I liked Seven Psychopaths a lot more than I thought I was going to. It actually caught me by surprise in it’s creativity and execution. What I thought was going to be a straight forward “crossed the gangster” cat and mouse movie was much more than that.

Here’s the gist of it: Marty is a struggling screenwriter in LA whose friend, Billy, kidnaps dogs and returns them to their owner for the reward a few days later. One day Billy steals a dog that belongs to a lunatic gangster. Marty gets pulled into a world that he wanted no first hand experience in…but it turns out to be just the right inspiration for him.

The movie starts in a standard way. Billy is trying to come up with ideas for his movie script, ‘Seven Psychopaths’ and is having a really hard time going anywhere with it. He only has two characters and that’s about it. Now, here’s where it gets different. The movie you are watching, forms the script that Billy writes, which is the movie you just watched. The events you see happen turn into the inspiration that Billy uses for his script. You watch as Billy comes up with the ideas for his script as things unfold around him. He comes up with characters, gets advise and ideas from his friends and it all rolls in and over itself as you watch. It’s a really creative angle for a movie.

The topper is a great cast. Colin Farrell, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell and my absolute favorite, Christopher Walken. Hans is the best character Walken has done in quite sometime. Props to Martin McDonagh for coming up with a role that really shows off Walken’s great acting ability without making him a walking cartoon.

I think this movie was really overlooked when it came out, highly recommended. And watch In Bruges if you haven’t, which Martin McDonagh also wrote and directed. Side note: No animals get hurt in this movie. Just people.

Monsters Inc. is one of my favorite Pixar movies and 12 years later the studio released the prequel, Monsters University.

The story takes the stars Mike and Sulley back to their formative years. We see Mike first, a very young monster on a field trip to Monsteropolis. He witnesses the master scarers at work and is inspired to become one himself. He hits the books hard and gets into Monsters University years later. This is where Mike and Sulley first meet and they do not get along. They take very different angles at scaring and butt heads at every step because of it. Mike has the book smarts, but lacks that special something to be effectively scary. Sulley is the son of a master and rides on his family’s coat tales to the top. But one scary face a monster does not make! Once they are forced into a corner by the dean of the school, Mike and Sulley realize that they work together far better than apart.

So is the story of how Mike Wazowski and James P Sullivan became friends and broke scaring records as an unstoppable team. This is a great return to the Monsters world. New monsters are all over as well as monsters from the first (seeing what turned Randall is great). The voice acting is great and complimented perfectly with Pixar’s legendary animation. Mike’s story is a particularly rocky one as he faces adversity at every step. He’s told time and time again that he will never make it, but pushes ahead to prove everyone wrong. While he doesn’t reach his dream goals exactly as he saw it, his smarts and attitude get him farther than any of his doubters thought. Sulley climbs the same mountain, but from a different side. The great friendship we see in Monsters Inc is born believably and sincerely in Monsters University.

With the few average movies Pixar has put out in the past two years, Monsters University is a strong return to form. The Monsters world let’s the studio go wild with their creativity and it’s all on display here. A lot of fun to watch, check it out!

I’ll get right to it, The Bling Ring isn’t a good movie. It’s based on the true story of teenagers living in LA who break into celebrity homes and steal just about anything they can carry out. Dumb kids doing something dumb and they get caught only because of their greed and stupidity. How they did it was pretty smart (!) though. They’d read about who was leaving town for a few days online, Google their address and then look at Google Maps to find the easiest way to get into the property. Then, just look for an unlocked door or window. To be honest, it was probably a lot of fun to do. They got away with it for awhile and stole well over a million dollars of stuff.

And that’s it. A story better left as an article in a magazine, there’s not much worth watching here. You get your fame obsession, celebrity worship and materialism finger wagging. The acting is passable at best (Emma Watson’s worst work to date) and the direction showcases Sofia Coppala’s ability to point a camera at people talking. Skip it.

