Eavesdropping on the Lothian Buses no. 29 bus brought me here.
Christoph Waltz features so I thought it worth a proverbial bash. It looks spectacular in an anonymous way. It’s cliche-ridden to the max. It gets boring very quickly.
I evacuated after 34 minutes.
Next.
The opening is ingenious, a peach of gleefully shameless gore and sadly the rest of the movie can’t top it. It’s a neat wee concept for a horror but it’s as predictable as you get. I made a wee bet (with myself) that one of the characters would allude to the Mary Celeste. Within half an hour they did exactly that.
These movies are funny – actor-stars like Gabriel Byrne turning up in dross for the lolly. Why not? I’d do the same if I were still offered decent scripts after my sins.
Some of the kills were amusing. It looks fine enough. It’s stupid, but I wasn’t bothered. A shitter to watch if you’re ever on a DFDS Seaways and you have fuck all else to do as the bar has closed.
Bobby De Niro in his first major TV role, with Jesse Plemons, the thespian formerly known as Meth Damon. I am embarrassed to report the embarrassing antics on display in this terrible miniseries.
It’s all about De Niro being infallible and imperious as the ex-Prez, our immaculately tailored Jack Bauer protagonist for 2025, an eager biographer relaying all the noble details of his presidency to the audience within 10 minutes of screen time. It’s lazy and dull, and the straw that broke this viewer’s back was our humble former chief’s speech at the rubble of an attack; it was like Bush with the bullhorn at Ground Zero, but suffused with your overbearing De Niro moralising.
This is mainly about Bobby trying to show everyone how to be presidential. I terminated the tripe right there, never to return.
Some reviewers are kind to the show. I’m sure it’s compelling if you can tolerate the grandstanding.
Pish.
The funereal pace of the exposition does it no favours; it was painful enduring this and it didn’t stop being dull for a long time in this never-ending crawl to the big reveal that you knew was coming from the off. All the characters were daft and vexing beyond belief, the type of folk I’d go out of my way to annoy – petty pursuits like sprinkling a bit of the ol’ Cyanide in their cocktails for a private wee chortle.
The premise didn’t go anywhere unexpected and any social commentary was hamstrung by conformity to genre convention and reliance on cheap splatter … which is all the movie really is.
But it did get moderately entertaining once the faffing around ceased.
2/5.
I don’t care that Steven Seagal is a conceited asshole with zero acting talent, Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995) is a bloody great movie – funny, thrilling, and better than the first outing. This was when Sensei Seagal’s ego was bananas but could be justified through bone-crunching mayhem that was pulled off so well, you believe it when Casey Ryback doesn’t even get a scratch on him after 90 minutes of knife fights.
Not these days. He’s a fucking pie presently.
Bye for now.
Ludicrous movie – part satire, part macabre black comedy.
They are a weirdo household, oddball vestiges from another century but somehow less nuts than the WASP irritants they must interact with. It’s a lot of fun and and I didn’t snore once.
And spot Peter MacNicol, a.k.a. Dr. Janosz Poha. And Harmony from Buffy. And Chandler Bing’s unfunny boss. And a dozen more familiar faces.
Christopher Lloyd’s Uncle Fester with carrot sticks up his nostrils should not be funny. But it is.
This was okay but the hoopla and hysteria around it, encapsulated in some quite bonkers spunking on the flick at awards seasons, had me confused.
I didn’t know it was a multiple Oscar winner, and I don’t know why. My conclusion here is that the Oscars are meaningless and movies aren’t judged outwith the the realm of the political, the contentious – trends trumping genuine art.
It’s a good movie, though. But it’s no masterpiece.
Jai Ho!
Delightfully throwback opening credits, recalling a time when cinema recognised the importance of setting the tone, immediately caught the eye – a rarity. And it all looks incredible, every shadowy frame an image that could have been from David Fincher.
It suffices to say that I was fully engrossed in this splendid horror, which was as unpredictable as they come.
We also have a barking Nicolas Cage.
I was expecting a great-looking movie and this was a beauty; Anthony Minghella was always good at that. Brutal battle scenes were a joy to watch, though that’s not a term one would normally identify with carnage. It works as tragic melodrama, some of the naturalistic dialogue almost quotable, and it does capture the precariousness of passing through a ravaged country where law and order is an arbitrary notion.
I didn’t really see the point to it other than a smug shot at Oscar glory, and there’s nothing to distinguish it from a dozen other sweeping yarns.
And the accents were insulting; I would have said Kidman’s Southern belle shtick, especially, was the nadir until Renée Zellweger turned up, embarrassing herself and everyone else with her mugging antics. I spent the remainder of the motion picture praying that she bit the dust. But sadly, she did not succumb.
Daft film, but at least the supporting cast is epic – Ray Winstone, Brendan Gleeson, Donald Sutherland, and the always hypnotic Philip Seymour Hoffman.
It’s far better than The English Patient (1996), but it’s no The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), which is this lad’s Everest.
And it’s time to watch that masterpiece again.
I wasn’t here for Tom Hanks, the most overrated actor of all time starring as Elvis’ notorious bottom-feeding manager Colonel Tom Parker. But it’s a suitable gig for Hanks in that he can apply his superficial charm to the role. I wasn’t here for Elvis, either. I don’t like his music and my only experience of his movies is of turning them off if they ever ‘graced’ the TV back in the day.
A Baz Luhrmann movie, however, is always worth a bash and at least distinctive (auteur quality), and he achieves more than most directors in trying to realise a style and vision. Elvis (2022) is an easy watch, engrossing even, visually dazzling, a kaleidoscope of colour, and frenetically edited and paced.
Luhrmann has no issue using music decades out of the depicted period; it’s a method of keeping the subject matter contentious, connecting it with the present. Some folk moan about such things, but the lad can do what he wants. He has a fervid and fearless imagination that is rare in cinema.
The lad who plays the titular crooner is quite brilliant. Unfortunately, Hanks isn’t, his ‘performance’ mere prosthetics. The movie succeeds most when he isn’t on-screen, but he’s barely off it – being a nuisance, trying to hog the limelight like a subpar Dutch-accented version of Orson Welles in Touch of Evil (1958).
But it’s a very good movie and attains an affecting, plangent beauty by the end.
It’s just a shame that Tom Hanks features.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 