Miles Teller

Eternity

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Eternity
  • IMDb: link

As with A Big Bold Beautiful Journey released earlier this year, Eternity puts a supernatural twist on your basic romcom. After a full life Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) wakes up in a sort of train station for the afterlife one week after her husband Larry (Miles Teller) died. Returned to their ideal ages of themselves, each gets a week to choose a different perfect world in which to spend eternity, although those who can’t decide can choose to stick around the station which is where Joan’s dilemma arrives as her first husband Luke (Callum Turner), who died in the Korean War, has been doing that for 67 years waiting for the love of his life in order for them to wade into eternity together.

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Top Gun: Maverick

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Top Gun: Maverick
  • IMDb: link

From the opening credits, Top Gun: Maverick lays heavy into the nostalgia by recreating the opening of Top Gun. Not much has changed since we last saw Maverick (Tom Cruise), the film is deliberately vague about what year the movie takes place and exactly how much time has passed. Pete Mitchell is still the maverick who flies by the seat of his pants even if that has left him at yet another crossroads of his decorated, but rocky, career.

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Bleed for This

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Bleed for This
  • IMDb: link

Bleed for This

It would be easy to look at Bleed for This and dismiss it as nothing more than another inspirational sports movie adapting a real-life athlete’s adversity into a feature film. However, that would be a mistake. Bleed for This is better than I expected as the tale of world-champion boxer Vinny Pazienza‘s (Miles Teller) rise, fall, and struggle to reclaim his dream turns out to be worth all the sports cliches you find in such films.

Offering 40 minutes of Vinny’s life before the accident which nearly paralyzed him, writer/director Ben Younger gives the audience plenty of time to learn about Vinny and the unwavering determination which will play a crucial role over the rest of the film.

While some supporting characters outside the boxing ring get the short shaft (Vinny’s girlfriends appear and disappear without ever letting us learn more than a name – if that), the movie hangs on Teller’s performance, and he pulls it off with aplomb. Younger also makes several interesting decisions throughout the film in how he shoots boxing sequences (getting us into the action without shaky cam) and even in one memorable moment dropping all sound completely except for the sound of each punch landing.

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Allegiant

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Allegiant
  • IMDb: link

rating_25

AllegiantAfter learning their entire civilization is nothing more than a science experiment, first-half of the final book in the Divergent series follows Tris (Shailene Woodley), Four (Theo James), Christina (Zoë Kravitz), and Peter (Miles Teller) over the wall, through the desolate wasteland and into an advanced city run by the Bureau of Genetic Welfare (which, you guessed it, turns out to be as equally corrupt as the society they fashioned in an attempt undo centuries of genetic manipulation).

Allegiant follows the same predicable patterns of the first two films, including a major supporting character’s death early on, before uniting the faction-less Chicago (which has broken into mob rule since learning the truth about the outside world) under a common purpose for next year’s series finale. While finally offering a reason for the bizarre society of single-characteristic factions, Allegiant still doesn’t make the premise any easier to swallow. Jeff Daniels (who I’m assuming must have a daughter who likes these books) is slumming it here as the leader of the genetic zealots behind the curtain.

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Still Craptastic

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Fantastic Four (2015)
  • IMDb: link

Fantastic FourThe first pre-screening I ever attended as a critic was 2005’s Fantastic Four. It was, in retrospect, a brutal rite of passage. One would hope that after a decade full of comic book films (the good, the bad, and everything in-between) 20th Century Fox would have learned their lesson and seen fit not to unleash such a travesty onto an unsuspecting movie-going audience yet again. One would be wrong.

Fantastic? After three movies somebody really needs to sue Fox for false advertising. The series made substantial improvements with 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer but still could only squeeze mediocrity out of one the best stories Marvel Comics has ever published.

Choosing to wipe the slate clean by adapting the Ultimate Marvel versions of the characters (an alternate timeline of the Marvel Universe I had little interest in going into this screening and even less on exiting), screenwriters Simon Kinberg, Jeremy Slater, and Josh Trank weave a tale of boy geniuses, alternate dimensions, and maniacal villains who are evil solely because the plot is dependent on them to be.

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