That's some title. In unrelated news, I now have to rename my unfinished screenplay again. Sounds fun. I noticed my library has this. I'll try it soon.
The Killers (1946) Two hitmen go into a diner for the hungry to kill an auto mechanic, who accepted his fate with calmness. Wondering nothing, they disappear from the plot. Maybe there is an insurance investigator who wants to look into the rumors of a missing quarter million dollars. Not bad, but overlong. The 1964 movie cut out a lot of fluff by keeping the hitmen as the main characters. I liked the later movie's justification for the falling out between the criminals better too. Burt Lancaster has the face of an innocent sap so he fits his role, but he wasn't very charismatic as the lead. At least he was a convincing boxer, unlike John "I'm in the car, now what is this round wheel in front of me" Cassavetes. Ava Gardner was excellent, especially at the very end. This movie opens with a very close replay of the Hemingway story, but they have to make a big leap to make the Swede act like in the story while still doing the thing that gets the insurance investigator involved. And the 1964 movie was trying to make the point that the hitmen were not the real killers, but wrecked it by making Johnny happy at the beginning. I don't know. Both movies can kind of see greatness from where they are, but it's a bit away.
That was supposed to say "3000 Miles to Graceland" and "Smokin' Aces", BTW. Not sure where my mind went to when I wrote that.
The Caine Mutiny (1954) Newly minted ensign Willis Keith is assigned to Destroyer Minesweeper USS Caine. A year and a half of front line duty has worn down the ship, the crew, and the captain. Keith is distressed at the lax behavior on the ship, and is pleased when by-the-book Lieutenant Commander Queeg takes over command of the ship. Until Queeg's mania over small details starts to ruin crew's morale. Communications officer Keefer is the most vociferous of Queeg's detractors, gaining Keith's loyalty and eventually convincing second-in-command Maryk to build a case for releiving Queeg of command. Fantastic movie that is totally engaging throughout its two hour runtime, outside of the worthless asides of Keith with his girl. Bogart rightly gets a lot of praise for his performance as Queeg. But I think equal praise has to go to Fred MacMurray as Keefer. The movie makes its moral statement very clear at the end, but it wouldn't have worked if Keefer wasn't such a charming, humorous, intelligent, and credible character.
T2 Trainspotting. Very well done sequel to the original. Not as dark but definitely more intense. If you like the original, I highly recommend it.
Faults (2014) Cult researcher Ansel Roth is trouble. Formerly a respected researcher and television show host, his personal and professional life is in tatters. But desperate parents approach Ansel to conduct a forced deprogramming of their enculted daughter, and despite powerful misgivings Ansel sees a way out of his immediate money troubles. Troubles emphasized by the appearance of Mick, the imposing collector hired by the man Ansel is in debt to. I can't say much without either spoiling things or giving the wrong impression of the film. But I ended up enjoying it, even though it didn't seem likely at the beginning. It's in the form of a comedy, but despite the lightness of direction it never not made me feel uncomfortable or concerned, and it definitely has something to say about the psychology of power relationships. It includes a short by the same director (and I mean short - only 4 minutes): The Cub (2012) Just watch it yourself.
Guns, Girls, and Gambling (2012) Everyone is trying to kill Christian Slater after he lost all his money gambling. So he does this movie to hide in the desert for a few weeks until the heat dies down. This isn't good enough to put you in a good mood, but if you are already in one (and I was) it's alright. It has some charm, mostly from Christian Slater himself and his snappy girl-next-door sidekick, and a few moments to make you smile. But the problem is that G, G & G is built of clichés, and not good ones. It attempts to compensate by highlighting the clichés, right clicking, and selecting the "Make Bolder" menu item, but it just ends up looking like they tried too hard. You can make the twist ending twistier, the superhuman killers superhumanier, and the endless racist jokes endlessier, but it doesn't make the movie betterier. Too much Smokin' Aces, not enough 3000 Miles from Graceland.
