At least they spelled it correctly.
Also, I feel as though I donât need to see the movie having seen the trailer.
Glass Onion. Probably better than Knives Out, certainly the murder is better-plotted. The rest of the cast seem fairly subdued next to Craigâs Sherlock Leghorn, Norton is fine, Bautista is good, everyone else isnât outrageous enough.
It was fun, I was expecting more, but it was a fine Friday night movie for the wife and me. I did think Janelle Monae was great.
Banshees of Inisherin. Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, in a Martin McDonagh film. Itâs funny, absurd, and violent, set on a pictueresque if bleak Irish island, with a great cast, even ignoring the leads. Itâs more serious than In Bruges, though it still has more comedy than youâd think would fit in a tragedy. Highly recommended.
Slash/Back. Taking an idea from The Thing, this film is a good effort, which has obviously been crafted with a lot of love and dedication, yet doesnât have the budget or the acting skill to make it fully successful. The film has a fantastic setting, which it also doesnât make enough of, the action isnât quite quick or dynamic enough, and so on. A near-miss. Excellent soundtrack.
A rather unusual coming of age tale, and late contender for my horror film of the year. Timothee Chalamet brings an air of heroin chic, Taylor Russell is solid as the lead, but the best performance goes to Mark Rylance, who is in all of three scenes and blows everyone else away, with an eccentric showcase of a role. Great atmosphere throughout, extremely competent and aggressive use of sound, beautiful filmmaking kept at the scale of the individual.
I assume the third movie is âBones and Allâ?
It is, Iâve been too easy on you lot, itâs time you started using your brains and I stopped spoon-feeding you information. New year new you.
I saw Avatar 2 yesterday in IMAX 3D. Itâs a visual treat for the eyes like youâd expect from a James Cameron movie. The underwater scenes are particularly jaw dropping. The story hits similar beats from the first movie. Nothing really new or exciting. A bit more character development but not much, which is surprising for a 3 hr movie. I would definitely recommend it IN 3D for the visual spectacle. If youâre not interested in 3D itâs a pretty easy pass.
I remember all the hype for the original Avatar but I didnât see it until its home release. I wasnât all that impressed. That was the only time I saw it and part of me wants to eat ch it again however far removed we are now from its original release. I donât have much desire to see the new one but perhaps if I found a newfound interest in the Avatar universeâŚ
Started the new year as I mean to go on, watching too many horror films searching for gems, and finding myself sifting through shit.
Pearl/X. A linked duo of films, with only thin threads connecting them. Pearl, I appreciated the style, but little else about it. Mia Goth is doing some excellent acting, but sheâs also trapped doing films like these, while her character dreams of being famous for being in films. Really quite depressing.
Bodies Bodies Bodies. Some nice self-aware dialogue, but another murder-game-but-itâs-real-murder conceit. Itâs also yet another film about a circle of friends who actually all despise each other.
The Gateway. Shea Wigham I am happy to watch, even in a role where heâs the last renegade social worker who gives a shit. This is not the film I was meant to watch, but I stuck with it, and it was okay. Not âgoodâ in any real way, but there was a decent robbery scene with some solid camerawork and real energy to it. It feels like everyone involved (Olivia Munn, Bruce Dern, Frank Grillo) is slumming it.
The Gateway. Still not the film I meant to watch, fuckâs sake. Some good ideas, but itâs just âdonât fuck about with time travelâ but with parallel universes instead.
The Gateway. Finally. Four criminals set up a weed growing business in an abandoned house, except itâs haunted or cursed or some shit, thatâs never made clear. It doesnât go well. They turn on each other. Does well to generate an uncomfortable atmosphere all the way through.
Revealer. The Apocalypse happens, throwing a Bible basher and a stripper together in an unlikely team-up as they attempt to survive, reconcile differences, and so on. Very lightweight, not particularly making a lot of sense. The final scene made me frown at the screen for quite a while.
Speak No Evil. A properly grim horror film, as families meet on holiday, and what seems like a nice little adventure turns out to be Very Bad Indeed. One of those bleak European films with absolutely no redemption or uplifting points. The fact the helplessness feels a little forced later on only makes it more infuriating. Only watch if you can have a nice period of quiet on the couch afterwards, or carry out a cathartic vigilante murder.
Same here. Iâm in the âAvatar is just Dances With Wolves with blue aliensâ camp. Saw the first one years ago, no desire to watch it again, or see the sequel. HOWEVER, I will fight anyone who says that the Avatar section of Disneyâs Animal Kingdom theme park isnât an amazing experience. Knowledge of the movies helps of course, but you donât have to be a fan to have a great time. The Flight of Passage ride is well worth the wait in line. Highly recommended!
