Love, Antosha Is A Poignant Reminder of the Finite Nature of Life

We all get a finite amount of time on this Earth. It's not something we like to think about (I'm very much including myself in that "we"), but it's the truth. Realizing that, one begins to wonder how we'll use whatever amount of days on this Earth. Will we hold grudges? Will we look out for ourselves? What careers will we dedicate ourselves to? The mind reels at all the questions pouring out from contemplating our own mortality, perhaps that's why we prefer to push the idea that we have a limited amount of life to live to the back of our minds. But there's no getting around such an idea while watching the documentary Love, Antosha, which chronicles the life of the late great actor Anton Yelchin.

Winter's Bone Propelled Jennifer Lawrence To Stardom And For Good Reason

Let's go back in time to 2010. It's the start of another decade. The iPad is the newest gizmo from the mind of apple. Kate Gosselin is trying to make Kate Plus Eight a thing. The House That Built Me is dominating the Billboard Country Music charts. And in June 2010, Winter's Bone got released to widespread acclaim and in the process, launched the career of one Jennifer Lawrence. Only the fourth movie she ever appeared in, Winter's Bone immediately propelled Lawrence onto the pop culture radar and her place on that radar would be cemented in the years to come with major hits like The Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook.

Red Sparrow Is An Empty Spy Thriller With Only A Dark Tone And Poor Treatment of Women To Its Name

CONTENT WARNING: DESCRIPTIONS AND DISCUSSIONS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT ARE BELOW 

A dour tone is not a bad element for a movie to have. It can be a quite useful element in fact! Just look at classic movies like Bicycle Thieves, Ordet or Au Hasard Balthazar, all motion pictures with a somber atmosphere that make that downtrodden aesthetic because it suits the story they're telling. A well-done bleak movie can be incredibly powerful to watch, but on the other hand, a film that mistakes the act of being grim for being inherently contemplative is one that can get tiring to watch awful quickly. Red Sparrow, the newest collaboration between director Francis Lawrence and Jennifer Lawrence after their work together on the Hunger Games sequels, is very much one of those movies that doesn't know how to properly use its solemn tone.

Mother! Is Mighty Interesting But Also Mightily Plagued By Pacing Problems (MASSIVE SPOILERS WITHIN)

THE FOLLOWING REVIEW OF MOTHER! IS SOAKED IN SPOILERS BECAUSE I'VE FOUND IT IS DIFFICULT TO TALK ABOUT MOTHER! WITHOUT DELVING INTO PLOT DETAILS THAT CONSTITUTE ACTUAL SPOILERS DUE TO THE SECRETIVE MARKETING. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT

Passengers Is A Bumpy Ride

WARNING: Like Collateral Beauty from a few weeks ago, Passengers is a movie whose marketing has outright lied to audiences by concealing the actual plot of the movie its advertising. To talk about the movie in any way shape or form, I'll have to talk about very basic plot elements introduced from the get-go in the movie that are only spoilers because the ads for Passengers have concealed them from viewers. OK? Okee-dokee, onto the review!

It's nice that Passengers has a polished look to it in terms of production design. The spaceship the two lead characters inhabit is nicely brought to life by way of some solid looking sets and I enjoy that the various technological marvels to be found on the ship are treated in the same way Futurama and Star Wars treated their own futuristic gizmo's; as everyday nuisances, in the same way we might gripe about an iPad mildly malfunctioning despite such a device being unthinkable to exist even as late as a decade ago. That's a unique enough approach that also leads to some brief diversions into dark humor that I wish Passengers had utilized more instead of just dipping its toes into the waters of mildly dark humor two or three times.

Joy Review

Now that Jennifer Lawrence is free of her Hunger Games and  X-Men commitments, I'm super curious to see what projects she undertakes next. She apparently wants to try her hand at directing (following in the footsteps of other A-list actors who go behind the camera like George Clooney, Angelina Jolie Pitt and Clint Eastwood), but I do hope her future efforts have more substance to them than her latest starring vehicle, Joy, a noble but ultimately underwhelming film devoid of energy and personality.

Jennifer Lawrence And The Director Of American Hustle Reveal A Joy-Ful Teaser

Silver Linings Playbook and especially American Hustle (one of my favorite movies of 2013) have made me a huge fan of director David O. Russell. Any new movie he works on would get my attention, but considering the two great performances he's gotten from Jennifer Lawrence in his two most recent films, well, the fact that his next feature stars that masterful actress has gotten me through the roof in terms of excitement. That film is entitled Joy and has just released a teaser trailer that you can watch below!

Storm, Cyclops And Storm Have Been Cast In X-Men: Apocalypse!!

