Watchings
I put this on because it was father’s day and someone said this was one of the great dad movies. Ehhh, not really. Better to describe it as a great American dad movie. Full of heroic martyrs and grizzled men weepily saluting the American flag and a logic that doesn’t bear any kind of scrutiny (first time I’ve ever seen a Trebuchet Ex Machina). Gandolfini’s delightfully scummy performance injects a bit of fun and saves it from being a complete boot-licking hagiography of Redford’s dickhead manipulative General Irwin.
Also, needed WAY more Lindo.
Faye Wong is easily in the running for top 10 most adorable characters of the 1990s but even by rom-com standards, her behaviour here is absolutely unhinged. Love how well the film comes together in the last 10 minutes.
Visually, this is gorgeous and the action/fight sequences are thrilling and visceral and I think Dan Trachtenberg is doing great things with this franchise. But can we just talk about the split-brain aspect that I think affects a lot of these Western grown-up animations? This has some of the most gruesome deaths I’ve seen in the Predator franchise but, at times, it’s also got some of the most childish storytelling that feels barely one step beyond “now THIS is pod racing”. Like, it’s a film that is apparently targeting hardcore gore-hounds and 12 year old boys. Weird!
Still, really enjoyed this.
Two full minutes of this film’s run-time are just shots of Edward Woodward opening his seatbelt - this film plumbs new depths of slow horror. But the mundanity of English suburban family life are cut with an air of supernatural, almost cosmic menace and an implication of something deeply nasty beneath the surface (incest?). There were two things I really loved about this film. First was the disappearance effect at the beginning, which was stunning and instantly made me sit up and take notice. Second was how excellently the film builds on itself. The film revisits things from earlier but with additional context, we see new, more sinister meanings. This is the kind of thing David Lynch did so well in Twin Peaks. The Appointment did this constantly and I loved it every time.
It loses steam about halfway through and takes a wild and unexpected pivot to squeeze just a little more life from the story. In the end though, it’s not interesting enough, and the satire isn’t biting enough. It’s got plenty of the classic Jesse Armstrong lines that will have people golf-clapping at the screen and the performances are terrific (especially Cory Michael Smith who is magnetic in every scene) and those are just about enough to carry the film but I was hoping for something a lot sharper.
A huge let-down..
Before screenings of Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, some cinemas are playing a short video of Tom Cruise where he thanks the audience for coming out to see the film in the cinema. He clearly sees himself as the saviour of the moviegoing experience. But if this is his vision of what he thinks films should be, count me way the fuck out. Watching a man wing-walking on biplanes is very exciting but it’s the exact same kind of lizard-brain spectacle-cinema as we were getting 100 years ago, but in Cruise/McQuarrie’s minds, films haven’t evolved since then. “I even brought a spare plane, just in case” conveniently colour-coded so the audience can keep track of who is who. I felt genuinely insulted at how badly this film was pieced together.
And I’m not even going to start complaining about reverential tones in which almost every character refers to Ethan Hunt. Or the relentless messianic images of a man with a cross fighting the antigod and the fallen angel Gabriel and who dies and comes back to life and whose face is literally 80% of the poster (I measured).
Exhausting.
Tom Cruise retire bitch.
(Tramell Tillman was great though. He fully understood the assignment.)
Fountain of Youth isn’t so much a direct Indiana Jones rip-off, it’s Indiana Jones filtered through forty years of copycats. It’s a copy of a copy of a copy. The half-tuck henley shirt from the Uncharted games. The moment where the mystery is solved by the last likely member of the team, taken directly from National Treasure. You could literally pick apart every element of this film and find its antecedent in earlier films or videogames. It’s a film put together like a shopping list.
Not that this is, by itself, a bad thing. Indiana Jones was a tribute to the Republic serials of the 30s, and some of its set-pieces are lifted wholesale from those. Like the truck chase with Indiana Jones going under the truck is a combination of similar gags in Zorro’s Fighting Legion and Stagecoach. But Fountain of Youth fails to be anything more than a hodgepodge of reference is because it completely misses any of the emotional beats that draw us into film. The emotional beats that allow us to overlook the seams in the plot construction.
