Archive for April 2024

22 posts from 01 to 23 April 2024.

  • Snatch

    Less a film, more like a series of music videos. The writing grates on the ears, nothing smooth about the quipping, the pattern is quip-reply-repetition-quip-pop song. Cinematic celery, lacks proteins.

  • Shut In

    Some kind of crappy horror film. It’s not just technically bad, the rest is so bad, you start noticing the technical fails.

  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

    The Fincher version. This is a great thriller, but feels like cultural appropriation to pretend everything is Sweden but speak English with accents. If you want to adapt a story, do it, don’t do this half way.

  • Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City

    So this is another reboot, for the money. They got that right, there’s a Jill Sandwich joke in the first minutes.

  • The Tomorrow War

    Low rent pastiche of other, better sci-fi films, with a way bigger budget it deserved. So much combat, it never ends, relentless bottomless magazines.

  • Lost Girls & Love Hotels

    Prude 50 Shades of Tokyo, with Alexandra Daddario. Suck it, Dakota Johnson, instead of nepo babies there are pillow boobies.

  • Civil War

    Yeah, a muddled mess, you can’t see the point clearly (maybe there isn’t any). Clearly written during the Trump years, it’s stale before it even plays in theatres. Amazing military visuals and sound, the sonic punch, the tactics, so engrossing.

  • Wind River

    Now, that’s another Sicario. What happened Taylor Sheridan, why go from this to dross like Those Who Wish Me Dead? Is it the higher budget? The ego inflation from Sicario itself? I don’t get it.

  • Monkey Man

    A political John Wick, that’s new. Of course it’s not filmed in India, Dev Patel would be murdered by RSS goons.

  • Nope

    Nope, there’s so much product placement, it feels like a very long commercial. It’s just too much, this is not Transformers. Self-Awareness notwithstanding, there’s no subversion that cannot be integrated into the system, all Hollywood people will eventually degenerate into telling stories about themselves.

  • The Castle of Cagliostro

    James Bond meets Scooby Doo. Is this a Heidi prequel? Are all Miyazaki films on the same universe? That scene inside the clock is like Modern Times on steroids.

  • Revolt

    Some kind of direct-to-DVD sci-fi romp, very light on plot, with silly effects. Lee Pace and a Bond girl hit it up, until she drops out of the film (probably dead by the end, it’s ambiguous). Not bad enough to hate.

  • The Predator

    An R-rated Predator film written by Shane Black? With this cast? Sign me up, this is amazing.

  • Love Lies Bleeding

    A very intense thriller, keeps delivering the goods until the end. Kristen rules, as always!

  • Mon Crime

    A very funny romp through the interwar period, my personal minette. Seems a bit conventional for Ozon, but it’s so hilarious, it gets a pass. This was apparently adapted to Hollywood comedies twice in the 30’s.

  • Poor Things

    This seems like Lost in Translation from the male perspective? That’s what I took from that middle section. The epilogue seems tacked on, something that does not belong.

  • King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

    King Amleth Moses Pendragon, more like it. It’s IP now, a meaningless label to slap on unsellable dross to make it pop.

  • Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

    I thought I detected the Soderbergh touch, not only on the very extensive cast, most the cut away gags, the stylish editing-based jokes. The underlying seediness, the depression, the mental instability, that’s something else, something Being John Malkovich-shaped.

  • Ladyhawke

    A medieval story to the bone, in the form of the standard silly fantasy film of the 80’s. Sort of a Dune in tights.

  • Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

    This is not the final chapter, feels like yet another chapter told badly for devilish reasons. It retroactively makes the last film worse, the whole President Wesker subplot is abandoned offscreen.

  • Resident Evil: Retribution

    This is a bombastic improvement over the rest of the series, the explosions and overall action sequences are better. Paper-thin characters, just as the doctor ordered for brain shutdown entertainment.

  • Resident Evil: Afterlife

    More derivative Resident Evil films. Yes Paul, I have seen The Matrix, Children of Men, and The Island. It’s called afterlife because the cast comes back even though they died.