I remember seeing the trailer for Mud and quickly dismissing it. Nothing about it really jumped out to me, more like a predictable story being told again. After it came out, I heard very good things about it which led me to believe that the trailer simply didn’t do the movie justice. So on the list it went and I’m happy to report that all the praise for Mud is well deserved.

Two young friends, Ellis and Neckbone (awesome name) are stomping around their home turf in Arkansas. Neckbone spots a stranded boat on a nearby island just down the river (Ellis lives right on the water, Neckbone not too far from there) so the boys go check it out. They find it curiously stuck up in a tree and while it’s a mess, they think they can fix it over the summer for themselves. That’s where they meet Mud, a fugitive on the run. They become friends and the kids agree to help Mud fix the boat so he can escape with his girlfriend, Juniper, from the bounty hunters who are closing in.

Mud is really Ellis’ story. He’s 14 and just starting to become a man. He’s starting to leave childhood, he’s got a crush on a girl and his parents are at a low point in their relationship. With everything changing around him, Ellis struggles to make sense of it all. He’s a very honest and sincere kid and when the ugly parts of the world start showing themselves, he’s thrown for a life altering loop.

Meeting a stranger on a little island is weird for anyone. Ellis and Neckbone are cautious around Mud, but he wins them over as they get information out of him. Mud happens to be a great story teller. His little life lesson speeches, his tales of love and loss. Then the big one on why he’s in hiding. Mud killed Juniper’s abusive partner and now that man’s family have put a bounty on his head in addition to the law coming for him. This is enough for Ellis to side with Mud, he thinks Mud is justified in his actions. He did it to protect someone he loves which is an honorable trait, something Ellis sees slipping away from the people around him seemingly every day.

Since this movie rides on two kids, casting them is of the utmost importance. They nailed it with Tye Sheridan (Ellis) and Jacob Lofland (Neckbone). Great young actors who look and sound like they’ve been in the game all their lives. No bad acting, each emotion hit just right. It goes a long way to make Mud as good as it is. Matthew McConaughey holds it down as Mud, a strong role model for the kids (a father figure really), but one who is deeply flawed as well. Mud has made a lot of poor decisions in his life and this is one that he may not be able to get out of.

The Mississippi river makes a great backdrop for this story, the dialog is smooth and smart and the growth you see from the main cast from start to finish is a real treat. Highly recommended.

As I’ve written before, I’m a big fan of writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn. He makes weird, intense and visually stunning films. Refn teams up again with Ryan Gosling for Only God Forgives and after loving Drive to death I was really excited to see this. I don’t know what I just watched.

I have the absolute reverse view on this than I do Drive. Everything I liked about Drive was absent here. Weird as hell, unreliable characters. A story that has some good ideas but does little more than just spin its wheels with so little going on. While the cinematography is there, this probably would have made a better half hour short film.

Ryan Gosling plays Julian, a drug smuggler who operates in Bangkok. His awful brother gets into trouble and gets what’s coming to him. Julian’s awful mother pushes him to avenge his brother’s death which leads to nothing good. Julian is a weird, stoic guy, much like the Drive character. But all the weird traits for Driver worked in that world and had great payoffs. He was a bad ass with morals and a goal I could root for. I didn’t get any of that from Only God Forgives.

I’m left scratching my head, one of the biggest disappointments for me this year.

I wish I was a bigger fan of this series than I am. It has all the parts of something I’d really be into, but The Hunger Games just can’t seem to hit the bar for me. I’ve read the first book only and thought it was good, the movie being a good adaptation but failed to be really engaging.

