Category: ⓏⒺⓇⓄ
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Walter Hill really likes to make movies about racist white cops (oxymoron, sorry, racist even for a movie) partnering with unlikely people and having big action sequences involving buses, huh? The racist white cop in this case is Jim Belushi, who’s never overtly racist (just overtly transphobic in a homophobic way—it’s the eighties after all),…
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Absolute Beginners, the David Bowie song, is so good Absolute Beginners, this Julien Temple directed musical film adaptation of Colin MacInnes’s presumably autobiographical novel would have to be singular to be better than the song. Okay, singular in a good way. Because I suppose Beginners, which Temple stages as a Technicolor stage production, is singular…
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I Lost My Body is the profoundly vapid tale of a man (Hakim Faris) and his hand. The hand has been chopped off and as it travels through a computer animated Paris, the film flashes back to Faris’s tale and, presumably, how he lost his hand. Along the way, the hand kills a young mother…
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Bastille Day is an abject waste of time from the start, which opens with some very bad “video stock” only it turns out to be supposed to be “bad” video from a smartphone. Not even getting into the opening sequence, a terribly directed one, seems more appropriate for an eighties Porky’s rip-off more than a…
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While I do not have much if anything nice to say about Time Lapse, including not liking the title, it’s somewhat admirable director and co-writer King and producer and co-writer Bp Cooper were able to keep it going for an hour forty. They sort of faked it past the ninety minute mark, sort of into…
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Every once in a while, Jane Fonda will say a line just right and Fun with Dick and Jane will be, well, fun for a moment. Not a long moment. Sometimes it approaches funny, sometimes it’s just fun. But it’s something. Because fun and funny are in short supply in Dick and Jane. Somehow the…
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Wind River is almost manipulative enough to be effective. If writer and director Sheridan just could’ve made it through his muted epilogue to the end credits instead of pointing out just where he was manipulative and how what a cheap job he did of it…. But he can’t. Not unless you count Graham Greene basically…
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As Above, So Below is a combination of a Goonies rip-off, a Tomb Raider rip-off, an Indiana Jones spin-off (which might just be the Tomb Raider rip-off), and, I don’t know, either Blair Witch or every other found footage horror movie where the third act just decides it’s time for image overload in lieu of…
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Peninsula is the sequel to Train to Busan but more like it just takes place in the same universe. It’s part of the Train to Busan Extended Universe, much like Land of the Dead would’ve been part of the Night of the Living Dead Extended Universe. And watching Peninsula, you realize just how much it…
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Valley of the Gods is a cautionary tale. If you’re going to make a combination of Citizen Kane—with either actual footage or a recreated shot—and then a bunch of vague Kubrick nods, including Keir Dullea (arguably in the film’s best performance) as a snippy butler and a HAL while doing a retelling of the Navajo…
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Rock Jocks is full of “it’s not racist because” jokes. There’s even a moment early on when Felicia Day tries explaining to Gerry Bednob how he’s actually a racist even though he says he’s not. When he disagrees, Day gives up, which is a fairly good place to give up on Jocks. You’ve hit the…
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Enter the Fat Dragon is about Hong Kong super-cop Donnie Yen (already in a pound of makeup before he puts on the fat suit, presumably to look more age appropriate for love interest Niki Chow) who goes too far one too many times and finds himself busted down to the evidence room. After Chow dumps…
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The Old Guard is better than any of the Highlander movies (to date, I suppose) but sadly not a success. It gets relatively close to passing at least, but then the epilogue is forced, predictable (screenwriter Greg Rucka’s really obvious, he’s really episodic and he’s really obvious–Old Guard is based on Rucka and Leandro Fernandez’s…
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Backcountry is all about this young couple who need a weekend in the woods to realize why they’re wrong for each other. She’s a lawyer who’s interested in playing on her smartphone with her friends. The movie’s from 2014; maybe it’s supposed to be Candy Crush? Is 2014 too early for Instagram? Missy Peregrym plays…
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I didn’t have much hope for Cabin in the Woods; though, I mean, director and co-writer Drew Goddard… he’s gone on to stuff. Good stuff. Right? But if I’d known it was written in three days—it shows—and cost $30 million—it actually looks pretty darn good for $30 million, saving the money shots until the final…
