She was great in Gone Girl; the book was sort of bad, but I liked the movie. And she was excellent in Pride and Prejudice. Which I know because my wife has watched it about 8,000 times. It’s actually a good version of that, with a lot of good acting, but at this point, I am weary of it.
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We prefer the BBC P&P, but Pike also reads the book for Audible, which is superb.
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Willy’s Wonderland. This is the most bored I’ve been by a film in quite a while. Cage never speaks, which is something of a bonus, but also odd considering you’ve paid a large amount of money for him to turn in a performance with a 25% unhinged quota. Cage beating the shit out of people in mascot costumes is of course very funny, but the film doesn’t bother showing it properly, the fights are terribly shot, cut, and edited. The cast of spot-the-stiff teens who turn up to die are 100% disposable. The ridiculous back story is elaborated twice at length, when Cage is shown ignoring it the first time, undercutting the joke, and rendering the second, deeper explanation of what is actually going on, pure torture.
Angry elf.
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I love Bond movies, but Die Another Day is about the only one I loathe. Not due to Rosamund, mind you. Her performance is arguably the best in the movie.
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It is truly execrable. People like to talk smack about The World is Not Enough (which I actually enjoy, good villains and some solid action, plus a more realistic plot) but Die Another Day is the real villain that buried Brosnan’s Bond career. That CG, the blatantly recycled story points, the mix of too much harsh reality and absolute bonkers absurdity. Of course, the director was a pretty messed-up dude.
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Supernova. James Spader, Angela Bassett, Robert Foster? Okay, nice. Wait, Lou Diamond Philips? Oh no.
The few times the film manages to look good are deeply and completely betrayed by the many times it looks like a Star Trek episode, and not a good one. There’s a cheap robot, a stupid AI, and so many bad lines (“What if? What if they never crucified Christ?”), Foster gets bumped off immediately, and both Spader and Bassett must have wondered what horrendous monkey’s paw wish forced them to star in this. Terrible camerawork, I mean awful, amateurish stuff.
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Dark of the Sun. It’s mercenaries in Africa again! This time recovering diamonds and people from a revolution to support the dictator currently in power in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Not great.
Paedo shorts aside, it’s a decent film, although I cannot forgive the scenes featuring guns which don’t even fire blanks, the actor just vibrates while holding the gun. Painful. The dedicated Nazi officer turns out to be a bad egg, somehow. Weird. Contains some extremely dated 1960s racism, and some ham-fisted attempts at talk about equality. Not all bad, but not aged well, and certainly not against that backdrop of colonialist consequences. Little bit shaky all round.
The Block Island Sound turns out not to be about an indie band, but strange happenings on an American island, as a small family experiences increasingly erratic behaviour and attempts to discover what is affecting them, as well as killing fish and wildlife by the ton. No, it’s not excessive decibels, shut up. It’s an okay film, with a smart ending that isn’t as clever as it thinks it is, and is also worried you won’t get it, so there’s an explanatory bit of narration.
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I can only watch this film for about five minutes at a time before having to pause it to recover.
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Insidious. The perfect role for Patrick Wilson, that of a father who promptly leaves for work every morning for his high-powered job as a teacher, leaving his wife to look after their three children and their home. He tops this when, after their haunting begins, he decides to start sleeping at work, pulling five-hour naps before tootling home to not-quite-confront his annoyed wife, Rose Byrne, here performing a thankless task on the same scale as a labour of Hercules. This film should end with her just blowing his fucking head off, quite frankly, because no jury would convict.
Some basic but effective horror in the first third, falls away into a deep trench of unintentional camp, as ghosts and people shove each other around in the shadow realm that’s lit like a brothel for ghosts. Warned not to alert the spirits in the shadow realm to his presence, Wilson runs around asking every spirit he meets if they’ve seen his son. Totally believable as an ineffectual dipshit, he’s conversely completely unbelievable as someone who would rescue his son, from anything. He’d get his wife to do it. The plot that emerges to explain what’s happening is as an abrupt injection of bullshit into a film as I’ve ever seen, sold with a straight face, somehow, by Barbara Hershey. Hershey also acted in Black Swan in 2010, which is a much better film.
I could list a hundred shit things this film did, but I think the ghosts coming into the real world, via the closet, and the solution being merely to force the closet door shut, stands for the stupidity of this entire project. Fuck this.
