2014 Movies: #25, #24 and #23

Readers, the Mulhern at the Movies blog has just gone over 5,000 hits! I guess it's not all that impressive when you consider that this is over the course of 89 posts, so the average is something like  60 hits per post, but hey-sometimes in life you have to celebrate the little things.

And in celebration, I am giving away a free signed copy of my mystery/thriller Everybody Wants You Dead to the first person that can correctly answer this Oscar trivia question:

*A so-called "sweep" of the Oscars is when a movie takes home awards for best film, director, actress, actor and screenplay. In the history of the Academy Awards, this has happened 3 times, and only twice in the last 50 years.

Can you name the two movies that "swept" the Oscars in the last fifty years?

Send me a message with your guesses. If you are correct, you will win fame, glory and a signed book!

Good luck. Let's start the top 25 of 2014, shall we?

#25 Edge of Tomorrow

There is a part of me that remembers the permeating preview for this movie more than the movie itself. You know, the one where Emily Blunt does this move? And some auto-tuned EDM artist sings "This is not...the end" over and over while gatling guns pop and mecha-robot aliens loom over Tom Cruise and buildings explode? The first time I saw this preview was while several of us were watching Desolation of Smaug at Eastgate Cinema circa Christmas 2013, and one friend turns to me and says "soundtrack by Antoine Dodson." I have seen the preview for this film almost as much as the one for the $82 million juggernaut Fifty Shades of Grey, which I can almost quote in its entirety.

"I have a very...singular...taste. You...wouldn't understand"

We're getting off topic. Edge of Tomorrow pits Mr. Cruise against a race of "Mimics", an alien race that has come to earth via meteor strike, which feels slightly like something out of a scientology text. Much like the X-Men vs. the sentinels in Days of Future Past, human soldiers throughout the world have been getting their asses handed to them, despite being outfitted in battery-powered mecha suits. Cruise plays William Cage, a military public relations officer, who is ordered to report on a battle on the beaches of Northern France (why screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie chose to draw parallels to the storming of Normandy is beyond me). When Cage refuses, General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson) has him marked as a deserter and he is sent to Heathrow Airport, where Sargent Farrell (Bill Paxton) has a battle suit strapped on him to storm the beach with the rest of them. In the catastrophic assault, Cage kerplodes a giant mimic but is sprayed with its acid-blood as a result and dies in the wet sand.

Dies, as it turns out, is a relative term; he wakes up back at Heathrow, having the exact same conversation with Farrell that he had earlier that morning. "This is going to fail," he tells them. "How else would I know exactly what you're going to say before you say it?" Their attitude is something along the lines of "Well, that is a strange coincidence, but get on that plane and go kill some meteor aliens for us, would ya?" This is when the "Live. Die. Repeat." slogan begins to rear its catchy head, as each time Cage dies on the beach, he wakes on the same luggage bags at Heathrow, left to come up with some way to alter the course of his dystopian Groundhog Day narrative. Finally, a cog in the gears--he meets war hero Rita Vrataski (Blunt) who tells him that she knows what's happening to him and to "find her again when he wakes up." She adds, "I'll probably be sweaty and doing this." When they connect again, she tells him he knows his skill of being able to reset the battle and make adjustments because until she received a blood transfusion, she had the same skill; he got it from the Mimic's blood that he killed on day 1. This information takes the film in a more lighthearted direction. Now each time he dies and wakes up, he seeks out Vrataski to get training, and the sequences are humorous and clever.

Ultimately, they figure out a way to take down the Mimics, and it's kind of dopey and convoluted. But the ride up to that point is highly entertaining. Edge of Tomorrow is based on a Manga graphic novel called "All You Need is Kill" that draws comparisons to both Starship Troopers and the video game Halo. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Edge of Tomorrow is very much like watching a video game unfold on screen. You screw up, you die, you start over, this time trying not to make the same mistakes. Everyone has to get hit by a few fireballs before they teach themselves how to take down Bowser, right? It's all part of the process.

