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6 stars

John Wick Chapter 2

John Wick Chapter 2

I really don't like their chances. Don't they know he kills everybody?

dir: Chad Stahelski

2017

When you ask yourself, really ask yourself, what is best in life, as in, what are the elements possible in life that give you the most meaning, or pleasure, what do you come up with?

There are the simple and cliché pleasures, of love, of family, of sex, that are no less pleasurable just because they’re universal, but there’s art, there’s exercise, there’s food, there’s booze, there’s a bunch of other stuff, elements as many and varied as there are people in the world.

When you ask yourself about those pleasures, does one of them end up being the distinct and exquisite pleasure of watching Keanu Reeves kill hundreds of people? Does that bring warmth, blood flow or wetness to the various bits of one’s psyche / body like any of those fundamental pleasures discussed earlier?

Because this film, and its predecessor, which wasn’t called Chapter 1 as far as I know, is really only about watching Keanu kill lots and lots and lots of people. If he killed a lot of people in the first one, he kills probably five times as many in this one.

If one isn’t thrilled by the prospect of watching a weirdly bearded Keanu kill boatloads of people, well, you’re not going to get much else out of this flick or this franchise. You’ve entered the wrong cinema / popped on the wrong Blu-Ray, or started streaming the very wrongest of titles. Best be putting on The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel instead.

Rating:

Kong: Skull Island

Kong

Maybe if they just shoot at him a few more hundred times,
that'll work

dir: Jordan Vogt-Roberts

2017

Good Lord is this a dumb movie. But, in the time-old math of cinema, dumb does not necessarily ≠ fun. Dumb can be way fun, as long as the fun isn’t overwhelmed by the dumb.

You need a decent balance, and I’m really not sure that Kong: Skull Island bothers to get that balance right. Of course, had I watched this drunk, plenty of the dumbest aspects of the story wouldn’t have leapt out at my eyes and brain like one of the Lost World creatures from this flick.

Yes, it’s a King Kong flick about King Kong. But it’s not really. It’s an excuse to make a Viet Nam war movie without having to actually get into the messiness of the Viet Nam war and what both sides of that stupid conflict inflicted onto millions of people.

What you do is get a guy, somehow a senior Army colonel (Samuel L. Jackson) freshly stung from losing the war (he’ll tell you, like he tells a photographer, that they didn’t lose the war; they just abandoned it instead, like they lost interest in it and it wasn’t worth their time anymore) against the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong, and pit him against an unstoppable force of nature called Kong. Get it? Kong and Cong? It’s the same thing, in case you didn’t notice. Why didn't you notice, huh?

Rating:

Ghost in the Shell

Ghost in the Shell

They really did think they were going to get sweaty nerds in a lather with this flick

dir: Rupert Sanders

2017

Well. That was something.

Yes, this is the part where I talk about something other than the film I’m pretending to review. I have seen the Japanese animated movie at least a thousand times, and I had the soundtrack, or at least songs from it on various music-playing devices for ages and heard those crazy Japanese wailing banshee songs at least 10,000 times. The (original) movie is in my DNA. Hearing that they were going to make a new version of it, I thought, rightly “so what?”

My relationship with the original, whatever it might be, can’t really be changed or tainted or in any way damaged or even really improved by something that comes out twenty years later, can it? Is this like what happened with the Indiana Jones flicks, where the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls made me hate myself for liking the first three movies, and childhoods were destroyed etc etc?

Rating:

Rogue One

Rogue One

I don't know why, but seeing the addendum "a Star Wars story" makes
me want to claw my eyes out for some reason.

dir: Gareth Edwards

2017

Yeah, so, Star Wars movies: for or against?

They always make a billion dollars, they’re as familiar as cheesecake with a similar level of consistency and taste, and they’re completely and utterly unnecessary.

And yet…

I ask myself what need there is (other than the financial) in this world for more Star Wars movies, especially since there seems to be no intention or interest in telling any ‘new’ stories, just in telling the previous ones again and again. The Force Awakens was maligned by some for being a retread of A New Hope, but what would you even say about this one here, Rogue One, replete with its fixation on daddy issues, ending, as it does, exactly at the point where A New Hope, or Star Wars, as we used to know it as, begins?

It’s less of a new construction, and more of an annex or extension on an existing McMansion that’s already plenty monstrously big okay thanks for asking bye.

It was, somewhat dishonestly, touted as a substantially different kind or type of Star Wars film, since it didn’t have any Jedi or Skywalkers in it and had a very different emphasis, being predominately more of a war movie, or at least as much of a war movie than usual.

Rating:

The Lobster

The Lobster

Consider The Lobster. Now maybe consider something else.

dir: Yorgos Lanthimos

2016

These movies from this Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, like Dogtooth, Alps and now The Lobster – I question whether they are movies to be enjoyed, or movies to be endured / survived.

They’re definitely strange, that’s for sure. Being able to say “there’s nothing else out there quite like it” can be used as much as a compliment as it can as a complaint.

I have watched too many movies in my life, and too much television, and what that means is that, just like everyone else, I can sometimes be energised by watching something completely out of left field, but I can just as equally be left confused and bemused by something so fundamentally odd that my mind can’t quite latch on to it.

I like to think that I kinda ‘got’ what was going on with Dogtooth – a strange flick where a very strange set of Greek parents bring up their kids in absolute isolation, warping their sense of language, sex, the world, everything – but having watched The Lobster, it’s more than likely that I was completely wrong about that flick. As for this flick, well, I have no idea.

Rating:

Hail, Caesar!

Hail, Caesar!

I think a better title might have been "A Tale of Two Tildas"

dir: Coen Brothers

2016

Eh. I didn’t really get it.

