Small Town Crime (2017) Dir. Eshom Nelms & Ian Nelms A middle-aged, disgraced former cop with a drinking habit is shaken out of his pathetic routine when on the way home from an all-night bender, he finds a badly wounded young woman by the side of the road. He takes her to the hospital where she dies within a day of her arrival. In spite of the fact that he is treated as a pariah by the majority of his former colleagues at the local police department, he starts an investigation of his own into the murder, which leads him to uncover a plot that involves prostitution and blackmail. This was a very enjoyable action-thriller with some noirish traits. I have been a fan of John Hawkes ever since I discovered him on "Deadwood". Subsequently I have primarily seen him in (excellent) supporting roles but he makes for a very good unconventional lead here. The cast is pretty terrific all-around and includes Octavia Spencer (who also executive produced this film), Anthony Anderson, Robert Forster and Clifton Collins Jr. in key supporting roles. Caity Lotz whom I primarily knew from the B-movie sci-fi thriller "The Machine" as well as some CW D.C. shows is also pretty great. I'm not sure if it's the intention of this getting any sequels, but this kind of felt like the origin story of a crime fiction series.
Hateful 8 (2015) Tarantino Bad timing and bad luck bring two bounty hunters, a sheriff, an old confederate general and a gang of outlaws together in a "haberdashery" in a blizzard in Wyoming in the Old West. As this is a Tarantino film, it ultimately turned into an overly bloody and pointless expression of id with some utterly gorgeous scenes and great acting (not Kurt Russell or Bruce Dern, tho). Samuel L. Jackson gives a not-quite-Pulp Fiction-level-but-still-damn-impressive tour de force of a performance. I had fun watching this, but am afraid to try to unpack the themes because the big one might've been "actually confederates aren't that bad once you get to know them." FWIW I really admire the write-ups you guys do. I feel like this one is inadequate.
We watched the remake of The Magnificent 7 tonight, and while it was completely fine in every way, I wish we had just re-watched the original instead. I think Denzel Washington made a great cowboy, and he should consider doing another Western. But when he said the same lines as Chisolm as Yul Bryner did as Chris in the original, I felt almost bad for Denzel. So many of the corresponding actors/roles: Steve McQueen > Chris Pratt, Eli Wallach > Peter Sarsgaard, and so on. The baddies are too evil in this one, and the shoe-horned gold mining operation with enslaved workers was too much. But what really changed the tone for me to one of more wanton violence was the combo of the opening in the village where they kill a bunch of people, followed close on by the meeting of the two main heroes. The bravery shown in the meeting of Chris and Vin in the first one is not based on gun violence, while in this one, that's the basis of the engagement. Subtlety definitely isn't a thing in the remake. Better in this one is the female lead played by Haley Bennett, who I had never seen before.
I enjoyed this, but primarily because I might argue this is Sam Jackson's best role in a Tarantino movie and the fact that the movies he references ("The Petrified Forest", "Man of the West", "The Tall T" among others) are ultimately better than his own finished article. Oh, and it reminded me of what a great actress Jennifer Jason Leigh is.
Bennett is pretty great in this but she has been poorly used in almost everything else I have seen her in. I think the only exception to that would be "A Kind of Murder" and her supporting role in that isn't very big.
Our Man Flint (1966) Insufferable expert in everything Derek Flint is called out of super-spy retirement to counter the greatest threat the world has ever known - global warming. Except this one was caused by the weather-control machine of a trio of scientists who want to remake the world in their grand design - mainly removing jocks from power and turning all women into brainwashed sex dolls. Flint has to penetrate the scientists' organization by repeatedly penetrating their female head of counter-espionage. Well, they certainly pegged scientists. But this suffers the same problems as other attempts to parody James Bond (such as The Silencers, also from 1966) - Bond is its own parody. Without the globe-hopping scenery and the fantastic sets and the brassy music and the world-record stunts you just end up with the annoying parts of Bond. James Coburn and Edward Mulhare (of Knight Rider fame) are game, but this lacks style or cleverness. The saving grace of the final confrontation is that it took place inside a massive power plant, and I love the insides of massive power plants. Maybe if they had more accounting I would give it a higher grade. One weird thing about the movie - in a scene Flint pokes henchman Rodney's chest right in his blazer's family crest and Flint says that "Rodneys [always] chose the wrong side". And they have a closeup of the crest as if it means something. The crest is (let's see if I have my heraldry right) "Or, two chevronels Gules between three boars' heads erased Sable". Does this mean something? Was there some common knowledge of the Rodney family in the post WW II generation that was lost to the mists of time?
