Archive for 2023
78 posts from 12 January to 20 August 2023.
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A very modern take on the revenge plot even though our “hero” murders uncountable people in the most gruesome ways, his raiders of the land of Rus burn up hundreds in a barn (Come and See, history rhymes), and not even his mother escapes his night blade. This is exactly what Beowulf wanted to be, but wasn’t.
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A 50 years old parable on how screentime in children is bad for them, delivered as a long stretch of PG-13 screentime. Ya’ know, fo’ kids!
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What the heck this this, did someone cut all Arnie’s lines? Joely Richardson plays the same role as Color Out of Space.
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with less drugs and more cheap beer.
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Another Alien “sequel”, something that is technically a direct followup, but is in fact a whole other film. A crew of supermax prisoners have the hots for Ripley, but only the doctor gets a chance to relieve his blue balls, then he is brutally killed by the Alien.
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Hot damn, this is intense. “Show, don’t tell is” taken pretty far here, most exposition is replaced with body horror instead. High octane paranoia, relentless from the opening shot with the escaping “dog” to the final explosions.
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My god, Nolan disappears up his own ass. Tenet was very watchable as an action film, but this just goes on and on. Could have been a tweet.
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The damn quotes are all over the walls, man:
- Game over man, game over!
- For close encounters.
- They mostly come at night. Mostly.
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Not a very good adaption, but it’s not that bad as a standalone film. It’s light comedy, ironically much, MUCH, tamer than the book itself. Maybe I’m just sucker for Emily Blunt.
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Back to the convent she goes, this time to teach a group of unruly inner city kids what life is all about: bust your ass for a possibility of an education, while external consultants suck the school money into their pockets, until they close it down and earn passive income from the capitalist leeching.
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Gus van Sant does a shot-for-shot remake, with Anne Heche as Marion, the thief and philanderer, and Vince Fucking Vaughn as Norman Bates. With Viggo Mortensen on the cast, as the married boyfriend!
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Just a standard Statham flick, with a John Le Carré framing device, some kind of SAS Oman Civil War intervention. Takes a back seat to the wall-to-wall action sequences. Yvonne Strahovski does a mean Australian accent, throwing another shrimp in the barbie.
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Holy shit, this is so 90’s teenage “comedy”. And so American, the come to generic “Europe” with green screens on exterior scenes.
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Like a fine wine, it gets better with age. The soundtrack is incredible. Not to be confused with Repo: The Genetic Opera, which is also great for different reasons.
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Not so excellent, but it’s not The Matrix Resurrections. Kristen Schaal could make a mean George Carlin, if they let her.
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The one with Felicity Jones as less platonic love interest, but still far enough from first base.
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The one with Ayelet Zurer as the CERN scientist. Langdon gets some lascivious looks but not even first base so far.
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Yet another prototypical Wes Anderson film. Not an inch of novelty, no twist on the formula, just whimsical stories within stories, within stories, with the regular cast, deadpan deliveries, and gorgeous visuals. It’s less on the nose than The French Dispatch, but a similar state of mind.
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This is the one with Audrey Tatou as the platonic love interest. Ron Howard’s brand of blandness and safe. To think I once though this was a great thriller, I was very young and naïve. Remember, this is like Bond for Dunning-Kruger sufferers.
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Gender swapping is fun. Can you imagine this the other way around, no way in hell it would be done. A rare American comedy with funny writing, but gets a bit po-faced in the third act.
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Come on man, I got four kids to feed!
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Scumbag dude cheats on his wife while she is six months pregnant, that’s vilest than most Trump moves. But is she pregnant, or just a giant spider? Why does it start with a sub-rosa strip club where topless woman torture themselves with spiders?
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A Blue Dog corporate Democrat is destined to win the White House and that’s God’s plan, unless he’s content to remain a corporate drone and live with a British dancer in NYC. Out of that horrible premise comes out a nice film.
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Come on maggots, you want to live forever?
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Yes, I also read The Shining, and saw the film. Doesn’t make you special, director man. And in case the meaning wasn’t obvious, the Overlook Hotel BURNED DOWN, finito, dead.
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Damn, Eddie Murphy is like a charismatic Dave Chapelle. The film is a weird blend of Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, on the comedic side. It’s all script, with minor Bruckheimer action scenes peppered within.
