Oscar Said This Movie Was Good is a movie review series by Ozarks native Kaitlyn Vaughan. She is not a professional movie critic by any means — and not even really a writer — but wanted to improve her movie buffness by watching all 9 films nominated by the Academy Awards for Best Picture. Then she said she wanted to write about them. We said, “Fine. Whatever.” So, if these reviews suck, it’s not our fault. But, if they’re good, we deserve all the credit.

Let’s get right to it. George Clooney is the man. You can’t argue with his track record: O Brother Where Art Thou, Ocean’s Eleven, all that time on ER, and the cherry on top, One Fine Day. (What woman didn’t want to be the struggling single mother, Michelle Pfeiffer in that movie?)

Add The Descendants to George’s greatest hits list.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. Take Clooney, pair him with breakout star Shailene Woodley (good to know she can do more than be a pregnant hooligan on The Secret Life of an American Teenager), put them in a storyline anyone can relate to, throw the whole thing in Hawaii, and you’ve got yourself a winner.

Speaking of Hawaii, the setting of this movie was fantastic. Not only were the visuals spectacular, but the Hawaiian locale gave the film a little something different, a vibe that you can’t get from a story set in New York City or Los Angeles. If you’ve been to Hawaii, you totally get it. If you haven’t, you definitely can appreciate it.

We all know George can play a wide array of characters, but now we can put vulnerability on the list. I could feel the anguish and heartbreak he struggled with throughout the entire movie. He was just a dad doing the best he could in a really crappy situation. His out-of-control 17- and 10-year-old daughters added a nice level of comedic relief to the storyline. Shailene’s character, Alex’s, harsh attitude and vulgar nature were downright funny at times and seriously, as much as you don’t want to admit it, watching kids under the age of 12 swear and say inappropriate things is hilarious. The dynamic between Matt, Alex, and the little sister Scottie (weird name, by the way) was spot on, although I’m not sure why Alex’s friend Sid was involved as much as he was. Whatever, it was all worth it to see Grandpa sucker punch him.

This movie had the potential to get boring. Mom is in a life-threatening accident, Dad has to assume responsibility for the children, Dad brings problem child back home from reform school, the family finds a newfound respect for each other in light of the tragedy, blah blah blah. But, wait, finding out Mom had been cheating on Dad for months before the accident throws an interesting wrench in things. We spend the rest of the movie watching Matt and Alex stalk and track down Mom’s lover while she lay in a hospital bed in a vegetative state. Father and daughter, working together to find the man who was about to ruin their family to tell him his mistress is brain dead. Surprise. Turns out Lover Boy is married, to a hot bodied Judy Greer, who, for some reason, made an impression on me. I could sympathize with her character and enjoyed her nature, especially when she came to visit her husband’s mistress in the hospital because he was too much of a coward to do it himself. Bam.

Of course, at the end, they unplug the mother from life support and they all say their goodbyes and watch her die. Matt and his girls come together with newfound love for each other. I cried. Duh. If you weren’t crying by the end of that thing, you’re heart is made of stone.

I’ve heard from others they thought this movie was too depressing. I say this movie was real life, and real life can be depressing. I was more than happy to pay the $10 to see this movie in the theater (although I didn’t because I had a free pass. What’s up?). You killed it, George. I would love to see you get Best Actor, especially over Brad Pitt in Moneyball (gross).

You were right, Oscar. This movie was good.

Other movies Oscar said were good (and were reviewed):

• The Artist
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
• The Help
• Hugo
• Midnight in Paris
• Moneyball
• The Tree of Life
• War Horse

Oscar Said This Movie Was Good is a movie review series by Ozarks native Kaitlyn Vaughan. She is not a professional movie critic by any means — and not even really a writer — but wanted to improve her movie buffness by watching all 9 films nominated by the Academy Awards for Best Picture. Then she said she wanted to write about them. We said, “Fine. Whatever.” So, if these reviews suck, it’s not our fault. But, if they’re good, we deserve all the credit.

SGF native Brad Pitt might be the only redeeming thing about Moneyball.

I am an avid lover of sports movie. While I am not the most athletic girl on the playground, Remember the Titans, The Mighty Ducks and A League of Their Own rank high on my list of favorite movies. (Please do not judge.) Prior to watching, I did not hear good things about this film. But, being the sports movie fanatic I am, I wanted to believe in you, Moneyball.

I shouldn’t have.

First of all, this movie was slow. As in, the speed of your internet when you had dial up, SGF traffic when it’s raining SGF traffic at any time, the McDonald’s drive thru line at noon, slow. As I mentioned, I wanted to believe in this film, but how many times can you watch Brad and Jonah Hill stare at standard deviation, long division, and computer screens from the early nineties before you start checking your Facebook?

As someone who has enough knowledge to enjoy the World Series, but not enough to know what constitutes a decent batting average, I found myself struggling to relate to the majority of the story. I’m sure someone with a respectable background in the sport would understand the jargon, calculations, and shorthand, but since Legends of the Fall heartthrob and SGF native son Brad Pitt starred in this movie, I guarantee I was not the only female to feel lost, and a little deceived, while watching it. On a positive note, however, I could relate to the old man scouts sitting around a table, gossiping (that’s what I call it) about every player in baseball. “His girlfriend is ugly. He’s getting a big around the middle. He parties too much.” Sounds strangely familiar to a girls’ night.

(Side note: How about when the Kansas City Royals make a killer comeback during what was supposed to be a crucial game for the Oakland Athletics? We all know things like that never happen to the Royals in real life so it was nice to see.)

In addition to be slow and confusing, this film lacked some serious character development. For how many people were involved in this story, I found myself caring for only one: Billy Beane’s 12-year-old daughter, Casey. Her musical talent, unusual wisdom, and justified worry for her father made her someone you wanted to care about. I didn’t flinch when players were traded or cut. I didn’t feel bad when Billy’s world was crashing down around him. But I couldn’t stop smiling when Casey played the guitar and sang her daddy a song.

Let’s talk about the ending. OK, Billy, so you don’t take the gazillion dollars Boston is offering you and then they win without you. And Oakland continues to not win a World Series under your management. And you’re still divorced and alone. And then you file for bankruptcy and your house floods. I mean, seriously. Let’s make this movie more depressing. I know it was based on a true story, and I figured the real story wasn’t all cotton candy and pizza for breakfast, but come on. Give a girl a little smile everyone once in a while.

