Posts Tagged ‘Giancarlo Esposito’
Monday, December 30th, 2024
I’m not fully acquainted with the filmography of John Sayles, but I’m pretty sure THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET is an outlier. It was 1984, so Sayles had already had his Roger Corman/exploitation beginnings (writing PIRANHA, BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, ALLIGATOR, THE HOWLING and THE CHALLENGE) and moved into directing his indie dramas (RETURN OF THE SECAUCUS 7, LIANNA, BABY IT’S YOU). Here he makes his only ever sci-fi movie as a director, but it’s not all that commercial. Supposedly the story came to him in a dream.
The most sci-fi part is the opening cockpit lights and bleeping sounds as the mysterious extra-terrestrial played by Joe Morton (CURSE OF THE PINK PANTHER) crash lands on earth. He loses a leg in the process and hops around in an abandoned church until he somehow grows it back. Since he’s missing one shoe we see that his feet have three big clawed toes, like a dragon, but otherwise he looks human. In the city he finds a replacement shoe in a garbage can and I wondered if he understood that was garbage or if he just assumed Earth has public shoe dispensers. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bill Cobbs, Caroline Aaron, Daryl Edwards, David Strathairn, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Ernest Dickerson, Fisher Stevens, Giancarlo Esposito, Harlem, Jamie Tirelli, Joe Morton, John Sayles, Leonard Jackson, Liane Curtis, Michael Mantell, Reggie Rock Bythewood, Steve James, Tom Wright
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, November 5th, 2024
I’m no scholar of the works of Francis Ford Coppola. I agree THE GODFATHER I and II and APOCALYPSE NOW are amazing, and I’ve recently grown into a BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA zealot. I enjoyed THE CONVERSATION and THE OUTSIDERS and RUMBLEFISH and THE COTTON CLUB and DEMENTIA 13 and obviously CAPTAIN EO. I’ve had some of his wine, too – we get those little cans of Sofia for Oscar parties. But like most people I’m not really up on the experimental shit he’s been up to b’twixt the 21st century. In fact the last time I saw a new FCC joint was JACK in 1996.
But hell, I wasn’t gonna miss MEGALOPOLIS! You know the legend. He conceived it in the ‘70s, he’s tried to get it off the ground many times across the decades, now he finally did it with his own $120 million. Amazing. Whatever it is, you gotta respect what he did. Become a rich guy just to make a true indie on the largest possible scale. Pretty much all rich guys waste their money in far stupider ways.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Francis Ford Coppola, Giancarlo Esposito, Grace VanderWaal, James Remar, John Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Nathalie Emmanuel, passion project, Shia LaBeouf
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 19 Comments »
Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024
Well, my friends, it’s after Labor Day. Time to stop wearing white shoes according to Serial Mom, and time to wrap up the summer retrospective according to me. Some interesting movies that were released at the end of the summer include Richard Rush’s COLOR OF NIGHT (yet another legendarily hated movie at the time time, I thought it was kind of interestingly crazy when I watched it years later) and Roger Avary’s KILLING ZOE (which I’ve always sort of liked but never nearly as much as I wanted to), both released on the 19th. The 26th gave us another Tarantino-connected movie that was a huge deal at the time, Oliver Stone’s NATURAL BORN KILLERS.
I previously reviewed that one so thoroughly that I not only covered the movie, but the earlier script and the making of book, so I’m not going to rehash it much here. I do want to note that Oliver Stone was one of the directors most associated with boomer self analysis – rightly or wrongly, his movies were a big part of the way people my age conceived of the Vietnam War, the JFK assassination, and of course The Doors. But here in the summer of GUMP he was more interested in being contemporary, cutting edge, of-the-moment. I found the movie’s hyperactive collage style annoying at the time, but I can respect it more now, and it was obviously influential for other movies I initially and/or still find annoying like DOMINO and CRANK. His choice to recruit Trent Reznor to produce the soundtrack album proves that the movie is more Lollapalooza than Woodstock. It was also an early foray into cinema for the future Academy Award winning composer (though of course we all know he was in Paul Schrader’s LIGHT OF DAY in 1987, plus “Head Like a Hole” was in CLASS OF 1999 and PRAYER OF THE ROLLERBOYS and “Dead Souls” was in THE CROW).
This finale to the Summer of ’94 series will focus on a triptych of movies with this sort of generational torch passing as part of their plot. They are stories about young people and the lessons they learn from older mentors. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Boaz Yakin, Casey Siemaszko, Chris Conrad, Constance Towers, Ed Harris, Giancarlo Esposito, Hilary Swank, Malcolm McDowell, Melanie Griffith, Michael Cavalieri, Michael Ironside, N'Bushe Wright, Pat Morita, Richard Benjamin, Samuel L. Jackson, Sean Nelson, Walton Goggins
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Crime, Drama | 9 Comments »
Monday, July 8th, 2024
I hope everybody had a good Big Mia Weekend this year! For me, MAXXXINE was easily the most anticipated non-FURIOSA movie event of the summer.