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Total Recall as morality tale thriller. Once again, Fincher steals from the best, like a true artist.
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A posse of Coen actors casually creates one of the best westerns ever, providing The Dude with another character for the ages.
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Undercover cop extraordinaire and loving father gets his whole family killed by a mobster and goes postal, punishing them for their sins. Pretty subdued, considering its current appropriation by fascist cops.
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Sicario, if Emily Blunt was actually working for the competition, split into random veteran, random surfer dude, and random trust fund valley girl. Did Oliver Stone took out most political references in exchange for the budget for shootouts?
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Just a regular film noir, where the “mystery” is checking which groan-inducing pickup lines do not result in hot steamy sex. And that ending, does not resolve anything at all.
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Emmerich-level disaster film, brought to you by many brands, and The Rock as the heart of the film, that’s just folly.
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A bunch of mixed messages here, particularly the ending that fixes (almost) everything.
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Juvenile Timur is already stylish, but this is too raw and “eastern European”. It’s not distilled into blissful and inventive visual transcendence like his next films. Angelina Jolie plays a mean ruthless Trinity.
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A better biopic than Marie Antoinette, with a somewhat similar style. Loved the speeches straight to the viewer, they are enmeshed in the story, usually ironic echoes of the main characters condition. The whole film is that, speeches extolling the virtue of equality in socialism, with men idling while woman toil.
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As intense as Sicario. A family drama with aliens. And with little to no dialogue. But the ending is very abrupt, there’s no resolution. There’s plenty of sequels though.
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An origin story. How did a philanderer, murderous wretch privateering in the name of Glorianna, a guy that sailed under Francis Drake, turned into a pilgrim warrior-monk? By watching pilgrims die at the hand of raiders while his vow of peace remained unbroken.
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That’s what I did when I noticed the Miramax logo. The Weinstein treatment. It’s so meta, it even opens with the youngest Barrymore clan member being slashed, to prove this is not your regular Hollywood film.
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A reversed noir with an horror twist. A great start to a meteoric career.
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Starts with a incredible scene and manages to hold up pretty well through the whole film.
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Classic Michael Bay/Bruckheimer collaboration. Not as much rotating cameras yet, but a lot of shit blows up. It’s also a non-official The Treasure prequel, since Mason gives up the secret location of Hoover’s archive.
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Thought it might not be a low budget thriller with mental health plot points (the modern daemonic possession), but it turns out it was a figment of their imagination all along.
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This is a more romantic twist on Back to the Future, just another excuse to have the good old 40’s and 50’s back in the spotlight. At least the theme park version.
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Like tears in the rain, the sheer visual power seeps into the water table and contaminates all downstream art.
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MrToo with a woman. I can see with the Oscars steer clear of this, there’s enough controversy with anodyne films, let alone one that takes deep stands in the culture wars.
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The Wizard of Oz. 50 Shades of Matrix. There’s more flesh on display than all the abbatoir scenes in Rocky.
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Like a refined jewel inside a pouch of imported silk, devoid of any imperfections or blemishes. Makes Frank Sinatra look like a complete idiot without charisma.
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Just here for Emily Blunt, this is a very short and narrow look at a small part of Victoria’s life, focused exclusively on palace intrigue, not even a glimpse into the outside world.
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This was not what I was expecting for a “political allegory”. Surely not Tarantino-esque shootouts and actual characters saying “Wanna fuck?”. This is not Parasite, not by a long shot.
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The Mummy Revolutions: The Two Towers. A lot of big set pieces and fight scenes, but less plot and quips. Not as good as the first one, but it’s still nice to recognise all these people, particularly 20 years later.
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Three hours? Sacrè bleu, that’s too much, way too much. I like the fight scenes and think they are up to par in inventiveness and brutality, but the rest is just a slog. Way too many people play their characters straight, unlike Laurence Fishburne, who is just having the time of his life. Please don’t make a fifth one, I’m spent.
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The opening says it all: a tracking shot of a modern subway station cuts seamlessly to the same subway in 1931 Berlin, right in the middle of an election campaign.
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David Lynch produces a Werner Herzog film. It’s much weirder than you can imagine, just full-on craziness.
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This is a just 2 or 3 stunt pieces wrapped in the thinnest of plots. It would barely cover a single game mission. A flimsy excuse to see Olga Kurylenko naked.
