MOVIE REVIEW | The Basketball Diaries (1995)

In a nutshell, Bored & Dangerous says: “The Basketball Diaries takes what could be an over the top, scared straight style after school special, and makes it scarily tragic, heartbreaking and real.”

 
“I was just gonna sniff a bag but one guy says if you’re gonna sniff you might as well pop it and another guys says if you gonna pop it you might as well mainline.”

Looking back on the last few years of Leonardo DiCaprio’s career, it just looks like an Oscar waiting to happen.  In the last decade, he’s been nominated for Best Actor twice, for The Aviator and Blood Diamond, before finally winning last month for The Revenant.  And even in less prestigiously highbrow roles, like Django Unchained and Shutter Island, he is never less than 100% committed.  I was thinking that this was something he grew into, once he got the heartthrob years of shit like Titanic out of his system.  But then I remember his performance in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, a movie he made as teenager, with a performance that’s nothing short of amazing.  And now I’ve seen him back it up just a few years later with The Basketball Diaries.

In New York at no specific point in time, Jim (DiCarprio) is a high school basketball star, wannabe poet and borderline delinquent.   Jim and his teammates, including Mark Wahlberg as Mickey, are the kinds of dudes who steal from their oppositions lockers after a game in a better neighbourhood than their own.  While it’s played off as ultimately harmless, it’s clear that on some level, Jim’s actions are fueled by the frustration of having his best friend (Michael Imperioli as Bobby) in hospital, dying of leukemia.

MOVIE REVIEW | The Gambler (2014)

“You’re born as a man with the nerves of a soldier, the apprehension of an angel.”

When I watched the original version of The Gambler, I went in knowing that movie gamblers rarely win, which is kind of the thrill.  “Because like gambling itself, even though you know winning is a long shot, it’s still exciting to think that there’s a still a slim chance of making that big score”.  Unfortunately, the risk of seeing a totally unnecessary and redundant remake didn’t add any level of thrill to watching an updated, Mark Wahlbergian take on, The Gambler.

Tens of thousands of dollars in the hole already, Jim Bennet (Wahlberg) makes the mistake of trying to gamble is way out.  Soon he’s hundreds of thousands of dollars in the red and in massive debt to two dangerous loan sharks, Neville (Michal Kenneth Williams) and Frank (John Goodman).  His rich mother (Jessica Lang) comes to the rescue, but why pay off his debt straight away when he can use her cash to gamble and lose even more?

MOVIE REVIEW | Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

“I hate cheap knockoffs!”

FULL DISCLOSURE: Before Transformers: Age of Extinction, I had never seen an entire Transformers movie from this current Michael Bay batch. I tried to watch the first one back when it came out, but fell asleep and never bothered returning to it.

FURTHER FULL DISCLOSURE: I didn’t really watch Transformers: Age of Extinction under the best of viewing conditions. I was on a long haul flight, I was half asleep, I had the volume down on the movie and was listening to a podcast. And I came in about 100 minutes in, stared dead eyed at it for 40 odd minutes, then turned off with about 20 minutes left. But I refuse to accept that a Michael Bay movie about robots hitting each other requires any more attention than that in order to form an accurate opinion and make an accurate judgment on its quality.