Well, this was quite remarkable and I’m shocked it wasn’t shite because the picture stank of ‘Oscar bait’.
It probably was made with that at least in mind but it’s quality, nonetheless.
And Michael Shannon once again steals the movie.
This is one atrocious movie completely without merit, devoid of any talent, and all involved should be ashamed. And Johnny Depp is a nuisance, a pain in the arse, and one of the worst actors to have ever been somehow relevant. He’s captivating in Donnie Brasco (1997) and Black Mass (2015), but nothing else in the litany of his cinematic crimes galore is worth bothering with. He was in a movie once about a lad with scissors for hands. It was painful viewing.
Pirates is an overwhelmingly horrible film made by prats for prats, and as for the only justification I can make for watching it … I felt like torturing myself a wee bit.
Bye for now.
I hate the use the term ‘wildly entertaining’ but my vocabulary is rather limited today and I can’t be bothered consulting a thesaurus. This movie is a joy to watch and it’s funny as hell and appears to be intentionally so. Tom Cruise can be very funny and this is peak Cruise having a ball.
My only criticism is its lack of dramatic heft but maybe that’s intentional. I don’t know.
Anyway, I recommend.
I fucking hate these things for a multitude of reasons but I’ll be brief:
They are boring. The travellers have nothing to say about their environment and do nothing of interest. All they seem to do is sample local cuisine and have stilted, forced conversations with small business owners. They are essentially paid to go on holiday, and a safe holiday at that.
Why should I bother watching a dull travel guide do dull things?
Fuck off.
Bye for now.
This teaser trailer is bonkers. Here’s hoping this, legendary in its gestation period, movie is more of the same:
This is a nasty flick, a proper stinker in all its faux style and messaging.
Let’s get this out the way first: it is replete with pointless POV camera angles so vexing I wished to POV my reaction to the POVS and open up a self-referential textual dialogue, metamorphose into a sub-par De Palma. But thankfully I didn’t.
It’s like a parody of 1987 made by a crappy satirical show in 2007 by your usual cabal of needy British panel show guests, the type of cunts you see reeling off wee jokes about yesteryear.
This film makes no sense. Why would anyone attempt to interview the new student for the school paper? Maybe just leave the alleged psycho alone, nah? This shitter runs with the premise and hits 90 mins. It’s so bad.
Every classmate is a cliché and treats their privileged schooling like a soap opera. Every authority figure is cruel and sadistic. Every human presence in it is horrible to look at and listen to.
And the protagonist is an absolute idiot.
I hated this movie. I hated it beyond hatred.
Because it’s full of hatred.
A stirring slice of still-contentious Irish history masquerading as a thriller, this is a biopic meets The Godfather (1972).
Tywin Lannister is in it. As is Julia Roberts with the worst ‘Irish’ accent since … the birth of cinema. But she doesn’t ruin it; her role is window dressing, a star name to pump up the box office.
Its like the anti-Richard Attenborough biopic, and thank the gods his perfunctory talents were never let near this kind of material.
Oppenheimer also turns up as an assassin. And the poster is sublime.
4/5.
I’ve never seen Seven Samurai (1954), or Throne of Blood (1957), or Yojimbo (1961), or Ran (1985), though I did own the latter on DVD but lent it to an actor who was in one of my shitty – or sublime if you’d imbibed a gravy boat of amaretto during the viewing – student films and he clearly took it as payment for featuring in something so spectacularly awful/amazing. I bumped into him in a bar years ago and he ignored me. Charming.
This movie, Dersu Uzala (1975), was great, Kurosawa approaching his Indian summer, a proper epic with a soul. It’s long but it doesn’t matter as it’s lengthy for a reason.
Wee treat for you:
For a very long, rotten, and delusional time, I thought this movie was a companion piece to 12 Monkeys (1995). It isn’t. I was confused by the reality of primates featuring in both flicks, and that 1995 was another parallel between them. The ‘similarities’ end there.
Congo (1995) is bonkers because it’s shite, wholly serious, and has a cast of actors you’d never imagine sharing a scene together. This is another one of those movies you wish had a lengthy ‘making of’, tea breaks (or whatever) consisting of grainy zoom shots of the mortified actors hiding away behind the crew and props department, slumped on a stool beside a half-tanned 35cl of Scotch, head in hands, and muttering “What the fuck have I done?” over and over.
One would, if pressed, describe this as an action-adventure film, but we all know it’s just … tosh.
Worth a watch.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 