IF ~ J. Krasinski About halfway through, I found that this was winning me over by being just goofy enough. Then it went for an emotionally-manipulative, tear-jerker ending and lost me. Like most children-focused films, this one centers on a dead parent, but wait, there's also a potentially dying other parent too. Krasinski mines this for tears in the end, but it doesn't feel earned by the rest of the movie. That manipulation just made me turn against the film, which requires a large suspension of disbelief to begin with. Not because of the imaginary friends, but from the weird reality the film is supposed to be set in, where a 12 year old is allowed to wander alone, unsupervised for weeks in a strangely empty NYC while her father for some reason needs to spend weeks in the hospital "preparing" for a surgery?
You Can't Run Forever (2024) Dir. Michelle Schumacher Miranda is a depressed teenager who accompanies her step dad to pick up a bassinet for her soon to be born half-brother, as her mom is in the last days of pregnancy. On their drive over there, they are accosted by a motorcycle riding individual at a service station. A little bit later, they meet the same man out on the road, where he brandishes a firearm. Miranda manages to escape as the man opens fire, fleeing into the nearby woods. The stranger follows her, revealing himself to be a disturbed killer on a killing rampage. Horror thriller starring J.K. Simmons as a deranged spree killer, directed by his wife and also featuring his daughter in a supporting role and his son as the music supervisor. Hence a family production for the Simmons clan. J.K. Simmons is scary as the unhinged killer but otherwise this was fairly forgettable fare, that does little new or original within the genre.
The Fall Guy (2024) Dir. David Leitch Colt Seavers is a Hollywood stuntman in the middle of an on-set romance with camera operator Jody Moreno. Just as both of them start to realize this might be more than just an on-set fling, Colt gets seriously injured in a stunt gone wrong. During his recovery, he ignores Jody's attempts to remain in touch. After his rehab is completed, he retires from stunt work and instead gets a job as a valet. Until Gail Meyer, a producer on some of the movies he worked on, lures him back with a chance to work as a stuntman on his old flame Jody's first movie as a director. Only when he arrives on set in Australia, Jody is nonplussed to see him again and Gail reveals she has really brought Colt down under to track down the movie's star Tom Ryder. Ryder has been a no-show on set for the last few days but only Gail knows he is actually missing instead of just acting like a Hollywood diva. So Colt has to find Ryder to save his former flame's movie and perhaps win back her heart... Went in with pretty low expectations but found myself enjoying this a lot actually. It probably won't be everyone's cup of tea. It has little to do with the TV show it is based on, it's basically to the Lee Majors show what say the 21 Jump Street movies were to their original TV show. So they definitely go much goofier than the source material. It is a celebration of the stunt man role (thus including some crazy stunt set pieces) as well as a fairly entertaining action comedy, with two very charming leads in Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. Of the supporting roles, I was most amused by Winston Duke, who plays the production's sympathetic stunt coordinator. In one scene, he lists off movie star fight styles he is using as he is beating up goons. He is physically imposing in a way that kind of makes me wish that he could become like the American Don Lee. Want to see him beat up goons in twenty different movies. Hannah Waddingham is also fun as the cunty movie producer, we had seen a slightly kinder version of this dynamic from her in Ted Lasso. Don't really have anything too profound to say about this film, it's about the best version you can hope for from an action comedy adaption of a TV show probably no one under forty remembers. I myself watched the original show with my dad as a kid. Even back then those were already re-runs, dubbed in French.
Guess who also went and saw The Fall Guy today? Brilliantly fun. There will be better movies this year, but there almost certainly won't be more fun ones. It plays with the meta take on things really well, it has seeming throwaway references that actually pay off (Jason Momoa), and it actually plays the original TV theme during the end credits. Emily Blunt is the sexy bacon.
