Category: 2012
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It’s so easy to pick on A Fantastic Fear of Everything there’s basically no fun in it. The only thing worse than co-director Crispian Mills’s script is his and Chris Hopewell’s direction. For the first half of the movie, when Simon Pegg’s basically all by himself making a mocking impression of someone with paranoia, the…
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If you told me Room 237 exists because someone wanted to test out how far the “Fair Use” part of copyright exception went… well, okay, I wouldn’t believe it because obviously there’s the other terrible stuff going on and you’d do it better if you were just trying to bring “Fair Use” to the Supreme…
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At the halfway point in If I Were You, it seems like the film’s biggest problem is going to be Joseph Kell being charmless. Close second is Valerie Mahaffey’s small part being a waste of Mahaffey. Director Carr-Wiggin’s script is a tad plodding in the plotting, but it’s because she’s thorough and it does just…
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Most of The Bay is tolerably tedious and mediocre. Levinson’s doing a found footage documentary—he may also provide the voice of filmmaker—about a bunch of sea cockroaches eating its way through a little Maryland town. It plays like a combination low rent Michael Crichton adaptation—the action skips to various government agencies and their internal camera…
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When we were about halfway through The Sapphires I figured something must go wrong otherwise the film would have a better reputation. Though you never know; music biopics do have their unfortunately hidden gems (no pun). Sapphires doesn’t succeed as a music biopic or a music pic or a biopic but it’s got some excellent…
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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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For its protracted 106 minute runtime, Vampira and Me is a combination of tragic, frustrating, annoying, and enthralling. The problem with the whole project is writer, producer, editor, director, and narrator Greene. Well, okay, the problem with any project about Vampira (Maila Nurmi) is the lack of extant footage of her television show, “The Vampira…
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I’m a fan of this season finale—and season resolver—and would be even if it didn’t (unintentionally?) follow a bunch of the same narrative beats as Halloween H20. No spoilers. But… it’s H20. After the pre-title murder—a gruesome but not gory one—the action picks up the next morning after last episode. Phryne (Essie Davis) is freaking…
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It’s truly amazing what they’re able to get away with this episode in terms of red herrings, shoehorned subplots, shock tactics, exploitative tension, and so on. Director Daina Reid and writer Ysabelle Dean put everyone through the ringer—with a couple really obvious questions left open at the end—and grinds them flat. The main plot itself…
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It’s a very intense episode, with Phyrne (Essie Davis) in constant danger—whether she knows it or not, usually yes but not the extent of it—in addition to being in a very traumatic headspace. We finally find out what happens to her little sister (or at least as much as Davis knows) when Davis takes a…
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It’s hard to know where this episode goes “wrong.” It’s not a bad episode, but it’s not a great one either. It’s nowhere near as good as the last, whatever, five. And it’s co-written by Liz Doran, who adapted one of those previous excellent ones. So maybe it’s the source novel not just being that…
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It’s a very intense episode. Miss Fisher (Essie Davis) is mentoring a group of underprivileged girls for a pageant and they’re the mystery, so they’re the ones in danger. It’s the first time “Miss Fisher’s” has really done the child or youth in grave danger thing and it’s a lot. Both because the story behind…
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Once again I stand corrected as to what “Miss Fisher’s” needs to do to have a successful episode. This one has a case very tied to Essie Davis’s past—victim Heather Bolton was one of Davis’s teachers, prime suspect Deborah Kennedy is a mentor—has lots of guest stars (Phryne Fellow Philippe Sung is back, bringing arraigned…
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So this episode takes everything I said—based on the last two—was needed to make a great “Miss Fisher’s.” Turns out I’m completely wrong, because Murder in Montparnasse doesn’t just break (most) of my rules, it breaks my bigger, obvious rules for melodramatic plotting. It ties together two seemingly disparate subplots and does it as a…
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It’s an excellent episode and maybe the one most interested in the murder investigation. There aren’t any substantial subplots—Ashleigh Cummings has to deal with Hugo Johnstone-Burt being a lug of a boyfriend and not a romantic daydream like stage actor Alex Rathgeber, who’s actually a right bastard but Rathgeber figures into the main plot. Cummings’s…
