Rated Greg’s Christopher Nolan Rankings

1. The Prestige (A+)
2. Interstellar (A+)
3. Inception (A+)
4. The Dark Knight (A+)
5. Batman Begins (A+)
6. Dunkirk (A-)
7. The Dark Knight Rises (A-)
8. Memento (A-)
9. Insomnia (B+)

Dunkirk was the most anticipated film of 2017 in the Rated Greg poll of one at the beginning of the year. What can I say, like a lot of men between the ages of 18-35, I worship at the church of Christopher Nolan. He’s LeBron James to Martin Scorsese’s Michael Jordan, and while LeBron will likely never surpass his Airness in titles I am fairly certain that Nolan’s catalog will eclipse Marty’s within the next ten years, probably five. It’s one thing to never make a bad movie, it’s a whole other thing to ONLY make great movies. Shit, I think each of his top five are my favorite films from that respective year (The Prestige, currently streaming on Netflix, is my favorite movie of the past 20 years).  I realize being a Nolan stan is an extremely basic sentiment, but I just can’t help it. His works of art are so remarkable on such consistent basis that it sets a ridiculous standard.

Which brings us to Dunkirk. For most directors Dunkirk would be their masterpiece but in this case it’s just an average at bat for Nolan. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very good, but I was expecting it to be the best movie of the year…… which it’s not. The one thing you need to know going in is that it’s really more of a ride than a movie. There’s not a ton of dialogue or plot pivots. Just three interweaving, action packed stories capturing the British army’s miraculous evacuation from the Battle of Dunkirk in 1940, all in a brisk 100 minutes. Many blockbusters are shown in IMAX theaters but very few are actually made for IMAX, with IMAX cameras, like Dunkirk is. The investment clearly paid off because it looks flat out AMAZING. The fighter pilot scenes specifically, led by Tom Hardy’s tender eyes, might be the most beautiful action sequences I’ve ever seen on the big screen (short of Fury Road, it always comes back to Fury Road). I know it can be a pricey hassle, especially for those with kids, but if this movie interests you at all it needs to be seen in the theater. Unlike Fury Road (again, it always comes back to Fury Road), I’m not positive this will translate as well to the TV screen. It might, Nolan’s films do tend to age like fine wine, but for some reason I have a feeling the small screen experience might be a little underwhelming. It would be like listening to Pink Floyd with shitty headphones. We’ll see I guess. Grade: A+

Misery: It’s The Remix…BABY!

Grade: C

P.S. – Some are really into this movie, specifically the French (it won Sofia Coppola the Best Director award at Cannes), but I found it to be dull and anticlimactic.

Rated Greg’s Top 5 Trilogies*

1. Indiana Jones (1981 – 1989)
2. The Dark Knight (2005 – 2012)
3. Star Wars (1977 – 1983)
4. Toy Story (1995 – 2010)  Planet of the Apes (2011 – 2017)
5. Bourne (2002-2007)  Toy Story (1995 – 2010)

*All installments must be good in order to qualify, eliminating the likes of Back to the Future, The Godfather, and Terminator.

I say this with ZERO percent sarcasm.  War for the Planet of the Apes deserves an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.  I understand why movies like Baby Driver and Get Out would never be considered for the classy affair, but if Academy voters are really doing their due diligence, the final chapter in this trilogy will get a seat at the adult table.  Do people understand how good these movies are?  From talking with friends it really seems like this decade’s Planet of the Apes series is the most misunderstood franchise out there.  Critics are on board (per Rotten Tomatoes, Rise of the Planet of the Apes got an 81%, the sequel Dawn 90%, and the just released War 95%), but I fear the general public might look at an advertisement for the Ape movies with the same disdain that a preview for Transformers evokes.  It shouldn’t.

Although it is meant to be seen on the biggest screen possible, War just isn’t your typical July popcorn blockbuster.  The tone is much more fitting of a super serious December release like Zero Dark Thirty or The Revenant (it has NO BUSINESS being PG-13).  If you’re worried about not being able to take the story seriously, don’t be.  The CGI motion capture technology is so freakin realistic and the voice work is absolutely impeccable.  I promise within the first ten minutes you’ll be watching the ape leader Caesar bark orders as if it were Tom Hardy himself.  It’s such an emotive and dark two hours and change!  I love it. Shoutout to Steve Zahn’s “Bad Ape” (my favorite character of the year).  Shoutout to the “Michael Jordan of being a son of a bitch”, Woody Harrelson.  And finally shoutout to Andy Serkis as Caesar. He deserves as much acclaim as any actor come awards season.  Grade: A-