The Lonely Man (1957) Dir. Henry Levin A middle-aged gunslinger and outlaw seeks out his adult son to reconnect with the young man years after he abandoned him and his mother. He finds that his son hates him and blames him for his mother's death, yet he still insists that the young man follows him in an endeavor to find a better life for the both of them. After they are turned away in several towns where he is recognized as an outlaw, he brings his son to a ranch he had left to a former girlfriend. Whilst they are staying there, the son's resentment for his father does not diminish, but his fascination for his father's ex-girlfriend, who is much closer to his own age, grows. The quiet life they slowly build together is threatened by the return of sins from the father's past, in the form of the gang members of the gang he once led and a vengeful vendetta held by another man he almost killed. This isn't terrible but it falls somewhat short of greatness. I like both Jack Palance and Anthony Perkins. A lot of the same themes are explored in "The Gunfighter", which stars Gregory Peck and I think the difference between the two films also explains why I liked "The Gunfighter" better. Mainly it's the fact that Peck is far better at conveying a sense of pain and regret at a wasted life than Palance. Come to think of it, most of my favorite Palance performances (e.g. "Shane") are in roles in which the character he portrays is either incapable or thoroughly uninterested in that kind of introspection. It also features Lee Van Cleef in a supporting role.
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016) Once a Military Police investigator, Jack Reacher is now a homeless ghost who namelessly wanders America dispensing justice the law cannot. Fortunately, being a homeless ghost gives him lots of time to set up dates, which is how he learned that his would-be paramour has been arrested for espionage. Less Jack Reachery than the first movie (outside of the totally Jack Reacheresque opening scene), but that actually made me like the movie more. But then, that also softens the unique feature of the movie and makes it more a standard action movie. I would have liked a little less breakneck speed and a few more pauses. Maybe the Scooby-Doo-like ending at the airport was a little to easy. And the people were able to absorb too much damage. Now I'm thinking too much about it. It was fun while it was on, and that's good enough. One thing I noticed was that Jack's daughter was much like him, but where his nature is always successful, hers gets them in trouble on numerous occasions. Maybe on the surface the series looks like it extols Reacher's independence and freedom, but really it's about how Jack is always right and everyone else should either follow or get out of the way. There's a hidden authoritarian streak in these kinds of action movies. I think it's telling that at the end we see her in boarding school and he's back on the road.
Homicide (1991) Homicide detective Bobby Gold in on a prime case to track down a cop-killing drug dealer, but is taken away to be in charge of investigating the death of a shop owner. That case leads to Gold facing city politics, underground wars, and secret societies. And the first case seems to be falling apart without him. This movie take place in a world where people are defined by their ethnicity, race, and sexuality (you know, our world), and it's full of powerful racist swears and attitudes. But in subtext it's an intensely anti-racist movie. Everything in it is about how those external definitions lead people to horrible actions and blind individuals from discovering and defining themselves. And it's a Mamet movie, so that means someone's putting on a con. In this case the guy coning Gold was Gold himself. Throughout the movie Gold keeps losing his gun, and I don't think it's just a Chekhov thing to set up the end. His attempt to fix the holster is directly related to his attempt at finding a Jewish identity, but more than that the movie is about him losing his cop identity represented by that gun.
Hidden Figures (2016) Dir. Theodore Melfi Chronicles the life and work of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson as they attain and thrive in their respective positions at NASA during the Mercury program. Obviously the story deals with issues of racism and sexism. It's an enjoyable and easy watch that feels shorter than its two hour run time (I mean that as a positive thing, obviously). If I have one issue with it, it's the Disneyfication of their struggle. Working in a STEM field is no cakewalk for women even today, as sexism is still rife within that sector, but it must have been considerably worse still for black women in the early 1960s. Some of the ways in which this is illustrated within the film feel a bit cheap and too convenient as a plot device (the biggest example of this was the returning motif of the bathroom visits and the crowd-pleasing, white heroic way in which this was "solved" by Kevin Costner's character). I think a more subtle and complex approach might have made for a film that left a deeper impact. Still, it's a good thing that these women's story got the proper Hollywood treatment and it's heartening that such a film can be a box office success (220+ million USD worldwide take on a 25 million USD budget). In terms of the cast, I actually enjoyed Janelle Monaé's work the most out of the three principals.