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After the lackluster previous episode, the show’s back on track with this one, which almost showcases what material “Miss Fisher’s” works best with. For instance, there’s not time for the whole supporting cast. Nathan Page doesn’t get a whole bunch to do this episode, but he gets to do all of it with Essie Davis.…
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This episode lacks the spark of the previous ones; it’s still solid and well-acted—even by the less sparkly supporting characters—and has nearly all the supporting favorites back (meaning aunt Miriam Margolyes and Essie Davis’s ward, Ruby Rees), but the main plot is a bit of a shrug. Also—the main plot and the subplot only intersect…
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There’s a lot going on this episode for star Essie Davis even though it’s not entirely clear to the audience until much later in the episode. Just before the mystery resolve, actually. This murder case has hit close to home for Davis, who’s on the scene when it happens—she’s meeting old friend Toby Schmitz at…
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This episode takes place soon after the first, with communist taxi drivers Travis McMahon and Anthony J. Sharpe not yet full-time in Essie Davis’s employ. Well, they don’t know they’re in her full-time employ yet. They realize it in their second scene, when she gets them a new car and they start hanging out at…
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Of course, “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” is based on a novel. How did I miss it was based on a novel… Not because Deb Cox’s script ever feels too much like an adaptation—quite the opposite—but because it does such a good job setting up the supporting cast. Lead Essie Davis meets her eventual team of…
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The funny thing about Luc Besson getting sued over lockout and losing—to John Carpenter, who sued based on the film’s similarities to Escape from New York and Escape from L.A.—is, yes, the film rips off Carpenter’s Snake Plissken duet, but it also rips off Die Hard and Die Hard 2 while seemingly reusing dialogue from…
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Short film with a reverse order narrative gimmick and nothing else. The story–about asshole Timothy Paul Driscoll dumping girlfriend Alice Hunter–is terrible. Writer/director Levinson seems utterly unaware his protagonist’s loathsome. Streaming.Continue reading →
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Either Evan Dorkin’s got the Eltingville TV rights back or whoever has them is a complete numbskull because the book’s so relevant you could subtitle it “An Incel Fable” and it’d be totally appropriate, narratively speaking. But it’d be somewhat intellectually dishonest, as Dorkin started The Eltingville Club long before the incels had a self-identity…
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Frances Ha relies on exposition but depends on summary. Or it depends on exposition but relies on summary. One or the other. Director and co-writer Baumbach and star and co-writer Greta Gerwig move Frances in the summary. Even when the film slows down for a longer scene, the style and tone don’t really change, so…
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The Amazing Spider-Man is melodramatic trifle, but not in any sort of bad way. I mean, it doesn’t succeed but it does try a lot. Director Webb really goes for a high school romance, with such saccharine effectiveness it probably ought to be an ominous foreshadowing for leads Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone’s burgeoning romance.…
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Besides having an unwieldy title, Jesus Christ Superstar – Live Arena Tour does have quite a few things to recommend it. Within reason. It’s still just a video taping of a live performance–albeit an occasionally rather decent one, albeit with the ability to do complicated shots. Lots of crane moves and zooms. Unfortunately, taping director…
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Much of The Dark Knight Rises is rushed. The film runs over two and a half hours and director Nolan can’t find anything he wants to spend much time on. He’s got a lot of characters to occupy that run time; they occasionally intersect, but rarely long enough to make an impression. Nolan seems to…
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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is really long. Director Jackson’s greatest achievement with the film has to be making that length work. He runs out of ideas for action sequences (worst is when he repeats one just a couple set pieces later), he doesn’t give his actors anything to do (he’s more concerned with showcasing…
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The Watch deals in caricature and stereotype. Ben Stiller’s the anal-retentive, Vince Vaughn (can anyone even remember when he tried acting) is the aging bro, Jonah Hill’s the kid in his early twenties who lives with his mom (and hordes guns, which dates the film) and Richard Ayoade’s the deadpan, socially awkward British guy. If…
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The Cold Light of Day is not just any lame action thriller set in Europe with an American leading man (okay, Henry Cavill isn’t American, but he’s playing an American). It is a distinguished lame action thriller. Not only does it contain one of the worst car chases ever put on film (or digital video),…
The Stop Button 