Posts Tagged ‘Michael Keaton’
Saturday, September 28th, 2024
KNOX GOES AWAY is, somehow, the second movie I watched in a week where a professional killer is diagnosed with the fatal neurocognitive disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In THE KILLER’S GAME it quickly turns out to be a false alarm, but even setting that one aside there’s a small subgenre of killers trying to do one last job before their dementia stops them. I’ve also seen THE DYING OF THE LIGHT with Nicolas Cage and MEMORY with Liam Neeson, which is a remake of a Belgian film called THE ALZHEIMER CASE (or at least an adaptation of the same novel). I suppose all of these are a cousin to movies about killers with other fatal diseases – in 3 DAYS TO KILL, for example, Kevin Costner has an aggressive form of cancer, in SHADOWBOXER Helen Mirren has the cancer, in KATE Mary Elizabeth Winstead has been poisoned, etc.
This one has a little dark humor but it’s mostly grim and serious. Michael Keaton (AMERICAN ASSASSIN) directs and stars as John Knox, who has hidden his memory problems from people including his partner Muncie (Ray McKinnon, FOOTLOOSE). When a specialist (Paul Perri, MANHUNTER) tells him the news he starts saying he’s “going away” and “cashing out,” as he arranges to launder his assets and give them to his ex-wife Ruby (Marcia Gay Harden, SPACE COWBOYS), estranged son Miles (James Marsden, ACCIDENTAL LOVE) and favorite sex worker Annie (Joanna Kulig, COLD WAR). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Al Pacino, dementia, Gregory Poirier, James Marsden, Joanna Kulig, Marcia Gay Harden, Michael Keaton, Paul Perri, Ray McKinnon, Suzy Nakamura
Posted in Reviews, Crime, Thriller | 14 Comments »
Thursday, September 26th, 2024
A sequel to BEETLEJUICE was first announced when part 1 was still in theaters. Director Tim Burton started developing it in earnest, went through a couple different ideas, it seemed like it was really gonna happen in the early ‘90s until he and Michael Keaton shifted their focus to BATMAN RETURNS. In my opinion that’s one of Burton’s best movies and one of the great sequels – it’s a continuation but reinvents so much of the first movie’s approach that it feels completely fresh and even more potent.
A bit of the song “Macarthur Park” echoes hauntingly over the production logos of the BEETLEJUICE sequel we finally got 36 (!) years later: “I don’t think that I can take it / ‘cause it took so long to bake it.” But after all that time in the oven, BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE is no BATMAN RETURNS. It’s more of a getting-the-gang-back-together type of sequel, not as much of a shift as it probly would’ve been back then, or that it would need to be to be a new classic. To me it feels less aggressive about nostalgia than most of these types of things, but I gotta admit it’s built more on “remember this?” than “hey, check THIS out!” It returns to the afterlife but mostly just the same bureaucracy/waiting room stuff as the first movie. We get another sandworm, another non-consensual lip synch, another wedding. All fun stuff, but wouldn’t all-new stuff be better? I bet younger, hungrier Burton would’ve brought us somewhere totally different. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfred Gough, Catherine O'Hara, Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux, Michael Keaton, Miles Millar, Monica Bellucci, Sami Slimane, Santiago Cabrera, Seth Grahame-Smith, Tim Burton, Willem Dafoe, Winona Ryder
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 22 Comments »
Thursday, July 27th, 2023
July 22, 1983
MR. MOM is a domestic comedy with a likable performance by Michael Keaton and a dated premise. The screenplay is credited to John Hughes, the National Lampoon magazine humorist who had started a career in movies by writing NATIONAL LAMPOON’S JAWS 3: PEOPLE 0, to be directed by Joe Dante. Steven Spielberg threatened to never work with Universal again if they really went through with that shit, and they ditched the project, making way for the hated but not parodic JAWS 3-D. So instead Hughes’ first screenplay credit ended up being NATIONAL LAMPOON’S CLASS REUNION, and this was his second (beating NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VACATION by a week). It was directed by Stan Dragoti (LOVE AT FIRST BITE).
