Archive for the ‘Thriller’ Category
Wednesday, February 20th, 2013
Well, I was stupid to write off K-19 all these years. I don’t know why I did. I didn’t even know what it’s about. I think I knew K-19 wasn’t a mountain, it’s a submarine. I knew it had kind of an audacious name but was directed by this year’s #1 Oscar snub, Kathryn Bigelow. That should’ve been enough, but I never heard anything too good about it and didn’t feel the need to see it.
Maybe it’s the submarine thing. I know this is blasphemy to alot of people, but I never even got into that one submarine movie that everybody loves that’s by the director of DIE HARD and PREDATOR. I’ve tried and it’s fine and everything but I just can’t get myself excited about it like everybody else. Maybe I’m subconsciously rebelling against my old man, who worked on subs. I never went that way. I’m a proud surface dweller. Strictly a land man. Vote no on Atlantis.
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Tags: Cold War, Harrison Ford, Kathryn Bigelow, Liam Neeson, National Geographic, Peter Sarsgaard, Russia, submarine, Walter Murch
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Thriller | 26 Comments »
Wednesday, February 13th, 2013
aka D-TOX
Here’s a movie that brings a new angle to my Badass Auteur Theory. If this starred Ben Affleck or Ewan McGregor or somebody it would just be a mediocre stalker thriller from the director of I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER. But since it stars Sylvester Stallone we can only see it in the context of his body of work. It forces us to look at it as a Sylvester Stallone vehicle and compare it to CLIFFHANGER and stuff. So it has the advantage of being an interesting tangent in his filmography.
Stallone plays Jake Malloy, former city cop turned FBI agent. The wikipedia entry makes me think he was supposed to be a Seattle cop, but I didn’t pick up on that from the movie and it wasn’t filmed here. Anyway, he’s on the trail of a serial killer who targets cops. He’s been chasing this guy for 6 months but he’s not in so deep he doesn’t have a personal life. He buys an expensive ring so he can propose to his girl (Dina Meyer), so I think you know what that means. He better own a black suit.
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Tags: Charles S. Dutton, Courtney B. Vance, Dina Meyer, Jeffrey Wright, Jim Gillespie, Kris Kristofferson, Robert Patrick, Sean Patrick Flanery, Stephen Lang, Sylvester Stallone, Tom Berenger
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 30 Comments »
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013
I have no familiarity with this Alex Cross character, either from the books by James Patterson or the two previous movies starring Morgan Freeman. But when they do a new one starring the guy from the Madea movies and from the director of STEALTH and the bad guy is Matthew Fox as a perverted ex-military, scuba-diving, charcoal-drawing, mixed martial artist assassin/rapist I figure it might be worth a look. And it is.
I’m not saying this is a good or even passable movie. It seems more like a fake parody movie from within another movie or a TV show than an actual thing that professional people would purposely make and release. But I mean that as a compliment. This is some awesomely stupid bullshit right here. You will like it. Or at least I did.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cicely Tyson, Ed Burns, James Patterson, Matthew Fox, Rachel Nichols, Rob Cohen, serial killer, Tyler Perry
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 44 Comments »
Thursday, January 10th, 2013
Okay, we were all horses pulling the Kathryn Bigelow bandwagon, right? We loved her for POINT BREAK and NEAR DARK, mostly. Also BLUE STEEL and STRANGE DAYS and all that. But did any of us ever predict Respectable Kathryn Bigelow would come about, and if so, did we guess how fuckin good that Bigelow would turn out to be? I sure didn’t.
The respect came for THE HURT LOCKER in 2008. It got the Oscar for best picture and she got best director, the only woman to receive that honor so far. It also had one of those career-exploding performances, the one that launched Jeremy Renner, at the time known mainly for playing Jeffrey Dahmer, into the guy who has two Oscar nominations and co-starred in big ass movies like THE AVENGERS and GHOST PROTOCOL and starred in THE BOURNE LEGACY and hosted Saturday Night Live and all this. I loved THE HURT LOCKER, which I saw as an ingeniously structured suspense thriller and character drama for its time that also worked as a deconstruction of many of our favorite action movie tropes. So I had high expectations for ZERO DARK THIRTY, and somehow it exceeded them.
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Tags: CIA, Edgar Ramirez, Frank Grillo, Harold Perrineau, James Gandolfini, Jason Clarke, Jennifer Ehle, Jeremy Strong, Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Mark Duplass, Scott Adkins
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Thriller | 203 Comments »
Monday, January 7th, 2013
ARGO is based on an amazing true story, recently declassified and told in this great Wired article. During the Iran hostage crisis, it turns out, the CIA managed to rescue a group of stranded American workers using an unusual cover story: they were part of a Canadian film crew scouting exotic locations for a STAR WARS inspired sci-fi fantasy epic. John Chambers, the genius makeup artist behind the PLANET OF APES series (and played by John Goodman here), had done “some contract work” for the CIA according to the article (let’s hope he gets a whole series of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE style thrillers) and helped to set up real Hollywood producers and offices for the fake movie. The now-worshipped-by-nerds comic book artist Jack Kirby (seen only in a cameo here, played by DEATH WISH V’s Michael Parks) provided the artwork that they used as pre-production set and costume designs.
