One of the best small roles in it! And there’s a few.
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Hopkins was at least in the other Thor movies, so this was more of a send-off/contract-ending sort of deal. But yeah, it’s far and away my favorite MCU movie that isn’t Winter Soldier.
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Danny Glover’s Ever More Fabulous Outfits, or as the studio insisted it be titled, Predator 2. When not dressing in the dark, Glover is investigating a series of vicious drug war killings that turn out to be the work of our favourite alien hunter. Culminating in a quite frankly unlikely wine-coloured jacket and dirty panama hat combo,
the film involves Glover sweating his way through every scene, in a Los Angeles setting that looks like an armpit feels. Bill Paxton typecast as unlikeable dick, Gary Busey still a fucking nutter, with Glover’s fear of heights being the best bit of acting in the whole film. At its most interesting during the scenes which are more horror in style (the train massacre).
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The Predator. This is an awkward jumble of a film. On the one hand, you have a traditional Shane Black fix; plenty of jokes and quips, lots of chat, intricate action scenes, lots of mistakes, accidents, and humour. On the other, you have a major IP from a big studio that has made them a lot of money. The result is a lot of the Shane Black feel is gone. We have a lot of CGI, a lot of senseless shooting, a very generic lead (budget Dan Stevens), a lot of the smarter elements and the sharp speed I expect from Black is dulled, slowed down, or simply gone. Olivia Munn and Sterling Brown are good in their rather generic roles, and I dunno what Thomas Jane is doing here. I like everything Black is trying to do, but I doubt he got the kind of freedom he deserves and used to amazing effect in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys.
Brigsby Bear. A kidnapped man is returned to his family after years in seclusion with just his kidnappers for company. He sets about finishing off his favourite TV series, which was created for him by his captors. This is an odd film. It is good, and there are some laughs, but it never gets out of hand. The comedy is always low-key. Good roles for Hammill and Kinnear. Claire Danes is in two scenes for about two minutes total, why?
Sicario: Day of the Dildo. A glum exercise in shooting people at close range. Brolin is a gruff American agent, Del Toro is a gruff Mexican killer. Together they’re working to get the cartels reclassified as terrorist organisations so they can really go to war, and like Iraq, it will be easier to fight them if they’re also fighting each other. They actually say this in the film.
Cue one half-arsed scheme and a government flip-flop later, and it’s all gone wrong. Now, the first film was cagily clever in a low, cunning sort of way, but this one is just stupid. In the first film, Blunt worked wonders as a viewpoint character and audience proxy. Here, we’ve got little of that apart from some smart scenes with Isabela Moner as the daughter of a narco kingpin. It’s a mostly empty, grim exercise in the back and forth of people with guns in the night.
MANDY was everything I’d hoped it would be, and more.
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Oh God yes please.
Mandy
Started very strong but ended up, from the point the “revenge” bit gets going, disposable ephemera very much in the (false) spirit of Kung Fury and Hobo with a Shotgun, if much more slickly produced than either. Can’t believe the director is 44, as it eventually revealed itself possessed of the sensibility of a self-proclaimed “edgy” 14-year old suburbanite, which makes it miss the “Conan meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre” mark it alllllmost hit. Wish neither I nor Cage had wasted the time. At least he (presumably) got paid for it.
Maybe I was a bit harsh, but I’m just kind of angry that the film that showed so much promise in its first hour ended up shitting all that promise away in the second. In retrospect, Cheddar Goblin, which seemed like a bizarre intrusion at the time, is a signal that represents a decisive shift for the movie’s “train” from one tonal “track” to another, and it’s not a smooth or earned shift, I think. Cosmatos appears to have absorbed a pastiche of the 70s/80s rather than their actual essence, which is what made me compare it to Kung Fury. The difference between those filmmakers and him, though, is that he actually lived through the 80s, which makes this film all the more bizarre to me, because it bears all the hallmarks of someone who only knows of a culture rather than knowing it, at least in its second half. I did not get this impression from the parts I’ve seen of Beyond the Black Mirror, for what it’s worth, which makes what happened here all the more baffling and frustrating to me.
Black Rainbow. Great mix-up though.
Oh, yes, thank you. Anyway, first half of the movie is great, second half feels like it was made by someone who watches movie trailers rather than movies.
Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. An alternative history tale of Japan under fascist government repressing violent uprisings with paramilitary police, and the infighting between police departments. A slow, melancholy tragedy, combined with exceptional animation.
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Godzilla (1998). I was going to say ‘inexplicably‘, but it’s rather too explicable: the theme song (the Led Zep-Puff Daddy bombast-o-blart) was played at the Horse of the Year Show and Mrs StC had a Proustian moment.
It amply justifies its 5.3 stars on IMDb. It’s a mess of a film, tonally all over the place. Roland Emmerich clearly gave up on the idea of “this is a noble creature, a product of mankind’s worse instincts” in favour of making Aliens and/or Jurassic Park fan fic. I’m sure I heard Bob Peck mutter “clever girl” when the lizard babies opened a surprise door. The token love interest prize subplot is some of the laziest writing ever, with at least one scene that has a rather different feel in the era of #Metoo.
Things I did like: John Reno out-acting everyone else, the fact that the French incidental dialogue wasn’t translated, that Emmerich slyly has the worst damage being caused by friendly fire rather than the monster, and, um. Oh, the sfx have held up pretty well. But eh.
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Has anyone seen anything about this? I need to see it in a theater, but not sure if heading to the US.
I’ve read different things (all extremely positive) but can’t find anything that confirms it’s coming here.
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It’s going to be on telly over here squire, so if you want to see it I’m sure I could somehow lay my digital hands on it and dropbox it to you.
That would be cool. Would love to see it in theater with loud speakers and whatnot, too.
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Halloween. I wasn’t expecting much, but I got a pleasant surprise. The film relies a lot on the techniques Carpenter used in the first film, good use of background and foreground, tracking shots, and so on, to the extent that it feels quite derivative of the first. Yet it’s still better than the other sequels, and The Shape is more of a thing than in any of them. The music is largely remixes of classic Halloween music, which is good, if also derivative. There are a number of brutal deaths, but there are also quite a few that happen off-screen, in a strange mix of coyness hearkening back to the original, and modern gore. Excellent cinematography, wonderful lighting. Jamie Lee Curtis does brilliantly as an embittered survivor.
The plot is a little confused, and it has enough nonsensical stuff in it to irritate, including one or two hard swerves that really made me frown.
I just watched the first one for the first time the other day. Couple of good shots and neat scenes, but it’s hard for me to understand why it’s such a classic. Watched Silence of the Lambs again a couple days later, and that one isn’t hard to understand at all, although the Buffalo Bill stuff is pretty boring next to Anthony Hopkins’ script chewing.
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I think it’s like watching Citizen Kane. It’s unremarkable now, but it popularised a lot of things that are common today.