Keaton (in his fourth movie, between NIGHT SHIFT and JOHNNY DANGEROUSLY) plays Jack Butler, an engineer at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. But the economy isn’t good, cars aren’t selling so well, so one day after commuting to work with his friends “Jinx” Latham (Jeffrey Tambor, SATURDAY THE 14TH), Larry (Christopher Lloyd, SCHIZOID) and Humphries (Graham Jarvis, THE HOT ROCK), Jinx calls the other three in to his office to tell them they’ve been laid off. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Spelling, Ann Jillian, Christopher Lloyd, Edie McClurg, Frederick Koehler, Graham Jarvis, Jeffrey Tambor, John Hughes, Lauren Shuler Donner, Lee Holdridge, Martin Mull, Michael Keaton, Stan Dragoti, Taliesin Jaffe, Terri Garr
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, June 21st, 2023
When Barry Allen (Ezra Miller, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN), a.k.a. The Flash, discovers that he can run so fast he travels through time, the first thing he does is what we all wish we could do: go tell Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck, SMOKIN’ ACES) about it. And his cool rich friend gives him wise, succinct advice: if it’s possible for you to change the past, such as by stopping the murder of your mother (Maribel Verdú, TETRO), it would be very dangerous, and besides, our scars make us who we are. Look at me, for example – I’m fuckin Batman!
But as Barry prepares one more desperate appeal for his father (Ron Livingston, KING OF THE ANTS), who was blamed for his mother’s death, it occurs to him that if he traveled back in time he wouldn’t have to intervene during the murder. He’d just have to make sure his mom had tomato sauce so his dad wouldn’t leave for the store, causing a burglar to believe no one was home. A loophole. One weird trick to save the Allen family. Of course, his changes cause reverberations (with the unusual twist that since time isn’t linear it doesn’t just branch off, it changes in all directions), and he spends the movie running around very fast trying to clean up his mess. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andy Muschietti, Ben Affleck, Christina Hodson, DC Comics, Ezra Miller, Gal Gadot, Jeremy Irons, Joby Harold, John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein, Kiersey Clemons, Maribel Verdu, Michael Keaton, Michael Shannon, multiverse, Ron Livingston, Sasha Calle, time travel
Posted in Reviews, Comic strips/Super heroes | 64 Comments »
Monday, July 11th, 2022
“It’s the so-called normal guys who always let you down. Sickos never scare me. At least they’re committed.” —Selina Kyle
“He had graduated to a point where he wanted to make movies that are his movies. And this is one hundred percent Tim’s movie.” —BATMAN RETURNS producer Denise DeNovi
On June 19, 1992 we got a blockbuster super hero movie unlike we’d seen before or have since. Since Tim Burton’s BATMAN RETURNS was about as much of a sure thing hit as a studio could ever have, and because the director had been unsure about doing another one, Warner Brothers left him alone to do what he wanted. So it’s a rare combination: an expensive summer blockbuster based on pop culture icons, but also an odd, personal film by an earnest visualist director without much interest in crowdpleasing spectacle. Okay, maybe that describes 1990’s DICK TRACY also, but this is DICK TRACY’s much freakier second cousin. As the first sequel to the movie that made comic book adaptations a hot commodity it was in a unique position to make up most of its own rules about what a super hero sequel is supposed to be, and it wasn’t timid about it.
