#51 A Most Wanted Man
Almost a year ago now, we were driving back from a cabin when the wife turned to me and read a a headline from her smartphone news ticker out loud: "Philip Seymour Hoffman found dead in manhattan apartment." It was shocking; he certainly wasn't a mainstay in the tabloid for any sort of degenerate behaviors. As it turned out, he had struggled with addiction as a young man, quit using for nearly two decades before relapsing in late 2013. Really, what he always had struggled with was perfection.
And for all of the roles he mastered over the years--as a fixture in the P.T. Anderson oeuvre, as hapless sycophant Brandt in Big Lebowski, as rock critic Lester Bangs, as baseball managers and cutthroat campaign runners, as disgraced priests and meta theater directors, as Truman Capote--it's kind of a shame his last leading role was in this movie. His performance, as usual, was reliable, but the film itself was a thickly layered, painfully slow, complex slog through the world of international espionage. A Chechen man shows up in Hamburg, claiming to be related to a wealthy Islamist, and Gunther Bachmann (Hoffman) is assigned to track him. It's unclear whether or not he is who he says he is, and it takes Gunther and his team take an extremely long time to figure it out. So long that, when the resolution finally comes, I barely cared. Sorry, PSH. You deserved a better exit.
#50 Muppets Most Wanted
The Jason Segel-helmed Muppets re-boot was so witty and well done that it made this one look practically dismal in comparison. We pick up a couple years after we left off, and the fabric and fur crew is riding a high wave of stardom. Enter the exploitative Dominic Badguy (Ricky Gervais), who books them on a world tour. He's in league with Constantine, an evil Russian dead ringer for Kermit, only with a crooked mouth and a mole. He wants to utilize the world tour to steal precious gems on all of their stops, so he arranges for Kermit to be thrown into Russian prison, unbeknownst to the Muppet crew, who just think that Constantine is Kermit with a cold, or Kermit acting a little strange. The Kermit in Mother Russia situation contributes to the majority of the laughs, with Tina Fey as the warden who loves frogs just a little too much, Jemaine Clement as the "Prison King", Ray Liotta as inmate "Big Papa", Stanley Tucci as "Ivan the Guard" and Danny Trejo as "Danny Trejo". Their jokes and prison musical numbers--Ray Liotta doing eight counts is priceless--are the best thing about the movie. Everything else, including Ty Burrell as the hapless French detective, gets old quickly. Especially the whole evil Kermit scenario, at best a half-trick pony run into the ground.
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