Review of The Ides of March

The Ides of March was so boring, I assumed it was based on a true story

It takes an arrogant person to name a movie after one of the most famous Shakespeare plays ever. And George Clooney is just the guy to do it.

The title would lead you to believe this was about a betrayal of a friend starring George Clooney as Julius Caesar and Ryan Gosling as Bruté. Only I don’t recall Caesar sleeping with his interns, and if he did, it was probably not as frowned upon in that time period and he probably bragged about it.

Regardless of ill-advised Shakespearian comparisons, this movie went nowhere for an hour. I’m all for character development, really I am. But it’s usually a bad sign once I start to wonder why a movie exists in the first place. I didn’t know if it was supposed to be a political commentary I wasn’t getting or if it was supposed to be wowing us with the peek behind the scenes of a political campaign, but I was having trouble justifying staying up passed 11pm on a Friday to continue watching this. I actually thought maybe it was based on a true story because it was so boring.

Then finally something happened. The girl is pregnant. It’s the governor’s. The assistant campaign guy she’s now sleeping with pays for her abortion. He gets blackmailed about another thing. Something about a delegate happened. He blackmails the governor he works for (so there IS backstabbing!). But for the right reasons. And in the end, it turns out there is no innocence in politics. Close-up of Ryan Gosling. Roll credits. Lesson learned. George Clooney pats himself on the back for just being George Clooney.

The pacing was awkward, I didn’t know what or who I was supposed to be paying attention to, the lesson was cliché and the payoff was not worth the investment. This could have been another Bulworth with a wayward politician with progressive ideals that doesn’t play the political game. There were some good speeches written into the film. But it decided to go the other way and give into blackmail and bribery. And for some reason, it overdramatized these scenes like it was brilliant and the audience wouldn’t see it coming. My wife summed it up once the final credits started when she said “That’s it?”

2 bugs/10

Dustin Fisher

Review of Moneyball

Moneyball can’t quite figure out what it wants you to take away from its story

I really wanted to like this movie more than I did. But I didn’t. I only liked it exactly as much as I did. At the heart of it, it was still just a formulaic underdog sports movie, complete with audio-driven video montage in the middle of it.

Here’s my issue with the movie. Brad Pitt starts out by making it to the playoffs with money problems. In baseball. Not basketball, where 4 or 5 teams get to the playoffs every year with a losing record. It’s pretty prestigious. Then his three best players leave for bigger contracts, so he tells his staff they need to start thinking differently. How?Well, I don’t know. Bring me a rock. No, that’s not the one. Bring me another rock. Nope. That’s not it either.

Then he meets Jonah Hill, who has a nice looking rock. So he buys it and goes all in with it. It’s a fun concept and I love the idea. But in the end, they get to the playoffs and prove to the world that they can do just as well as they did last year. People all around say “good try.” I know it was based on a true story, but it’s not billed as an educational documentary like Inside Job or The Cove. And after over two hours, just when I expected some sort of climax, there was white text on a black screen saying that he revolutionized the way people looked at the game and his idea brought success to another team. Oh, and not just any team, but the team that took his star player from him, who happened to be Jonah Hill’s example of somebody that this method has proven is not valuable.

Que?

So the movie instead overdramatized the record-setting 20-game win streak in the middle of the season only to immediately dismiss it when Brad Pitt admitted the streak meant nothing. The goal was a World Series. Which they didn’t achieve. What do you want us to feel, movie people?

That said, I enjoyed the idea they were striving for, combining sports and math as more GMs should. I’m hoping to see somebody like that pop up in football and revolutionize the way we view 4^th and 1. Maybe that’s how I’m going to make my millions. Mostly, I enjoyed seeing Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill in scenes together, even when they weren’t saying anything. They drove the audience through this convoluted math problem in a way that made us feel good about it. And the baseball scenes were so well-handled, I forgot most movies screw this up. On another note, can we please stop making 60-year-old managers wear a baseball uniform to work? They look ridiculous.

6 bugs/10

Dustin Fisher

Review of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close proves Tom Hanks can’t save every movie

“They say there are more people alive today than have died in the course of human history.” This is the quote the movie opens with. This was another way of saying “Dustin, I know you paid to get in here to see the movie, but why don’t you consume yourself with something else for the next 45 minutes instead.” Really? How the hell is that possible? When did human history start? What does that suggest about our future? Will that always be the case? Al Gore was right. We’re fucked. And who the hell is he quoting? He just said “They say…” They could very well be The Fraggles. And what the hell do they know about anything? They live in caves, for Godsake, caves!

I was quickly sidetracked. The movie had little to do with the origin of human history or Fraggles. Or Al Gore. And I’m still not sure what was supposed to be loud and/or close and to what degree. The movie was about a son who loses his father and spends the movie searching for a matching lock to his father’s key. And it’s much different than Hugo, who was searching for a matching key for his lock. See, different movies.

This borderline autistic child loses his father in 9/11. The movie definitely uses 9/11 to tickle your tear ducts, but it isn’t untastefully done. In fact, there weren’t many more shots of “the worst day” in the movie than was in the trailer. The movie focused on young Oskar’s mission to find a message that his father may or may not have left him before he died hidden somewhere in the city. This is a lot of emotional heavy lifting for a child actor not named Haley Joel Osment.

I learned in memoir class that you can always write about the bad stuff you did when you were a kid because the audience sympathizes with you. You are not yet responsible for your actions. But at the turn of the film, Oskar told his mom that he wished she was the one who was in the World Trade Center instead. That’s tough to recover from at any age. He whispered “I love you” under the door for just about no reason other than to win the audience back. It did not work for this viewer.

The last 20 minutes were as sappy as promised, but it gave the movie the heart that I assume the Academy voters thought was worth the Best Picture nod. I was less moved than I anticipated, as I tend to tear up at the end of most episodes of Monk. Maybe it’s because I saw what they were doing and it put me back in a movie theater chair. The slow-motion of the vase falling, the close-up of the answering machine, the mute grandfather with a secret and the “Swing Away” writer’s contrivance appearing phone number that Mr. Attention-to-Detail didn’t think to check before he started this trip. I did not dislike this movie because of any exploitation of the 9/11 tragedy, but because it’s hard to appreciate the taste of cheese when it’s on the end of a mop being shoved down my throat.

4 bugs/10
Dustin Fisher