Catching Fire gave me the exact same feeling that the first did. It has all the production of an expensive Hollywood movie but left me indifferent about everything happening on screen. First, it’s really predictable. As such, it felt like little more than a bridge episode to something far greater and more interesting in the next movie. We follow down the beaten path to social revolution with the populous being so suppressed that they are just itching to pop the second Katniss says the word. The format and pacing is almost exactly the same as the first movie so that makes it feel even more like a retread. Again we start out in District 12 and see that everything sucks. The seeds of revolution are taking root. Then, the set up for the annual Hunger Games that the evil government loves so much. Katniss and Petea get thrown into The Hunger Games again (cue ‘oh no! This is terrible and unfair!’). We hop on the train and zip back to Hunger Games HQ where we go through the same meet-the-rest-of-the-cast, training and interview segment as before (but wisely done faster), then the actual Game to get to the end where we get a ‘dramatic’ reveal to the credits.

While it’s not a bad movie and series, I don’t understand why it’s so unbelievably popular.

Let’s jump into the time machine and visit the 1980’s when things were much more neon and rad. Bones Brigade is the brilliant documentary about the skateboarding team that Stacy Peralta put together in the early 80’s that dominated the competition for nearly a decade straight. The story of a group of misfit kids being led across the world doing what they love, making their dreams come true and creating a industry.

Stacy Peralta is one of the great pioneers of skateboarding and when he hung up his sneakers from competition in the late ’70s, he still lived for the culture and wanted to help it grow. Having a good experience on a short lived team, he thought making one of his own would be the right path to take. He kept an eye out for the same fire that was in himself. The absolute love and desire to do nothing but skate. Tony Hawk, Steve Caballero, Tommy Guerrero, Lance Mountain, Rodney Mullen, Mike McGill. While many would be added over the years, these guys were the foundation of Bones Brigade.

This is such a good documentary with interviews of all the guys and archival footage of them changing the world as kids. They were in the middle of the rise and fall and the epic resurgence of skateboarding. They created countless new tricks and the vocabulary that is still used today. There’s a lot of inspirational stories (especially from Rodney Mullen) about what it was like growing up with such talent that for a long time was seen as a complete waste of time and effort. The stresses and joys of competition, business and keeping a level head through it all are all talked about.

I can’t really do this documentary justice with words. It’s one of the best I’ve seen and should be watched by any skateboard fan past and present. Even if you’re not a fan and have no idea who these guys are, it’s a great look at life.

Somehow I got onto a really dark movie path in the passed few weeks. We Need to Talk About Kevinis my latest stop on The Feel Good About Nothing tour.

We Need is the story of a mother who never makes a connection with her son. From the very beginning there is an emotional rift between Eva and her son Kevin. Kevin immediately picks up on it and grows to completely resent his mother. Up until Kevin turns 15, there is something very strange about Kevin. Eva is very cautious and tentative about it while her husband Franklin dismisses or outright ignores any signs of wrong doing. One day at high school, Kevin innacts a plan that cannot be ignored.

A great and rather odd cast anchors We Need. Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly play Kevin’s parents and Ezra Milller plays Kevin (the two kids playing Kevin at age 3 and 7 are shockingly good too). There’s a real chemistry and disturbed energy between Eva and Kevin that is brought to life by Tilda and Ezra. John C. is more known for his comedic roles, so seeing him in a movie like this was a real trip for me. He makes it work though, as he plays Franklin as a gentle and loving soul that is unknowingly in the center of a growing maelstrom. The story is told from Eva’s perspective, or more accurately her memory. We bounce around from the past to the present and back again gaining pieces of the puzzle with each stop. It’s a bit jarring in the beginning and it’s hard to tell what’s really going on, but the ebb and flow does click in and makes sense. There’s a lot to take in from scene to scene as the visual palate changes every time Eva recalls different moments.

The topic of We Need is a complex puzzle (and rather taboo). It’s nature vs nurture, the role and responsibilities of parenthood. There’s really no clear answer to the puzzle and the movie clearly shows that. Seeing things through Eva’s memories, it’s like we’re thinking about what happened with her over and over again. Is she responsible for all of Kevin’s actions? Is she the one to really blame? Where did it go wrong, could she have done anything differently? “Why?” is constantly asked and never answered. We Need is a stark look into the side of tragedies that is often over looked. We always look first to the perpetrator, but what about the collateral damage to the immediate family? A lot of lives get ruined in a wide radius.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a uncomfortable movie to watch, but it’s really thought provoking and that makes it worth experiencing.