This felt more like an actors' workshop to me than a movie with a point. Great actors and acting! But... for what? The most comparable Tarantino movie is Django Unchained which I DID think had a point inside all the comic-book violence.
Some minor plot spoilers below: Spoiler (Move your mouse to the spoiler area to reveal the content) Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler The basic structure was essentially ripped off from "The Thing". The subplot of villains replacing the owners of a stagecoach lodge and tossing the bodies of the real owners into a well was lifted straight from "The Tall T" Several scenes in and around the lodge directly reference "Man of the West", both thematically and visually. The entire film renders homage to "The Petrified Forest" But anyway, my first point informs much of the choices made in the film. e.g. the ending with just Chris Mannix and Major Marquis Warren remaining mirrors the last scene of The Thing
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) Dir. Rian Johnson After her search for Luke Skywalker in "The Force Awakens", Rey has now found the man, but in spite of her hopes, he turns out to be a very reluctant mentor, to say the least. Meanwhile, the rebels have been hunted and harried by the First Order to the point of being utterly decimated and what remains of their fleet is chased by Snoke's fleet even beyond FTL jumps. Finn and a new friend attempt a dangerous mission to give the rebel fleet a chance at escaping. Rian Johnson made a mostly entertaining sci-fi adventure flick here (apart from maybe the casino sequence which I didn't dislike as much as some but which was still probably around ten minutes too long) that is brimming with the joy of film-making and references movies as varied as "Wings" and "The Sorcerer's Apprentice". But at the same time, it felt like something was missing. I honestly think I slightly preferred "Rogue One" to this, though it's much better than "The Force Awakens" in terms of at least trying something new instead of following the original movie's blue-print to the letter. Though there are still moments that mirror the original trilogy (Rey and Luke obviously are very similar to Luke and Yoda on Dagobah in "The Empire Strikes Back" and that scene in Snoke's throne room was reminiscent of the climax of "Return of the Jedi"). I wish I had something more profound to say about this film, but at its core its a perfectly serviceable Star Wars movie that all fans of the franchise should probably see. On the other hand, I'm not sure if this movie will have left a lasting impression on me five years from now, which cannot be said for any of the films of the original trilogy. Perhaps that's too much to ask of the franchise at this point.
After having La La Land on the DVR since September, we finally gave it a whirl. Both my wife and I were disappointed somewhat in the ending. Mostly my wife didn't like a romantic comedy/musical in which the protagonists don't get together, but that part was just fine with me. What I found surprising was that in only five years (the amount of time that they indicate passes before the final scene) Mia manages to 1) star in an indie film that took at least a year to film, edit, and release, 2) star in other things, enough of them to become famous on the Warner Brothers lot (because that indie film - no way does she remain famous years later to be shuttled around in a golf cart on the studio lot), 3) meet and marry a guy and 4) give birth and have a ~2 year old. I enjoyed this one - but I think the end was supposed to be semi-realistic even after the rest was fantastical, and when it wasn't, I was disappointed. I didn't think it was a 14 Academy Award nomination sort of thing. But good enough.
No one should see this film. It's as unambitious as TFA and as bad as AotC. Our old friend Demosthenes attempted to fix it without major surgery: https://medium.com/@GynoStar/the-last-jedi-if-it-were-good-or-at-least-better-315e74726a6c
J.J. Abrams made a movie that was almost a carbon copy of "A New Hope". Whilst there are still referential moments in "The Last Jedi", there are also some original ideas. Of course, it's perfectly alright to find those ideas uninteresting, but at least Rian Johnson tried to deviate a bit more from the blueprint of the original trilogy. Though I sort of agree with you on some other level, that's why I argued that I don't believe there won't be much that has left an impression on me about this film five years from now.
I hadn't watched this since it came out, though scenes and moments have come to mind often enough over the years. It's not one I would be likely to "plan" to watch - too heavy for that - but the stars aligned for my wife, daughter, and I to watch on Sunday (just getting ready to start as we channel-surfed for something to watch) and I am very glad it did. It's Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs.