And this is down to two main problems, as I see it.
The first is that there are just too many characters that do absolutely nothing. Even Natalie Portman, the apparent second lead, has little to do apart from to be a foil for John Krazinsky’s witty banter (is it banter when its just one person who gets literally all the good lines?). She’s a capable actor but she’s the Basil Exposition of this film, just there to say the things that helps move us to the next sequence. Laz Alonso and Carmen Ejogo were also in this film, I guess, but for what? Maybe two lines each? Get that bag MM, but yikes your character could have been wallpaper for all we learned about you. Stanley Tucci appears for two minutes to be the guy who says things just for the trailer. And the extent of Domhnall Gleeson’s character development is a single cough to indicate his terminal illness. What are his motivations? Not sure! So if he turns out to be the bad guy (or doesn’t), I don’t really care! We’re given nothing to invest in him as a character.
The other problem affecting Fountain of Youth is one that I feel also contributed to the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull-hate. When everything is CGI and it lets you do anything, nothing makes sense, so we’re left just throwing our hands in the air and shouting “I GUESS??!” I leave my lawnmower in the shed all winter and when I take it out again, I have to oil the blades to get them spinning nicely. But an enormous 200-foot tall precision mechanism shoving thousands of tons of rocks into a complicated stair system buried under the pyramids that hasn’t been touched in 5,000 years? No problem! CGI allows filmmakers to set their films in incredible places, allows their camera to do impossible movements, regardless of how illogical they might be. And who cares about dramatic or emotional stakes when CGI artists can literally paint around your un-affected movements? People make the big jump at the last second because that’s what the CGI artists made it look like. When Yakima Canutt is dragged under horses in Stagecoach or Vic Armstrong is pulled behind the truck in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s thrilling because there’s a real person performing it.
On their own, nither one of these problems is enough to really sink a film. But taken together, it just leaves me feeling like what’s the fuckin point? When you’ve got me looking back fondly on National Treasure 2 (of all films), you’ve really shit the bed.
What an enormous waste of money.
Cinderella told from the point of view of the ugly stepsister. The Substance is the obvious touchpoint here, with both films showing the lengths people will go to achieve beauty. But while that film was bright and hypersaturated and the magical element felt like a safe buffer, the story of The Ugly Stepsister is told with grim Scandi indifference. This isn’t a girl who was once beautiful and is feeling the effects of age. This is a girl who was born unattractive and the cruelty of the world’s treatment of her, along with the astonishing body horror makes this an impressive though incredibly tough watch.
Cheap and cheerful Ozploitation Indiana Jones knock-off. I went into this expecting some industrial grade schlock, but it actually turned out to be surprisingly fun! Almost good, even! It’s impressive how much they achieve with so little, especially in the effects department, and a few of the stunts made me laugh out loud at how inventive they were.
Imagine you’re watching one of the best westerns you’ve ever seen, with a compelling askance view of the myth of the American west, along with a terrifically nuanced and sympathetic depiction of a Native American. And imagine someone else in the room is doing some of the worst guitar noodling you’ve ever heard over the top of the entire movie.
I’m not a huge fan of Neil Young but honestly, this made me like him even less.
(I realise this is not going to be a popular opinion.)
Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster are tremendous in this rugged revisionist men-on-a-mission western, a classic of the “just guys being dudes” genre. The relationships all feel completely believable. The camaraderie between the four leads is off the charts and the late-film reunion between Dolworth and Chiquita is one of the most badass, heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen.
Really, really great.
Warfare does its best to thread the tricky needle between giving an honest depiction of the horrors of war told through a skirmish in the Middle East being told from the point of view of some extremely green American soldiers without descending into jingoistic oo-rah American imperialist bullshit. I’m not sure it fully succeeds, and ultimately it ends up falling between the two stools and pleasing nobody.
Still I’m glad Alex Garland got this out of his system though.
How 70s is this? It’s even got Gene Hackman being sexy and eating fondue, every character is completely broken and the film is thoroughly bleak throughout. None more 70s.
