Posts Tagged ‘Jesse Plemons’
Wednesday, November 13th, 2024
Jody Hill’s OBSERVE AND REPORT (2009) was maybe a little ahead of its time. Or at least ahead of me. I guess I didn’t review it, but I remember being a little disappointed at the time, thinking it had kind of a fake darkness to it. I thought it was supposed to be a TAXI DRIVER type portrait of a mall security guard, and it seemed kind of forced to me.
Watching it now, though, it obviously got alot of shit right about a certain type of person that it really was important to be keeping an eye on. In fact it was right enough that now my issue is that maybe it’s treating the subject matter a little too lightly.
Seth Rogen stars as Ronnie Barnhardt, the jovial but completely deluded head of security at Forest Ridge Mall who sees an opportunity for glory when a serial flasher (Randy Gambill, production designer of Hill’s debut THE FOOT FIST WAY) keeps showing up and exposing himself to customers and staff. Ronnie treats it like a big murder investigation and becomes very competitive with the overqualified actual cop assigned to catch the guy, Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta, COP LAND). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anna Faris, Aziz Ansari, Celia Weston, Collette Wolf, Danny McBride, Jesse Plemons, Jody Hill, Michael Pena, Patton Oswalt, Ray Liotta, Seth Rogen, Tim Orr
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs | 11 Comments »
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2021
In a small, depressing town in Oregon, ravaged by economic despair and opioid addiction, out crawls a monster to make shit even worse. Come on, read the room, monster. We don’t see him clearly for a while, we don’t know what he’s up to at first, or how he works, but we get his general vibe. Uncool.
We see this story primarily through the eyes of elementary school teacher Julia Meadows (Keri Russell, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III, DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, and I believe I heard she was in a ‘90s television show created by the directors of those films, not sure about that, probly mistaken), who is not in a great spot. She moved out of town when she was young, but has recently returned to find it not as good as it even was then. She temporarily lives in her childhood home with her brother Paul (Jesse Plemons, BATTLESHIP) and every day goes to the store and stares longingly at the liquor shelf while she buys a pack of gum or something.
She has trouble getting all but one of her students to engage at all in class, but she tries. For example she calls on Lucas Weaver (Jeremy T. Thomas, “School boy / classmate,” DOLLY PARTON’S COAT OF MANY COLORS), a scrawny sad little kid with holes in his shirt, who may possibly be illiterate. He goes from drawings with no text when he reads his story, an extremely grim and thinly-veiled autobiography about a young bear and his sick father bear. We can see how it sounds to her, but we know it’s even worse: his dad Frank (Scott Haze, VENOM, MINARI) and little brother Aiden (Sawyer Jones, one episode of Modern Family) had an encounter with the monster and now they’re locked in the attic as veiny, bestial zombie-type creatures. Lucas kills small animals and chops up roadkill to feed them. Alot of responsibility for a kid that age, and he definitely steps up to the plate. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amy Madigan, Graham Greene, Guillermo Del Toro, Guy Davis, Jeremy T. Thomas, Jesse Plemons, Keri Russell, monster movies, Nick Antosca, Rory Cochrane, Sawyer Jones, Scott Cooper, Scott Haze
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 5 Comments »
Monday, March 29th, 2021
JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH is one of this year’s best picture nominees (plus best original screenplay, best cinematography, best original song, and its two title characters were confusingly both nominated for best supporting actor). It’s from director Shaka King (NEWLYWEEDS) and it’s about the true story of an informant pressured by the FBI to go undercover in the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, an operation that culminated in police murdering Fred Hampton in his bed with two shots to the back of his head. (And getting away with it, obviously.)
The movie opens with a familiar scenario: an officer interrupting a group of Black men to hassle them. They’re in a bar, at a pool table, he makes them empty their pockets, asks about the car out front, claims it was stolen. They’re outraged but obviously used to this shit, then they notice his badge says FBI so why is he asking about a car, and he’s kind of hiding his face and he looks really young…
As he’s about to drive away using their keys they realize it’s a scam. He’s not an FBI agent, but a clever and/or weird car thief named William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield, THE PURGE: ANARCHY). But after he’s caught with the car a real FBI agent named Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons, BATTLESHIP) comes after him. He obviously doesn’t really give a shit that some kid impersonated a federal officer, but he knows he can threaten jail time to force him to do undercover work. So like Ron Stallworth at the beginning of BLACKKKLANSMAN, but under duress, O’Neal is sent to spy on black militants, specifically Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya, JOHNNY ENGLISH REBORN), the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Black Panthers, Charles D. King, Daniel Kaluuya, Dominique Fishback, Fred Hampton, J. Edgar Hoover, Jesse Plemons, Keith Lucas, Kenneth Lucas, LaKeith Stanfield, Martin Sheen, Ryan Coogler, Shaka King, Terayle Hill, Will Berson
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Wednesday, February 13th, 2019
Scott Cooper is an actor-turned-writer/director who seems slightly under the radar to me. He made a splash with CRAZY HEART ten years ago, a movie that somehow seems overshadowed by Jeff Bridge’s Oscar-winning performance in it (and that I thought of a few times watching A STAR IS BORN). His followup, the gloomy crime drama OUT OF THE FURNACE (2013), teamed him with Christian Bale (POCAHONTAS) for the first time, and I have to admit that I have not seen his poorly reviewed BLACK MASS (2015). But he didn’t write that one. I only watch the ones he directs and writes, obviously.