I was watching a stage production of Oklahoma! last night, so as one can imagine, I had my cellular device turned off during the play. An hour and a half into the story, intermission commenced, and I turned on my phone and amusingly discovered that a massive casting announcement had been unveiled just since I turned off my phone. That casting announcement, as you have likely guessed, is none other than the confirmation of who will be playing Cyclops, Jean Grey and Storm in X-Men: Apocalypse.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One Review

Mock (Yeah)...Ing (Yeah)....Jay (Yeah)

Cliffhangers are a tricky business. Do it one way, and it can become an entertaining way to simultaneously push the characters forward while giving a glimpse at the future (see: The Empire Strikes Back and The Hobbit films). But others really just do it in an abrupt fashion that manages to decrease the overall quality of the film. Thankfully, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One manages to avoid being a calamity. In fact, it's an entertaining movie filled with tension packed sequences.

The Hunger Games Mockingjay: Part One Just Got A Freaking Awesome New Trailer

I really did not care for the first Hunger Games movie, with it's poorly written characters and terrible camerawork, but oh my God, I adored the second movie. Catching Fire was easily The Dark Knight of these Hunger Games films, going much deeper into the struggles of the cast of characters to excellent results. Considering the director of Catching Fire (Francis Lawrence) is in charge of both Mockingjay movies, I'm super pumped for the next Katniss adventure, and that excitement has only gone up with this newest trailer that you can watch below.

X-Men: Days Of Future Past Review

Welcome to The Future

The X-Men face their most terrifying threat yet; Sentinels...and bad photoshop

The future is very rarely an idyllic place in the world of movies. Even family movies like WALL-E make sure it looks terrible, while R-rated movies go to the most extreme ways possible to prove just how deplorable the future is. The X-Men likely think everybody from Max Mad to Robert Neville got it easy though, as their future consists of giant adaptive robots killing every mutant in sight.

The opening scene of X-Men: Days of Future Past, which introduces us to those robots (called Sentinels), is a thing of beauty, as it beautifully sets up how miserable this future really is, as mutants are killed off in a casual manner that makes one sick. Besides setting up an impressive action and tone-defining sequence, the opening also shows off one of the movie’s greatest assets; it’s ability to make any character that pops up immediately memorable. The unique powers that comes with each of the many mutants we meet in the film are so darn cool that it’s hard not to root for them (my personal favorite is featured in that opening; Bishop, played by Omar Sy).

Soon though, Wolverine (still played terrifically by Hugh Jackman) is off to 1973, where he hopes to get younger versions of Xavier (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to help prevent the creation of those pesky Sentinels. The arc Wolverine’s undergone in six of these seven movies has had it’s ups and downs, but it all culminates nicely here, as he has to take responsibility and be more of a helpful presence to the younger versions of Xavier and Magneto. Jackman handles this thoughtful side of the character in fine fashion, while also delivering an immensely quotable one-liner and awesome fight scene in similarly successful style.

The 1973 seen in this movie is a dazzling place that sucks one in due to the insane amount of detail here. That year really wasn’t that long ago, yet it feels like an entirely different world compared to the one we have today. Thankfully, they play up these differences to their maximum potential, as everything from Pong to Richard Nixon is given time to shine.This era also gets us to McAvoy who absolutely brings it as young Xavier, a tortured soul who’s now a drug addict and a recluse. McAvoy does do an excellent job making sure his character comes off across as damaged, but not unlikable, a tough balance that he pulls off nicely.

McAvoy and Fassbender had some terrific chemistry in X-Men: First Class (for me, still the best X-Men movie) and perhaps the film’s only disappointment is the lack of time the two spend together. The one major scene they do get is gripping, but soon Fassbender does some things that feel abrupt and unwarranted; I get why they did him, but they could have been executed better, especially since they come at the cost of Fassbender interacting with the spectacular ensemble cast. It doesn’t help that Fassbender does some stuff in the finale that feels….weird and a little over the top considering the circumstances he’s acting in. Add in some questionable actions involving Beast and Wolverine, and some of the climax of this feature does slightly underwhelm, though it’s saved by some final few set pieces that being the film back to glory.

Oh, and lest I forget, the rest of the ensemble cast, by the way, is thankfully well balanced, with Halle Berry and Ellen Page getting nice cameos while (contrary to the public consensus) Jennifer Lawrence does a superb job handling all the complexities Mystique has to endure in this film. By the way, you’ve likely heard by now about Evan Peters landmark action sequence as Quicksilver. Spoiler Alert: it more than lives up to the hype.

Really, some underwhelming aspects of the finale notwithstanding (which still pale to The Wolverine, which I was overly generous with last summer) X-Men: Days of Future Past is still excellent moviemaking that shows how good storytelling mixed with superb action is an extremely potent mix.