In conclusion, I was not impressed with this movie. I am glad I chose to pay the $1.29 (way to raise your prices, Redbox) to rent this movie rather than pay $10 to see it at a movie theater.

Oscar was wrong. This movie was not good.

Mexico, 1991: A crash Senna walked away from.

Full disclosure: This review marks my second occasion for seeing this movie. The first was its one-day-only screening in St. Louis in September, which happened to coincide with a trip into the city to visit friends. The reasons for the second viewing, however, were very different than the first. It was no longer about seeing a movie about the life and death of one of the most transcendent and enigmatic international sports stars of my childhood, a man I remember getting up at 6 a.m. on Sunday mornings to watch, live from somewhere in the world, turn a marathon of violent, skittish, edge-of-physics motion into something resembling art. The second viewing of Senna was about none of that. It was about therapy.

What happened to legendary Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna on May 1, 1994 happened again recently to another successful driver, 2011 Indy 500 winner Dan Wheldon, in Las Vegas: a powerful, horrifying death broadcast second for heart-rending second on live television. No other popular sport puts its participants and followers through even the possibility of such a bloody outcome. It’s not something that has to be dealt with often anymore; thankfully, advancements in safety technology have seen to that. In the world of Formula One racing, the most-watched form of motor sport in the world, that is largely due, for better and for worse, to the last man to die behind the wheel of one of its cars: Ayrton Senna. And it’s Senna himself who offers here, through his eyes and his words, as redemptive–and defiant–an explanation of why a racing driver does what he does as has ever been laid out. For him, he tells us, it’s ultimately about pushing into different dimensions of the mind, a sort of meditation at breakneck speed. Riding along at eye level with him as he rattles and surges around the streets of Monte Carlo in 1988 while he tells it, it’s hard not to believe along with him.

That’s the real coup director Asif Kapadia (Far North, The Warrior) pulls off with this documentary: Senna, 17 years dead, is not only the protagonist of the film but the principal narrator. Because of the media age he came up in, the fame he received as a three-time world champion and his polarizing passion, Senna was one of the most publicly and privately documented drivers Formula One has ever known. The movie Kapadia has made is a phenomenal piece of video and audio editing at a blink-and-it’s-over 106 minutes long. The reason is the lack of that great documentary film convention: Static present-day interviews. The people who knew Senna are not telling his story while sitting in a cushy chair in a black room and facing the camera. You hear their voices, but what you see is all action. When someone is facing the camera and talking into a microphone it’s Senna, speaking in footage from one of his countless press conferences and other interviews. His eloquence in these situations lets him carry the film, and that eloquence came from his obvious passion for what he did.

That passion is also at the heart of the film’s conflict, namely Senna’s poisonous rivalry with fellow champion and onetime teammate Alain Prost of France. If it seems weird to use movie terms such as “conflict” and “protagonist” when talking about a documentary, that’s because the movie suffers from one significant flaw, and it’s in discussing this rivalry that the flaw is most exposed. The events of Senna’s career would be a Hollywood movie script if they weren’t real happenings; watch the sequence where he wins his home race in Brazil in 1991, riddled with pain from muscle spams caused by wrestling a car with only sixth gear, and see for yourself. But Kapadia, in trying to make the story accessible to people who don’t know the story, makes a clear narrative with a hero (Senna) and villains (Prost and the sport’s biggest power broker, International Automobile Federation President Jean-Marie Balestre) out to get him. The story fits to a degree, especially when Prost (allegedly) deliberately crashes himself and Senna out of a race in Japan in 1989 to make it happen. But when Senna returns the favor a year later it’s a reminder he was not a saint in this, either, though that’s where the movie’s examination of it ends. Maybe it’s out of respect for the deceased; maybe it’s to avoid angering fans who waited years for a proper telling of the driver’s life’s story. But to gloss over the faults of a man whose reputation as mercurial and notoriously hard on his teammates (Prost wasn’t the only cohort Senna drove away, just the most successful) sort of takes the “document” out of “documentary.”

Such debates fade away quickly, however, when the tragic events of 1994 take over the narrative. Kapadia holds nothing back when taking you through the weekend of the Grand Prix of San Marino, the weekend best known for Senna’s death but that also claimed the life of Roland Ratzenberger and nearly took fellow Brazilian Rubens Barrichello, too. It’s all there, in chilling, unflinching detail. Leave it to Kapadia, though, to bring a touching full-circle conclusion to things with another deft piece of editing. Let’s just say Terry Fullerton should be proud.

For longtime racing fans, Senna is a way to remember a once-in-a-lifetime talent at his best: as the pride of Brazil, and as a man who saw his profession and his sport with eyes open and loved it without reservation. For younger fans, it’s not only a look at the Michael Jordan of his sport at a time when it’s now in the midst of its Kobe Bryants and LeBron Jameses, but also a way to come to grips with racing’s darkest side through one of its staunchest supporters and most famous victims. It may play best, though, to those who were never into the sport at all. Most people who see Senna will never understand what it’s like to drive a racing car, but they will understand the need of a son to get a hug from his dad at one of the most important–if painful–times in his life. They will understand a mother’s conflict in wanting her son’s safety but not getting in the way of his dream. They will understand, in some way, giving everything they have for success even when others try to stop them. Senna is an engrossing reminder that, in a sport so reliant on machines, it is humanity we ultimately root for, and for which we ultimately weep.

Senna is currently showing at Moxie Cinema. For show times and ticket details, click here.

A FrankCritic.com review by Frank C. Bailey

A directly proportional relationship exists between your enthusiasm for Easter and how much you will enjoy this film. By your enthusiasm for Easter, I am speaking of nothing to do with the death and resurrection of Jesus or anything else with the slightest relationship to the Christian faith. Easter, as it is secularized in the United States to be about bunnies, baby chicks, pastels, and various kinds of savory and confectionary eggs, has even less to do with any of the world’s great monotheisms than Christmas in the United States does. Despite Christmas’ associations with the pagan festival of Yule, its generic similarity to similar winter solstices celebrated in most cultures, and its prominent role as an engine of the economy taking undeniable precedence over any savior’s birth, it is, at least, still in the fight to be a Christian holiday integrated into mainstream secular culture. Santa Claus is based upon the real Saint Nicholas Agios, Nativity scenes remain common in town squares, and plenty of the Christmas carols mention Jesus, angels, or some such thing. With Easter though, it’s another story entirely. Any Christian church with any integrity at all is going to make sure Easter is celebrated with the proper acknowledgement of Christ having died for one’s sins, his involvement in a miraculous resurrection three days later, and may even encourage something of a solemn approach to the celebration of the holiday. Some, but not all, also include the secular elements of the holiday. However, secular participating in the holiday, especially the children participating, never even get the slightest notion that the holiday is about Jesus, and why should they? It’s not about Jesus, it’s about bunnies, candy, and pretty colors. That is the Easter you need to love in order to love Hop.

