Posts Tagged ‘Kyle Chandler’
Thursday, April 1st, 2021
GODZILLA VS. KONG follows GODZILLA, KONG: SKULL ISLAND and GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS as the fourth movie in the 21st Century American kaiju series known as The MonsterVerse. When it comes to the giant monsters, as I’ve told you before, I’m a Gamera guy. I’m not trying to be a hipster and choose the less popular thing to show off, it’s just a fact – he’s the Guardian of the Universe. But setting him aside, Godzilla and his Monster Island pals have always interested me more than the King Kong movies, as great as some of those are.
So hopefully that puts some weight behind me saying that this crossover – which stacks the cards for Kong by starting with him, spending much of the movie with him and treating him as the underdog hero – is easily the best of the series.
It got me instantly. Opening with Kong waking up to a perfect needle drop and a sunny day on Skull Island, he scratches his ass as he groggily stumbles to the waterfall for a shower. It’s just a great example of those times I love when monsters just get to live a normal life instead of always leaping through the air and roaring at the camera. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Wingard, Alexander Skarsgard, Ben Serisin, Brian Tyree Henry, Demian Bichir, Eiza Gonzalez, Eric Pearson, Godzilla, Julian Dennison, kaiju, Kaylee Hottle, King Kong, Kyle Chandler, Lance Reddick, Max Borenstein, Michael Dougherty, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Shun Oguri, Terry Rossio, vs., Zach Shields
Posted in Monster, Reviews | 46 Comments »
Monday, June 10th, 2019
GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS is not the perfect American Godzilla movie of our dreams, nor is it one that takes a thrillingly new angle on giant monsters, like SHIN GODZILLA did in 2016. Honestly I expected to like it more than I did, being a devotee of director Michael Dougherty’s previous movie, KRAMPUS. (He’s also the guy who wrote X-MEN 2, URBAN LEGENDS: BLOOD MARY and SUPERMAN RETURNS, and then wrote and directed TRICK ‘R TREAT) But this is the first time an American version feels to me like it’s completely in the spirit of the Japanese films from Toho Studios, particularly the “Heisei period” from GODZILLA 1985 to GODZILLA VS. DESTOROYAH (1995), so we’re getting there. As a monster fan apparently more forgiving than some of my friends, I found plenty to love about it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bradley Whitford, CCH Pounder, Charles Dance, David Strathairn, giant monsters, Joe Morton, Ken Watanabe, Kyle Chandler, Michael Dougherty, Millie Bobby Brown, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Sally Hawkins, T.J. Storm, Thomas Middleditch, Vera Farmiga, Zhang Ziyi
Posted in Monster, Reviews | 38 Comments »
Monday, November 19th, 2018
I really dug WHIPLASH and LA LA LAND so I was gonna see any new movie from director Damien Chazzelle. When I saw the trailer for FIRST MAN, his new one starring Ryan Gosling (FRANKENSTEIN AND ME) as Neil Armstrong, it looked like it was shot in an unorthodox way, but I still wondered why we would need another astronaut history moon movie. Haven’t we seen every variation of this? Clean cut, crew-cut, cut-from-a-different-cloth heroes like they don’t make anymore. Courage and adventure and boy scouts and all that. Is there anything new to say about it?
Well, it is in fact a totally different take. In fact, I don’t see anyone saying this, but it seems to me like kind of a subversion or at least a deconstruction of that ideal of heroism.
Sure, you also have all the stuff about what a preposterous feat it was to figure out you can shoot some guys on a fuckin rocket, have them get out and walk around on the moon, and then come back and land on earth safely. I mean, how the fuck? The filmatism really concentrates on rockets as rickety, iffy propositions. We’re crammed in there with him in the test flights, or with the crew on the real launches. Always claustrophobic. We hear all the roaring, vibrating, clattering, rattling and mysterious straining metal groans from somewhere in the machine. The dials and buttons click and look so impossibly low-tech today. Even when they were the state of the art they couldn’t have felt all that safe. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: astronauts, Buzz Aldrin, Ciaran Hinds, Claire Foy, Corey Stoll, Damien Chazelle, Ethan Embry, Gil Scott-Heron, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Leon Bridges, Lucas Haas, moon landing, Neil Armstrong, Patrick Fugit, Ryan Gosling, Shea Whigham
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 11 Comments »
Wednesday, December 14th, 2016
MANCHESTER BY THE SEA is the heavily critic-worshipped third film by writer-director Kenneth Lonergan (YOU CAN COUNT ON ME, MARGARET*). It’s a story about loss and family and people trying to salvage their fucked up lives. It’s not as devastating as some people make it sound, but also not as ultimately-uplifting or inspirational as maybe you would hope. It’ll probly make you tear up a few times and laugh a few times in its 2+ hours. It captures the ways family, friends and beer can bring you both solace and pain.
