The Midnight Sky. Bags of visual style but a little empty, and employing several cheap tricks. Bonus points for using a different actor for young Clooney but using Clooney’s voice for his dialogue, very funny. I don’t think it’s meant to be funny, but then again I didn’t make that absolute corker of a choice in production, did I. The extremely non-specific Event (DON’T TALK ABOUT THE EVENT) is just a blatant plot device. Good spaceship design though.
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The Expanse is sooooo good that the weekly release schedule is killing me. Jonesing for sci-fi, I decided to watch Midnight Sky as well. It was boring and predictable and not at all what I was looking for.
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Did not know there was a new season of this! I’m so behind I haven’t finished last season…
Yeah, I’m big on The Expanse, but the release schedule combined with the profusion of storylines means each one advances rather slower than I’d like. It’s not bad; I recall feeling around book 8 or 9 of The Wheel of Time like they’d take so much time to refamiliarize readers with each storyline that they’d basically stopped making any meaningful progress. This isn’t like that; stuff’s still happening and all. But every time they switch perspectives I’m simultaneously excited to get back to the one they’re switching too and yet hoping they don’t leave the one they just left for the rest of the episode, because I don’t want to wait a week for the next installment.
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Interesting list, but, good heavens, he missed many of the best. The first Dirty Harry movie opens with a gripping shootout, there are some great ones in some of the recent Liam Neeson movies, Luc Besson’s The Professional, the first John Wick, pretty much anything Michael Mann has done (including some Miami Vice episodes), speaking of Eastwood, the one at the end of Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is excellent, oh and Unforgiven (Eastwood again) ends with a fantastic shootout, and I don’t know how anyone could overlook the one-take shootout/fight scene in Atomic Blonde, which is the best filmed action sequence maybe ever. I suppose it’s not technically a shootout in the purist sense, but damn.
A few he gets absolutely right are Rio Bravo, The Untouchables, and Heat (Michael Mann). Those are among the very best. The Matrix feels cheatery to me–it’s all special effects.
One movie I love and wish I could include is Bullit, but the gunplay is pretty average; it’s the car chase that makes that movie.
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I checked the list only to make sure that Open Range made it. It’s on, so the list is legit.
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Wind River’s dross otherwise, but it has a fantastic gunfight.
The Wild Geese. A bunch of British mercenaries are hired to rescue a tribal leader from a dictator. Some classic post-colonial hijinks here, as a deeply alcoholic Richard Burton, played largely by his liver, is accompanied by a deeply alcoholic Richard Harris, alongside Bond-era Roger Moore. Some absolutely accurate scenes of deeply unpleasant phys follow, as the slightly over-the-hill crew are beasted back into something resembling fitness (there’s a perceptible haze around Burton and Harris as the alcohol boils off), and what follows the rushed kick-off is something resembling a car-crash, as they are double-crossed and left to their own devices. For me it’s worth it purely for the mishmash of kit on show, showing off such luminaries as the SLR (FN FAL to you foreign types), Bren, Vickers machine gun, and Sterling SMG. Perhaps not the most apt film of our times, given it’s largely about white people being paid a bunch of money to kill a bunch of black people, but at least it’s honest. Some standout moments of close quarters desperate firefights in the African bush.
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Wild Geese, was that a remake? I remember watching the original (if there is a remake) and really loving it.
Though I couldn’t tell you anything about it.
The 1978 film, which AFAIK is the only one, though there is a bad sequel.
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Ah yes. I remember hearing about the sequel, which I studiously ignored.
The original, though, is really cool. Though I haven’t seen it in like 30 years, so I can’t say what I would think now.
Do Deckard’s eyes ever glow?
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Depends on which version you watch…
Shoot 'Em Up. Clive Owen deadpans as much as Paul Giamatti overacts in this, a proper action move romp, with Monica Bellucci as the visual feast. Just constant gunplay, Owen delivering one-lines as a misanthrope, and Giamatti intense and/or raging. Very enjoyable.
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Shoot 'Em Up is a huge guilty pleasure for us.
So enjoyable.
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Shadow in the Cloud. A very silly film that only ever gets sillier. Moretz is good, alongside a bunch of spot-the-stiffs for a cast, and the film is equal parts horror and war adventure in a nice pulpy mix, with the addition of an unsubtle chunk of feminism (which is fair enough), unfortunately ladled on with absolutely no concern to its sincerity being undermined by the previous elements.
Imagine if in Die Hard, Hans Gruber & co. attacked Nakatomi Plaza, but it was haunted, and John McClane was a single father with terminal cancer. You can’t really cope with McClane’s hair falling out and his throwing up on top of everything else.
Initial D. A film carried by some fairly good cinematography, as a series of street races sees an improbable amount of drifting around corners.
Baywatch. Just enough stupid humour to keep me watching, and sometimes it was a close thing.
Head Count. Innocuous creature feature, good eye for detail and good build up, bit of a squib of an ending.
Bloody Hell. A lot of promise that simply went nowhere. Some great individual scenes, that led up to precisely one short, static, scene, and then the film fizzled. Whether they ran out of time or money or the material was never there to have more actually happen, I don’t know, but it’s a shame more substance couldn’t be found. Some solid acting and a great deal of enjoyment to be gained watching Ben O’Toole argue with himself, also played by Ben O’Toole.
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The Little Things. Denzel Washington is himself, as he has been for decades, and Rami Malek as a man who never unclenches his jaw, with Jared Leto in a grossly unlikeable role. Nothing particularly wrong with this film of two cops hunting a serial killer, but there’s absolutely nothing noteworthy about it either.
Greenland. Spent most of the film with my fingers crossed hoping the entire family would eat a meteor. Very little suspense, at any point. Watch Deep Impact, again, instead.
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Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. 2h 45m of Tarantino is a lot for even a fan of Tarantino.
Pitt and Decaprio are fantastic - watch it for them or if you enjoy long drawn out movies where the point (?) finally comes together in the last half hour. Otherwise it’s a lot of Tarantino showcasing Tarantino.
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