Arguably the best Batman film since The Dark Knight.
Because sometimes you need a break from Oscar season.
I had sky-high expectations for The Lego Movie as a veteran player of their first several video games — both Lego Star Wars, both Lego Indiana Jones, both of Lego Harry Potter, the first Lego Batman, Lego Pirates of the Caribbean, and the most epic of them all, Lego Lord of the Rings. They’re inventive, unpredictable, witty beyond all expectations with a keen self-awareness that frequently lampoons the very intellectual properties they paid good money to license. And those were just the cutscenes.
Alexander Payne’s new film Nebraska perfectly replicates that forlorn Midwest sensation of being trapped in rooms with hordes of impressionable, elderly relatives all living on the same slow-motion wavelength, visiting and reminiscing and comparing their amnesia levels and enjoying life’s remaining minutes at the speed of molasses, except when they’re jumping to conclusions at hyperspeed. When that happens to me, I put on a brave front while suppressing the desperate urge to crawl out of my skin. With SNL’s Will Forte acting as my proxy and reenacting my childhood family vacations so vividly, I’m surprised I didn’t convulse in my seat with flashbacks.
Older fans of Matthew McConaughey’s spate of ’90s romantic comedies may be in for a shock when they walk into Dallas Buyers Club and see him playing Christian Bale’s character from The Machinist. He and costar Jared Leto (both radically transformed and up for Oscars this year) underwent severe weight loss for their roles in this based-on-a-true-story underdog drama that’s one part can’t-we-all-just-get-along and four parts sticking-it-to-The-MAN.
If the stakes were catastrophic enough, the training techniques were sufficiently intensive, and the world were just that unforgiving, who’s to say preteens couldn’t be accelerated to maturity and transmogrified into hardened soldiers like today’s eighteen-year-old American military volunteers?
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 