Another period in which I haven’t posted Weekly Reviews for a stretch, this time due to my time spent at Sundance, this week I offer up eight (!!!) short blurbs on movies that I’ve watched in the recent past. Some good, some bad, some ugly, this Weekly Review segment features two of the Oscar-nominated documentaries (I’ve now seen all five) some lingering 2013 movies I finally got around to and the Oscar movie that couldn’t (The Butler).

A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD (2013)

One swift word can sum this all up: garbage. As if the name isn’t fair warning enough, A Good Day to Die Hard takes all the good grace for this lauded action series, tears it apart and erects a statue to stupidity in its place. Gone is the John McClane we’ve known and loved from the first four installments and in his place is a goon of a gunner. With cartoonish dialogue, a Russian villain eating a carrot, and no intelligence to speak of, this hard dying Die Hard allows McClane to be reduced to a bumbling old kook. He was once the life of the party, now he’s just a supporting character, a scaled down accidental hero. What a bore.  

D

CHOPPER (2000)

Eric Bana stars as the real life Australian prisoner Mark “Chopper” Read who achieved fame in prison after penning a wacky autobiography. Bana does a great job at embodying a character but director Andrew Dominick is not quite as deft behind the camera. There’s a few great scenes but all in all it feels like a lesser version of Bronson, Nicholas Winding Refn‘s similarly themed prison character study. But if you’re looking for a good performance from Bana, this an early role in which he really holds the screen. Worth a watch but doesn’t demand one.

C

JAWS (1975)

It feels like it’s been a lifetime since I watched Steven Speilberg‘s game changing blockbuster and revisiting it proved a fun foray into my childhood shark angst. Pretty much the only memory I had of the film was the iconic music and the behemoth great white monster so seeing how long it took for Mr. Jaws to really reveal himself was an unexpected exercise in tension. Richard Dreyfuss is on fire here and Roy Scheider is immensely watchable as the old timey symbol of bygone, stoic masculinity. It’s a film that distinctly belongs to the 70’s and yet could have been made today and been just as great. All in all, Jaws is a well oiled how-to playbook for mainstream blockbusters.

B+

RED 2 (2013)

Noticeably more fun than the first installment, Red 2 seems to rely more on comic book sensibility than the first one. The action is goofy and fun, mimicking the out-of-control physics that only a video game or comic could provide, and the characters are oft-kilter shades of insanity. Bruce Willis is much more of an action hero, or arguable John McClane, here than he is ever is in Live Free or Die Hard and it’s good to see him turn his rootin’-tootin’ antics towards something that we can at least get a kick out of. Still much in need of a narrative overhaul and fresh direction, Red 2 is still just enough fun to warrant a watch.

C+

THE BUTLER (2013)

I was backpacking Glacier National Park when The Butler screened here in Seattle and somehow over the course of the year, I never really found the time to catch it in its theatrical run. After all the dust has settled though and The Butler missed out on even one Oscar nomination, I’m a little surprised that this film ever had the traction it did. Forest Whitaker is solid but his work is never immensely challenging, nor is it near the ranks of the many top-tier performances we’ve seen this year. Oprah Winfrey is fine but honestly the script spoon feeds her “Oscar moment” scenes and she doesn’t really elevate them to a point where I would consider her performance worthy of note. Drunk, struggling with race and suffering from a dying child, her role is a cocktail of awards bait and little more. The racial relations present here are certainly overshadowed by the might of 12 Years a Slave but Cecil Gaines’ story is none the less important, it just may be a few years too late. With Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom being an absolute failure, The Butler can be happy taking second place in the 2013 black historical biopic race.

B-

DIRTY WARS (2013)

An absolutely gripping documentary that starts with the investigation of an isolated massacre of women and children in Afghanistan and builds into the scariest reality America is facing today, Dirty Wars unfolds a scenario in which unbridled warfare is our country’s inevitable future. Rather than place blame on the many “enemies of the US,” investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill shows how through outsourcing our military might to JSOC we have created a need fulfillment system in which our list of enemies will always be growing, no matter how many names we scratch off through drone strikes and illegal and immoral acts of war. Dirty Wars is a must see documentary that’s been nominated for Best Documentary this year and is currently streaming on Netflix.

A

THE SQUARE (2013)

Another important (and Oscar-nominated) documentary that so happens to have a Netflix exclusive run, The Square deals with the aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian revolutions that toppled Mubarak’s long standing regime. While that story of overthrowing a nation’s ruler, a million man march and secular revolution amidst torrents of religious zealots was the hot topic issue across the world for the span of a few weeks, when the flash burned out, people’s gaze faced elsewhere. Egyptians though still faced an uphill battle of implementing real change. Documenting the two and a half year period following the events that changed political efficacy in the Middle East, Jehane Noujaim‘s powerful documentary is about maintaining hope and fighting for what you believe, no matter what the cause and no matter how futile.

A-

DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)

I’ve seen portions of Dazed and Confused throughout my life but, somehow, I’d never watched it in its entirety. Richard Linklater, one of my favorite living directors, though focused on the lives of high schoolers in the 70’s, still has the same vision he does today for perceptive realism and dialogue driven earnestness. Regardless of the fact that a bevy of this where-are-they-now ensemble are high, drunk or too geeky to function, their observations about life, love and growing up are surprisingly acute for how red or glazed over their eyes are. More than just a dumb stoner movie, Dazed and Confused is smartly comedic and just dramatic enough to give it some emotional heft.

B

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