This is fairly minor Coen Brothers as far as I’m concerned. Yes, I get that the Coens love the Golden Age of Hollywood. Yep, okay, got it. In case I’d never noticed before, most of the Coen Brothers’ movies are about movies. Some of their greatest work or funniest sequences have harkened back to times of yore and movies of days gone by.

But, yeah, it’s not a matter of just doing a homage/reference, or enjoying a homage/reference. The whole point of this flick is that there doesn’t really seem to be a point, other than Hollywood continuing to do what Hollywood does is probably a good thing(?)

It's the feeling I had, when Hail, Caesar! ended, that I also had at the end of Burn After Reading, a flick I genuinely, actively disliked before it ended, and downright hated once the ending basically stated outright "We have no idea what the point was, either". Endings like that are such a shoulder shrug of a statement that I can't help but feel insulted.

There's some kernel of an idea, several ideas, even. There are some keen or even endearing performances. There's an almost structure, one almost kinda similar to a detective trying to navigate a corrupt world and solve a mystery.

Rating:

The Witch

The Witch

I never really enjoyed eating goat, have to be honest, and that's not
going to change any time soon, okay Satan?

dir: Robert Eggers

2016

I fell like I should be calling this ‘The VVitch’ instead, because that’s what it said on all the posters, which I couldn’t work out. Then the lightbulb I keep in a tinfoil hat on my head went bright, and I realised, a few minutes in, that the ‘V V’ is because this movie is set in the time of the Puritan Pilgrims of the 1600s, who were fleeing persecution / going somewhere new in order to dole out more persecution to each other.

It was the time before Ws, when V V stood for Double U. And when they used f in place of s. And everyone was cool with slavery, and Native Americans didn’t have souls so could be killed with impunity. Good times.

Confusing, frightening times. A time of great terror in the face of the unknown in the New World, a place where Puritans thought they were going to come to create a stoic, humourless, sexless Paradise on Earth, and instead they found the place just like everywhere else, just with better views and more squalor.

As this deeply unsettling film starts, a man with a thick Yorkshire accent, and his family, are being expelled from a Puritan plantation, because the lead chap’s religious views slightly contradict the party line of the other Puritans. Or it could be a conflict over those goofy hats with the buckles on them: he’s against them, they’re for them.

Rating:

Anomalisa

Anomalisa

Is there a word for a type of mental condition where you see movies and think
that every character in them is played by a puppet and that they all have
the same voice?

dir: Charlie Kaufman

2015

Anomalisa is a pretty depressing film, at least I found it depressing. It’s possible that I found it depressing because it seems to be about depression, or at least the main character seems to be suffering from it.

It’s also… an odd film to describe, and it sounds far more amusing to describe than it ends up being. Being from the mind of Charlie Kaufman, he who came up with the screenplays for such out there and phenomenal stuff as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you are right to expect that there’s some strange artistry going on. And there is.

To say that the story is entirely told with puppets again makes this sound comical, but in reality this is stop motion animation with some very expressive and articulated puppets. It’s also in the service of a story mostly set in or around a drab hotel room.

Rating:

Suffragette

Suffragette

How could they not succeed in their efforts when they have access to
such resolute, steadfast facial expressions?

dir: Sarah Gavron

2015

There is a problem inherent in this movie, at least from my perspective. Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan both of women voting and of the people who fought for and earned the right (that should have been theirs from the start) to vote in Britain’s stupid, stupid elections.

Wait, why ‘stupid’? Well, tell me what point there is to enfranchising more than half the population of the United Kingdom when the House of Lords, the most transparently undemocratic institution since Robert Mugabe came to power as the ‘democratically’ elected dictator of Zimbabwe that’s only been around and certainly unreformed since, oh, about 1350, still bloody well exists.

It’s like Russian women having the right to vote: you have a dictator for life in the form of Vladimir Putin – who cares if you have the right to vote?

Well, whether it actually means anything, or whether it’s a smokescreen established to hide the fact that we vote for one of two sock puppets operated by the same person (you may have heard of that person, they’re known as The Man), the fact is that at the dawn of the previous century, the sisters in Britain had decided that they no longer wanted to politely ask to be allowed to vote.

Out the window went the cucumber sandwiches and the parasols, and in came blowing shit up, smashing windows, being tortured by the cops and doing what militant actions they could intended to force the government to capitulate.

Rating:

San Andreas

San Andreas

With his massive muscular boobs and her brains, of course they'll save
their daughter, or at least they'll take the rest of the town down with them

dir: Brad Peyton

2015

Every year has to have a big disaster flick where chunks of America, if not the whole world, and let’s face it, to Americans America is the whole world, are destroyed.

Some years it’s tornadoes, other years it’s meteors or comets, or aliens, or tsunamis.

This year it’s earthquakes.

I would tentatively ask why this yearning, insatiable desire is imagined to always exist in the broader audience, but then most of the people who went to see this flick were living far from the gentle land of roaming buffalos and stripper poles gleaming from sea to shining sea.

Yep, non-Americans pay to watch Americans dying in great numbers.

That sounds awful to me, but hey, I’m just a guy watching a disaster movie.

The standard template of disaster flicks is still the defense of the family. It’s never (anymore) trying to prevent the disaster from happening, or stopping a catastrophic situation from getting worse. That horse has bolted. You could make some argument about the Sep 11 attacks, but I’m not going to make it. I think it’s true, but it’s an argument I don’t want to have.

The only reason to watch a flick like this is to watch CGI depictions of mass destruction in awe-inspiring “Oh FUCK!” ways. The people, man, the people suck.

Rating:

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