Colma The Musical (2006) Three very close friends in the small San Francisco suburb of Colma find out that graduating the structure of high school throws them into something far more horrible - freedom. A microbudget movie, it somehow makes its amateurism into an charming style, although the really should have kept the title song and the first two numbers within the very limited ability of the male actors. Some of the dialog was really cringy, so they got 18-year-olds right as well. What was really disappointing was that there was so little unique about Colma in a movie about Colma - the main storylines were theatre-nerd clichés that could have come from any episode of Glee. Yeah they had the requisite cemetery number and occasionally filmed from the scenic foothills of the San Bruno mountains, but neither felt insightful or enlightened.
Pride (2014) - Marcus Rashford This is a very paint-by-numbers British feelgood dramedy in the vein of Billy Elliot, Brassed Off, or The Full Monty. It's very conventional. You can see the dramatic beats coming from a mile away. But nevertheless it was an extremely well done version of this kind of movie, with great editing, performances, and pacing. You'll be welling up and tapping your foot despite yourself. It's about the 1984-85 coal miners' strike. A lesbian and gay group in London raised funds to support a striking miners' village in Wales. Unlikely friendships and overcoming prejudice follows. The MVP for me was the actor Andrew Scott, whom I first became aware of when he played Moriarty in the recent Sherlock BBC series. He's terrific in this.
Annihilation (2018) Dir. Alex Garland A biologist who teaches at John Hopkins is bereaved and depressed after a year without her soldier husband, who disappeared during a mission. One day, he shows up unannounced in their bedroom, with seemingly little idea how he got there nor what exactly happened during the mission that took him away from her. Shortly after his return, he falls ill and subsequently she is informed of the fact that her husband is the sole survivor of a unit of soldiers that was sent into the Shimmer, an area which seems underneath the spell of a strange phenomenon and from which no one had ever returned apart from the woman's husband. When she learns of a new, all-female team that is readying itself to go into the Shimmer, she volunteers to join up, partially because she wants to find out what happened to her husband in there and partially because a feeling of guilt she endures towards him. This was pretty good. Certainly the best 2018 release I have seen. Not that it has a lot of competition, so far. This owes much to Tarkovsky (especially "Solaris" and "Stalker") but also to every variation of "Heart of Darkness" you can think of. I can't really understand what Paramount Pictures was so afraid of in terms of denying it a worldwide theatrical release. It's not a particularly difficult film. Structurally it is straightforward and apart from the climax, everything is fairly easy to understand (also because we get exposition via dialogue which might be the weakest aspect of the film). It's a bit depressing when even a film that asks some modest philosophical questions is already deemed too difficult for a mainstream release. As someone who loved "Thor Ragnarok", I also hope that it won't become the norm for the level of complexity a studio allows to be on display in a movie theater. The cast is pretty great and the female ensemble have good chemistry. I'm very much enjoying the Jennifer Jason Leigh renaissance and this is the first Natalie Portman performance I have liked in a long time. Gina Rodriguez, Tuva Novotny and Tessa Thompson are also very good, though in the case of Thompson, I do feel she was a bit underused, considering her great talent. And Oscar Isaac (together with Sam Rockwell) is the only actor from whom I have never seen a bad performance and this film certainly doesn't change that. A message to the American posters: go see this in theaters whilst you still can. This was a movie made for the big screen and it's a bit sad that the rest of the world will only be able to see it on the small screen.
I saw the original when I was 25, so I wasn't a kid either, but I have very strong reactions about movies that do not need to be made. Do something new, do something different. But to make a new Jumanji movie? I won't watch this even as a netflix movie.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) Dir. Fritz Lang A novelist struggling with his second effort has a casual discussion with his future father-in-law, the owner and editor-in-chief of a newspaper in which the man reveals his personal vendetta against the local District Attorney, who has a penchant for successfully sending men to death row on purely circumstantial evidence. The newspaper man believes that this means he has likely already sent innocent men to face the electric chair. He has an unusual and risky proposition to prove as much: use an unsolved crime to insert an innocent individual as the prime suspect by planting evidence. Then after the innocent man is convicted, reveal the deception and use it as proof of the callous nature of the District Attorney's modus operandi. The novelist is intrigued but understandably horrified by the proposition. But when a "perfect crime" suddenly occurs - the murder of a show girl for which there are no clear suspects - he cannot resist but becoming the willing guinea pig for his future father-in-law's little experiment. But what if their little act of deception works too well? One of Fritz Lang's later works that I hadn't yet seen. Enjoyable, even though I thought the twist was handled less than perfectly at the end. But there are still flourishes of Lang's talent, among them the opening scene. Dana Andrews is perfectly casts in the lead role. But it's Barbara Nichols as one of the larger than life showgirls that steals the movie.