Although it will sound like a spoiler to say so, James Marsden’s character Fred O’Hare, and yes O’Hare is the character’s name and also the sort of humor you ought to get used to with the film, becomes The Easter Bunny. He is the first human ever to do so and this destiny is stated at literally the first thing the film does, which is why it’s not a spoiler to say so. Fred’s story is really the actual story of the film, as he is meant to be the kid-like character actual kids in the audience can relate to the best. Like Blythe Danner’s character in Paul, his whole life was changed by his encounter with something fantastic visiting his home as a child, and his high standards for greatness have doomed him to being something of a loser as an adult. When we first meet him, he is around his more successful siblings, some of whom are still children, and his deeply disappointed and sardonic parents, who are enthusiastically discussing kicking him out of the house due to his seemingly chronic inability to get a job because he refuses to settle. In fact, Fred is only not homeless throughout most of the film because he is housesitting for a wealthy person. Meanwhile, The Easter Bunny, voiced by Hugh Laurie, is dealing with his rebellious son’s running away from home to avoid his destiny of assuming the mantle of The Easter Bunny.

The creatively named E.B., voiced pretty much as you’d expect by Russell Brand, is obsessed with having fun and trying to make it as a professional rock n’ roll drummer. So, of course, Fred and E.B. meet and what is essentially a buddy movie comes to fruition. A lot of the time, their interactions reminded me of The Odd Couple, with the responsible and driven Fred playing the Felix Unger role and the laid-back and irresponsible E.B. playing the Oscar Madison role. Having recently watched Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, it also reminded me a great deal of Harry having to deal with Dobby the house elf constantly causing him trouble for what he assured Harry were good reasons. E.B doesn’t say he has good reasons for causing Fred trouble, exactly, but he does insist that everything will be fine or that he is somehow justified.

I don’t normally talk about parental concerns too much in film reviews, but Hop seems innocuous enough that parents could be forgiven for not being concerned. For one thing, E.B. poops candy as one of his established abilities. While kids are likely to think this scatological bit of business is hilarious, and this is doubtless why it was included, it’s still a sort of scatological humor and those who disapprove ought to be aware. What concerns me more is that E.B. is enough of a selfish anarchist, and largely gets away with his abuse of Fred, which includes everything from trashing the home Fred is housesitting to framing him for murder sort of accidentally on purpose, that it renders the character a poor role model.

At the end of the film, while he and Fred have been through enough together for him to be unlikely to abuse him anymore, E.B. seems to have basically learned nothing about how his earlier behavior in the film was wrong. Hank Azaria plays the villain, a chick named Carlos whose villainy should be obvious from his earliest appearance if not the trailers themselves, and his position that E.B. is a spoiled brat who doesn’t deserve either to be the Easter Bunny or to have all the privilege he does is difficult to not sympathize with. Carlos is made petty and given ridiculous ideas about how he thinks Easter should be run so the audience is forced to root against him, but I do start to question things when the villain of a piece makes as many good points as he does here. Brand’s anarchic shtick perhaps well serves projects like Get Him To The Greek and Arthur, but in a kid’s movie his persona makes the cute little bunny difficult to root for. Despicable Me’s minions briefly appear before the film and basically had the same effect on me Natalie Portman did in No Strings Attached by reminding me of greatness during an otherwise mediocre project.

When Calvin Klein finished the titular sentence to name arguably its most famous fragrance, it also laid out a deceptive and unforgiving spectrum for the human mind to navigate. How far is too far? How and when do you come to love something too much? Where do the boundaries end and you stumble, tumble, lurch and bang headlong into the darkest, most monstrous corners of the mind? And when do those corners stop being just corners?

The mind of Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a spinning plate, sane because she makes it be. She is young, extraordinarily coddled both physically and emotionally, sexually repressed and is hyperfocused on one thing in her life: dancing ballet. Nina’s mother (played by Barbara Hershey) was herself a ballerina, one who left her… love behind in order to have a child–Nina, whom she has molded into not only the ballerina she never got to be herself but also a young woman in terminally arrested development. She falls asleep every night to the sound of a music box, keeps a room full of pink hearts and stuffed animals and is… obsessively attended to and cared for by the woman she calls “Mommy.” She literally dreams of dancing as Odette the Swan Princess in Tchaikovsky‘s “Swan Lake,” among the most pressure-filled roles in classical ballet, and when the production comes to Nina’s dance company she’s ready. She has learned every step until she’s perfect at them. She wants the role. But what Nina didn’t dream of was dancing as Odette’s evil twin Odile, who steals Odette’s prince away, leaving Odette trapped in a spell as a swan the rest of her life. The same dancer must inhabit both roles, and according to Nina’s company director Thomas (a dickish, cheauvanistic, womanizing Vincent Cassel) she’s perfect for the innocent, virginal White Swan but doesn’t have what it takes to play Odile, the Black Swan. Nina is too uptight, to scared, too prudish; he wants sexual, raw, dangerous. Nina, he says, hasn’t learned how to lose herself in her performance. He rolls the dice and gives her the lead anyway, even though all the qualities he wants from the Black Swan are evident in newcomer Lily (Mila Kunis), whom Nina is almost immediately suspicious of as a rival as well as quietly taken with. And from there Nina’s plate slowly… stops… spinning.

What director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler) has made is an unnerving, claustrophobic, paranoid, borderline-schizophrenic parallel to Swan Lake and a trip into the dark corners of the mind I mentioned earlier, which he’s not going out of his way to light for you. Most of the movie is shot uncomfortably close to the subjects’ faces on shaking, twitching hand-held cameras. It seems every glance into a mirror or closing of a door comes with a glimpse of some mind-bending “Did you just see that?!” visual you can barely process before it’s gone. The moments of violence are few but unsettling. The film is also unflinchingly harsh in showing the brutal physical toll of ballet. Oh, you’ll flinch when it shows Portman splitting toenails, having her diaphragm worked on and puking in toilets before and after tryouts; it’s the camera that doesn’t. And those aren’t even close to the most cringeworthy scenes. The whole second half of the movie plays out as a long-form dance of metamorphosis, sexuality and psychosis as Nina’s… love of her new role and terror over potentially losing it to someone else leave her spinning plate of sanity teetering closer and closer to… madness. When the plate finally falls the climax is positively jaw-dropping, both horrifying and darkly beautiful. Like a lot of what leads up to it, it will spin through your mind after it’s off screen.