I’ve written before about my love for the era of comic book movies that started with BATMAN and ended around BLADE or X-MEN. Since the medium that inspired them was still considered nerd shit, since digital FX were in their infancy, since most of them never worried about setting up a sequel let alone a cinematic universe, and since most were heavily influenced by what Tim Burton had done in BATMAN, the genre was very different from what it is today. There was far less literal fidelity to the source material (for good and bad), and relatively few attempts to depict extravagant super powers and creatures, meaning less falling back on visual effects sequences. Some tried to reimagine a pulpy past (THE ROCKETEER, THE SHADOW, THE PHANTOM, DICK TRACY), while the ones trying to be new and contemporary often celebrated colorful outsiders and weirdos (THE CROW, THE MASK, BARB WIRE, TANK GIRL, X-MEN). And I think my favorite thing about them is that they didn’t usually take place in “the real world.” They depended on a stylized look with big sets on sound stages, matte paintings and miniatures to create their own heightened reality. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony De Longis, Christmas, Christopher Walken, Cristi Conaway, Daniel Waters, Danny DeVito, Danny Elfman, DC Comics, Denise DeNovi, Diane Salinger, great sequels, Jan Hooks, Joan Giammarco, Michael Gough, Michael Keaton, Michael Murphy, Michelle Pfeiffer, Pat Hingle, Paul Reubens, Sam Hamm, Steve Witting, Tim Burton, weird sequels, Wesley Strick
Posted in Reviews | 111 Comments »
Thursday, September 23rd, 2021
I don’t know if Maggie Q thinks of herself as an action star. She’s a good actress, and in recent years she’s been in horror movies and thrillers and on Designated Survivor, and she has a new sitcom coming soon. Maybe one of her best known roles was the title character in Nikita, where I assume she kicked a multitude of asses every week, but it’s not like anybody puts the original TV Nikita Peta Wilson or the original movie Nikita Anne Parillaud or the second movie version Bridget Fonda in a category with Jean-Claude Van Damme and those guys. They’re just actors without much association to the genre.
But I respect that Q specifically came out of Hong Kong martial arts films. She’s American, but as a young woman she worked as a model in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong, where she was discovered and trained by Jackie Chan. Some of her Hong Kong films were Benny Chan’s GEN-X COPS 2, Ching Siu Tung’s NAKED WEAPON and Daniel Lee’s Seagal-produced DRAGON SQUAD, before coming to Hollywood for cool supporting parts in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III and LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. She’s been in a bunch of stuff since then, including the DIVERGENT series. A lesser known one I thought she was cool in was PRIEST. But I kinda thought she’d moved on from that, so as an action fan I was so thrilled when I first saw the trailer for THE PROTÉGÉ and realized she not only had a legit starring role action vehicle, but one that was made to be released in theaters! And it really happened! I saw it in one!
This was a few weeks ago, many of the reviews I saw were negative, and it’s probly pretty much gone already, but it’s on VOD now and on disc soon. So I want to put in a good word for it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Maggie Q, Martin Campbell, Michael Keaton, Richard Wenk, Robert Patrick, Samuel L. Jackson
Posted in Action, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Tuesday, May 4th, 2021
May 3, 1991
I’d never seen this one before, and from the title I always thought it was a thriller about police corruption. I guess I had only seen the tough guy poster on the DVD and blu-ray, and not the theatrical one that looks like SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE or something.
I think there is some subtle commentary about policing early in the movie, which I will go into, but for the most part it’s not about that. Instead this movie – which was only the fifth release from Disney’s not-for-kids label Hollywood Pictures – really is a fusion of the type of vibe of those two posters. It’s a gritty police/crime thriller about a cop whose partner gets killed, but in addition to going after the people he considers responsible, he and his wife take care of and then try to adopt the dead partner’s three adorable daughters. The amount of screen time and sincerity it puts into the second part is very unusual, so although this is in many ways not my type of movie, I respect its bold mix of genres. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony LaPaglia, Benjamin Bratt, Heywood Gould, Kevin Conway, Kevin Corrigan, Michael Keaton, Rachel Ticotin, Renee Russo, Summer of 1991, Tony Plana, Vondie Curtis-Hall
Posted in Reviews, Crime, Drama | 20 Comments »
Friday, June 21st, 2019
Tim Burton’s BATMAN is a movie about a feeling – a feeling called Batman. It’s a lonely, broken, hanging out in a cave with the bats feeling. A sad about my dead parents but trying to be me feeling. A doing a bad job of passing for a normal person but fuck you I’m gonna dress and drive how I want and do what I want at night feeling. An okay it’s true that I am legitimately crazy and even sometimes hang upside down like a bat when I can’t sleep but does that have to mean I can’t have a girlfriend feeling. The feeling is evoked by shadowy alleys, towering gothic structures (thanks to brilliant production design by FULL METAL JACKET‘s Anton Furst), matte black metal and Danny Elfman’s low, murmuring horns that climb to the rooftops, step to the edge and spread their gargoyle wings in a thunderous explosion of marching drums and rococo instrumentation.
