Category: 2013
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Agent Carter is a terrible execution of a nice idea. The short is supposed to follow-up on Hayley Atwell’s character after the Captain America movie. A post-script for a supporting character… love that idea. Sadly, Carter wastes most of its runtime. The first minute is a recap from the movie, the end credits are three…
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A Single Shot is the best film noir I’ve seen in a long time. Director Rosenthal eschews trying to make a neo-noir and just sets a film noir in some backwoods region. It’s never specified and it doesn’t really matter. It’s beautiful and dangerous. From the first hunting sequence, there’s always danger in Shot. Sam…
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Besides J.B. Smoove, Clear History does not reunite Larry David with any of his “Curb Your Enthusiasm” costars. David and Smoove have their fantastic chemistry and it’s a little strange not to see them hanging out in the film. Instead, David hangs out with Danny McBride, who probably gives the film’s must mundane performance. He’s…
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There are a lot of interesting things Woody Allen does with Blue Jasmine–genre shifts, a somewhat fractured narrative style where he reveals lead Cate Blanchett’s past in glimpses–but the most surprising one has to be when she ceases to be the film’s protagonist and becomes its subject. Blanchett sort of shares the picture with Sally…
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The Flying Man is a mixed bag. A good one, thanks to the actors, but they take forever to show up. Director Alqueres instead opens with these newscasts about a flying vigilante who kills bad guys by dropping them or their cars from such great heights. There’s all this talk about the federal government getting…
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Trance is extremely cute. It’s sort of Hitchcockian, with James McAvoy actually playing the female role and Rosario Dawson the male. Director Boyle and screenwriters Joe Ahearne and John Hodge figure out some neat ways to change up expectations of that relationship along the way. Besides being a technical marvel, full of good performances, Trance’s…
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You know what would have been nice? If the makers of Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox had any idea what they were doing. In the last act, there’s all this Flash action–he’s running around, fighting at super speed–and it’s all fantastic. Even with a cruddy director like Oliva. But there’s none of it before the…
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Truth in Journalism is narratively broken. The gimmick is it’s a short French documentary about a New York city photojournalist (Ryan Kwanten), set sometime during the eighties. The setting isn’t immediately clear, which is a problem because otherwise it looks like director Joe Lynch just ran it all through a crappy video filter. Once the…
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The Colony really took four writers? It’s only eighty-some minutes long. Not surprisingly, director Renfroe contributed to the script. Maybe he put in all the terrible action sequences he knew only he could screw up. Renfroe’s not a terrible director. All the new ice age shots are good, the confined dialogue scenes are okay… sure,…
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The Wolverine suffers from too many pots on the stove, a director in Mangold who can’t manage said pots and some really, really silly things. Like giant monsters silly. The film’s at its best during a long chase sequence–both in terms of run time and story time–when Hugh Jackman is protecting Tao Okamoto throughout Japan.…
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Sort of a lot happens but also not a lot. Rucka really plays up incest between the siblings, which would have been shocking if he hadn’t done it twice. There’s a lot of suggestions here too about Forever. She was genetically engineered, probably grown or cloned. Rucka treats it like a big deal because she…
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Red 2 is a lot of fun. It’s so much fun, in fact, most of its problems are never obvious during the actual film, only on later reflection. The film opens quickly–Bruce Willis and Mary-Louise Parker going shopping seems to be very fast, but turns out to be one of the slowest sections of the…
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It’s weird how Slott let Gage handle the script on this arc. It’s got some of the biggest changes to Superior since it started–a new page in Otto’s relationship with Jonah, a secret base (and lab) for Spider-Man–one would’ve thought Slott would want to be more hands on with it all. The issue’s pretty good,…
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Adrift is… well, what is Adrift? Adrift is four and some minutes of fog cover San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge and some of the surrounding areas. Director Christen uses time lapse photography, which turns the fog into waves. There’s always motion. It’s a beauty of the natural world piece, with only the slightest hint…
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Where to start with Europa Report. There are some obvious places. First, it’s in the near future but digital video is about as advanced as it was back in 2004. On a cell phone. Or, you know, the filmmakers wanted to cheap out on the special effects. Another place to start might be the music.…