The Ledge (2011) Detective Lucetti is called in to talk down a jumper on a ledge. The would-be jumper Gavin says he has to jump at noon, but seeing as there is some time until then begins telling Lucetti the story that lead him there. I didn't hate this as much as most reviewers, probably because I am part of the target audience - atheists. Which is a little weird because the movie kind of goes with a generally wrong idea about atheism: that it is a reaction to loss, an expression of damage to the psyche. Actually, all of the four main characters in the movie have suffered greatly, and their reactions to their losses is the most interesting part of the movie, but I don't think anyone says "that guy's a Catholic, someone close to him must have died". And the movie's themes of what an atheist might die for and the conflicts between the religious and non-religious cross in a unpleasing way. I think the two segments could have been kept separate with some tinkering of the plot, and you wouldn't have to make the religious guy (who otherwise was fairly sympathetically portrayed) a psychopathic killer.
Fences (2016) The Denzel Very interesting film. It's a bit like the TV show that George and Jerry are creating: It'saboutnothing, Nothing happens until the last reel, when Troy and Cory have a confrontation, I read Richard Brody's critique of the movie and I have to agree with bits and pieces of what he finds fault with, but I think Brody is being far too harsh in his detraction regarding Washington's and Davis's performances. I wonder how "inspired" would have looked. Personally, I thought Fences was easily as effective as Manchester By The Sea and Washington as deft as Afleck.
Vengeance: A Love Story (2017) Dir. Johnny Martin After a single mother has been the victim of a group rape and vicious assault in which she was left for death and which was witnessed by her twelve-year old daughter, the detective in charge of the investigation - who has a passing acquaintance with the victim due to an impromptu bar date - is horrified when it appears that the slick and expensive lawyer that the lowlife criminals somehow managed to hire might get them an acquittal or at the very least a short prison sentence. When the daughter of the victim reaches out to him, he decides to mete out his own style of justice. Pretty much a straightforward vigilante movie in the "Death Wish" mold. Within the "Nicolas Cage Bad Movies" canon, it's far from bad. I mean, it's the good kind of bad. Nicolas Cage's hair scores about a "Matchstick Men" on the Nic Cage hair scale (which goes from "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" all the way to "Bangkok Dangerous").
The Bye Bye Man (2017) Dir. Stacy Title After a cold open set in the late 1960s in which we follow an apparent spree killer as he goes around his neighborhood shooting people, the action is moved nearly 5 decades forward. The new perspective is that of three college students, two of them best friends and the girlfriend to one of them, who decide to rent an off-campus house together. The house isn't in a great state, but it is spacious and comes with a basement full of furniture. Shortly after they move in, they have a party which culminates in one of their guests performing a seance, which quite predictably ends badly. After that, all four of the people who participated in the seance start experiencing strange things in the form of hearing weird sounds and eventually seeing things that are not real. Their delusions seem to be triggered by the figure of the Bye Bye Man, a strange entity that becomes more powerful as its victims get more obsessed with it. Not all that great as modern day horror films go. The narrative borrows somewhat from "It Follows" and "Slender Man". It lacks the stylistic quality that made the former of those two films stand out among the pack. It does sort of share one thing with the aforementioned Creepypasta creation: Doug Jones played a character very much based upon Slender Man in "Always Watching: A Marble Hornets story" and he plays the monster in this film as well. I did like the casting of Faye Dunaway and Keelin Woodell as the same character 48 years apart. Woodell really did look like the young Dunaway in that flashback scene.
