Movie Review: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

Nearly every instance of a Guardians of the Galaxy trailer shown for the past six months at multiplexes nationwide is immediately followed by the same whispers. "Who are those guys?" "Have you ever heard of these superheroes?" "Are they related to the Avengers?" Don't beat yourself up if you've never heard of the Guardians. Even the most diehard geek only has a passing familiarity with these characters. Marvel Studios, well aware of this, takes this as an opportunity to cut itself loose from comic book continuity, giving director James Gunn a considerable amount of creative license to come up with a bouncy, hilarious bauble, an almost $200 million near-throwaway that also happens to be one of the best cinematic adventures of the year.

Movie Reviews: Mr. Peabody and Sherman (2014) and The Lego Movie (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

With one unorthodox animated feature (discussed at the end of this post) capitalizing on parental nostalgia at the box office, it's expected that another more conventional one would try and do the same. And Mr. Peabody and Sherman is that... conventional. Admittedly, it is funny, with many of its jokes sailing over younger heads and right towards the hearts of their gen-x parents. But they aren't anywhere near as dryly hilarious as the one-liners which seemed to fly out a mile-a-minute in the "Peabody's Improbable History" segments of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (1959-1964).

Movie Review: Her (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

"Falling in love is a crazy thing to do. It's like a socially acceptable form of insanity." That's Amy (Amy Adams), a close friend of Theodore Twombley (Joaquin Phoenix) who is in the throes of what feels like a full-blown romance with Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) in Her. Much like the viewer, Amy is essentially giving her approval to the strange love affair Theodore conducts with a disembodied voice, a variation on the long distance relationship that many of us in this age of globalization have experienced or are familiar with. It comes an hour deep into Spike Jonze's film, at a point when we've made peace with its science fiction-y premise, that Samantha is really an artificially intelligent operating system marketed as OS1. Amy speaks for us, the disconnected millions who have more Facebook friends than actual ones, keep up with their life events without ever having to reach out to them in person, go through entire cycles of relationships on dating sites like Match.com or eHarmony without ever having to leave our seat in front of a screen.

Holiday Viewing: Delivery Man (2013) and Frozen (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

Just checking in with some words on a couple of films I saw this past holiday week, sort of a bad news, good news deal. Let's start with the bad.

Zero Dark Thirty

by Tony Dayoub

Zero Dark Thirty begins with heart-wrenching audio recordings of 911 calls placed from inside the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. From there, the long awaited film about the manhunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden follows a rigid three-act structure that is one part Michael Mann-style procedural—in which we get to know a protagonist simply through process—and one part meta-analysis of how America once again lost its innocence, possibly for good this time. That director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal frame this film through a unique perspective rarely found in war films—that of a female—is the key innovation. Instead of attempting to duplicate the action beats of their last Academy Award-winning film, The Hurt Locker (2008), by predictably zeroing in on the SEAL operation to capture or kill Bin Laden, aka UBL, Bigelow and Boal open up the canvas to spin a sprawling tale involving everyone from CIA field operatives to their more political Washington-based intelligence counterparts, from suspicious informants to the most trustworthy of military officers.