Some of Aronofsky’s storytelling tricks feel over-the-top and sort of gratuitous until they reveal their true nature near the film’s end, and to pull it all off he must put an enormous amount of faith in Portman to believably seem both sheltered and emotionally brittle as well as increasingly unhinged. For her part, Portman gives what has to be the performance of her career so far–which, as long as we’re discounting the Star Wars prequels, is saying something. Kunis, Cassell and Hershey all put in vital work, and Wynona Ryder‘s brief onscreen time as the wrecked outgoing ballet star to Nina’s incoming one is also impactful, but Portman owns Black Swan from start to finish in a way I haven’t seen since Daniel Day Lewis did in There Will Be Blood. She is captivating, disarming, sweet and scary as hell. You’ll want to help her right up to the moment you’ll want to run from her. And you had better run, because when her love and madness collapse upon each other and her plate stops spinning and falls there is no telling what will shatter with it.

Class Act mixed sit-com with social commentary in 1992.

So, you think the conversation about the theatrical careers of Chris “Kid” Reid and Chris “Play” Martin starts and ends with the House Party series? Not in this circle. I was a fan of House Party (the first and second editions, at least), but the Kid ‘n Play movie that got the most run in my VCR was the 1992 release Class Act.

The idea of Class Act is a theme that stands true even today in education. Identities are switched when a bookworm and a bully get their files swapped while starting a new school year. The movie highlights the difference in education of gifted and troubled students. Well, could have. As Robert Ebert wrote in his ’92 review for the Chicago Sun Times, it “has fun with exaggerated satirical versions of the two styles in education” but is mostly a “goofy sitcom”. Ebert is spot on, but, it would be hard to believe that the creative team was going for a deep, system-changing movie. They make the point very clear, but a load of punchy, sometimes slapstickish comedy directs the traffic. It’s still effective for the crowd they reached (if they were paying attention).

The quirky and obvious differences between Duncan Penderhughes (Reid) and Blade Brown (Martin) – bet you can’t guess who was the nerd – create humorous moments and ultimately closes on the similarities shared. Of course it’s predictable. It’s supposed to be. I could watch Penderhughes line up field goals all day long, but a kicker as a “secret weapon”? Get out of here.

If you’re looking for a solid hour and a half of cheap laughs, a decent plot, early 1990s lingo and style (look out for jean short overalls and fluorescent shirts), and a little social commentary, give Class Act a try.

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* The Hot Chick (2002): No. It’s not a good movie, but, of course, good is relative. An attractive high school cheerleader is transformed into Rob Schneider, and the one-liners fall from your speakers one after the other. The Hot Chick will leave you in stitches if you can dial back the effort to think logicaly.

* House Party (1990): Obviously, this is a good choice. Same principle actors, but mix in a little Martin Lawrence. Kid gets grounded for getting into a fight and has to sneak out to get to a big party at Play’s house. It’s funny with a great 90s rap soundtrack, but again very predictable.

Need more Kid ‘N Play?

Listen to 2 Hype

And watch this classic Kid ‘N Play Jam:

The moment director Oliver Stone decided to make a sequel to his 1987 film Wall Street he gave himself what was, effectively, an insurmountable task. For starters, Oliver Stone movies aren’t made for sequels. They’re message movies, mostly parables about power and its abuse. (Even Natural Born Killers was less about Mickey and Mallory and their killing spree than about the media’s misappropriation of coverage and how it can make wrongdoing into stardom.) The original Wall Street was not only such a parable but also a product and reflection of its time, introducing us to a one-man embodiment of everything that reviled and repulsed about ’80s status-chasing America: broker Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), he of the aerodynamic hairstyle and total lack of human empathy. At the end of the movie, of course, Gekko and his protege-turned-conspirator, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) end up in prison for insider trading and Douglas rides the role to an Academy Award and to a place as an icon that endures beyond the times that made it.

Most saw it left there, but Stone apparently thought Gekko could play a role in a new parable, one we’re all just beginning to learn the lesson of. In Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps the director brings back what may be his most famous character to place him in the middle of a love story, a father-daughter reunion tale, a look inside the money mess America is in and how it got there and, of course, a parable about misuse of power–all in one movie. Getting greedy with the plotlines much, Oliver? Even at 133 minutes there is no chance for any one facet of the film to breathe enough to be effective, as the other parts jump in at some point to stymie and bog each of them down. The problems are made worse by a heavy-handed script by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff that forces its dialogue to the point of making it obvious that it’s trying to preach at times (a sure way to lose a congregation) while seeming hollow and without emotional weight at others. Memo to the writers: When you write a character who loses his company and fortune, falls apart onscreen and commits suicide, and it still doesn’t register any emotion from the viewer, you haven’t done your job.

What makes this movie especially disappointing is that it could have worked. Stone sets Money Never Sleeps in 2008, seven years after Gekko is released from prison and months before the great economic implosion that throttled American finance that year. Not only has Gekko’s own personal kingdom crumbled, then, but the business empire he existed in–populated by hundreds of people, knowingly or unknowingly living out his “Greed Is Good” philosophy in the real world–has collapsed upon itself, as well. It’s the ultimate tearing-down of a man who was created to be a gruesome mirror held up to his times but instead became yuppie America’s antihero. With his debt to society paid, Gekko becomes a best-selling author, public speaker and prophet of the ruin to come, a plot choice that could have seen him used as an instrument to expose just how foolish the financial sector was in leveraging home loans and more. Stone starts to head down this path, and even gives us a fictionalized look inside the boardrooms of the corporations at the front of the landslide to show the sheer hubris and ignorance of it all, but then he sidetracks the movie with mushy stuff like the aforementioned love story and father-daughter reunion.