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It’s fitting Kevin Huizenga loses it in his pocket guide, The Pocket Guide to Series. Not loses it in a bad way, but loses any pretense he isn’t just having a laugh with the form. The skill and talent comes from how well the laugh goes. Series is ostensibly a guide to all Huizenga’s pocket…
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It’s hard to watch R’ha without laughing, especially towards the end when Lechowski’s direction gets absolutely inept. He can’t direct movement shots in medium or closeup. When he’s got a bunch of CG fighter jets attacking a CG city, he’s fine… it’s all extreme long shot. But the big naked alien running down a hallway?…
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Giuseppe Camuncoli and John Dell make Otto look so positively condescending it’s wonderful. He only has a couple scenes outside his Spider-Man adventures, one with Anna and then one with his boss. I didn’t pay attention to the credits so I didn’t realize it was Christos Gage scripting from a Slott story; a lot more…
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It never occurred to me there might still be significant mileage in the undercover cop melodrama. Or, for that matter, in the gangster melodrama. New World proves me uninformed on both points. Writer-director Park mixes both genres, somewhat unequally, and creates this unbelievably good film. I use the adjective “unbelievably” because, for the most part,…
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By the third page of A Pocket Guide to Pleasure, it becomes clear Kevin Huizenga is having fun. He’s not messing around and not doing work, but he’s having fun. The guide doesn’t really include any tips on what kind of form and content give pleasure, except this guide does give pleasure so maybe one…
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Dr. Easy is definitely well made. It’s unclear if directors Groves, Harding and Kenworthy are competent on their own but together they can make a decent looking little picture. But they raise a lot of obvious questions with Easy and ignore them. It’s a future story with a robot medic going in to handle an…
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What’s A Pocket Guide to Objects about? Guess what, not objects. Not really. Sort of. Maybe. The pamphlet or comic or book is itself an object, which Kevin Huizenga wrote while listening to Beethoven. A lot of the concepts he actually does discuss–I thought when he said “objects” he meant something simple like how to…
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I haven’t seen an episode of “Dallas” since I was a kid, but for some reason, when the characters in Lazarus blather on about family, it reminds me of “Dallas.” This first issue has three distinct tones. One is action. There’s a lot of action at the beginning; with another artist, I’d probably argue it’s…
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Ennis jumps ahead nine years to Vietnam. Nick’s sidekick is all of a sudden out of joint about the events in the last issue–a rare misstep from Ennis in this series–so Frank Castle comes in. Much like Nick, Ennis is just using Frank to exploit a brand. He hasn’t done anything Punisher-like to make his…
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Hope Larson’s Bitter Orange is a precious short set in 1920s Hollywood. For the most part, I mean precious as a compliment. The production design is fantastic, something Larson showcases in the first scene. The way the film deals with nostalgia is interesting too–it’s present, but maybe the viewer shouldn’t pay too much attention to…
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Man of Steel is good. It’s really good. Not only is it really good, I like it enough for a 500 word special. There’s always a moment in a good action movie when it eventually runs out of steam and one has to give it some thought. There’s a breather scene, in other words. For…
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Judge Minty runs around twenty-seven minutes so I’m a little embarrassed I didn’t realize the big problem until probably halfway through (so, say, thirteen minutes). Director and co-writer Sterlacchini is a lousy director. It’s not all his fault–Ben Woods does a terrible job editing the poorly directed action and suspense scenes–but he’s really bad. Maybe…
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Wow. Okay, starting at the beginning. Ennis jumps ahead five or six years, then fills the reader in on Anna and Mouse’s time since the war. Specially how Anna got out of her cliffhanger. Now they’re in a different war–training North Korean pilots to fly against the Americans–and there’s not much appreciation for either woman.…
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For Star Trek Into Darkness, J.J. Abrams operates with an “if it ain’t broke” mentality. It serves him–and the film–fairly well. Except Michael Giacchino’s music. While Abrams goes for sensationalism every time, he does it competently. The Giacchino music, however, is never competent. This Trek tries hard to create mainstream post-modern; it’s a sequel to…
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Adequate is probably the best word for this issue. Stokoe doesn’t actually do much with the idea of space monsters. It’s just a big monster fight issue–Godzilla, Mechagodzilla, Ghidorah and Gigan–with a little of the protagonist. He pilots Mechagodzilla, which should work but he’s too busy fighting monsters to narrate. And Stokoe doesn’t do much…
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