Elijah Wood stars in Maniac, a remake of the original made in 1980 (which I have not seen). I’m a big fan of Elijah Wood and his work here made for one of the most effective horror movies recently released.

Frank is a very disturbed young man, molded by an abusive childhood where his mother subjugated him to things a child should never see. With mommy issues galore, Frank takes it out on women he stalks in the night, killing, then scalping them to keep as a trophy.

Using a rather unique first person perspective that is pulled off extraordinarily well, we are literally put into the head of a psychopath. We come out of his head only for brief moments which makes for a really tense and disturbing horror experience. While we don’t hear Frank’s thoughts, we do hear everything he says. He’s often fighting with himself, so it doesn’t take much inference to figure out what he’s thinking.

Elijah Wood is really terrific, giving Frank a real emotional core of a person who just never had a chance. He’s so mentally disturbed, just struggling to hang on to some sort of normal life. He manages to make a living by restoring mannequins and when he meets Anna, he thinks he might actually see a light at the end of the tunnel. He desperately wants to have a relationship but constantly snaps into a murderous state, haunted by flashbacks to his childhood and the physical torture of migraine headaches. There’s a war in Frank’s head and the audience is a witness to it all.

This is a tough movie to watch and the visual effects are very, very well done making the horror seem all that much more real. Really great editing, this must have been a tough film to pull off the page and put onto the screen in such an effective manner. I think this is a real standout for horror buffs.

Zombies over here, zombies over there, zombies everywhere! With the zombie craze still going strong, every medium of media is getting a piece of the action. World War Z started as a book that took an interesting angle of the zombie apocalypse: an anthology of stories from survivors of the outbreak. The horror retold from the ground from people who saw it first hand.

The film adaptation starring Brad Pitt is much more conventional in it’s story telling. Abandoning the format of the book, we follow a UN employee in NYC named Gerry Lane. From the start, the outbreak is a full blown epidemic. When it reaches the city limits, the sickness travels like a tidal wave over everyone (literally and figuratively. The zombies are the sprinting variety as seen in 28 Days Later). Making it out of the city with his family, Gerry travels the globe looking for patient zero which may be the only hope of finding a cure.

Where the Romero movies are horror movies wrapped over social commentary and The Walking Dead is a showcase of how people are often the real monsters, World War Z is more of a disaster movie on a grand scale. The action set pieces are huge with hoards of undead that resemble insect hives conquering a neighboring nest. Gunfire, grenades and heavy artillery explode in a desperate attempt to slow down the end of humanity.

Overall it’s a good movie. While I found it low on horror and devoid of any gore, it’s still a tense ride. The first half is on a grand scale as you see society being trampled into the ground where the last half scales things down to just a few people in a confined environment. It’s a smart move as there’s only so much CG city destruction you can show before full action fatigue sets in and the more focused ends brings things back to a more traditional zombie movie.

Having no gore in a zombie movie is really odd, but what is shown is an exciting action movie. There’s a lot of CG monsters that look good, but the make up work (again really shown off in the last act) is very good. These guys tend to click their teeth together which makes them unintentionally funny at times and things seem to go into Brad Pitt’s favor all the time, but I can’t find much that really bugged me. Smart move with the ending too, it’s not all nicely tied up in a bow.

Chucky is usually left out of the horror movie talk. It’s always Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers. You’d hear Pinhead and Leatherface long before Chucky too. Being a murderous doll does have it’s disadvantages (a solid kick will probably save you). Child’s Play hit theatres in 1988, at that point Friday the 13th was up to it’s 7th movie. So while he’s always been in the shadows of the bigger horror icons, Chucky’s fan base still appreciates him. The series continues to pop up over time and this year we get the 6th movie, Curse of Chucky.

