Category: Review

Categories
Movies Review

REVIEW – Bullet Train

Brad Pitt in BULLET TRAIN.

David Leitch (ATOMIC BLONDE, DEADPOOL 2)’s Guy Ritchie-esque film version of Kotaro Isaka’s novel of mercs & assassins riding the Shinkansen is a perfectly diverting time at the cinema, though a bit slow-going at the outset. Having thought the trailer, which covers Brad Pitt‘s bad-luck assassin who doesn’t want to kill anymore taking a mission to hop on a train outta Tokyo and snatch a silver suitcase, looked like a lot of fun I wasn’t prepared for quite so much setup; the film opens with Andrew Koji‘s Yuichi Kimura hovering over his son’s hospital bed, then taking off in search of revenge on whoever pushed him off a roof. The culprit is the Prince (Joey King), a vicious master manipulator hiding behind an oh-so-innocent-girl act, who wants to use Yuichi against a terrifying Russian criminal who swooped into Japan and seized the Yakuza. Also aboard the train: the double-act of Tangerine & Lemon (Aaron Taylor-Johnson & Brian Tyree Henry), whose banter makes them probably the most fun characters to spend time with aboard the train. The action’s damn good (Leitch co-directed the first JOHN WICK, and the tremendous dragged-out staircase fight in ATOMIC BLONDE is one of THE points in its favor) and Pitt’s character’s loopy reluctant fighter/fortune cookie aphorisms schtick is charming enough, but the characters with the real stakes are never really presented as compelling, and past a certain point the film seems to be working a bit too conspicuously hard to center so many non-Japanese in a flick set in Japan. Entertaining enough, but maybe wait ’til it’s streaming somewhere? (More polished and fun, to be sure, than similar stuff made FOR streaming; I’d say it’s more worth your time than, oh, Netflix’s Gosling-Evans face-off THE GRAY MAN.)

Categories
Movies Review

REVIEW – Nope

Daniel Kaluuya on a horse in NOPE.

Took two viewings for my thoughts to settle on Jordan Peele’s latest, partly because on second viewing I wasn’t being distracted by whatever the hell was going on with the projector bulb in theater 7 of the ol’ Pittsburg 8. More streamlined and cohesive than US and, at least on the surface, less About Race than GET OUT, NOPE plays like a sorta clever, slightly arty old fashioned creature feature. Having inherited their father’s ranch, the Haywood siblings, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer), get spooked when, one evening, a freak occurrence shuts off all the power across the property and causes one of their horses to flee. More upsettingly, OJ hears a strange sound out there — something he last heard when his father (the great Keith David) was killed by a falling object: a nickel falling at something like terminal velocity, to be exact — surrounded by other falling objects like forks and keys and whatnot. So begins a quest to find out what that thing out there is, which leads them to buy a security camera system from Fry’s Electronics salesman Angel (Brandon Perea) and eventually bring in eccentric cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott, whose bizarre spoken word take on a classic novelty song is — I don’t know that I’d call it a high point, but it sure is SOMETHING) to document the mysterious phenomenon in the sky. Like US, NOPE does slide in something tangential that feels like it might just be a combination of weird fixations of Peele’s — the Haywoods’ nearest neighbor is a small-scale theme park called Jupiter’s Claim, run by Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child actor who was traumatized in a freak occurrence involving a chimpanzee co-star in the late ’90s. And yet, Jupe’s story does wind up figuring into the overall plot, both thematically in a couple of ways and — it took me ’til the second showing for this to become clear — straightforwardly as well. There’s a lot to chew on here, but it also works well as a pure suspense flick about ordinary folks being terrorized by and challenging an unknown force. It also has some very funny moments — honestly, the timing and delivery every time the title is invoked is near-flawless (Kaluuya kills with his deadpan delivery throughout), and Perea is highly amusing all thru the entire initial installation of the camera setup. It’s a good, highly idiosyncratic time at the movies, with some nice flourishes, some splendid weird design work, and some light genre-bending insofar as what influences Peele obviously threw into the stew that is this flick. It’s definitely grown on me.

Categories
Movies Review

REVIEW – Thor: Love & Thunder

Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth in THOR: LOVE & THUNDER.

