Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Wednesday, November 13th, 2019
GEMINI MAN is your traditional “the greatest assassin anybody ever saw decides to retire and then god damn it I thought they loved me but they’re sending a guy to kill me what the fuck” type scenario. The gimmick is that the guy they send after him is a younger version of himself created through the miracle of cloning. He figures this out a good third or more into the movie, but we know from frame one because of the studio’s decision to advertise the film.
Will Smith (“Nightmare On My Street”) plays both extreme retiree Henry Brogan and the facial expressions of the very advanced digital animation character playing his clone. Junior, as he’s called, gets dispatched after Henry’s Old Buddy From the Marines Jack (Douglas Hodge, THE DESCENT PART 2) and Russian operative Yuri (Ilia Volok, AIR FORCE ONE) tell him that that last guy they had him kill, the terrorist, was actually an innocent scientist being eliminated as part of a cover-up. When Henry hears this information he looks up to the clouds just as the lite on a satellite blinks, but it’s only to tell us someone heard this. He doesn’t seem to figure it out himself.
He does catch on that the new manager at the docks where he keeps his boat is really a D.I.A. agent sent to keep tabs on him. He asks Dani (Mary Elizabeth Lucy McClane Winstead, BOBBY) on a date, maybe just to get her to admit she’s spying on him and convince her he’s not a threat. But when some dudes try to kill both of them they end up on the run together. They head to Colombia to meet up with his Old Agency Friend turned small plane pilot Baron (Benedict Wong, LARGO WINCH). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Niccol, Ang Lee, Benedict Wong, Billy Ray, Brian Helgeland, Christopher Wilkinson, Clive Owen, Darren Lemke, David Benioff, Douglas Hodge, high frame rate, Ilia Volok, Jeremy Marinas, Jerry Bruckheimer, Jonathan Hensleigh, Marko Zaror, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Stephen J. Rivele, Will Smith
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 58 Comments »
Tuesday, November 12th, 2019
GOOD TIME is a hell of a movie from Josh and Benny Safdie, thirtysomething New York indie directors I never heard of until the flashy A24 trailer acted like they were a household name. Sure enough it’s their fifth feature film (including one documentary) but this one got a little more attention for starring Robert Pattinson, the guy from the Cronenberg movies. He plays Connie Nikas, a New York City dirtbag who storms into a doctor’s office to get his developmentally disabled brother Nick (Benny Safdie) and bring him to help rob a bank. They get away at first but most of the money is ruined by a dye pack and Nick gets arrested. The movie is about Connie running around town all night trying to find $10,000 more dollars to pay Nick’s bail.
It’s a stylish epic of dirt-baggery – Meth Age Michael Mann. An intimate look at a shitty dude doing idiotic things with fevered lighting, gritty real locations, some raw non-professional actors and one of the most legit retro-synth scores I’ve heard, a Tangerine Dream-esque thing by an electronic artist Oneohtrix Point Never, which is a name that I totally understand and can say easily, on account of how young and with it I am. And just so you know I didn’t have to ask anybody what vaporwave was and if I had I totally would’ve understood what Wikipedia meant about it being “built upon the experimental and ironic tendencies of genres such as chillwave and hypnagogic pop.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A24, Barkhad Abdi, Benny Safdie, Buddy Duress, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Josh Safdie, Necro, Oneohtrix Point Never, Robert Pattinson, Taliah Webster
Posted in Crime, Drama, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Monday, November 11th, 2019
As a young man I read a bunch of Stephen King. He was my favorite until I decided Clive Barker was more interesting – I don’t know if I was right. The point is I’m just another movie-watching asshole and can’t pretend to be a King scholar. I haven’t read The Shining (1977) or its 2013 sequel Doctor Sleep. I have, of course, seen Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING, and like everyone except King and the Razzies voters I think it’s a masterpiece. (I also just realized it’s the first horror movie I remember seeing.)