Rated Greg’s Top 5 Fictional Pets

1. Baxter (Anchorman)
2. Okja (Okja)
3. Marcel (Friends)
4. Gizmo (Gremlins)
5. Buck (Married with Children)

Honorable Mentions: Babe, Brian, Hooch, Jinxy Cat, Santa’s Little Helper

Beasts of the Southern Wild meets an R-Rated E.T.  No film has moved me in 2017 as much as this beautiful story about a little girl and her “superpig.”  That might sound ridiculous, but some movies you just have to take a leap of faith and try not to judge a book by it’s cover.  When I first pulled up Okja on Netflix I was greeted with the image above and had I not know anything else about it I probably wouldn’t have clicked play.  This is for kids, right?*

Fortunately I was already aware that this film was on the horizon and knew better.  I knew this because of the players involved and their propensity to always pick really interesting projects.  Jake Gyllenhaal (still leading the league in WAR) in possibly his weirdest character yet.  Tilda Swinton playing a modern day Cruella de Vil.  Paul Dano getting to play an alpha for once.  All directed by South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho, who the Ringer recently speculated could be the new Spielberg (That’s So Ringer).  And not even included in that list is the main character and best part of the film, Mija, played by 13-year-old Seo-Hyun Ahn.  She’s truly a force of nature.

Anyways, Okja is good.  It’s really, REALLY good.  It’s a perfect blend of quirkiness, action, legitimate emotion, and genuine LOL’s all in sync within exceptional framing.  It’s also a love story in its purest form with some very strong sentiments towards corporate greed and animal rights.  Okja replaces Beasts of No Nation as the best Netflix Original Movie to date.  Grade: A-

*It’s not.  I repeat, this film is NOT for children.  If you did happen to watch this with a toddler, I have a feeling you would be forced to turn it off halfway through, much like my grandmother dragged my two siblings and me out of the theater in the middle of Who Framed Roger Rabbit way back when.

Any frequent RG reader knows that I’m kinda sick of writing about superhero movies and what they mean for the business.  Thus for Spiderman: Homecoming, I’m going to take a page from prolific NBA writer Zach Lowe and just write 10 things I liked or didn’t like about the movie and leave it at that.

1 – I really liked the high school aspects of this movie.  The John Hughes coming of age catalog was apparently an inspiration to director Jon Watts and he did a great job recreating that environment.  If you stripped away the superhero threads this would have been a comparable PG version of last year’s terrific Edge of Seventeen.

2 – I briefly dozed off during not one but two different action sequences (Wait. What’s happening at the Washington Monument?).  The set pieces aren’t necessarily poorly executed, I just find most superhero action boring at this point.

3 – Michael Keaton plays a fantastic villain, definitely the best of the Marvel movies.  He’s also the most grounded which isn’t a coincidence.  Keaton chews up every actor in his periphery during his screen time.

4 – I didn’t like that Ironman and his chauffeur kept popping up.  I can’t fault Robert Downey Jr and Jon Favreau to “keep getting dem checks,” but their shtick after a decade is no longer getting played out, it is played out.

5 – I liked the murderer’s row of very funny actors enlisted in the margins of the movie.  Donald Glover (Atlanta). Bokeem Woodbine (Fargo). Tony Revolori (Dope). Hannibal Buress (Broad City). Martin Starr (Silicon Valley). Marisa Tomei (my dreams). And the funniest of them all, Zendaya (I don’t know what else she’s from but apparently she’s famous enough to have no last name).

6 – I didn’t like that Donald Glover only has two scenes.  He seems far too famous and talented to get so little screentime, but he probably signed onto this prior to Atlanta’s debut so that may have something to do with it.  Also, it’s not like this is a standalone film so I have a feeling this will correct itself and his name will be third on the poster for the inevitable sequel.

7 – Tom Holland seems to be channeling Marty McFly as Peter Parker and it translates perfectly to the tone of the movie.  He’s significantly more likable than the previous iterations of Spidey (Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield).

8 – The climactic battle between Spiderman and Vulture reminded me of a certain scene in Con Air.  I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s most certainly something.

9 – There’s a recurring bit about high school morning announcements that’s among the funniest things I’ve seen all year.

10 – I don’t like having to sit through the credits at Marvel movies.

Grade: B+ or a B- …… idk it’s a very solid B

Rated Greg’s Top 5 Opening Scenes

1. The Prologue in Raising Arizona
2. Indy’s escape in Raiders of the Lost Ark
3. The phone call in Scream
4. The interrogation in Inglorious Basterds
5. The car chase in Baby Driver

Honorable Mentions: The Social Network, Pulp Fiction, Drive, The Lion King, The Dark Knight, Bad Boys

Ocean’s 11 meets Drive.  A week ago I listed Baby Driver as the best movie of 2017’s first half on the Rated Greg rankings.  Since then I’ve had some pushback from a couple friends, claiming that it was good but not great.  Entertaining but not exceptional.  “A little overrated.”  You know what, JUSTIN?  Star Wars is a little overrated, lacrosse is a little overrated, and YOU’RE a little overrated.  Baby Driver is a goddamn delight and you should be ashamed of yourself.  This is why we can’t have nice things.

