As always, my professional review’s available over at the Herald.

My unprofessional review: I’m a big fan of sports, but I’m lukewarm at best towards sports movies. The dramatic arc is about as predictable as it gets. New coach rolls in, finds his team is filled with losers who no one believes in, belief in them ensues, they start winning, beginning an improbable comeback which leads to the championship, which they win, or which they sometimes lose, but you know they’ll be even better next year. Someone is hoisted onto someone else’s shoulders, credits roll, hooray.

Moneyball kind of follows that pattern but also not. Brad Pitt isn’t the Oakland Athletics’ coach, he’s the general manager. And he’s not taking over, he’s just facing the offseason loss of this three biggest stars. And if you know your recent baseball history–as a fan of the Seattle Mariners, Oakland’s division rivals, I am painfully familiar with this–you’ll know the A’s didn’t win or even go to the World Series in 2002, leaving Moneyball‘s dramatic climax to focus instead on their history-making 20-game win streak. Some of the old cliches are here, like when Pitt and assistant Jonah Hill rake together an “island of misfit toys” nobody else wanted or valued, but, well, that really happened, so. Anyway, I’ve got this theory that good stories are a balanced mix of the cliched and the original. Moneyball has both.

Pitt turns in another solid Pitt performance as a guy who failed young and can’t stand losing now. Hill’s pretty great, too, as a bottled-up geek-type whose ideas about baseball are about to revolutionize the game. Although the history’s already written, and it’s a sports movie so you know there will be triumph in the end, Pitt’s gnawing doubt and worry about whether his crazy new plan will pan out is so effective your stomach will be churning right along with him. Writers Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian paint a lot of extras into the margins; I loved how they nailed Pitt’s ex-wife’s new man as a soft-spoken, gentle, caring wussbag who’s probably the exact opposite of Pitt, the former pro player willing to take a huge gamble with an MLB franchise.

I gave Moneball a B+, and I feel like I might have short-changed (sweet pun, me) it a bit. It’s thrilling and competent in the very best way. A few years from now, we could be looking at this one as a classic.

Except at the place where I get paid to, of course.

Drive is good. You can tell Drive is going to be good from the opening scene, where Ryan Gosling, moonlighting as a getaway driver for a pair of robbers, shuttles them away from the crime scene through a net of cop cars and helicopters. It isn’t a car chase, though Gosling flips a couple sweet maneuvers along the way. It’s more of a car hide, with Gosling slipping out of view, holing up, and finally blending in with the crowd to escape being caught. It’s tense, it’s gripping, and it’s a hugely welcome break from your typical “vroom vroom VROOM bash *cop car flips over median, explodes*” chase scene.

This movie should be big for director Nicolas Winding Refn. It’s incredibly stylish and awash with righteous performances out of Gosling, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, and Oscar Isaac, who I don’t think I’ve seen before but whupped all kinds of dramatic ass as a man released from prison to find Gosling sniffing around Isaac’s wife Carey Mulligan. It’s a non-action action movie that’ll have you questioning whether Gosling is a hero or maybe just a psychopath who’s finally found the chance to lash out.

I liked Drive so much it convinced me to finally watch Refn’s Valhalla Rising, which had been languishing on my Netflix queue for some time. Unfortunately, the review never appeared online, but I liked that one too. Not for everyone, though–very moody and light on dialogue. Drive is, too, but it should have much wider appeal as–perversely–a sort of indie crime drama romance sandwiched around or possibly by meaty scenes of vicious action.

Full review available at the Herald.

Yeah, that headline isn’t a joke. I really do love “lethal virus threatens society as we know it” movies. It’s a serious contender for my favorite subgenre, right up there with “alien fleet threatens society as we know it” and “natural disaster threatens society as we know it.” I might have some hostility issues? Well, what can you do.

Besides watch Hollywood’s Contagion! That’s good transition. While many breakdown-of-society stories like 28 Days Later keep the focus on a single character of family’s efforts to survive the chaos, Contagion, much like 2012, takes a broader view. Family man Matt Damon is the stand-in for the guy on the street; wife Gwyneth Paltrow dies within the first minutes, evoking cheers across the internet and leaving Damon to try to protect his surviving daughter from disease. Most of the movie is about the CDC and WHO’s efforts to track down the virus’ source, identify its characteristics, and create a vaccine.