In case you haven’t met Maxine Minx, she’s a character from Ti West’s X (2022). That’s a slasher movie set in 1979, when a group of amateur pornographers rent a farmhouse to shoot their first movie and are terrorized by the octogenarian owners (and an alligator). Mia Goth (A CURE FOR WELLNESS) plays both Maxine, the star of the porno shoot, and Pearl, the withered psychopath she runs over at the end. The prequel PEARL (shot back-to-back and released in the same year) is set in 1918, with Goth playing young Pearl growing up and losing her shit in the same farmhouse.
Now MAXXXINE completes the trilogy with Goth playing Maxine in 1985. Since surviving the massacre she’s had a successful porn career in Los Angeles and is now trying to move into “real” movies, like Marilyn Chambers or Traci Lords. But just when she seems to have her big break a sleazy private detective named John Labat (Kevin Bacon, FRIDAY THE 13TH, WILD THINGS) starts to harass her about her past, and also someone starts killing her friends and co-workers. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A24, Bobby Cannavale, Elizabeth Debicki, Giancarlo Esposito, Halsey, Kevin Bacon, Larry Fessenden, Mia Goth, Michelle Monaghan, Moses Sumney, Simon Prast, Ti West, Toby Huss, Tyler Bates, Zachary Mooren
Posted in Reviews, Crime, Horror | 22 Comments »
Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024
ABIGAIL (2024) is the new humorous horror-crime movie from directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, a.k.a. Radio Silence, the team behind SOUTHBOUND, READY OR NOT, SCREAM (2022) and SCREAM VI. The screenplay is credited to Stephen Shields (THE HOLE IN THE GROUND) and the usual Radio Silence guy Guy Busick.
I enjoyed this one, it’s a fun movie, but it kinda seems like it was designed without considering how it would have to be advertised. In order to explain the premise the trailers had to reveal information you don’t get until surprisingly far into the movie. It feels weird how long it pretends we don’t know, and how much of a shock it seems meant to be when it happens. You can see how much more fun it will be for anyone who sees it by accident on cable or whatever other blind viewing opportunities may exist. So in case someone out there still has that possibility, I’ll follow the movie’s example in taking my sweet time with the set up and then I’ll warn you when to cut out.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alisha Weir, Angus Cloud, Dan Stevens, Giancarlo Esposito, Guy Busick, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand, Melissa Barrera, Radio Silence, Stephen Shields, Will Catlett
Posted in Reviews, Crime, Horror | 29 Comments »
Tuesday, August 15th, 2023
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM is exactly what I hoped we’d start seeing after SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE: more animated features feeling they have permission to go wild with their visual styles. Directors Jeff Rowe and Keyler Spears already took the baton and ran with it two years ago in THE MITCHELLS VS. THE MACHINES; MUTANT MAYHEM shares that film’s anarchic doodles-on-your-notebook spirit and preference for cartoonish exaggeration. But this time they’ve largely abandoned three-dimensional computer animation’s longstanding quest for realistic textures in favor of artistic flair. Not only the backgrounds, but even the characters look like energetic oil pastel sketches. Even objects that appear tactile are covered in lines, squiggles, smears. Light-colored scratches on swaths of black give the impression of reflections or lights, but also of lines drawn by human hands. Computerized precision takes a back seat to creative looseness and chaos. Every frame looks like the concept art that you see in the making-of coffee table books, as if they somehow removed that final step that polishes things but inevitably loses some of their personality. The personality is intact.
It’s also like SPIDER-VERSE in that it’s a fun animated all ages super hero tale with plenty of laughs, good music, and some emotional substance. And until we have too many of those, I enjoy that too. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Atticus Ross, Ayo Edebiri, Brady Noon, Evan Goldberg, Giancarlo Esposito, Ice Cube, Jackie Chan, Jeff Rowe, John Cena, Keyler Spears, Micah Abbey, Nicolas Cantu, Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen, Shamon Brown Jr., Trent Reznor
Posted in Reviews, Cartoons and Shit, Comic strips/Super heroes | 9 Comments »
Thursday, June 8th, 2023
June 8, 1983
To many, TRADING PLACES is a beloved comedy classic. To me it’s a movie that Mrs. Vern references often and that we occasionally flip past on TNT. I think the only time I saw it all the way through I was still in elementary school. So I came to this viewing pretty fresh.
