I can't believe that we are already into the third month of the year already! Where does the time go? Now the general rule is that the first few months don"t have a ton to offer. Which is true, so far I have only seen one good movie (Kingsmen). But March will at least have a few more interesting films. A re-imagining, a sequel, a business trip, and a curious robot! March 6th, 2015:
Chappie, Unfinished Business, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Bad Asses on the Bayou, Kidnapping Mr. Heineken, Road Hard, Faults, A Year in Champagne, Merchants of Doubt.
Excitement:3 Reason: This reminds me very much of District 9. Dev Patel and Hugh Jackman star in this A.I. movie about a robot who actual feels. Looks like an idea we have seen before, but yet it still looks like it will get me into the theater.
Excitement: 3 Reason: Vince Vaughn, Dave Franco, and Tom Wilkinson star in this crazy business trip movie. Speaking of movies we might of seen before. Say what you will about Vince Vaughn. We know he basically plays the same characters in all his movies, it still looks like this will be good for a couple of laughs.
March 13th, 2015:
Cinderella, Run all Night, It Follows, Home Sweet Hell, Anarchy, Just Before I Go, The Wrecking Crew.
Excitement: 3 Reason: Well Disney Studios is back at it again. This time with a new re-imagining of the timeless classic Cinderella. Last year surprised me by how good Maleficent actually was. Hopefully they can build of that success and not have a disaster of the Alice in Wonderland kind. Also if your a fan of Frozen, they are showing Frozen Fever, a new animated short in front of this film.
March 20th, 2015:
The Divergent Series: Insurgent, The Gunman, Do You Believe?, Tracers, Danny Collins.
Excitement: 2
Reason: I was not a huge fan of the first Divergent movie. I am however a fan of Woodley. Hopefully it is better than the first and filled with more excitement.
Excitement: 2.5
Reason: Looking at this cast list, how can this move suck. I'm interested in this movie cause it handles PTSD and it will be a Military thriller.
March 27th, 2015:
Get Hard, Home, Serena, While We're Young, White God, Man from Reno, Nightlight, Riot Club, A little Chaos
Excitement: 3 Reason: Kevin Hart and Will Ferrel star in this buddy comedy. I love to laugh and that's what I did watching the preview, so hopefully that carries over to the film. I'm a fan of both of these stars so fingers crossed this doesn't disappoints.
Top Five Movies I'm Looking Forward to Seeing:
1. Chappie
2. Unfinished Business
3. Get Hard
4. Cinderella
5. The Gunman
Top Five Performances I'm Looking Forward to:
1. Dev Patel - Chappie
2. Richard Madden - Cinderella
3. Idris Elba - The Gunman
4. Kevin Hart - Get Hard
5. Tom Wilkinson - Unfinished Business
Summary of the Previous Month:
I was able to see a total of four movies this month.
Top Movies:
1. Kingsmen: The Secret Service
2. The Imitation Game
3. Fifty Shades of Grey
Top Performances:
1. Taron Egerton - Kingsmen: The Secret Service
2. Benedict Cumberbatch - The Imitation Game
3. Samuel L. Jackson - Kingsmen: The Secret Service
4. Keira Knightley - The Imitation Game
Well, thats what you can look forward to in March! Hope you have a great month at the movies!
Imagine this: In a not-too-distant
future, America has suffered through a mysterious war and has subsequently been
divided into twelve five factions.
These factions are based on socio-economic class intellectual
aptitude, and each year, young people who have come of age must battle each
other in a fight to the death choose a faction to join, which will
determine which other factions they will battle against in a fight to the
death.
One fearless, plucky young woman, Katness
Everdeen Beatrice Prior, is chosen among the ordinary masses. She must fight in order to protect her sister
brother and the rest of her family from some mysterious, dangerous government types. Along the way, she endures a series of brutal
physical trainings and discovers that she excels at bow and arrow knife
throwing. She has a love interest named Peeta
Four, who must hide his admiration for her in order to himself survive. All the while, the ominous President Snow
Kate Winslet looks on, realizing that Katniss Beatrice has a special
ability to resist conformity and lead a revolution against the evil people in
charge.
OK, so Divergent isn’t the world’s most original concept. Like The
Hunger Games, it adapts a popular Young Adult book series on to the big
screen and opts to tell a dark, dystopian story that’s clearly too adult for
Disney. But let’s give it credit where
credit is due – it does manage to be different than The Hunger Games in a few notable ways. The Hunger
Games holds an 84% approval rating from Rotten Tomatoes; Divergent
only has 40% approval. The
Hunger Games grossed an extraordinary $190 million in its opening week, while Divergent
only grossed a modest $68 million. And while The Hunger Games managed to entertain
both fans of the book as well those who were uninitiated, Divergent is impaired because of numerous loose story ends, which may
have been accounted for in the book series but remain underexamined over the course
of the nearly two-and-a-half hour film.
