Chris Rock's Top 10 (Movies of 2014)

Chris Rock's Top 10 (Movies of 2014)
By Erik Luchsinger

1. Interstellar

     Of course this is at the top. if you're a sci-fi nerd like me, there should be no question. If you like excellent acting, convincing visuals, (mostly real) scientific theories, and a bitchin' deep-space adventure story, you know what I'm talking about. Interstellar was amazing, and it gives me hope that intelligent sci-fi might not be dead.

2. Nightcrawler

  This movies really made me feel like I was a grimy LA news stringer and made me pine for late-night highway drives and the random carnage of the city. It's a real thriller and incredibly engaging. It kept me enthralled the whole time, which is saying a lot considering the run time. Jake Gyllenhal's incredibly convincing role as a sociopathic news stringer was just icing on the cake, and that's why it gets such high marks.

3. The Drop
  

James Gandolfini's last film was not a disappointment, as The Drop was one of the best movies I saw this year. It was a mob film that wasn't trying to be Goodfellas or Godfather. It had a fresh take on mobsters and wannabes, and a vein of gallows humor that ran quite deep. I had no idea what I was going into when I went to see The Drop, but I was pleasantly surprised. It didn't get the fanfare that it deserved, and if you haven't seen it I recommend that you get it on DVD/Blu-ray/VOD, as it was great.

4. Gone Girl

Unlike The Drop, this movie got a lot of fanfare, and rightly so. Gone Girl was a thrilling mystery, not to mention a (probably unneeded) reminder that Ben Affleck can act with the best of them. The characters were deep, the plot was well constructed and wholly engrossing, and overall the movie was a great watch. Bonus: seeing Barney Stinson/NPH get murdered during sex was really, really satisfying.

5. Fury

    Between Fury and Inglorious Basterds it seems like Brad Pitt belongs in WWII movies. Fury might look like a run-of-the-mill WWII movie, and in a lot of ways it is, but it is fantastic nonetheless. It may not seem like a movie about a single tank crew could be interesting, but the characters in Fury are so deep and emotionally intense that every scene is engaging, even when things are exploding and dying all over the place. When they are, though, the movie really shines, The final battle in Fury is among the best I've ever seen, and all of the action scenes are just really fucking sweet.

6. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
  

Despite having too many "of the's" in the title, Dawn was a great movie. I've been quite disenchanted with the current trend of rebooting old movie franchises, but this gave me hope. The human characters are good, but the apes really makes the movie. Despite being CGI (and excellent CGI at that), they have a lot of emotion and depth to them that makes the whole struggle between the two camps so much more real. Awesome battle scenes and great dialogue contributed to this being one of my top 10 as well.

7. Edge of Tomorrow

    I am very wary of Tom Cruise. I really dislike how he's always the "save the day badass" guy, and a lot of his movies seem to be the same action crap. Not to mention that he's a crazy scientologist. I didn't even see Edge of Tomorrow in theaters because I was so wary of it. When I did see it though, I was surprised how awesome it was. It had a really interesting concept and it was explored and presented in an interesting and easily understandable way. The aliens were cool and the visuals were quite stunning. The best part about it was seeing Tom Cruise play a wimpy bitch of a character and then progressing into the confident character he usually plays. Character development in a big budget sci-fi action movie, imagine that!

8. Guardians of the Galaxy

    I had some gripes about this movie, but overall I liked it. Despite a completely asinine plot to escape jail (space cops can shoot in zero gravity, dumbasses!), Guardians had a lot of witty dialogue and humor, not to mention cool characters. The characters really drove the movie for me, so much so that it still made top 10 despite a generic Marvel plot.

9. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1

    I really liked the first two Hunger Games despite not being a 14 year old white girl, and Mockingjay Part 1 was no exception. This one was a bit darker and more mature, featuring a lot of political intrigue, posturing, and propaganda-slinging. While it lacked some of the emotional shocks present in the first two, and Katniss only has one shocked/sad/angry face, it was a good watch and promises an awesome finale, hopefully featuring President Snow getting brutally murdered and an R rating. What, a guy can hope, can't he?

10. The Giver

    Ok, I didn't really see that many movies this year. In all honesty I've just started taking movies seriously enough to write about them every week. So yeah, if I'd been to the theaters more often this year I might have a different number 10. Nonetheless, The Giver was a cool adaptation of a favorite childhood book. It's a simple story and undoubtedly a cash-in on the popularity of converting YA fiction into movies, but it was fun to watch and really brought back some memories. As far as YA distopias go it's not the meanest by any means, but that made it kind of refreshing. It's not just brutal for brutality's sake, and it's got a nice message behind it. Plus, it was leaps and bounds better than Sex Tape, Annabelle, and As Above, So Below, so here it is.

Honorable Mentions

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For: It's good, but it's not as cool considering we've already seen the visual style in the last Sin City.

Godzilla: Cool monsters! Explosions! Sweet visuals! No guys in rubber suits.

Exodus: Gods and Kings: Seeing the 10 plagues in crisp, 2014 CGI was really fucking sweet.

