Archive for Release Year: 2013

49 posts from 17 December 2022 to 08 December 2016.

  • R.I.P.D.

    Jeff Bridges playing a parody of Rooster Cogburn

  • La vie d'Adèle

    Came for the lesbian sex, stayed for the Bildungsroman.

  • Warm Bodies

    Ravenous consumers of human flesh are people too. At least when they literally turn to people.

  • Man of Steel

    Goddamn clusterfuck of pieces of plot strewn together randomly. They credited an editor, but it’s just a pseudonym for BlendTec.

  • Pacific Rim

    Go Go, Jägar Rangers.

  • A Gaiola Dourada

    More a series of sketches than an unified plot. Still very much worth watching, if nothing else for the massive amount of talent on screen.

  • Closed Circuit

    Ultra British thriller.

  • Now You See Me

    There’s no The Prestige into taking Mementos from other films. Pure Larceny.

  • The Conjuring

    Every horror film rolled into one.

  • Fast & Furious 6

    The one with Luke Evans as the villain. 20 min to stupid car chase.

  • Paranoia

    Completely pathetic. Antitrust wears Prada.

  • Carrie

    The new one. Chloë Moretz is not as pitiful as Sissy Spacek, but she is a better actress, so it evens out in the end. The bullies are even more massacred here.

  • Frozen

    Another competent musical from the Disney assembly line. Professionally Formulaic.

  • Europa Report

    2001, a Blair Witch in Space.

  • The Host

    Twilight of the Body Snatchers. The Stephanie Meyer connection was only brought up later.

  • Her

    An alternate future where the “AI” response to “Siri, cure my loneliness” is not “Searching for porn/one-night-stands”, but phone sex with a machine.

  • The Call

    Starts of as a Cellular retread, complete with LAPD copaganda, and slowly inches toward Hostel, thankfully stopping well before that.

  • The Double

    The Japanese music is damn eerie. It falls straight in the middle of the uncanny valley, it’s both familiar and a little strange. Works very well to make whole environment more contradictory.

  • 12 Years a Slave

    Middle class black family man is living his life, when the father is lured into lucrative work and gets kidnapped and sold into slavery for 12 years. Even though it’s based on a 200 years old book, it’s still as powerful as ever.

  • Ender's Game

    Just like The Dark Tower, this seems like a peek into an entire universe, ending on a cliffhanger. It seems the epic sci-fi standalone story is a thing of the past now, it’s all vignettes now.

  • Parkland

    The Passion of Christ: American Edition. JFK’s death is treated with more reverence than any other event human in history. This is a liturgical film, much more religious than everything Mel Gibson has directed, except the religion is American Exceptionalism.

  • The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

    LotR with dwarves! The climax, where the party reaches their goal, awakens the dragon, and resolves are tested again.

  • Prisoners

    Random guy tries to take justice into his own hands, fails spectacularly. Buying shit off Alex Jones is no substitute for community.

  • Belle

    Can’t believe it is not a BBC production. A straightforward historical background cum classic romance story, featuring upper class people in fancy dresses.

  • The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet

    Jeunet does a lightweight book adaptation, and it’s still as fabulous and magical as his other films. Zut alors!

  • The Fifth Estate

    A bird’s eye view on the beginning of Wikileaks, told from the anti-Assange point of view. The best part about the whole thing is re-viewing the “Collateral Murder” video, still as strong as ever.

  • Locke

    An actual and metaphorical journey come together. Simple, but effective.

  • After Earth

    Shamamalama directed this? A hamfisted metaphor for Jaden Smith himself, leading him to scream at his father for being absent and treating him like shit. Will Smith himself played the ultra stoic warrior, so he wears a single constipated facial expression. I’d hate to be at those Christmas parties…

  • White House Down

    An “improved” Independence Day, with more “political” content as a plot clothesline. A two hours long diatribe against the military-industrial complex, brought to you by the DoD, Raytheon, and Boeing.

  • Olympus Has Fallen

    Red Dawn (2012) meets White House Down, except before, and by Antoine Fuqua. What the hell is this?

  • RPG

    Rutger Hauer’s Paid Getaway. Ruins, Porking, Gloating. Standing for “Real Playing Game” is a sick joke.

  • Only God Forgives

    More Refn weirdness, dedicated to Alejandro Jodorowski. Bangkok Dangerous-ly dark.

  • Hammer of the Gods

    A surprisingly deep medieval Bildungsroman, comprising a lot of gruesome deaths but also mental thrashings: disappointment, grief, betrayal. Moving from defeat to defeat, until the final “victory”.

  • Charlie Countryman

    The indie equivalent to the superhero film: trite and treading well worn paths. Usually when filming on a backwater (from Hollywood’s POV), at least one of the lead is local so that colonialism parallels are less apparent. Even that is ignored here, accents are tactically deployed to hide this!

  • Jack the Giant Slayer

    I’m Jack’s complete lack of pacing. It’s as if someone saw The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and though: we should have more battle scenes.

  • The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

    The rabble demands panem et circes. They can eat brioche, but plenty of circes to go around. The emperor tries to kill two mockingjays with one arrow by having the old tributes fight to the death, again. Our heroes falls from a cliffhanger unto another.

  • Quarta Divisão

    An above average cop thriller, slightly dinged by too much activism in several fronts. On one hand they follow the “show, don’t tell” maxim, but then try to cram two separate scourges of society in a single plot.

  • Les Grandes Ondes (à l'ouest)

    After being politically pressured into deviating the focus of his radio station from sensitive subjects to light and positive themes, the programming head sends a team to Portugal during April 1974, to report on the great Swiss cooperation. Little do they know there will be a coup d’etat followed by a revolution.

  • Sunlight Jr.

    Life and love of white trash in Sunny Florida. Love doesn’t prevail, crippling healthcare-related debt conspires against that. Fuck that shit.

  • How I Live Now

    What the fuck is this? Why does all young adult fiction must be post-apocalyptic? A crazy setting for such anodyne film. This is similar to The 5th Wave, but the core of the film is sexy people sexying it up, and not the end of the world as we know it. No gun worship either.

  • Bairro

    Oh my. The pretend edgy stuff. The pseudo-Robin Hood shtick. The cars wrecking cardboard boxes. The fade to black, oh god, so many fades to black.

  • The Numbers Station

    Still Bourne. Ripoff in the worst possible way from specific Bourne films. The climatic music is a naked ripoff from 28 Weeks Later. Not even worth to waste time on the credits.

  • The Last Days on Mars

    The Thing, but on Mars was already done by Carpenter himself as Ghosts of Mars, but this adds 28 Days Later zombies too. Worthy for having Olivia Williams bossing everyone around like a queen.

  • The Green Inferno

    Eli Roth pseudo-remakes Cannibal Holocaust, without dead animals, including a virgin final girl. The tone flip-flops between abject horror, and “fun” body horror. Why, just why?

  • Ida

    Bit of a nun-binge, after Benedetta. This is the absolute opposite.

  • Diana

    A story about Lady Di and the forgotten post-Charles pre-Dodi Diana fuckbuddy.

  • Odd Thomas

    Oddly weird mix of banter, pious bullshit, and superhero origin story. Doesn’t work too well, it feels unfinished. I had to see it to believe it.

  • Blue Jasmine

    Neurotic Park Avenue socialite meets the real world, tragedy ensues.

  • The Congress

    The Futurological Congress is very small book, so for this book adaptation they added 1 hour of meta-commentary on showbusiness and some kind of tugging at heartstrings, in case a bleak dystopia where the masses take soma to escape their crapsack worlds was not depressing enough.