Iâve been able to watch a bunch of action movies over the last week or so after the kids are in bed, and I am questioning why Iâm spending my time this way, as they were all pretty awful. It has brought to mind that editorial Scorsese wrote several years ago in which he used the Marvel movies to decry the state of modern movie-making. I thought it was a bit much at the time, but Iâm starting to really see his point (though none of what I watched was Marvel).
âBullet Train: They were very clearly trying to do Tarantino on a train with this, and it fell flat to me. Pitt is fine I suppose, but I think heâs the protagonist mainly by virtue of most of the other characters being difficult/impossible to like. The dialogue is nowhere near as clever as the person who wrote it thinks it is. And the fight scenes showed me nothing new. Sandra Bullock showing up on screen looking increasingly like late-period Liza Minnelli did not pack the âwowâ factor I think the director as going for. A lot of money was clearly spent on this and a lot of people seem to think this is really great stuff, and I just do not get it.
âJolt: Beckinsdale has a truly uncanny ability to chose awful scripts. For years Iâve kept thinking âSheâs better than this materialâ but now I think she just isnât. I signed on for this because Tucci and Sarandon were in it, and theyâre usually reliable, but this was garbage. The dialogue would shift arbitrarily from normal basic conversation to people swearing for no reason to flirtation as though the writers had never heard humans interact. The level of suspension-of-disbelief necessary for this film sets some sort of new record. Only good moment in the film was when Beckinsdale uses one manâs head to headbutt another man, which was a move I hadnât seen before. Sarandon appears to be on tranquilizers.
âSpenser Confidential: I read some of the Robert B Parker novels a long time ago and thought they were decent and I have a fond remembrance of the Robert Urich series so I though Iâd be up for this. But noâI have no idea who would be up for this. The fights were utterly uninventiveâand the villains use machetes! You would think if theyâre going to give a bunch of dudes machetes, theyâd make the fights really unique, but no. Wahlberg is sort of unlikable in everything he does, so I was prepared for that, but they make him kind of pointlessly aggressive and thuggish, which is not that character. Duke, his partner, delivers his lines as though heâs struggling to remember them. Alan Arkin is the only good thing about the movie. Watch the trailer, and youâve seen the best parts.
The remarkable thing here is that all three of these were very obviously made with an eye towards sequels. As though anyone would watch Part 2 of this garbage. Or maybe they would. I have no idea how this is getting made.
âThe dialogue is nowhere near as clever as the person who wrote it thinks it is.â
I feel like this is the sad state of entertainment these days, from movies to television to even books.
Are you expecting too much from action films? Is it a genre where the cost/benefit analysis shows that using a dude to headbutt another dude is more important than incisive dialogue?
You may have a point about my expectations being out of line with what an action film can do. I want great writing and great action sequences, which is apparently asking too much. And itâs not as though Iâm watching Oscar material (intentionally avoiding it?) or art-house fodder. At the same time, there are action films that deliver bothâa couple of the more recent Bond movies, The Batman, Atomic Blonde, etc.
Shane Black does it regularly when the studios let him. Itâs not like itâs impossible, they just spunk the budget on the action scenes and donât bother hiring a good writer. Which is perverse, because there are so many writers around one of them would gladly punch up the dialogue for the credit alone.
First Cow.
I do wonder, with some films, if the problem isnât anything to do with the film itself, but the viewer. This film is fine. Honestly, it is. But I finished it, glumly turned it off, and resumed my life. I donât know what it is that is missing (from me, or the film), but it struck me as being a bit of a non-event. Good craft, but nothing much to say about it despite not being bad in any way.
Thelma.
A really, really solid film. Good debut performance from Eili Harboe in the lead, a girl with uncanny powers and a strict Christian upbringing that do not mesh well together. Gorgeous palette, sometimes stark, sometimes sensuous, and a well-written, thoughtful story behind it.
The Lady Vanishes. The excellent tale of two Brits on a train full of shifty continental types, transiting a nonsense country with a fruity language, subject to an evil conspiracy. A proper romp, from start to finish, as a continent on the verge of war is played for laughs and thrills, cricket-obsessed British tourists bimble around, jack-booted foreigners are all in on it together, and Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave actually have some convincing chemistry. One of the best examples of a thriller Iâve ever seen.