2017’s HOSTILES (based on a manuscript written by Donald E. Stewart [JACKSON COUNTY JAIL, DEATHSPORT, THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, PATRIOT GAMES, CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER] in the ’80s) reteamed him with Bale for what might be categorized as a Real Serious Western – the kind where the director is hesitant to call it a western (“I don’t think in terms of genre… If anything it’s a psychological western in the vein of Anthony Mann…I don’t think it’s a western, it has more in common with Joseph Conrad or Larry McMurtry or Louis L’Amour” he told Moviemaker) and you want to grab them and tell them “all right cool it buddy, just admit you made a really good western.” (See also THE REVENANT.)
But I guess I sort of get it. A completely traditional western is not very marketable in this day and age. Most people don’t really want the genre without a little bit of a new spin on it, and HOSTILES has one. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Beach, Ben Foster, Christian Bale, Donald E. Stewart, Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane, Rosamund Pike, Scott Cooper, Scott Wilson, Stephen Lang, Timothee Chalamet, Wes Studi
Posted in Reviews, Western | 12 Comments »
Tuesday, February 12th, 2019
When I heard writer/director Adam McKay was doing a movie with Christian Bale (TERMINATOR SALVATION) playing Dick Cheney, I couldn’t picture what that would be, but I assumed I would love it. The former Saturday Night Live writer has much more experience in beloved Will Ferrell comedies than in Serious Important Movies, but I enjoyed THE BIG SHORT‘s novel and audacious attempt to make entertainment out of explaining the early 2000s housing bubble. Many worship ANCHORMAN or STEP BROTHERS, but for me it’s TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY that makes me laugh no matter which part I rewatch for the one-thousandth time on cable. Maybe people don’t think of it this, way, but to me it’s the best pop culture portrait of what was going on in our country during the Bush years. So I figured McKay had good instincts about this stuff. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam McKay, Amy Adams, best picture nominees, Christian Bale, Dick Cheney, Jesse Plemons, movies that are not as good as The Fast and the Furious, Sam Rockwell, Steve Carell, Tyler Perry
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Reviews | 35 Comments »
Monday, February 12th, 2018
THE POST is Spielberg’s newspaper movie. Specifically it’s about the Washington Post in 1971 struggling for relevance, banned from a first daughter wedding, in the process of taking an inherited family business public, when suddenly their more exalted rivals the New York Times get a court injunction for breaking the story of the Pentagon Papers (a secret study proving that the government had known for years that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable and stayed in just to put off the humiliation of a loss). Can The Post’s reporters get ahold of these Papers for themselves, will they have the balls to print a story about them, and will they get away with it? I think you know the answers, but tune in to find out how it goes down.
Like LINCOLN or MUNICH, this is one of Spielberg’s very good grown up movies that doesn’t necessarily light the world on fire, seems destined to be buried in his catalog of iconic classics, but gets some nice reviews and an “it’s an honor just to be nominated” slot in the best picture category at the Oscars. Another movie like that was BRIDGE OF SPIES, the year SPOTLIGHT won best picture. SPOTLIGHT was a good movie with a big cast doing great work in a story about the importance of journalists uncovering dangerous secrets and standing up to powerful institutions that have covered up their own complicity in atrocities. THE POST is all those things with the added bonus of being thrilling and cinematic. Spielberg might be doing a smart-people-talking-and-figuring-things-out movie, but he’s gonna do that with an eye for imagery, period detail, and visual explanations of processes: stealing and reproducing a massive document, puzzling together the order of said document when the pages get mixed up, delivering a message across town, creating the plates to actually print a newspaper, running the printing press, the list goes on.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alison Brie, Bob Odenkirk, Bruce Greenwood, Carrie Coon, David Cross, Jesse Plemons, Josh Singer, Liz Hannah, Matthew Rhys, Meryl Streep, Michael Stuhlbarg, newspapers, Pat Healy, Sarah Paulson, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Tracy Letts, Vietnam
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 18 Comments »