Really great.
The dialogue is crackling, and Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth are two of the hottest people ever to share a screen. Rita Hayworth’s hair deserves a character credit all of its own. But I really struggled keeping up with the motivations of the characters, which seemed to change from one scene to the next. One minute, Johnny is trying to stop Gilda cucking his boss, and the next minute he’s okay with her cucking him?
Sultry fun.
De Palma is in very familiar territory here. Not that there’s anything wrong with that - no-one does incredibly enjoyable, watchable elegant sleaze quite like De Palma.
Was Luis Guzman in this film the inspiration for Flight of the Conchords’ Hair Helmets?
Honestly, it took me three runs at this film to finish it. The problem, for me, was that the opening half of the film is some of the most turgid setup, written as if the audience is completely stupid. Actually, the whole film treats the audience as if it’s stupid. There’s a bit at the end where the treasure agent has finally figured out who he is and the film has her say all the things out loud that the audience have already worked out ages ago. A LITTLE LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK PLEASE. So yeah, this isn’t a problem that goes away in the film, it’s just that there isn’t enough juice in the first half to justify it. It gets a lot more enjoyable in the second half when it stops pretending to be the first draft of Good Will Hunting/ and goes a little more John Wick.
But tbh I think my main issue with this film is that I just don’t like Ben Affleck.
Classic Amicus. A little bit of camp but a lot of fun. The nightmare sequence was a delight. Also loved the various two-shots of an eyeless skull facing off against Peter Cushing, the greatest eye-actor in history. Mad respect for the multiple shots from the inside of the skull. Mad audacious.
(Minor aside: since this is firmly in the era of using asbestos for snowflakes in films, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of toxic shit Cushing was breathing in during the gas sequence).
I don’t think I took a single breath for the entirety of that heist sequence. Phenomenal.
I love Gareth Evans, but this is, by a huge margin, the worst of his movies. Lazy and uninspired. Even John Woo on autopilot isn’t this bad. It doesn’t help that he tries to hide that this film was shot in Wales and not, in fact, Anytown, USA by using some of the worst CGI I’ve seen in years.
The Netflix effect is real.
There’s probably a great movie in here, it’s just suffocated by self-indulgence and catastrophically terrible script that feels more like a to-do list of pirate movie cliches. Because, in terms of pure visual spectacle, this is incredible. Even my wife, who has very little patience for films like this, was pulled in by the carriage chase sequence and neither of us could see the seams of how they pulled off that falling out a window stunt. The film is full of stuff like this. Giant practical effects that we just don’t see any more. But they go too far. Renny Harlin clearly had no-one telling him “sorry Renny mate, this is a bit much now”. And so, rather than just shooting some kick-ass fight sequence, almost every time Geena Davis is on screen, it’s shot in slow-mo and from five different angles and so half the fight scenes are incomprehensible garbage.
Still, Frank Langella is enjoying himself, hamming it up as the scenery-chewing baddie. So at least someone really enjoyed this film
The “piercing the veil” sequence totally captured me. Astonishing and overwhelming. It’s not surprising that Ludwig Göransson is listed as an executive producer here - music is every bit as important in the storytelling as any of the actors’ performances (which, it should be said, are also across the board incredible). It’s also refreshing to see a modern blockbuster genre film where the credits for the musicians are as long as the credits for vfx.
Best American vampire film since Near Dark.
Often overlooked compared to its genre contemporaries like Labyrinth, this is a wonderful inventive piece of filmmaking that deserves a better reputation. Obviously, inviting comparisons to one of Hollywood’s original and brightest darlings is a tall ask. And Return to Oz does itself no favours: instead of the technicolour oomph of the original film, this has a more gritty realism that could almost feel like a betrayal of expectations from an ‘Oz’ film. But it acts as a vital counterweight to the fantasy elements. In Return, the world of Oz feels more grounded and dangerous, not entirely dreamlike and safe. This means the antagonists here are extra terrifying, especially to younger eyes ‐ the Wheelers and Mombi and two of most terrifying villains ever put into a kid’s movie. But it also means that the moments of whimsy, the visual style such as character design of Jack Pumpkinhead and Tik-Tok, feel even more grounded and real and special.