Civil War (2024) Dir. Alex Garland In a near future, dystopian vision of America, the country is in the final stages of a civil war, with the so-called Western Forces getting ever nearer to their goal of getting into Washington D.C. The sitting president, who is losing the war, is thus in his Hitler bunker phase and before he is captured and no doubt killed by the rebels, photographer Lee and photo journalist Joel want to get to D.C. themselves to document the president's downfall. Starting out of NYC, they require a circular route to avoid the more dangerous direct route, thus heading out in the direction of Pittsburgh before circling back to approach D.C. from Charlottesville, which is the current front line of the conflict. Two other individuals request a seat in their ride: veteran reporter Sammy, who is chasing the final big story of his decades long career and wants to report the advance of the Western Forces towards D.C and Jesse, a young photo journalist for whom Lee is a hero and who wants to use the final days of the conflict to make her own name. Garland obviously trying to tap into the zeitgeist here, his feature imagining a scenario in which the current extreme political polarization and a president with fascist tendencies leads to a popular uprising. Less interested in the minutiae of the conflict or indeed what the motives of the rebels are, exactly, this is more about how the four central characters each process the violence they encounter. Unfortunately it's probably also the least interesting film I have seen of him. I don't have issues with some of the stuff that was mocked upon the films release, like the surface level nonsense of the coalition of rebels (essentially California and Dallas fighting on the same side). I always saw this as a form of satirizing how very complex foreign conflicts are often times reported upon in the West (with an interpretation of the underlying factions that would seem ludicrous to the people on the ground in those countries). I was more bothered by the use of exposition through dialogue, which on more than one occasion got pretty close to being cringe-inducing. After seeing it, I was mostly trying to figure out what the point of this story was, in spite of the admittedly good performances. It's too sensationalized to work as an earnest study of the experiences of a front line war journalists (some of the footage of the embedded journalists is more reminiscent of a first person shooter perspective). As a satirizing of our current political climate, it is lacking in depth. Do have to tip my hat to Jesse Plemons, who is genuinely terrifying in his one-scene cameo. Instant classic movie psychopath. The costume designer who gave him those red sunglasses deserves a raise.
Mute Witness (1995) Dir. Anthony Waller Billy Hughes is a mute woman who works as the make-up artist on a low-budget slasher shot in Moscow. The crew is a mix of Americans and locals, with Billy's sister's boyfriend being the director of the project. One night, Billy stays behind at the studio to prepare some of the props she will need on the next day of shooting, only to be locked inside accidentally by the janitor. As she is forced to spend the night there, she is surprised by the arrival of one of the local crew member after dark. She spies the man shooting what she thinks is a porn movie, using her production's camera equipment. Only when the woman he is filming is instead murdered, she realizes she is actually spying on the making of a snuff film. With both the murderer and camera operator becoming aware of her presence, she is chased around the studio. After her escape, the crime is reported to the police, but all of the proof of what went on has vanished and Billy is accused of instead having witnessed a make-up test that looked a bit too realistic. Yet in reality, she is a very inconvenient witness to a local crime boss lucrative criminal endeavor, and thus has to be eliminated... I enjoyed a lot about this 1990s horror thriller. The first hour is very well done. The final half an hour is kind of ruined a bit by the introduction of a superfluous KGB subplot that is distracting and adds nothing. The proverbial hat on a hat. The director is clearly a big fan of Brian De Palma, with the opening scene rather obviously meant as a wink to De Palma's Body Double. Not that this ever is as good as any of De Palma's classics, but it's still a nice little genre exercise. Lead Marina Zudina is Russian, only it doesn't matter because she plays a mute character. Most well known non-Russian actor among the cast is Fay Ripley, who has had a pretty long career, mostly on British TV. The bumbling director is played by Evan Richards, who played Bill on the TV series version of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. There is also a rather insane cameo in there that I won't spoil (insane due to both the identity of the actor involved but also how the scenes ended up in the film).