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Tags: Adrienne Barbeau, Alan Arkin, based on a magazine article, Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Christopher Denham, Clea DuVall, Iran hostage crisis, Jack Kirby, Jack Pierce, Jimmy Carter, John Goodman, Kerry Bishe, Michael Parks, Philip Baker Hall, Rory Cochrane, Scoot McNairy, Tate Donovan
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 48 Comments »
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013
THE BOURNE LEGACY is a sequel with the uphill task of replacing its title character. Not recasting, like James Bond, but creating a new hero, like when Valerie Harper got fired from Valerie and they brought in Sandy Duncan as her sister-in-law. I actually think that’s more interesting than if they just made another Matt Damon BOURNE. I liked those movies but I think they’re pretty repetitive, and they wrapped up that storyline anyway. Enough of that, I say. But I’m surprised the studio thought there were enough people like me to justify making this movie.
(And I thought they were wrong, based on the reviews I’d heard. I know at least a couple of you guys hated it, and I assumed not many went to see it. But I just looked it up and it turns out it made more money than they expected it to and they might do another one.)
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Tags: Albert Finney, David Strathairn, Edward Norton, Jeremy Renner, Joan Allen, Oscar Isaac, Paddy Considine, Rachel Weisz, Scott Glenn, Stacy Keach, Tony Gilroy
Posted in Action, Reviews, Thriller | 83 Comments »
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012
Friends, it is my sad duty to verify reports that Isaac Florentine’s ASSASSIN’S BULLET (formerly titled SOFIA on IMDb, and out on DVD today) is no good. I guess it played a couple of theaters at some point, and it has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I can’t say I really disagree. It’s dull and amateurishly written and even though it has a weird thing going on with being a vanity project for some lady I never heard of, that’s not enough to make it very fun.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christian Slater, Donald Sutherland, Isaac Florentine, Timothy Spall
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 19 Comments »
Friday, September 21st, 2012
What more high pressure situation could there be than two men in a submarine arguing over whether or not to launch a nuclear missile? I guess the only thing that would make it more tense would be if they also had to get home in time for a kid’s birthday party. Luckily the birthday party happened at the beginning of the movie, right before they were deployed to take part in “the worst standoff since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Denzel Washington, Gene Hackman, James Gandolfini, Quentin Tarantino, Rick Schroeder, Steve Zahn, submarine, Tony Scott, Viggo Mortensen
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 51 Comments »
Thursday, August 23rd, 2012
Do you guys know about this one? How come I never knew about it? Not that PAST MIDNIGHT – a 1991 thriller starring Natasha Richardson, Rutger Hauer and Clancy Brown that went straight to video in ’93 – is very good, but it holds an important enough place in cinematic history that I figure I should’ve heard of it before.
On his commentary track for TRUE ROMANCE, Quentin Tarantino talks about the time before he sold that script and directed RESERVOIR DOGS. He mentions a job at the production company CineTel, where he says he would do punch ups on scripts “which were really page 1 rewrites.” I don’t know if he’s exaggerating that part or not, but I’m sure it’s true that he rewrote a line here or there. So did any of those ever end up getting produced?
Yes, at least one did, and it is PAST MIDNIGHT, Tarantino’s first film credit besides production assistant on Dolph Lundgren’s MAXIMUM POTENTIAL workout video. Associate producer Catalaine Knell thought his contributions to the script were important enough that she shared her credit with him.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Clancy Brown, DTV, Natasha Richardson, Paul Giamatti, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Yeoman, Rutger Hauer, Ted D'Arms, Tom Wright
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 26 Comments »
Thursday, June 21st, 2012
An Avenger and a Throne-Gamer butt heads over a suitcase of money in this mediocre DTV thriller
Wasn’t that awesome? I wrote a headline.
Chris Thor Hemsworth plays Sam, a Chicago knucklehead who thinks the Lord is smiling on him when a suitcase full of money is thrown over an overpass and lands on the hood of his station wagon. He’s not a streetwise tough guy of any kind, not a guy that knows how to handle the situation. He’s just a dipshit who thinks since nobody saw him take it as far as he knows he can just live off the money and there will be no consequences. At first his wife Leslie (Victoria Profeta) is nervous about it, but she decides to go along with it anyway. They pay off their debts in cash, buy a new Range Rover, a new house, new furniture, new TV. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chris Hemsworth, DTV, Glenn Plummer, Mike Starr, Sean Bean, Stephen Milburn Anderson, Victoria Profeta
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 142 Comments »
