The Monthly Countdown: March 2015

In which I list the 10 best movies that I saw for the first time last month.

March was a poor month for new movies: at least for me.  Sure, there were great movies that were released last month and there were great movies that I saw last month, but very few of them were first-time viewings for me.  Despite having seen thirty movies in March (which is already a step down from previous months), only 14 of them were new to me.  Most of them were chosen because Becky - not myself - hadn't already seen them, and that was just something that I wouldn't let go down on my watch.

10) Justice League: New Frontier - DC is as much the go-to brand for animated superhero movies as Marvel is for live action ones.  And although New Frontiers is a pretty sizable step down from the likes of War, Throne of Atlantis and The Flashpoint Paradox, it never the less provides an interesting spin on established DC canon by crossing it with the dated concerns of Watchmen.

New Frontier pretty much makes my case for a Martian Manhunter solo movie for me (although still expect to find an AdapNation focussing on that a few weeks from now).  Although just one of many competing plot lines, his is by far the most interesting and fleshed out.  On top of that, the film has the creepiest kids book outside of The Babadook and top-notch (it stylistically dated) animation.

9) Run All Night - This is the third and latest team-up between rebranded action star Liam Neeson and genre director Jaume Collet-Serra.  Although I'm getting pretty tired of Liam Neeson by way of Tom Cruise, this actually is one of his better action movies and the most thematically, stylistically and aesthetically mature of the duo's collaborations.

That's not to say that Run All Night is a great, or even strictly speaking good, movie, just that it's comparatively better than similar movies that the actor has starred in recently.  It starts unnecessarily en medias res and the characters are not as fleshed out as I would have liked (even if their interactions hint at something deeper just underneath the surface).  Still, Collet-Serra knows how to engagingly stage and action scene and Neeson and Harris lend this movie a far better cast than it deserves.

8) Non-Stop - Although Run All Night is their most refined and mature collaboration to date, Non-Stop is ultimately their best.  Its narrative - concerning US Air Martials and the state of post 9-11 aviation security - is both thematically relevant and inherently exciting.  It's set-up of a killer hidden among the passengers of a mid-flight air craft is the perfect mix of mystery and paranoia that made The Thing such an exceptional horror movie.  And, like Run All Night, Neeson and Moore give the film more acting cred than it rightly deserves.

While the payoff is a little weaker than its build-up and the sub plot of purposefully framing the Air Marshal is a bit superfluous given everything else that's happening on that plane, it mostly all holds together.  Although a bit lighter than Run All Night, it does hit its action notes more strongly and confidently.

7) Dragonball Z: Lord Slug - Of the five Dragonball Z we saw in March, this was the only one that I hadn't seen already (even if Lord Slug Abridged already covered its climactic "twist").  And while it's not as well animated or exciting as some, and its plot is overly derivative of Dragonball, it's still easily one of the best movies of the franchise.

Lord Slug is hardly original.  In fact, it's amazing that it took until Team Four Star's parody for anybody to point out how ultimately carbon copied it is from Goku's fight against King Piccolo.  But I'm not ranking movies based on originality here: only on how their overall quality.  And, for that, Lord Slug was an exciting, well choreographed, well animated and well executed vision of a hopelessly non-canon Dragonball Z.

6) Chappie - Contrary to popular belief, I liked Chappie.  It was an interesting, well-imagined, narratively and thematically ambitious movie from the director of District 9.  Dev Patel is especially delightful to watch, Chappie's attempts at being a gangster are adorable and the trio of conflict that composed the core of the film were all incredibly interesting.

The problem is, however, that there just was not enough time to cover all of the ground that writer-director Neill Blomkamp wanted to cram into two-hour movie.  Although Chappie comes with three times the ambition of District 9, it has only one third the focus of it and is all the worse for this.  Chappie is not the transhumanist masterpiece that some have made it out as, but it is the kind of ambitious science fiction movie that we need a lot more of these days.