Watched this with my kids and they loved it.
Opens with a Busby Berkeley dance number but instead of dancers with feathers, we get marines with rifles. And ends with a cheesy “The End” card. Feels like the last gasp of Old Hollywood. Wonderful stuff.
Worth pointing out that although Tom Cruise is more than capable enough to handle the intense sequences, he really, really struggles with the lighter stuff. There’s a couple of bits where his character has to do basic relatable, human shit like “tell a joke” and, god bless him, the poor guy is really trying but never quite gets there.
There are a couple of flashes of brilliance to be found here but unfortunately you have to wade through an unforgivable amount of bullshit to find them.
Goldmember is not substantively worse than any of the other Austin Powers films. It follows the exact same formula, with variations of the same jokes (they even joke about the expected, inevitable “Johnson” joke). But the franchise was just running out of steam at this point and people had moved on, I guess. Made me laugh out loud a couple of times, but I wasn’t proud of having laughed.
Also I feel stupid for saying this but I didn’t get the whole Goldmember gag. The entirety of the joke appeared to be “Dutch people have funny accents”?
Adolescence for the 1980s.
I love how everyone is watching cartoons in this. Shooting up and then watching Bananaman.
(I’m working on a first-time watch of Twin Peaks and I’ve finally made it to Fire Walk With Me.)
Is this what David Lynch always wanted Twin Peaks to be like? Was Mark Frost holding him back? Did they just decide to go with what the 18 certification would let them get away with? All of the above?
The show has its moments of real nightmarishness (especially season two) but it’s dialled all the way up here. Sheryl Lee, given such short shrift in the TV series, is given so much more to do here and she handles it beautifully. A thoroughly demented, fragile performance.
The first half is overstuffed with too many story threads that don’t go anywhere (although we can largely forgive this because “Black Leather Rock” is great). And good Christ it is molasses-slow. The second half is much more straightforward Hammer fare, albeit a fairly middling entry, with radiated children being kept under wraps by a secret government agency.
There’s an interesting streak of nihilism peeking through here that I wish they’d leaned into.
Do you like watching an entire film through a tiny pinprick of light? Then boy do I have the film for you.
The Blair Witch Project comparisons are obvious - a bunch of young people head off into the wilderness with video cameras and go slowly insane - but the second half goes off in such a weird hallucinogenic, experimental cosmic horror tangent that it suffers slightly in the comparison. People expecting a straightforward found footage horror will be disappointed.
A better point of comparison is The Evil Dead (there are a couple of shots toward the end that seem to directly reference this as an influence). And this is what unlocked the film for me. Once I realised this film was just a bunch of genre sickos armed with a microbudget, a camera and buckets of caro syrup and having lots of fun, I vibed with the film a lot more. Unfortunately the many, many (way too many) frustrating torch scenes meant I’d already semi-checked out by the time I saw what they were actually trying to do and it wasn’t enough to fully save the film for me.
It’s a testament to Noah Hathaway’s performance that multiple generations have been so deeply traumatised by something that happens to a horse that we’re introduced to barely one scene before.
Oof this is a hard one to score. On the one hand, my kids absolutely loved it and it was everything they wanted from a Minecraft movie. There’s a reunion late in the film that had my son slapping both his knees with relief and delight and he was fully invested. For kids, this film is absolutely delivering the goods.
On the other hand, “kids like it” isn’t an excuse for a film to not really try. What we’re left with is a film about creativity that demonstrates almost no creativity in itself. Jack Black’s entire direction appears to have been “just do your normal Jack Black thing pls”. The main characters have no arc and are completely forgotten for large parts of the film, completely lost in the messy action. There were a couple of nice creature effects, but most of the effects felt flat and volume-y.
On the the other other hand (we’re on our third hand now), this really could have been a lot worse.
This just didn’t work for me. The first act was a bit of grim fun but ultimately felt like Director Bong on auto-pilot. Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, the film becomes something else entirely when Ruffalo and Colette appear giving career-worst performances and completely upend the film’s tone and pointedness of the satire.