It almost seemed like a suicide mission for writer/director/editor Mike Flanagan (OCULUS, HUSH, GERALD’S GAME) to make a movie out of Doctor Sleep. How do you even make a sequel to one of the most unfuckwithable horror movies ever made – a fucking Stanley Kubrick movie – let alone try to please the author who famously hated the movie’s take on his very personal story about alcoholism? He tried to bridge the movie with the books, and I think he pulled it off! (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alex Essoe, Carel Struycken, Carl Lumbly, Cliff Curtis, Ewan McGregor, Jacob Tremblay, Mike Flanagan, Rebecca Ferguson, Stephen King, Zahn McClarnon
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 75 Comments »
Thursday, November 7th, 2019
BROKEN PATH (2008) is a humble but impressive low budget production, simple in story and filmmaking, but with a high volume of work put into its virtually non-stop action scenes. A little like last year’s NIGHTSHOOTERS, it has the feel of an indie horror movie, but its attraction is high quality fight choreography. It’s what happens when some passionate people get together a little money to make a violent home invasion movie, but those passionate people happen to be a star, director/choreographer and stunt team (Alpha Stunts) from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
I had a hard time getting a hold of this obscure footnote in the history of western martial arts movies of the oughts. I’m not sure I can call it under the radar, because I’ve had it recommended to me a few times over the years and seen it on an underrated action movies list. It never got American distribution though, so when I looked for it years ago I couldn’t find it. But it’s directed by GUYVER 2 and DRIVE choreographer Koichi Sakamoto, so Jack Thursby (and possibly another person on Facebook – sorry that I can’t find your comment) reminded me of it when I did Steve Wang Week earlier this year. This time I was able to order it on a German DVD under the title ATTACK OF THE YAKUZA. I think there’s also a UK release as BROKEN FIST. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alpha Stunts, Dan Southworth, home invasion, Johnny Yong Bosch, Koichi Sakamoto, Lanie Taylor, Michael G. Cooney, Pamela Walworth, Power Rangers, Sonny Sison
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, November 6th, 2019
I honestly wanted to see the LION KING quasi-live-action remake in the theater, but never managed to. Turns out it did okay without my money. But by waiting until now to review it I missed out on timely discussions of related issues about a pioneering studio turned monolithic corporation treating their legacy of hand drawn animation as just a shitty licensing library to be resold (and possibly replaced in the imagination of new generations) with more realistic imagery. I guess I addressed it in my review of the (actually) live action ALADDIN. Basically, I’m open to to enjoying these remakes on their own terms, but the whole idea of them is a bummer.
Now let’s get to a more controversial topic: I have never thought the original LION KING was very good. I know it’s a beloved classic, one of the highest grossing animated movies of all time, etc. I watch it once every 5-10 years hoping to like it better this time, but I always strike out. I liked the dramatic stuff, like everything having to do with Mufasa’s death, but I always thought the musical numbers, in addition to not being really my jam, were more of a distraction than a story. And I was not really into the farting warthog. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfre Woodard, Beyonce, Billy Eichner, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Disney, Disney remakes, Donald Glover, J.D. McCrary, James Earl Jones, John Kani, Jon Favreau, Keegan-Michael Key, Seth Rogen, Shahadi Wright Joseph
Posted in Cartoons and Shit, Family, Reviews | 67 Comments »
Tuesday, November 5th, 2019
LEON (THE PROFESSIONAL) sums up Luc Besson pretty good, doesn’t it? He’s creepy about young women. Also, he’s really good at putting them in cool, stylish action roles. His latest in that vein, ANNA, came out this summer with little fanfare (or box office), at least partly because Besson had recently been accused of rape. Maybe it deserved to fail. But for whatever it’s worth it’s a solid movie full of what he does well.
It actually has alot in common with ATOMIC BLONDE. A beautiful bisexual spy (well, assassin in this case) double and triple crosses her way through end-of-the-Cold-War European intrigue with a twisty plot and a couple of long, impressive fight sequences. Charlize and her action and David Leitch’s intoxicating colors and music are more my speed, but ANNA has the advantage of being real complicated without being hard to follow. It’s a satisfying tale. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: assassins, Cillian Murphy, Helen Mirren, KGB, Luc Besson, Luke Evans, models, Olivier Megaton, Sasha Luss
Posted in Action, Reviews, Thriller | 5 Comments »
Monday, November 4th, 2019
I love THE TERMINATOR, but I love TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY. To me it’s one of the all time greats of sequels, summer event movies, action movies, movies in general. It came into the world at the right time to knock me on my ass, and has only grown with me. We’d never seen a movie like it; the technology had not existed for a character to do the things that the liquid metal T-1000 did, and no woman, not even Ripley in James Cameron’s own ALIENS, had returned to the screen as thoroughly transformed into an indelible badass as Sarah Connor.
