Biopic

Saving Mr. Banks

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Saving Mr. Banks
  • IMDB: link

Saving Mr. BanksWritten by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith, and based off pieces of the life of P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson), Saving Mr. Banks is half of a really good film. The story is broken into flashbacks of Travers’ childhood and decades later when Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) was attempting to buy the rights from the author’s children’s books to make Mary Poppins.

Although there is much to enjoy in the later Disney years (despite the oversimplification of Travers’ stubbornness) the film gets bogged down in the weight of the constant flashbacks which may offer a peek at the real story that first created Mary Poppins on the page but ignores much of the life story of the woman who wrote her.

The scenes involving the young Travers’ () drunken but imaginative father (Colin Farrell), troubled mother (Ruth Wilson), and larger-than-life aunt (Rachel Griffiths) fall in the realm of Dinsey-ized melancholy, but the scenes in California between the equally stubborn Disney and Travers provide its magic.

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Dallas Buyers Club

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Dallas Buyers Club
  • IMDB: link

Dallas Buyers ClubWhen we first meet Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) the southern redneck might, in some circles, be described best as an ignorant sumbitch. Coasting through life with no cares deeper or more involved than rodeo, fucking, betting, drinking and drugs, Woodroof certainly isn’t ready to discover he has HIV which he and everyone around him still consider a gay disease.

Based on a true story, the tale could have gone as one might imagine. Given a prognosis of 30 days to live, and ostracized by his friends, you might expect a downward spiral into oblivion or a last-minute feel-good redemption tale. Thankfully for the audience, Dallas Buyers Club has far higher aspirations and Ray Woodroof led a far more interesting life after being diagnosed.

Although ignorant, Woodroof isn’t dumb. Possessed with a keen mind and driven by both greed and his own continued survival, the film follows the unusual path his life takes after researching not only the disease but also various medical treatments all over the world for the treatment of HIV and AIDS.

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Isn’t Apple the Most Awesome Thing Ever?!

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Jobs
  • IMDB: link

JobsDirector Joshua Michael Stern‘s (Swing Vote) biopic of Apple founder Steve Jobs isn’t without it’s moments, even if the the screenplay by Matt Whitely brings nothing new to the party or fails to reveal anything previously unknown about Jobs’ life or the the rise of Apple Computers from a garage to a multi-billion dollar brand. Where it begins to get tedious, however, is in its never-ending praise of Jobs’ apparently limitless genius and all things Apple.

The story is relatively simple as Jobs (played surprisingly well by Ashton Kutcher) is the very much the cliched pretentious genius who doesn’t play well with others. From his humble beginnings, we watch as Jobs uses the expertise of Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad), a far more interesting and sympathetic figure than Jobs in almost every respect who doesn’t earn nearly enough screentime, along with the help of Bill Fernandez (Victor Rasuk), Rod Holt (Ron Eldard), and financier Mike Markkula (Dermot Mulroney) to launch the beginnings of what would grow to become a vast computer empire.

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Ed Wood

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Ed Wood
  • IMDB: link

“This story’s gonna grab people. It’s about this guy, he’s crazy about this girl, but he likes to wear dresses. Should he tell her? Should he not tell her? He’s torn, Georgie. This is drama.”

ed-wood-blu-rayDirector Tim Burton‘s love letter to arguably the worst director Hollywood ever saw has made its way to Blu-ray. Johnny Depp stars as Ed Wood in this comedic biopic surrounding the earnest, but undeniably bad, filmmaker’s relationship with Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau), his crossdressing fetish, and the filming of Wood’s most famous films including Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster, and Plan 9 From Outer Space.

The Blu-ray includes the featurettes from the 2004 Special Edition including the trailer, deleted scenes, and featurettes on the look of the film and recreating the look of Ed Wood’s movies, composer Howard Shore‘s use of the Thermin in the film’s score, a basic behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film, Landau’s performance of Bela Legosi, and audio commentary with Burton, Landau, co-writers Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, director of photography Stefan Czapsky, and costume designer Colleen Atwood.

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The Iron Lady

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Iron Lady
  • IMDb: link

the-iron-lady-poster

The Iron Lady is as perplexing as it is forgettable. Coming off like a sanitized made-for-TV film that was given a bigger budget once it landed arguably the greatest living actress, the film is centered around some of the least important moments of one of the most important British politicians of the 20th Century. Like I said, perplexing.

In her waning days, after losing her husband, Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep) looks back on her career as she rose to power as Britain’s first female Prime Minister during one of the country’s most tumultuous periods. Despite detractors, and the fact that many of her monetary policies helped lead to high unemployment and social unrest (some of which is still felt today), the film certainly takes a pro-Thatcher stance.

The strangest choice the film makes is to center so much of the story around Thatcher’s days after her years in office. Yes we get flashbacks of her days in office, but except for a segment of the the film that deals with the Falklands War, they are short, fragmented, and don’t fit together all that well.

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