The story. On the surface, its most obvious similarities
are to The Hunger Games, but viewers
older than 15 years old will also recognize parallels to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Minority Report and Inception
(there’s even a scene where two characters hook up diodes to each other’s
brains and enter a dream world). As
Beatrice explains in the most jam-packed opening two minutes of exposition
since the first scene of Casablanca,
the survivors of the unnamed war now inhabit what remains of greater Chicago,
and are divided into five factions: Erudition, Dauntless, Amity, Candor and
Abnegation (one wonders whether the book series was published with the hopes of
boosting teen readers’ verbal SAT scores).
Beatrice and her family belong to
the Abnegation clan, which operate the government because of their selflessness
and care for humanity. As she reaches
adulthood, she must take a personality exam which will advise her which faction
to join. Once she makes her choice, it
is permanent, meaning that if she chooses to join a group other than
Abnegation, she will likely never see her family again.
But why? What is the point of this seemingly
unnecessary and burdensome dispersal of the small remaining human
population? Even after seeing this
movie, I’m still not sure I can answer this question (and like a couple of the
houses at the Hogwarts School, at least two of the factions seem entirely
irrelevant to the story). Of course, we
didn’t have all the answers at the end of The
Hunger Games either, but that was OK because the main thrust of the narrative
was simple to understand – two dozen kids killing each other in front of giddy
audiences. But the lack of clarity
sticks out in Divergent like a sore
thumb. Every time we begin to become
involved with the story, nagging unresolved issues frustratingly come into the
fray, and fail to get sufficiently answered.
The best part of the movie is in the
first hour, when Beatrice has decided to reject her family and its faction by
joining Dauntless. She does this because
the personality test she takes indicates that she has characteristics of
Dauntless, Abnegation and Erudite – in other words, her results indicate that
she is a “divergent,” which we’re told is dangerous because – well, again we’re
never really told why. Oh well, maybe
they’ll explain it more in the sequel. So
concealing her true test results, she joins Dauntless, which is supposed to be
the military clan, but the ways in which they crawl up buildings and leap off
trains make them seem more like delinquent hoodlums. The movie shows rites of initiation, and
Beatrice (who renames herself “Tris”) must learn to suppress her “divergent” psychological
tendencies and instead channel bravery and gleefully approaching dangerous
situations.
These training scenes work because,
like the training sequences in Rocky,
Hoosiers or any sports movie, we like
to see characters gradually transform themselves into more confident and
powerful people – especially when it involves sweat, knife-throwing, and an
upbeat soundtrack. But even here, basic logic
interferes with the skillfulness of these scenes. What are they training for? Is this future society preparing for war? The stakes are never fully established until
midway through the film, when we learn that Erudition is attempting to launch a
coup against Abnegation’s unilateral control of the government. But even this explanation is unsatisfactory
because Dauntless is never able to put up a fight after Erudition induces them
with a magical serum (gotta love those magical serums!) in which they blindly
follow the orders of the radical and deranged would-be revolutionaries (headed
by Kate Winslet, looking uncomfortably close to Hilary Clinton and invoking the
diabolic spirit of Jodie Foster in Elysium). Meanwhile, all people who are divergent, like
Tris, are sought after because . . . well, maybe someone who read the books can
explain this better than I can.
You’ve probably had enough of
reading about this ludicrous plot (I’m sick of writing about it), but let me
just point out the most ridiculous part of the story. Remember how I said Tris has to take a
personality exam? Well, the person who
administers the test (played by Nikita’s
Maggie Q) is the one who tells her to conceal her result of “divergent.” So the movie moves on and we don’t expect to
ever see her again, until suddenly, midway through the film, she shows up with the
Dauntless people as – get this – a tattoo artist! That’s right, after her daytime job as a
tester on behalf of the state authorities, she moonlights nights at an
underground tattoo parlor, where she is conveniently able to remind Tris that
she’s in mortal danger and must not tell anyone about her divergence. What are the odds! She must have taken the second job because those
Abnegations in charge must be underpaying their valuable employees at the
testing center. And that must be the
reason why the government is being overthrown, since the screenplay doesn’t
offer any other clear explanation.
So let’s remove the logic factor for
a second and consider whether this movie is worth seeing so long as you are
able to completely and totally shut off all deductive reasoning for 140
minutes. Admittedly, there are good
things about it. As Tris, Shailene
Woodley is likable and convincing (although it never feels quite right seeing
her run around with a shotgun in her arms) and she has good romantic rapport
with her fellow Dauntless member, Four (played by Theo James, effectively able
to combine Team Edward and Team Jacob into one analogous dreamboat). As stated above, the training sequences are
lively and the movie manages to move along at a brisk pace (save the climactic
battle scenes at the end, which drag on far too long). CGI Chicago looks great. Fans of the book will undoubtedly enjoy
it. And even though the story is
preposterous, there is something undeniably interesting about it (and it’s not like
The Hunger Games is exactly Tolstoy).
Defenders of Divergent will say it is an underdeveloped introduction to a rich
and complex world where your personality decides your fate; cynics will say
that its appeal is a direct result of its close resemblance to better films in
the already well-represented “dystopian future” genre. But unfortunately for the film, in the internal
battle between my heart and my brain, Amity is no match for Erudition.
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