Tread Softly, Stranger (1958) Dir. Gordon Parry Owing large sums of money to various bookkeepers all around London, Johnny Mansell travels back to his Yorkshire hometown of Rawmarsh. His remaining family there consists of his brother Dave, who has a job at the local steel mill, as a bookkeeping clerk. Dave carries a torch for Calico, a pretty young blonde who turns many heads at the local dance club. Johnny immediately realizes that Calico is using her brother, though even he feels an immediate attraction to the object of his brother's affection. A few days after Johnny's return home, Dave admits to his sibling that he is in trouble: to afford Calico's taste for expensive jewelry and assorted costly gifts, he has been stealing from his company's cash reserves to the tune of 300 pounds. A sum small enough to escape immediate scrutiny but which is certain to be discovered once a more thorough tallying of the accounts is done. It is Calico who suggests the solution of stealing the contents of the company safe the day before payroll, the idea being that a bigger theft will shift the suspicions from an employee pilfering some cash to instead having been robbed by professional thieves. Johnny is against the idea as he believes that being amateur robbers, they are sure to be caught, but Dave is running out of both time to fix his problem and patience... British crime noir that was pretty straightforward and predictable plot-wise, but still enjoyable. Its biggest asset is Diana Dors as femme fatale Calico, equal parts coquettish and manipulative. My favorite performance of hers is in Yield to the Night. This isn't quite on that level, partially because the role is more constrained by the genre archetype she is portraying. George Baker and Terrence Morgan are also good in their respective roles as the ultimately doomed brother pair.
Can't believe I've only come round to watching this 1 now.....but better (very) late than never I suppose. A very simplistic story to follow, whoever holds the book, the last of it's kind, has the power to shape future humanitarian life. The film does a great job in holding our interest till the end......helped by 2 legendary figures in the filming world and Kunis certainly plays more than a bit part role as the supporting cast. Also just learned we're about to get TV series based on the film dating way back before so hopefully Boyega embraces that role and does an equally stellar job.
Man Bait (1952) Dir. Terence Fisher John Harman manages a London bookstore. One of his employees is Ruby Bruce, an attractive junior clerk who does not take her job too seriously and thus is tardy for her shift quite often, to the frustration of her co-workers. One night, whilst doing inventory with her boss, Ruby and John kiss in his office. John apologizes for the lapse, as he is a married man, and goes home believing that Ruby will forget about the incident. Unfortunately for John, Ruby's new ex-con 'gentleman' friend instructs her that this is a golden opportunity to blackmail John out of a nice sum of money, by threatening to reveal the intimate moment to John's wife. John however angrily rejects any attempt at threatening hush money out of him. A decision which is complicated when Ruby disappears without a trace and is suspected to have come to serious harm... Crime drama directed by frequent Hammer Horror helmer Terence Fisher. The poster might suggest otherwise, but this is a rather tame affair. I couldn't help but think of something like En Cas de Malheur, also a 1950s feature which mines from roughly the same vein, only there the tension crackles off the screen. This is a far more lukewarm effort. One of Dors' earlier screen credits and you can see she lacks the more polished level of performance from her later 1950s features.
Tarot (2024) Dir. Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg Seven college aged friends have a weekend getaway to celebrate one of their group's birthday. When they get bored, they decide to explore their remote rental house, finding a locked basement filled with lots of old objects, many of them linked to the occult or to ancient superstitions. One such item is a box filled with tarot cards. When a girl in the group, Haley, reveals she has experience doing tarot readings based on horoscopes, her friends insist she does one for each of them. Haley reluctantly agrees, mostly due to the unwritten rule of not using someone else's tarot deck to do readings. A feeling strengthened by the clearly handmade set appearing very old. The readings themselves go well, but then in the days after some of Haley's readings become reality, only in the most gruesome possible interpretation of her prophecies... A horror film that ultimately underwhelms. The table setting was actually enjoyable, with the entire opening sequence of finding the tarot cards and then the readings themselves a nice bit of ominous horror film-making. What comes after isn't very good, a cliche-ridden 'and then there were none' type exercise. I suppose cursed tarot cards might not be the best horror movie premise. Most high profile member of the cast is Jacob Batalon, who plays Peter Parker's best friend Ned in the Tom Holland Spider-man films.
