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Posts Tagged ‘Vanessa Kirby’

The Fantastic 4: First Steps

Wednesday, August 6th, 2025

It took Marvel years to finally get back the movie rights to the team they call their “first family,” and then they had the bad luck to release THE FANTASTIC 4: FIRST STEPS two weeks after James Gunn’s SUPERMAN. It won’t matter in the long run, but right now you can’t miss the similarities in its approach: it’s light and stylized, it’s old timey, it skips over the origin story and gets right to it. It feels like a restart because it’s set in a different reality than the MCU and it’s the sixties – theirs has some flying cars, a race of mole people and possibly less racism. I believe they also got baby monitors and fist bumping early over there.

So in many ways it feels fresh for a Marvel movie. The retro-futuristic designs are very appealing, and it’s always nice when they have one that’s a visual experience. But I’m sorry to say it’s not nearly as fun or as funny as SUPERMAN, mostly a glossy surface with nothing but air beneath. I remember the idea of these characters from the 2005 movie – here are those ideas again, looking less embarrassing (love those turtleneck sweater uniforms!) but really not exhibiting much more depth than before. (read the rest of this shit…)

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

Wednesday, July 26th, 2023

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE DEAD – RECKONING PART ONE is a top shelf spy action blockbuster. There’s plenty for people to quibble with about how it compares to its six predecessors, but to me it’s another strong variation on and evolution of a series that has managed to go for 27 years and still feel special each time out.

After only a few weeks of release, conversation in movie lover world has already moved on, except to note that DEAD RECKONING is unlikely to make back its huge budget in theaters. I’ll be sure to send a sympathy card to the bean counters, but I appreciate this case of a movie going overbudget to (on top of COVID delays) allow leeway for the filmmakers to tinker with it and take the time to try to meet their enormous ambitions. Director/co-writer Christopher McQuarrie has a weird, partially improvisatory way of building these that other filmmakers shouldn’t copy, but it sure seems to work better than rushing everything to meet a deadline.

Part of the magic of these movies is their mixture of simple and complicated. They’re simple enough that they can advertise this as the one with a motorcycle jump and a train crash and know we don’t need more than that. And boiled down the premise is as simple as that a nefarious A.I. known as “The Entity” has infiltrated all databases around the world, including the entire knowledge base of every intelligence agency, threatening to mix it all with bullshit to destroy our whole civilization’s understanding of reality, so various parties are fighting over two literal keys they believe lead to the only way to get at The Entity. Everyone wants to control it, except Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, LOSIN’ IT), who wants to destroy it. (read the rest of this shit…)

Fast & Furious Presents Hobbs & Shaw

Monday, August 5th, 2019

I’ve been enjoying all of the THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS movies since the early 2000s, so even though part four, FAST & FURIOUS, does not rank high in the series for me, when it decides to present a separate movie about characters introduced in parts 5 and 6, respectively, it gets my attention. And also I like ampersands. For these reasons, FAST & FURIOUS PRESENTS HOBBS & SHAW was one of my most anticipated movies of the summer.

Of course, you gotta have realistic expectations when it comes to presentations. There’s a pretty big difference between, say, DJANGO UNCHAINED, A FILM BY QUENTIN TARANTINO and QUENTIN TARANTINO PRESENTS MY NAME IS MODESTY. I definitely don’t think this spinoff is as good as the FAST series proper, but there’s a part where a helicopter is hooked onto a truck that’s chained to a line of several hot rods and they’re all raised off the ground driving on two wheels along a cliff. So I enjoyed it. (read the rest of this shit…)