Review: "Kong: Skull Island"

by Chris Feil

Kong is back for another franchise chasing smash-em-up with a slight reimagining in Kong: Skull Island. This time director Jordan Vogt-Roberts is aiming almost exclusively for amusement park thrills after Peter Jackson’s high gloss, Very Serious take a decade ago. While the film does deliver the fun with its own visual zeal and resistance to some of the staples of Kong’s past, Skull Island is best met with limited expectations...

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Beauty vs Beast: Witchy Women

Jason from MNPP here, tackling one of my favoirte movies of all-time for this week's edition of "Beauty vs Beast" -- unless it's Halloween-time I mostly try to lean away from horror films for this series but I gotta make an exception this week, for Wednesday marks the 40th anniversary of Dario Argento's fairy-tale giallo Suspiria getting released in Italy. I love that the movie came out just in time for Valentine's Day - with its lurid reds (not to mention a character being stabbed directly in the heart) it feels tremulously appropriate for the season.

It's also a timely moment to celebrate the movie because as you might've heard A Bigger Splash and I Am Love director Luca Guadagnino is currently right this minute in the process of remaking the film, with a starry cast including Tilda Swinton and Dakota Johnson and Chloe Grace Moretz. Oh and Jessica Harper, the star of the original film, will appear as well! If only Joan Bennett & Alida Valli, the wickedly cruel mistresses of the dance academy, were still around for cameos...

PREVIOUSLY One week ago we were still holding out hope for the hopeless, aka a ton of surprise Oscar nominations for Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster. But we're happy it got that one nomination at least, and that we got to give love to its two key supporting men - and of the two Ben Whishaw kicked John C. Reilly square in the chin, taking 70% of your vote. And I gotta go with what Nathaniel had to say:

"Team John always. I admire the committment, injuring himself for love. or rather "love""

We Can't Wait #5: The Lobster

Team Experience is counting down our 15 most anticipated for 2015. Here's Teo Bugbee...

Who & What: The Lobster is the latest from Yorgos Lanthimos, writer-director of Dogtooth. It's his first film in English, and his cast is an exciting hodgepodge of both art house and multiplex stars, including Rachel Weisz, Colin Farrell, Léa Seydoux, John C. Reilly, Ben Whishaw, Olivia Colman, Ariane Labed, and Angeliki Papoulia.
As for what they'll be doing, it's all very hush hush, but what we know is that The Lobster is set in a dystopian future where all the single people are rounded up and brought to a hotel, where they are given 45 days to find their mate, or else they are turned into animals and released into the woods.

Why We're Excited About it: Lanthimos' Dogtooth is one of the best movies of the last decade. It's so weird and it's so fun and it's so specific about the kind of cinema that it wants to be—no matter what, we should be excited for what else he has up his sleeve. But that cast! That amazing tease of a plot description! The fact that all the characters have crazy names like Loner Leader and Limping Man and Biscuit Woman! And to be honest, it's more than a little encouraging that Sony has stepped onboard so soon as the film's international distributor, even if US rights are still up in the air. Rare for an art film to be afforded that kind of confidence before a premiere, and it's only making the anticipation greater.

What if it all Goes Wrong? Well, what if indeed? Does it matter if this movie is good or bad at all so long as it fuels the artistic energy of its collaborators? Lanthimos's last film Alps was not particularly well received, but it's always nice to know that there are artists in this industry who are still able to get their films made. It's not hard to imagine The Lobster being bad—if it is, it'll probably be because there are too many elements and too many ideas that aren't being corralled together. But even if it isn't the great film we're hoping for, it's almost impossible to imagine a version of this movie that wouldn't be worth seeing, and that's exciting in its own right.

When: No word on this yet, as the film has yet to premiere or pick up a US distributor. But considering it finished production last year, and considering Lanthimos's friendly relationship with the Cannes Film Festival, it seems likely it will appear there this May.

previously...

Oscar's One Hit Wonders or When Bad Nominations Happen to Good Actors

[Here's abstew to talk about a semi-annual Oscar tradition. Even if you disagree with the picks you surely recognize the curious problem. Will any of 2013's future nominees qualify for this list? -Editor]

When it comes to acting nominations, let's face it, not everyone can be Meryl Streep (17 nominations and counting). And with only 20 acting nominations to hand out each year, there's always going to be people left out. So many factors affect nominations: how well the actor is liked in the industry, whether they've been nominated (or won) before, how visible they've been promoting the movie, whether or not it's their "time". Sometimes the actual performance doesn't weigh in as heavily as it should.

Which is why the Academy gives something I like to call the "Oh, sorry we didn't nominate you for that great movie you were in a couple years ago, but let's call it even by nominating you for this instead" nomination. For many actors their body of work greatly out-weighs the single nomination. (For purposes of this list, I'm focusing only on actors who've received their nomination in the past 25 years or so but this has been happening since the beginning of (Oscar's) time.)

With so many greats yet to receive a nomination, perhaps we should be grateful that the following actors can precede their name with "Academy Award Nominee", but knowing how much better they are than this single nomination implies... 

Single Nomination: Best Actress, Catherine Deneuve Indochine (1992)

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Take Three: John C. Reilly

Craig here with this week's Take Three. Today: John C. Reilly

Take One: Terri (2011) 
The last couple of years have brought Reilly a trio of great dramedic roles. He showed real range in a slight but noteworthy career shift from his usual broader comedies to Cyrus, Carnage and Terri. The third film which is about the lonely life of an overweight high school outcast (Jacob Wysocki) was a particularly great role for Reilly. He was unassuming, believable and much more curiously sombre than in most of the roles we've seen him play to date. (He also played Tilda Swinton’s husband in We Need to Talk about Kevin last year, though his role was largely, though I'd argue unfairly, labelled as miscasting.) Playing Assistant Principal Fitzgerald here Reilly gets to balance that oddball characteristic of his – the one where he does that shouty-then-calm bafflement – with more introspective modes of expression. His first meeting with Terri, who is called to his office for wearing PJs to school, is a beautifully played example of Reilly’s ability to quickly establish a strong, unconventional personality, and then let an audience work out and appreciate what that character is all about. He’s pally one minute and almost comically aggressive the next – especially with the ‘problem’ students. He’s probably the only adult figure in these kids’ world who resembles an authority figure but who can serve it to them on a level they might understand. Watching Reilly in Terri you see just how perfectly he understands certain ‘types’ (here the hardened know-it-all with a hidden nice side) and how that understanding allows him to blend the comic and tragic aspects of his characters in a fresh manner.

Two more Reilly takes after the jump

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