I typically don't care for movies on flights, but occasionally.... Beyond Utopia (2023) The story of several families as they attempt to escape oppression in North Korea, revealing a world most of us have never seen. Holy crap. I don't remember last time I saw a more disturbing movie. Disturbing in real life sense that you feel emotionally sick. We all probably know or have heard how awful things are in North Korea, but I think this is the first time something like this has been documented. In fact, I've no idea how the director managed to film this. I can't fathom how people live in North Korea and it makes me beyond angry to know that they just don't know any better. It's really a gut wrenching film that follows predominantly two families/story lines. What they have to do to escape North Korea and navigate to safety is unimaginable. I'm really happy there are people out there who help such people. In any case, if you want to shed a few tears, feel angry and be disturbed, do watch this. It's incredible.
Fallout (1995) It wasn't a regular day at the office. Rachel has arrived as a representative of the bank's board to fire Dan because of a bad deal he made. She is assigning Will to take his place. Then the fire alarms go off. No one in the high-rise office knows what to do. They suspect a drill. But the elevators don't work and there's some smoke and people start panicking on the stairwell and the group involved in the firing decide to go down the closed back stairwell. The door to the garage is locked, so they go further down, into the ancient bowels of the building where the former fallout shelter was located. They find themselves trapped, with no food, little water, and no way of getting help. Saw this a long time ago and it started my obsession with low-budget single-room movies. I love how the heat and the boredom and the tension keep this movie spare and deliberate, but it's never not interesting. There's nothing to do but seethe and let slights - real and imagined - turn into fury. Well acted with believable dialogue, which it better have because a movie like this is nothing but. Love the final shot. It reframes everything in a different perspective.
I'm not convinced it exists. There's no info anywhere except a RT page with zero reviews of any kind and IMDB where 67 people have rated it 3 actual reviews. How did you even see it, it's not listed as streaming anywhere.
I originally rented a tape from Blockbuster. I first saw it shortly after the Sept 11 attacks, so it had a little added emotional impact because of the setting. A few years later I saw the DVD in a store and got it. It is one of a handful of DVDs that I last saw before I started reviewing movies on BigSoccer, and I'm going through them now.
Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story (2004) Bobby Dukes was a certified star in the sport of paintball until that dark day in the 1993 Hudson Valley National Paintball Classic when Bobby was caught wiping the paint from a hit. The humiliation forced him to leave his sport, his home, even his country. After 10 years doing odd jobs in 141 different nations he decides it's been long enough. He has one mission - reform his old team and win the 2003 Hudson Valley National Paintball Classic. Only they want nothing to do with him. He has a new mission - create a team from the scraps that no one else wants and win the 2003 Hudson Valley National Paintball Classic. A mockumentary-style comedy with two main selling points: it features a lot of comedy actors that went on to bigger things, and all the dialog is improvised. The improvisation keeps the rough documentary feel while occasionally delivering the gems that only come from that art form. The revelation of the film is DJ Hazard, who plays the owner of the field with a very strong bias towards Bobby Dukes and a very patriotic resistance to all things Canadian. As a sports movie it strictly follows the standard formula, which works perfectly well on spejic and anyone thinking of changing it is a fool. If it doesn't feature ragtag underdogs going up against machine-like corporate asses in the final I don't want to see it.
