It never fails to astonish me, looking back from the beginning of each year to the present day at the end, how there were so many movies that I reviewed and how not all of them were utterly awful pieces of dreck.
Of course, so many were. Hollywood is much like the mama bird chewing up a worm and then regurgitating it back for the babes to feed off of. One good meal deserves a repeat, or a sequel, they philosophize. That’s why the recent remake of Poltergeist felt more like a sad rehash: something leftover in the fridge that was good the first time but once reheated turns into a sloppy pile of tasteless mess.
It is a funny world that values that over creative originality. I would prefer to have to sit through a million movies like Self/Less, one of the year’s most uninteresting yet original movies, than to endure five more minutes of any movie that remakes some of my favourite movies from childhood. I swear that if anyone ever dares touch Jaws then I’m going to write Steven Spielberg a sternly worded letter.
Still, I always start to think of recapping each year in movies by getting the remakes, reboots, sequels, reimaginings and all the permutations in between out of the way first.
And that’s why we start with Poltergeist, perhaps the most egregious insult to one of horrordom’s most enduring and beloved flicks. What started with a story (a story!) about a family dealing with a house built on a graveyard is now a porridge where a family cares more about its technology than its foundations. When the girl gets ghost-napped in Poltergeist 2015, her brother helps out by sending in a quadcopter with a Hero Pro attached to it to scope out the afterlife. This entry was such a waste of Sam Rockwell’s time, and the audience’s.
Even worse, however, was Terminator Genisys, the continuing adventures of a robot without a timezone. Arnold Schwarzenegger returned to acting – was that acting? – as the Terminator, or one of them anyway. What started out as a fairly astute premonition of the rise of technology to incite the end of the world has now turned into a hammy and banal mind buster that one must really avoid thinking about. Trying to offer a sentient review of this sequel was an exercise in pure nostalgia: the pain of the new. What’s older was so much better, am I right all you 40somethings?
I would dare to say that Spectre was the king of this list, although both James Bond and The Terminator had a sense of campy romanticism to them. The latest installment of the gentleman spy franchise, however, only had an interesting 10-minute scene to start before trailing off into an intercontinental escapade that would somehow try to inject some much-needed life into the backstory.
From his very inception, Bond has been an inert figure: the ultimately competent super spy whose presence could somehow allay the public’s fears about the Cold War and a growing threat of nuclear annihilation. We were all safe even in his capable hands even from the most nefarious of supervillains. Now he needs to be a poor, downtrodden kid who has a vendetta against him by a snarky bum with billions of bucks and nothing better to do. He doesn’t even get the same level of toys that Q used to provide, leaving him to pilfer them out of a makeshift MI6 HQ. That, and he’s a sexual predator who would be slapped across the face and then slapped with a prison sentence if he dared to exist in real life. Sign me out of this, M?
As series movies go, there were still some highlights. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Mad Max: Fury Road both kept punctuation enthusiasts on their toes and film lovers on the edges of their seats, reveling in the imagery. Tom Cruise still cuts mustard as Ethan Hunt, the American counterpart to the aforementioned British agent. He’s over the top as a person and over the top as his character, a guy who hangs onto the side of cargo jets taking off with his fingers and then dives hundreds of feet into a whirlpool tank to breathlessly attempt… something. I forget what he was trying to do but it sure was important at the time.
But the real winner was Tom Hardy’s Mad Max picking up the gauntlet dropped in the dust by Mel Gibson now 30 years ago. It was amazing that he managed a spot-on performance as Max Rockatansky but even more amazing was how he still played second fiddle to Charlize Theron’s character Furiosa who is on a mission to save the lives of five women who are slaves in a forced group marriage to a maniacal leader in a desert wasteland. The story was impressive. The visuals were fantastic. It’s playing on the big screen at the Metro Cinema on Jan. 1. Guess who’s going to be there?
I also would go again to re-watch the last Hunger Games movie, Mockingjay – Part 2. I’m still glad it’s over and that it went out on a high note. Now perhaps I’ll slowly rework my way through the entire set of four just to make sure I’ve memorized everyone’s names properly.
And even though Kingsman: The Secret Service isn’t part of a series, I strongly urge the powers that be to make it happen. There is a sequel on the schedule for 2017 and it better not go off the rails. This fun flick was the perfect antidote to anything even remotely related to James Bond, Jason Bourne or even Jack Bauer. It was smart, over the top and had great action. It left me wanting more, a sure sign of a winner.
I fell in love with a few lower budget movies including some Canadian ones through screenings at Metro Cinema and as part of the Global Visions and Edmonton International Film Festivals as well. Jewel Staite had a very fine double bill at the EIFF with 40 Below and Falling and How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town. It wasn’t deeply challenging fare but one can still appreciate the simple pleasures of a romantic comedy, oui?
Hyena Road was more serious and took a fair bit of contemplation afterward to really digest its storyline and message. I probably should have taken in actor-writer-director Paul Gross’ previous work Passchendaele to fully prepare for his consideration of war in movies. I’d only ever seen his adaptation of Men With Brooms and it was awesome in its own way, but Hyena is a world apart from that comedy.
Other excellent productions included Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room, the modest The Rocket List, and the ’70s Canuxploitation send-up Bad City. From around the world, I also enjoyed Tim Burton’s Big Eyes, the Kafkaesque Russian epic Leviathan, British biopic Mr. Turner, Ricki and the Flash, and In the Heart of the Sea.
That being said, I recommended – and still recommend – that people avoid Self/Less, Crimson Peak, Poltergeist and Spectre. Life is precious so why waste it on such drivel?
