Tag: 2022 movies

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Movies Review

REVIEW – Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero

Son Gohan crackles with energy in DRAGON BALL SUPER: SUPER HERO.

DRAGON BALL SUPER: SUPER HERO is everything I wanted from a new Dragon Ball anime in 2022. The series’s star rivals Son Goku and Vegeta are sidelined for the duration, allowing other members of the long-running franchise’s super-powered roster of martial arts defenders to shine: primarily, former would-be world conqueror and present day babysitter Piccolo and his ex-pupil, former world savior and present day harried scholar Son Gohan, whose three year old daughter Piccolo has spent an AWFUL lot of time looking after. The story concerns the revival of the long-beaten Bond villain-esque organization the Red Ribbon Army; its current leader, Magenta, has decided they need a trump card, and the man to craft it for them is Dr. Hedo, the grandson of long-dead Dr. Gero. Gero’s crowning abomination, the living biological weapon Cell, was obliterated by reluctant hero Gohan when he was just a boy in one of the series’s more spectacular climaxes and Magenta wants an improved version of the monster. But with Magenta having convinced Hedo that Goku and his friends constitute a rival organization seeking to rule the world, what the Red Ribbons first wind up with are the superheroic androids Gamma 1 & 2. Smart use of the series history, using the fact that, oh yeah, Piccolo WAS once a well-known supervillain to give these androids, who are programmed to think themselves champions of justice, a solid initial target; by the same token, the fact that Piccolo’s “the smart one” among our present-day protagonists means once he’s thought to be out of the picture, he’s able to sneak into the Red Ribbons’ compound and pull together a plan to take them down, hopefully for good this time. Probably incomprehensible to anyone not up on the series’s lore (or, at the very least, they won’t have the same level of investment), but for aficionados, a funny, exciting good time that does shamelessly play on our memories of Gohan and the rest’s battles with the Androids and Cell, but in such spectacular fashion that I really didn’t care. Tetsuro Kodama’s film (from a script by Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama) is the first Dragon Ball animation to be entirely 3D rendered, and in the early going it’s very IN YOUR FACE about it, opening a swooping and swaying view of the world from the eyes of one of Hedo’s insect drones — but as the film goes on it settles into a more typical groove stylistically; the action is furious and flashy, new powers cool and slickly designed. I think the only weak spot is the fake Hans Zimmer score; it works in the moment, but god, as I was waiting for the post-credit scene, the repetition of the core theme got a little obnoxious. Overall, though, I came away just thrilled to bits that 2022’s entry in the Dragon Ball anime franchise was a fun throwback to my favorite part of the Dragon Ball Z story starring probably my favorite franchise heroes that ALSO added some fun new bits to the ongoing universe.


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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.)

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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