Movie Reviews: The Real Ides of March Steel

by Jack Garcia

This is the first post to be written exclusively for my brand-new Joaquin the Chihuahua spin-off: Joaquin’s Movies and More!  I decided that my personal blog was being overtaken with movie reviews and Glee commentaries and whatnot, so I decided to create a new blog.  If you are already following my other blog, I would greatly appreciate it if you could follow this blog as well!

Before I start watching the new movies that came out today, I decided to post reviews for the movies that came out last week.  My theater only got Real Steel last Friday and in order to see The Ides of March I had to get a guess pass and go to another theater of the same name in a neighboring city.  It was worth it though!

The Ides of March AWESOME!

Ryan Gosling—who seems to be popping up everywhere lately—stars as Stephen Meyers, an idealistic staffer who works tirelessly for presidential candidate Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney, who also co-wrote and directed the film).  Meyers and the head of the campaign Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) are optimistic of Morris’ success, when Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti)—who works for their opponent—calls Meyers up one day asking him to switch sides.  What proceeds is a deceitful game of political chess, where Meyers is simply a pawn… or is he?

I was very excited to see this movie and I was more than satisfied with the political drama based on the play Farragut North by Beau Willimon (the title of the film comes from the line “Beware the ides of March” from Shakespeare’s Julius Caeser).  The film is very concise, meaning that story works like clockworks, each cog having a purpose and moving with precision.  The music by Alexandre Desplat (who most recently did Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Parts 1 and 2) was well-placed and really helped to highlight what the brilliant actors were already doing on-screen.  Gosling, Clooney, Hoffman and Giamatti were all terrific as to be expected, but the movie also benefited from Marissa Tomei in a small role of a newspaper reporter and Evan Rachel Wood as the young campaign intern who is the crux of the controversy.  She has one particularly moving scene that really shows her to be one of Hollywood’s most well-kept secrets.

Real Steel ADMIRABLE

Hugh Jackman stars as Charlie Kenton, an ex-boxer who tries to make a living by fighting robots in the not-too-distant future where human boxing is out and robot boxing is in!  He discovers that his ex-girlfriend has passed away, leaving his 11-year-old son Max (Dakota Goyo) in his custody.  The two struggle to get along after so many years apart, but when Max discovers a sparring bot in a junkyard, the two find themselves coming together as father and son.

I have to admit that I thought the movie looked ridiculously stupid when I first started seeing it advertised.  I came into the theater fully expecting to give it an “awful” rating on my blog.  Yet, I got suckered into the adorable story of Charlie and his son Max—mostly because Goyo played him with such spunk (and I have a feeling he’s a child actor that will start popping up in more and more movies).  Despite the fact that the boxing scenes were very juvenile, I thought the movie had quite a lot more heart than I was expecting, and I even found myself in tears!

Of course, I am a big crybaby, so take that for what it's worth.