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016) Dir. Paul W.S. Anderson After the defeat in Washington D.C., Alice wakes up and gets a new mission from an unexpected source: the Red Queen informs her that she will assist Alice to get to the heart of Raccoon city and into the Umbrella Corporations underground facility to retrieve the anti-virus to the T-virus strain that has caused the zombie epidemic. Even though she does not fully trust the Red Queen, Alice does follow her instructions and meets some familiar faces along the way, both friends (Claire Redfield) and foes (Dr. Isaacs). All of them converge for one final showdown, with the stakes being the last small group of surviving humans: no more than a little over 4000 people across the world. This series stopped being about the plot of any of these movies a long time ago, if it ever was. It's another piece where the plot is secondary to the action set pieces. If you like the previous movies in this series, you will probably also like this one. Milla Jovovich, now 41 years old and 15 years removed from her first performance in this series, is still an excellent lead for this kind of fare. The promise that this is the "Final Chapter" seems dubious considering that the ending does leave a rather big opening for more sequels.
The Asphalt Jungle (1950) The Professor, a big time jewel thief, has just been released from prison. But in his pocket is the plan for his biggest heist ever. And the hard-luck crew he finds in the roadsurface chaparral are just the ones to carry it out. I found the first third, which gives us the history of the pathetic people of the town and how they ended up in the crime business, the most interesting. The heist itself was a big letdown, and the inevitable downfall of the criminals felt very inevitable. The films Asphalt Jungle gave birth to (like Rififi or Thief) were much better.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) A hip three-girl rock band from squaresville takes a trip to Los Angeles to make a splash. They hang out at the pad of Z-Man, the biggest cat in the music biz. And soon everyone digs their crazy sound. But they get caught up in the scene, man. It's all a major downer, my brothers and sisters. But keep your heads, because righteousness wins out, baby. Most films of the counterculture era didn't understand the time. Beyond didn't either, but did it in a way that showed that they did. They didn't know what the scene was like, what actually happened among the libertine class. But they did create something transgressive and imaginative and live and new. It's a terrible movie, but one that you can't look away while its on and you don't regret having seen it.
Life (2017) Several astronauts, biologists and other scientists are on the ISS waiting for the return of a probe that has allegedly found some foreign cellular material on the Mars surface. They are able to collect the probe and do indeed find some unknown foreign cellular materal that seems to grow at a rapid pace when it has access oxygen. What follows is a nightmare cause "Kelvin" shows signs of intelligence and manages to breakout ... At first I thought this was some classic popcorn cinema movie, using the same recipe as it was used Alien 1 and the genre that followed. And yes, the recipe works for most of the film. The acting is okay and credible. Soon ISS seems nothing but a dark labyrinth in space. The design of an universally gifted alien as a foreign lifeform striving for survival instead of just wanting to kill human is somewhat something new. But apart from that the film ads nothing new, no new idea in the filmmaking or storytelling. At least not something other thriller or space horror motion pictures havent done before. In a nutshell: there is nothing brave or groundbreaking in it. At some certain points during story humans seem to act pretty stupid while the alien seems like a survival master. All the stuff the humans do go inevitably wrong, precaution measures and rules fail and after all the humans managed to save Earth again... right?
Wrecked (2015) Dir. Michael Bafaro To get over the fact that her boyfriend cheated on her with a work colleague, a woman and her best friend take a road trip through the desert. On a lark, they decide to get off the main road to take a more scenic route by the charming name of 'Devil's Pass'. Shortly after getting on that road, they encounter a tow-truck, whose behavior becomes ever more dangerous and threatening towards them. A pretty basic "Duel" clone. Not a great one either, by the standards of even horror films some of the choices made by the characters and the plot developments are ludicrous. It's almost more of a Ford commercial, since the candy red Ford Mustang the women drive gets through almost the entire film in a pristine state.