#24 They Came Together

In 2001, a little indie movie called Wet Hot American Summer made its way to the big screen briefly before it almost disappeared forever into obscurity. Then, a funny thing happened: It got new life as a massive cult hit. A friend of mine once showed it to me in her sorority bedroom (it wasn't like that, you guys) and we laughed like crazy. I guess part of me couldn't quite understand why it wasn't bigger, either. The cast was insane! It featured, among others, Janeane Garafolo, David Hyde Pierce, Michael Ian Black, Bradley Cooper, Elizabeth Banks, Christopher Meloni, Molly Shannon, Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler. It's just been announced that they will be making a miniseries continuation on Netflix with just about all of the principal players returning, and plenty of cult cinephiles are drooling already.

I bring this up because Wet Hot was written by Michael Showalter and David Wain, with Wain also handling directorial business. More than a decade later, the duo teamed back up for They Came Together, starring WHAS alums Rudd and Poehler. They Came Together is a spoofball satire of romantic comedies, with one friend of mine drawing comparisons between it and Airplane! I didn't know what to expect, but I guess I figured that with Rudd and Poehler at the helm, it would be worth a watch. Turns out I was right-I guffawed and chortled and hit just about every point on the laugh spectrum.

Joel and Molly (Rudd and Poehler) are out to dinner with friends (Bill Hader and Ellie Kemper) when they are asked how their relationship came to be. Then it's a he-said, she-added-on retelling of how they met, each cliche' more spot-on than the next. They meet and dislike each other immediately--he is a corporate schmuck who is trying to buy out her specialty candy store. They unknowingly show up to the same Halloween party in matching Ben Franklin costumes and deny vehemently that "they came together". It is mentioned about 100 times that one of the characters in their love story is New York City, and plenty of formula interactions with the Big Apple ensue: talking to strangers, juggling fruit at a corner market, playing basketball in the park, getting splashed with taxi puddle water. Of course they eventually fall for each other, and every romantic comedy move is employed, down to the   "her making him taste pasta sauce on a wooden spoon" and "awkward fall down the stairs after getting herself dolled up." The supporting cast, like Wet Hot, is enormous and features Keenan Thompson, Ken Marino, Jack McBrayer, Melanie Lynskey, Colbie Smulders and WHAS returns Meloni and Michael Ian Black. The detractors of this movie, and there were plenty of them, didn't care for it simply because they expected something different and got a rom-com send up. If you take that knowledge with you going in, you'll laugh until it hurts and see that Rudd and Poehler have the ability to make even the most stale look fresh and new.

#23 Pride

In 1984, under the iron-fisted rule of Margaret Thatcher, British miners went on strike to protest the closing of 20 coal pits that would lead to thousands and thousands of layoffs. Also being brought under attack by Thatcher: the LGBT community throughout the United Kingdom. Searching for kindred spirits to help bring their voices to the forefront, a group fronted by activists Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer) and Mike Jackson (Joe Gilgun) start raising money for the miners and try to form an alliance. Their efforts are shut down by members of the National Union of Mineworkers, who don't want to be openly associated with the gays. Instead, the Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners campaign crew takes a bus trip to a small mining town in Wales and ultimately forges a connection with the down-and-out coal miners and the surrounding community. Every now and again they come up against the close-minded and are bombarded with nastiness, but for the most part, the queries about the differences in lifestyle are dealt with in an innocent and accepting fashion.

This is a true story that is handled extremely well by director Matthew Warchus, who is most known for his stage adaptations for Royal Shakespeare company and various award-winning British musicals. Much of the story is told through the eyes of the one fictional/composite character, a teenager named Joe Bromley (George MacKay), a gay teenager who experiences his first activism and love as their Support the Miners crusade takes them from inception to completion. Schnetzer and Gilgun are both outstanding as two heroic young lads who put everything on the line to champion their cause. The heroes on the Welsh side of things are portrayed convincingly by veterans Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton and Paddy Consindine, who approach the situation with varying degrees of concern and humility. Another standout is Dominic "Jimmy McNulty" West as Jonathan Blake, an older member of LGBT community who helps bridge the two factions as somewhat of a figurehead. It's not altogether too surprising, unfortunately, that there was controversy surrounding the release of the film in oft-uptight Britain; it was given a R-rating almost entirely because of a couple of homosexual kissing scenes, and descriptor "a group of Lesbian and Gay activists" was changed to "a group of London-based activists" on the DVD banner. That didn't stop it from a standing ovation at Cannes, one that was entirely deserved for bravely taking on what is still a sore subject in many sectors of Britain.

More to come! Stay tuned!