The Accountant (2016) A strip mall accountant who usually works with farmers is hired by a rising consumer electronics firm to doublecheck their books before an IPO. The FBI is looking for him too, although to them he is an accountant to the worlds criminals who also happens to be a one-man army. This is what the Batman movie should have been. It's what this essentially is, anyway. Very superheroey, a little overlong and overcomplicated (like any superhero movie), but fun enough. Although I liked the accounting stuff more than the shooting stuff. And I think the Affleck character in this movie is like that too. He's good at the shooting stuff, but the only time he's excited is when he figured out some accounting trick. Maybe someone should make a movie where people fight with money and only money. Well, there's Trading Place. I should rewatch Trading Places.
And now I'm thinking about this more (which is always bad for the movie). Affleck really went about the final fight in the most difficult way. It was a frontal assault with no support at all. He didn't even shut down the power to the house before attacking. But I'm thinking what he really should have done is to get the check the bad guy wrote the mercenaries to bounce. That would be worthy of the name The Accountant.
Arrival (2016) Twelve bean-shaped alien things appear all over the globe hovering just above the ground. They allow occasional entry by humans, including the team of linguist Louise Banks and physicist Ian Donnelly in charge of learning about the one in the United States. The research progresses slowly until a crisis moment comes when everything is solved Bill and Ted style. Despite my general desire to see more intellectual science fiction, I am going strongly against the movie reviewer collective on this one. I didn't like anything about the second half of the film. I didn't like the meaningless questions it was asking, I didn't like the hack answers it was giving. There's nothing about non-linearity that Star Trek Deep Space 9 didn't do better. I am strongly against this trend in science fiction to favor the singular experience over collective collaboration. And I am even more strongly against this cliché in science fiction of the writer giving characters the writer's own knowledge of the entire temporal scope of the story to solve problems. That isn't any form of humanity I recognize.
The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) Dir. Julius Onah To save an Earth on the brink of a crippling energy crisis, an international crew on board a space station have been experimenting with getting a new kind of energy source online. After countless failed attempts and nearly two years in space, they finally successfully fire it up, only to face a catastrophic failure, which has caused serious side-effects both on board of their station and down below on Earth. Oh boy, this wasn't very good, was it? I would say that the first act was still a passable sci-fi thriller, albeit a not very original one. But the rest of the film is laughably bad, to the point of self-parody. I think that Chris O'Dowd obviously found out as they were shooting he was making a bit of a turd, which probably explains his acting style. Even for a comic relief character, he plays everything in a too ironic style, rendering even supposedly serious scenes unintentionally funny. I also don't get why they tried to shoe-horn this film into the Cloverfield universe. The scenes shots for that specific purpose feel clunky and distracting. I honestly don't see what is gained by adding a subpar third film to a series that has given us one decent monster movie and one quite good intimate little drama/thriller. I did like the cast, so much so that I wish someone had written a better sci-fi film for them to star in. Now that Sarah Gadon is finally getting the recognition she deserves for her work on "Alias Grace", Elizabeth Debicki is the next actress I deem to be waiting for someone to write her break-out role.
I think this film is much worse than you indicate in the second half. There are moments which are Hall Of Fame for worst sci-fi ever. Spoiler (Move your mouse to the spoiler area to reveal the content) Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler But perhaps even more annoying - lots of plot stuff happens - apparently from a plot no longer in the film? e.g why does the ship attack O'Dowd (2x) and the Chinese scientist? How does schmidt get out of the airlock? Why dd the captain have to stay in the damaged part of the space station - the explanation made no sense whatsoever. I get the feeling large parts of the original movie got edited out that would explain what the movie was actually about. Or at least I hope that As it is - none of this stuff makes any sense.
I think the idea behind that was they needed the compartment to be pressurized for him to be able to operate the release mechanism of the ring?
