Category: 2 Stars
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The Future is a Tasteful Monochrome: Anon
Andrea Niccol’s Netflix exclusive Anon is a rather quaint throwback to the techno-paranoia cyberpunk genre, once common in the late nineties — remember Virtuosity, Johnny Mnemonic, and Paycheck? The ultimate modern incarnation of is of course the BBC series Black Mirror, which out-Philip-K.-Dicked Philip K. Dick., and set a newly high bar for cynical, pessimistic…
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Exhaustively exhausted: Ben Affleck’s Live by Night
Has any topic been more exhaustively dramatized than Prohibition-era gangsters? Live by Night seems especially redundant so soon after HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, which covers a lot of the same ground: the Florida/Cuba liquor pipeline, the Irish/Italian mob conflict, the pivot to legal gambling, etc. The explanation being pretty simple: original novelist Denis Lehane also contributed…
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A Dangerous Delusion: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) is of course a remarkable achievement, a massive production with epic scope, a clever structure, and one of the best possible showcases for Technicolor. But I’m evidently so far out of step with the consensus on this one that I’m doubting my…
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Famously chill dude Keanu Reeves goes on a killing spree in John Wick: Chapter 2
I want to enjoy action movies like the popular John Wick franchise, but the gun worship spoils everything.
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Everything is… fine… in The Intern
Nancy Meyer’s 2015 trifle The Intern is a little outside the usual scope of this blog, but it sparked a couple thoughts I needed to get out: What a waste of a decent premise: a retiree reenters a transformed workforce, while the young founder of a startup grapples with success. But so little is at…
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Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy make an odd couple in The Counselor
Cormac McCarthy and Ridley Scott were bound to be an odd couple in any case. All the richly composed and poetic dialogue in the world doesn’t disguise the fact The Counselor is basically a grimy, scuzzy, sleazy, feel-bad potboiler. There is an element of pulp to several of McCarthy’s novels, but here it’s brought to…
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Riddick makes the most haphazard of movie franchises
When even the humblest movies are planned to allow for multiple sequels if at all financially feasible, the Riddick trilogy (and counting?) must be one of the most haphazard of movie franchises. I doubt many would have expected any kind of sequel at all to 2000’s Pitch Black, and yet The Chronicles of Riddick appeared…
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Double Jeopardy was one rewrite away from being a thrilling thriller
Not to imply that screenwriting and revision are easy, but Bruce Beresford’s Double Jeopardy is only one rewrite away from being a decent action thriller. The elevator pitch is obvious enough (The Fugitive… but with a lady!), but it truly does have a killer hook: jilted woman – framed for a murder that not only…
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The chemistry only goes one way in The Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty
Intolerable Cruelty is usually found at or near the bottom of Best-to-Worst films by the Coen Brothers: #15 of 15, by David Haglund for Slate #10 of 15, by Ann Hornaday for The Seattle Times #13 of 14, by Andrew Osborne for Nerve You get the idea. But Intolerable Cruelty is the movie for you…
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Scream 4 makes a few half-hearted stabs… at relevance
By the time Scream 4 appeared, over a decade after the original trilogy began, the horror genre had moved on from the ironic, winking mode the series popularized. A character in Scream 4 complains that most horror movies traffic more in outright gore (“I hate that torture porn shit”). On television, The Walking Dead characters…