that, I was interested in the characters enough that I started to enjoy the movie, but that’s a long time to wait for a movie to grab you.

Bateman, Fey and Fonda were all disappointments in this movie, but Adam Driver was fun to watch.  The movie got entertaining every time he was on screen, and I wish his character had been on screen more.  There is one really fun scene where the brothers sneak away during temple to get high.  

In the hands of a better director, this might have been a pretty good movie.  The material is there and these actors are really good.  But Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum, Real Steel) isn’t the right director for this kind of material.  Big disappointment.

The Drop - 3 stars

Based on a short story by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River; Gone, Baby, Gone), this is a crime drama set in Brooklyn.  Tom Hardy stars as Bob Saginowski.  He tends bar at Cousin Marv’s, a popular neighborhood bar which also doubles as a money drop for Chechen mobsters.  Bob is quiet and shy.  He knows who he works for, but he isn’t involved in any criminal activity.  He kind of just keeps his head down and does his work.  But we get the impression that he wasn’t always that way. 

One night a couple guys rob the place.  The Chechens don’t really care who robbed them, they just want their money back.  So it’s up to Bob and Cousin Marv (the late James Gandolfini) to either find the robbers, or come up with the money themselves.  Another storyline concerns Bob adopting an abused dog he rescued, and his new friendship with Nadia (Noomi Rapace from The Girl with the Dragon Tatttoo), who helps teach him how to care for the dog.

What’s interesting about this movie is that the story is the least interesting part of it.  There isn’t all that much plot to speak of.  What I liked about the movie is the performances.  Gandolfini is always good, and here he easily embodies this guy who used to be somebody powerful but now has been kind of beaten down by life.  He lives with his sister, and most of their conversations have to do with whether to take their father off life support.

But the movie belongs to Tom Hardy.  He’s one of those actors who disappears into his characters.  He does a good job with the Brooklyn accent and it was amazing watching him be so interesting while doing so little.  

There were a few problems with the movie.  There’s a running storyline with the detective investigating the robbery that doesn’t go anywhere.  And too much screen time is devoted to Bob trying to care for the dog.  The movie dragged in a few places, but most of the time I was absorbed in the story and enjoying watching these actors.  It’s especially sad to realize that this is the last time we’ll get to see a new James Gandolfini performance.

Despite those problems, I enjoyed this movie.  It’s not as good as Mystic River or Gone, Baby, Gone but it had the same feel, with the same working class type of characters.  The neighborhood and the characters felt very authentic, and I was surprised how gripping and intense the climax of the movie was.  This movie is definitely worth seeing.

Dolphin Tale 2 - 2 1/2 stars

This is a movie about a boy and his dolphin.  I didn’t see the first Dolphin Tale (2011), but from what I’ve read, the Clearwater Marine Hospital rescued an injured dolphin and named her Winter.  Winter’s tail has to be amputated, and she is fitted with a prosthetic tail.  This not only allows her to swim without injuring herself, but she becomes an inspiration to everyone.  

In this movie we see how many people come visit the aquarium to see Winter.  She’s especially popular with disabled children and wounded war veterans.  When Winter’s companion dies, they have 30 days to find a new companion for her (USDA regulations say dolphins can’t be housed alone).  If they don’t find a new companion for her, Winter will be moved and the aquarium will be shut down.

That’s the main source of drama in the story.  The other bit of tension is about whether Sawyer Nelson (Nathan Gamble), the boy who works there and is closest to Winter, will leave town to study for three months at a prestigious marine biology program in Boston.  

This is a nice, pleasant enough movie for kids.  Watching it, I was reminded of movies they might have shown us in elementary school.  There’s nothing offensive to kids, it’s not too intense or scary, but it’s too safe and uneventful.  I was bored most of the time.

It was interesting at times to observe what the daily routine is at this place.  Both movies were “inspired by true events” and there really is a Clearwater Marine Hospital.  Over the end credits, we get to watch actual video footage of events depicted in the movie.  That was probably my favorite part of the movie, and I wouldn’t mind seeing a documentary about Winter and the aquarium.

I took my niece and nephews to see this movie (ages 5 – 10), and they enjoyed it.  So based on that, I’m going to say that it’s enjoyable enough for kids and the story is moderately engaging.  But unless you have kids who really want to see this, there’s really no reason to go.