Archive for Release Year: 2009
36 posts from 16 March 2016 to 22 March 2025.
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Surrogates might be a mishmash of every sci-fi film in the last decades, but then it takes large cues from Snow Crash too.
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Peter Jackson does Life Is Strange
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A thriller that cheats.
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I have seen this several times now over the years, and it never fails to impress, even when you know the twists. Bourne with much less action and more evilness.
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Should be named “The Pink Panther: You Too?”
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Wikus is the real everyman. A dumb bureaucrat who keeps fucking up.
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Oh, American comedies. Predictable as ever, emotionally manipulative, gratuitous nudity. Still, this is quite charming, like a puppy that wags the tail at you while you can see the poop in the distance.
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Bog standard high school horror film, of course it’s a thinly veiled selection between those who have sex, and those who want to. Not sure why I even bother…
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An old-school political thriller that screws everything up at the eleventh hour. It wrapped everything up cleanly, but then in the last scenes pulls a fast one, and turns the plot around. Why?
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The protagonist is such a such a charisma black hole, he is billed third, and the “sidekick” was capable of playing both roles. The amount of squandered talent is staggering.
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God wants, Gilliam dreams, the Film is shot. Like stretching The Brothers Grimm into the present and into the religious.
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Wes Anderson translates his style to stylistic “bad” stop motion. It works as well as his human-starring films, the emotional rollercoaster remains.
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Hooked by the intro, this hits the floor running but runs out of steam in the middle part. The perils of having to explain the origin stories of all characters, and the mandatory sex scenes.
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Push, push, give me yeyo… Baby’s first X-Men. Ends with a sequel hook, just to crap all over the already mediocre plot. Did not see that coming…
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Clint Eastwood pulls a Ron Howard in the Obama years. It’s incredible that the director of this hagiography of Mandela, pacifism and race relations is the same guy that spoke to an empty chair. Schizophrenic.
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Can you do a zombie film without zombies? Yes, but it’s just The Happening with less killer trees.
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This title resembling a YouTube tutorial hides a muddled bunch of nothing with some French music as soundtrack. That imagined osmosis could make up for the lack of everything else.
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Psycho Marple. Just like all criminal Bong Joon-Ho films, the whodunnit appears to be a very complex web of motives and suspects, but turns into a nearly throwaway situation, completely random and unpredictable.
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Random Ziyi Zhang in an American Nordic noir ripoff (directed by the dude from Smack my Bitch Up and produced by Michael Bay, a match made in hell). Too many characters just appear out of nowhere, and die in the next scene.
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What the heck is this? The Christian Rock cover of the greatest horror hits. Let us soil ourselves to provide Christians with their vanilla terror.
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White Noise…
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A feature-length The Thick of It series, about war and walls (either Gaza or some local council). Has familiar faces on similar situations, but they get fucked in less time.
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One of the 127 ripoffs, this has an eloped couple. It came out the year before, so it’s technically in the clear, I guess. Rates pretty high on the cosmopolitrometer, I would say a 7.
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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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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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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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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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Oh my lord, a bit part for Léa Seydoux? Mike Meyers in a non-comedic role, post-The Love Guru? Fucking Eli Roth, man! What kind of crazy casting is this?
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Damn, Vincent Cassel can talk passable Brazilian Portuguese, with a strong accent. Not a bit part either, a large role. Not sure how much is ADR, but he definitively dubbed himself. This is actually a Bildungsroman for the real protagonist, the older daughter. Quite a reactionary tale.
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Whoa, the tone of this is all over the place, it’s too serious and dramatic for a comedy horror, but too silly for a proper drama. Tries to have it’s farm cake and eat it too. No wonder Sam Raimi moved to Marvel films, where this kind of appeasement to everyone is their bread and butter.
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It’s not that bleak, actually. They find “plenty” of food (and eventually lose it), there are several bands of marauding cannibals, but also regular people too. Just like the real world, with much less people.
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A less focused, 1930’s Heat. There’s not just one cop and one robber, it’s a lot of robbers with distinct allegiances and a boatload of cops (and even some bureaucrats like Hoover). It’s still better than The Untouchables, but doesn’t hold a candle to any of the Scarface films.
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I guess Scorsese is the real monster. What’s he doing, dipping his toes into stuff he knows nothing about? Or does he direct every script that comes up to him with violence against woman?
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That’s some esoteric shit. If this is an autobiography of the Coen brothers, were they the perma-high kid who goes through the motions at the bar mitzvah?
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More of the same. An almost beat for beat remake. The main new idea is cool, a Power Rangers-style kaiju battle where the monsters are Statham with a silly square jaw, and the other random bad guy.
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The title is a reference to Hercules’ twelve labours, but this is just Die Hard with a Vengeance without Zeus. John Cena cannot carry a movie all by himself, and there’s nobody else. Even the villain is weaksauce.