Baby Driver puts Fast and Furious to bed and goes hunting for fucking dinner.  It’s is the most exciting movie since 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.  Name me a recent movie with more pure entertainment, start to finish, than Edgar Wright’s just released crime caper.  The very opening scene already makes my Top 5 Car Chases list appear dated and the pulse never really lets up from there.  What I appreciate most is the tremendously impressive, real life, stunt work contained within each set piece.  Bravo.  It’s commendable that Wright refused to let computers do the heavy lifting and chose to create magic the old fashioned way.  Shoot, there’s better choreography in an early, relatively meaningless scene involving a casual stroll for coffee than most of the action in 2017.

That’s not all I appreciate though.  I appreciate Jamie Foxx throwing 100mph heaters in every scene he’s in (how has he not been in a good movie since Django?).  I appreciate Jon Hamm embracing a new haircut and going H.A.M.  I appreciate my first exposure to former Telenovela star (and Bachelorette JoJo lookalike) Eiza Gonzalez.  I appreciate Ansel Elgort’s undeniable charm as the titular character.  I appreciate what great diner scenes can do for a movie.  And finally, I appreciate a nonstop kickass soundtrack.  Grade: A-

Here are the updated Rated Greg movie rankings for 2017.  I was all ready to stamp the Q2 slate as underwhelming, but Edgar Wright went off and dunked from the free throw line at the buzzer with Baby Driver, single-handedly redeeming the quarter.

I haven’t had the chance to write about Baby Driver yet, but I’ll quickly state that it’s the most entertaining movie, start to finish, since Mad Max: Fury Road.  Trust me, even if you’re not typically into heist movies go see it.  On top of multiple off the chain chase sequences, it uses music like I’ve never seen before in a film.  Also, Jon Hamm finally goes H.A.M.  Seriously, this whole movie made me so happy, I’ve literally been smirking since Tuesday night.

My most anticipated for Q3 are:

1. Dunkirk
2. The Big Sick
3. War for the Planet of the Apes
4. Detroit
5. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
6. Battle of the Sexes
7. American Made
8. It
9. The Dark Tower
10. Good Time

 

Get lost The Mummy Tom Cruise!

Grade: F

Rated Greg’s Top 5 Superhero Movies This Century

1. The Dark Knight
2. Batman Begins
3. Kick-Ass
4. Logan
5. The Dark Knight Rises

65 movies.  SIXTY-FIVE.  That’s how many mainstream superhero movies I counted that have come out since 2002’s Spiderman.  For my entire adult life, the practice of gearing a franchise around a brave individual with super abilities has been the most popular avenue towards blockbuster success for the big studios.  I sure wish they would spread the wealth to the more mature genres, but given the revenues flowing in I don’t see a major shift coming anytime soon.  The main reason I started this blog last year was to talk about movies that I was passionate about, but I’m pretty much fresh out of takes for conventional comic book cinema at this point.  Most are fine, two-hour distractions, but what else is there to say?

A Ringer favorite of mine, Chris Ryan, mentioned that he was “aging out of this shit” on The Watch podcast recently and I have to agree.  Superhero stories just don’t excite me anymore.  The Dark Knight trilogy holds up so well because, other than Katie Holmes’s mysterious ability to shapeshift into Maggie Gyllenhaal, it was fairly grounded.  CGI was kept to a minimum and the plot developments were “mostly” based in realism.  In comparison, the current crop of Marvel and DC films incorporate our heroes literally exchanging roundhouse punches with gods and aliens.  There’s time travel and alternate dimensions, infinity stones and floating battleships.  The stakes are way out of wack as an average of 1.5 bustling cities are completely leveled per movie and yet the heroes (and villains) are basically immortal due to the well known multi-picture deals of the actors.  Sidenote – In the case of Marvel, I also don’t think Disney is comfortable killing off anyone with a speaking part.  That would be off brand for them unless we’re talking about cartoon parents (RIP Mufasa).  

Because we’ve seen the conventional superhero in 3 arcs story so many times, DC and Marvel films will require other, more interesting elements than green screen action alone to earn higher praise.  I got cised for Guardians 2 (A-) because it was, matter of factly, really fucking funny.  I got cised for Logan (A+) because the director disguised a brutal, gut wrenching, R rated Western as a superhero movie.  But those are the exceptions.  The majority of these films, at this juncture, don’t stray too far from the corporate formula which ultimately limits their ceiling.