I know it goes back to The Prince and the Pauper or some shit, but Hollywood particularly loved this kind of comedy concept in the ’80s through ’90s: What if a non-rich guy could live among the rich? And what if a rich guy could live among the non-rich? What laughs would we have? What lessons would we learn? Don’t you agree it would be valuable? This one’s writers, Timothy Harris & Herschel Weingrod, later gave us BREWSTER’S MILLIONS, and you could also count THE TOY, LIFE STINKS, KING RALPH, and I’m sure some others. This is John Landis’s version, and he kicks it off with some satirical bite, but it eventually eases up and acts like we’re supposed to like the rich guy, assumes we want to see him have a happy ending. As was the style in those days. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christmas, Dan Aykroyd, Denholm Elliott, Don Ameche, Eddie Murphy, Giancarlo Esposito, Herschel Weingrod, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jim Belushi, John Landis, Paul Gleason, Ralph Bellamy, Timothy Harris
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs | 25 Comments »
Thursday, December 1st, 2022
Here’s a story I may or may not have told before. It takes place on February 28, 2001. A few minutes before 11 am there was a 6.8 earthquake epicentered in the southern Puget Sound. I was at work and I saw some shelves wobble and a few things fall down, but nothing serious. Downtown there was some damage – some vehicles got crushed by falling bricks, and I remember a couple clubs where bands used to play in Pioneer Square (OK Hotel and Fenix Underground) were wrecked enough they went out of business. I called my roommate at home to make sure none of my stuff broke, and he made fun of me.
After work I went to Pacific Place to see this movie MONKEYBONE. All the advertising looked cheesy, but I was hoping it might be interesting because it was from Henry Selick, the director of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. Unfortunately the advertising was pretty accurate. I remember a couple times during the movie something playing on a bordering screen made a loud rumble that vibrated the whole row I was sitting in. I thought about the three escalators I took up through the mall to get to the theater, and the fourth escalator inside the theater that goes up to the floor where this one was showing, and I thought, “That’s an aftershock, and the building is gonna collapse, and I’m gonna die watching fucking MONKEYBONE.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bob Odenkirk, Brendan Fraser, Bridget Fonda, Chris Columbus, Chris Kattan, Dave Foley, Doug Jones, Giancarlo Esposito, Harper Roisman, Henry Selick, John Turturro, Lisa Zane, Mark Ryden, Megan Mullally, Sam Hamm, Sandra Thigpen, stop motion animation, Thomas Haden Church, Whoopi Goldberg
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Fantasy/Swords | 21 Comments »
Wednesday, May 25th, 2022
“Like Popeye says, ‘I yam what I yam,’ right?”
On May 1, 1992, Fine Line Features released Jim Jarmusch’s NIGHT ON EARTH on a mere 40 screens. By comparison, LEAVING NORMAL was released to 362 screens on the same day, and nobody ever heard of that one. But this was a well marketed limited release – I knew NIGHT ON EARTH existed, and in fact went to see it on one of those 40 screens, specifically the one that was upstairs at Seattle’s Harvard Exit Theatre (1968-2015).
This is Jarmusch’s fifth film. It’s possible I’d seen STRANGER THAN PARADISE and DOWN BY LAW already, but I suspect I rented them after seeing this. (I know I’d never heard of PERMANENT VACATION and saw MYSTERY TRAIN later.) So I may not have realized that by his standards it was kind of commercial: in Winona Ryder (who had BEETLEJUICE, HEATHERS and EDWARD SCISSORHANDS under her belt and was about to do BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA) he had his biggest movie star to date, and despite its simplicity it sure seems to have a bigger budget than his previous films, since it’s filmed on location in four different countries. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: anthology, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Beatrice Dalle, Frederick Elmes, Gena Rowlands, Giancarlo Esposito, Isaach De Bankolé, Jay Rabinowitz, Jim Jarmusch, Kari Vaananen, Matti Pellonpaa, Paolo Bonacelli, Roberto Benigni, Rosie Perez, Sakari Kuosmanen, Tom Waits, Tomi Salmela, Winona Ryder
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Reviews | 15 Comments »
Monday, September 11th, 2017
This year THE HOST and SNOWPIERCER director Bong Joon-ho made a truly one-of-a-kind movie. OKJA is a sweet girl-and-her-creature tale like MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO after it has been swallowed by a vicious satire of corporate greed and man’s treatment of animals. It’s produced by Netflix with an international cast, many of them speaking English, but its wild shifts in tone make it feel safely within the tradition of South Korean cinema.
It already seems bug-nuts from the opening, when aggressively-faux-enlightened Mirando Corporation CEO Lucy Mirando (Tilda Swinton, CONSTANTINE) gives her colorful presentation about the “discovery” of the allegedly miraculously eco-friendly “superpig” species and their plan to give them to farmers in 26 cities around the world to raise for ten years using their local traditions and then to crown one as the best.
The decade passes, and young Mija (Ahn Seo-Hyun, the daughter in THE YELLOW SEA) lives an idyllic life in some mountains in Korea helping her grandfather (Byun Hee-bong, MEMORIES OF MURDER) take care of their superpig Okja. She’s bigger than a hippo – looks like a giant Eeyore – but limber enough to leap around like Ang Lee’s Hulk. Mija plays with her and rolls around on top of her belly and climbs inside her mouth to brush her teeth for her. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ahn Seo-Hyun, Bong Joon-ho, Byun Hee-bong, Daniel Henshall, Darius Khondji, Devon Bostick, Giancarlo Esposito, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jon Ronson, Lily Collins, Paul Dano, Steven Yeun, Tilda Swinton
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 13 Comments »