Both of these originate from Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan), a character that seems to have been created solely for the purpose of being manipulated. Winnie’s boyfriend, aspiring Wall Street player Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), plays financial-backer footsie with a green-energy company doing research on fusion while attempting to convince Winnie that she should reconcile with her father, if only to keep him closer as Jake’s new advisor. Winnie runs a self-described “leftie blog” that’s about to go national, suggesting a woman of strong will, healthy suspicion and an independent mind, yet throughout the film she repeatedly gives in to her father and boyfriend and repeatedly gets burned for it. Moore wants to get back at Churchill Schwartz honcho Bretton James (an almost too-slick Josh Brolin), whom Moore believes drove his mentor and father figure, Louis Zabel (a limp performance by the great Frank Langella) to suicide in the wake of unnecessarily destroying Zabel’s company in a takeover. Moore’s revenge plot turns into a job offer with Churchill Schwartz, the largest finance firm left standing, which he takes to see if he can topple James from the inside, a job he hopes to employ Gordon Gekko to help with in exchange for access to Winnie. Set aside from the big-picture storytelling of the 2008 collapse this storyline could work, and vice versa, but put together they fall flat, all shackled with one serious problem: It’s extremely difficult to root for any of these characters, with the possible exception, ironically, of Gordon Gekko, who Douglas once again plays with relish while adding some dimension to a character not meant to have any in 1987.

Poorly crafted, heart-tugging subplots aside, in the first Wall Street we saw the human cost of Gekko’s single-mindedness when it was juxtaposed against Bud Fox’s father and the people in attendance at the shareholders’ meeting where Gekko gives his famous “Greed Is Good” speech. We knew Gekko’s capacity for, and indifference toward, hurting people because we saw the people he hurt. In Money Never Sleeps we’re shown the catastrophic events of 2008′s market collapse and the callous approach of the power brokers, but the only person we see directly hurt by those events–Moore, who loses his mentor and has to move out of his condo–isn’t someone we can sympathize with, since he’s doing his own underhanded wheeling and dealing and manipulation in the process. If anything, the people we’re most likely to sympathize with as we watch billionaires reap what they sow is ourselves; we lived through these times, after all, and most of us are far worse off for it. But can the audience–real people–be effective as the human cost in a fictionalized (if essentially true) tale of events? Is a parable still effective if it has to jump off the page or screen to prove the validity of its message? Mark this down as a vote for no.

Sometimes you want to sit at home. While it’s not encouraged, it’s understood. It sucks to rent a bad movie so the Lost Reel Review is here to help guide you on your path to good movie rentals.

Turturro and crew got the brunt end when producers pulled a LeBron on Paramount after filming.

John Turturro, Bob Nelson and Mel Smith are absolutely hysterical in the unbelievably forgotten comedy Brain Donors (1992). Why was it so forgotten? Producers David and Jerry Zucker (remember Airplane! and The Naked Gun series?) jumped ship just before the film’s big-screen release. Initially, it was titled Lame Ducks and billed among the year’s funniest films. After the Zuckers ducked out Paramount pulled the marketing campaign and took it out of theaters after initial screenings. Instead it hit the video circuit and developed a decent cult following.

Directed by Dennis Dugan (who also directed Happy Gilmore, Beverly Hills Ninja, and Don’t Mess with the Zohan among several others), Brain Donors is based on the Marx Brothers comedy A Night at the Opera. It follows Roland Flakfizer, a personal injury lawyer (played by Turturro), who battles attorney Lazlo to become director of the Oglethorpe ballet company. Nelson and Smith help Flakfizer’s mission and complete the trio of nonsense. It pulls from a lot of Three Stooges comedy, with no shame in seeking laughs while destroying one crowd’s night at the ballet.

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Dirty Work (1998) – Norm MacDonald plays Mitch who is down on luck and needs cash quick. So he begins a “revenge for hire” business with Artie Lange playing his best pal. The revenge gets entirely out of control. It has direct connections to Brain Donors with a hysterical broken up ballet scene, and no regard for comedic boundaries. Directed by Bob Saget with unforgettable cameos by Chris Farley and Gary Coleman – it was Farley’s final project.

The Jerk (1979) – Steve Martin‘s first leading role was a smash hit (which he co-wrote), so I feel like it’s sort of a cop out to recommend it like you haven’t seen it. However, since it’s more than three decades old, it works. The movie is based on gags (go figure) and the gags are based on many of Martin’s experiences as a youth working at a theme park (read his book Life Standing Up – just do it). Martin plays Navin Johnson, a white man raised by a black family, who moves to St. Louis to find a new life.

There is an entire industry built around the attempt to understand dreams, an industry that would be bigger and more mainstream if such a thing were actually possible. The truth is you can keep any number of interpretive books on your nightstand and notepads and pens handy to write thoughts down with and still never get to the heart of what the nether regions of your mind are trying to tell you. Lucid dreams–ones in which the dreamer is aware he or she is dreaming, and can sometimes even manipulate the dream–are the closest we get to presenting the subconscious mind in a way the conscious one can grasp. Inception, the latest film from director and screenwriter Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Memento), lives in the lucid dream, and while his sprawling story of mental espionage and a widowed father’s only chance at redemption is both commendable and compelling–it may be the best movie of the year so far–it chooses to ignore one important truth: The human subconscious is a dark, messed up place to tell a story.

In the world of this movie, the United States military develops technology with which it can induce sleep in a group of people and, with the help of a portable device that fits in a suitcase, all of them can end up in the lucid dreamscape of one of the sleepers to try and extract information from that person. Basically, it’s the most passive form of interrogation ever conceived. (Already the plot is reaching quite a bit, though it must be said that if the U.S. military can turn Flipper into a killing machine then anything is possible, really.) Leonardo DiCaprio (The Departed, Gangs of New York… okay, he was in Titanic) plays Dom Cobb, the best in the world at “extraction,” the process of going into someone’s dreams to get that one piece of information a person would never, ever tell you. Who else could want such technology? Mega-high-budget corporations spying on one another; these are Cobb’s contract employers. When one such high-dollar, high-risk heist goes wrong his mark (played by a very hard-to-understand Ken Watanabe) becomes his new boss, offering Cobb a cleared criminal record and a way back into the States to be with his kids if he just does this one little thing that’s supposedly impossible: Plant a thought in the mind of an heir to a corporate empire, getting him to dissolve his father’s business–and make this heir believe it was his idea all along.

Sploosh, sploosh.