At the time it seemed like the biggest, loudest, most over-the-top and technologically advanced action spectacle we’d ever seen. Now there’s a certain quaintness and groundedness to it. The then-show-stopping computer effects are only for a little bit of morphing – now we notice the huge amount of real stunts involving a semi-truck, motorcycles, a helicopter and various pyrotechnics that would never be so real in a modern movie. And the story is built on characters and emotions in a way that’s much more resonant to me than most subsequent movies of this type. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Billy Ray, David S. Goyer, Gabriel Luna, James Cameron, Josh Friedman, Linda Hamilton, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Tim Miller
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 118 Comments »
Thursday, October 31st, 2019
THE HILLS HAVE EYES is not my favorite Wes Craven movie, but in a certain sense it’s one of his purest. It has that LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT maniac-college-professor vibe – another raw, seedy gut-punch of a drive-in movie layered with completely sincere themes and social commentary. And it’s a little more fantastical than LAST HOUSE, with less straight up degradation, so I don’t feel as ashamed for liking it.
Instead of a gang of criminals we have a literal tribe of modern primitives – the wicked spawn of Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth, THE CANDY SNATCHERS), born “40 pounds and hairy as a monkey” in Nevada, mutated by nuclear tests and the nearby Air Force gunnery range, grew to adult size too fast, burned down his parents’ home, his dad split his face open with a tire iron and left him in the desert to die, but he survived in the hills and kidnapped some poor prostitute (Cordy Clark) “to raise a passel of wild kids” with. They wear animal parts and pieces of junk as trophies, and like the buzzards in the sky they stay above, keeping watch below, waiting to see what the highway brings them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: cannibals, Dee Wallace, Don Peake, James Whitworth, Janus Blythe, Martin Speer, Michael Berryman, Peter Locke, Robert Burns, Robert Houston, Russ Grieve, Susan Lanier, Wes Craven
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Wednesday, October 30th, 2019
MA is a pretty simple little Blumhouse thriller that doesn’t go much deeper than what you see in the trailer, but I had fun with it. Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer (HALLOWEEN II) plays the titelistical matriarch, a.k.a. Sue Ann, a single veterinarian’s assistant in a small town in Ohio who is randomly approached one day by some high school kids who want her to buy them alcohol. Not only does she hook them up that one time, she becomes their regular buyer. And then she decides to let them use her basement as their party space. She’s like a cool, irresponsible aunt. She jokes around inappropriately sometimes, but tells them she’d rather they be here than out driving drunk or something. (Plan A was to party in a van.)
There are a couple obvious ways to play this. One would be to draw out the reveal of whether or not Ma is a psycho. I like that they immediately show her looking up the kids’ Facebook pages like a stalker. There are two other major escalations in craziness that happened so abruptly I got a big laugh and wished I’d seen this with an audience. The suspense is in how far she’s gonna take this. And there’s tension about things like “why is she so insistent that they not see the upstairs” and “will Maggie (Diana Silvers, BOOKSMART) be able to make her friends and her boyfriend Andy (Corey Fogelmanis, Girl Meets World) see that this lady is trouble?” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Blumhouse, Corey Fogelmanis, Diana Silvers, Juliette Lewis, Luke Evans, Missi Pyle, Octavia Spencer, Tate Taylor
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 34 Comments »
Monday, October 28th, 2019
SHREDDER is a snowboarding-themed slasher movie that I never heard of until now, but apparently somebody had, because RoninFlix put it out on blu-ray with a nice painted cover by Devon Whitehead (designer of many fine t-shirts from Fright Rags and Cavity Colors). It’s from 2001 (shelved until 2003 in the U.S.), but seems late-‘80s in its “we know this is dumb, but we’ll take it seriously because that’s more fun” spirit. It’s clearly not made by a studio, and shows very little of the SCREAM-inspired postmodern attitude of its actual era.
It’s about a mysterious skier (disguised only by normal ski gear) who murders snowboarders who trespass in a closed pass where a fatal accident once happened. Like my other recent 2003 Slasher Search entry, SIMON SAYS, it has a vanload of young people on a trip, slathering the screen with unadulterated obnoxiousness. The stuck up/aggressive girl is trip-arranger Kimberly Van Arx (Lindsey McKeon, Saved by the Bell: The New Class), whose rich dad is buying the resort, and has a quick trigger finger when it comes to asserting “do you know who I am!?” privileges. Her boyfriend Cole (Scott Weinger) seems kind of square and has a has kind of a Steve-on-90210 older-out-of-place-guy vibe. I was excited to learn that he’s the guy who did the voice of Disney’s Aladdin! (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Billy O', Brad Hawkins, Greg Huson, Lindsey McKeon, Scott Weinger, Slasher Search, slashers, snowboarding
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 5 Comments »