We watched "Splash" this morning, which was fun. My wife remembers watching it on VHS way back in the day when her older brother came back from his Mormon mission and they showed it to him like a day later. He was convinced the whole family was going to hell because they were so comfortable with the sex in the film. Thankfully he mellowed out over the ensuing weeks and months.
But why? And in this case, why did 3 of them go over there? It surely makes no sense that the release mechanism can only be operated from the part of the satellite being jettisoned?
King Kong -- The Peter Jackson version It was free on netflix. It was worth about what I paid for it. I do think that this movie would have been a lot better if Jackson had just been allowed to make a Jurassic Park movie.
I can only guess that when they added in all the Cloverfield stuff key parts of the original movie plot ended up on the editing room floor? For instance, there seemed to be the idea of the ship becoming somehow malevolent if we think about the water scene, the arm scene and the strange magnetism business - not to mention the ships missing gyroscope business .... But in the re-edit - none of this actually fits with the plot
I think those problems are indeed related to the "Cloverfield" edit of the film. There are other things that didn't make sense to me. e.g. Jensen. Why is she the only one of her crew to end up in the other dimension? Is it because she is the only one who is unique? But as I understood it, the two stations did not merge, the other universe's station just crashed into the ocean upon re-entry.
Naked Alibi (1954) Dir. Jerry Hopper When one of his detectives is murdered on the street, a chief of detectives remembered that a man picked up on a random drunken disorderly charge had threatened the cop in question on the eve of the murder. Unfortunately, the man seems like an unlikely candidate to have committed the crime, having a clean record apart from the drunken disorderly arrest and being a well-respected small business man in his neighborhood as the local baker. To add to the chief's problems, there is no witness or even a piece of material evidence to link the man to the crime, so the baker has to be cut loose as a potential suspect. In spite of being warned by both his subordinates and superiors to let it go, the chief develops an obsession with the baker that first costs him his job and then makes him devote nearly every minute of the day tailing his mark in the hope of proving his guilt. A decent film noir with a good Sterling Hayden in the lead role. I liked this film best when the truth of the central crime was still up in the air. For the first forty or so minutes, it's not revealed to the audience which of the two scenarios is real: is the innocent baker a killer after all or is the chief a misguided man fueled by hubris and an unhealthy obsession that has nothing to do with good police work? Unfortunately, once this question is thoroughly answered, the film deflates a bit and the climax was a bit of a false note to end on.
The Shape of Water (2017) Dir. Guillermo del Toro A mute young woman who works as a cleaning lady in a government research facility becomes intrigued by a creature which is kept in one of its labs. During her nighttime shift, she steals moments to slowly bond with the water creature and gradually she develops ways to communicate with it. When she finds out that the man in charge of the project intends to vivisect her new friend, she concocts a daring plan to break the clearly intelligent creature out of the facility. If I would choose to be objectively critical to the extreme, I'd have to conclude that this film is somewhat overrated. The story is referential and rather flimsy to begin with. But this film is made with so much love and obvious joy, I can totally understand why so many people fell in love with it (me included). Its greatest asset is not Doug Jones' admittedly great monster but his romantic partner, Sally Hawkins. She is an absolute delight in a role that limits her to non-verbal communication for most of the film. The claim by Jean-Pierre Jeunet that Guillermo del Toro ripped off one of his scenes from "Delicatessen" is absurd, but at the same time there is a certain hint of Jeunet's work there. More "Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain" than "Delicatessen", but both the visual style and the tone are very reminiscent of the Frenchmen's work at times.