The result is a race against two things: the clock, and a force of nature that could mutant at any time. Even more horrifying, however, is Steven Soderbergh’s relentless illustration that we’re all totally boned against infection and the only chance of staying healthy is to seal yourself in a bubble. A bubble with a lot of machine guns strapped to its sides. Stop touching things, people! You’re going to kill us all!

Contagion doesn’t just have an ensemble cast (you got Bryan Cranston, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, John Hawkes, and Marion Cotillard–oh, and the always-awesome Enrico Colantoni), it’s got an ensemble plot. Some of its threads are stronger than others, but they work great as a whole, building to a disturbingly plausible and pleasingly comprehensive look at how something we can’t see could threaten everything we’ve built together.

Full review available at the Herald.

I was looking forward to Apollo 18. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while now–its original release date was something like April 22, I think, and somewhere around that time, I saw a trailer for a movie where a secret moon mission was investigating something strange we’d found there. Oh man! I thought. That concept is exactly the kind of thing I would love! I can’t wait to see this. Then, a few seconds later, a logo appeared and I realized it was fucking Transformers: Bark at the Moon.

Then something bizarre happened. A couple weeks after that, I saw a trailer for another movie revolving around a secret moon mission. It was as if the universe had yanked my secret-moon-mission football away from me only to say “Just kidding, here it is after all. Have fun!” Amazing! When does something like that happen to you? Never, that’s when.

Then I went to see Apollo 18. In the ultimate Lucy-football move, it was worse than Dark of the Moon.

It isn’t immediately obvious that Apollo 18 will be shitty. Not to me, anyway. I find this is true of a lot of bad movies (the big ones, anyway). Generally, as I’m watching something that turns out to be terrible, I’m thinking “Well, this hasn’t really grabbed me, but maybe the second half will do something with the kinda boring stuff that’s happened so far.” Then everything shoots off the rails and the movie’s total badness becomes clearer than the void of space, which is as clear as you can get because it is a vacuum. Space.

In this case, signs of Apollo 18‘s suck didn’t appear to me until they reached the moon. That’s when director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallago decided that scenes are not something that should be coherent. I get that it’s found footage from the ’70s that was recovered from the inky void of space/the dusty, windless surface of the moon, but I also get that I am a human being whose eyes have a hard time making sense of grainy, distorted, jumpy, cut-happy sequencing.

Of course, it doesn’t matter so much, because it turns out there just isn’t that much to see. SPOILERS to follow.

What’s on the moon? Rock-monsters. Small stones that are actually crab-bug things that burrow inside one of the astronauts, give him a plague, and make him insane. A lot of people have ragged on this concept, which okay, but it really is no less silly than giant fucking truck-people from beyond the stars showing up to stage a war on planet Earth. On the sci-fi silliness scale, I give rock-monsters on the moon about a 6.5. Maybe a 7. Faintly ridiculous, sure, but not irredeemably so. I mean, they’re not actually rocks. They just have space-camouflage.

But we learn essentially zero about them. Where did they come from? Have they always been there? Do they hibernate when food sources don’t come along? Because in the 4-billion-odd-year history of the moon, there have only been what, like a couple of guys who actually walked around on it. There may also have been a monkey at some point. Unless these things eat gray, potential prey sources are a little scarce. As for the particulars of the space madness they introduce to one of the crew, or who the crewmembers are themselves, all of that is pretty much left up to the imagination. It’s like the creators came up with the whole crab-rocks on the moon idea, looked at each other, and said “Well, that’s it then. Let’s roll!”

Thing is, you don’t even need much if any exposition. Cloverfield hardly begins to answer anything about its Manhattan-stomping monster. But we know plenty about the characters. And the pacing and story beats of the script are impeccable (whatever you think of the movie itself).

Apollo 18 has neither material nor execution. It’s just there. If “there” is ever “on your TV,” you should probably turn it off.