Kiss Kiss Kill Kill [Kommissar X - Jagd auf Unbekannt] (1966) Suave American private investigator Jo Walker and straight-laced New York police captain Tom Rowland are in scenic Croatia for reasons unrelated to how cheap it is to film there. Rowland is training the local police and Jo Walker is looking for a missing nuclear scientist. As Jo investigates (or, more accurately, as he shifts locations randomly), he finds out there is a connection to the recent assassinations of three crime lords. Their long term plan was just about to come to fruition, and their former partner Oberon has decided not to share ruling the world. Oberon's fantastical plan just don't make sense (how will irradiating your own gold affect the world economy?). Neither does the confusing plot, nor the multiple women rendered indifferentiable by their lavender wigs, nor the extended stock footage of carrier operations of US Navy aircraft. Not that I would ever complain about that last one. In fact, I'm not complaining about any of it. This low-budget Bond has a secret weapon, and it's an underground lair full of charm and style. There's just something about skinny ties, Euro-mod music, and a tiny red convertible on a winding road along the Mediterranean coast that is eminently captivating.
The House of the Devil (2009) Dir. Ti West Set in the early 1980s, we follow Samantha Hughes, a college student who is desperate to move off campus due to her horrendous room mate in the girls' dormitory. She finds herself a home she can afford, but needs to pay a month's rent in advance. To make the money she still lacks, she is looking for a job that will bring her some quick cash. She answers an ad for a babysitting gig and after two attempts she gets the job. In spite of her best friend's misgivings about how out of the way and creepy the house she will be babysitting at is, she is intent on doing the job and getting paid. Even when it is revealed that the man who hired her wasn't entirely honest about the nature of the work. Ti West's instant horror classic. A terrific example of suspense film-making, shot on 16 MM to get the slightly grainy, authentic look of 1980s horror films. Renders both homage to the genre and subverts some of its tropes. But it's just a terrific horror movie in its own right (Hitchcockian in the manner in which it steadily raises the suspense until it becomes near unbearable for the audience), with West using primarily just his location (essentially the co-lead of this film) and his main actress (Joceline Donahue; wonderfully understated and brilliant) to maximum effect. Features the now much-lauded Greta Gerwig in a supporting role as the protagonists best friend.
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a 60's Spy Movie Marathon. In Like Flint (1967) Insufferable expert in everything Derek Flint is brought in to investigate some minor mysteries in the White House. But in poking these hints he was able to bring out the full conspiracy - a massive insertion of double agents into the deepest crevices of power world wide by the most dastardly league of treachery yet - women. I can hear you now, 60's man, "Women taking over the world? Bwahahahahhaha!". Yes, this is certainly a work of comic genius. Any part of the movie dealing directly with the conspiring women was ghastly. Fortunately, it wasn't that much. Most of the rest of the film was actually fairly enjoyable, and not just because it features Yvonne Craig. Their key to success was to make Flint act so stupid it was hilarious, and that usually involved slapstick combat featuring his "karate". They also had a bit involving the president that wouldn't be seriously funny until Nixon left the White House, but oh man was it funny after that.
Insidious (2010) Dir. James Wan A couple, parents of three children, move into a new house. Shortly after their arrival, their eldest son falls down a ladder in the attic after having heard a strange noise coming from up there. The next morning, he is unresponsive when his father is trying to wake him up. At the hospital, the parents are informed that their son has all of the symptoms of a coma, but none of the scans reveal any brain trauma. As the months pass and their son's condition does not improve, the mother becomes convinced that his ailment has a supernatural instead of a medical reason. A James Wan/Blumhouse Productions horror film. In terms of the tone and style of this film, it is very similar to James Wan's "The Conjuring" films. I would consider those films slightly superior to "Insidious", primarily courtesy of the real chemistry between Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson in them. Wilson (also one of the leads here) and Rose Byrne are fine together, but their dynamic does not elevate the material the way Farmiga and Wilson do for James Wan's other horror franchise. The climax feels a bit rushed and the double ending slightly contrived.