Posts Tagged ‘Harold Perrineau’
Wednesday, December 15th, 2021
THE MATRIX RELOADED may have been the most highly anticipated but immediately rejected sequel of my lifetime. I’m not just excluding PHANTOM MENACE for being a prequel – whatever happened in the rest of the world, I honestly didn’t experience many people hating it until months later, at least. With RELOADED it was pretty instant.
It was the only MATRIX movie I reviewed upon release, so you can click here to see my kinda dumb, mostly still applicable 2003 thoughts on the matter. I seemed to be fielding a backlash against the original MATRIX movie as well as people hating RELOADED, but it was only the latter I found myself feeling I had to defend over the years.
I do think I partly understand why people were disappointed. THE MATRIX ends on a perfect note of letting us imagine what’s next in the “world where anything is possible.” Any definitive answer of what happens next has a hard time competing with the electric feeling of not knowing. Especially when part 1 was a carefully constructed machine of concept, explanation and payoff, while part 2 kind of wanders through a labyrinth of tangential notions and questions before it gets to the battle it’s been promising. And it cuts off in a cliffhanger well before said battle. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Zerbe, Carrie-Anne Moss, Cornel West, Daniel Bernhardt, Gina Torres, Gloria Foster, Harold Perrineau, Harry Lennix, Helmut Bakaitis, Hugo Weaving, Ian Bliss, Jada Pinkett Smith, Keanu Reeves, Lambert Wilson, Laurence Fishburne, Monica Belluci, Nathaniel Lees, Nona Gaye, Randall Duk Kim, Tiger Hu Chen, Wachowskis, Yuen Woo-Ping
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 31 Comments »
Thursday, April 3rd, 2014
Listen all y’all, SABOTAGE is a great vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger right now. It’s a good mix of what you expect from him and what you don’t. It’s a movie that benefits from his Huge Movie Star presence. He can just walk in and the legendary badass backstory of his character, DEA squad leader John “Breacher” Wharton, manifests physically before our eyes. He can strut and bark commands and joke and you fully believe that his unruly team of trained killers – even big Joe Manganiello, who towers over him – respect, fear, and look up to him like he’s their dad.
I think this here is the perfect approach to Old Man Arnold: not making self-deprecating jokes like in the okay THE LAST STAND, but just being Arnold while proudly rocking a thick stripe of white hair around the edges. Yeah, I’m 66, who the fuck cares? I’m Arnold. Are you gonna be Arnold when you get to be my age?
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Arnold Schwarzenegger, David Ayer, Harold Perrineau, Joe Manganiello, Max Martini, Mireille Enos, Olivia Williams, Sam Worthington, Skip Woods, Terrence Howard
Posted in Action, Mystery, Reviews | 48 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.
(read the rest of this shit…)
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 »
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
I never did write a real review of the popular Danny Boyle picture 28 DAYS LATER, just a little blurb in a summer recap column. To make a short story stay short, I liked it but did not understand the hooplah. It seemed to me most of it had already been done in Romero’s movies, and I liked it better when it was a real movie instead of a home video. So I was kind of annoyed by all the hype at the time that Boyle had “reinvented the zombie movie.” Even the controversial running zombies were straight out of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. Somebody give Dan O’Bannon some credit. When he did that in 1985 it was a clever new take on zombies.
But I gotta tread carefully here because there are people out there who will flip out if you use the word “zombie” to describe the zombie-like people doing zombie things in this movie that is clearly based on the zombie films of George Romero. Zombies, it turns out, are people who die and then come back to life as zombies. They are not people who are infected and become zombies, unless they are infected to the point of death and then become zombies. In the case of these movies they just get infected, they do not necessarily die as far as we know, so they are something else. Nobody knows what it’s called, but it’s not a zombie. It’s just some thing that is exactly like a zombie and has every quality associated with zombies, but you can’t call it a zombie, that’s like using the N word almost. So I apologize to all the things who are not zombies but are exactly like zombies in all respects but they have not died and therefore are not zombies that I offended in my previous blurb. I will be more sensitive this time. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Harold Perrineau, Imogen Poots, Jeremy Renner, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne
Posted in Action, Horror, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Saturday, May 24th, 2003
This might bother some of you but I just want to say it up front: put me in the camp of people who say the original MATRIX really is “the shit” as the kids say when they mean that it is not shit but actually the opposite of shit, which is I guess in this case THE MATRIX. Because what these boys the Wachowski Brothers did was an extremely well executed twilight zone concept for the post William Gibson days which also happened to be the perfect vehicle to combine over the top Hong Kong martial arts traditions with american actors and computer effects AND an appropriate metaphor for our times.
I love the idea that somebody like Jackie Chan or Michael Jordan who has extraordinary physical skills could actually just be a smart dude who figured out loopholes in the laws of reality. If you can understand the program well enough you can cheat and do things that a person isn’t supposed to be able to do. In the old shaw brothers movies it was just magic or shaolin wisdom but here we put those same spectacular moves in a sci-fi context and we get a whole different spin where even some jackass like Keanu Reeves can fly through the air and be so convincing that most of American can watch him as the iconic badass Neo and not even think of him as Keanu anymore. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Carrie-Anne Moss, Harold Perrineau, Harry Lennix, Hugo Weaving, Jada Pinkett Smith, Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Monica Bellucci, Randall Duk Kim, Wachowskis
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 13 Comments »