I, Tonya (2017) Dir. Craig Gillespie A dramedy that is basically a biopic of figure skater Tonya Harding, centered around the incident (the attack on Nancy Kerrigan) that made her infamous but including her maturation into a top level ice skater, in spite of the fact that she did not fit into that world's rather narrow mold. There is a tag-line on the poster above that sums the film up rather well, liking Robbie's performance to a Scorsesian antihero. The film does strangely remind me of "Goodfellas", if the film had been about competitive figure skating instead of the mob. It's actually amazing that this film works as well as it does (and is as entertaining and occasionally very funny as it is), between the full embracing of the unreliable narrator format (to the point that we get some scenes from several POVs Rashomon style) and the fact that part of what Gillespie is asking of the audience is to feel some compassion and sympathy for Tonya Harding. It's incredibly well-acted, with Margot Robbie only slightly better than her foil Sebastian Stan. If Allison Janney wins the Oscar for her evil mother character, it will be totally deserved, but Julianne Nicholson is equally great in a less showy role as Tonya Harding's coach. Also, as someone who knew the very basics of this scandal (that people in the entourage of Harding had Kerrigan attacked after a practice), I was surprised to find that the depiction of some of the more colorful characters within the film were actually quite close to reality. e.g. Shawn Eckhardt was apparently just as cuckoo in real life as he is depicted here.
Nocturnal Animals (2016) Dir. Tom Ford An unhappily married wealthy art gallery owner receives a manuscript in the mail. An accompanying letter explains that it's an unpublished novel that her ex-husband wrote, signifying the first bit of communication she has received from him in nearly two decades. As she starts reading the novel itself, she is first shocked to see it is dedicated to her and then she is both intrigued and slightly disturbed when the crime story her ex has written can be read as one long metaphor for their own failed marriage. As she progresses in reading the novel, she reevaluates her life choices and further fuels her pre-existing doubts about both her career and her second marriage. This is far from bad, but I think it's a bit overrated, certainly by the critical community. I think I get what Ford is trying to do here, but some of his choices make this movie harder to watch. One of the obvious things he went for is to make the scenes in the "real" world as artificial as possible, both in how they are shot and in the lines he has his cast utter. In sharp contrast to that, the world of the novel looks and feels a lot more real, however horrific the events that are portrayed. But this means that one half of the movie feels plastic, for a lack of better word. The fact that this is obviously a conscious choice doesn't make those scenes any weirder to sit through. There are too many moments where the fact that real people would never talk to each other in that manner becomes too obvious. Still, it's certainly an interesting enough debut film for me to be curious what Tom Ford's say, sixth film is going to look like. Assuming he has that many in him. I liked the cast, especially the dynamic between Michael Shannon and Jake Gyllenhaal in the novel section of the film.
Hangman (2017) Dir. Johnny Martin A homicide detective in a heartland city gets assigned a reporter who will follow him for a while to eventually write a piece about his police work. At the very start of this strange partnership, they come upon the scene of a gruesome crime. When some of the clues left behind at the scene point to both the cop and his former, now retired, mentor and partner, the older man is brought back in a consulting role to help catch the killer. A pattern emerges in which the killer uses the game of hangman to leave clues behind about both his motive and who the next victim might be. This was fairly bad. If you remember the movie industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a sort of serial killer fad that had come in the wake of the success of the likes of "Silence of the Lambs" and "Se7en". Most of those copycat films were bad, some of them very bad. This is a film that fits into that mold, both in terms of the screenplay and the way it looks. In fact, it could have been easily released in say 2001. It's a bit sad that Al Pacino, like his friend and contemporary Robert De Niro, is reduced to acting in such rubbish in the Autumn of his career. Also features other actors I have liked in better films, like Karl Urban, Brittany Snow and Sarah Shahi. Avoid at all costs unless you are a huge fan of the genre who doesn't much care about a plot making any sort of sense.