5) The Tale of the Princess Kaguya - If the Oscar for Best Animated Feature was simply awarded to the film with the best animation, there's no doubt in my mind that The Tale of the Princess Kaguya would have handily won the award this year.  Its breathtaking, brush stroke animation blew away every other film that came out in 2014 and is Exhibit A for why 2-D animation still has a place in the world today.

But for as sublime as the visual quality of the film was, the narrative it conveyed was a bit flat, even for those like myself who were familiar with the story of the moon princess.  Incredibly slow-paced and resistant to all conventions of modern structuring, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is a movie that will frustrate audiences as often as it excites them, and often at the same time.  It's certainly no Big Hero 6 or The Lego Movie, but its half-measured success will hopefully convince a few of those in power to invest more effort into traditionally animated films.

4) Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole - What little I heard and saw of this movie when it first came out did not encourage me to seek in out in full.  While it was undoubtedly a beautifully rendered vision, it basically looked like Lord of the Rings with Owls.  I even thought that the guy who voiced Soren was Elijah Wood!

Legend of the Guardians, though, is a surprisingly dark tale of lost innocence and conflicting loyalties: of brother turned against brother when one's ambitions pulls him from what he knows to be right.  It's grim subject matter and savage fight scenes should actually come as no surprise once you realize that the movie's directed by Man of Steel's own Zack Snyder, who intended this to launch a high fantasy franchise to rival How to Train Your Dragon.  Its failure to find an audience is one of the most disappointing things to happen to the genre in quite some time, since it really is an excellent piece of cinema that I would have loved to see developed into something a bit more substantial.

3) The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel - I did not expect to enjoy this movie at all.  We watched the first movie at Becky's behest, and I was less than impressed with it.  Despite a stellar cast of British icons, it did little more than reinforce how adorable folksy racism in old people is and take a stab at the phrase "life begins at 50."  What's more is that there was nowhere for the story to go from where everything left off: everybody was already either dead, dying, split up or hooked up by the movie's end, and the novel upon which it was based lacked a sequel.

To my surprise, however, I actually loved the movie.  Having already established its expansive cast of characters, gotten rid of the obnoxious hag of the bunch and paired everybody up in seemingly happily ever afters, the second movie was allowed to deeply explore the characters and their interactions with one another in ways that the first could never possibly hope to.  There really wasn't much of a plot to speak of, but seeing as that's where the first film faltered, that's not such a bad thing.  It's a cleverly insightful character study of the old and aging, and unquestionably this year's best Dev Patel movie.

2) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb - Growing up, I had been lead to believe that Dr. Strangelove was the greatest political comedy of all time: outrageously lampooning the cold war with a mostly serious story of a pending nuclear holocaust.  Although I had never seen it myself, its reputation hung over me since I first started getting into movies, and it naturally was a high priority on my watch list.

Whatever it was that I was expecting to see when I popped Dr. Strangelove into the BluRay player, this was certainly not it.  It maintained far too strait a face to ever possibly be a comedy, despite the obvious cartoonishness of certain key characters and scenes.  I can't help but think that the original ending for the film - in which the war room erupts in a pie fight between the US generals and their Soviet guests -would have been a better fit when all was said and done, even if the movie that did hit theaters in 1964 was the most brilliantly under-stated satires in film history.

1) Cinderella - As awesome as the oddly disappointing Dr. Strangelove or the unexpectedly fun Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel were, there was never any doubt in my mind that Disney's live-action Cinderella would top the month's list of best first-time viewings for me.  I've already seen it twice in theaters and am planning on making time for a third before it slinks away on BluRay.

Alice in Wonderland proved that Disney's live-action remakes could be profitable.  Maleficent proved that they could be good.  Cinderella, however, proved that they could be even better than the animated originals: fleshing out the wish-fulfillment fantasy of an abused girl into a near historical drama made with the same care and consideration as most year's Best Picture contenders.

So what was your favorite movie that you saw for the first time in March?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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