Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day - 3 stars

Alexander’s terrible day is only the setup to this movie.  He does have a pretty bad day, but that’s only the first 5 or 10 minutes of the movie.  Before going to bed that night, he wishes that his unsympathetic family would have a bad day of their own, so they would understand what he’s gone through.  The next morning, it’s his family who has a horrible, no good day.  His day actually goes pretty well.

Each member of the family has something really important going on today.  Dad is an out of work rocket scientist, and he has an interview with a video game company.  Mom works for a publishing company, and she’s in charge of a big celebrity book reading that day.  Alexander’s older brother Anthony has both his driving test and junior prom that day, and his sister Emily is playing the lead in the school’s production of Peter Pan. 

I had pretty low expectations for this movie going in, and I was pleasantly surprised.  Steve Carell and Jennifer Garner play his parents, and they provided plenty of laughs.  And Ed Oxenbould does a pretty good job playing Alexander.  Jennifer Coolidge shows up as a crazy driving instructor, and it’s always nice to see Dick Van Dyke in a movie, even if he only shows up for 30 seconds or so.

I’m probably going too easy on this movie.  I’m sure I could pick it apart if I wanted to.  Why would the school hold this big play and junior prom on the same day?  None of the characters really grow or learn anything, and everything kind of works itself out just by dumb luck. 

But it’s a good movie to take the family to.  It’s not too long (only about 80 minutes), there are laughs for the kids and adults, and everything works out for everyone in the end.  

Kill the Messenger - 2 1/2 stars

Based on a true story, Jeremy Renner plays Gary Webb, a reporter for a small newspaper.  He accidentally discovers evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the crack epidemic.  Basically the CIA worked with crack dealers back in the 80s, and they used the profits to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua.  When Webb writes the story, his paper runs it, and then the trouble starts. 

It’s hard to talk about a movie like this without referencing All the President’s Men.  There are a lot of similarities – a reporter out of his league, his editor pushing him to get sources and make sure the story’s tight, intimidation from the government, and exposing national corruption.  For the first hour or so, that’s where it seemed like this movie was going, and I was really enjoying it. 

But late in the movie, there’s nowhere for the story to go.  The investigation is done and the story is published, and the CIA stops going after him.  There’s a good 20 minutes where nothing much happens.  The focus shifts to Webb and his family, but the movie doesn’t do much with that.  There are a couple of good scenes showing the tension his family is under, and there is a really good scene where Webb is confronted by his son for a past indiscretion.  But most of the time, I was bored.

Part of the problem is the story is anticlimactic.  I’m not sure what they could have done exactly to make the last half hour better.  I am glad they didn’t add anything like a car chase or shootout that didn’t happen in real life.  But at the same time, it makes for a less exciting movie.  

The Judge - 3 stars

Robert Downey, Jr. plays Hank Palmer, a hot shot, big city lawyer.  His mom dies and he has to go home to Small Town, Missouri (or wherever it is) and face his dad (Robert Duvall).  His dad is a well-respected judge in the town, and the two of them hate each other.  When his dad is accused of murder, Hank has to convince his father to take him on as his attorney.

This movie is trying to be several things at once.  Most of the time, it’s a dysfunctional family drama.  From their first scene together, we can tell the relationship between Hank and his father is not good.  But then his father is on trial, and we meet the slick prosecuting attorney, Dwight Dickham (Billy Bob Thornton).  At this point, the movie becomes a courtroom drama.  Hank is also dealing with his ending marriage and pending custody battle over his daughter.  The movie also finds time for a little romance between Hank and his high school girlfriend, Samantha (Vera Farmiga).

The first 20 minutes or so of the movie are pretty rough.  It feels sloppily edited, and I thought the trailer did a much better job of conveying the emotional beats that the movie is going for.  In fact, if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the movie.  The only things you’re waiting for in the movie are why do Hank and his dad hate each other so much, and will his dad be convicted of murder.

But the reason to see this movie is the performances.  It’s a lot of fun to see Robert Downey, Jr. and Robert Duvall bicker and argue the way they do.  As the movie progresses and we learn more about the pain they’ve gone through, the scenes get deeper and more intense.  There’s some real powerful stuff going on in their scenes together.

Besides those actors, Vincent D’Onofrio does a good job as Hank’s brother, Glen, who’s kind of the anchor keeping the family together.  And Dax Shepard gets some laughs as a lawyer / antique dealer who’s not at all up to the challenge of a murder trial. 

The movie is 2 ½ hours long, and it feels it.  I think it would have been a good idea to cut at least one of the storylines out, or cut it down.  The most important story in the movie is Hank’s relationship with his father, and I really didn’t care that much how the trial turns out.  And there’s a really unnecessary scene at the end where we see Hank back in the same bathroom he was in at the start of the movie, having a conversation with the same lawyer.  The scene is showing us how much his character has changed by the end of the movie, and it was too on-the-nose. 

But despite my reservations, I enjoyed the movie enough to recommend it.  

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.