Looking Glass (2018) Dir. Tim Hunter A bereaved couple who just lost their daughter try to deal with their loss by upending their life and starting over far away from the city by buying themselves a motel in a small town. They get the place up and running, in spite of the fact that the previous owner was not there to greet them and some of their early visitors are of the weird variety. Within a few days of their arrival, the husband discovers that the previous owner installed a narrow corridor from which he can observe his customers through one-way mirrors. In spite of the fact that he knows it is wrong, the husband then starts watching some of the customers himself, until one young woman he has observed is found dead the next day. More weird things occur and the man starts asking himself what dark secret his new property is hiding. This starts out interesting enough. Obviously the screenwriter plundered Gay Talese's "The Voyeur's Motel" for his central premise. But all of the weirdness and quirkiness in the first and some of the second act doesn't lead to anything truly interesting in the third act. In fact, all we get is a rather boring and predictable thriller climax. Nicolas Cage is the good kind of bad here and Robin Tunney is a good foil as his recovering-addict-wife. Unfortunately this movie is harmed somewhat by being neither here nor there on Nic Cage scale. It's not bad enough to be a Bad Nicolas Cage movie (which are great) and it's not good enough to be a Good Nicolas Cage movie. Probably only for Nic Cage completists.
In a Valley of Violence (2016) An Army deserter named Paul and his clever dog named Abbie are headed to Mexico by way of the town of Denton. Formerly a prosperous mining town, it's now just a handful of farmers in buildings far too grand for them. The area has a reputation as a "valley of violence", but these farmers never learned that when you sew the wind you reap the unstoppable killing machine. I love a good revenge movie, but this didn't quite have the right ingredients for that. Paul is less a man than a hive of bees that the townsfolk stuck a stick into, and the plot is grimly one dimensional . Doesn't mean the movie wasn't enjoyable if you didn't take it too seriously. Travolta stole every scene and his character was a non-stop source of great dialog. I think Abbie was the best movie dog I've ever seen.
I liked a lot of the little details. e.g. Paul suddenly remembering that he is supposed to take of his hat when talking to a lady so he does so in the middle of a conversation with Mary.
The Seven-Ups (1973) Roy Scheider leads the Seven-Ups, a hard-core rule-breaking NYPD task force that deals with high-level and organized crimes that normal policing can't touch. They are currently following a group of mobsters not knowing that the mobsters have been suffering a string of kidnappings-for-ransom by people claiming to be cops. Not a bad 70's gritty crime drama but nowhere near the classics. There is a cracking car chase with American land-yachts and New York looks fantastically grimy and run down. But police without rules - not even their own morality, no matter how twisted - are just another gang and it isn't really possible for the viewer to get on their side.
95% of all movies are crap. 99% of all stupid comedies are unwatchably stupid. I loved Beerfest. Since the Fire dont have a TV contract!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ill watch it again diring the season opener. Stupid Fire. Dont loose the opener or its no beer all year.
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) Dir. Jake Kasdan After the events of the first game, a jogger finds the Jumanji board game on the beach and takes it back home as a gift to his teenage son. Since said son has little interest in playing board games, the game transfers itself onto a video game console and the boy is sucked into the game that way. Twenty years later, four kids are tasked with cleaning out a storage room on their school campus during detention, in the process of which they find both the game console and the Jumanji game cartridge and they decide to have some fun to pierce through the boredom of detention by playing the game. This obviously leads to very predictable results. Whilst I did see the original film at the time, I was already 14 back then. That's probably why it didn't leave such a strong childhood impression on me as it obviously did on many others. I based this on the strong reactions that I've read online against the mere existence of this film. I personally think it's a decent sequel. Certainly in terms of the story, I don't believe there was an obvious better path they could have walked in terms of bridging the 23 year gap between the first film and this sequel. I liked the cast. Dwayne Johnson is reliably good in this kind of fare and Karen Gillan is genuinely delightful. She is terrific channeling an awkward 16-year old girl. Both Hart and Black are fine, but I thought both were playing a tiny bit with the handbrake on, likely because letting them loose entirely would have turned this into something completely different. The one false note was probably Bobby Cannavale as Van Pelt, though through no fault of his own. Even by the standards of paper-thin villains, the character he has to play is paltry. And yes, Jake Kasdan is Lawrence Kasdan's son.