The last 2 movies strayed from the mold of the first 3, adding doll family members and more comedy to the mix. The series went in the direction that the Nightmare on Elm Street veered into, leaving straight horror for more camp. Curse of Chucky pulls things back to the original, the trapped soul of a serial killer hiding in plain sight, bumping off people one by one to get to his goal. They really tried to make a straight forward horror movie while expanding the lore of the franchise. For the most part, it worked.

It’s a great low budget movie. Made for a few million dollars, all that money appears on screen. Most of the movie takes place in an old house, so the scope is very narrow and precise. Chucky is delivered to Sarah, who we find out is part of Chucky’s past. She opens the box and it’s just a funny looking doll, so she sets it aside for her granddaughter at the request of her daughter, Nica.

Chucky is wisely in hiding for the entire movie. He only reveals himself to people when it’s too late for them to defend themselves. It works to build tension and suspense really well and the pay off is usually great. There’s a body count of 6, which isn’t too much, but it fits the series and the deaths are well done. The puppet work is really outstanding, with little CG added (only when he’s seen walking down stairs). There’s a real life to him and the voice of Brad Dourif is perfect as usual. My only complaint is that he seems to change in size from scene to scene. When he knocks someone down and walks up to them with an ax, you can see his legs are maybe 4 inches long. He’d never be able to walk downstairs normally with legs that long. He’s huge when people pick him up, but not nearly as big when standing on his own.

The story is solid as it’s a mystery in the beginning that slowly unravels right into the end. I was really surprised at the end as it’s not something you see much. If you like the Child’s Play movies, check this out for sure. If you’re in the mood for a different kind of slasher movie, go for it and have a good time.

I wanted to see The Perks of Being a Wallflower simply because Emma Watson is in it. I’ve followed all of the main Harry Potter kids to their other movie projects and this is Emma’s first outside of that universe. So with her casting getting my attention, I looked to see what attracted her to signing on this movie.

Perks started life as a young adult novel published in 1999 by author Stephen Chbosky. He wrote the screenplay and directed the film so he saw his baby right through from book shelf to big screen.

Charlie (Logan Lerman) is a high school freshman in the early 90’s who doesn’t have any friends. The tragic death of his aunt when he was 7 and then the recent suicide of his best friend have made Charlie keep to himself. He finds comfort in books and writing, his new English teacher is the first one to make a real connection with him in some time. Then he meets Sam (Emma Watson) and Patrick (Ezra Miller), seniors (and step siblings) who befriend him and change his life.

Perks is a great coming of age story that works so well because of its awesome cast. Emma is brilliant as Sam, who Charlie falls in love with the first time he sees her (easy to understand and relate to). I’ve never seen Ezra before (and half convinced myself that he is Paul Dinello’s son) but I love his work too. They have an immediate chemistry together and with their close friends Brad, Candice and Mary Elizabeth. It makes the story and interactions of characters seamless and believable. In the ways that The Breakfast Club became landmark roles for its young cast, I think Perks will have similar effects on this cast from a new generation of kids.

Charlie is at a tough spot in his life and as the movie goes, you see more of why the way he is. Events out of his control and understanding have molded him, but the support of his family (big props Nina Dobrev who plays his sister Candace. She reminded me of my sister which was kind of a trip). Even though Charlie has a lot on his shoulders and emotional problems because of it, I always felt for him. He was never annoying or obnoxious and Logan’s acting in the last act of the movie is exceptionally good.

A couple plot points from the book were wisely edited out of movie, which streamlines Charlie’s journey and keeps Perks from being way too dramatic and overbearing. There’s already a significant weight being pulled around by Charlie and I think any more would have just made it a hard movie to watch. Great editing, sound track, directing and cinematography made this a great surprise for me. It’s got a lot of what I look for in a movie.