PS.
    Transformers: Age of Extinction was the highest grossing movie this year and the 10th highest grossing movie of all fucking time. Guys, come on. Upgrade your tastes, and maybe Michael bay will stop insulting everyone's intelligence with schlocky crap every fucking year.

The Interview Review

The Interview Review
By Erik Luchsinger

                                                                      www.ropeofsilicon.com 

By now everyone is familiar with the cyberterror fiasco/brilliant marketing scheme surrounding the latest James Franco and Seth Rogen buddy comedy, The Interview. Whether or not it was actually the North Koreans who hacked Sony, it was dubious if the movie would come out. Despite the sheer number of testicle-less movie studios and theatre companies, The Interview still came out on Youtube on Christmas day, and you better bet that we here at the ManChild Movie Blog jumped on the opportunity to see it.

As I ponied up the $5.99 to rent the movie on Youtube for the day I was about 70% sure I was wasting my money on another expendable buddy comedy. I really do like Rogen and Franco, with Pineapple Express and Superbad (fuck you it still counts) near the top of my list of favorite comedy movies. I was fearful of spending 2 hours watching them phone in a terrible movie.

Luckily, that was hardly the case. The Interview had some legitimately funny jokes, as well as the kind of ridiculous situations you would expect from a Rogen and Franco movie. The scenes where Dave Skylark (Franco) is hanging out with Kim (Randall Park) are the very hallmark of Franco's brand of humor. There's tanks, basketball, hot asian ladies with big ol' titties, copious drugs, and serious talk about approval by peers and parents. This is all set to everyone's favorite Katy Perry songs, just to top it all off. Not only is the whole sequence pretty funny, but it really gives the relationships between Skylark and Kim Jong Un quite a bit of depth. Considering how important that is to the story, I'm really glad that they decided to spend some time on it.

                                                          Baby, you're a firework. Or whatever.
                                                                          style.notizie.it

The time invested in their relationship pays off too, and not just in laughs. The actual interview scene is pretty tense in addition to being sprinkled with funnies. There is a betrayal between Kim and Skylark once Skylark finally gets that Kim has been hiding all of the bad things going on in North Korea from him. If they hadn't spent so long broing out over Katy Perry and margaritas together it would have felt totally phony, but instead you kind of feel for Skylark despite all of his arrogant stupidity. It also makes Kim more thoroughly hate-able, as he almost seems human while chilling with Skylark.

There is no lack of sex and genital gags in The Interview, ranging from the "hide it in your butt" joke from the trailer to Skylark yelling loudly about his "stink dick" with the CIA at the door. My favorite of them was during a prep scene, where Rapoport (Rogen) and Sook (Diana Bang) are arming themselves for action. They reveal some large machine guns, grenades, etc. then, in the same way, Sook takes off her shirt and Rapoport pops his dick out, and then they're fucking. While it's just a sex joke (literally, Sook and Rapoport have sex), it's revealed in such a way that I thought it was really funny.

                                                           Fun fact: Kim loves Interracial flicks
                                                                       www.joblo.com

While the plot is predictable in a lot of ways, it's not the kind of schlock that an equivalent movie by Adam Sandler would be. Instead of just flying off to North Korea, Rapoport has to go meet Kim's ambassadors in China first, which proves to be a complete waste of time for him. In Korea, our protagonists constantly lose their poison strips and lose sight of the goal, with Skylark decided to abandon it entirely at one point. When they do decide to go through with the plan they have to do things differently, which results in an intelligently crafted plan to discredit Kim on national television instead of just killing him, thus empowering the Korean people to revolt. Honestly, I was expecting the Sandler approach to the whole thing: some lowbrow asian penis jokes, Rob Schneider telling Skylark that "he can do it, kill Kim Jong Un!" and then Kim dying due to pooping his pants. Instead there is a plot that moves with jokes. Almost like a real movie, but a comedic one!

                                               What, poop isn't funny anymore? POOP ROCKS!!1!1
                                                                           giphy.com

The Interview was not the best Franco/Rogen movie ever, nor the best buddy comedy. It was good but not great. The reason I spent most of this review discussing the good points is because I was quite surprised that it didn't totally suck ass. I was worried my favorite stoner duo had lost their touch entirely. That is not the case, as The Interview is quite watchable, even if it's not quite worthy of all the hoopla surrounding it. I kinda feel like North Korea should have been OK with it, as it humanizes Kim in a way that's basically impossible to do in real life. It'll make you laugh, it might make you cry (if you break your leg somehow while watching it), but it's not an Oscar-worthy masterpiece by any means. I give it 3/5.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies REVIEW

The 6th and final film of the Middle Earth saga and the finale of The Hobbit series is finally here and holy shit is it action packed! The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies or TBotFA starts immediately where Desolation of Smaug left off. A really pissed off and undiagnosed mentally ill dragon heads towards Lake Town to do one thing and one thing only. FUCK. SHIT. UP. But a giant fire breathing dragon isn't the only thing that the thirteen dwarves, Gandalf, and Bilbo Baggins have to deal with. Five armies consisting of Dwarves, Elves, Men, Orks, and a special mystery guest group are about to descend upon the Lonely Mountain to take it's vast amounts of treasure and secure its strategic position within Middle Earth.






