I trust most renowned film critics, so I’m sure the glowing reviews of this are accurate.
I couldn’t make it beyond 30 mins. It was beyond boring. Hopeless filmmaking. Apparently there’s kick-ass action. But I won’t be watching it.
Will win Oscars.
It’s silly and ludicrous and daft and nonsensical but it works because of the music cues and the overarching unapologetic style of it all which screams ‘This is the 1980s’.
But it isn’t. We can, however, pretend otherwise.
Sonnie’s Edge from season one of Love, Death & Robots, a truly spellbinding visual feast. This was something else. And I don’t just mean the Glaswegian ring announcer. Animation done right.
This bloke, he knows:
The concept is a bit better than the end product but still, this is a movie deserved of revisiting from time to time, despite the inevitable thriller elements that take over towards the denouement. It’s an intriguing premise, what you can achieve when you reduce thinking to its salient elements and get rid of the background noise.
It excels in its exposition and depiction of the cutthroat financial arena as a den of thieves with half of them on some variation of the gear (NZT-48). I hear it got adapted into a TV spin-off that was cancelled after a season, which sounds about right. There’s only so much you can squeeze out of the story.
But De Niro is a gift in this. He always is.
“Don’t make me your competition.”
Volcano (1997) has it all – highly convenient money shots, ludicrous dialogue, every character intro cliché in the book, and the usual late ’90s anything-goes-because-logic-doesn’t-matter action.
The effects are sometimes great, sometimes shite, and usually just ordinary. Anne Heche is in this and looks like she was made to by her agent. Tommy Lee Jones looks bored off his tits in another one of those “It paid the bills and got me a yacht” performances. And an armoured division of fire engines defeat lava.
Better than Dante’s Peak (1997), though.
Testament to a looney age.
Early Seagal is almost as ludicrous as latter-day Seagal. The cut-off point is everything after On Deadly Ground (1994), an incomprehensible riot of a shitter which somehow stars Michael Caine.
His Casey Ryback displays no vulnerability, is never once close to losing a violent encounter, doesn’t break a sweat, and appears to give zero fucks about anything going on around him. The funniest motif is all of the other ‘characters’ informing the audience at every opportunity that Casey Ryback is not mortal.
Supremely entertaining movie with quite the catchy score which totally isn’t a rip-off of JFK (1991) ….
This type of music is not really my cup of tea, save the band’s forever catchy ‘I Disappear’ from Mission: Impossible 2 (2000). I was expecting a sort of This Is Spinal Tap (1984) farce but what I found was an endlessly rewarding slog, and it is that exhausting, through the Dr. Melfi-infused (yes, the band hire a therapist) sessions of a troupe in full-blown crisis, trying to wrestle with a monster bigger than its human components.
It’s a document of the creative process – you actually see how music is made collaboratively, the hours that go into four minutes of a completed song, and the constant bickering that accompanies the undertaking. The chief treat here is drummer/co-lyricist/band founder and victor of Napster Lars Ulrich, who seems beguiled by most of the nonsense spewing from the therapy sessions, one step ahead of the psychobabble. He’s a totally self-aware uber-brat and utterly hilarious.
I’ve never listened to the album (St. Anger). This doc will suffice.
A decent enough, semi-rousing yarn that is better as an example of missed stylistic choices than a superior entertainment. It’s mature but has a soap opera ‘quality’ to it, which makes you wish it went all out and 100% ridiculous for it’s so damn plodding at times. The cast are the best thing about it. Tim Roth is suitably supercilious and looks like he’s having a ball. What happened to him? He was Mr. Nineties. Perhaps that’s his decade and no more. Brian Cox, though, is the gem here. He’s a total slimeball and unashamedly so. He excels at those roles.
The score, sadly, is horrendous and frankly intrusive; it detracts from the would-be drama on display. Listening to it, I kept thinking of Miller’s Crossing (1990) or Fargo (1996), and then realised it was the same bloke who scored those movies.
A cracking sword fight with actual decent editing rounds off proceedings. There aren’t a million cuts to the sequence, which is shocking. But then this was made prior to ADHD being a prerequisite for the job of editor.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 