Disappointing.
A fun mash-up of spy film styles. The understated, rigidness of Le Carre combined with the jazzy smoothness of Bond, Black Bag is entertaining enough and breezes along but I’m afraid this wasn’t a total success for me. From a purely aesthetic point of view, it’s impeccable as you’d expect from a film shot by Peter Andrews (I know). But narratively, it was all over the place. The stakes of the story are Hollywood-enormous ‐ literal nuclear meltdown ‐ but the protagonist’s main concern are some very British dinner parties. In video games, they call this ludonarrative dissonance and it’s confusing as hell.
All the same, I’m glad someone gave this a go but I doubt I’ll ever watch it again..
I know England in the 80s looked post-apocalyptic but holy shit Alan Clarke really pushes it in Road, turning it into a Beckettian primal scream of working-class rage. Lesley Sharp’s monologue is heartbreaking and the obvious highlight of the film but the real genius is the camera: unflinching and constantly moving, refusing to give us comforting edit breaks. I don’t think a fourth wall break has ever made me as uncomfortable as they did here.
Recommended.
When I was 15, it felt like everyone in my all-boys school discovered Full Metal Jacket at the same time. And it’s impossible to overstate what an impact it had on us at that age. We thought it was the ne plus ultra of hardcore, grown-up filmmaking and we made sure we could recite pretty much every line from scratch. God, we were insufferable.
Watching it now, it’s hard to be completely objective because of the oversize impact it had on me/us at that age. But the thing that stands out is just how much it feels like it was specifically designed to appeal to teenage boys. But being teenage boys, we completely missed the ironic detachment of the film and so we just saw the whole thing as a big macho act. We missed the fact that the scenes, each iconic on its own, never really cohere into a truly effective whole, especially with the bifurcated structure of the story.
A flawed masterpiece.
A masterpiece of breathless “just then” storytelling. Vienna goes to the bank and JUST THEN the gang decide to rob it and JUST THEN one of them kisses Vienna and JUST THEN etc etc. It’s extremely shallow stuff, but that’s not what makes this film stand out. It’s the performances that are the real draw here. Okay so Sterling Hayden is extremely wooden but the female leads are crushing it. Crawford is fiery, and McCambridge is electric as the malevolent Emma Small whipping the town into a frenzy. The McCarthyism allegory is interesting but also reflects our current political situation, which is more than just a little heartbreaking.
Painterly in its composition. That final shot is as gorgeous as anything ever put on screen. But its reach exceeds its grasp, as Scott struggles to inject any emotionality into the film and Carradine struggles with the material in general.
It’s a bold and audacious debut that represents the best and the worst we’d see from its director over the next 50-odd years..
Somehow I got it into my head that this was going to be a romp in the vein of Brewster McCloud ‐ a film I appreciated more than liked ‐ but this film has so much more wit, so much more heart. Not the words I was expecting to be using to describe such a toxic story. Matthau and May are perfect foils for each other. Matthau’s hangdog face and dour demeanor against May’s innocent ditziness and I could watch this potent combination for hours.
Wonderful.
Tony Scott could take even the messiest script and make it extremely watchable. In Days of Thunder, the flop sweat is almost literally oozing off the screen, and the editing is nothing short of chaotic but Tony Scott somehow pulls it all together. Nowhere near as entertaining as Top Gun but, then again, few things are.
Disjointed, baggy and I’m not sure it actually has anything new to say. Barely anything more than just a collection of stock military vignettes. Emotional states fluctuate from scene to scene, making the whole film feel incredible schizophrenic which on the one hand is possibly intentional but on the other hand, has the effect of making it really difficult to engage with the characters or the story.
All this being said, it’s interesting to see how much this film almost single-handedly influenced the aesthetics of war movies and video games for at least a decade.