What follows is a mixture of Ocean’s 11, The Matrix and In Dreams, with Cobb and his team of helpers diving not one but three levels into the subconscious of young heir Robert Fischer, Jr., played by Cillian Murphy (Batman Begins, Red Eye), to try and execute their plan–in other words, they induce a dream… within a dream… within another dream. Here’s where Nolan’s brilliant high-wire act of storytelling begins, as by the time you follow the crew to the top of a snowy mountain you’re following three stories simultaneously. Lots of directors have tried the story-within-a-story approach and failed spectacularly at it, and that was just with two stories usually. Nolan, his set designer and visual effects crew put together three radically different environments that don’t ignore one another or their respective story arcs; in fact, what happens at one level of subconscious has magnified effects in each lower level. Falling from a height in one level will feel like zero gravity in the level below it and falling into a bathtub will send an aquatic avalanche into the room you’re standing in one dream-level down. All of this makes for epic visuals, particularly as Ariadne, played by Ellen Page (Juno), learns how to manipulate dreamscapes during her training as the “architect” of the dream the crew will enter in Fischer’s mind. Physics, space and time slip away as you watch Paris literally fold on top of itself like a city turned calzone. It’s mind-bending, literally and figuratively.

The idea of the dream “architect” is a little outlandish, but acceptable in context–Cobb can no longer build believable dreamscapes because the figure of his dead wife haunts his, so he has someone else create the lucid not-realities–but the problem comes in what the architect designs. See, in spite of all the folding, bursting and flooding, these lucid dreamscapes seem so, well, normal. There is none of the horrifying randomness that comes in actual dreaming; instead, what we see in the real world is mirrored exactly. For example, in lucid dreams the dreamer can look for telltale signs they are dreaming, such as text that reads differently or blurry on second glance. Where is that in this movie? Or maybe an out-of-place face, person or happening? Are dream “architects” too good for that stuff? Does being a maze-building genius mean such a person isn’t subject to the whims of the subconscious mind? It’s a stretch to believe this once you think about it, but it’s a necessary sacrifice, if you will, in order to keep a Hollywood movie acceptable to a Hollywood movie’s audience. In other words, don’t get crazy, scary or otherwise lose the plot thread.

There’s one other Hollywood intrusion that tries to muck up Inception: The stereotypical Love Interest, in this case Cobb’s dead wife, played by Marion Cotillard (Public Enemies, Big Fish) who continues to haunt Cobb’s dream worlds and sabotage his work. She is his greatest obstacle in the movie, but the truth is her character comes off as one-dimensional and uninteresting. In a movie where characters can float through air and manipulate their physical realm, all she seems able to do is huff and occasionally stab someone you don’t want her to. She’s a plot device and little more. What reels her back into relevance, really, is DiCaprio, who gives an insane-sounding movie (go ahead and read the second paragraph of this review again and see) with a hackneyed lost-love subplot the titanium-strong link it needs to hold everything together. The fear and desperation one sees in Cobb is the realest thing in any of the alternate realities he drifts in and out of, as well as an interesting counterpoint to the cool hand and quick wit he must show during his heists. That these opposites serve to undermine each other should come as no surprise.

While it (necessarily) has some tuned-down elements required of any big-budget Hollywood flick, what Nolan has crafted is a movie with lasting visuals and a plot that is both riveting and thought-provoking. It’s not how dreams really go, but that’s what David Lynch movies are for. This, instead, is an internal epic, a movie as claustophobic as it is sweeping, one that goes everywhere while never leaving the darkness you see when you close your eyes.

Sometimes you want to sit at home. While it’s not encouraged, it’s understood. It sucks to rent a bad movie so the Lost Reel Review is here to help guide you on your path to good movie rentals.

Triplets of Belleville (2003) is almost creepy. With earth-toned shades of dreary brown dominating the animation. Triplets takes viewers on a mostly silent journey as a elderly woman tries to track down her grandson who was kidnapped while competing in the Tour de France. The grandmother teams up with her aging canine and sisters to create one of the greatest getaway scenes I’ve ever watched. It’s clearly geared to adults – greatly to blame for losing to Finding Nemo for Best Animated Feature – and features a rhythmic, timely, strange but masterful soundtrack. The story is well constructed and dialogue perfect (when used). Comedy comes in doses as grandmother flaunts uncanny frog-gigging ability.

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Waking Life (2001) – A digitally enhanced live action masterpiece directed by Richard Linklater which dances through a young man’s thoughts while in a constant state of lucid dream (I think). Discussions of reality, existentialism and even the age old meaning of life question prevail. Fascinating animation make it visually exciting.

I Heart Huckabees (2004) – Jason Schwartzman is the frontman for an environmental group which is trying to keep a box store – Huckabees (Wal-Mart/Target) – from opening. Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin play existential detectives and Jude Law is the Huckabee’s CEO. Hilarity ensues. If that’s not enough, Naomi Watts is involved and she hasn’t to date harmed interest.

(The following is a review of Winter’s Bone, the film based on a local novel that was adapted for cinema and won best film and best screenplay at the Sundance Film Festival. It was shot entirely locally, more specifically in Christian and Stone Counties. Many of the cast and crew had local ties. WB will be at SGF’s Campbell 16 on June 18. This review is done by a guy who doesn’t normally do movie reviews. Hang on, tight.)

There are many preconceived notions about Winter’s Bone. Depending on what you know, or what you don’t know, this is likely what you have heard.

• It won awards at the Sundance Film Festival.
• It was shot entirely here in the Ozarks.
• There are local actors and actresses.
• Meth is involved.

All of those things are true, but when trying to explain what Winter’s Bone is, I think it’s best to start with a simple statement and then go into what it is not. My official opinion (solidified by years of movie and TV watching…)

Great movie, mediocre story.

The scene is set in Forsyth and follows the path of the 17-year-old Ree Dolly and her family, which includes her missing meth-cooking (and using?) father, her catatonic mother and two younger siblings. Ree is the main character who tries to juggle school, cooking and cleaning duties and, essentially, all parenting. When she finds out her father has been released on bond, she’s told that he put the family’s only true possession — their house — up as collateral. The danger is heightened after the sheriff says he’s skeptical the father is going to show for his court date.

The story is set with pitfalls for Ree and she must overcome them in order for her family to be able to survive as one unit. However, there are many moments in the story that are implied, but not fully explained. I don’t want to ruin the entire plot for you with Cliff’s Notes, but while much of the story is Point A to Point B to Point C, etc., a substantial amount of the danger is heightened by elements that aren’t directly described. Instead, they are forbidden even for Ree to know, and, in my opinion, it’s asking the viewer to take major leaps of faith with the plot and the characters. For me, it wasn’t overly effective, although it’s possible that someone could inject their own adrenaline-pumping suspense. I just don’t think it will be as obvious for every viewer. Did I believe in Ree as a heroine? Yes. Do I agree that her path was difficult and she deserves to be portrayed as a protagonist that makes the impossible happen? Absolutely. I just didn’t agree with the story’s payoff at the end. Storywise, I found myself wanting more.