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Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, or as it’s known in the UK, Abuse Me A Woman in Every Scene. Warren Oates as a grimy bar manager falls into a scheme to behead Alfredo Garcia for impregnating the daughter of someone Oates calls “El Jeffy”. Probably the finest moment of the dubious Spanish in the film is Oates shaking a hotel manager by the throat and growling “Nintendo?” at him repeatedly, something I am going to assume was supposed to be “Entiendes?” Language foibles aside, there’s a fantastic performance by Isela Vega, and the plot quickly goes absolutely spare, as Alfredo Garcia is already dead, so it’s corpse-desecratin’ time, then the locals get involved, then the men who recruited Oates get further involved. Misogyny and slow-motion gunfights are essential components of Peckinpah westerns, but this film is at its best when Oates is driving, begrimed with grave dirt, talking to the decapitated head on the passenger seat, furious that his now-dead girlfriend once cheated on him. Peckinpah didn’t really do subtle.
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Nobody. Almost good. Some decent action, some decent jokes, but Odenkirk seems particularly ill-suited to playing a quiet bland man who turns into a quiet bland killer. The action scenes aren’t kinetic enough or funny enough to stand out. The jokes are almost all sub-par. Some early promise really had me hoping this would find a niche. I find it incredible that Odenkirk’s role couldn’t be funnier, as the film is mostly tongue-in-cheek. It’s far more disappointing than if an actual nobody had that role. No distinctive bad guys. Connie Nielsen’s role is joke. Christopher Lloyd’s appearance is welcome.
Anti-Life. Dog shit. Bruce Willis needed a new kitchen or something. Terrible on all levels.
Love and Monsters. Rubbish…but fun rubbish. It has a sense of humour, it’s self-aware, it has some great dog acting, there are some nice practical effects amongst the usual cheap CGI. It’s doing 100% what it means to do, and it’s doing it competently.
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We enjoyed Nobody, but yeah it’s definitely not a “good” movie. It needed a better villain. It wasn’t written well enough and the actor couldn’t pull it off.
And yes, Nielsen’s role is a joke, unfortunately.
Loved seeing Lloyd, though!
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Mortal Kombat. It baffles me that they make these films (presumably they’re very profitable), and the quality of the fights is always a bit shonky. It doesn’t even hold up well against something like Birds of Prey, which is no prize, but the action choreography is better, even if it’s just because the physics aren’t as fuzzy. It’s full of references to the games, the CGI is decent, and the creators were at least aware that the film is at its weakest when people aren’t hitting each other. What does puzzle me is that it has any exposition at all, it might as well just be a series of fights with no plot.
The Dry. Eric Bana presumably did this one to prove he’s still Australian. Bloody good film anyway. Big time cop goes back to a small town he grew up in for a friend’s funeral, and to take a look at the double murder/suicide responsible. It’s a classic plot we’ve all seen before, but the cinematography is gorgeous, there’s no piss filter on the camera to show us just how dusty everything is, and there’s no unlikely shootouts or punch ups. He’s just a cop looking into a case and stirring up some ancient history. What makes the film is the cast, who all do an amazing job at appearing to be fleshed-out people regardless of the size of their role.
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“time cop”
You are such a tease!
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Oh no, he’s much taller than van Damme.
Without Remorse. Why gut the source material so badly?
The movie just wasn’t good. It was one fairly nonsensical foreign operation that was too conveniently ended.
This should have been a series and they should have used the original story which was actually good. They could have changed it for modern times and kept the same plot.
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The Mitchells vs. the Machines was great fun for the whole family.
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Boys from County Hell. A neat little vampire film, that has some great moments. A small-town roadbuilding project disturbs an ancient cairn, and the locals have to cope with the resulting horrors. Some great comedy in a largely conventional work, a good cast, solid practical effects, and all of it adds up to an enjoyable time. If only it didn’t stick to convention so tightly, there’d be much more in the way of laughs and room for the actors to show off. As it is, they do a fine job, but for every scene where there’s a skilful pause to let you appreciate the humour or the effects, there’s a rushed death to shove a character aside for the denouement, or a bit of plot crammed in as quickly as possible. Loses additional points for someone’s bloodline being an important part of the plot; regardless of the history behind that idea, it’s about time we ditched it permanently.
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