I can’t overemphasise what a big deal this film was in my family when I was growing up. I was too young to get most of the jokes (loved the pratfalls though!), but it was nearly constantly on in the background every weekend, embedding itself in my DNA through osmosis. So watching it now, this film I haven’t thought about in 30 years, is a really strange experience. All of the lines and even the delivery of the lines are bubbling up from my subconscious ahead of time. I’m finally old enough to get the jokes and there are some top-class bangers, but the film never once made me laugh because I knew the lines by rote. Very strange!
Even stranger was the wave of nostalgia that washed over me while watching this was unreal. It was like finding my childhood comfort blanket again. The feeling of safety and warmth. That was really unexpected from a film with a close-up of a half-naked Swedish woman dancing in an office. Wild stuff.
The wheels have come fully off the bus here. It doesn’t feel so much like Fuqua and Washington have forgotten what brings people to an Equalizer film, but more that they just aren’t interested in making that film any more. There are still occasional flashes of greatness here, like the brief first-person perspective of the assult whose aftermath we’re introduced to at the beginning, but for the most part this is more The Talented Mr McCall than badass action film.
Massively disappointing.
It all kind of falls apart in the last half hour, but I’m still a total sucker for Parker’s unfussy style.
Also, maybe watching this in 2025 wasn’t the best move? Can’t help but feel like maybe we’re not as far from this as we think.
I’ve seen a lot of people complain that Flow felt like an extended video game cutscene. And it’s true that the film is in conversation with videogames. Specifically the work of Fumito Ueda, whose sparse, barren worlds hint at but don’t explain their history which allows you to project your own emotions and interpretations onto the story.
If you’re going to copy anyone, copy the master, right? Flow does all this along with the added difficulty of telling a complex story through the believable gestures and motions of a range of animals. This is every bit as magical as the hype would have you believe. A remarkable achievement.
I thought maybe I’d enjoy Martin McDonagh’s schtick a bit more when he wasn’t wrapping it in some diddley-eye patronising Irish bullshit. I guess not!
Sam Rockwell was terrific, though.
Now it’s very possible that I was just in a bad place watching this, because I’m seeing a lot of very high scores for this film and I just can’t relate.
I mean, intellectually I understand that it’s a significant achievement to stage Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto Online and I understand intellectually that the juxtaposition is supposed to be hilarious. But something about this film rubbed me the wrong way. What I saw was a pair of charmless craic vacuums with no understanding of the medium latching onto a cheap gimmick that would have worked better as a series of TikTok clips instead of a full movie where everything feels contrived and inauthentic (the soliloquys were delivered more believably than a lot of the supposedly natural dialogue, like the “oh what do we have here?” finding the theatre at the beginning).
It also doesn’t help that the film is stuck between a rock and hard place ‐ viewers need a certain level of fluency with the game to be able to understand what’s going on, especially considering how disjointedly the whole thing has been put together. But on the other hand, too much fluency and you realise how much of the game’s bonkers anarchy has been left on the table, and how anaemic and dull the end result is.
God bless Parteb, the agent of chaos in the whole thing ‐ the true spirit of GTA:O ‐ and the only thing that made me laugh in the whole movie.
Even more disappointingly, there’s another story here: two out-of-work actors during lockdown, struggling to find work, struggling mentally and emotionally. They finally find a project to keep them occupied, to keep them connected with other people and get them some industry recognition. A better film would have spent some time interrogating this but for the most part it’s completely ignored in Grand Theft Hamlet.
A hugely missed opportunity. Disappointing.
Master and Commander is up there with Mad Max: Fury Road for sheer dad-level “how the FUCK did they even make this??”
You solve one problem, and you solve the next one, and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.
Somewhere during Covid, this became my ultimate comfort film. A colossal epic and Ridley Scott makes it look easy.
Dopey, dirtbag Ex Machina but make it fun. Jack Quaid and Sophie Thatcher are perfect ‐ Quaid playing against his usual loveable goofball type and Thatcher is right up there with Samara Weaving for “actors I love to see going feral”.
Way better than it should have been.
Ray Liotta is rightly the star of the show here. His introduction halfway through the film shifts the story into another gear entirely. He’s electric, absolutely magnetic and steals every scene he’s in. But at what cost? In the first half of the film, Lulu/Audrey (the 80s Manic Pixie Dream Girl) is a whirlwind of life and vitality and an absolute smokeshow, one of the sexiest characters in cinema.