Sushi Girl (2012) Fish has just gotten out of prison and is surprised to see a car waiting for him, as he thought all his bridges were burned. It takes him to a warehouse temporarily set up for a banquet arranged by crime boss Duke. As Duke is a Japanophile, he arranged for Japanese decorations and sushi to be served nyotaimori-style. Also arriving are the other members of Duke's crew that six years ago stole a tremendous number of large diamonds from another criminal outfit. Right after the heist the bagman - Fish - got separated from the crew and was arrested. He didn't tell the cops where the diamonds were, nor anyone else. Fish finds out he isn't the guest at the banquet - he's the entertainment. Everyone gets 3-minute turns to try to get Fish to reveal where the gems are. And Duke brought a number of gruesome tools to help things along. Style goes a long way, as they say, and this movie had plenty of it. It also had great performances, with Tony Todd playing the character you expect Tony Todd to play and Mark Hamill doing the exact opposite. The plot also gets more interesting as it goes, the crew all get revelations, and it ends extremely well. There's some ideas about patience and about metaphorical (and not metaphorical) masks. But I can't get over the fact that most of this movie is sadistic violence. It doesn't do anything to hide the torture and gun violence - in fact it revels in it. It's all very Reservoir Dogs.
Soldier (1998) Dir. Paul W.S. Anderson Todd 3456 is a super-soldier engineered and trained from infancy to become a peerless killing machine. Around the age of forty, after countless campaigns in which he has emerged as the very best of his batch of warriors, an officer arrives at the unit's base, claiming that the men in question have become obsolete, bringing along the next generation of super soldiers. After Todd and his men do indeed fail to measure up to the super-soldier 2.0 specimens, Todd is decommissioned in a rather merciless way, waking up on board of a garbage freighter which dumps him on a planet used for scrap disposal. To his surprise, a small community of people live there, colonists who crash-landed and have made a home for themselves, mostly using the junk items which are dropped on their world every month. The friendly group take in Todd as one of their own, even though they are weary of his soldiering past. Some time later, a ship arrives that only Todd recognizes as belonging to his former unit, with its CO having chosen the junk planet for the new soldiers' first training mission. Unfortunately Todd also realizes this means that none of the colonists are likely to survive, unless he himself decides to get involved in protecting them... A Paul W.S. Anderson sci-fi action thriller that is about as good as you'd expect from a Paul W.S. Anderson sci-fi action thriller. Dated special effects that probably did not look so great even at the time, a cliche ridden screenplay, some strange Blade Runner references that only seem to be in there because the screenwriter apparently really likes Blade Runner... I can't say this is any sort of masterpiece, but Kurt Russell does manage to keep this watchable. He is just a great action lead, even (or especially) in roles where he is sparse of dialogue. The supporting cast isn't bad either and includes Jason Isaacs, Connie Nielsen and Michael Chiklis.
Phantom (2023) Dir. Lee Hae-young Seoul 1933. An attempt is made on the life of the new Japanese resident-general of the occupied territories. The resident-general survives the attack and the Japanese officer in charge of tracking down the resistance cell that carried out the attack traces a coded message back to a movie theater poster display. The nature of the message is such that only a handful of people could have been aware of its content. The officer in question gathers the five suspects in a remote hotel, intending to solve the mystery of who the 'phantom' within the intelligence services of the colonial government might be. Ramping up the tension for the five-some and hoping that one of them might crack and betray the real culprit, a pressure cooker situation arises, one which might end up threatening even the Japanese captors. South-Korean spy thriller, somewhat reminiscent of The Age of Shadows, but whereas that was more of a straight and fairly serious drama/thriller, this is far more action oriented, especially in the second half. Some nice misdirection in the opening hour culminating in an explosion of violence at the start of the third act, at which point the movie never lets up again. Very good ensemble cast but it's really carried by the good twin performances of Sol Kyung-gu (self-loathing half-Korean disgraced police officer) and Lee Hanee (upper class Korean turned cryptography clerk). Always nice to see Parasite's Park So Dam in anything as well. Good stuff.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai ~ J. Jarmusch Meditative and a bit corny at times, Forest Whitaker plays a man devoted to the samurai code serving as a retainer to a low-time mobster who gets targeted by said mob for a hit gone bad. At first I thought it was going to be an extended music video for the RZA soundtrack, but it turned into a fairly entertaining film by the end. I kind of love that the mobsters are so inept and unintimidating. The scene where their landlord demands the late rent payment with obvious contempt was hilarious.