On the other hand, Winter’s Bone dominates with its visual details. I would imagine part of its success nationwide, at least in filmmaking circles, is its setting and how it delivers such an unusual set of circumstances — unusual, at least, to those from different walks of life. Think about it. When you watch it — whether at Campbell 16 or if you were at the recent 450-seat screening at Missouri State’s Plaster Student Union — some of the scenery might not be as system-shocking as it would to be to someone living in an urban setting. On the same token, SGFers are going to grade the depictions of these locations on a curve because they have seen, or know of, places like this. For me, it gets an A.

This isn’t just rural Missouri; this film is set off the backroads of the backroads of the backroads, a right-left-right turn off of Highways like D, HH and Y. Most of us who have grown up around the area have seen this slice of rural Missouri at least once, if not lived in it or near it. We’ve seen the dilapidated farm houses, the ones that are family investments of ancestors that haven’t been updated in years, have a Dish Network dish or the state-of-the-art wood-chopping machines. The surplus bales of hay are used as jungle gyms until they’re needed for food or money. Stray dogs become lookouts and friends. Winter’s Bone hits these details like meticulous sniper fire.

MSU alum Lauren Sweetser played Ree's best friend, Gail.

The language wins, too. We’re not beaten over the head with “I reckon,” “Y’all,” or “Warsh.” It’s a nice touch, yet there’s still a certain necessary and familiar twang in their dialogue. Anything that would have been too over the top we would immediately have called BS. The scenery shots are amazing, a compliment not only to the rural images of trees and cloudy skies, but to director Debra Granik’s infatuation with details and her eye for them. It’s the same reason when many move to this area they say they spend time driving around and looking at trees. The perspective on our surroundings was refreshing.

It’s also a reminder of those who live with virtually nothing out in the Ozarks, hunting for their food — there’s a squirrel-skinning scene — and using wood stoves. The beginning of the movie moves slowly, trying to illustrate exactly how Ree has and comes from nothing. Granik toys with the viewer’s attention span, hoping that the visuals bide her enough time until the story gets to moving at a better pace.

As for the methamphetamine portion of the story, I was pleasantly surprised. As I said to MSU alum Lauren Sweetser in our video interview, I was worried about the way the Ozarks would be portrayed. Winter’s Bone should be described this way: It’s a story about meth and how it can wreck families, but meth isn’t an active on-screen character.

You know how in AMC’s Breaking Bad you get a glimpse into meth culture, including scenes of cooking and selling it? Winter’s Bone doesn’t take you inside the meth labs. It doesn’t show the ingredients and the cooking utensils. And not that I was expecting gritty Trainspotting-like meth usage, but meth’s screen time is shorter than reading this paragraph. The fact that it wasn’t gratuitous made me very happy — and relieved.

Arguably my favorite part of the entire film revolves around the character Teardrop, Ree’s uncle. Again, I don’t want to spoil his role, but think of a mix between Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. I felt the movie needed more of his unpredictability, but his role, while important, was limited.

In all, there is no doubt Winter’s Bone is a unique drama, especially when measured against many movies we have all seen. While it’s based on Ree’s journey, there isn’t a feeling of conventional suspense or mystery. Much of it is left up to interpretation. There are scenes that are some of the most gripping and uncomfortable that I have seen in some time, but they don’t seem to blend with the rest of the stoic tone. But maybe that’s the problem, and it’s only mine. It’s not traditional.

But I found myself getting lost in the details, the stunning visuals and the authenticity of the scenery, not the story. I think Granik deserves an awful lot of credit because she breathed incredible life into a mediocre story. (I should note I never ready Daniel Woodrell’s novel, so I have no foundation to compare it to the film.) I’d love to see what she could do with a good plot, because her eye for detail and scenery is incredible. Considering it was made with the help of dozens of local actors, cast and crew, that alone should be enough to get you to Campbell 16 on June 18. It’s the only time, as of now, it will be shown on the big screen in Springfield.

Check out our previous Winter’s Bone coverage:

• Listen to the audio of the post-screening Q&A with cast, crew and the audience.
• Watch our video Q&A with actress Lauren Sweetser.
• Watch video of two bands that have music in Winter’s Bone.
• Click here for the film’s official website.

James Cameron spared no time or expense to place a giant, two-hour-and-forty-minute, $200-to-$500-Million “L” on humanity’s forehead with his live action/CGI sci-fi epic Avatar, the story of man’s attempt to connect with a tribal alien race in order to exploit its land for profit. Thanks, Jim. At least this bitter pill comes in the form of a movie that is visually rich and, when one turns a blind eye to Cameron’s occasionally sloppy storytelling, is even compelling at times. Best of all, Celine Dion‘s heart does not, at any point, go on.

Avatar is Cameron’s first turn directing a feature film since 1997′s Titanic, which is close to how long it took to develop this movie. Cameron says he had to wait for technology to catch up to the script he wrote in order to bring it to life properly with digital animation. Waiting was a sound decision; the visuals lead the way in this movie from the very beginning, taking the viewer to the far-off planet of Pandora, where the indigenous people are eight feet tall and blue and can literally plug into the plants and animals to communicate with them.

Unobtainium: You can't touch this.

Yes, the planet’s name is Pandora, the same name as the girl with the little box you don’t want to open. Also, the name of the precious metal the humans are on Pandora to try and mine out from under the natives: Unobtainium. Really, Jim? Was MC Hammer unwilling to give up the rights to the word canttouchthisium? Here’s the thing with Cameron’s opus: He’s not sweating little details such as names or, you know, actual science, and if you do an otherwise good movie will slip through your fingers. He’s a director telling a story, not a script writer or even a CGI guru. Avatar is about big visual impact and overarching plot themes, not floating mountains that aren’t snow-capped but still manage to have waterfalls or creatures with regenerating carbon fiber (a man-made substance) for skeletons.