But in the second half of the film, she’s relegated to being a helpless, screaming damsel as two men fight for her. I guess there’s some indication that this is partly Ray Liotta’s grip on her and she’s regressing but the story doesn’t really bear this out fully, so I’m back-filling an explanation. The film did her dirty.
Slowly trying to wean my children off whatever (AI-generated??) Netflix slop they’re so used to by introducing them to some classics. And I’m delighted to report that Singin’ in the Rain was a huge hit. My 6-year old was literally rolling around laughing at the “Make ’em laugh” number.
Saturday Night occasionally descends into boring, clunky exposition with more than a few “chubby hmm” moments that don’t pass the sniff test. But its heart is in the right place, and that’s not nothing. The performances are solid across the board, but it’s interesting to see how much the tenor of the film changes when a genuine star like Rachel Sennod is on the screen. And Jon Batiste’s wonderful propulsive, anxiety-making soundtrack does an incredible job of underscoring the chaos of the story.
Could have been a lot worse.
40 years later and this is still a magical experience. From a purely visual standpoint, it looks like nothing else, and every song on the soundtrack is a top-class banger. I watched it with my kids and they were completely rapt and delighted at pretty much every turn (their favourite character was the ’ello worm, naturally).
The fuckin balls it takes to trick an audience into thinking they’re just getting a sweet geri-action heist film by drawing cute comparisons to Mission Impossible films where the action isn’t running full speed across roofs and jumping impossible gaps but is instead just getting a thing down from a high place. But then to pull the rug and reveal the whole thing has been built above a deep, deep well of heartbreak that only occasionally bubbles to the surface? Incredible.
Loved this.
A slow burn horror about exhuming bodies to appease restless spirits. The film almost imperceptibly layers superstition upon superstition until there’s someone covered in blood and carving up pig carcasses and you’re like “okay, sure!” The middle section is old-school proper terrifying, to the point where the actual ending and final act feels like a tiny bit of a let-down. It went in a completely different direction than the rest of the film had me expecting. If I hadn’t been receptive or hadn’t allowed myself to be pulled along by the story, I can imagine it would cross the line into ridiculous. But I should also caveat this by saying there’s a strong possibility that this is another one of those films that probably has a deeper layer to the horror that I’m unable to tap into because of my ignorance of historical geopolitics in that region.
Still, extremely enjoyable.
The cartoon boi-oi-oing sound effects over the opening credits had me worried this was going to be just another extremely broad Soviet-bloc comedy. And for the most part, that’s exactly what this it delivers. But in the last act, when the timey-wimey shenanigans kick in, the film jumps into another gear with some of the most enjoyable time travel antics I’ve seen in a while. Really entertaining.
I try to avoid lazy “this film is like <other film>” comparisons but I feel like the Den of Thieves films actively invites them, being so blatant with their uhhh let’s call them “homages”? So if the original film is dirtbag Heat, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is dirtbag Ronin (“Ronin” is used as a callsign here and is one of the first words in the film ‐ like I said, blatant), or maybe dirtbag Oceans 12. Or maybe even dirtbag Miami Vice. Or maybe all of these things.
Point is, it has a very different vibe from the first film. Much looser. There’s less swagger and more swanning. Less out to impress the Boondock Saints crowd. More out to impress the Le Circle Rouge crowd .And it kind of suits it more? They have some fun with it, and they use Big Nick’s fish out of water schtick to great effect (“FUCK NATO!”).
Don’t get me wrong, despite its aspirations, this is still a very, very dumb film. But it’s never not entertaining and holy hell can Christian Gudegast film an action scene.
Fun.
I’m delighted that Hollywood has started embracing sex again but I feel like I was oversold on how horny this film was. Not nearly as torrid or thrilling as it seems to think it is.