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My initial impulse as I sat through the droning minutes of Personal Foul was to give the film a pass. Not give it any stars, but a pass. Also, when I say droning, I mean droning. The film’s music is a set of three or four songs by folk singer Greg Brown (and friends) on…
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If you’ve ever started watching To Live and Die in L.A. and turned it off because it’s terrible or just heard of it and thought you should see it, let me say… there’s no reason to see it. Or sit through it. Not even morbid curiosity. Or unless you want to see John Pankow’s butt.…
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There’s not a lot to say about Plan 9 from Outer Space. It’s comically inept on almost every level—the uncredited sound editor (unless it’s also director Wood, who wrote, produced, and edited) does all right. The chirping crickets in the graveyard as the cast mugs their way through an alien zombie invasion give it a…
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It’s impossible to overstate what a profoundly, risibly bad movie Shyamalan has made with Signs. As the end credits started rolling, after the most disappointing “epilogue” Shyamalan could’ve come up with—it’s not just disappointing, it’s also pointless (pointless is the probably the best adjective to describe scenes in Signs)—my wife joked the movie took two…
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Sadly, the Writers Guild of America does not publish their arbitrations for writing credits, because the one on Rogue One has got to be a doozy; I desperately want to know how they go to this script. Did it actually start as a video game or did director Edwards really have no idea how to…
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The Enforcer is cheap in all the wrong ways, both in terms of budget and narrative, which probably ought to be clear in the first scene, when the movie opens on a butt shot of Jocelyn Jones in Daisy Dukes. She’s hitchhiking but it’s all a setup for the villain reveal—Jones is in an ostensible…
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I really didn’t want to bag on Clueless when I watched it this time, the first time since the theater, almost twenty-four years ago. It got good reviews on release, which I fully disagreed with—I’d forgotten how much audiences in the eighties and nineties liked farcical sitcom-level characterizations. Particularly in the nineties with the lusterless,…
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What’s so incredible about Boondock Saints is how David Della Rocco’s atrocious performance distracts from lots of other terrible things going on in the film. At least when Della Rocco is onscreen. When he’s off… well, then the omnipresent deficiencies proudly scream their presences. Della Rocco gets all of the film’s racist jokes and I…
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Either there’s a good story behind Fist of Fear, Touch of Death’s production or it’s exactly what it seems to be, some producers got ahold of the rights to an old Chinese movie, 1957’s The Thunderstorm, starring a teenage Bruce Lee in a non-martial arts role (in fact, it’s incest melodrama), and couldn’t figure out…
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From the first scene, Mighty Joe Young is concerning. There’s a nice establishing shot of an Africa plantation, with some great matte work, then little white girl on the plantation Lora Lee Michel sees a couple African men passing with a basket. She wants what’s in the basket, so there’s a nice lengthy barter sequence…
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With forty minutes left in its way too long 124 minute runtime, Magnum Force starts getting real tiresome. The film’s already gone through multiple set pieces, with the Clint Eastwood ones pointless to the narrative but apparently what screenwriters Michael Cimino and John Milius think is character development, while the ones related to the a…
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The surprise tragedy of Fresh Horses is Molly Ringwald could’ve been good in it. Even though she’s top-billed, she doesn’t get a scene without Andrew McCarthy until almost halfway through the movie—she’s the white trash object of his working-to-middle class sexual lust—but she’s not good in that scene. Actually, it’s her only scene without McCarthy…
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I wonder if, much like that one immortal monkey divining Borges’s dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, one could assemble a list of all the action beats in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which are mostly from Aliens and Jurassic Park 1 and 2, and arrange them to figure out the story…
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At the end of Congo, after the heroes have found the lost expedition, the lost city, and the laser-pure diamonds but also run afoul of said lost city’s super-ape protectors and happened to find this place during a volcanic eruption, some of the super-apes jump into the lava flow. It’s a somewhat lengthy sequence, which…
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Timeline is really bad. The opening sequence starts Donner regular Steve Kahan in a terrible bit part but at least there’s the stunt casting; the rest of the poorly edited sequence has ER doctors and anonymous law enforcement looking into the mysterious death of a man who appeared in the middle of the highway for…
The Stop Button 