Taika Waititi’s second turn directing an adventure for Marvel’s trademarked version of the Norse God of Thunder feels like a streamlined Cliffs Notes version of itself — this is a film I absolutely believe has a rough Director’s Cut featuring at least an extra hour sitting on a hard disk somewhere. But the version released to theaters is perfectly enjoyable, charming, and hits all the beats it needs to tell its tale. Chris Hemsworth‘s Thor is still, in the wake of the grand AVENGERS finale, hanging out with the Guardians of the Galaxy, when alerts from all across said galaxy start ringing out that someone is killing all the gods. That someone is Gorr the God-Butcher (a manically grinning Christian Bale), a man whose god turned out to be an asshole, therefore once he was empowered to do so he started killing gods. Upon discovering that Asgard is Gorr’s next stop, Thor and his pal Korg (director Waititi) zip down to Earth to stop him, only to discover — wait, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) now ALSO has the Power of Thor?! Yes, bless Taika Waititi for bringing her back to do a riff on that four-ish year stretch of Jason Aaron’s long run writing THOR comics; Jane is wielding a reconstituted Mjolnir whose enchantment adds a foot to her height, turns her straight dark hair into magnificent golden locks, and enables her to smash baddies as effectively as her passive-aggressive divine ex. Alongside an action-starved Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), the two Thors, Korg, and a pair of large noisy goats the Odinson picked up in his time with the Guardians set forth to wreck Gorr’s plans to annihilate all so-called deities across the cosmos. Bale turns in a fascinating performance as Gorr, but it feels fragmented, like with a little more screen time the cackling, manic parts and the cooler, calculating parts might knit together a little more effectively. Hemsworth’s Thor is still being written in the goofy, blustering mode Waititi used in RAGNAROK, but things do get real when lives and heartbreak are at stake (and there’s a couple of scenes where the bluster turns positively charming as he’s addressing a group of Asgardian children). I’ve seen others write of the film’s tonal whiplash, but A. it didn’t bother me much, and B. I swear that’s a product of the tight edit — this thing never stops to breathe. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the bonkers side-trip to the golden city of the gods where our heroes meet Russell Crowe‘s lunatic version of Zeus, with his mighty lightning bolt, weird-ass accent, and little sheer skirt. It’s a playfully over-the-top performance that has the side effect of making you think Gorr might have the right idea, the film’s crazy juxtaposition of tones actually feeding into one of its core ideas nicely. I think I do have to agree with others that RAGNAROK is the sturdier, more cohesive work, but LOVE AND THUNDER is still a cheerful rock’n’roll sci-fi epic of magical mayhem with all the moments of joyful triumph and shocking sorrow you’d hope for. It’s just one that feels like it’s missing anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour. (Amazingly, the audience we saw it with remembered to keep butts in seats for the two post-script scenes.)

Categories
Movies Review

REVIEW – Jurassic World: Dominion

Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Pratt, Isabella Sermon, and DeWanda Wise in JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION.

Okay, so second sequel in a row where I didn’t see the previous movies — and unlike TOP GUN, this one felt like it did leave me at a disadvantage. The reason I was in the theater, however, was because this of course is the JURASSIC WORLD movie where they bring back the original cast of JURASSIC PARK — and it’s funny for me to be interested for that reason, because when I was twelve years old I didn’t particularly like JURASSIC PARK; surly tween Captain JLS wasn’t buying the awe and wonder Spielberg was selling and mostly just wanted to see dinosaurs rend and eat people — which happened, but not enough for my middle school bloodlust. I vibed more with with the grisly sequel a few years later that centered Jeff Goldblum‘s sardonic mathematician Ian Malcolm and featured, among other sights, a T-rex stomping through a backyard and chomping down on a family dog. (Clearly I just have a thing for grim Spielberg sequels; TEMPLE OF DOOM remains my favorite Indiana Jones film.)

The plot that Michael Crichton’s original characters as reinterpreted by Spielberg find themselves embroiled in feels like something that could have been an unrelated Crichton novel; giant prehistoric locusts are wiping out fields across the midwest, but not touching anything grown from seeds sold by the biotech firm Biosyn. Laura Dern‘s Ellie Sattler suspects that they’re Biosyn’s locusts, and recruits her old friend Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) to join her at Biosyn’s compound, where she’s been invited by the aforementioned Ian Malcolm, who is now working as some kind of in-house lecturer — and who has a plan to get them all the evidence they need.

Continue reading “REVIEW – Jurassic World: Dominion”
Categories
Movies Review

REVIEW – Top Gun: Maverick

Tom Cruise flying a jet in TOP GUN: MAVERICK.

First off, let me admit that, unlike nearly everyone else in my age group, I’ve never seen the original TOP GUN; for some reason, our household in the ’80s & ’90s just was not a Tom Cruise-filmgoing household, and I somehow managed to miss it on HBO and every other cable channel as well. My filmgoing has lots of weird gaps like that; like, I’d never seen JAWS until it came out on Blu-Ray. And yet, through the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE films I’ve come around to the Church of Cruise, Patron Saint of Cinema who continues to cheat death for our entertainment — at this point, it would feel wrong not to bear witness to his latest half-mad feat of filmmaking. Thing is, despite not actually having seen the original ’80s film, a lot felt familiar here just through cultural osmosis — ah yes, there’s “Highway to the Danger Zone,” there’s Harold Faltermeyer’s extremely ’80s synth theme, there’s Tom Cruise on a motorcycle racing a jet at the golden hour, and so on.

Mercifully, Joseph Kosinski’s film (his second sequel to a beloved ’80s flick in about a decade; his directorial debut was 2010’s TRON: LEGACY) gives you everything you need to know to understand what’s going on. Tom Cruise is Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a perpetual loose cannon Naval aviator who has deliberately avoided promotion in order to keep flying planes well into his fifties. Having danced between the lines of regulations yet again, before he can be reprimanded his former wingman, Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazanski (Val Kilmer), orders him back to TOPGUN as an instructor to prepare the current best of the best for an incredibly dangerous mission that — let’s face it — is basically the trench run from the original STAR WARS.

Continue reading “REVIEW – Top Gun: Maverick”