A humanising of McDonald’s here. Sort of. It works as a character study and a business lesson, or a warning for small businesses when the sharks come sniffing around.
Well paced once the lengthy exposition is dealt with, mostly interesting, and with a perfectly reasonable Michael Keaton performance, but that’s always expected. There’s nothing exceptional about this but I can’t think of a bad scene, either. I also like to see folk using pay phones and paper diaries. A simpler time, aye.
As for McDonald’s, I just find it funny how a place making and selling shite can be so successful. But that applies to most things on this planet.
There’s an interrogation at the start of this, a programmer/designer/whatever given a lecture about the use of deceased actors in contemporary movies, that CGI-pasting which seems to be the new zeitgeist. “Poor dead guy didn’t want to be in a movie.” I’d never actually considered that before, but then this film gets one thinking.
AI is terrifying; this movie was terrifying, utterly risible but scarily real. It’s Skynet from a chat room. Turn off your Wi-Fi, turn off your webcam, correspond in letters written in disappearing ink.
It’s Blade Runner (1982) and Tron (1982) territory. And with Lance Henriksen. Bishop lives.
The cutting, the stark directness of the style, the quite astonishing framing, this is a movie that demands your attention. The violence is visceral and brutal, and you get the feeling that anything can escalate out of nothing, which it often does. The cast are are all on the top of their game, Billy Bob Thornton a revelation in one of his earlier roles, and the late Bill Paxton once again proving that he’s incapable of a bad performance. And who on Earth was the very bad lad with the tash? Why haven’t I seen this bloke Michael Beach in anything else?
It’s such an unpredictable drama and grips the whole time. It’s also a horrible movie to watch … but for the right reasons.
And there’s a visual reference to North by Northwest (1959) that is simply magical.
It’s some experience, and not just as a kaleidoscope, a who’s who of ‘lads’ from yesteryear. Worth a viewing aside from Vinnie Jones in his worst performance. One loses track of the sighing at his antics.
To steer clear of the alleged football player, the movie is a gem in places. Not much of a script, premise a bit desperate, but if you mute the pratfall happy-to-be-here frolics of half the ‘actors’ in half the scenes, the rest of the sequences are an inspiration, a compendium of short movies shot like a bloke who studied Scorsese and saw how to use a song for a character intro.
It’s entertaining as hell if you skip 50% of it all. And Vinnie Jones.
Razors from The Long Good Friday (1980) wielding a rubber willy is also amusing.
Without the performance, this movie would be nothing. It kind of still is a nothing motion picture, but for an intro to Jack, it works as just that. A tedious affair with so much unnecessary fictionalisation – like, what’s the point if it’s a biopic? – needs a bit more going for it than acting showcase material. As for the lad Hoffa, is he really as interesting as the surfeit of films suggest? Not really.
What’s the term, intimate portrait of an empty vessel?
This was quite an amusing watch. A performer of sorts mercilessly taking the piss out of himself through his dummy is disconcerting, but then you’ve also got all these crude sexual innuendos with highly colourful vitriol. I burst out laughing three times.
The voice of the dummy has the most vexing dialect, the concoction sounding like a cross between Frank Nitti from The Untouchables (1987) and a blocked toilet. The protagonist is clearly away with the fairies, but then it is Anthony Hopkins with his hand up a puppet. What do you expect?
I got a bit tired of it after an hour. You can’t be carrying a Johnny Cab midget for 60 minutes. But it’s worth it for the crash zooms, the sledgehammer sound design consisting almost entirely of laser noises, and the spectacle that is Hopkins in a cardigan.
Absolute rubbish. But in a good way. And that’s rare these days.
This channel is what the Internet was made for (aside from cat videos and staged pranks). The wealth and detail of info in these vids, the animation, the music, the narrator and his redoubtable voice.
I desperately wished to like this because of William Friedkin and his mostly fabulous work but it wasn’t meant to be. I absolutely hated it.
It starts with this film-within-a-film narrative and the suggestion appears to be that making movies is a sin and invites possession. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it.
There were extended shots of leaves falling in this for no reason and it bothered me, like the leaves were attempted symbolism. Maybe it was an augury for bad things, like how the writing progressed. The most baffling aspect of this whole escapade was the fact you have a wee child on the verge of death in a cushty Georgetown house of a famous actress and not a single cop, nurse, social worker, doctor ventures into it aside from a chain-smoking Priest and his spiritual benefactor.
The horror? It’s not scary, just nasty. You’re merely viewing sadism, with very boring actors and a story so nonsensical there should be a Muppet waltzing in with a musical number. Lighting was terrible, framing something out of a TV show (a bad one), and the sound mixing was crushingly theatrical, but not backed up by anything visually memorable.
Horror is some poor bloke getting stabbed over an argument about football teams or having to work 37.5 hours a week in a supermarket, not this shite.
Pointless motion picture.
Anyone who thinks it is good needs their head examined.
A mentally unhinged cluster of psychopaths managed to hijack a state and proceed to massacre hundreds of millions beyond their own country, putting their own in Gulags. An ideology which doesn’t even acknowledge its own nonsensical dialectic should be looked at. It’s a religion for the worst.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s get to the movie.
I have a lot of time for Warren Beatty. He’s a one-man show with proper acting ability. Quite the handsome lad, I would say.
The film:
I fell asleep around the 15-minute mark. Seemed rubbish. Wikipedia informed me how it ends.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 