Archive for July 2023

20 posts from 01 to 31 July 2023.

  • Poltergeist

    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!

  • Maggie

    What the heck this this, did someone cut all Arnie’s lines? Joely Richardson plays the same role as Color Out of Space.

  • Delírio em Las Vedras

    Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with less drugs and more cheap beer.

  • Life

    It’s probably an homage, but the whole plot is like Salt, a script unearthed from the 1950’s filmed straight. A Scary Dogmatic Alien (the dogma is communism), played straight? Like a philosophical Alien, devoid of all the subtext that made it great. Cool effects though.

  • ALIEN³

    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.

  • The Thing

    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.

  • Oppenheimer

    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.

  • Aliens

    The damn quotes are all over the walls, man:

    • Game over man, game over!
    • For close encounters.
    • They mostly come at night. Mostly.
  • Gulliver's Travels

    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.

  • Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit

    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.

  • Psycho

    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!

  • Killer Elite

    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.

  • EuroTrip

    Holy shit, this is so 90’s teenage “comedy”. And so American, the come to generic “Europe” with green screens on exterior scenes.

  • Repo Men

    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.

  • Bill and Ted Face the Music

    Not so excellent, but it’s not The Matrix Resurrections. Kristen Schaal could make a mean George Carlin, if they let her.

  • Inferno

    The one with Felicity Jones as less platonic love interest, but still far enough from first base.

  • Angels and Demons

    The one with Ayelet Zurer as the CERN scientist. Langdon gets some lascivious looks but not even first base so far.

  • Asteroid City

    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.

  • The Da Vinci Code

    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.

  • No Hard Feelings

    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.