Scandal Sheet (1952) Dir. Phil Karlson Mark Chapman is the editor in chief of the NY Express. Once a serious newspaper, under Chapman's tutelage it has changed into a tabloid that chases sensational stories in an endless quest to grown circulation. Even though the number of daily sales has already more than doubled, Chapman will not be content until they reach the 750K mark, at which point he is owed a hefty bonus. One of his star reporters is Steve McCleary, a hotshot young crime beat man with a nose for the kind of grisly stories that help sell newspapers. Chapman has taken McCleary on as his pet project and protege whilst McCleary more or less hero worships Chapman. Less enthralled with Chapman is Julie Allison, another reporter at the Express and the object of McCleary's affections. She is more aware of the cold and calculating heart underneath a lot of Chapman's strategic decisions to boost his publications' sales. Just as Chapman is close to his long-time goal of becoming a partial owner of the Express, through having his bonus paid out in stocks, a ghost from his past shows up. Over twenty years earlier he abandoned his wife Charlotte, whom he happens to run into at a social event hosted by the Express. Charlotte recognized her husband but to Chapman's horror, she is not out for an easy payday, but rather to use her newfound information to ruin the man who himself ruined her own life twenty years earlier. A complication that morphs into a more immediate concern for Chapman, once he himself inadvertently becomes the story... Crime noir adapted from a Samuel Fuller novel (for which Fuller probably mined a lot of his own experiences as a reporter). Enjoyable stuff, even if a lot of what transpires is fairly predictable. Bo Derek's one-time beau John Derek isn't super convincing as the young hotshot McCleary, but thankfully the movie is primarily about the Chapman character and Broderick Crawford has one of those terrific noir faces, a mug that looks like it was chiseled from a block of granite.
Cry Vengeance (1954) Dir. Mark Stevens The release of former cop Vic Barrow from San Quentin ruffles some feathers in more than one place. Some of his former colleagues in the police force assume that Barrow has murder on his mind, as the criminal he deems responsible for killing his wife and child with a car bomb is still at large. The criminal in question, Tino Morelli has fled to Alaska with his child and is in fact innocent of the crime, though guilty of many others. In San Francisco, crime boss Nick Buda does not want Barrow and Morelli to meet again, since it might reveal it was actually him who ordered his underling Roxey to rig Vic's car with explosives. All three of Vic, Morelli and Roxey converge on the town in Alaska where Morelli has been hiding out under an assumed identity. Bloodshed is inevitable, with the only remaining question who might be the last man standing. Crime noir directed by and starring Mark Stevens. Decent entertainment, with a lot of on-location shots of both San Francisco and especially Ketchikan Alaska. One-time child star Skip Homeier is good as the bottle blonde sociopath Roxey. Joan Vohs steals a couple of scenes in her role of an alcoholic moll.
House of Usher (1960) Philip has arrived to the Usher house to see his betrothed, Madeline. They had met in Boston, where she was the life of the party. But he comes to an estate exuding death and rot. The mansion was brought brick-by-brick from England, a monument to past glory. It is full of treasures and opulence, but faded and decayed as the house crumbles. All that remains of the bloodline is Madeline and her brother Roderick. Roderick is against the marriage, telling Philip all the members of the House are not long for this Earth. Either out of embarrassment or out of a feeling of irrelevance, it takes a while for Philip to get the backstory out of Roderick, but it eventually becomes clear that while this house might have been a monument to past wealth, it was never a monument to glory. Another Roger Corman / Vincent Price / Richard Matheson / Edgar Allen Poe jam, but a lot less goofy than The Raven (although not 100% so). Vincent Price was wonderful as a retreating man convinced of incipient doom. I loved the set design, although the ambient lighting was way too bright and didn't fit the events or the dialogue. A little slow near the end, but I really enjoyed it overall. This is my kind of horror, with a little unease and suspense through the proceedings and some unanswerable questions at the end over what actually happened.