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More like the hateful two: Weinstein and Tarantino do 2 and a half hours of soliloquies about the Confederacy, then 30 minutes of blood-soaked shootouts for the ratings, but finally both Yankee and the Rebel join forces in reining in the real threat: the only female character. She gets slapped around hard, but is finally lynched, and all agree it was good.
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The original Gone in 60 Seconds, but with plot. Baby Driver without rapists. Not even worthy of Saturday afternoon viewing.
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What the hell, why is this a The Matrix ripoff in the first act? There’s slow mo shootouts complete with waving capes, lookalike music, elevators. Then it turns into a generic 90’s action film, where two of Elvis’ illegitimate children quarrel over 3 million dollars.
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Hot damn, that’s a nice modern detective story. Just like most modern plots, it incorporates the detective into the plot itself, even though our Kentucky Fried Poirot bills himself as a dispassionate, cold, calculating observer, seeking only the truth. In the end, all is good, even after all twists, double twists, and even untwists. The butler did not do it, in the attic, with the morphine injection.
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The silly adaptation. Fogg is still a upper class twit, but mostly the distracted type, always with his head on the books. Passapartout did rob the bank of England, but just to return stolen artefacts, so it’s fine, a kind of Elgin marbles situation. Monique is a struggling artist forced to wait on other twits like Vincent Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec.
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Warm Bodies, but crazier, it’s the whole kitchen sink. Zombies, Vampires, Aliens, Werewolves, but also teen romance, jocks, stoners, and nerds.
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What a goddamn mess. A 90’s The Exorcist, radical and shit. Hideous in every way. It just ends, no payoff for our suffering girl. Just a stroll in a garden.
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What a great film, I love how everything fits together. It’s really funny, the dialogue is full of zingers.
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Well well, Bourne with a family. But Reacher is still the noir anti-hero, a complete asshole who respects no one, we are supposed to root for him.
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Just people talking about hideous crimes. Kids! Revolting.
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Ah, I think this is a pretty faithful film noir update. Reacher is a complete asshole, to women, to allies, to everyone. But he’s also the Marty Stu protagonist, impervious to any threats. It’s better when the social mores being violated are from the 50s, he’s just a prick.
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Just a 2 hours long Red Bull/Monster commercial, with the added beats from the older film. No pitbulls being thrown at our protagonist, sad. It kinda makes sense instead of being surfer dudes, the new anti-social anti-heros are ecoterrorist stunt YouTubers.
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Good old Vicky gothic horror, with all the ingredients: ghastly blood and guts, burly men with guns powerless against evil, and last but not least, sexual proclivities which should scare any proper lady.
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In Inisherin, not In Bruges. It’s an improvement, since the protagonists are depressed common people, instead of depressed hitman.
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Oh, what a lovely day. I’m expected in film Valhalla.
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The quintessential millennial horror film, part of the “nihilist slasher” genre. Incredibly engrossing, naturalistic, and scary.
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Part of the Citizen Kane extended universe. In which a bout of jealousy and murderous rage, William Randolph Hearst shoots a guy in the head, while intending to kill Charlie Chaplin (which himself is about to run to Mexico with the 16 year old girl he just knocked up, since the statutory rape age is lower there).
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This is yet another female version of John Wick, but much less po-faced. There’s more than just smouldering rage, there are attempts at humour and drama. The lead is not Charlize Theron, though.
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A serious, philosophical script about the interplay of science and philosophy, warped by Arnie’s Reality Distortion Field. The big soliloquy on who should play God and decide who lives and dies regarding clones ends with a one-liner “So that you can go fuck yourself”. This might be an improvement.
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This is batshit insane. I think the weirdest part is where a billionaire ran a union shop, the SAG-AFTRA logo is prominent.
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Some kind of mesoamerican Blade Runner, bots hunting bots. It’s mostly self-contained, by way of the tried and true method of amnesiac protagonist that keeps discovering things about herself.
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This film is torn between a competent horror thriller about an abused girl turning inward, escaping into her own inner world; and some over-the-top mind-over-matter transhuman, toying with mere mortals like a cat playing with its food.
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Die Hard on a building. The Rock’s Reality Distortion Field approaches Arnie, he just has too much charisma.