Daily Awesome #83

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Daily Awesome #75

Skook (2012)

Skook
Director: Connor Hurley
Starring: Ashley Pishock, Patrick Arnold, Jon Beland
My Rating: Liked It

Skook is a low budget coming of age story about a girl getting over some nasty things that happened to her in the past. Skook really has its on personality. The friends in the movie have inside jokes and secret handshakes. This really brings the viewer close to the characters, which makes the scene towards the end of the movie hit harder.

The movie follows a college girl who is back in her hometown, Skook, for break. She runs into a guy that she had some history with in high school and starts hanging out with him. Throughout this story, Skook shows flashbacks to a high school party they were at when they were 18. Both of these stories unfold side-by-side. It's a well told story because it never reveals what exactly happened to the main character in high school, but you know that something did happen. And then, you get to see it unfold at the end of the story, and man, it's rough to watch, but it could've been way worse.

Skook is bound to end up on Netflix Instant, so check it out.

Daily Awesome #74

Interstellar (2014)

Interstellar
Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain
My Rating: Loved It!!!
Budget: $165 Million

Interstellar is quite possibly the sci-fi movie of the 21st Century so far. I can think of a lot of other extremely great ones, but none of those are nearly as ambitious as Interstellar. And none of those nearly brought me to tears, either. There is one super gripping and emotional moment about half way through the film, and I can imagine this scene has brought many people to tears. It's tearing at my heartstrings just thinking about it.

Visually, Interstellar is constantly impressive. It's especially beautiful and creative in space, most notably near the blackholes. Sort of like Gravity from last year, if there's one movie to see in IMAX this year, Interstellar is the movie.

I was completely tuned in to the story in Interstellar for the whole movie and I thought I was understanding it at the time, but upon recollection it's hard for me to piece the puzzle together. There were so many parts to it that I just need to see it again. I think I understand the majority of it, but the whole relativity thing has been throwing my mind for a loop when I think about it.

Interstellar cannot be missed. No sci-fi movie has been this beautiful, emotional, or ambitious in decades. Nolan's 2001? Yes, yes it is.

Daily Awesome #73

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Daily Awesome #70

Wetlands (2014)

Wetlands (Feuchtgebiete)
Director: David Wnendt
Starring: Carla Juri, Christoph Letkowski
My Rating: Liked It

If you are squeamish at any kind of body fluid or if you are shy about the grosser parts of the human anatomy, Wetlands is not the movie for you. The leading lady, Carla Juri, really shines and embraces her character's strange, goofy, and nasty sensibilities. The story follows an 18 year old girl, who definitely has a couple of screws loose, as she goes to the hospital for an anal fissure. Throughout her visit the movie cuts to scenes of her adventures, her childhood, and her divorced parents.

Wetlands is a very fun and entertaining movie. The gross-out shock value segments (all 100 of them) are presented in such a playful manner that they tend to be more funny than gross, with a few exceptions, of course.

Wetlands is vibrant, upbeat, weird, gross, perverse, funny, and a bunch of fun to watch.

Foxcatcher (2014)

Foxcatcher
Director: Bennett Miller
Starring: Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo
My Rating: Didn't like it

Foxcatcher is a very hard movie for me to "review." It would seem like this film has everything it needs to be a perfect, hard hitting, oscar winning drama, but I don't think all those parts jibed quite as well as Bennett Miller hoped. Yes, the performances are good all around and technically it's a well put together movie, but here's the thing: Foxcatcher bored me.

I couldn't find a lot intriguing about the story. Quite frankly, I don't think this is a story that should've even seen the big screen. It's a strange story, for sure, but there's not a lot to it. What exactly am I supposed to take from this film? Money can make anything possible? Don't fly across the country and wrestle for some nut job? Yeah, definitely that last one.

To give credit where credit is due, Carell's transformative performance should have oscar nomination written all over it. On top of that, Foxcatcher is probably the best showcase for Channing Tatum's acting skills, and Mark Ruffalo is great, as always. Even though Carell's performance was amazing stuff, it was impossible for me to find that character interesting. If anything, I just felt very sorry for John du Pont.

Bennett Miller is a fantastic director and Foxcatcher has some great performances, but like John du Pont, it's a little too distant.

Daily Awesome #69

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2014)

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (L'etrange couleur des larmes de ton corps)
Director: Helene Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Starring: Klaus Tange, Ursula Bedena, Joe Koener
My Rating: Liked It

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears is an ambiguous work of surrealist horror, a la David Lynch on psychedelics. The film is stylistically captivating with incredibly creative and twisted visuals second by second for the whole duration. It really is a full on aggressive attack on the viewers' senses.

The "story" starts out with a businessman returning home to his apartment building to discover his wife is gone. He then begins to wander around the building asking his neighbors questions about his missing wife. A few of these interactions catapult the viewer into crazy, trippy, and disgusting flashbacks. Don't get me wrong though, this whole film is crazy and trippy, not just those flashbacks. A diary is found in the film, and the resulting flashback is seriously the best Nightmare on Elm Street freddy-like dream to be on film in a few decades. That segment would fit right at home in a Kreuger film.

The movie is so ambiguous to the point that I never really knew what exactly was going on, but at the same time I still felt like I was figuring things out about the story in waves throughout the movie. Whether I was right is anybody's guess. I'm already intrigued at the thought of watching it again and trying to piece the puzzle together; if there even is a puzzle there at all.

Some people may be turned off by how vague and hard to figure out the story is, but when it comes to filmmaking one thing is for certain: The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears has more creativity in any given solitary minute of its full run time than a lot of movies have in their whole durations.

Daily Awesome #68

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