TBotFA had a lot of hype going into the theaters, and it lived up to quite a bit of it. Smaug silently stalking Lake Town before setting it ablaze was absolutely bone chilling, intense, and probably one of my favorite scenes. The different armies showing up all at once at the base of the mountain and clashing together throughout the film was epic! From the Orks taking first place on making an entrance, to endless amounts of battle trolls, to Orlando Bloom and Evangeline Lilly doing crazy elfish fight scenes, the battle really was one of the best from the entire series.

(OH, SHIT!)

That being said, the final Hobbit isn't without some fault. One being that Bilbo is kind of sidelined for parts of the movie. A character as greatly portrayed by Martin Freeman could have used a little more screen time.

Another fault was the consequences of expanding one book into three different films finally catching up with us. In the book, Smaug going ape shit and the entire battle is probably the last quarter of the story, so there wasn't much to really stretch out into an epic large film. It's 2 hours and 20 minutes long so I didn't feel like the movie flew by too fast, but the ending felt a little sudden to me. Seeing as it was the last film in the entire saga (For now) I was expecting an emotional gut punch that we had experienced with Return of the King, Instead the battle ended, goodbyes were had and a quick journey back to the Shire occurred, all in the span of a little over 10 minutes. Though I will say the ending song did help with the closure.

Overall The finale to The Hobbit delivered exactly what it was titled. Five armies epically duking it out for the fate of Middle Earth and in the middle of it all, one small brave hobbit. It might not have been my favorite film in the series that I really love, but it was exceptionally great experience. To quote my Dad after the movie ended "That was fucking awesome!" I give it 4 orks getting beheaded at once out of 5.

The Imitation Game: REVIEW

It's Oscar season and that means the Oscar bait is out. World War 2 films are always Oscar bait and so are films with a gay character who needs to keep it a secret. The Imitation Game is both of those crashing together to create a marvelous film.


Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is the man that broke the Nazi code during the Second World War.  Because of him, the war was shorten by at least two years, and the machine he made to break that code is basically the first computer.  What he created during the war is still relevant to today, but he was not honored in any way, sharp, or form for everything that he did.


The Imitation Game has a very fractured story line. Shifting between near the end of his life with an investigation that made the discovery that he is a homosexual, which lead to his suicide due to homosexuality being a crime at the time and his forced chemical castration; to his childhood that becomes a heartbreaking tale about him discovering cryptography and his first love; to his time during the war, breaking the Enigma machine the Nazis used to share encrypted messages to each other.


The main chunk of this film is during the war, and it feels like "Revenge of the Nerds" meets "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy", and that is a very good thing. Everyday that they do not solve the code, more people die at the hands of the Nazis.  Cumberbatch plays Alan as a very toned down version of his Sherlock character.  Both are intellectual assholes, but this version is much more vulnerable. Its the main reason why Joan Clark (Keira Knightly) is a perfect foil to him. Both are as smart as each other, but no one likes Alan and everyone likes Joan. Together they help Alan achieve his greatness and break the code, and people's hearts. This film is dreadfully sad in the best way. There is a reason why these two actors are getting much Oscar Buzz. I give The Imitation Game 4 dead Nazis out of 5.

Top Five: Review

Some of the strongest comedians have a hard time translating their comedy to the big screen. Adam Sandler keeps vomiting the first idea that comes to his head and it some how lands on the big screen. Chris Rock's first two films he directed "Head of State" and "I Think I Love My Wife", both weren't strong indicators of his comedic talents, but luckily third time is the charm with Top Five.


Top Five deals with a comedian named Andre Allen (Chris Rock), who is having a mid-life crisis. He is known for making a trio of buddy-cop movies as Hammy the Bear, where his catch phrase is "Its Hammy Time!". He doesn't think he is funny anymore and to combat that he has a film coming out called "Uprize!" which basically is the Haitian version of Django, but with him killing more white people.



With the advent of Uprize! coming out, he is doing press releases, radio shows, and whatever he can to get butts in seats for this movie. He reluctantly decides to am interview for the New York Times, with reporter Chelsea Brown (Rosario Dawson). They have real conversations about his lack of being funny, black culture, and when he hit rock bottom.


Going into this film, it feels like its just going to be another movie where a man having a mid-life crisis tries to find his spot in the world and all becomes well. This doesn't happen in the most wonderful way. This movie is basically a guerrilla style Rom Com. You don't think its going to happen and when it does you feel foolish for not realizing what was going on the whole time. Dawson and Rock have the most wonderful chemistry in this film. A lot of directors do not know what to do with Dawson, other than just make her a pretty ethnic face. Chris Rock has created a multi-faceted female character that feels fresh and is even a force against his comedic prowess.


Go see Top Five. Its a genuinely funny movie with characters that feel and are vulnerable. Its good to see Chris Rock knock one out of the ballpark and I can't wait for his next film. I give Top Five 4 and half hot sauce soaked tampons that are shoved up someone's basement out five.