Such is the bizarre world of the Na’vi, the race of eight-foot-tall blue people who inhabit the inhospitable-to-humans Pandora. How, then, to connect with the Na’vi and convince them to stop sitting on their giant kajillion-dollar unobaitium stash? Scientists figure out how to engineer Na’vi bodies and have them telepathically controlled by humans in a control outpost. One of their Na’vi drivers is Jake Sulley (Sam Worthington), a Marine veteran pilot called in because of his genetic similarities to his deceased superpilot brother… except for his legs, which haven’t worked since the accident that sent him out of military life not long before. From the moment he arrives, Sully is the servant of two masters: the scientists, led by Na’vi expert Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), who want him to act as a social experiment while in his Na’vi body, and the military men who want him to do recon on the land so they can plot to extract the Unobtainium. What’s more, both sides mock and degrade him for rolling around in a wheelchair, even as he becomes the prodigy neither side has ever had on Pandora before. Can’t a blue-person pilot get any love around here?

The answer is yes, courtesy of the Na’vi, who take Sulley in and put him in the care of the tribe chief’s daughter, Neytiri (voiced by Zoe Saldana), who spends all of her time teaching Sulley to hunt and how to bond with the plants and animals of Pandora, all of which the Na’vi can plug literally plug into and connect with psychically. What could possibly happen? Yup, they fall in love and get it on in the glowing forest. Since Neytiri is betrothed to the tribe’s best fighter, this might be what one would call “a situation.” Now the man called upon to appease the Na’vi and get them to relocate must do so while convincing them he didn’t do it all for the nookie, all while the humans begin their march on the land to take the Unobtainium by force. 

The movie starts treading on Michael Bay territory from here with lots of explosions and grandiose fighting sequences, but the parallels are already set. The Na’vi, hyper-in-tune with the nature around them and sitting on valuable land they’re being pressured off of, are basically Cameron’s sci-fi take on the American Indian. An overacting Giovanni Ribisi plays Parker Selfridge, the government man pushing the button to pillage Pandora and who becomes the epitome of Man the Greedy Planet-Killer. When Sulley tells the Na’vi “they already killed their mother, and they’ll do the same to yours,” he’s talking about Earth. If you pull your 3-D glasses down slightly, you can feel the metaphorical “L” being stamped on your forehead. Cameron puts the viewer firmly on the side of the Na’vi toward the end, even if the viewer isn’t eight feet tall, blue or equipped to plug into his or her planet USB-style. By now, the Na’vi don’t even matter, really; it’s all about watching the humans negotiating via air-to-surface missile at this point. Cameron’s job is done; he’s told a flawed story well, using contrived, sometimes stereotypical characters to get across a penetrating message dressed in flashy, breathtaking CGI. Spend the extra money to see this film in 3-D, as the game-changing graphical presentation is positively absorbing in three dimensions. Being absorbed in Na’vi life in Pandora is all part of Cameron’s storytelling strategy anyway, and it might help that “L” on your forehead hurt a little less.

Psychologists would probably have a field day with Cormac McCarthy. The author’s two most recent novels, The Road and No Country for Old Men, share two things in common. First, now that The Road has been released starring Viggo Mortensen (who is making a dark-horse bid for inclusion in the “great actors of our time” discussion) and Charlize Theron, we can say both have been made into feature films. Second, both explore the one thing mankind doesn’t want to talk about: its animal nature. We are animals, but we have built Society to hide and restrain the natures and tendencies we’re born with. When those tendencies do come out, they become classified as “breaking the law.” Killing and theft are commonplace in Nature, but Society is better than that. So what happens when s*** hits Society’s fan and all the handshakes and yes-please-thank-yous and netiquette are gone and all we’re left with is the beast within? This is the question at the heart of The Road‘s premise, and though it becomes hard to watch at times, McCarthy and director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) flesh it out marvelously, if not perfectly.

In a way, The Road is the perfect opposite of No Country For Old Men. Where No Country watched Society implode from within in a world not fully aware of that implosion, The Road watches humans cling to the last remnants of their humanity–”the fire inside,” as Mortensen’s son, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, calls it–in a world destroyed by some unmentioned catastrophe and visibly in its death throes. Every city and town is laid to waste, most people are dead, trees are leveled everywhere, earthquakes and fires happen periodically and the world is constantly rainy and cold. (Here, by the way, is where we run into the movie’s major annoying trait: The lack of expository details. Did humans cause the catastrophe? Was it a nuclear holocaust? Meteor strike? Did Sarah Palin answer the red phone? Answers are desired and not given. Won’t be the last time, either.)

In this post-apocalyptic world, people do whatever they must to survive, wandering the world foraging abandoned buildings, sleeping in burned-out cars and stealing whatever they must to make it to the next day. In this world, man no longer considers it wrong to kill man; indeed, Mortensen’s character tells us cannibalism is on the rise. Don’t worry, though; this father-and-son duo are the self-described “good guys” and would never do that. Anything else, though, just might be fair game, especially in Mortensen’s eyes. Hey, it’s a cruel world and he’s got a son to protect… and two bullets in what looks like a .38 revolver to do it with. This could get ugly.

There’s a lot of ugliness in the movie, actually, from the stark and vivid wasteland brought startlingly to life in the film to the hunting parties and aforementioned cannibalism that’s heard onscreen but not seen. The ugliness also resides within Mortensen’s character, a man so obsessed with doting after his young son that he drifts into cold, vengeful mania at times. Maybe he’s driven to madness by the dreams of his wife (Theron), who slowly went crazy herself and committed suicide sometime after the unknown catastrophe with no reason given. (Remember that expository detail thing we talked about? Yeah. There it is again.)

Mortensen’s character lives only for taking care of his young boy, who is a total wet noodle and needs a lot of taking care of. Not that watching so much death and destruction wouldn’t be cripplingly traumatic, but Mortensen ends up carrying the boy–literally–every time danger comes. Really? The boy can’t even run? Ever heard of survival instinct, kid? Apparently not, as he wanders off to try and make contact when he spots another boy his age and falls asleep rather than keep watch over camp. Then again, maybe his bumbling is necessary to advance the plot; pushing shopping carts through grey landscapes can only hold the viewer’s attention for so long, really.

In a movie that is almost exhaustingly bleak there are moments of redemption, when “the fire inside” wins, and they come out best during cameo appearances by Robert Duvall, Michael K. Williams and Guy Pearce. At the moments when Mortensen’s character most looks down at humanity, giving in to the beast within, his son looks up at humanity and sees these people for what they are: People whose hands have been forced by extraordinarily trying times. In the child’s eyes, Society can still come out on top, but it has a beast of a fight on its hands to do it.