The Walk - 2015 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ben Kingsley
Director:  Robert Zemeckis

Note:  Spoilers for Man On Wire, The Walk

The Walk tells the story already told in Man On Wire of Phillippe Petit's tightrope journey between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.  Man On Wire would easily go into my top 5 documentaries of all time - it's just a fantastic story, well-told, and one I knew almost nothing about when I watched the documentary.  Unfortuantely The Walk exists in a world where Man On Wire exists and thus it's somewhat of a failure - the one advantage it has is that it's able to film a CGI simulation of Petit's walk.  Here the issue I have with the film is that the 'walk' is meant to evoke fear and anxiety in an audience, and although they stick an audience surrogate on top of the building with Petit, the whole point of Petit's journey is that he's not afraid to do this - he does it for exhilaration.  The film is unable to convey Petit's mental journey from 'possibly afraid of falling' to 'not at all afraid of falling'.

I rated this 3 stars because even though it is a narrative failure and Man On Wire is a much better re-telling of this story, I was still terrified during that walk - that's what the film is trying to achieve, and it worked.

Hail, Caesar! - 2015 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Josh Brolin, George Clooney
Director:  Joel Coen

The Coen Brothers have made homage movies before - The Hudsucker Proxy is a melange of old Hollywood tropes mixed with the bizarre Coen sensibility.  That movie flopped.  Miller's Crossing is a period noir film mixed with the bizarre Coen sensibility.  That movie flopped.  Enter Hail, Caesar!, a film which appears to have been concocted with the sole purpose of getting to stage old Hollywood-style scenes in a madcap Coen brothers type film.  And it works.  It probably won't make anyone's list of the most profound Coen brothers films, but it's quite funny and its plot moves right along until the end without a bad scene in the bunch.  It's entirely possible that upon rewatch this film will go up in my estimation, and I do intend to rewatch it.