*[Please note that it is not one movie called YOU CAN COUNT ON ME, MARGARET. It is one movie called YOU CAN COUNT ON ME and then another totally separate one called MARGARET. And if I had written it as MARGARET, YOU CAN COUNT ON ME I would’ve had the same problem.]
*[Also please note that Lonergan wrote THE ADVENTURES OF ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE and an episode of the cartoon Doug, but it wouldn’t be appropriate to mention those at all because right now we are focusing on his directorial work.] (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: C.J. Wilson, Casey Affleck, Gretchen Mol, Kenneth Lonergan, Kyle Chandler, Lucas Hedges, Michelle Williams
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, February 9th, 2016
CAROL is a story of love – long, drawn out, dangerous, afraid-to-say-anything love. Young Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara, NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET remake), working as a shopgirl, seems practically hypnotized when she spots customer Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett, INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL) in her fur coat, Christmas shopping for her daughter. When Carol forgets her gloves on the counter it gives Therese a reason to contact her, and they strike up a relationship outside of the store. Who does Carol think she is, Cinderella? Well, some of the men in the movie treat her like O.J.
See, this takes place in the 1952 (five years before CRYSTAL SKULL), when women falling for each other was treated like a shameful crime or a sickness. Carol recently split from her husband Harge (Kyle Chandler [THE WOLF OF WALL STREET], looking more and more like Robert Foster as each minute of the day passes), and he’s still trying to work it out. But when that’s obviously not gonna happen he threatens to use a confessed lesbian incident against her in custody hearings. That’s devastating to her because her daughter is the only thing that matters to her.
It’s a movie where women dance with men and look over at each other from across the room. They have to make up alibis just for being together. Saying Therese is her assistant. If they’re sitting at a table together and a dude comes over and starts talking to them they have to act like he’s not interrupting, and sit and listen to the motherfucker. And he has no idea. He probly figures they’ve been sitting together wishing for a man. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Carrie Brownstein, Cate Blanchett, Kyle Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, Phyllis Nagy, Rooney Mara, Todd Haynes
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Romance | 8 Comments »
Monday, December 30th, 2013
THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is the incredibly entertaining new movie from director Martin Scorsese (Michael Jackson’s BAD), based on the memoir of scumbag fraudulent stockbroker Jordan Belfort (executive producer of SANTA WITH MUSCLES), adapted by Terence Winter (writer of a 50 Cent video game and 2 episodes of The Cosby Mysteries). Leonardo DiCaprio (POISON IVY) plays Belfort in the saga of his meteoric rise from innocent Wall Street rookie to multi-millionaire cokehead innovator in greed and callous thievery. After THE GODFATHER and all these other classics that show how organized crime operates like a business, here Scorsese flips it around to show how business acts like gangsters.
Man, we take it for granted after so many big, showy movies with great directors – or we don’t want to admit it ’cause he’s still got kind of a baby face and we remember when he made the teenage girls faint in their pants – but jesus, DiCaprio sure has turned into a good actor. WOLF is Scorsese picture #5 for him, and it seems for a while like he’s mostly doing his usual moves. He’s got the intensity, the energy, the accent that’s old timey and not very naturalistic but he goes so all-in that I buy it, the face that teeters between boyish and Benicio Del Toro. Early in the movie he even crash-lands a small aircraft and stumbles away, as if he’s doing callbacks to THE AVIATOR. He should do that in all his movies, it could be his “I’ll be back.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Jean Dujardin, Jon Bernthal, Jon Favreau, Jonah Hill, Kyle Chandler, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Matthew McConaughey, Rob Reiner, Robin Leach, Sharon Jones, Spike Jonze, Terence Winter, white collar crime
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Crime, Reviews | 144 Comments »