Man, that score. There aren’t many I like better than this one. It’s as eternal as the concept of Batman itself.
Now, just as we’re in a groove here – as Batman (in a place that looks sort of like the ’40s, sort of like the ’80s, sort of like a future that never happened) is terrifying muggers, chasing gangsters in fedoras, dodging old timey reporters with similar hats, sitting in his cave looking at scans of old newspaper articles on his computer that looks sturdier than a submarine, or out of costume hiding away in his big empty manor, stewing in a mood that’s black, blue and overcast – here comes this walking splatter of white, green and purple called The Joker. The nerve of this asshole to hold himself as a parallel to Batman! Sure, we understand the need for self expression, the rebellion against conformity, the back and forth between masking and glorying in his disfigurement. And yeah, he knows how to be a funny jerk. His arrogance can be kinda charming. “You look fine.” “I didn’t ask.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Danny Elfman, Jack Nicholson, Jon Peters, Kim Basinger, Michael Keaton, Peter MacDonald, Philip Tan, Summer of '89, Tim Burton
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 54 Comments »
Thursday, December 7th, 2017
The trailers for AMERICAN ASSASSIN had me confused. Here is this mainstream, slick and expensive looking movie, Michael Keaton is in it, they’re advertising it before respectable movies. And then the plot is that a guy’s fiancee is killed in a terrorist attack, so he trains himself into a super-duper-badass warrior and master of covert ops and goes on a personal mission undercover into the terrorist cell to get revenge on the motherfuckers. That sounds exactly like a movie I would watch if it starred Scott Adkins or Jason Statham or The Rock or somebody. But this just stars some guy. Some actor.
Well it’s on video now so I had to find out the deal. Turns out the actor is Dylan O’Brien and additionally it turns out that Dylan O’Brien is the guy that starred in those movies THE MAZE RUNNER that somebody has probly watched at some point. Also it turns out that there is still a serious TV show based on TEEN WOLF and the show has Teen Wolf’s wacky buddy Stiles in it and Dylan O’Brien plays this Stiles. We are learning alot here today in my opinion. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Suchet, Dylan O'Brien, Michael Cuesta, Michael Keaton, Sanaa Lathan, Scott Adkins, Taylor Kitsch, terrorism, Vic Armstrong, Vince Flynn
Posted in Action, Reviews | 21 Comments »
Tuesday, July 11th, 2017
I liked the Sam Raimi SPIDER-MAN movies (1, 3) and I liked the chemistry between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone in the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN that I saw, but this new SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING is the first one to convince me that hey, I like Spider-Man. This is easily my favorite version.
Continuing the story of Peter Parker (Tom Holland, phone voice of Tom Hardy’s son in LOCKE) shortly after he got to fight with the Avengers in CAPTAIN AMERICA V. THE CIVIL WAR, this is an upbeat, funny slice of life in a previously unseen part of the Marvel Universe: the high schools.
Thanks to being discovered by Tony Stark (Saturday Night Live Season 11 cast member Robert Downey Jr.), Peter is now armed with a high tech costume and the prestige of being able to talk about “the Stark Internship,” but he’s still a dork. He gets made fun of even within his Academic Decathlon team (thanks alot Flash Thompson [Tony Revolori, THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL]), his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) talks to him about Legos in front of cheerleaders, and he annoys the shit out of his Avengers pointman Happy (Jon Favreau, THE WOLF OF WALL STREET), who doesn’t return his way-too-many calls and texts about wanting a new mission. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bokeem Woodbine, Jacob Batalon, Jon Favreau, Jon Watts, Logan Marshall-Green, Marisa Tomei, Marvel Comics, Michael Keaton, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Holland, Tony Revolori, Tyne Daly, Zendaya
Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 143 Comments »