So how does Wonder Woman stack up against the other films?  Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news.  Let’s tackle the good news first.  First off, the titular character is WAY more interesting than the average beefy template in a cape.  WW is only the third of these sixty-five films with a female lead, and the first of which that’s also directed by a woman (clearly Hollywood doesn’t have it’s own Title IX), so it’s no surprise that a different perspective is brought to the table.  What was surprising, at least to me, was how entertaining Gal Gadot is in this role.  She hadn’t shown much in the Fast and Furious franchise previously, but clearly they didn’t give her enough to do.  She’s fantastic.  In fact, on a charisma scale I’d put her well ahead of her Justice League counterparts Ben Affleck (Batman) & Henry Cavill (Superman), but still behind my #1 STUNNA Margot Robbie (Harley Quinn).

The other good news is that this movie’s got jokes.  It’s not one of the best comedies you’ll see all year like Guardians mentioned above, but it has several good bits that hit.  And intertwined within the movie’s lighthearted banter is a moving romance between Gadot and Chris Pine.  Most superhero movies contain love interests, however for some reason they almost always come off as clumsy (Thor and Natalie Portman) or even borderline creepy (Superman and Louise Lane).  This one works.

Onto the bad news.  It’s one thing for action to be the same old song and dance (Marvel), it’s another thing for the action to actually take away from the movie.  I have the same issue regarding the combat sequences of this film as I did in last year’s DC movies (Suicide Squad and Batman v Superman).  It all looks too way much like a video game or cartoon.  During much of these scenes, you can tell that Wonder Woman isn’t even a stunt double but actual computer animation (at least I think so, maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me).  Anyways, I’m just not a fan of the look.  I will say it’s pretty cool seeing Gadot kick the shit out of a bunch of Germans but I would prefer the use of a more realistic filter.  Also, can we stop it with the whole final boss battle at the end trope, where he explains his diabolical plan to the hero and presents how all-powerful he is?  Haven’t we evolved past that?  Why does this have to happen in every movie?

All in all, Wonder Woman is good.  It’s not great, but very solid and worth seeing, probably on par with the average Marvel movie.  It’s definitely a step in the right direction for the DC universe after a disappointing 2016.  Grade: C+

Rated Greg’s Top 5 Scariest Movies

1. The Shining
2. The Conjuring
3. Jaws
4. Paranormal Activity
5. It

My rule of thumb when it comes to watching movies is generally the less you know going in the better.  I just think all trailers (and most reviews) hint at jokes, action, and plot points that would have been more enjoyable experiencing first hand without prior knowledge that they were on the horizon.  I would liken it to my current situation watching hoops.  Because I cut the cord and now watch basketball via online apps, most of the games I watch are on a 60-120 second delay.  This may not seem like a big deal, except I can tell when something epic is about to happen because my phone starts blowing up right before a buzzer beater occurs (or something else wild like a Kelly Oubre hip check).  You remember the crazy UNC/Kentucky Elite 8 finish?  I had a strong inclination Luke Maye was going to hit that shot when he put it up given the constant morse code of vibrations felt on my thigh in the minute prior.

Occasionally though this lack of information on a film prior to seeing it can really throw me for a loop, which is precisely what happened last Sunday.  I knew four things about It Comes At Night before seeing it, and exactly these four things only:

1. The title was It Comes At Night
2. It was listed as a Horror
3. It starred Joel Edgerton (a Rated Greg favorite)
4. It had a 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes

Based on those factors above, I assumed this was a spooky, BOO!-type haunted house story in the vein of The Conjuring or Poltergeist.  I mean, it’s called It Comes At Night after all.  How could I expect any different with a dumbass name like that?   Once noticing that it got an 86%, it was a no-brainer that I would check it out.  A good scare can be quite fun.

From the opening frames however I quickly realized that there wasn’t going to be anything fun about this movie.  This is the heaviest, darkest, and most intense film of 2017 thus far.  Of the 91 minutes run time there might only be three, four minutes tops containing lighter fare (definitely not suitable for a fun date night).  It Comes At Night isn’t even really a horror movie despite being heavily marketed that way (more on that in a second).  It’s a psychological thriller about the animal instincts of mankind that can kick in when presented with a possible threat.  I do think it’s a decent movie in the end (first half is a little tough to watch), just so very far from what I was expecting.  The film is professionally well crafted in every aspect, cinematography and acting especially (shout out rising stars Christopher Abbott and my current #wcw Riley Keough), but the material is such a grind to get through.  The primary measuring stick when grading something on the Rated Greg scale is simply how much did I enjoy the experience of watching it, thus I can’t put it higher than a B-.  Grade: B-

• One last item of note:  Given the 44% public score on Rotten Tomatoes (compared to 86% critical), it looks like I wasn’t the only one surprised by what I just saw.  I went back and looked at the trailer and it is certainly very misleading.  I get why A24 marketed It Comes At Night this way.  Conventional Horror movies make more money per dollar invested than any other genre, so why not try to lure viewers in and win them over.  But it’s a dirty trick.  It’s kind of like those deceptive individuals who only use extremely old photos on their dating profile.