Apparently this started life as an episodic TV show for Disney+ and was hastily retrofitted into a full-length movie and oh boy can you can feel it. The obvious TV adaptation structure pokes through pretty hard, especially in the first half of the film. The songs, in particular, feel shoe-horned in. They’re completely forgettable and have no magic and really cement the feeling that we’re hitting the Aladdin: The Return of Jafar level of rushed cash-grabbery.
But what do I know? I asked my kids (9 and 6) if they thought this was better or worse than the original Moana and they said “much better” and they absolutely loved Maui’s “Can I get a Chee Hoo” song.
Take from that what you will.
At the beginning of the film, Tom Green almost goes out of his way to point out how artificial documentary filmmaking is, how by documenting something, you’re changing it so you’re not getting the true, authentic thing. It feels like he’s preparing an excuse so he, the most ironically detached man on the planet, doesn’t have to actually be sincere here.
As a result, I’m not sure if the film teaches us anything real about Tom Green, or about what drives him. It’s bookmarked by his big move out from Los Angeles and out to some farmland in Canada and we aren’t actually told the reasons for the move (I guess we can infer something about mental health but this is mostly speculative?)
All the same though, Tom Green is an entertainer that doesn’t get enough credit and sometimes it’s enough to be given just a quick reminder of all the great things he’s done.
I enjoyed my time with A Real Pain. It’s a Kieran Culkin type character (conveniently played by Kieran Culkin) bouncing around Poland with a Jesse Eisenberg type character (conveniently played by Jesse Eisenberg) and the whole film is brought to life by Kieran Culkin’s natural effervescence. Everything else ‐ literally everything else ‐ exists in service to his performance. Which is both good and bad. It’s fun to watch him cook but feels like the rest of the film suffers a little. Like, this is Jennifer Grey’s first major role in decades and she’s got nothing to do except be a foil for Culkin in like two scenes. Feels like a lot of missed opportunities got missed because they were just so focused on Culkin Culkin Culkin.
And that’s fine. Like I said, I enjoyed it. He’s got buckets of charm and, more importantly, he’s also got the chops to pull off the occasional emotional gasp when it’s needed.
But if you were to ask me what the film is about beyond this, I’d struggle. I guess it’s trying to say “people sure are complicated!”? There’s a few other things I can see it reaching for but not quite succeeding. Although I accept this might also be a cultural thing and if I was Jewish or American, I might see this film differently?
Regardless, this is still a solidly entertaining hangout film.
Wonderful, vibrant performances completely let down by a lazy, lifeless screenplay. Robin Johnson and Trini Alvarado give some of the best on-screen depictions of proper angsty punk teenage rebellion almost in spite of a screenplay that doesn’t know what to do with the characters beyond some surface level bullshit.
Interesting how you can really see the bones of Empire Records here though!
The screenplay suffers from being a little too contrived and Save The Cat-y. The injected emotional drama in the second half never felt believable and ironically achieved the opposite result by detaching me from the emotionality of the story. But my goodness, the performances are incredible. Colman Domingo holds everything together with some genuine movie star magic, but the semi-/non-professional performances are the real beating heart of the film.
Astonishing.
Every film I watch only gets so much of my suspension of disbelief. A coincidence here or there? No problem. A convenient meeting of two characters at just the right time? Sure, I’ll go with it! Too much, though, and it feels like lazy writing. The happy chances stack up and cross a line and lose me.
North by Northwest blasts through its disbelief budget in the first 10 minutes. The plot hinges on so much flimsy serendipity that the film strains credulity. At no point in this film does James Mason even say “hey given this nationwide manhunt for Roger Kaplan, maybe my dopey henchman’s dopey plan didn’t identify the right guy”. And the film just keeps rolling with it. On to the next “and it JUST SO HAPPENS that…” until you find yourself in a house just two minutes down the road from the top of Mount Rushmore. Riiiiiight.
And yet! AND YET! Honestly, who needs credulity when you’ve got stars like this? North by Northwest perfectly demonstrates that, sometimes, megawatt charisma really can carry a movie.
A charming shaggy dog detective story that feels like the marriage of Encyclopedia Brown and The Long Goodbye. Adam Brody is terrific. Perfect hungover Sunday matinee viewing.
johnke.me